75: Getting Results the Agile Way by J.D. Meier

We need to jump into follow-up right away, Mike.

All right, let's do it.

Because I have thoughts on today's book.

Okay. You've got 2 follow-up items. I've got 3. You want to go first?

Yeah. So my first one is start doing some music after dinner. And I, I can say that we've been doing this fairly regularly where we will finish eating dinner at night and I will help clean up as much as I possibly can so that my wife can go pick out some music and she sits down at the piano. We play a song or two. The girls run around the house like crazy little monkeys. It's a great time. It's really entertaining.

I think we need a, we need a video of this.

We need a video of this?

Yes.

I, okay. I'll take, I'll take a note. I will do my best to get a video. I will post it somewhere. It's very entertaining. So that was number one. That one's been going really well. Number 2, I wanted to just have a conversation with my wife. about what our second mountain goals are. And I have done that. And we are exploring some ways of tackling said mountain, none of which I can share here, which is a bit unfortunate. But I can say that having that conversation with your spouse is extremely rewarding. Highly recommended. I'll leave it there.

All right. So mine are in the question format. First 2 anyways. The first one is, who are my mentors? Which I mentioned a couple of them on the last podcast. I had a chance to tell a couple of them in person. I flew out to San Francisco for the Relay live show, which was pretty incredible. 15 Relay hosts on stage split up into 4 teams for a Family Feud-style game show. With Jason Snell as the host, and Mike and Steven were running the scoreboard, and Steven was making sure nothing broke. But that was a really good time, and I got to see a bunch of people, including David Sparks, who I called out in that episode as being one of my mentors. So that was kind of cool to spend some time with him and meet a couple of new people. I texted you. I got to meet Brad Dowdy, the Pen Addict. And he remembered you, so he said hi. I told him that you mentioned that he cost you thousands of dollars.

He's cost me a fair amount of money. I'm not sure it's thousands, but it's a fair chunk of change.

Yeah. So, really the takeaway from that is that I have not only identified my mentors, I've started telling people that I view them as mentors and I could tell That it meant a lot. So I think for the rest of them, this is going to be something that I'd absolutely 100% have to do in person. I don't think it's going to be a phone call, definitely not a text message, but still have to follow through with the rest of the people on that list, which really wasn't to the definition of done for that action item. But having seen what happened, it's definitely the approach I want to take with the other people that I listed there.

Nice. Nice. Cool. I'm really glad you got to do that.

Yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's really fun. Turns out rabbit hole tangent here for a second.

Okay.

The, uh, we're good at those. Yeah. Uh, well, this is kind of in line with, with what we were just talking about, but I am more and more realizing the importance of relationships and going to the Relay thing. was expensive. Rachel came with me, which was really cool because I got to share that experience with her. And more importantly, as I was telling her on the way back, it really means a lot that she is involved with that part of my life. You know, it's not just like, oh, you go hang out with your nerd friends and I'll be here when you get back. It's something that we get to, get to share, even though she doesn't really consider herself a nerd. The fact that, you know, she's there, she feels comfortable in that environment, and she wants likes meeting those people, hanging out with those people, just like I do. Like, that's, that's super cool. But, you know, going back to my main point that like the relationships really are the principal thing. Before I went to the Relay live event, it was a lot of money and I was hemming and hawing like, I don't think I'm gonna go, really can't swing it right now. I am 100% glad that, that I went. And I don't think that I'm ready to make a blanket rule, just spend all your money on experiences. I think we talked about that at some point.

Right.

But being there and building those relationships, that was the thing that I couldn't plan for on paper prior to going. And afterwards is the thing that added definitely the most value to the trip, is being able to make those connections and meet those people. Not that there's even something that's necessarily coming from it right away. It's Just getting to meet those people and hang out with them and build those relationships. I realize more and more now that that is really important to me. So, kind of tangential action item, not really ready to make it official, but thinking about how can I continue to build relationships in everything that I do and looking for those opportunities to do so that are outside of the day-to-day routine sort of a thing.

Sure.

Anyways, that kind of leads into my second one, how can I build my communities? Although, to be honest, for this action item, I really haven't done a great job of this. I have been traveling. I have been busy. And I haven't really thought a whole lot about how I can do this for Bookworm or Faith-Based Productivity specifically. But as I mentioned, there is a whole bunch of takeaways and inspirational moments that I've gotten while on this trip and during that sabbatical week. So, I feel like there's been some progress made on this already, but nothing that I can point to and say like, I did this, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, it does. Because I think I've been on a similar path as you lately where I've been trying to figure out how to be more specific with building relationships lately. And I think there are a lot of ways that you can do that. There must be something in the last 2 or 3 books we've gone through, Mike, to spark that in you and me at the same time. Uh, cause I feel like that's something we've been slowly learning more about and realizing the value of. Maybe that's partially because we do so much online that we are starting to focus more on the offline side of things, but there's something there. And I think you're spot on with, you know, doing things in person, building out communities, whether it's with Bookworm or through Relay or whatever that path is. Like there's, there is definitely a lot of value there. It's almost like we were made that way, Mike.

Yeah, well, just one small example, I guess. When we were at the, the Relay thing, so we're in this theater and there's, I think, 350-ish people there, and it's a pretty nice, pretty nice theater. They have it set up so that like there's an intermission in the beginning, and if you want to go back to the green room, you can like duck behind the stage and There's a half-hour break in the middle of the show, basically. And they said, essentially, you can go mingle with people in the audience if you want to, but if you just need a break, go this way. And as tired as I was from traveling and how exhausted I was being jet-lagged from a 2-hour time zone difference, which really made me feel like a wimp, but it's true. I was definitely feeling it by, by that evening. I forced myself. I say forced, it really wasn't that bad, but like my natural instinct is as an introvert, go hide somewhere and recharge, you know? But during that half-hour break, I went out into the audience and it's kind of interesting because I'm fairly new to the Relay Network. And there's some people there who have been there for a long time. And there's some people there who are a much bigger deal than I am. You know, there's a line of people to get to Merlin Mann, but I could walk wherever. No one comes up to me.

Yeah.

going into the audience, I found this guy who wore this dog cow t-shirt that I wore at Max Stock. And I'm like, hey, I like your shirt. I started talking to him. And it was cool to see how the intentional relationship building, even though that wasn't naturally my comfort zone, I wanted to just go hang out in the back, get a bottle of water, and just not talk to people for a while. But I'm like, I'm here. This is the whole point of this thing.

Yeah.

And so I forced, again, I say force, but it really isn't forcing. It's just against my natural nature to do that sort of thing. But I recognize that I'm in this place and this is why I'm here. I'm gonna go build these relationships, you know? So I didn't talk to a ton of people, obviously, but I talked to a few people and the few people that I did talk to, it was really great to talk to them. And, and I could tell that it, it meant, uh, it meant a lot. You know, the fact that I am a Relay FM host, like that gives me some sort of platform and I can use that platform to make people feel really good. Which is very much in line with like the life and air thing. I want to make people feel like a million bucks, even if I don't have a million bucks. And so I recognize that that's, that's kind of in my, my DNA. That's the kind of thing that makes me feel really good, even if it is against my personality. And I want to take that to the next level. And then to get to your point about how did— how has this become like a revelation for us recently? I kind of think it's a perfect storm of things. So number one, I listened to that Life and Air audiobook. At the same time, number two, we were going through The 4-Hour Workweek and was absolutely repulsed by the tone of it. And again—

So it was like an anti-point through The 4-Hour Workweek. Yeah.

Well, I want to be careful here because as I mentioned in the club, if you like that and you benefit from that, that's completely fine. But I just, when I went through it, it's kind of like, eh, what he's saying is kind of right, but it feels wrong. And I had to reconcile, like, how do I put that square peg into a round hole? And I feel like The Second Mountain kind of did that for me. So it's kind of all these things for me anyways lining up that have led to this aha moment, I believe.

Sure. Makes sense. So my biggest question about all of your follow-up right now has to do with you learning a second language.

Yes.

I told you I was going to ask this. Will you roll an R on air?

I cannot roll an R, but I am, I am crushing it with Duolingo and I have my wife and my 2 oldest kids into it now too. Nice.

Well done, sir.

Yeah. So I have, I'm trying to look in the app here. I think a 12-day streak of, um, like getting however many XP you need, you know, that's basically just answering questions, right?

Sure.

Duolingo is interesting because they have like a heart meter. And when you get a question wrong, it uses one of your hearts. When you run out of hearts, you basically have to watch some ads or you wait until tomorrow, or you can upgrade and you never run out of hearts. You can just go through it as much as you want, which is really interesting. So, you can completely go through everything in Duolingo, it looks like anyways, for free. But if you want to get rid of the annoyance of having to wait to recharge your meter when you answer a bunch of questions wrong, because you are learning a second language and you're going to make mistakes, then they don't force you, but they invite you basically to upgrade. And so far, I've been able to get by without the upgrade. Somebody shared with me another program, which was a paid upfront program, which I'm sure is good, but Duolingo just seems to work for me. Much more so than any of my Spanish classes in high school did. So I'm going to keep going with this. At some point, maybe I will plateau inside of Duolingo and have to try something else. But there is tons of stuff in here. And I feel like if I went through all of the things that they have for Spanish, then I would be at the point where I would check this off as completed. Like, yes, I have learned the second language. Obviously, you can keep Keep going with it. You can keep going with English. I wouldn't say I've mastered that language yet. All the quote unquotes.

So you're going to pull up Duolingo and start learning English?

Uh, no, I don't think so, but we'll see. Toastmasters helps with that.

There you go. Well, let's, let's get to our book. But before we do that, I just want to point something out because I ran into some friends this past weekend. And I was wearing my Bookworm sweatshirt. And one of the ladies in the group said, oh, I love your sweatshirt. It's like, actually, it's a podcast I run with a buddy of mine. Really? And then that sparked a whole conversation. So it reminded me that we don't talk about this a whole lot, but you can still get t-shirts and sweatshirts through Cotton Bureau. That's an ongoing thing, right? That hasn't changed, right, Mike?

Correct.

Okay. So if you were interested in a Bookworm t-shirt or sweatshirt, And I love these. Like, they're the best material in shirts and sweatshirts I've ever had. I love them. Link in the show notes. Go get one. We love these things. Definitely pick one up.

They are very comfy.

For sure. All right. That said, I want to go back in time to the time when Joe learned about GTD and learning what Getting Things Done was. So back in the day, this is long before Bookworm, long before Mike and I decided if we're ever going to read books, we got to do it together on a podcast. Like back before that time, I became aware of GTD, started trying to implement it before I read about it. But at the same time, I ran across this book, Getting Results the Agile Way. And at the time it seemed like people were like in one of these 2 camps. It seemed like one was exclusive from the other and people didn't do both at the same time.

Yeah.

Seemed like Getting Things Done resonated with me more at the time. So I went down that path, have been on that path for quite some time now. But it, it has also kind of morphed to the point where I've seen people read this book and then implement this on top of GTD. So I don't think they're actually exclusive. But this particular book has a lot of support. There's a lot of people who have talked about this one and seemed to really, really like Getting Results the Agile Way. This is by JD Meier, by the way. The tagline on this is a personal results system for work and life. The second tagline, which kind of confused me at first, but how to focus and prioritize, manage time and information, and employ the power of balance and flexibility for meaningful results.

A third tagline, a list of lists.

Yes. Yes. And repeated definitions. It's, it's kind of nuts. I'll get to that one later. But there's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot in here. And I have to say, I did not care for this one, Mike. Like, people talk about this a lot. And I really, really struggled with this book. It was to the point where I almost texted you and say, is there any way we can drop this book from bookworm, because I did not want to finish this and I did not know how to come on this show and talk about it. So there we are. That's out in the air. I'm done. What are your thoughts on this book?

Confession time, I guess. Uh, I also heard about this book a long time ago and I read Getting Things Done. That was kind of my first foray into the productivity space. I started reading productivity, self-development, business-type books after that because I got a lot out of that one the first time that I read it. Almost ended my journey though when I came across this one the first time because I started reading it and I couldn't get past the first section where he was talking about hotspots. That just did not make sense to me.

Yeah.

And since I was new to GTD, I was like, I don't know how to reconcile this. I'm going to stick with what I know and just put this back on the shelf. Did make it through this time. And this book is, I think the best way to describe it is kind of like a productivity primer. As I went through it, I realized that there is a ton of stuff in here that we have talked about in other books. And there's a lot of great advice in here, but he doesn't really get into a lot of the concepts. And then, like you said, he does repeat a bunch of them. So my initial thought was, this feels like a book that ended up being created from a series of blog posts and was never designed to be a book that taught specific concepts. He just took all of his blog posts. And since he was blogging about these things and these ideas were bouncing around in his brain. That's why things show up multiple times. I could be completely wrong with that, but that's kind of the, the initial reaction that I, I had. Uh, the other thing is that with all of these lists of things and all of the like titles that he gives things but not really the descriptions, it reminded me of a saying that I picked up. I don't remember exactly where, but I heard it From Aaron Walker. He said, you can be a mile wide and an inch deep, or a mile deep and an inch wide. This book feels like a mile wide and an inch deep to me, which is kind of frustrating if it's the first time that you've come across any of these things that he mentions in the latter part of the book. Because you're like, I want to know more about that. But he just gives you a A couple of sentences and then he's on to the next thing in his list. I didn't count up all of the items that are in the list, by the way, but there's got to be hundreds. There's, let me just look real quickly. 20 key factors for motivation, 10 strategies for motivation, 10 pitfalls of motivation, 25 strategies for results, 25 keys to results, 30 common productivity pitfalls, the top 5. Like why even have those 2 sections together? You know, like The top 5 are also in the 30 common pitfalls. So that's why, you know, another anecdotal piece of evidence for this was a series of blog posts. Uh, they've got the values, the principles, the practices. Like there's so many lists in here. And after a while you start to see the same things popping up over and over again. And, uh, that has a couple of results, I think. Number one, it Makes you feel— it makes you start to understand on a positive side. It makes you start to think that you're wrapping your head around the system and how everything ties together.

Sure.

But on the negative side, it also is like, oh, I've heard this already. So you just kind of tune out, which is definitely what happened to me by the end of this book.

Well, when you were running through that outline, if my quick math caught on, there was 140 points there just in what you rattled off.

Yeah.

And there's more than that because there's like lists within those lists.

Yep.

And you can definitely tell this is a self-published book because there's a lot of those lists where he'll have 10 items and then he wants to go through those 10 items. But the titles that he uses when he goes through the specific item, he rewords so it doesn't line up with what he said in the original list. And that, that just drives me crazy.

Yeah. Sometimes he would use the same title and he'd use a slightly different definition, which I thought was actually helpful. But at that point, I would rather you just go say everything you want to say about the first thing, the first time that we see it, and then just reference it over and over again instead of trying to define it every time.

Right. Well, and like a good example is the Monday Vision. We'll get into that, but he, if my math If I found them all, he defined what the Monday vision is 14 times.

Yeah, that could be.

Like, okay, how many times do you have to tell me what the Monday vision is? Like, it just— oh, sure, it was very hard to read. Um, there was one story in the book, I believe, unless I just missed them because I tuned them out. There was one story at the very beginning that helped him That where he explained where this came from, this whole process. And there's not another story in the whole book. And again, unless I tuned it out and missed it. So that to me, that makes it very hard to go through it.

That does make it less interesting for sure. I wouldn't necessarily say that that is a negative thing. If the content is engaging enough, you know, I'll stick with it.

Agreed.

But I'm kind of weird that way where I like nonfiction books over fiction books. So come at me.

Yep. There's that. Um, so I struggled with it a lot. Obviously it's been a long time since I've picked up a book and wanted to put it down in quite a while. So, all right. All of that rant out of the way. There's 3 parts to this book. The first is the approach. So what is agile results? Part 2 is basically that again, but at different levels, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly results. And then part 3 is an explanation of those results, which I had a hard time putting together. So when we get there, I'll share some of that part, but part 1, the approach. He, he does go into why Agile Results. This is his story of where this came from with him working at Microsoft, being overwhelmed when he first got there and then needing a system. And in the process of needing a system, he goes to meet and learn from people who have been with Microsoft for quite some time and who know how to achieve results in that culture, and then takes notes from them. And over time builds out this system called Agile Results.

Yes. And there is a diagram that he has. It's like a one-page thing with 9 different boxes, which made absolutely no sense to me when I looked at it. Because immediately when I saw it, I'm like, how can I apply this to the way that I work with like my daily planning template? And I quickly gave up on that idea. There are some similarities to what I do and what he's talking about, which is why I think that this maybe is complicated at first because you're seeing the way that it works in his life, but it's really not probably a copy and paste sort of thing that you can apply to your own life. It's too complicated for that.

Sure.

Getting Things Done has a very clear hierarchical tree and you just make a yes or no decision at each point. And that's a lot easier to follow. This is a lot more fluid. And if you don't understand a lot of the basics that he talks about, but doesn't get into detail with in this book, then there's no way this is going to work for you. But we can kind of break this down. Before we do that, he talks about the 3 keys to results in the first chapter. And he defines agile as the ability to respond to change, which I completely agree with. He talks about some things that make agile different, things like outcomes over activities. Testing your results. The one that kind of stood out to me was fix time but flex the scope. I really like that. That's kind of in line with the whole Scrum methodology and sprints, by the way, but this is kind of bigger than that. Scrum is a version of Agile, but Agile is kind of the framework that Scrum is built on. If that— am I defining that correctly?

Yep. Scrum is a version of Agile.

So Scrum is Agile, but Agile is not necessarily Scrum.

Correct.

And then there's the—

Well, the general public has a tendency to mix that up.

Yes.

It's all right.

I do too. But I wanted to call that out because I do think that this book has a higher-level approach, which if you're going into it thinking that you're going to get all of the macro-level specific things that you need to do, because he even talks about how this is a system and The solution is a system, which I put in my mind node, oh brother. But if you're going into it expecting that, it is going to be a little bit different. But I think it's not so bad if you do understand that this is high level and you go into it with the understanding that you're going to have to make some modifications to what he's talking to you about in order for it to work for you.

Sure.

3 keys to the results though. He says that the key to time management Is energy management. The key to energy management is passion. The key to results is time, energy, and technique. He's got this Venn diagram of those three things: time, energy, and technique intersecting, which produces the results. I liked this, and it brought me back to the time, energy, and attention thing framework that I was working on with the Asian efficiency team before I left, and the Attention, um, the intention one never really felt quite right to me. I knew, you know, focus was a big thing and it's becoming more and more important. And it's like if the ability to focus, David Sparks has said, is kind of going to be like the, the superpower in the, the going forward because there's so much distraction. And I agree with that. But I think technique is actually a better term than that because it's the application of the attention or the application of the focus It's the intention turned into action to produce the, the, the results that you're, you're looking for. And again, results is kind of the intersection of all of these things, but time, energy, and then the technique, that's kind of like the— I see that as the, the manifestation of the attention. Like, you can have your attention on something and you're just staring at it, but when you apply a technique, you, you're producing some motion And that's the thing that's ultimately going to move you towards the results that you want. So I did like this piece.

Sure. I was just trying to find— there it is. This book was written in 2010, at least the one I'm looking at. Yes, 2010, which would make me think that this is kind of before a lot of the whole mindfulness and focus trend had picked up. So maybe there's some of that. In there as well with a little bit of age coming on it. But yeah, no, I get it. I get it. The next section here is when he gives a full overview of the whole system. And I have to say that this really short chapter was like, it should have stopped. Like, I think this is where it should have been the blog post. This particular chapter should have been the blog post and then it was done.

Sure.

That's my thinking. And this is where he defines the first time, what is the Monday vision? What are— how do you— the rule of 3. Everything is done in 3s with this whole system.

Yep.

The Monday vision, the daily outcomes, the Friday reflection. We'll break these down here in a little bit, but what are hotspots? But then he's got this chart, like you're saying, with 9 boxes. That show how this whole thing works. So he repeats that diagram.

3 rows of 3 boxes.

Yeah.

He likes 3s so much.

Yep. Like, okay. And where he can, he tries to put 3 items in those and you can tell he kind of tried to get them to work. So yes, that's, that's the overview. But again, that's in the book. This is where he defines all the pieces the first time and then he goes through them. Later on.

Yeah. So this rule of 3, I actually think this is a great place to start. He says, identify 3 outcomes for the month, identify 3 outcomes for the week, identify 3 outcomes for the day. And then on Fridays, when you're doing your review, identify the 3 things going well and the 3 things to improve. So I understand, you know, he wants to pick a number, make it consistent and apply it everywhere. I do think that an even better version of this though, is the highlight that we learned about in Make Time.

Yeah.

I added that to my daily planning sheet and that has helped a lot. And that's basically the rule of one. Like, you pick one thing that's going to be the most important, which when you have a huge list of tasks that you need to get done is really, really hard to do. But for the way that I work, I think that's a better application of this. However, I think if you're coming from, I have 1,000 things on my task list and I'm going to just try to get as many of them done as I can. This rule of 3 could provide a very helpful framework that will help you not be burned out at the end of the, at the end of the day. So I do see some value in this. It's not the way that I would choose to apply it. He's also got these hotspots, which he defines as work, personal, and then a life frame. I don't really like the breakup of work versus personal. I believe That is just your life. And there's personal and work aspects of it, but you have to figure out how to make those work. And then everything that he has in the life frame— mind, body, emotions, career, financial, relationships, and fun— those could fit into one of those 2 boxes. They could also fit into other boxes, possibly. So I don't really like the way that these are compartmentalized. But I do think that there is value in identifying the things that you want to focus on, the things that you want to apply intention to and try to improve. Like if you are just cranking all day, every day, you can quickly find yourself, and I've been there, in a bad emotional state. And if you never take stock of where you are at emotionally, Then it takes just one little thing and then you fly off the handle. So if you can recognize that you don't have much margin in that particular area, to borrow Sean Blanc's term, and then do things to create positive outcomes in that specific area in your life frame, that is a, a good thing. You know, it's kind of like You trying out meditation again? Like, I can almost guarantee you that that, at least at one point in the process, was the process.

Yeah.

Where you identified, I'm not happy with the way I am, my emotional state right now, and I'm gonna do something about it. So I am going to download this app, and even if it doesn't stick, I'm gonna give it a shot. And that's totally in line with, with Agile here. Just, I don't like the way that's broken up into life framework and personal. I would I would get rid of those 3 distinctions and just list all of that, the stuff that you care about in the hotspots area.

Yeah. And I think I'm 100% with you on that. I, when I read his breakout of it, it just rubbed me wrong the whole time. Like, okay, so you want me to compartmentalize these things? I know that doesn't work. And my brain runs too fast for that to function long-term. I even— spoiler alert— as of this morning, as we're recording this, I released a new article on how I'm using OmniFocus. And my whole layout of how I have all my projects broken out, yes, it has like a work area, but it's just so that I can keep those specific projects in line. But if you look at how I actually operate, off of all that, it doesn't matter where those tasks are, they all get pulled into a single list. And that's how I prefer to operate. Like, I, I don't want to think about things as like, that's personal, this is work. Like, this is just what I do and how I live. And that's how I want to keep operating. So I think I'm with you. I just, I just really struggled with like everything I read.

Well, again, it's not that far off. But If you were to make a diagram off of what you do compared to what JD Meier is telling us to do, then it is going to look very different. That's the thing. And so in that, that sense, these diagrams actually hurt more than they help, I would argue.

Sure.

I mean, I get why he did it. He's trying to give you a mental model that you can wrap your head around if you're brand new to this stuff, but had the opposite effect for me. Right.

The next section here is values, principles, and practices. And to me, after having read the book, I realized this is a precursor of— what is it? 32 list items across 4 pages?

Yes.

That maybe it's 5 pages, something like that. It's like this quick hits sort of thing with all these different like action over analysis paralysis. I'm just going to read this one because it made me— kind of made me laugh whenever I read. This is point number 1 of all these undervalues. Taking action is the best antidote for analysis paralysis. Rather than overengineer or try to figure out everything upfront, start taking action. Your results will inform your thinking and you can change your course as needed. And the first thing I thought was, well, if you're in the middle of analysis paralysis, how do you break out of that in order to take the action? Like, you gave me absolutely nothing to work with. Other than don't do that. Well, yeah, that's not helpful.

I think you're right. You know, there's not a whole lot of specifics on how to break out of that. But for the right person, I feel like maybe there's enough there, not for a newbie for sure. But I mean, basically what he's saying is stop thinking about the work and start doing the work.

Sure.

And I do think that if you were to make that mental, mental switch in your head, and you were to just step out there and just start in something, that everything that he said there is probably true. But if you are in that state where you don't know what the next thing is, then just saying take action isn't helpful. You do need to be able to identify if you're in that place, like, I don't even know where to start. It would be great if he said, here's how you identify where you should start. But he doesn't do that. Yep.

And I felt that way. I can't say I was that strongly against all of his values, principles, and practices that he lays out here. Um, but I, I didn't get anything out of this. Like, I feel like this is an area where I should have been like, oh yeah, I should do that. Oh yeah, this would, that would be helpful. Yeah, that would help. But I came out of it like, what did I just read? Like that, it, it didn't resonate with me at all.

Yeah. So just to give you an example, he's got what makes Agile different. And there's a bunch of things that I listed here in my mind node file, which I will upload to the club. So if you don't want to read the book, but you want all of the list items, this is a great I want to download the mind map.

There you go. There you go.

Uh, but in the initial list of what makes Agile different, he's got things like fixed time, flex scope. Um, what was the other one that I— and then that shows up, uh, let's see, that shows up in the principles section, but then there is outcomes over activities. Is that the one? Yeah. Outcomes over activities. That's in the values list. So the values, principles, and practices here, the practices, he's got number 1, the rule of 3. That is one of the key concepts that he taught us in chapter 2. And this, at this point, I'm making these lists of values, principles, and practices, and I'm starting already to see the repetition. I'm like, huh.

And this is on page 30, by the way.

Okay. Well, I'll let that slide for now, but I feel like I know this already.

Yep.

So this is— that it doesn't take very long to get to the point where this starts to feel weird because he's repeating himself. But if that's, if that's his intention with the book, by the way, I guess there probably would be some value in doing that because by the time you get done with this, you do know what the rule of 3 is and you do know that you're supposed to fix time and flex, flex scope. But It's kind of annoying to have to read the same thing over and over and over again.

Yep. All right. Hotspots.

Yeah, I kind of talked about hotspots already. Uh, I do think they give you scaffolding for supporting your life, but I don't like the way that he, he did them necessarily. There's probably a million ways that you could do this, by the way. My version of this, I would argue, is broken down into the the 8 different areas that I've identified in my own Wheel of Life from my personal retreat course.

Yeah.

That's a different version of the hotspots. The difference is that instead of trying to hit all of these hotspots every single day, week, month, whatever, I'm picking the lowest ones that I want to focus on for the next period per the 12-week year. And I'm going to set some goals and create some habits that are going to make a positive impact in that particular area. And some of those things have turned into habits that I stick with, like a daily journaling habit. So it does translate into his version of the hotspots under the life frame. But that's not the approach that I would take. And I feel like it's a, it's a little bit more difficult. Feels, it feels like more, it feels like more mental overhead to see this list of all these areas and then say, okay, make sure that you hit all these. I feel like it's a lot more approachable if you just tackle one at a time. Sure.

Nope. Makes sense. I mean, the hotspots is the, it's just his term for areas of focus from GTD or the wheel of life, like what you're saying, uh, which is also the term I think it was used in Make Time, or maybe that was Free to Focus. Those two are blending to some degree to me. It's a very similar concept. I think one of the things that he spells out here, uh, is to use those as a way to manage your energy and where you're spending your focus. Uh, he doesn't use that term. I wish he would, but he does recommend that you use these as a way to gauge if you're on the right path or not. And I would agree with that. Uh, but I, I really wanted him to show like within your system, how do you recommend doing that? Maybe he did. I just didn't catch it somewhere. So correct me if I'm wrong, but he never does spell that out.

No. I mean, he kind of leaves it up to you to identify what are the things. In work and personal, he's got listed activities, active projects, and then a backlog. And then in the life frame, mind, body, emotions, career, financial, relationships, and fun. But I think the real power of this is if you chuck that list and identify your own stuff that's important. Sure.

Yeah.

If you want to add video games to that list, go right ahead. I mean—

Done. Last section here in the approach is Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection. He defines them again here. Take a wild guess as what these are just from the titles of them. Monday Vision, set a vision on Monday for what you want the week to look like. Daily Outcomes, define 3 tasks that you must complete that day. And then Friday Reflection is to reflect on those, on that Monday Vision to see how well you did. Now, the key there is that you need to select your 3 items for your daily outcomes based on your Monday vision. That's, to me, that's like the core foundation of his entire system is that particular habit and that particular flow. And I understand that. I can see how that's helpful. I really like the highlight concept better than that. But I also like the concept of habit building more so than this. So sure. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree with all of that. I do like the idea of taking Monday to be your vision day. I don't think it necessarily needs a whole day, although that's kind of where my brain went is like, that's an interesting idea. Yeah, I just took all of Monday to prioritize for the rest of the, the week, would that increase or decrease the amount of output that I'm able to, to create?

Sure.

Would I write more or less if I stopped writing that day and just thought about what I wanted to write?

Yeah.

It's an interesting idea, and I don't think I'm in a place where I'm able to say, hey everybody I'm working with, peace out. I'm just thinking today.

Yeah.

But it would be an interesting exercise. Maybe somebody can do that for us and repeat back and report back.

I don't see that as something I'm going to even experiment with. I, I have a tendency to do some vision casting of sorts from like blank spaces throughout the week or on like week-long trips anymore, or conferences and such, like I'll, I'll do that sort of thing then, not a whole day every week. But—

Sure.

Taking those higher views, like I'm, I'm slowly realizing that I'm wanting to work myself into the habit of acting on things right away, as opposed to putting it on a list. So a lot of what this seems to be designed around is putting things off to later. As opposed to getting it done right now, even though he does say action over— I don't even remember what he said, but I, I'm less and less inclined to put things on a list and more inclined to try to get things done right now, even if it takes an hour to get it done. Like, that's—

Yeah.

I'm just learning that the more I do that, the more productive overall I am, even in the right direction. If I'm able to say yes or no as to whether or not it should be done or not, in its entirety from the get-go. Like, I, I do a lot better just with that whole now concept.

Sure. And I think in order to embrace a concept or a system like that, you do need to have some margin where you can just say, okay, I'm going to do this right now.

Correct.

Instead of running from thing to thing. That would be an interesting follow-up book, by the way, would be Margin by Richard Swensen. It's a book that I read a while back. Got it on my bookshelf here. I haven't read it in several years. I think that was actually pre-Bookworm.

Okay.

So if anybody wants to hear us talk about margin, go vote for that one. But that would be an interesting follow-up to this because this book, I think, assumes that you have some flexibility In that, but that's obviously the natural question is, if I don't have that, how do I apply this? And then maybe the follow-up question, at least for me, would be, if I don't have the space to do this the right way, how can I get the space to do this the way that I want? And honestly, margin is the answer, which again is one of those things that you hear about it and you're like, oh man, that would be nice, but I can't just, I can't work on that right now. I'm too busy to even think about margin.

Yeah.

Which means that you're gonna continue to running the hamster wheel for a while. But anyways, we'll put a pin in that. Go recommend that one if you want to hear us talk more about it. I do want to call out one other piece to this. You mentioned the Friday reflection. This is basically the weekly review.

Yes.

And this is something that I thought he does a good job explaining this because he says, make sure to schedule your reflection for at least 30 minutes on your calendar every week. I feel like if people who read GTD understood that and put that on their calendar for 30 minutes every week, probably about 500% more of them would actually do their weekly review. That number is probably low. But I remember, maybe David Allen does mention that. It's been a while since I read the book. But I remember going through that and thinking, oh yeah, weekly review, I totally get this. I need to do this. And then I never did it. And then it was like, Well, why didn't I do this? And then later on, just reading other things, learning other things. Like if I think it was Patrick Rhone actually, who mentioned in an old Mikes on Mikes podcast, like, if it's not on your calendar, it doesn't exist. Like everything you have to do has to take place within the context of time. So if you're going to do your weekly review, you got to put that on your calendar. And I was like, oh, that makes so much sense.

Yeah. Yeah, I specifically remember that episode because I remember he had the, he had the phrase, if not now, when?

Yes, exactly.

And he would, he would ask that question. And I don't know why I got a chance to meet Patrick Rhone, I don't know, about a year ago now. And like, I had to make sure he knew, like, for whatever reason, that particular phrase has stuck with me for a very, very long time. And I still to this day, whenever I look at how I build task management systems, I always have to like think about with this specific project or a context or a tag or whatever it is, which side note, I'm not using tags at all in OmniFocus anymore. I haven't tagged a list in—

So go read Joe's blog post, link in the show notes.

I don't know why I'm bringing this particular article up. I'm not intending to do this. But I'm always looking at these things from the stance of, well, if I'm going to put this on this list, when does it actually get done? Because if I just put it on a list and there's not some form of a routine or a habit or a calendar item that's associated with that, it'll just disappear. I'll never get it done. And that, that's the black hole for me where things just go and they disappear.

Joe's tasks go to die inside a text.

They totally do if I don't have a timeframe for it. So yes, I love— sorry, I interrupted you on this whole thing. But yeah, Patrick Rhone's, if not now, when? Love that question.

No, that was basically the main, main point I was gonna make was that that little 2-sentence thing that he shared, I felt like that was really, really good. And it can get lost inside of the list. But there are a couple of places like that where there's things that you may not agree with any of the system that he's outlining, but there's a couple things in here that can really have a positive impact. Going back through my notes, I also see I mentioned at the beginning how I continue to get the understanding that relationships are really important. It's kind of wedged into the hotspot section, so it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense here. But he says continually invest in your relationships. Your relationships are either growing or they're dying, and people will flow in and out of your life. But that's very much in line with what I was saying at the beginning of this podcast. Didn't even realize that that was something that I had called out in my mind note file. I have a little light bulb icon that's like an inspiration thing, like when something really hits me, that's one of the keys that I use. So when I can go back through this, I can kind of really quickly glean what are the big ideas that impacted me from this book. Didn't even realize that as I'm looking at the chapter list, but those types of things are in here, just like making sure to schedule your reflection. That's a great tip. And you should absolutely do that for your weekly review.

Sure. So part 2, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly results. And I took 4 chapters and put it into one line item because effectively, like, pick 3 goals for the year. Using those 3 goals for the year, pick 3 things for your month. Using those, pick 3 things for your week. Using those, pick 3 things for your day. Like, okay, there you go. All right. Now part 3.

I could not disagree with this section more. Yeah. I, well, So let me just say that I really do, I really do believe in the 12 Week Year idea, even if you don't like the 12 Week Year book, because I get it if you're reading it, that you do have to kind of cut through some of the sensational language. But I really do think it's a powerful idea that if you set yearly goals, you will wait until the 11th month 11th hour, and then you're going to try to accomplish them. And maybe you'll get there, maybe you won't, but basically you've wasted a whole bunch of time.

Right. This whole part in the book is where his working for Microsoft comes out, I believe.

Sure.

Because he's working corporate and corporate is in a, like, they still mandate yearly Goals.

Yep.

So he's, he's just taking that and then like, okay, these are my goals for the year that I was given and probably not allowed to have any say in. So here's what I'm gonna do with them. Like, that's what it feels like to me. And I think you're right, like the 12-week year thing is a great concept. I have personally, I run on like 8-week cycles right now.

Mm-hmm.

So I've kind of shrunk down even off of the 12-week year. Uh, but yeah, I, I don't like this section at all. I'm with you.

The thing that really jumps out to me from the first section, if I were to pick like one thing that Agile's based off of, it's this whole fixed time, flex scope idea.

Yep.

In fact, he even says Agile is the ability to respond to change. I guarantee you there will be change in a 12-month period. So why even bother setting those yearly goals? I feel like if I were to do that, I would write those 3 things down for the year. And then I go through my first month, quarter, whatever. And I learned some things. And I realized that one of those 3 things is not really the thing that I should be working on. But the fact that it's written on my piece of paper that I look at all the time would be enough To keep me moving towards that thing just because I had written it down and I'm like, this is the plan, we're going to stick with it. It just, it feels like if to me it would force me into a negative, a potentially negative course where it's giving you these boundaries. Yes. But maybe you need to be able to turn off the road that you're on and go in a different direction.

Right.

And I feel like by starting with the yearly goals, you are kind of forcing yourself and providing the inertia to keep going in a specific direction. I feel like you do need to create some momentum. And The 12 Week Year for me is kind of the sweet spot for that, where it can help you, it can, it can help you create the, the incentive that you need to keep moving. Because it's— you can see how it is leading you towards the outcomes that you want to achieve. Those are anchored by the Wheel of Life, not a yearly goal. But what's great about The 12 Week Year, in my opinion, is the ability to just chuck it 4 times a year, 3 times a year.

Yeah.

Say, yes, I'm gonna start over.

Right.

So there's no clear-cut— and again, you know, if you're coming to this with the impression that this is going to be the system and you just have to apply it, it's probably not going to work for you. If you're going to take pieces of it, then there could be a lot of value in this.

Yeah.

But just the way that this is described, I feel like provides too much structure and not enough freedom.

Yes, I'm with you 100%. Because I— this is where like this whole 8-week thing, and it's because I know About every 5 to 6 weeks, sometimes less than, sometimes a little more than, something comes my way that forces me to course correct. And that's just the, the rhythm that my life seems to fall into. Don't really know why, it just kind of is. And if I operate on 8-week cycles, it means that about the time those changes come around, I can finish up what I'm working on and then adjust to those changes.

Yep.

Like, that's, that's the way that I'm operating on. Now, can I take his— the, the last 3 pieces of this, the, the month, week, and day side of it, and ignore the year? Maybe. I probably could. But I— it seems like it's forced to try to come up with 3 things each time. Like, whenever I go through those 8-week cycles It's pretty common for me to have one thing I'm focused on.

Sure.

Like, that's, that's what I'm driving towards. And to try to find 3 things within that one thing for the week to work on doesn't always make sense. A lot of times it's one thing that I'm working on for that week, and then I have one thing on that day. Maybe that has to do with how detailed I break things down into or don't, but I understand his rule of 3. I get why he loves that. And it's just everything is consistent, but I think I'm with you on the one thing.

Yep.

I didn't even try to do that reference, but—

I was thinking it the whole time you were saying 3.

I didn't connect it until it came out of my mouth, but maybe that just resonates with me way more than 3. I don't know.

Yeah. Uh, now that being said, as much as I hate this section, this is where all of my action items come from.

Of course it is.

So there is living proof that you can disagree with the main message and still mine some gold nuggets from the books that you read. So we don't need to go through all of his process here. But again, there are lists, and it's very specific. You start your day, you design your day, you drive your day, you end your workday, and then you end your day. And there's different things in here. I'll just call out a couple of the ones that stood out to me. So number one, under design your day, he has a point where you should set boundaries and limits. And he has some things that you should fix time for, like eating, sleeping, and he specifically listed working out. I kind of get the idea that he really is into exercise. I don't know specifically if he's a weightlifter, runner, whatever. But you do kind of kind of get that, that vibe as he's talking about the different things that fitness is important to him. And I have created an exercise habit. I work out 6 days a week, every single week. I'd say about half the time I work out every single day. And it's always a struggle for me though, to find the time to do it. I find that when I go to plan out my day the night before, I have to consciously put forth a bunch of effort to carve out the time. to make that happen. In fact, that's another thing that he mentions in here is that you carve out time for what's important. You don't find time, you make it. Uh, making time for what's important is the driver of great results. When I read that, I instantly thought of Curtis McHale. I know he doesn't like that terminology, making time, but yeah, again, I think that's the best description that I've heard so far. So I'm going to run with that one. I really agree with that. You make time, you don't find time. Uh, and then, uh, so my first action item here is setting up time every day for working out, like specifically from 7 to 8 or something. I haven't identified specifically when this is going to be because I kind of want to rethink my whole morning routine and what time I start my day, that sort of thing. It's always been difficult for me to work out when I get up early, but I also am reading Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins as my gap book. And Holy cow, that is an inspirational book. Tons of language, but really, really good. And, uh, you— this guy just like, he's pushed himself through so much. He joined the Marines, he had to go through Hell Week 3 times. He didn't fail out, but he like, his body broke basically, and he couldn't, couldn't finish. So he did it 3 times. Then he ran a bunch of ultramarathons and crazy stuff. Like he, he keeps pushing himself past what he— I'm not done with it yet, but he keeps pushing himself past what he thinks he's capable of. And when you read those stories, you kind of get jacked up and you're like, I wonder what I'm actually capable of. And I'm sure I'm capable of working out in the morning. So I want to push myself to do that. Just don't know the specifics yet.

Yeah.

Uh, there was another one here under Drive Your Day for power hours, or when you feel strongest in the zone. Because I am an intermittent faster. I know that this is the morning for me. And I want to identify my power hours. And I want to shade them on my daily planning sheet. So I have a visual indicator, like these are special, only put really important stuff here. I kind of think I do that already with how I do it, but I want something visual.

Sure.

And then the last one, end your day. He's got 4 questions to cap your day. What did I learn? What did I improve? What did I enjoy? What kind of act did I do? I'm not a huge fan of these questions, but I kind of get them. And I have my own journaling prompts that I use. That's basically what these reminded me of. I think these are great starters. But again, the 4 questions to cap your day isn't the magic piece here. It's just identifying for yourself, what are the questions that you want to use in your own reflection? But then the shutdown routine. So I want to write down my shutdown routine. And this has popped up before, but I just never get around to doing it, or I do it and then it ends up not sticking. Like, I want to be able to say at this time every single day, I am done with work and here's the checklist of things that I do as I disconnect completely. And maybe it's just the nature of working online with other remote teams that that's more difficult for me, but it is something that I aspire to do. So those are my action items.

Yeah, I gave up on the shutdown routine concept. And it's partly because I've adopted kind of a weird alternative to that in that I know I have a set number of things I need to get done at the church each day. So I'm working there full-time and somewhere between about 2:00 and 3:30, I'll get done with the things I needed to get done that day. And when I hit that point, the next thing on my list is, you know, things like checking in on email, checking in on some forums. Like those are some things that I've got as like habits that come up. You could probably call that a shutdown routine, but I don't have a set time when I get to that. It's just a thing that I try to get done every day. And if I don't have time for it, say I get done at like 10 till 4, and I usually go home at 4. I just don't do it. I just cancel it, put it off till tomorrow, and then don't do it. And if I have any form of like a cleanup or move things around and, you know, clean up my computer, clean up the desk, anything like that, that's usually done at night if I'm going to do it. And it's part of like an evening ritual. So I kind of broke this whole shutdown thing down into whenever I can get to those instead of saying, okay, at 3:30, I'm going to go and stop everything I'm doing and do this particular list. No, it just doesn't work that way. 'Cause I'll, I'll never do it because I'm always engrossed in whatever it is I'm working on. It's like, well, I can do that a little bit later. But if I just have it as things somewhere, I want to get these things done today if I can, I'm more apt to actually do those.

Sure.

So maybe I just don't like calling it a shutdown routine, but you know, it does seem to work pretty well for me.

Yeah, that makes sense. I've gone back and forth on this so many times, but I feel like I was inspired after reading this again to give it a shot. So sure. I don't have a high degree of confidence in this action item sticking for me, but okay. We'll follow up with it.

Sounds good. Well, part 3 is Results Explained. I have to say, when I saw this in the outline and after I finished reading part 1 or about, well, I shouldn't say that the first couple, 3 chapters of part 1. My thought was that in part 3, he was going to then break down everything he talked about in part 1 and show why it works. That is not what I got at all. I got another 5 chapters of lists thrown at me, the first of which is the results frame, personas, and pitfalls. Personas? Personas. How do you say that? Does that sound weird?

I don't know. We'll go with personas.

Okay. I don't know why that sounds weird whenever I say it. Dunno.

So just an example of some of the things that they list here under the personas: starter, finisher, thinker, doer, simplifier, maximizer, critic, opportunist, perfectionist, stuff like that. The idea being here that these are Kind of all different hats that you could wear. At least that was my interpretation of this.

Yeah.

Which I guess has some value, but this is not something that I was struggling with or thinking about. I tend to be the kind of person where if there's something that needs to be done, I'll figure out how to do it. I'm not going to say, oh, well, I'm not functioning as a controller right now, or I'm not thinking about this as a marketer. I have my marketer section blocked off for Thursdays at 3:00 PM. It's just like, this is the task in front of me. So I think there's limited value in these sorts of things. Maybe as you scale this into a larger company, there is. I don't know. Maybe it's not on the list here, but I do see some value if you were to set aside an entire day for meetings. And say, I am going to be a meeting attender on this day. That's really the only example I can think of where this could be useful though.

Right. Right.

Because he, well, actually he does say 3 ways to use the persona. So you know yourself, team up, and then you can improve the situation. But I kind of feel like if you're able to, to function in whichever one of these you naturally gravitate towards, that's great. For everybody else, just figure out how to get the job done.

Sure.

A better way to define this, in my opinion, is Dan Sullivan's unique ability. So you can identify your unique ability, and then you want to maximize the time that you spend in your unique ability. But after us, to a certain point, especially when you are, when you are in a situation and you're not in a Microsoft, you know, where you have a job that's designed around your, your skillset. You're just solving problems where you are, which is probably the majority of people who are listening to this. Honestly, this stuff doesn't matter. Like, it's great if you're able to say, this is what I'm good at, and I'm going to try to carve out more time for that. But that's not the approach that he takes here. He's just saying, these are all the different things that you might have to do, and you have to switch between them, and good luck. Yeah, I don't, I don't really understand how you apply what what he lists here.

Yeah. To add to that, the results frame piece of this is the hotspots. Again, I'm not sure why he called it something different in the title of it, because he calls it results frame. And then he has a chart for the hotspots and a definition of those hotspots. And I could not figure out what he was trying to do with that.

Well, the, uh, The results frame, he— I put in parentheses, this is just a list of popular productivity topics.

There's that.

So he lists things like action, efficiency and effectiveness, energy management, expectations, focus, goals and objectives, information management, learning, mindsets, motivation, planning, prioritizing, stuff like that. And I don't really understand how this translates into anything that, that you can use.

Oh, I got it. So this is, you know, you going back to your thought of this is a whole bunch of blog posts thrown together. This is keyword injection for his website for SEO. That's what that is.

That could be. I mean, basically, it's a list of things that anybody who is concerned about what they're getting done has already heard of or studied in a In some way, shape, or form before. And I do understand how if you were to master these things, they would increase the results you're able to get as you focus on your hotspots. But just listing these things like learn how to plan and prioritize doesn't really help you. I guess you could tackle these one at a time and say, I'm going to improve my self-awareness skill over the next week. But I don't know. I mean, a lot of this stuff, not to go back to emotional intelligence, that's kind of what it is. If you were to develop emotional intelligence, then that would have a positive impact on the results frame for your hotspots, I would argue.

True.

But just listing a bunch of things, I felt at this point was just kind of useless and a Not great way to start this section. Sure.

Well, he ends that section by talking about productivity pitfalls. And whenever I read this, they sounded familiar, which at this point, like everything sounds familiar. If you go back and take a look in the first part, values, principles, and practices, most of these pitfalls are those The negative, yeah, the inverse of those, right? Yeah.

Like, like a lack of boundaries, for example, because that's one of the things that they talk about in the front section. Yeah, I, I don't know. Again, this felt like a blog post, especially with the top 5. Like, these are the top 5 that people suffer from. At one point, that probably was a blog post. And these are, you know, it was probably a great blog post. But then following that up with here's all of the other common pitfalls, and then no real strategies to avoid them other than you know, hey, we talked about this previously. It's not very useful. And I, you know, I say like lack of boundaries, for example, there's lots of stuff in here as he goes through the boundaries section, it comes up over and over and over again, but it's never very deep. And even if you compiled it all together, it's still not going to be a whole lot of strategy for you if lack of boundaries is a specific problem for you.

Sure.

All this list is going to do is make you feel bad about where you are. It's not going to help you out of the hole.

Well, the next 2 sections here, I'm gonna lump them together. 25 Keys to Results and 25 Strategies for Results. Not sure why he didn't just call it 50 points or something like that. They feel like they should be together. I don't even know what's in these because I, I think I just skimmed them. I, I couldn't understand what he was trying to get across. It feels like more of the same. Yeah. From the first part here, like the results frame, personas, pitfalls. It feels like he just has more lists he wants to share. Or again, these are blog posts he just wanted to throw in, had a word count.

Basically are more lists to share.

Yeah. Yeah. So I, I, I don't know. I don't even know what to say on these other than there's more lists of things you should do.

Even the terminology between them is somewhat consistent. So if you're looking for a difference between keys and strategies, it's, it's hard to, to, to find. There is some cool stuff in here. I actually liked the idea of above the line or below the line, number 11 under the 25 Keys to Results. He's got a couple diagrams, which I think are Really good. And this kind of comes back to in the first section, we didn't really talk about this because again, there's not a whole lot of structure around this idea, but he talks about prioritization in the Monday vision, daily outcomes, Friday reflection as either must, should, or could. And he's got a couple diagrams here. Basically must, should, and could are things that contribute, I would say, at a high level. to the outcomes that you want to achieve, or they provide a lot of value. And then things that provide a moderate amount of value, things that provide only a little bit of value.

Sure.

And then there's these diagrams for above the line where the things that you must do, these are things that provide a ton of value. And then as you progress to the things that you should do or could do, there's diminishing returns there. Below the line, the value that is produced from the must, should, could— again, they're like these bars. Where must is the biggest one, should is the medium one, and could is the smallest one. But as you go down, when you're doing below-the-bar tasks, then you're increasing your dissatisfaction. I've got these in my MindNode file for people who want to take a look at these. But I thought this was kind of a cool way to think about the results that you are gathering. It's like diminishing returns, for example. That's not as big a deal as something that is actively producing unhappiness if you are stuck below the line.

Sure.

And recognizing that and saying, I'm absolutely not going to do these could or should tasks. I'm just going to do the things that I have to do. And I'm going to do everything that I can to get above this line and kind of, kind of change my relationship with the things that I have to do. Like, that's, that's kind of a cool idea, but it's one point in a very long list and easy to gloss over.

Right. The next section here is motivation. I kind of get, like, I understand why he has this one in here. Like, I finally found something. It's like, okay, I get it. I get it. I'm with you on the flow here. And it has to do with, like, why are you doing this? Why are you focusing on being more productive or effective and understanding the why behind what you do? He has a bunch of quotes. But he goes through some sections here of mostly understanding yourself. He has to throw in another list of 10 pitfalls for motivation.

Which includes analysis paralysis and perfectionism yet again.

Yep. That's the 3rd or 4th time we've seen analysis paralysis.

Yep.

Must be something he struggles with. So he does go through 10 pitfalls of motivation and then 10 key strategies For motivation.

And then 20 key factors for motivation.

Yep, 20 key factors, because somehow that's different. And again, these are all— they're all interesting and they could be helpful for each of them. But when you've got 2 sentences about something, it's hard to take that and come out with Oh yeah, I need to make some changes, or I'm— this is exactly what I need to do with that. It's like, oh, okay. Like, there's so much of it that you just glaze over it, and you come out of this— at least I came out of this more demotivated than motivated. Like, okay, there's so much here, what on earth am I supposed to do with that? I don't know, I'm gonna go grab a cookie.

Sure, sure.

Which I did not do because I He shouldn't do sugar. Side note.

Well, there are, in his defense, there are some things that are different between Pitfall strategies and key factors, but it's not immediately clear what those are. Just as an example, he's got a Venn diagram at the beginning of this, I believe, where motivation comes from your thoughts, feelings, and body. And then in the middle is kind of why you do what you do. Those are all things listed under the 20 key factors for motivation. But not in any specific order. In fact, body is 12, thoughts and feelings are 10 and 11. And if you're reading these as a numbered list, you would think that the higher up you go, the more important they are. He's basically told us prior though, that these are the 3 main things that motivation comes from. Then he lists 9 other things above that.

Yes.

So a little bit confusing there. I don't necessarily think he's wrong. I mean, number 1, he talks about pain and pleasure. That absolutely is the key motivator for everybody, whether you realize it or not. You're either trying to avoid pain or increase pleasure. Pain, I would argue you should break those apart. The avoidance of pain typically is a higher motivator than the pursuit of pleasure. But I understand why he grouped those together.

Sure.

But I just use that as an example of how these things can really be muddied. And there's not enough here to really grab onto in terms of differentiating these. Again, I just jotted down the, the titles because by the 5th time you hear about perfectionism, you're like, okay, I got that. I don't need to write it all, all down again. But the result is that the more distance you get from this book, the more this stuff just kind of blends together. And so whatever distinctions and points that he's trying to make in this particular section, they are quickly lost.

Sure.

Not necessarily, you know, again, it's, it depends on what his goal was with this book. If it's just like a reference work, and you want to come back at some point and write an article about things that impact your motivation, this would absolutely be a great place to start. You look at this list of 20 things and, okay, yeah, I'm going to write about these and do some more research and flesh these out. That'd be a great starting point. Maybe that's what he was doing when he wrote this. But in terms of the bookworm approach where we want to pick up a book and learn some new ideas and apply these things, It's just harder to latch, latch on to something specific here because there's not a whole lot of meat behind any one of these and he's quickly on to the next thing.

Yep. It feels like it would have been a lot more effective to spend some time synthesizing all of your points about motivation down to 3 and—

There we go.

Spell those out in a lot more detail. As opposed to giving us 40 items across 6 pages to somehow figure out. I don't know.

Yep.

The last chapter here, Mindsets and Metaphors. I think there's some interesting things in here. I don't know that they're brand new. But he covers the difference between an abundance mindset and a scarcity mindset, a positive mindset versus negative, and a growth mindset over a fixed mindset. Now, we've talked about the growth Versus fixed mindset, read a whole book on it and talked about it here. And that's one that he must like because he gave us a list for that one and not the other 2.

So yeah.

It's kind of the key indicator. Then he gives us a list of things on how to change your mindset, which again is helpful, but it's 4 points on a third of a page, half a page. Yeah. I mean, there are some good things in this section. I can't say anything jumped out at me specifically that was new that made me want to change things, but it does reiterate some things elsewhere in the book. Uh, and some things we've covered in the past. So I don't know. Any thoughts on this, Mike?

Uh, yeah, there was one thing in here that really jumped out to me and the whole section on learned helplessness. This— I say a whole section, it's a very short section.

Paragraph?

But I thought it was good. He talks about the problem of learned helplessness is that you apply it personally. You think that your state is permanent and it's pervasive, which means that it impacts everything. And the solution to that is to kind of flip all of those views on its head and recognize that the state you're in right now, it's only temporary, that it's situational. Okay, so it's going to change and that it's specific. So it applies to this one area of your life over here, but not to these things over there, which are actually going pretty well. I thought that was a really powerful idea. There should be a whole book written and probably is just on that specific piece. So again, to reiterate the point that you can go through a book and not really enjoy the main message, but still get these gold nuggets here where I feel like this is something that the next time I find myself in a situation where I'm frustrated and I feel like there's nothing I can do about it, I look back at these things and say, oh yeah, I'm taking this personally. I'm thinking that it's always going to be this way. And I'm thinking that this is impacting every area of my life. But when I recognize that this is a temporary state, that it's situational based on the current set of circumstances, and it's only applying to this one thing, it makes it seem like it's not that big a deal. It gives me a better perspective on it, which is why it's in the mindset section. But I don't think necessarily people are going to make those connections like I did.

Right?

Like, it's very easy to completely skip over and gloss over that piece of it.

Sure.

Which again is like the whole book though. The mindset stuff that he talks about in here, if you've not read Mindset, that may completely rock your world. Now, we read Mindset, so I went over it and I'm like, yeah, I know that already. And Carol Dweck did a much better job explaining it. But that's just me.

Fair enough. I don't feel like there's any other points on this I would like to cover other than it feels very disjointed to me. Again, I think after about the first 3 or 4 chapters, I just became jaded towards the whole thing and it made me hard— it made it very hard for me to keep an open mind with it once I had been kind of turned off. To the whole thing. So—

Sure.

Thus, you can probably sense the extreme negativity from me on this whole thing. But it is— for me, it was very hard to go through and understand or pick out little points that I felt were helpful here and there, mostly because I didn't have any trust in, in him because he hadn't won that trust. So I found myself like looking for loopholes where I would normally be Looking for the positives. And it's been a while since a book has led me down that path. So apologies for all the negativity.

Maybe that's because you're an Apple user and he works at Microsoft.

I don't know. I work with Microsoft stuff and I've recommended Microsoft a little bit lately. So—

No, I'm just kidding.

Interesting point though.

Should we talk about action items? Yes.

You're going to reiterate your 3?

Yeah, I'll just real quickly reiterate the 3 that I picked out from the short section that neither of us liked.

Did you try to get 3?

No, I did not. That was coincidence. Dang it, JD Meier, you're rubbing off on me. All right. So the first one, set time every day for working out. Again, I don't know exactly when that's going to be, but it is going to be probably in the morning. Uh, second one, identify my power hours and shade them on my daily planning sheet. So I have a visual indicator. And only put the really important stuff during those hours. And then number 3, write out my shutdown routine. Again, not with high hopes of this actually sticking, but going to give it another shot.

Cool. I have one potential, and I say potential because I'm not committed to it yet. Uh, I kind of want to sleep on it one more night before I make this decision, but I wrote down 3 MITs. Most important tasks. If I had anything from this that reached out to me in any form, it was this concept of 3. Now, obviously I've mentioned in a few places that I kind of like the, the rule of 1 instead of the rule of 3, which is why I'm not sure that I want to do 3. I know that I won't do it on a weekly or a monthly basis, or especially not a yearly basis. If I do it anywhere, it would be on a daily. Uh, outcome list, but I'm not sure that given my day-to-day work that that's realistic. Because working in IT, a lot of my stuff is support. Probably 75% of the work I'm going to do every day is unknown until I get there. So it— I can find and make time for one in a day, and I know I can do that. But trying to choose 3 feels a little bit irresponsible. So I would either have to break them down further or ignore the rule of 3 in that case. So I'm leaving it as a question mark because I'm not sure how that's going to pan out.

All right.

You follow me on all that? That's kind of a weird thought process.

Yes. You're looking for something to take from this book. The only thing you can find is the 3 MITs, but you're not sure you like it.

Thanks. Thanks for that summarization. On that note, we should do style and rating. I can go first on this since I'm the negative Nancy here.

All right.

Um, I think it's obvious I didn't care for this book just from a, a writing style stance and from an editing stance. We bring this one up once in a while. Lots and lots of grammar issues and typos. He really needed a full-blown editor on this. More than— there were a number of cases where I would read something and then have to stop and reread it 2 or 3 times to try to figure out what it was he was trying to say because the words actually don't work in a sentence. So it's not an actual coherent phrase. So I had to go through and figure that out from time to time. That just bugs me. I'm not a grammar Nazi, but it just— I have a hard time with that. Anyway, lots of grammar issues and typos. I found it very confusing to follow once I got through the, the, the format of his system, which was early on, and then struggled to put together what it is he's trying to do in especially part 3. Like, I just could not figure out why that part was there, save the motivation piece. Basically, his main point in this whole book seems to be to break things down into 3 smaller chunks and turn actions into habits. Now I can resonate with the whole turning actions into habits, but that is my summarization of what he's trying to get across and not getting across. That's my perspective. My last thing here, I am looking at a list that I didn't share with Mike. I think he's an Upholder. If I go back to The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin, I think he's an Upholder because he has this perspective that if you spell things out and make a list of things, it will get done. Did you catch this?

Well, no, because I, I blocked the—

You are one.

No, I, I disown anything from The Four Tendencies.

All right, sure.

You know my stance on the—

I do.

The research basis of that survey, not assessment.

Well, I'm gonna hold up to it. And I say he's an Upholder. Because the way that he's— he lays all these things out, like, just break this down, and then this down. And then once you've got this broken down, it'll be fine, because then you'll get that done. No, if I've broken that down, It to me feels like I've done all the hard work and then I'm just not going to do the list. So that actually has a negative effect in my case. So I, I need to be done with that. This whole book is a very glorified view of picking 3 things and doing it. That's my overall summarization. As far as how to rate it. I struggled with this one. At one point I told my wife, I was like, I think this might be the first 1.0, 1.5 book that I ever go through. There are some key components to it that I could see you could pull out and run with, but I will most definitely not recommend this book. I think I'm going to put it at a 2.0 in my case. I don't think people should pick this up. They're other books that do a much better job. I have complaints with his system. He's hard to read. I don't pick this one up.

All right.

I'm gonna put it at 2. There you go. I'm done.

That's actually a little bit more generous than I thought you were going to be. I don't think I hated this as much as you did. Although, like I said, I really think the visuals of the systems that he has here kind of do more hurt than, than help. He's got a lot of templates and things inside of the book that you can use, but it's totally not the way that I would do things. And really, I can't see anybody applying it that, that specific way.

Sure.

I do think that there are definitely a lot of gold nuggets in here. I feel like JD Meier is probably a very smart person who understands this stuff. And as such doesn't feel the need to expound on these things. But it's hard to pick out the few things in here that really can be of benefit to your specific situation because they very easily get lost in the lists. And even the system at the beginning of the book is kind of too complicated to follow in the 9-box diagram. Like, that doesn't look like a workflow diagram to me. And I know me personally, as I was thinking about, well, how do I implement aspects of this? And I was going to start drawing out my own productivity workflow diagram. I was like, nah, it sounds like too much work. Just forget it. So I don't know. I'm with you that I don't think I would necessarily recommend this book. I do feel like I did get some stuff out of this book. More so than I thought I was going to after the first section. There is a lot of repetition. Oh, one plus side of this self-published book, since you said it was self-published, it does stand the right way on my bookshelf, unlike How to Take Smart Notes. But I don't know. I feel like there's some good stuff in here, but it's more work than it needs to be in order to unearth it. You really have to work at it in order to identify the key ideas for you personally. I'm generally not a fan of services like Blinkist. And I should caveat that because I feel like with a service like Blinkist, where you can read a whole book in 15 minutes, that's what they say, the value of the ideas tends to be diminished by the truncated timeframe. In my opinion, it's kind of like going to the gym and doing bench press with no weight on the bar and then saying, there, I did my workout. Like it's the resistance and pushing through and reading that allows you to get the full idea and the weight of those ideas that really is impactful as we read books. That obviously is not going to happen here. So if you were going to, because that's by nature, it's a very surface level list of lists. And so if you were going to Blinkist a book, this might not be a bad one to do.

Yeah. Or just listen to this episode and call it a day.

Or listen to this episode and call it a day. Yeah, you could do that too. Um, but that, like, that being said, you know, there were a couple of things in here that I think, uh, added value to me going through it. I am glad that I, I read it. Uh, I did have trouble with it and I had to really crank through that last section with all of the lists, especially as I'm trying to jot down all these stupid lists in my MindNode file. The third section is huge.

But you spend more time in your MindNode file than you did reading.

Well, eventually I just went to Siri dictation and I'm like, I don't even care if there's typos, like I'm just going to get these things down. Uh, so I'm gonna rate it higher than you. I'm gonna put it at 3.0. And again, that's just because I feel like there's some, some good stuff in here, but it's definitely harder to get to than, uh, some of the other books that we've read. It's a hard read based on the, the style and just how things all tie together or don't. But if you're gonna put forth the effort, there will be some things I think in here that are going to be of value. Just, there are probably better— whatever you're looking for, there's probably a better vehicle to get you there.

Good deal. All right, put that one in the trash. What's next, Mike?

That's going on my shelf, I believe. The next one is—

I won't trash it.

The next book is Range: Why Generals Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. Which I have not started yet. This is a listener recommendation. Uh, if I'm remembering right, I don't have it open in front of me. It was the most requested book besides Sapiens, which we will cover at some point, but not yet.

It's a long one. We forgot to commit to that one.

I think it may be our first 2-part episode. Oh no, I don't think I could talk about Sapiens twice.

All right. Well, after Range, Uh, the next one we're going to pick up is Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull. Uh, this is, uh, the Pixar team story and how they go about doing their things. So I think this would be really interesting to talk through with you, Mike, and to discuss just in general. So yeah, Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull. I'm interested.

I've actually listened to this on Audible and it is a good book. I will buy the real book and read it. For this particular episode, but it's essentially a biography. So it's a biography of a company, not a person. It is definitely a little bit different than the type of books that we typically cover on Bookworm. So this will be interesting.

Yeah, gonna force us to branch out a little bit.

All right. Gap books, I've got one that I bought while we were in Woodstock. That is The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky. Haven't started this. This is a Looks like a huge book, but the pages are actually pretty thick. I don't think it's going to be that bad. And it also looks like a very interesting read with a lot of diagrams and pictures. So try and get that one done in between.

Yeah. Getting Results kind of kicked my butt when it came to reading. So I'm kind of behind on the whole gap book thing. So I'm still going through Primal Branding by Patrick Hanlon. Hopefully I'll have that one finished up quickly because I need to finish that before I pick up Range and have a deadline on Range. So there you go. I might read that one quick.

All right.

Primal Branding, that is. So there you go. But yes, uh, all of this, everything we've covered, if you have thoughts on this, you think I'm absolutely crazy and you completely disagree with me, I don't think you should disagree with me. Uh, go to the club, club.bookworm.fm. Let us know your thoughts. Join the club. All the cool stuff happens over there.

It's true. And if you are looking for another way to support the show and you want some sweet swag, you can go to the Cotton Bureau site where we've got t-shirts and sweatshirts. Link will be in the show notes. But that'll do it for this episode. So if you're reading along with us, pick up Range, and we will talk to you in a couple of weeks.