312. What’s Actually Worth Your Time?

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Joel: Some of you may know this, some of you probably don’t, but I am a native Californian. I grew up in Sacramento, California. Actually, I grew up in Roseville, California, which is an itsy bit north of Sacramento, and spent some time in Lincoln. And what I know about California is many things, many, many things about California, but one of them you’ve probably heard of, and that’s the Gold Rush.

[00:00:27] The San Francisco 49ers are named the San Francisco 49ers because of the Gold Rush of 1949, and this lives large in the imagination of any Californian who’s worth their salt or something. So imagine these prospectors. They’re out in the rivers. They’re, like, scooping up dirt, and they’re swirling gravel and mud in their gold pans, and they’re trying to sift the worthless stuff from the gold.

[00:00:56] And let me tell you, there’s a lot of worthless stuff. Like, most of what you’re finding is just dirt and gravel and mud. But some of what is in that pan is gold, real gold. It’s worth a ton. And your work is like this very same thing. You’re out there in the river. You’re scooping up mud and dirt and gravel, but some of the stuff in your pan is worth a lot.

[00:01:25] And what you want to do is you want to swirl that stuff around, get the lighter weight stuff. This is how gold… This is, like, the physics of gold panning. You didn’t come here for this, but this is what you’re getting. The physics of gold panning is this: the gold is heavy, so it drifts down to the bottom of the pan.

[00:01:41] The dirt and the gravel and the mud, it’s light, and it just kind of sifts off the top. And what you’re trying to do in your work is the same thing as those prospectors all the way back there in 1849. What you’re trying to do is keep the heavy stuff and get rid of the light stuff, keep the valuable stuff and get rid of the worthless stuff.

[00:02:02] And that’s what we’re going to talk about doing on today’s episode of Focus on This.

[00:02:12] Welcome to Focus on This, the most productive podcast on the internet. I’m Joel Miller.

[00:02:18] Marissa: And I’m Marisa Hyatt.

[00:02:20] Joel: And this is where we remind you of something you already know. It’s not about getting more things done, it’s about getting the right things done.

[00:02:27] Marissa: Both at work and in life. And today we are talking about ROI.

[00:02:33] And in case you don’t know what that means, that means return on investment. How to find what’s actually worth your time. And Joel, I have a confession to make.

[00:02:43] Joel: Yeah.

[00:02:43] Marissa: This may be my most blonde moment on this show to date. For those of you who have never seen me, I am not blonde.

[00:02:53] Joel: Nor have you ever been.

[00:02:55] Marissa: I am very brunette.

[00:02:56] I am today years old. When I found out that the 49ers are called 49ers because they were doing this in 1849.

[00:03:07] Joel: Yeah.

[00:03:07] Marissa: I did not know that that was a reference to the year. I always wondered, “Why are we calling them 49ers?”

[00:03:12] Joel: We do need to say something just on behalf of all blonde people, that you’re excused.

[00:03:18] There is no actual intent- That’s true … on maligning an entire hair thing. I grew up quite blonde in Sacramento

[00:03:27] Marissa: Joel, I’ve never seen you with hair. I don’t even know, I can’t even visualize it, if I’m honest, so.

[00:03:32] Joel: Yeah.

[00:03:32] Marissa: Well, we are not here to talk about hair color, nor are we really here to talk about 1849.

[00:03:38] However, we are here to talk about how to help you figure out the type of work that is really worth your time, what you should be spending time on day in and day out. So we’ve been talking over the last couple weeks about the priority filter. Hopefully, you’ve been joining us for these episodes. If you haven’t, please go back and listen because there’s some really good things in here that will help you really know what is the best, highest use of your time, your skills, and your energy.

[00:04:08] Joel: You missed the obvious connection. Those episodes are gold.

[00:04:14] Marissa: Oh my gosh.

[00:04:15] Joel: Sorry.

[00:04:16] Marissa: Okay, we’re gonna start, like, a joke jail jar that’s happening now. But we have been going through specific questions, three in fact, and today we’re going into the second one. But last week we talked about you. What are you wired to do?

[00:04:32] This week we’re talking about ROI. What is high leverage? And next week we’re gonna dive in to what matters now. So let’s dive in, Joel.

[00:04:43] Joel: What we’re really talking about here is high value work. There is a anthropologist, sociologist, one of those ologists, named, uh, David Graeber, who wrote a very popular book several years ago called, I’ll use the acronym for the sake of our family friendly rating here, BS Jobs.

[00:05:03] Marissa: Hmm.

[00:05:04] Joel: And there was another book several years ago also around the same kind of idea called Fake Work. And none of us wanna think that a lot of what we do is fake work, but I remember reading not that long ago, uh, in 2024, Slack put out a sort of survey of desk workers and what they think about their work.

[00:05:25] And of the respondents, what they found was about 41% of the work on people’s plates they thought was low value- Hmm … didn’t contribute to the company goals, was basically worthless That’s what we’re trying to get as much off our plates as we possibly can.

[00:05:44] Marissa: Well, and as soon as you say that, I’m like, yeah, I think we all feel that.

[00:05:49] 41%, that’s not a small thing.

[00:05:51] Joel: That’s not. I mean, if you think about how many hours you have in a week.

[00:05:55] Marissa: Right.

[00:05:55] Joel: 41% of them, holy cow, that’s a lot.

[00:05:59] Marissa: And I think what we’re getting at here is that not all work is created equal. How can you figure out which work to do more of and which to do a lot less of? And we’re gonna talk about this specifically as two steps for you guys.

[00:06:15] Step number one is that we wanna figure out the results that you’re responsible for. I know this is, like, kind of obvious. Maybe it’s not obvious, but I know that it’s not obvious because when we talk about this with our coaching clients, it’s like, “Wait, I’m responsible for results?” Sometimes we’re not even aware that we are.

[00:06:36] Sometimes it’s super clear, but sometimes it’s not.

[00:06:39] Joel: We tend to think that we’re responsible for the activities that we do, which is more direct, you know? Right. Like, the result is the outcome of the activity we do, and you kind of have to get, I don’t know, used to just thinking in terms of the outcome as opposed to the activity.

[00:06:55] First off, there’s 100 ways to get the outcome. It may not even include the activities you’re currently doing, and on top of that- The activities are only, they only serve the outcome. Mm. Nobody’s paying you for the activities. They’re paying you for the outcomes.

[00:07:10] Marissa: Well, and these activities are things like meetings, emails, reports, writing stuff, giving feedback.

[00:07:18] That’s all like the stuff that we’re doing. Those are the activities, how we’re probably spending a large majority of our time. But then there’s also the results of those things like we’re talking about, and that’s the stuff we’re actually paid for. If we continue to do all these things, but we didn’t have results, we’d probably not have a job either.

[00:07:37] Joel: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, somebody’s gonna be sitting there in corporate looking down at their P&L, and your name’s not gonna be there, but something attached to your name is gonna be there, and they’re gonna say, “Nah, we don’t need that anymore.”

[00:07:49] Marissa: Because what they’re really after are things like customer satisfaction, you know, scores, conversions, improvement of performance over time.

[00:07:58] You know, there’s a lot of these results that are really important to our roles and frankly, to our livelihood. Yeah. And unless you’re in a role like me, like sales, marketing, it’s really common for people to not know what results that they’re actually responsible for in their specific roles. ‘

[00:08:19] Joel: Cause there’s not like a metric attached to it.

[00:08:21] Marissa: A lot of them aren’t a number.

[00:08:22] Joel: And when something is a little bit more abstracted or more qualitative as opposed to quantitative, it’s really easy for that stuff to just get lost in all the busyness. And then, you know, you’re looking up and all you can really account for is what you do, not what it adds up to.

[00:08:39] Marissa: And it’s really important that we know what we’re responsible for because this is how we know actually how to win. And if we wanna win, we have to know how to keep score.

[00:08:48] Joel: Right.

[00:08:48] Marissa: It also helps us know which problems matters more.

[00:08:52] Joel: Like if you’re in a situation where you’ve got three or four competing claims on your time.

[00:08:58] Yeah. One of them matters more. If it’s a bigger, hairier problem to solve, that one probably matters more than some small detail over to the side. Even if that one’s easier to do, even if it would give you a lot of satisfaction to check it off the list, if it doesn’t matter as much, it needs to be demoted.

[00:09:14] Marissa: It’s truly the difference between like what’s important and what’s most important.

[00:09:18] Joel: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:18] Marissa: Because a lot of us are not sitting around with a lot of unimportant work. I know at least from the people that I’m working with, my team, and also our clients, I hear constantly like, “I have too much to do, and I have no idea how to not do all of it.”

[00:09:36] Joel: Right. It all feels important.

[00:09:37] Marissa: It all feels important, and the truth is, it probably is. But even within that importance, there’s different levels. There’s like important, and then there’s what’s most important.

[00:09:47] Joel: So some tips to figure out what the results are that you’re after. You think about the work that you do, and you ask the question, “And why do I do that again?”

[00:09:59] You talk to your boss or your supervisor. Obviously, they should have an idea. Depending on where you are in an organization, they may not actually have an idea, but this is, like, a great place to at least start. And then review your job description or others like it online. Not for the activities. Ask, like, what would that contribute to?

[00:10:19] What does that- Yeah … activity add up to? Why does that activity exist? Because at the end of that question, the answer is gonna get you closer towards what it is you’re really there for, what it is you’re really delivering.

[00:10:32] Marissa: A little pro tip here. If you are somebody who is utilizing AI, you may wanna have AI analyze your calendar or Slack or Teams or whatever it is, your email, and kind of say, “Where am I spending my time?

[00:10:46] Like, when you look over my week and the communication I’ve had and, you know, the literal meetings on my calendar, where am I spending my time?” And knowing if you can give it your job description or whatever and say, like, “Knowing what you know about me and my role, why do these activities matter?” Ask. It can kind of dig in for you, and it’s not gonna get it perfectly right.

[00:11:07] It’s not you. It doesn’t have all the context that you have, but it will get you a little bit of the way there.

[00:11:12] Joel: Well, as a thinking partner, I think that’s a really cool exercise. AI’s really useful at just surfacing things that we don’t see, and, you know, I’ve already mentioned a few books. I might as well mention another one.

[00:11:23] Duncan Watts wrote a really great book several years ago called Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer.

[00:11:29] Marissa: Yeah.

[00:11:29] Joel: And sometimes we just don’t know the answer, and it, it feels obvious, but it’s not. And once you get the reframe from having the right answer, you go, “Ah,” and everything just kinda clicks.

[00:11:40] Marissa: Well, I feel like for a lot of us, this is obvious, and for a lot of us, it’s not. And so sometimes those results are gonna be measurable like we talked about, very clear metrics that you’re trying to hit. And if you’re certainly in marketing like me or something like sales, that’s pretty obvious. For the rest of you guys, it might be more subjective.

[00:12:00] It could even be that it’s currently unmeasured or even potentially undefined, and so this is where having that conversation with your boss can be really helpful in saying, like, “What do you feel like the most important result is that I’m supposed to deliver?” Maybe that is client transformation. Maybe it’s something like trust, or it could be a specific executive’s satisfaction.

[00:12:25] Either way, it should be a favorable outcome that you’re trying to create. I can’t think of one thing that would be non-favorable that you’re trying to create.

[00:12:35] Joel: Unless you do happen to be delivering a lot of non-favorable outcomes, in which case it might be time for a reassessment of some kind.

[00:12:42] Marissa: Yes.

[00:12:43] Either you’re gonna need that, or you’re gonna be forced to make that-

[00:12:46] Joel: Right …

[00:12:46] Marissa: that reassessment.

[00:12:59] Joel: Okay, so the second step is to figure out which activities are actually driving those results. So once we separate activities from the results, we’re not just focusing on activities, we’re now focusing on activities and results. Now you wanna ask the question, which activities are actually driving those results?

[00:13:20] Because if you go back to that Slack statistic, it could be as many as 41%, as much as 41% of the activities are actually not driving the results you’re really responsible for.

[00:13:30] Marissa: Which is a major problem, because then you’re just kind of investing your time into a really crappy investment. It’s not a good idea.

[00:13:39] You’re not gonna get a high ROI on those activities.

[00:13:44] Joel: No, your gold pan is full of nothing but dirt and mud and gravel.

[00:13:47] Marissa: Yeah. Your effort will make the biggest difference when it directly relates to the results that you’re trying to create, okay? So think about a lever. A lever exists to make it easier to lift something heavy.

[00:14:01] So these activities that we’re talking about that are high leverage are gonna lift those results Higher for the energy they require

[00:14:11] Joel: In other words, you’re having to do less work to get better results.

[00:14:16] Marissa: And this is what we all want. Every single one of us wants to figure out how can we work smarter instead of harder.

[00:14:25] We all know that feeling of grinding, and you’re just like, “Oh my gosh, I’m putting so much time into this or so much effort, and it just feels like what I’m getting is so small compared to the time and energy being put in.”

[00:14:40] Joel: Can we explore, like, an example of this? The example I want to use is a customer experience manager, and let’s say one of your key results, this should be obvious, is customer satisfaction.

[00:14:53] What could you do to improve customer satisfaction?

[00:14:58] Marissa: One of the things that you can do is to look for patterns in your customer tickets that you’re getting and go solve those upstream problems that are leading to that dissatisfaction.

[00:15:10] Joel: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:10] Marissa: So for instance, if your customers continually are reaching out saying, “Where’s my shipment?”

[00:15:15] over and over and over, why don’t you go put in an automation that gives them, at certain periods of time, updates about their shipment? And if maybe you already have that through email, but you’re still getting all these tickets, maybe try another type of communication like SMS that is more likely to get read and is less likely to be missed than email.

[00:15:40] Joel: Makes sense. You could develop guidelines that give your agents more autonomy to solve problems more quickly without waiting on your approval. That might speed up the satisfaction and keep the person in a dissatisfied state less long.

[00:15:57] Marissa: Or you could also build, um, and kind of deploy some type of AI solution that handles specific simple issues, which is gonna save your team a lot of time and probably a lot of money, where they can go reinvest that into more complex cases- Yeah

[00:16:16] that they need to solve for.

[00:16:17] Joel: You could review call data and coach your team on specific skills or information gaps that you’re noticing, ’cause those are undoubtedly somewhat present.

[00:16:26] Marissa: Well, I think this is good because all of these options are gonna be a lot more high leverage than, say, handling lots of escalated cases, or managing your team’s scheduling, or responding to emails, or sitting in a lot of the meetings that you’re being asked to sit in.

[00:16:43] We can tell that these are going to deliver better results Than sitting in a bunch of meetings or responding just what I would call feeling like you’re in the rat race of the day-to-day.

[00:16:57] Joel: This is deceptive, too, because maybe those meetings are about these issues. Maybe you’re handling some emails that are about these issues.

[00:17:05] Maybe the team scheduling feels like it’s contributing to the issue. Maybe you handling those escalated cases may feel like you’re being really responsible, like you’re the one- Right … jumping in there and taking care of it. But all of that stuff may actually be distracting you from the more meaningful version of the work, which is the list we just kind of walked through.

[00:17:25] Marissa: Yeah.

[00:17:26] Joel: And if you were to do those things, you would not only clear up some of the downstream problems, but you’d save yourself time, too, and probably feeling like your hair’s on fire.

[00:17:35] Marissa: Well, and just like we manage our financial investments, there’s certain investments that deliver a better return, and we want to do more of those investments because it’s making our money produce better results.

[00:17:49] It’s the same thing with our time and our energy. It doesn’t mean that, like you’re talking about, Joel, those other activities are necessarily bad. It’s just that they’re not as good at delivering the results as these other higher leverage kind of activities are going to be.

[00:18:05] Joel: And I want to just double down on this point because I, I think it’s really easy to miss this sometimes, but spending time doing the lower leverage version of addressing a problem can feel just as good as the higher leverage version.

[00:18:23] So you feel like you’re doing important work, but it’s not as valuable. And until we get really good at analyzing the output, at analyzing the result, what we can do is we can fill our weeks up with lower return versions of work- Yeah … that still feels like we’re on task. It’s not like we’re wasting time, quote, unquote, but in a way we are because the return on that work is lower than it would’ve been if we had invested that same effort into something that was stronger, better, weightier, had more gravity, was just had more oomph in it for dealing with those problems.

[00:18:59] Marissa: What do we do with the stuff that still has to get done that we know isn’t probably as high leverage as some of these other things, but like, we still have to do those things?

[00:19:09] Joel: I mean, the minimal viable dose is I think the right framework for that. Whatever medicine you take, there is like a minimal viable dose of what is going to be effective, and then there is some kind of Range above that at which you will not be poisoning yourself, but you can still take that medicine.

[00:19:29] Well, it’s the same thing with maintenance. We have in the past used the phrase downhill work. Like it’s just easier to do. Yeah. We can default to it because it’s comfortable, it’ll fill some time, and we feel decent about doing it because it kind of needs to be done. But you can over-invest your time in that work and get less return than if you did the minimal amount of that work and invested the time in something higher leverage.

[00:19:56] Yeah. And if you did, you would get better results. Those results would be more visible to the organization that you’re in. Those visible results would then get better rewarded. Nobody is really impressed that you manage your calendar all that well. What they’re impressed is what that leads to. And so what you wanna do is emphasize what it leads to and de-emphasize the rest.

[00:20:18] Marissa: And one of the best strategies, I think, for this type of work is figuring out how we can automate it or use something like AI to spend less of our time in those activities. So for instance, Joel, you mentioned calendar management And you and I, at this moment in time, are both going into super intense strategic planning for next year, which means a lot more meetings on our calendars, a lot more prep work, and all kinds of stuff that we need to do for those meetings.

[00:20:55] We were talking about this over text yesterday, but it kinda feels like our work kinda doubled overnight.

[00:21:00] Joel: Yeah. Strategic planning comes around every year. It’s like Christmas, but somehow or another, it’s always a surprise.

[00:21:06] Marissa: And I would say this is really important, high-leverage work, but the calendar management piece of it is not.

[00:21:12] Like, this feels like it’s just not the best use of my time. You and I share an executive assistant. It’s probably not the best use of her time to be trying to figure out how to place all these things. It could be. However, you and I independently both chose to use Grokbot to help us figure out how to put all this stuff on our calendars for the next few months as we’re going through this process, and to map out all the prep time that is needed, make sure that all those other meetings that we need to do outside of strategic planning still happen, right?

[00:21:45] Yep. Those important ones. And then all the stuff that isn’t that important on our calendars could come off. That was a great way for us to do that because it’s the kind of stuff that still has to get done. Like, we still need to plot all this stuff on our calendars. It would take a lot of time if you and I were to manually go in and figure out every single thing, but now with a tool like AI, we can shorten that amount of time that’s required, both for us and for our executive assistant, so that it doesn’t eat into it, and we can actually go do the actual work and go in those meetings versus trying to figure out how to map it out.

[00:22:19] Joel: Totally. I mean, one is low value. One is very high value. Yeah. Knowing the difference and being able to, in the moment, say, “Yeah, I can see the value in doing all that calendar work,” for instance. It’s not like it’s pointless. It’s actually really important. It’s just that it’s nowhere near as valuable as other things that are also competing for the same scarce time.

[00:22:40] Marissa: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:40] Joel: And so when you have endless things to do and a very endless you, you have to figure out how to reduce the low leverage stuff and amplify the high leverage stuff.

[00:22:52] Marissa: You know, we’re talking a lot about work here, and what may be less obvious is that this also applies to our personal life. There is certain things that we are going to do in our personal life that deliver better results than other things.

[00:23:07] For instance, we might be doing things because we want a specific result, like exercising, right? We’re trying to be energized or fit. You’re gonna have dinner as a family, so you feel connected. You wanna declutter various parts of your home so you feel more at peace, you know, and less kinda chaotic. But the problem is that most of us are not slowing down long enough to think about what we’re optimizing for right now when it comes to our personal lives.

[00:23:32] Joel: I think part of the reason is- None of us want to optimize our personal lives all that much. If we’re in a work environment and we’re already optimizing everything as much as we can, it feels like a drag to kinda drag that same mindset into our personal lives. And yet there’s some value in being clear about what the returns are on the activities that we do.

[00:23:56] Like, if you have a free evening and you’re already somewhat rested, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to sit down in front of Netflix and watch four hours of TV when you could go hang out with friends. Right. Like, that would be so much more valuable. You can think through, like, I don’t know, your entire life and think through all the things that you do and just evaluate, like, what actually contributes more to my life, this thing or that thing?

[00:24:23] Marissa: Right.

[00:24:23] Joel: And they may both be fine, but one is better. And if one is better, more often than not, it’s a good idea to choose that. Yep. That doesn’t mean you don’t sometimes opt for the lower thing just because why the heck not, and maybe you really do wanna watch those four hours of Netflix. There’s some great stuff on Netflix.

[00:24:40] At the same time, if you’re underserving other areas of your life, like your personal relationships or your health or something else like that, you need to invest more there. And being clear on that, like, just keeping kind of a mental spreadsheet of, how am I doing in the various domains of my life, enables you to think, you know, you don’t have to, like, actually have the spreadsheet.

[00:25:02] That would probably be too much. But we do definitely wanna be optimizing for where we need more value in these private domains.

[00:25:12] Marissa: Yeah. Well, and, like, getting clear on what are the results I’m actually wanting in my personal life, and then where can I go spend my time wisely to get those results? So this is gonna look different for every single one of us ’cause we’re not all optimizing for the same thing in our personal life, like you mentioned.

[00:25:29] Some of us are optimizing for better health. That’s something I’m working on. You know, y’all know I had a really serious shoulder injury this spring, and I’ll be honest, it has been really hard to get back on my feet from a health standpoint. I did a lot of lab work recently. Inflammation is still really high and all that kind of stuff.

[00:25:47] So I’m looking at where can I optimize for better health? And that doesn’t just mean that I’m gonna go start working out every single day for an hour to an hour and a half. That Seemingly sounds good. However, that’s probably not the highest value type- Mm-hmm … of plan for me. In fact, I’m reading Andrew Huberman’s book Protocols right now, and he talks about three strength training workouts is all you need a week.

[00:26:14] That’s something that is high leverage, that’s going to deliver the results disproportionately to the time that it takes. It doesn’t mean that necessarily more is better. So this is where we can get really strategic in our personal lives and ask the question, what am I actually trying to create? What are the results that I’m after?

[00:26:31] Is it a better marriage? Is it to get into a relationship? Is it to create better friendships? Is it get off Netflix and develop a hobby? Is it to get outside? Like, what are we trying to drive for? And then let’s figure out what those actions are that we need to start building into our lives.

[00:26:49] Joel: At the end of the day, we can’t do it all at home any more than we can do it all at work, and there’s just 24 hours in a day, 168 in a week, and I mean, someday somebody may figure this out, but up until this very moment, nobody’s figured out how to mint more time.

[00:27:07] There’s just no more of it coming. And so that means we have to make choices, and if we go back to the priority filter, as long as we’re keeping activities that we’re performing, that we’re doing true to us, in other words, like that qualify for that you category, what’s stuff that we’re wired to do, and now factoring in ROI, stuff that’s high on return, that opens up the third, which we’ll talk about next week.

[00:27:34] But let’s just focus on these two for a moment. If it’s you, like this is like what lights you up, this is what brings out the best in you, this is aligned with your values, and it’s high ROI, that’s a really good indicator that you’re on the right path.

[00:27:49] Marissa: You know, I was sharing earlier, financially, we’re making investments all day long.

[00:27:54] And it’s the same thing with our time. We are making investments every single day, and we’re going to get some type of return on those investments. And the goal here is that we’re spending the time that we do have, inside and outside of work, on things that are gonna create a disproportionate result to the time that we’re putting in, meaning we’re getting better results in less time.

[00:28:21] Yeah. That’s the goal. We don’t wanna just be working 60-hour weeks to work 60-hour weeks or feeling like we’re trapped in that. We wanna feel like, man, I can work a 30 to 40-hour week and actually get better results because I’m super clear on the results that I’m after, and therefore, I know exactly what actions I need to take today and all week and all quarter to deliver those results so that I’m not having to waste a bunch of time, so I can go live the rest of my life.

[00:28:52] Joel: So we’ve mentioned a lot of books. Well, here’s another one. So, you know, we’re talking about gold panning. Patrick DeWitt wrote a novel called The Sisters Brothers, which is like a, a great Western if you’re into Westerns. Hmm. And there’s a gold panning scene in this. So I just mention that to bring us back to gold, ’cause that’s what we’re after is the gold.

[00:29:13] And the way you get the gold is it’s out there, but it’s surrounded by cruft. It’s surrounded by mud and dirt and gravel, and you gotta pan that junk off. And the way you pan that junk off is to get really clear on what it is you’re after, to get really clear on the high leverage stuff that’s weightier, it’s gonna fall to the bottom of your pan, and that’s what you wanna keep.

[00:29:38] And the rest of it just goes right off the top and you never look back.

[00:29:42] Marissa: Our job really is not to try to get it all done. The truth is, we never will. We just need to decide what deserves the best of our time, energy, and attention, and if we can figure that out, gosh, there’s so much freedom in that. There’s so much peace in that

[00:30:03] Joel: Thanks for joining us for Focus on This.

[00:30:06] Marissa: This is the most productive podcast on the internet, so be sure to share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you listen or at focusonthispodcast.com.

[00:30:16] Joel: And we’ll be back here next week, where we’re going to bring this thing, I would say full circle, but we’ve already covered a few circles, so this is actually about bringing the circles full circle.

[00:30:27] We’re gonna bring in now into the priority filter and dig in deep on that to decide what you should be doing today without being in reaction mode, ’cause that’s no fun.

[00:30:38] Marissa: Until then, stay

[00:30:41] Joel: focused.