292. Breaking Out of “Busy” (Planning 2.0 Pt. 2)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Marissa: Do you ever feel like your life is way more stressful and chaotic than it needs to be? Well, today we’re covering a few simple strategies for creating more rhythm and spaciousness to your weeks so you can slow down on purpose.

[00:00:22] Welcome to Focus On This, the Most productive podcast on the internet. I’m Marissa Hyatt.

[00:00:28] Joel: And I’m Joel Miller.

[00:00:29] Marissa: 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,

[00:00:37] Joel: both at work and in life. And today we’re talking about how to leverage planning 2.0 to create more margin and break free from busy.

[00:00:47] If this is, it is important to say the second in a series. So if you haven’t heard the first episode, I recommend that you stop right now and go back and listen to that one. Otherwise, you’ll feel like you’re somewhere in the middle of the Lord of the Rings saga, and you’ve missed the first episode. You don’t wanna do that.

[00:01:06] What you want to do is get clear on what we talked about before and follow it up with today, because today we’re actually gonna finish what we started in that first episode. We’re gonna close some loops and we’re going to dig in on something that really depends on you having digested last week. So let’s go ahead and talk a little bit about last week to get you caught up.

[00:01:27] If you, in fact, did listen to the first in the series last week. Some of those brain cells, uh, may have dimmed a little bit since then. No worries. We’re gonna turn the lights back on right now. Last week we introduced two concepts from Elizabeth Stanley in her book, widen the Window. She defines planning 1.0 as the kind of thinking that we do when we’re left to our own devices.

[00:01:54] This is like just your brain running on autopilot. Thinking through just the various things that are popping up in your life. So this tends to result in anxious looping, worst case scenario planning, worrying about scarcity and so on. And as I was thinking about worst case scenario planning, you’re just an example.

[00:02:14] You may remember the worst case, survival manuals, the book that was created that helped you plan for extreme circumstances. I think about this book almost every time I go to the beach because I love swimming in the ocean. I’m dreadfully afraid of sharks, and these two things contradict each other somewhat.

[00:02:31] But when I think about going to the beach, I literally think about sharks every time, and yet I have to override that part of my brain. And in overriding that part of my brain, I remind myself that the number of shark attacks. Are rather minuscule that I am likely to leave the water with most of my blood in my body and my limbs still attached, and I’ll be just fine and overriding planning 1.0.

[00:02:57] Is what Stanley calls Planning 2.0, and that’s like giving the thinking parts of our brains a better way to address uncertainty.

[00:03:06] Marissa: 1.0 is like default mode.

[00:03:08] Joel: Yeah.

[00:03:09] Marissa: You know, it’s like the kind of crappy first draft or whatever. It’s not really conscious thinking and planning. 2.0 is where we actually are conscious, we’re making better decisions, we’re being strategic, and it’s not that.

[00:03:25] Default mode, like we’re actually orchestrating things in this context, not just drifting, which is right. I feel like what planning 1.0

[00:03:34] Joel: is, so this is like flexible planning where you can actually think about all the contingencies and start putting them in order. You can allocate your resources, you can determine your priorities.

[00:03:44] You can. Make logical inferences from the data that you have to tell yourself that you’re not, in fact, gonna die in the ocean that afternoon, right? Instead, you’re gonna have a good time.

[00:03:53] Marissa: I never knew this fear that you had.

[00:03:55] Joel: Yeah.

[00:03:56] Marissa: So Stanley’s idea of planning 2.0 includes six. Practices. So we addressed the first three principles last week.

[00:04:04] As Joel said, if you haven’t yet listened to that, I wanna really encourage you to pause this episode. Go back, listen to the episode from last week, so you’re up to speed. We really talked about how these three principles. Integrate with the weekly preview. Now this week we’re gonna talk about the last three and we’re moving from the weekly preview to talk about the ideal week.

[00:04:26] Now, if you haven’t heard of the ideal week, we’re gonna talk about it and and help give you a quick crash course and what that is. But this tool is highly underutilized, I think, by people and frankly by myself. Actually, this is very timely episode because this weekend I realized. I’ve had some changes in my schedule, uh, one of which is I now do our evening coaching call on Tuesday evenings for our Double win coaching program, and that’s a new pretty major calendar adjustment for me, and I have not updated my ideal week to accommodate for that.

[00:04:58] And so I’m still living kind of in this. 1.0 for myself, and I need to pull that into 2.0 with my updated schedule, my updated responsibilities, all of that. And so if you’re feeling a little bit of that friction where you feel like, gosh, I am struggling to do what I need to do, struggling to feel like I have the energy in the day to get it done, and really being strategic in how you’re managing your time and energy, the ideal week might be the exact tool that you need to be using to help.

[00:05:28] So Joel, why don’t you share with us before we dive into all the ins and outs of these three principles, tell us about the ideal week for those who maybe have never used it, maybe they don’t know about it, or maybe they have, but they need a refresher and how it’s intended to be used.

[00:05:44] Joel: The simplest way to think about the ideal week is that it’s like a visual budget of your time.

[00:05:49] I’m gonna go ahead and change my metaphors here for a second. Just, I dunno, because, but if you imagine like a soccer field. You’ve got like the area in which the play is defined, like that’s where the work happens. And then you’ve got outside of that, you’ve got the stuff that is for non play stuff. The ideal week shows you where the play is happening, like where your work hours are, where you’ve got time at the top of the day time, at the bottom of the day, time on the weekends to separate all of these different activities that we’re going to be doing throughout the course of the week.

[00:06:25] The reason why the budget analogy is helpful here is that you can apportion that time so that when you think about your weekends, for instance, what are you gonna do on them? When you think about the top of the day or the bottom of the day, what are you gonna do at that time? You probably know when your work hours are, but what often happens with us is we end up really not thinking.

[00:06:48] Clearly or intentionally enough about our work hours, and we almost never think about our non-work hours. And so the ideal week gives you a structure that basically enables you to put some hard boundaries on things. So you know, like I’m over budget on work right now. I need to be in rest mode. And it’s telling you when because it’s a visual reminder.

[00:07:10] So it’s like a map. To use a third metaphor, now it’s a map of your week and it’s, again, it’s ideal. Like your actual work week will probably never exactly correspond, and it doesn’t have to, you know, you don’t get like docked points. There are no police officers ready to arrest you if you fail your ideal week.

[00:07:30] But it’s a way to use like this planning 2.0 mindset to get intentional about our time. So it gives you structure to say things like, when are you gonna start and end your workday? When will you do meetings? Meetings often just get confetti spread throughout our entire week, and that’s a terrible way to do meetings.

[00:07:50] It’s better to have them batched. In fact, it’s better, and we’ll talk about this to batch a lot of stuff. When are you gonna rest? When are you gonna take care of your home? And life logistics. A lot of times that stuff just backs up into any given day that you happen to have free time. But there’s like intentional ways of using that better.

[00:08:08] It’s kind of like. To use are now a fourth metaphor.

[00:08:12] Marissa: I mean,

[00:08:13] Joel: what is happening like playing Tetris with your calendar, you get to kind of organize the schedule so that it aligns with your priorities by taking these blocks of time and like putting them in place so that they work best.

[00:08:25] Marissa: Well, it really is, and it’s similar to a budget you think.

[00:08:28] It feels on the front end, possibly restrictive as you go in and like, oh my gosh, I’m gonna account for basically every minute of my week and. The reality is what it actually provides is so much freedom on the other side, because every time you get an imitation or a request for something or you know, you’re trying to think through your priorities, you’ve already factored all of those things in.

[00:08:52] And we’re gonna get into really the nitty gritty of how to actually execute this well. And we’ll give you the free download so that you can actually go do this if you don’t have a full focus planner. Or maybe if you just. Are like me, and you don’t wanna put a non final version into your planner. You want kind of a, a draft version that you can, can work with.

[00:09:11] Joel: You can kind of sketch it out first

[00:09:12] Marissa: Exactly. And so you can make mistakes and, you know, try different scenarios and all that kind of stuff. Uh, so we’ll give you a link for that here in the episode. But I think the biggest thing I want to communicate to everyone who has not done an ideal week yet.

[00:09:28] Remember that this is ideal. So Joel, you touched on this, but I think that this often gets overlooked and people feel like they all of a sudden have to become really rigid with their time. And so when somebody requests a meeting outside of their typical meeting rhythm or days, it’s not an invitation to be rigid.

[00:09:46] It’s really an invitation to. Do your best to reinforce those boundaries and to say, Hey, it can be as simple as suggesting a new time. Could we do it at this time? But it doesn’t mean that you have to immediately say no or be unwilling to be flexible. So I think that’s important before we go into all of this.

[00:10:02] And like I said, we’re gonna give you some really practical application for your ideal week. Just remember that, you know, this is the ideal and also. You’re creating one week that will represent any given week in time in your life right now on the stage that you’re in and the season that you’re in. We recommend updating this on a quarterly basis because typically your life adjust, you know, within that quarter enough that it’s important to revisit if nothing else.

[00:10:29] But there’s no need to create an ideal week every single week. And I think sometimes people think they’re supposed to do this for every single week. You can think of this like a template. You’re gonna create it once. For the quarter and use it as a template, and then in the next quarter you’re gonna revise it and update it based on any changes that have happened in your life.

[00:10:48] Joel: For those of you keeping track, that’s a fifth metaphor and I’m hoping that we can get to six by the end of this episode. Yeah,

[00:10:55] Marissa: this is, this is impressive. We’re on a roll.

[00:10:57] Joel: So let’s transition from the ideal week to Elizabeth Stanley’s principles. So again, last week we covered principles one through three.

[00:11:07] Now we’re gonna jump into principle four. Marissa, why don’t you walk us through this first principle,

[00:11:13] Marissa: principle four is to deliberately build plenty of white space into your schedule. Again, this is something that we often miss and if you think of the budget metaphor, going back to that metaphor for a second, you know, we want to build in some white space often to our financial budget so that we can account.

[00:11:30] For those random purchases or impulse things that we want to, we wanna be able to do and have the freedom to live our lives. Right? And have those spur the moment things and. Same kind of thing here within your ideal week where we want to account, we don’t want every single minute to be assigned to a specific task, for instance.

[00:11:51] So we really wanna create buffer, which is what we mean when we say white space. So this really creates room. For things like unhurried transitions, and if you’re somebody who is in a lot of meetings, for instance, you know what that feels like. You’re jumping from one zoom meeting to the next zoom meeting or one conference room to the next conference room, and it feels like you don’t have enough time to actually take a breath, gather your thoughts and realize.

[00:12:16] Where you are in that moment. So we wanna be able to slow down a little bit to allow for better transitions. The other thing is important opportunities. So we wanna be able to make some space for when those things come in. We have the buffer to be able to say yes to those things. Another one is inevitable interruptions.

[00:12:35] We know this to be true, whether

[00:12:37] Joel: it’s in eruptions like you, like I’m doing right now.

[00:12:39] Marissa: Yes. Like whether it be your boss. Who’s interrupting you? The people that report to you, interrupting you, your kids, whatever it may be. You wanna build in some buffer for those interruptions, and then also for things going wrong.

[00:12:54] The truth is, is that stuff is not gonna be perfect 100% of the time. Stuff is gonna go wrong, plans are gonna go awry. That’s going to happen, and we really wanna be able to create this white space so that we have that buffer to account for frankly. I could sum all this up for real life and being a human, like we cannot jump from one thing to the next all day long and expect ourselves to be able to be high functioning people in that process.

[00:13:20] So we’ve gotta account for that.

[00:13:21] Joel: Life is gonna life, right? So you have to have that in place. And the reason why this is like important to do intentionally is, I don’t know if you suffer from this, Marissa, but I tend to overpack. My weeks, I have more going on than I have available time. Speaking of Lord of the Rings call back earlier in the episode, the line from Bilbo Baggins, I feel like butter scraped over too much bread.

[00:13:48] That’s like my schedule. It’s like too much stuff and I’m like trying to cram it all in. And so

[00:13:53] Marissa: yeah,

[00:13:54] Joel: I think that what we’re talking about here is just ensuring that we plan for days to be. A little slower. Slower or a little bit roomier than we might otherwise do by default, which again is a move from planning 1.0 to planning 2.0.

[00:14:13] You may remember our episode on overestimating.

[00:14:16] Marissa: Yeah.

[00:14:17] Joel: Like I’m totally guilty of that and I think a lot of our listeners probably are too. It’s just like our ambitions outrun our schedule.

[00:14:24] Marissa: Yeah. Well it’s really true and it’s easy when we’re working off of paper to. Really go to the ideal and think that we have somehow these superhuman powers to be able to go through eight hours of meetings with no break to use the restroom or no buffer to eat lunch or respond to our team or whatever it may be.

[00:14:48] Or just take a breath. And it’s really easy for us to map it out in a perfect scenario as if we were these. Robotic people who could just have endless capacity. But the truth is we’re not. And some of us may have more energy earlier in the day than later in the day, and we’re not accounting for things like that.

[00:15:08] And so the ideal week really provides an opportunity for us to consider all of those aspects to our given. Whether that is when we need to rest, when we wanna have downtime, social time, when we wanna be doing deep work, or that kind of more important thinking type work, or when we need to be engaging in meetings.

[00:15:28] Um, so we wanna be able to consider all of these factors and more obviously, within our week, just to make sure that we’re, we’re setting ourselves up for the best success possible.

[00:15:38] Joel: Part of that is that a lot of times what happens is. We only think in terms of tasks, not time.

[00:15:44] Marissa: Yeah.

[00:15:45] Joel: And so we’ve got, you know, our big three for the day, but we’ve got a lot of other tasks at the start of the week.

[00:15:51] You know, if, if you do the weekly preview process, you may sit down and identify like all these open tasks that you have facing you, and you may end up with like 15 or 20 tasks that you’re planning to deal with that week, but you only get to do those things. Time, and if you don’t think about the time that you have available, that list is just gonna be as wonky as it was at the beginning because you didn’t actually figure out when you would do those things.

[00:16:17] And the ideal week enables you to have another lens on how to use your time so that you can.

[00:16:23] Marissa: I think one thing that I love that Stanley recommends is having one full day with no work, and this means personal and professional, almost like a Sabbath. And I’ve not done this, just to be honest. I do. I’m not, I’m not a

[00:16:39] Joel: personal testimony.

[00:16:40] It’s beautiful.

[00:16:41] Marissa: I know that you do. I do not do this and I need to do this because usually Saturday would kind of be that day. A Sunday is always my like get prepped for the week. Kind of day. And so that’s not really a good candidate for that. However, Saturday would be a perfect day for me to do this.

[00:16:58] Probably like most of you listening, Saturday often ends up being more of a social day or that kind of a thing, and I still somehow manage to end up piling in personal work on Saturday. So, Joel, please share some wisdom here. How do you do this?

[00:17:15] Joel: Mine just comes outta desperation. So it used to be that. The weekend would roll around and Megan and I would have this massive list of household chores and just projects to get caught up on and all that kind of stuff.

[00:17:28] And we’d hit the ground running Saturday morning and we’d get done whatever we would get done. But Saturday would be completely eaten up. And you go into Sunday and then there’s still more stuff to handle on Sunday, including getting ready for the week and all that kind of stuff. And all of a sudden it’s like I had a weekend.

[00:17:45] That was hopefully ideally there for rest, and there was no rest that happened. And one day we just said, this doesn’t work any longer. And it was me saying, God help me. Like this is too much. I, I, I need a break. Yeah. And so we just decided like Saturday was gonna be our off day. And I read, I walk, I putter around, I, you know, help with the kids on stuff that they need and, and all that kind of stuff.

[00:18:11] But it’s like, it’s not a workday. I don’t do personal projects on that day. And it ends up, meaning that Sunday comes, there’s less time to get done that stuff. Mm-hmm. But I just like dig in on Sunday afternoon and like that time is committed to the family and family projects and you know, home projects and all that kind of stuff.

[00:18:29] And I just like work like a beaver to get done on Sunday afternoon so I can keep preserving my Saturday.

[00:18:35] Marissa: I love that. Well, and it kind of gives you a natural momentum into the work week, which is nice, uh, by, by kind of having like, you have a real sense of rest, and then you can carry that momentum on Sunday afternoons all the way into Monday, which is fantastic.

[00:18:49] And hopefully as part of that practice, you’re doing your weekly preview, uh, so you’re able to really set yourself up well come Monday morning. A few other quick ways that you can really just create more space to slow down if you’re not maybe able or, or if. You know, that doesn’t appeal to you as much taking a full day.

[00:19:07] A few other options are determine which days you’re staying home. Mm-hmm. From work and gonna work at home, and so you’re able to have a longer, slower morning. My gosh, my favorite thing in the world is a slow morning. I love a slow morning, and it’s really true on the days that I’m not commuting into the office, which is about.

[00:19:27] Three days out of the work week, I’m able to really incorporate a better morning routine that’s slower, that’s more intentional, less hurried, and uh, I love that. Another one is to choose evenings that you’re going to stay home and relax. So you may wanna designate in your ideal week some social blocks where you say, okay, this is when I’m gonna go.

[00:19:47] You know, see friends or have date night or that kind of activity. But here’s the nights, here’s the evenings where I’m intentionally going to stay home and rest. And usually I would couple that the day before, you know, you have a more intense workday. Maybe it’s the day that you do all your meetings. You wanna say the night before.

[00:20:03] I’m gonna stay home and really relax and rest so that I’m totally on my A game the next morning. A couple other quick tips on this is to designate when you’re going to do all those household personal chores. So Joel, for you that Sunday afternoon for, for me, that tends to be more on a Sunday morning bleeding into kind of that early afternoon.

[00:20:24] And that is great. I have, you know, my typical Sunday chores, I change the sheets, I clean the kitchen, I go to the grocery store. Clean up and you know, fold laundry and all those things. And it’s nice to know that’s my time to get it all done. I’ve kind of got that protected. And then lastly is to build in extra time around transition.

[00:20:44] So we’ve talked about this in previous episodes. Whenever you are transitioning from one activity to another, you need to build in a little bit of a buffer to help your mind catch up with your body where you are. So you could do this in between meetings by setting what are called speedy meetings inside of Google Calendar.

[00:21:04] I know Outlook and other calendars have similar settings that you can do. It basically takes, for instance, a 60 minute meeting and makes it a 50 minute meeting by default, and so you get a little bit of a 10 minute buffer between meetings to run to the restroom, refill your coffee, refill your water.

[00:21:19] Just take a breath. Walk outside for a second and get some fresh air, which is really fantastic. And then I think one of the most overlooked transitions that people don’t factor in is the end of the workday moving into their personal life. You know, back in the day when we were all commuting and, and some of you may be in a position where you’re commuting every day, that usually looked like your literal commute home, right?

[00:21:42] You had period of time in the car where we, you could kind of decompress process what had happened at work. Allow your brain to settle. But for a lot of us, especially if you’re in a remote position, this has become more increasingly difficult to manage that transition because all of a sudden it’s like you close your laptop and you’re supposed to just jump into personal life.

[00:22:05] There’s zero transition, so this might be a really good time to take a walk, you know, get outside, allow your brain and your body to kind of. Again, catch up to the present moment and that next activity or next thing that you’re gonna be engaging in.

[00:22:19] Joel: If you had to sum up what’s the big idea of principle four, what would you say it was?

[00:22:25] Marissa: Yeah, I would say it’s really create space so that the unexpected doesn’t end up sending you into a total panic stress by spiral. This should be something that feels doable. You’re just building in buffer, creating that sense of white space to really account for real life and all the things that come with that.

[00:22:47] And part of that is you as a human and your capacity. So I think that that is kind of the big idea of principle four.

[00:23:08] Joel: That takes us to drum roll please. Principle five, to build in time to attend to the squeaky wheels in your environment.

[00:23:19] Marissa: We need a meta metaphor count.

[00:23:22] Joel: Yeah.

[00:23:23] Marissa: I’m like, I think we’re up to six or seven at this point. I think seven.

[00:23:25] Joel: Definitely. It’s at least six for sure.

[00:23:27] Marissa: Squeaky wheels. Let’s talk about what they are.

[00:23:28] So squeaky wheels are those things that are just constantly nagging, that are just there, that are kind of. Under the surface driving you crazy, but you’re not quite conscious to these. So this may be like a really cluttered desk or that pile of unopened mail that’s sitting on your counter. It could be your messy car.

[00:23:51] I have a, this is a silly thing, I have a coffee stain on my passenger seat that has literally been there for probably two years. That is a squeaky wheel, and I have never gone to get my car detailed to get that out. And I think I’m gonna add that to my task list this week. ’cause it, it drives me crazy and it just takes up a little bit too much mental load.

[00:24:13] Joel: It’s like one thing wouldn’t be a problem, but when these squeaky wheels multiply and you got like 50 of ’em that get triggered throughout the day, that’s a thing at some point.

[00:24:24] Marissa: Yeah, it’s the piles of laundry. When you don’t actually finish them, you don’t actually fold those. It’s your unresolved financial concerns or fears.

[00:24:34] Right? Right. It’s all those necessary home or auto repairs. I mean, if I had to sum up squeaky wheels. It’s like the annoying adulting tasks that we all have to do that nobody wants to do that again. Take up that mental space and we’re not really conscious to them. It’s like at some point we stop seeing that coffee stain, and yet it still is annoying to us.

[00:25:00] There’s still that little bit of twinge of friction inside of us every time we see it, even though we’re just used to seeing it. I went to one of Tony Robbins conferences. Probably 15 years ago, uh, unleashed the power within such an amazing conference. And one of the questions that he asked was, what are you tolerating?

[00:25:22] And he meant like squeaky wheels, like what are you tolerating? It’s like that, that broken cabinet door that you just keep working around because you haven’t taken the time to actually fix this. And there’s this whole trend on social media that is so fascinating. I see it on Instagram. I know it’s on TikTok and other other social platforms.

[00:25:42] Where people will say, like, they’ll do a series and it’s hilarious, but it’s basically like, let me see how long it takes to do tasks that I’ve been putting off for a really long time. And so they’ll say like, I have this. To use the, the cabinet. You know, I have this cabinet door that’s been broken and I just keep managing around it, and I’ve been putting it off for two years.

[00:26:04] Let’s see how long it takes me to actually do it. And then they set a timer countdown clock, and they see that it actually takes like 30 minutes or an hour, and they’ve been putting it off for a year. And so I know for me, there’s several of these squeaky wheels that the truth is, if I actually did it, it probably wouldn’t take that long.

[00:26:21] It’s just like. For some reason it feels like too much

[00:26:25] Joel: and you could lower like that just background noise in your life, the anxiety that it causes if you just did, and by you I mean we, because I mean me because like I do the same thing.

[00:26:37] Marissa: One thing that this. Kind of activity does on a psychological level is there’s like a, a boost of confidence that comes with this.

[00:26:46] Joel: Yep.

[00:26:46] Marissa: It’s like, oh wow, okay. I actually did fold my laundry, or I did make my bed, or I did that chair in my room that has all my half dirty clothes. You know, I finally just hung those up or put ’em in the wash and now that chair is clean and. Now I feel a sense of pride of like, yeah, I can follow through with those types of activities.

[00:27:06] And it, and it really does give us a boost of confidence, which is pretty amazing.

[00:27:10] Joel: That happens in the workplace too, when you’ve got just like a long list of just kind of petty officey kind of things that you need to manage, but they’re not really high leverage. They need to be done, but they’re not high leverage.

[00:27:24] They’re not valuable in and of themselves, and. They’re easy to put off because you look at that list and it’s like, that’s not important. That’s not important. That’s, nah, that’s not very important. But after you’ve got 15 of ’em, you’re gonna have to do something. Either you’re gonna have to decide that you’re not gonna do them, like strike them off the list, or you’re just gonna have to knock ’em out.

[00:27:44] Otherwise, they just sit there and they accuse you that like, you haven’t finished me yet. Yeah. You know?

[00:27:49] Marissa: Yeah. So what do we do? Like how do we actually, how do we build this into kind of going back to the ideal week? How do we build this in? Because a lot of these, it’s like, well, I don’t know. I don’t even know exactly what I need to get done or how long certain things are gonna take.

[00:28:03] And so how do we factor these into these squeaky wheels into our ideal week?

[00:28:08] Joel: Because they live kind of in our heads and like they become apparent to us when they’re annoying. One of the most helpful things is just to write them down. I love a list. I talk about the benefit of lists all the time. If you just write something down, that’s your first.

[00:28:23] Step because that takes it out of planning 1.0 and gets you closer to putting into planning 2.0. Now it lives in some place where it can be objectively looked at and then planned. On or around or whatever.

[00:28:37] Marissa: Yep.

[00:28:37] Joel: So keeping a running list of the things that you want to attend to is a useful thing. You know, you can use a note in the back of your planner, a note page, or you’ve got a separate notebook or you keep an Apple note or whatever.

[00:28:47] Just like have a list of all those things and then you can set aside time in your ideal week to tackle some of that stuff. So it could be like, for me, again, this is Sunday afternoon, but it could be. A block of time that you just know that you’re gonna work on the stuff that annoys the heck outta you, and it’s a block.

[00:29:05] You know what’s great about it is you get done whatever you can get done in that block. You don’t have to commit to spending your entire day working on things that suck the life out of you. Instead, it’s like, I’m gonna work on something that sucks the life out of me for an hour, and I’m gonna do it on this prescribed day of the week.

[00:29:21] You know, so that you’ve got. A start and a stop to it.

[00:29:25] Marissa: I love this tactic, and I would encourage you to actually set a timer because it’ll drive a sense of urgency and will prevent you from actually procrastinating. So I do this especially, I mean, these are not squeaky wheel tasks, but these are, well, kind of, they’re the things that annoy me, which first and foremost I’ve probably talked about this before, is the dishwasher I hate.

[00:29:46] I’m so grateful for it because I hate washing dishes, period. But I hate unloading a dishwasher. It’s like I will finally do the dishes and they’ll sit there for three days in the dishwasher clean, because I’m just like, Ugh.

[00:29:58] Joel: You can just take whatever you need out of the dishwasher when you

[00:30:02] Marissa: Exactly,

[00:30:02] Joel: yeah.

[00:30:03] Marissa: Which I, which I do. It’s just not a very good tactic because then you inevitably accumulate dishes in the sink that are dirty that you can’t load. Right?

[00:30:11] Joel: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:12] Marissa: So what I have started doing. Is treating myself like a child and setting a timer. And I’ll set a timer for 10 minutes or 15 minutes and I’ll say, all right, I’m gonna start with the dishwasher.

[00:30:24] Unload. Unload. And then I’m gonna basically clean as much of my kitchen as I can in that time period. And it’s usually a very tight window like that, like 10, 15 minutes. So it forces me to move. Like I can’t just dilly dally. Yeah, and there’s probably some research on this and all kinds of understanding of the psychology of why this works.

[00:30:43] All I can say is that this tactic works. So if you’re struggling to get to these squeaky wheel type tasks, set a timer, give yourself a designated time and set a timer. Put it on your ideal week, but then go and set that timer and knock it out. Uh, I’d be curious to hear from you guys who are listening. If this tactic ends up working for you, you can share in.

[00:31:04] Full focus planner community with us on Facebook, but for me, it’s been really effective.

[00:31:09] Joel: Okay. If you had to sum up the big idea for principle number five. What would you say it was?

[00:31:15] Marissa: I would say that these little arbitrary, minor tasks that are just hanging out in our environment, in our mind really impact our nervous system.

[00:31:30] Yeah. And so the ideal week is. The perfect tool for us to utilize to be able to actually plan for these and build in time so that we’re able to really kind of restore order to our environment. And while these things again may be. We don’t think that are that big of a deal. They really do impact our nervous system and our ability to focus, our ability to be calm, our ability to be present in our lives, right?

[00:32:00] And so being able to tackle these, boost your confidence literally and figuratively, clears your environment and your mental load, and will help you be more productive in all the other areas of your

[00:32:11] Joel: life because. Again, it’s taking you from planning 1.0, which is like the chaos in your head to being into a, in a place where you can be intentional about your time and the tasks that you want to accomplish.

[00:32:24] Time. And when you think about focus, calm, the ability to plan, that’s planning 2.0, that’s the transition you’re trying to make, which takes us to principle number six, that you should group or batch tasks of similar energy to together to minimize distraction, depletion of your energy and all that.

[00:32:46] Marissa: Yeah, I mean, this is literally what we teach about batching.

[00:32:50] If you’ve listened to any of our podcast episodes in the past where we talk about planning, we talk about the ideal week, we’re always talking about batching. We’ve been talking about this for years, if not decades at this point, because it is such an effective strategy to be able to manage your energy and your thinking.

[00:33:08] Well, so. Stanley talks about this and emphasizes that it all comes back to our energy. Like that is the most important thing to be considering and thinking about. And when we combine similar type work that requires being in a similar type headspace.

[00:33:26] Joel: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:27] Marissa: We’re able to batch these and be more effective in our output because we’re able to stay in that level of energy.

[00:33:35] Rather than bouncing all over the place, which we’ve all felt this, oh my gosh. Where, you know, it’s like all of a sudden you have a day of meetings and then you have an hour block here and then you know, for working, and then you have another meeting that’s, you know, with somebody on your team where you’re having to deal with leadership stuff and then you have another two hour block for working and then you know you’ve gotta go.

[00:33:57] Record a podcast, for instance, and it’s all over the place. And trying to stay in a head space in a day like that can feel really challenging. It feels more exhausting because your brain is literally having to switch. Yeah. Between tasks. Exactly. And between mental spaces. And so it’s actually more exhausting, like the return on the investment of your time and energy is worse than if you were to just batch all those things together.

[00:34:23] So for example. Your one-on-one meetings if you’re, if you’re in a leadership position and you have a lot of one-on-one meetings with your team members. You may want to batch those on one singular day, just back to back again, building in that buffer, but back to back meetings like that. So you’re able to stay in that headspace of leadership or your team meetings, which may require a similar headspace to be in, like your, your one-on-one meetings.

[00:34:51] You may wanna do those all in one day so that you’re able to kind of stay in that place of leadership. Similarly, you know, writing or reporting or deep focus work requires a level of concentration and precision. That being in one-on-one meetings or team meetings, it’s, it’s very different headspace.

[00:35:12] Mm-hmm. And so you wanna protect your best hours where you feel like you have the most energy for those types of tasks. So for me, that’s typically in the morning. I prefer to really just knock out those deep thinking projects or activities that I’m trying to do in the morning. And then if I need to have meetings, I’ll try to as best I can to reserve those for later in the day when I don’t have quite as much energy in the mental capacity.

[00:35:41] Joel: Gloria, mark talks about this in her book Attention Span. You know, like when we do particular kinds of work, we build. Like a cognitive frame, a mental frame that has within it all the kinds of. Details and things that we need in order to accomplish that kind of work. And when we switch to another kind of activity and a radically different type of work, like going from trying to do focus work to a meeting, to back to focus work, for instance, you break down that frame, you hastily build another frame to handle the new thing, and then when you go back to the old thing.

[00:36:20] You’ve gotta reconstruct that frame. It’s better to stay in that cognitive frame as long as you reasonably can, maybe as many as you know, four or five, six hours, and do all of those kinds of things together so that you’re not suffering the switching costs of going back and forth between, which really undermines our productivity.

[00:36:41] Amps are stress, amps are anxiety, which is what we’re trying to avoid by going from planning 1.0 to planning 2.0. So like this process of batching actually serves the end of keeping you calm, keeping you focused, keeping you on task.

[00:36:58] Marissa: And you know this, if you’re somebody who has notifications on for Slack or for your email.

[00:37:06] Because let’s say you’re like, great, I’m gonna go in, do some deep work for a while and really make some headway on this specific project. And you say, okay, I’m gonna take the next two hours to do that. And yet you still have all those notifications on, and so every, you know, five minutes or 10 minutes, you’re hearing a ding ding.

[00:37:22] That’s immediately pulling you out of that place of focus, right? And so this is why we really recommend when you’re in that level of deep work. Making sure that you have your notifications off first and foremost, but secondly, that you’re batching. You do need to attend to those messages and you know those emails, but you want to batch those as well.

[00:37:44] And so for me, that typically looks like first thing in the morning in my Workday startup ritual, right before I check out in the day on my workday, shut down ritual. But I also usually slot that in around lunchtime, right? So that there’s likely gonna be. Messages that require response within the same day.

[00:38:02] You know, whether it’s one of my team members looking for a little bit more direction or approval on something that they’re working on. And so I want to do my best to give them that response. Or there’s maybe action items out of meetings that I’ve been in in the morning that I need to go give to somebody to complete before the end of the day.

[00:38:18] And so usually those three touch points are sufficient. Yours may look a little bit different based on your. Specific position in your role, but I find that that is helpful to batch those rather than feel the need to be plugged in all the time. And a really simple way to make sure that this boundary is respected is to change your status inside of those apps so that your teammates know when you’re gonna be checking in.

[00:38:43] So you can say something like Deep work. You know, checking in at 1230 or checking back in at 11:00 AM so they know, Hey, I don’t need to text this person. If I don’t get an immediate response, they’re gonna be back at this time. It’s kind of like putting a little sign on your, you know, your business door that says like, be back in 15.

[00:39:02] Right? It’s the same kind of idea. You’re just doing it in a virtual context.

[00:39:06] Joel: You not only need to communicate that to others, but you need to communicate it to yourself. And that’s why the ideal week is so great because.

[00:39:13] Marissa: Like

[00:39:13] Joel: that workday shutdown ritual that can be right there in the ideal week. Your workday startup ritual, that can be right there in the week.

[00:39:20] The time that you’re planning to bounce to slack to handle midday messages can be right there in your ideal week.

[00:39:27] Marissa: Before we move on from this principle, Joel, I think it’s important to talk about. How to incorporate our priorities and how this kind of impacts our energy and, and how we need to think about our priorities for the week, which would be our weekly big three in our model and how that translates to our energy.

[00:39:48] So can you share a little bit about that with us?

[00:39:50] Joel: Yeah. Well, Daniel Pink, his book when is a really great resource for this, but we all have energy peaks and valleys throughout the day. And like I’m usually sharpest in the morning and. I personally, like I have personal projects that I’m working on. Like I get up at five usually in the morning, and I jump right into one of those.

[00:40:12] I’m writing or reading something, usually writing and. That time is great for me. I’m super sharp. The house is quiet. The kids are asleep for another hour and a half, and I’m able to work that whole hour and a half. I protect that time because my energy is peak at that moment. Then I move into the workday.

[00:40:31] I’m still sharp until, you know, probably noon and by. Afternoon by like two. I’m probably at my lowest energy of the day at that point. And so as I think about batching my work, as I think about batching, really everything I’m taking into account, my energy level. And I know for instance, that at two o’clock I’m not gonna be doing my most creative work.

[00:40:54] I’m not gonna be. Writing a document of great import, uh, at 2:00 PM in the afternoon, unless I’m under some kind of like terrible deadline and I have no alternatives, because that deadline may focus me, but without the benefit of that, I’m probably just gonna flag like I’m not gonna be bringing my best energy to it.

[00:41:13] And so I try to save that time for other sorts of activity.

[00:41:16] Marissa: And you may even wanna be strategic if, you know, at 2:00 PM you. Are consistently struggling with energy. At that point, it may be going back to the buffer. That may be a great candidate for you to say, I’m gonna go take a walk for 30 minutes at two o’clock.

[00:41:32] Yeah. Or I’m gonna go take a nap for 30 minutes. My dad, Michael Hyatt, he does this. He knows that after lunch, his energy is a lowest. It is all day. So without fail for as long as I can remember, he takes a nap. And he did this when he worked in an office. He’s done this when he’s worked in a remote setting all kinds of ways.

[00:41:52] He has figured, he used to do this in his car. He’s done this where he just lays back on the couch in his office. Um,

[00:41:59] Joel: he, he does it live events.

[00:42:00] Marissa: He does it during live events.

[00:42:02] Joel: When we break for lunch, he gets lunch and he goes off and takes a nap. Yeah.

[00:42:06] Marissa: And it’s usually a 20 to 30 minute nap. So it’s usually probably closer to 20 minutes.

[00:42:10] It’s not very long, but it does enough to reset his energy. And Joel, I would imagine for you, that probably looks like a walk for you, knowing you well enough Yep. That would be able to reset your energy. And that’s probably true for me too. I’m, I’m not a huge napper, but. Walking feels like it. It will kind of jolt me.

[00:42:28] And so being able to say, Hey, I know this about myself, and rather than to try to work against my nature, let me try to be strategic in helping myself be set up for success so that I can go take that walk or go take that nap at two o’clock. And be able to come back with a renewed sense of energy to finish my day strong rather than feeling like you’re constantly on that downward turn for the rest of the afternoon.

[00:42:54] So, Joel, to wrap up this specific principle, principle number six, what would you say is a big idea here?

[00:43:02] Joel: You’re turning the tables on me. I was gonna give, ask you that. Yes. So now this is my responsibility.

[00:43:07] Marissa: It’s now your responsibility. I’m passing the torch.

[00:43:09] Joel: Oh my gosh. I mean, I would say that. We are most effective when we align our work with our energy.

[00:43:17] There’s a lot of studies on this, but a knowledge work, most people don’t really have a lot of juice after four to six hours,

[00:43:23] Marissa: right?

[00:43:24] Joel: Recognize that and work within that. You don’t have to be superman or superwoman in order to accomplish really great work, and you won’t be accomplishing really great work if you try to just power through when you don’t have the energy to do it.

[00:43:38] And. I think what that fundamentally means is as you’re building your ideal week, you want to align, you know, those batches of time that you’re setting aside with your energy level.

[00:43:49] Marissa: You can think of like planning 1.0 or that kind of frame of mind that you’re in as living in reaction mode.

[00:43:57] Joel: Yep.

[00:43:57] Marissa: Right? Like you’re just surviving, you’re just trying to keep your head above water, and it’s really easy to feel powerless in that context to all the incoming request.

[00:44:09] Any issues or challenges that arise projects, especially when things don’t go the way that we hoped they would go. And we’re not factoring that in. We’re not planning for that.

[00:44:19] Joel: By the way. They won’t go the way you were hoping they would go. I don’t know if you’re familiar with your whole history, but

[00:44:24] Marissa: I don’t know if you’re familiar with a thing called life.

[00:44:27] Right. But it tends to throw some curve balls more often than not. Yeah. So this is why we wanna build an ideal week that has white space. We wanna account for those things that come up and unexpectedly give ourselves time to attend to our environment. Really making that so it’s, it’s helping us and not working against us, and allow ourselves to match our tasks with our energy.

[00:44:54] So this really gives us the ability to get back in the driver’s seat and really have a sense of agency rather than feeling like we’re a victim and we’re just at the whim of life and all the things that can happen, which is just a horrible place to live in.

[00:45:12] Joel: Not fun, don’t recommend it.

[00:45:14] Marissa: Definitely do not recommend.

[00:45:15] So, you know, we obviously can’t play God and all of that. We don’t have full control, but we do wanna do the best. Stewarding our lives as possible so we really can choose to do less and to focus on the right stuff. You know, we can choose to live in a way that creates less anxiety. Again, like setting ourselves up for success on the front end, rather than just feeling like we’re at the whim of life.

[00:45:42] We can choose to expect. The unexpected, and I think this is a really big thing, is expectations and when we expect for things to not work perfectly. All the time. It gives us a little bit of a sense of relief and when we can create margin for those unexpected things that are gonna happen. Gosh, talk about anxiety reducing or stress reducing is so amazing and we can really, you know, choose mindful resilience.

[00:46:09] We can choose to be in a place where when life throws that curve ball. We go, oh yeah, we’ve got that built in. We factored for that into our plan, and so we’re gonna make sure that we’re adjusting accordingly. Making pivots, and again, understanding that your ideal week really is ideal.

[00:46:28] Joel: Okay, so to take action on what we’re talking about here, it’s great to talk about all this in theory.

[00:46:35] Theory matters. Basically nothing. It really matters what we do with it. You can download. We’ll have the link in the show notes for the ideal week. You can turn to that page in your planner. You can do this from scratch for the first time, or you can update your current ideal week. Just kind of given what we’ve been talking about.

[00:46:52] There may be some color you want to add to it or some things you want to change. As Marissa said. We recommend doing this every quarter because our lives change and our interests change. Our priorities change. Lots of stuff changes. Given the fact that lots of stuff changes. We want to be updating this ideal week, and I wanna stress two things.

[00:47:11] As you’re looking at your ideal week. I want you to add time to restore order to your environment, you know? Deal with the squeaky wheels and really spend some time thinking about where you need extra time, where you need white space in your schedule so that you can more proactively deal with the stuff that’s.

[00:47:33] Frankly driving you nuts or will just add to the stress and anxiety of your life.

[00:47:39] Marissa: I think this is such a great exercise and frankly, I’m excited to do this. And so as you create your ideal week, please share it with us in the Full Focus Planner community. You can upload a photo of your ideal week. I think it’s helpful.

[00:47:53] For us to see each other’s, and Joel and I will do our best to get in there and respond to you guys. Feel free to tag either of us in that group and so we can get a notification when you share that. But I think this will be a way for us to kind of start a movement as a community about really managing our time and our energy.

[00:48:13] Well, you can really think of this as we are stewards of that time, right? All of us have a limited amount of time. On this earth. And so we wanna steward that well, and part of that is making sure we’re building in buffer for real life to happen and for our own humanity to be fully realized as part of this.

[00:48:38] Joel: Thanks for joining us for Focus On This.

[00:48:40] Marissa: This is the most productive podcast on the internet, so please share it with your friends and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen or at focus on this podcast.com.

[00:48:51] Joel: We’ll be here next week where we’re going to talk about making the most of your time off work.

[00:48:57] Marissa: Ooh, I can’t wait. Well, until then, stay focused.