All right, guys, welcome to our internal team training.
We've been doing these team trainings every Tuesday
for a while, and what we thought we'd do is we'd actually just
go ahead and share them with everyone
if they want to tune in.
The first half of this will just typically do
a training on some topic.
Specifically for our dev agency, we
have a small team of six that are
working on building awesome apps using AI.
We're using ShapeUp.
We're using a number of different processes
that we've developed over the last 15 years.
And so recently, we've just been doing a lot of team training,
and so we thought it'd be great to just share this.
And if you're interested, you can reach out to us and connect.
So we'll do that.
We're going to be back every Tuesday, hopefully,
pretty consistently.
And so today, we want to jump in a topic.
The team is actually on here.
I'm not going to make them come on the camera,
but we may bring them on for some questions.
And so today, we're just going to cover
one really interesting topic, which
is around creating a perfect week for your schedule.
And so this is something, if you're familiar with Dan
Martell, he's an awesome entrepreneur.
He wrote a book called Buy Back Your Time.
So this is something we took from his book,
and we've implemented not just in our business,
but between my wife, Lindsay, and I,
we use this to manage our family.
And it's just a way to put together a really simple plan
for your perfect week.
It's pretty self-explanatory.
And the reality is that most of us
just end up playing defense with our calendars.
So we're being pulled into Slack and email.
And your time, if you're the founder,
your time is the most valuable piece.
And if you're building a project,
each one of our team members are leading their own project.
So your time is just kind of a mission-critical piece.
It's not just something we want to just let happen
over the week.
And there's a lot of great analogies
around time management.
I think when you think of it like a budget,
if you're creating a budget for the month,
I've got this much money, and I've
got to spend this, this, this, we're
very careful about just spending money on random things.
And so you try to stick to that budget.
So that doesn't just happen.
You have to be intentional about it.
And same thing with your calendar.
If you just let the week happen, you're
going to open your laptop on Monday morning,
and you're going to have a bunch of emails.
You're going to see Slack.
You're going to pull into this, pull into that.
You're going to get an email invite for this.
And someone else is actually going
to be taking over your entire calendar.
So you have now given the control over your calendar
to just other people.
So what this does is it essentially
puts you in the driver's seat and lets you manage your week.
And this is not something that you can say, well,
if I'm on a team, this is maybe a little bit harder.
If you're working with a remote team,
this is a great way to put together
your specific perfect week plan, and then come back to the team
and say, hey, this is my plan.
And we can look at what creates some general team rules
as well that will apply.
So if we want to generally do meetings in the afternoons,
if we want to do meetings earlier in the week
and then leave the rest of the week to have no meetings,
things like that, we can put some general rules in place
as a team.
And then we're all in sync.
And so Lindsay and I have done this even in our own family.
And so what's interesting is when I put my plan together
and she puts her plan together, then we can look at that
and say, hey, if we just move a few things around and arrange
this a bit better, she can accomplish everything
she needs to do.
I can accomplish everything I need.
And not just a to-do list.
I think that's the key thing is not just a to-do list of,
here's the work things I'm going to do this week.
This is like you as a person, as an actual human.
There's things you would say, like if you have a hobby,
I'm currently trying to get my pilot's license.
So if I get a chance to go fly or do something
around aviation, that's an awesome week.
If I get a lot of quality time with my kids,
if I get time with my wife doing a date night,
that's a great week.
If I accomplish some really meaningful things
in our business, that makes a great week.
If we, whatever, do some live content
like we're doing right now, this is something
that I feel is a really essential part of the week,
is putting out training and putting out things even just
internally to our team.
And so you pick those things that are important to you,
and then you build that into your plan,
a template for the week.
And so one thing that I would think about as well,
we're not going to dive into the whole topic of deep work.
But essentially, I think of very simply deep work
as like deep sleep.
If someone was coming every 15 to 30 minutes
during the night and shaking you and just being like,
hey, I want to tell you something,
and then you just go back to sleep,
and then 30 minutes.
later, someone shakes you like, I want to tell you something. If you have young kids, you know
exactly what this feels like, because this happens. And so, but if someone was doing that, you would
wake up like feeling horrible the next morning, you would not feel like you got any any kind of
sleep. And that's exactly like how most of our days go. Like I said, we just wake up, we get
reactive. We're just reacting to all the things that come in. And so when you start to stack
things with kids and a spouse and other parts of your life, you kind of that margin goes away in a
way until you kind of just feel like you're totally not in control of any part of your week.
And so essentially creating these uninterrupted blocks of time to get meaningful work done.
And this requires you actually saying no to stuff. This requires you actually closing
your email, closing Slack, like taking your phone, putting it in a different room,
and setting up your notifications on your phone. So it just blocks absolutely everything.
And just essentially taking a little bit more responsibility for it, but also just having,
just being intentional is the word. So the other thing we're trying to think through
as well as you're planning the week out, like you want to plan out where you're, it's really
like energy management versus like time management, because time management is hard.
I think where you're like, Hey, on a 2 PM, I'm going to do this thing. And I'm gonna work on
this task. That's maybe works for some people. What I generally like to do is have blocks of
time. So generally I'm going to do team meetings on Monday afternoons. Then I'm going to do client
meetings later in the afternoon on Mondays and Thursday afternoons. Those are my client meeting
afternoons. So when a client asks to schedule a meeting, it's not just, Hey, when are you
available? I'm available anytime. When are you available? And we kind of just go off the client
schedule. You can say, Hey, I've got Monday afternoons here available. And I got Thursday
afternoon, which one of those two do you want? And that way people kind of just work within
those constraints. And so we're trying to think through, meetings obviously are kind of the
fastest way to kill productivity. And so planning meetings to where maybe they're at the end of the
day, end of the week, maybe, or just some part where they don't, they're not in the middle of
these productivity blocks. And just figuring out where your energy is. If you do a couple back-to-
back meetings, you can kind of get into a groove and it kind of like, cool, I'm in meeting mode.
But if you're doing a meeting and then you're trying to do an hour of coding, and then you're
jumping back to a meeting and then you're coming back, that context switching will drive you insane
because you're not going to do either of those well. Honestly, you're not going to be great at
the meeting. You wouldn't have prepared and been in that groove of talking and being social. And
then also when you switch back into context, switching back into the code, it's just like,
you're just going to take another 10, 15 minutes to get back into the zone. So creating these nice
little blocks and being very protective of it so that we aren't just showing up to meetings that
aren't doing anything specific. Or if that meeting's not really essential for what's happening,
we can kind of have feedback and we do this a little bit in our team. If the meeting could
have been an update email or a Loom video, we kind of want to do that instead of pulling everybody
into something that's live. So we typically only use meetings to get work done. So we're actually
shaping something. We're either working through a problem with a client as far as solving a
technical problem. So that's typically why we actually do training. So what I did to help you
guys out is coming up with a little plan here. And we love FigJam in our team. I love FigJam.
And so I made you guys a little template here. And I'll share the link in a second. I'm not
going to drop it just yet. But we have this little process. This is a very simple piece here.
So if you want to, just two steps. Essentially just sit here and create as many blocks as you can.
If I want to go flying, I want to have, I put date night. I said workout. I said,
if we want to have kids time, if we want to have, if you like to read, if you like to,
whatever your hobbies are, whatever that thing is, if you want to go for a walk, whatever. Put all
these things that kind of bring you energy throughout the week. And obviously we have times for
working. Like I want to, if you're developing, obviously you're going to have some deep work
sessions as this. And you're going to create a template. You're not going to specifically say,
I'm going to get this one project done here on this day. And you kind of put all these
things together. And then you just drag them over here to step two. And you're just going to pull
them in. And we're going to do this live with the team right after this. I wanted to talk it through
with you guys. And we're going to do this live with the team right after this. I wanted to talk it
And then we're going to take a second
to actually hopefully leave this call with you
guys having this done.
So let me lock that.
And let's say we're going to do this.
I typically have this at the end of the week.
So it can just block this time out.
Let's say it's like 5 to the afternoon, basically.
I also, mine looks like this, where I have client meetings.
And I want to go from 5.
I hard stop for me at 5.
So all my, that's why I kind of have this morning time.
There's a sort of afternoon block and evening.
If you want to incorporate things like a date night
or whatever, you can pull that in.
We do like Monday evenings right here.
Typically happens like this now.
And that's just something we just planned.
We're like, hey, we want to make this a priority.
We put that in the template.
And now we know that that's going to happen.
We also have like, sorry, family time.
So we may say like, we've got kind of from,
if you guys are parents, you know, like 5 to 8, 5 to 7
is like, I just call it family because pretty much that just
runs every single week, every single night.
It doesn't even matter which day of the week.
It's pretty much consistent with the weekends as well.
We, you know, we're finishing work, whatever.
We're getting kids ready for bed, doing dinner.
It's a whole thing.
They get to bed and then you kind of have
like this next batch of time.
So it's just like worth taking a second
and drawing these things out just
to think about it for a second.
No one, very rarely people take the time
to actually figure this stuff out and just put it on paper.
And so I have something that looks kind of like this.
So I have client meetings in the afternoon.
And then I may have, for me, like I
have to do some strategy kind of for the whole business
as like the founder.
A lot of what things I'm thinking about
and stuff dictate like what the rest of the team is working on.
So I just have this thing.
I don't know what happens here other than I'm just
doing some strategy time and I leave some spaces like this.
Obviously you need to eat lunch.
There's like stuff you have to have.
So don't try to like schedule every minute
but you can see kind of how loosely I'm planning it.
We do team training and we do this like from two to 11
and I can't, we don't just show up.
Like I need an hour before this, I prep this.
So from like, let's go from nine to 11 like this
there's basically two hours does team training.
And then we do some other like coaching things.
So like I'm kind of in the mode for coaching on Tuesdays.
And so I just kind of scheduled this out.
Now you may not have as many different things
like this as I do.
But as you start to put these things down
the main thing that you're going to figure out
which is always a shock is how much space there is.
Like if you're like wanting to learn a new hobby
you want to like go through a course
you're doing some training or whatever.
There's so much space here to where like
I have like three hours every single night here
that's kind of unaccounted for.
I don't think you have to like schedule everything.
And honestly, if you just want to have downtime
with your spouse or we're just watching TV or that's fine.
I'm not saying you have to be in like high productivity mode
from like 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Put that in there, just know like, Hey
this is just, I'm deliberately going to be in rest mode
which means I'm also not on Slack.
I'm also not like sort of tuning into work stuff.
I'm just dedicated and like totally present
and being there with like family.
And so that's like how I would schedule this.
And the other thing you can do
if you have a spouse, have them go through this as well.
We, you know, and then kind of compare and look at this.
So we have kind of a complex thing that happens here.
So I recently, we changed this
because I've been working out for a while
but now Lindsey, so I have like basically Bruce
workout here and then Lindsey happens like right after.
And so I have, we basically have to
there's a little bit of coordination now that we've got kids.
So someone's going to, we basically flip.
So I go to the gym, I come back.
Lindsey goes to the gym, we come back
and then I can kind of start my week.
So if someone asked me like recently
we had someone who's like, Oh, can you meet 9 a.m. Monday?
No, like I'm starting work at 1030.
Like, Oh wow, that sounds really late.
Yeah, I've been up since like five.
So, but that's how we like scheduled everything in.
And we kind of, you know, you kind of
this is also a time for Bruce to be with our girls
the two, our two kids.
So like, it's not like I'm
that's one of my things that I actually wanted.
It was like, I get two hours of like uninterrupted time
just to play with the kids.
Like at the beginning of the day
before anything is like hit
and also the beginning of the week, which is great.
And then, you know, it kind of builds itself
out pretty quickly.
Cause we do this every like Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
And so if I schedule this
like I'm getting six hours before I start my day
you know, hanging out with my kids.
And then I'm going into like my work, my work schedule.
So and I'm not like, because I planned it, I put the biggest
rocks first, the most important things to me first, the workout
number one, like your health stuff, obviously, I'm not going
to preach on that. But like, that should be your number one.
And then like family next, and then spouse, right? It's kind of
all these key things. So we just make it work with what what
happens, like where we are. And when we every couple months, we
kind of look at this again, and figure out, especially if we
start to feel off. If it feels like I'm not getting enough time
with kids, like we kind of look back at the schedule. And we're
like, oh, that's because recently, like I would kind of
start to respond to some slack stuff, like in between these
things, before I was watching the girls or stuff was
happening. And so my mind would be like pulled out. And I don't
feel like I really had, I don't feel like I really got the
chance to work. And I didn't feel like I really connect with
the girls. So like, it's I'm losing on two fronts, trying to
be in quote, like multitasking, right? That's the dumbest, you
know, solution to try to do time management and be productive.
So single task, super focused, and then kind of block this out.
So one thing that my favorite day here is, is on Wednesday,
because we do like I got a pair pair dev session here with some
of our team, we just spent two hours on a live call
programming. And then I just do I have this whole thing marked
out for dev here. So we do pair dev as a team for two hours, I
think my sizing and my boxes are going a little weird here. And
then I got like the whole afternoon to just do my own
coding. So what's great about this, I don't have any meetings
on Wednesdays, which kind of frees me up to, to just focus on
building stuff, which is my one of my favorite things to do. I
go a whole week, and I'm not like doing a little bit of
coding and a little bit of building. I'm like, what is this
like, all for like, I don't want to sit on client meetings and
talk about that, like, I want to go build some stuff. So schedule
that in. And I didn't put like a dev thing next to a meeting
block. Like, I have two days where I have to be present and
on zoom and back to back calls. And then, you know, I know with
the energy of the week, Fridays, like things are pretty dying,
much dying down, and we're kind of getting ready for things are
getting pushed to the following week for work. So it's not like
we have some major deadlines, typically on a Friday, most of
our this, the first part of our week is like very intentional.
And then Thursdays, Fridays are pretty loose, and I can kind of
adjust how I need to. And so a couple rules on this, like,
you're going to do the first draft, and you're probably going
to hit like 30% of this the first week, okay, so just just
try it once, see how it goes. And then you're going to just
pivot, it's going to take you a couple weeks of tweaking and
getting feedback, and trying different things. This is great,
because I love fake jam, just to get the idea down on paper. The
other thing that you can do, and I'll see if I can pull this up
for you guys live, is I actually built it out in Google Calendar.
So and this is not going to look at all as clean as what I just
showed you. But what we have here is I built a calendar
called Bruce's perfect week. And so I can turn that on and kind
of see what things are, you know, what I'm planning, there's
my coding, there's my, there's the gym stuff, I've kind of got
these things blocked out. And there's a few things overlapping,
which should not be doing that. But I can then toggle on my
actual calendar next to it, and kind of turn it on and off as
needed. So that's a that's a great way to kind of map this
out, and then actually have it in your calendar. And that way,
if you have it on your phone, it's like alerting you like,
hey, focused work is starting, hey, you know, family time
starting, and being really specific with that time. And
once you kind of like put that much time into planning the
budget, you start to trust it. And then you like from that
point, you like have, I'm confident. So like, I know, like,
hey, if I it's five o'clock, and I've been on calls with clients,
and it's five, and I were coming up to five, I was like, hey, I
have a hard stop at five, they got two girls that are like,
waiting all day to go hang out with me. And so I can't go over
that five, because if I start going to 505 515 530, which is
so easy to do, because there's always an infinite amount of
work to do, then I get to the end of the week. And I'm like,
man, I just felt like all I did is work, right? I didn't feel
like I get enough time. So if I kind of trust the budget of
like, okay, I planned this in a when I had clear head, you know,
and I mapped it out the way I thought it needed to go, I'm
just going to like, in the moment, I'm just going to trust
the system and go with it. For now. So So try that. I'll share
the figma link here. And we'll put it in the in the description
as well, if you guys want to check it out. Then I just I
would prefer you guys to do it kind of in fig jam first,
because
It kind of frees you up from all the stuff
of having a repeating event, and then getting it to sync,
and all the stuff just gets away from the tech a little bit,
and just gets you to kind of put your ideas down on paper.
If you want to take a few minutes after that
and recreate it in the calendar, that's
how I would suggest that.
So let me check my notes real quick here,
make sure I didn't tackle anything here.
And yeah, this is good.
I think generally we're going to put it
in offensive mode, not defense.
This is true of everything.
If you're going to be intentional,
you start figuring out when you want to do
these different tasks.
And then having good feedback of like, man,
I got to the end of this day, and it just felt too much.
There's too many meetings today, or there's
too many of this today.
Kind of know what that is.
And I'll pull in one more random analogy.
But when you're flying, we have a thing
called your personal minimum.
So if I want to go flying, I only
have about 100 hours of flight time, which is very little.
And I know I could handle a 10-knot crosswind
when we're landing.
If it's 15, if it's 20 knots, it gets too hard,
and I would not want to be landing in that.
And not for where I am right now, it's not a good fit.
If I know like, anyway, you put these different things in.
I have my Oura ring, so I have a sleep score.
My sleep score is not above 70, not going flying that day.
It's just a safety thing.
If I did not get a good night's sleep, not risking it.
So you put these little things in place,
and you get to kind of tune your body, and your mind,
and your heart as far as how the week is going.
And so I know as well, if I had a really intense Tuesday,
sometimes a lot of these back, sometimes
we end up with other calls, and stuff doesn't go to a schedule.
Things get pulled in, stuff happens.
And so I can get to a really crazy Tuesday,
and then Wednesday's just like that reprieve
to kind of get more into a restorative mode.
And for me, what restores me is just sitting and coding
and building stuff.
That's super fun, and kind of hanging out with a team,
and doing pair programming and stuff.
So that's really fun for me.
And you kind of look at what someone else,
I heard someone say, what's giving you energy,
and what's sucking energy?
Sometimes we can get on a meeting,
and be being super creative, and we're shaping stuff,
and we're breadboarding.
And that actually, I leave that meeting, I'm like,
this is awesome, this is so exciting, I love my job.
I can be on other meetings, which are not exciting at all,
and I leave that meeting, I'm like, I never want to do it.
Sales calls, for example, getting
on new people who just want to work with us,
or kind of learning more about our business,
I absolutely hate that.
So we hired a salesperson to do those calls,
and it was the best thing ever.
Because it just sucked the life out of me,
and I'm like, all I want to go do is build the thing,
and these people just want to talk about it,
and ask me questions.
So just figure out what's best for you,
it's going to be different for everybody.
And that's everything we want to do.
So we're going to jump in, and jump into just a team time.
I'm going to end the stream here.
And then also mention, if you guys
are interested in connecting with us,
I'm going to drop a link in the description.
We are always looking for new team members and new developers,
so there's a link to apply there.
But thanks for hanging out, and we'll
be posting more content like this every Tuesday.