Podcast appearances and mentions of jocelyn glei

In this bonus episode, Leo interviews expert Jocelyn Glei, who has shifted her expertise from productivity to a slower, deeper approach to work.This is an incredible episode filled with wisdom and tools for accessing a deeper creativity. Must listen!Topics CoveredLeo interviews Jocelyn Glei, a former productivity expert who transitioned to a more transformative, slower approach to workJocelyn's background includes working with 99U, creating the 99U conference, and writing a book on email productivityJocelyn's burnout led her to start the "Hurry Slowly" podcast and explore personal and collective transformationThe importance of moving away from mainstream productivity and embracing a slower, more inquisitive, and heartfelt approach to workThe shift from productivity to receptivity and how it can lead to more efficient and sustainable outcomesRestorative activities that involve doing something different to refresh one's mindsetFear, particularly related to scheduling and deadlines, as a common obstacle to maintaining a receptive state during workThe limitations of the expert mode, which can be rigid and uncreativeLeaning towards the experimental side to open up opportunities for creativity and learning from creative mistakesThe fear associated with not having a strict plan but highlights the beauty in unexpected outcomesThe importance of self-trust and leaning into imperfectionsCreating systems to collect and revisit creative insightsResourcesJocelyn's podcast, Hurry SlowlyJocelyn's brilliant newsletterHer RESET courseConnect with LeoZen HabitsYoutube channelX (Twitter) InstagramZen Habits Facebook GroupTiktok channelEmail leo@zenhabits.netResourcesThe Fearless Living AcademyCreditsIntro music composition: Salem Beladonna & Robrecht DumareyEditor: Justin Cruz

Occasionally I come across a book that I  get fired up about and todays is one such book.   Manage Your Day-to-Day edited by Jocelyn Glei brings to us by "highlighting the best practices for making ideas happen."On todays show, we will talk about executing on those ideas and putting theory into action.  Key Points from the Episode:Our teachers--and our old friends-- from this book, Seth Godin, Mark McGuinness, Cal Newport and Steven Pressfield.Cal Newports Time Blocking method3 master tips to execute, execute, executeOther resources: More goodnessGet our top book recommendations listWant to leave a review? Click here, and if we earned a five-star review from you **high five and knuckle bumps**, we appreciate it greatly, thank you so much!Because we care what you think about what we think and our website, please email David@teammojoacademy.com, or if you want to leave us a quick FREE, painless voicemail, we would appreciate that as well.

Are you an asker or a guesser? In 2015 while I was deep in hermit mode writing Pivot while living in a tiny studio apartment in Nolita (North of Little Italy), a friend texted: “Hey, do you mind if I crash on your couch tomorrow night?” To this day, I still feel somewhat bad about my answer . . . but every bone in my body was saying, “Yes, I mind.” I said no. Years later, I still wonder: Should I have rolled with the punches, accepted the spontaneous company, and just said yes? Today I'm sharing a framework that changed my life when I first read about it in Jocelyn Glei's book, Unsubscribe—the difference between ask culture vs. guess culture. Or, as I like to think about it, spaghetti throwers vs. spaghetti twirlers. Which one are you?

In this episode of The Mental Performance Daily Podcast, Brian continues his Book Battalion in which he breaks down one of his favorite books that he has read recently. Today he breaks down Manage Your Day to Day by Jocelyn Glei. Mental Performance Daily is brought to you by FitBod. Link: https://fitbod.me/MPD25/ Brian Cain, MPM, the World's leader in Mental Performance Coaching brings you practical tips, techniques, stories, strategies, meditations and motivations every day that you can use to close the gap from where you are to where you want to be with The Mental Performance Daily Podcast.   You can follow along with Brian's 2022 reading schedule by clicking here. Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qZ_3jqFJmt0bOP8ot08e-1SZIUJ-LJgGy-RJXmKkUT8/edit?usp=sharing Join Brian Cain and his friends at Optimize/Heroic by getting their great 20 minute audio book summaries so you can follow along with Brian's reading list and be a proud member of The Book Battalion. FREE when you join here as a member of the Mental Performance Daily Community Link: http://optimize.me/cain Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review for a chance to win a FREE 1-1 coaching session with Brian each month and engage with Brian on social media @BrianCainPeak  Be sure to join Brian's email list at BrianCain.com/join so that you can stay updated and in the know when it comes to mental performance training and opportunities to work with Brian. If you are a coach looking to master mental performance coaching, the missing link in your clients and athletes performance, join Brian's MPM Coaches Insiders List and receive his best strategies for coaching mental performance and save $200 off his MPM Certification Course when it opens in May and November. Link: https://briancain.com/certification Want to take your coaching to the next level? Join Brian and The Coaching Matters Foundation every other monday night for a FREE one hour group coaching session. Join today at BrianCain.com/coaching-matters Are you a coach? Join Brian's FREE 3 Day Mini Course on Coaching Mental Performance Link: https://briancain.com/coach-offer Are you an athlete? Join Brian's  FREE 3 Day Mini Course on Mental Performance for Athletes Link: https://briancain.com/athlete-offer Are you a golfer or golf coach? Join Brian's  FREE Golf Masterclass Link: https://briancain.com/golf-masterclass-registration Are you a baseball player or coach join Brian's FREE Baseball Masterclass Link: https://briancain.com/baseball-mpm-masterclass 

In this episode of The Mental Performance Daily Podcast, Brian continues his Book Battalion in which he breaks down one of his favorite books that he has read recently. Today he breaks down Unsubscribe by Jocelyn Glei.  Brian Cain, MPM, the World's leader in Mental Performance Coaching brings you practical tips, techniques, stories, strategies, meditations and motivations every day that you can use to close the gap from where you are to where you want to be with The Mental Performance Daily Podcast.   You can follow along with Brian's 2022 reading schedule by clicking here. Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qZ_3jqFJmt0bOP8ot08e-1SZIUJ-LJgGy-RJXmKkUT8/edit?usp=sharing Join Brian Cain and his friends at Optimize/Heroic by getting their great 20 minute audio book summaries so you can follow along with Brian's reading list and be a proud member of The Book Battalion. FREE when you join here as a member of the Mental Performance Daily Community Link: http://optimize.me/cain Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review for a chance to win a FREE 1-1 coaching session with Brian each month and engage with Brian on social media @BrianCainPeak  Be sure to join Brian's email list at BrianCain.com/join so that you can stay updated and in the know when it comes to mental performance training and opportunities to work with Brian. If you are a coach looking to master mental performance coaching, the missing link in your clients and athletes performance, join Brian's MPM Coaches Insiders List and receive his best strategies for coaching mental performance and save $200 off his MPM Certification Course when it opens in May and November. Link: https://briancain.com/certification Want to take your coaching to the next level? Join Brian and The Coaching Matters Foundation every other monday night for a FREE one hour group coaching session. Join today at BrianCain.com/coaching-matters Are you a coach? Join Brian's FREE 3 Day Mini Course on Coaching Mental Performance Link: https://briancain.com/coach-offer Are you an athlete? Join Brian's  FREE 3 Day Mini Course on Mental Performance for Athletes Link: https://briancain.com/athlete-offer Are you a golfer or golf coach? Join Brian's  FREE Golf Masterclass Link: https://briancain.com/golf-masterclass-registration Are you a baseball player or coach join Brian's FREE Baseball Masterclass Link: https://briancain.com/baseball-mpm-masterclass 

Conquer your Digital Addiction: https://www.optimize.me/missions/conquer-digital-addiction Get all the wisdom from the best books on Conquering Digital Addiction—in less time (!)—with a collection of PhilosophersNotes distilling the Big Ideas and an Optimal Living 101 class highlighting the absolute best of the best. All 100% free. Forever. No credit card required. No ads. No strings attached. Period. → https://www.optimize.me/ You'll learn the Big Ideas from: - Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport: https://www.optimize.me/pn/digital-minimalism-cal-newport - Irresistible by Adam Alter: https://www.optimize.me/pn/irresistible-adam-alter - Indistractable by Nir Eyal: https://www.optimize.me/pn/indistractable-nir-eyal - The Shallows by Nicholas Carr: https://www.optimize.me/pn/the-shallows-nicholas-carr - The Distraction Addiction by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: https://www.optimize.me/pn/the-distraction-addiction-alex-soojung-kim-pang - Your Brain at Work by David Rock: https://www.optimize.me/pn/your-brain-at-work-david-rock - Unsubscribe by Jocelyn Glei: https://www.optimize.me/pn/unsubscribe-jocelyn-glei - Brain Wash by Dr. David Perlmutter and Dr. Austin Perlmutter: https://www.optimize.me/pn/brain-wash-david-perlmutter-austin-perlmutter - Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday: https://www.optimize.me/pn/stillness-is-the-key-ryan-holiday Plus, with your (FREE!) Optimize wisdom membership, you'll get instant access to 600+ PhilosophersNotes, 50+ Optimal Living 101 classes, and 1,000+ Optimize +1s, all to help you Optimize every aspect of your life with more wisdom in less time. So… What do YOU want to Optimize today? Ancient Wisdom Modern Science Mental Toughness Habits Sleep Stoicism Buddhism Purpose Leadership Focus Goal Setting Productivity Energy Peak Performance Meditation Nutrition Weight Loss Fitness Breathing Prosperity Creativity Learning Self-Image Willpower Sports Business Relationships Parenting Public Speaking Conquer Cancer Conquer Anxiety Conquer Depression Conquer Perfectionism Conquer Procrastination Conquer Digital Addiction

Dana and Dennis started the show by talking about Dana's busy day ahead, which led into talking about Email Etiquette training offered recently at LA Mission College.  In particular, we talked about how email etiquette is even more important now as most of us continue to work from home. The training session was based on the book SEND: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home (2007), updated in 2010 and retitled as SEND: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do it Better - by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe.  Two other books offered inspiration for the training: The Tyranny of Email by John Freeman and Unsubscribe by Jocelyn Glei. We wrapped the show with Dana's "I Dare You To Watch" The Social Dilemma on Netflix.  We'll go deeper into this topic in future shows.   Find out more about CCCSFAAA at cccsfaaa.org. Follow CCCSFAAA on Twitter at @CCCSFinaidAssoc. Find this and future WBC podcast episodes at What's Brewing, CCCSFAAA (WBC) podcasts.  Find us also in Google Podcasts, the Apple Podcasts app, and on Spotify. Have feedback for Dennis and Dana?  Got a topic you want us to discuss?  Email us at wbcccsfaaa@gmail.com.   "What's Brewing, CCCSFAAA?" is a Studio 1051 production.  Studio 1051 is a creative collaboration of Dennis Schroeder and Dana Yarbrough.

Get book summaries with FREE 1-page PDFs here: https://frodeosen.com/ Subscribe to join 1,600+ Self-Help Junkies ► https://www.youtube.com/c/frodeosen?s...Follow Me On Social MediaFacebook ► https://www.facebook.com/championsofp...Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/frodeosen/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/FrodeOsenTikTok ► @frodeosenLinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/in/frode-osen-934037b6/~ Created by Frode Osen, here to help you improve your life and your character faster through self-help book summaries and YouTube videos

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Manage Your Day-to-Day by Jocelyn Glei --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bestbookbits/support

Slow living has positive applications for everyone – no matter their age, life circumstance or work situation. All too often however, it’s presented from the perspective of people in their thirties and forties who are well-established in their careers, relationships, family and home situations, who are making changes in order to slow down (usually after burning out or reaching a crisis point).   In this week’s episode Brooke chats with Lauren, who is in her mid-twenties and wants to know whether slow living is something you need to ‘earn’ in your twenties by hustling and burning the candle at both ends, or whether there are things she can do now to help “build the right foundations for a slow life from the start of my career, rather than course-correcting later?” Lauren also wants to know what specific things she might want to prioritise now in order to set herself up for an intentional life. Brooke and Lauren talk about what success looks like, and why it’s important to develop your own definition of it, as well as how to reframe the sense of overwhelm that comes when faced with so many opportunities and options in your mid-twenties. Brooke offers Lauren some suggestions on how to better get to know herself and her values, and also offers some super practical suggestions on how to develop boundaries, how to cope with self-doubt and how to practice present-moment awareness when the world is so full of distractions. Brooke is then joined by Jocelyn Glei, host of the podcast Hurry Slowly and author of Unsubscribe: A modern guide to getting rid of email anxiety, who shares her own experiences of figuring out what living with intention actually means and how to view the mistakes and challenges of your twenties as essential learning experiences rather than failings or mis-steps. Enjoy! Looking for more Slow? Find show notes, resources and links at slowyourhome.com/season4 Follow us on Instagram @slowhomepod Sign up for our love letters Join the Slow Experiment Club over on Patreon Or leave a rating or review in iTunes Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/slow See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Buy Make Your Mark by Jocelyn Glei on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2lmkKpX Read my notes: https://parkerklein.com/notes/make-your-mark Visit my website: https://parkerklein.com App used to take notes: https://twosapp.com App used to track habits: https://awarepath.com App used to reflect: https://reflectwithmuse.com Thank you for listening :) --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/parkerklein/support

Sarah is Managing Director of Thrive Consulting Collaborative. She has a side hustle, Love Work More, with friend Richard Ferguson. Thrive is based on the premise that we all have enough time to prosper and works with organisations and leaders to achieve this. Love Work More provides people with tactics and strategies to find a working life that they love. Sarah originally qualified as a lawyer then moved into legal recruitment. After an MBA she moved into senior roles in professional services management and also joined the board of the Children's Society. Subsequently she and her husband moved to Colorado where she became CEO of an autism school. “It was a job that was about meaning rather than making money” she says. 18 months later, her husband Jonathan died in a car crash leaving Sarah with two young boys. She moved back to the UK and set up her consulting business. Six years on she reflects that “friendships and reading” have kept her sane. She has found that while “not everything has a reason, you can give everything meaning.” Sarah is a team player. “I think it is that sharing.” Sarah runs Thrive as a social enterprise and gives between 10 and 20% of her time pro bono. She is currently doing this with a programme at The Pankhurst Trust. During her career she often found herself the only woman in the room. Her sporting knowledge and background helped her cope, but in her coaching she tries to provide women with other strategies to flourish in what are often male dominated professions. There are 50 coaches and 50 coachees on the programme at the moment. Her current coachee runs a social enterprise in Manchester. “There is so much potential in all of us…” Sarah is disappointed by the current quality of political debate. She observed that in times gone by our politicians were our philosophers. She became involved in politics because she felt that the world was moving both environmentally and socially in a negative direction. She joined the Women's Equality Party several years ago and has since enjoyed canvassing and discussing politics in the town centre on Saturday mornings. All the research shows that “more equal societies are happier.” One of her proudest achievements at work related to a major restructuring in 2009. “It was about courage and values.” The CEO wanted everyone to feel heard, listened to and supported, so he and Sarah met everyone in the organisation. Her advice to her 18-year old self would be to find a coach or mentor, and to learn about mindfulness, meditation and stoicism. Those things would have stood her in good stead for the events of the coming 30 years. She would have also told herself that “you're going to be OK.” Your relationships and friendships will see you through. Sarah's has to work hard at self-care. Running, hill-walking and pull-ups(!) feature prominently. She encourages everyone to take some physical exercise daily, if only 15 minutes. She is big on visual cues to make things happen and so has fixed up a pull-up bar in her hallway. The running developed as a response to grief. The death of her husband profoundly changed her life. It devastated yet also transformed her and “the results of it have been inspirational in some ways.” He was her soul mate. The feeling that “we don't know how much time we've got on our clock” informs the way that she works with people. She was deeply moved by the response of people after Jonathan's death. The community in Colorado brought them a meal three times a week for three months. Reading is one of Sarah's passions, but she encourages all aspiring leaders to find their natural way of learning. There is a reading room on her website thrive.co.com. She is an enthusiast for medium.com. Regarding podcasts she recommends ‘Hurry Slowly' by Jocelyn Glei – time and energy management is a common theme of her work with leaders – and also ‘How to Fail' by Elizabeth Day. ‘How to Own the Room' by Viv...

Has your inbox taken over your life? Does just thinking about checking your email give you incredible anxiety? Do you find yourself checking your email over and over again to the point where it's keeping you from accomplishing your actual tasks? Then Jocelyn Glei is here to help. She joins us to discuss how to take back control of your inbox and how to get real work done.Jocelyn K. Glei is a writer who's obsessed with work, careers,and creativity. She is the author of 4 books, including Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/the-unmistakable-creative-podcast.

Has your inbox taken over your life? Does just thinking about checking your email give you incredible anxiety? Do you find yourself checking your email over and over again to the point where it's keeping you from accomplishing your actual tasks? Then Jocelyn Glei is here to help. She joins us to discuss how to take back control of your inbox and how to get real work done.Jocelyn K. Glei is a writer who's obsessed with work, careers,and creativity. She is the author of 4 books, including Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome to the fifth and final episode of the Summer Series (/Winter Warmies!) For all of January, we’ve been bringing back the best of 2018, re-sharing some of our favourite episodes to keep you company on the beach (or the slopes!) Last but not least, this week is our episode with the awesome Jocelyn Glei, writer and creator of the podcast Hurry Slowly. Now seemed like the perfect time to feature Brooke’s chat with Jocelyn, as they focus on the relationship between technology, work, life, slow and creativity, as we all get back into the swing of work after the holidays. Jocelyn shares so many great resources with us, and we hope you find something to explore from this episode. Head over to http://slowyourhome.com/234/ for all the links and resources mentioned, as well as the full blog post. And we’ll see you in February for the new season of the show! ==== If you're enjoying the show and want to know how to best support it, leave a rating or a review in iTunes or head over to the Patreon page to help support the show financially. And thanks so much for listening! === Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/slow See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Has your inbox taken over your life? Does just thinking about checking your email give you incredible anxiety? Do you find yourself checking your email over and over again to the point where it's keeping you from accomplishing your actual tasks? Then Jocelyn Glei is here to help. She joins us to discuss how to take back control of your inbox and how to get real work done.Jocelyn K. Glei is a writer who's obsessed with work, careers,and creativity. She is the author of 4 books, including Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/the-unmistakable-creative-podcast.

Has your inbox taken over your life? Does just thinking about checking your email give you incredible anxiety? Do you find yourself checking your email over and over again to the point where it's keeping you from accomplishing your actual tasks? Then Jocelyn Glei is here to help. She joins us to discuss how to take back control of your inbox and how to get real work done.Jocelyn K. Glei is a writer who's obsessed with work, careers,and creativity. She is the author of 4 books, including Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It’s a podcast love-in today, as Brooke sits down with the awesome Jocelyn Glei, creator of the equally awesome podcast Hurry Slowly. Jocelyn’s podcast is also about slow living in a fast-paced world, but her guests tend to work in the extra-speedy realms of tech and entrepreneurialism, so their conversations often take place through the lens of work. This gives their chats a really relatable feel and begins to answer the question so many people ask themselves - “how can I work in my fast-paced industry but still live a slow life?” First up, Brooke asks Jocelyn what slow looks like for her, including her relationship with technology and the boundaries she sets. Jocelyn has actually written a book called Unsubscribe, all about how to manage email and prevent it from becoming all-consuming, so her insights into this and the references she makes are fascinating. Brooke and Jocelyn talk about the pleasure and power of introducing more analog into your life, as well as the relationship between mindfulness and creativity, and the importance of creating space for both rest and boredom. They also discuss the connections between technology and risk-taking and meaningful human connection, the way tech use impacts the way we form memories and more. It’s a really juicy episode, full of insight and interesting ideas to check out. Hungry for more? Head over to http://slowyourhome.com/234/ for all the links and resources mentioned, as well as the full blog post. And as mentioned in the intro, we’re bringing our email newsletter back! Be sure to head to http://slowyourhome.com/slowpost/ to get yourself on the list. We look forward to catching up in your inbox soon! ==== If you're enjoying the show and want to know how to best support it, leave a rating or a review in iTunes or head over to the Patreon page to help support the show financially and join in on our live monthly video calls. And thanks so much for listening! === Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/slow See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Season 2 crew reunites. Laracon Venue: The Museum of Science and Industry Evan You Ryan Holiday / Conspiracy Jocelyn K. Glei / Hurry Slowly / Unsubscribe Marvel.app Zeplin.io Laravel: Up and Running A Brief Introduction to Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs Marcus Aurelius book - Meditations The Daily Stoic AWS Lambda Esther Perel - sample TED talk: The secret to desire in a long-term relationship The Imposter's Handbook The Millionaire Next Door The Simple Path to Wealth Editing sponsored by Larajobs Transcription sponsored by GoTranscript.com [music] Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to a special edition of the Laravel Podcast season three. It's season three but it feels like season two. Stay tuned. [music] Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to a special edition of the Laravel Podcast. This is season three but I wouldn't hold it against you if you got surprised because I have two guests with me. Not only do I have two guests but I have the OG two guests. Can you guys say hello to the people? Jeffrey Way: Hey, everybody. I'm Jeffrey Way. Good to be back. Taylor Otwell: I'm Taylor Otwell. Matt Stauffer: You may have heard of Taylor. We got Jeffrey Way, the creator of Laracasts and bringer of many of us to Laravel and then Taylor Otwell, OG Laravel Podcast, OG Laravel. We figured it's time for a little bit of a breather in season three with all these episodes and just catch up and see how the crew is doing and catch up on things. Stuff we've got on our plate for today is definitely talking about how Laracon is looking for this year, what's going on with the development of Laravel and Laracasts and everything like that. I figure the easiest and most concrete thing for us to talk about is Laracon. What is going on? How is ticket sales? How is speaker lineups? How's the venue looking? How's Chicago looking? How's everything going for Laracon right now. Taylor Otwell: I think it's going pretty well. The venue is the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago which is a really large museum. On the South side of Chicago. We'll be in their auditorium and the ticket sales are going really good. We already sold out. That's about 850 attendees, about 50 of those attendees are going to be speakers and sponsors and then around 800 of them are going to be actual ticket purchasers from the community. This will definitely be the biggest US Laracon. It'll probably be the biggest Laracon yet so far. Although Laracon EU is usually a little bigger, so I wouldn't be surprised if they sold more tickets this year. I'm pretty excited about it. All the speakers are pretty much lined up. Some of the big name speakers that people may have heard of so far. Of course, I'll be there. Creator of Laravel, Evan You creator of Vue will be there. Uncle Bob Martin who's famous for writing some very popular programming books and just being a programming teacher will be there. Ryan Holiday, the author of several books that people may have heard of. His latest book is called Conspiracy but he also wrote The Daily Stoic, Perennial Seller, Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy. Some pretty popular books actually. Who else? Adam Wathan will be there. Several other community members will be there. I'm really looking forward to it. I think it's going to be a great talk. Right now, what I'm working on is just ironing out food, drinks, all those extra things you have to do for a conference. T-shirts, about to order those probably. Sponsors, we'll have 11 sponsor tables at the venue. We have quite a few sponsors again this year. It's going to be a packed house. Jeffrey Way: I always wonder how you keep track of everything. Matt Stauffer: Yes, me too. Jeffrey Way: Do you ever get close to the conference and think, "Oh, my god. I didn't even do that yet?" Taylor Otwell: One way I-- Matt Stauffer: Do you have a checklist? Taylor Otwell: One way I keep track is I have a spreadsheet from last year with every expense. That actually serves as a checklist. Like, "Hey, badges are on here as an expense. I should probably order those for this year." I just duplicate that every year and then I type in the new expenses and it also serves as a projection for profit and loss on the whole conference. It serves a dual purpose as a checklist and as a profit estimator for how the conference is looking to make sure I'm not way overspending. Especially, on speakers this year. We've spent probably $50,000 on speakers this year just because we several speakers that have a speaking fee and then we try to pay every speaker at least a few thousand dollars to make sure they're not just losing money coming to the conference which can happen. I don't know if you've spoken at conferences. As a listener, you may know that often it's a breakeven or maybe even a losing affair. Trying to make it somewhat worthwhile. Jeffrey Way: I've been to some where you don't get anything and that's just how it is. Look, you can come and speak but we're not giving you a penny. Taylor Otwell: [chuckles] I feel like I usually lose money. Matt Stauffer: That's most of them. Jeffrey Way: I used to go to a lot of WordPress conferences. What were they called back then? WordCamp? Taylor Otwell: Yes, WordCamp. Jeffrey Way: Maybe. With them is like they just don't have the money. They don't have the budget. You're doing that all on your own dime, if you want to go. Matt Stauffer: I'm looking through this list of speakers. There's quite a few people who I don't know of, but I've heard you guys talk about them. Jocelyn Glei, maybe? Ryan Holiday, you've mentioned him being an author. Then, there's one other person who I didn't know. Who do I not know? I guess it's just them. I think everyone else here is either, Jason Freed or Bob Martin or Evan Yu or people who are pretty reputable members of the Laravel community. Although we do have a few first-time speakers, TJ Miller, Caleb Porzio, Colin DiCarlo are all speakers-- Taylor Otwell: Collin DiCarlo is not. Matt Stauffer: He's not-- Geez, I thought he was-- Taylor Otwell: No. I think he's a 2016 Louisville speaker. Matt Stauffer: That was the year I was at home with the baby, so my bad. Caleb and TJ. Jocelyn, you mentioned Ryan. He's written a couple books. I need to go check those out. Can you tell us a little bit about Jocelyn? Taylor Otwell: Jocelyn runs a podcast called Hurry Slowly where she talks about work, productivity, burn-out, stuff like that. She's actually interviewed Jason Freed on the podcast. She also wrote a book called Unsubscribe which is on Amazon. You can check out. It's just about the overabundance of notifications and busy-ness that's prevalent in our tech world especially. I think she's going to talk about similar topics at the conference. I entirely forgot Jason Freed would be there. That's kind of a big deal. [laughter] I've been so busy with other stuff. Matt Stauffer: Let me ask you. Do you guys feel overwhelmed sometimes by all of the work you have to do? Do you feel that you can manage it fairly well day-to-day? [crosstalk] Jeffrey Way: I'm often overwhelmed by the work on my plate. My life is a constant battle of trying to figure out whether I'm overwhelmed because I don't have everything settled on my side or whether it's because we need to readjust the company a little bit. There's always a the, "Oh, Dave quit and he used to do all this high-level administration stuff so I took on all of his jobs for a while. We need to hire a new Dave." That was the thing for the longest time. "Oh, we've got four more developers than we did a year ago so there's a lot more management" or "This one client is requiring all these needs." Sometimes, it's process stuff. Sometimes, it's just I need to stop screwing around in my free time and actually, work through my email backlog, or I need to figure out how to handle my tasks better. Right now, I'm actually doing really good. It's because I've spent the last couple of weeks really putting in a concerted effort. We also have hired someone who is not joining us until mid-May, who's going to take probably a third of my job off my plate. It's funny because I was actually-- That whole thing, there was this guy, Dave, who managed all this. A lot of those responsibilities are going to be back off my plate soon, so I'm getting to that point. I usually can tell, "Do I finish my day with an empty email inbox and a task list with a couple items left on it and a clean desk? Do I finish my day with 70 emails still in my inbox, 20 things in my task list, a big pile of paper on my desk." Usually, those are the signs for me of, "Am I struggling to keep up, or am I actually on top of my life?" Matt Stauffer: What about you, Taylor? Taylor Otwell: I was just thinking I feel less overwhelmed by the work, and more overwhelmed by the expectations of everything. Because I don't really have that much I have to work on every single day, like Forge is going to run so I just have to answer the emails. It's a little different, I guess, because you probably want to crank out videos. I don't know what your schedule is and then, Matt probably has his daily tasks. For me, it's this expectation of somewhere out in the future, I have to do something impressive again. Matt Stauffer: Do something amazing. Taylor Otwell: I have to get up on stage and speak about it and it has to not fail. That's the pressure I feel really-- weighs on me every day, basically, because at Laracon, there has to be something cool to unveil, which, nobody panic, we are working on something but things can come up, or problems can arise. It could be buggy, it may not be finished in time, and that stuff's really overwhelming, more so than just the daily routine. Like Laracon itself could-- There's expectations there for it not to suck, for people to have a good time, for the food not to be terrible, for the speakers to do well, all that stuff is high expectation, too. Matt Stauffer: Had you guys seen the grid of urgent versus important? I'm trying to remember who it is, but somebody from a long time ago, basically, drew a grid and any given thing that's on your plate as a pressure should be doing can be urgent or not urgent, and important or not important. The really interesting thing is that you can put all the things that are pressing on you into that grid and figure out which of the quadrants they find themselves in. The things we're mostly like to do that are most wasteful is the urgent and not important. The things we're least likely to do that sounds like, really, what's on your plate a lot, Taylor, is the important and not urgent. It's the things that don't have that immediate time pressure but are the most important. It sounds like a lot of your life is important but not urgent which I know those are the hardest things to have the discipline, the focus on. Is that something where you have developed practices to make sure you're not just letting that stuff slip? Taylor Otwell: Past couple of years it's been trying to start really early on stuff like Horizon and then the thing I'm working on for this year's Laracon. I don't know. I do agree because Mohammad's going to take care of a lot of Forge stuff for me. I don't really spend a lot of time working on those features lately. I would say yes, you're right, it is important but not urgent. That is a challenging spot to be in. Jeffrey Way: Plus you have so many products. I wonder does it ever get to the point where you think "Well, I'd love to do another one but I just don't have the capacity to maintain yet another project" Taylor Otwell: Yes. There is a sense of when do you say "I did what I set out to do." This is what success is, basically. I should just maintain what I have and be happy that it got this far and not really try to overwhelm myself with a new impressive thing year after year because-- Most people will never reach the popularity of something like Laravel ever. I should just enjoy that maybe and not really try to stress out about creating the next big thing all over again, every single year. Which I think there's some merit to that as well but people don't really like that I guess [laughs]. Matt Stauffer: It's a little bit of the Apple thing, right? Is a WWDC where they don't completely blow your mind an acceptable WWDC? I would say "Yes man, I'm happy with what I've got. Just don't break it". Taylor Otwell: Yes. I remember Steve Jobs saying not to compare Laravel to Apple in any way really but he said something like most companies are lucky to ever invent one amazing product, They had invented the iPhone, the mac itself was amazing and then iPhone and iPod and all the stuff that came with it. I don't know. At some point, there's only so much you can do. I'm going to keep trying this year we'll see. Matt Stauffer: Jeffrey, what about you? Jeffrey Way: I'm okay right now but it's more of the anticipatory type of thing because my wife's pregnant so we're going to having a second child. We're not going to be having two children. Matt, I know you have more experience with that than me but it's stressing me out a little bit. Then, also this is the first year I've been working with a UI guy. I don't know what you call him, a designer or UX, I don't know what the terminology is anymore but he's doing really great work but every time he cranks out something new it ads to the backlog of stuff I have to implement, which I'm very thankful for but I'm kind of anticipating an insane amount of work in the next five months. I was just curious how you guys handle it. Then, there's also that thing where I worry sometimes when you feel stress and anxiety it's like to some extent you're creating it yourself and it's hard to determine, is this something I'm just doing myself and I am entirely in control of or are you not in control of it? That's something I think about a lot. Is there a way to turn that switch off when you need to? I don't know. Matt Stauffer: I know that you have at least some, like talking about that urgent versus not urgent thing. I know you have some urgency because there's this expectation of a certain timeline for delivering videos. Are there a lot of things on your plate, for work, that are in the longer terms? You mentioned one thing being the implementation in the UI. I know that you do visual refreshes occasionally, although in your latest podcast you talked about how a lot of that was early days and it probably will be a little bit less the case going on where you feel like you're getting more of a handle on things. Do you have a lot of things that are in the longer term bucket? Or are most things still locked in the immediate video production timeline? Jeffrey Way: Most is in the immediate. The UI work we're doing will probably be next year or at the end of this year. That's probably the most long-term work thing I'm doing. Most of it is immediate. It's very difficult to crank out content all of the time. Sometimes if I go even four days without something new I will get a tweet or somebody is complaining. It's like, you have to understand I've been doing this for three years, there's like thousands of videos. At some point, I'm going to have trouble thinking of new stuff to cover. I'm amazed every week I'm able to, I'm not complimenting myself, but I'm amazed th I'm able to think of something to publish every single week but that does wear on me a little bit to finding things to cover every week. Matt Stauffer: I hit episode 100 of the 5 Minute Geek Show and I just was like you know what I've talked for 10 to 15 minutes at a time for about 100 episodes and I don't have anything else stuff to say. People keep saying bring it back. I'm like-- Jeffrey Way: Yes and I think that's-- Have you close that down? Is it done? Matt Stauffer: It's not over. It's just on the hiatus. It's on hiatus until I come up with something else to say. You know what I mean? Jeffrey Way: Yes. Matt Stauffer: I'm not saying it's over because I'm sure that moment will come again, but right now, I'm just like, "I don't have anything else to say." If I felt that pressure like you do, to keep saying things, man-- granted, everytime the new tech comes out you can choose to go learn that tech and go to it. There's some things you can reach for, but still, I totally identify with what you're saying. It's just at some point, I just might not have anything else to teach right now. [laughs] One real quick, on ask for a pro tip, two kids. The big shift for two kids for me-- Taylor, I want to hear if you have the same perspective as-- With one kid, there's always the possibility for one parent to be taking care of the kid and the other parent being an adult. With two kids, there's now-- Even if one parent takes care of the kid, the other parent is taking care of another kid. All of a sudden, those rests that you get-- What I can imagine is, once you have three kids, it's even crazier. Because now, all of a sudden, there's never a one on one. That was the big shift that I noticed with the second kid was. Let's say, the other parent is feeding the baby or something like that, you're not cleaning up, you're taking care of a three-year-old or whatever else it ends up being. That's the biggest shift for me for a second kid. Jeffrey Way: Sounds stressful. Matt Stauffer: [laughs] It's not that bad. It's just a perspective shift, I think. Jeffrey Way: I have heard one bonus is that, like in your case, Matt, your oldest probably helps entertain your youngest quite a bit more, whether or not, depending upon you and your wife at all times for entertainment. Matt Stauffer: The older she gets, the more they play with each other and the more moments we get where they're playing together in the toy room for 45 minutes. We go, "Oh, my gosh." We sat down and had an adult conversation. That's definitely, definitely a boom. All right, that's what's going on with Laracon. You said the tickets are already sold out. Do you have a waiting list like you have previous years, Taylor? Taylor Otwell: There's not really an official waiting list right now. As people email me, I actually do put their name in a little file. I have sold a few tickets that way, but there hasn't been a lot of cancellations lately. There's not really any tickets to give out right now, anyway. Matt Stauffer: Got it, all right. I have a couple questions, but before we do that, let's talk Laracasts real quick. What kind of stuff have you-- let's say, anybody who hasn't been to Laracast for a little while, what have you been covering? What's your latest technologies that you've been looking at? Is there anything exciting you want to share with people? Jeffrey Way: Yes, sure. Let me take a look. Been doing a bunch of things lately. I finally covered Laravel Echo in full. Somehow, that was one of the things that I just missed a year ago. I went through that top to bottom. I think if you're intrigued by that, on how to communicate with the client, I think that would be really useful. It's a series called Get Real With Laravel Echo. Some things, I just have to refresh. That's one of the worst parts of my job is, even if it's from 2014 and it still works, it's like, there's just a few differences where you sort of have to record it all over again. That's the worst part of my job. Other than that, one of the things we're working on right now which I'm excited about, it's a series called How To Read Code. The whole point is not for me to write code, it's to work through the process of how you learn from the code that other people have written. There's that phrase about, "If you want to become better as a developer, you have to--" I can't remember what it is. You have to read a lot of code, you have to write a lot of code, and you have to learn, I guess. A lot of times, I think young people really get into the learning phase where they're reading the books and they're watching the videos, but they're not actually taking enough time to read code that other people have written. I notice that's sometimes a black box. People are afraid to dig behind the scenes and learn how these things are constructed, so they stay away from that. Then, also, they end up not writing as much code as they should, because they don't know what to build. This is the thing that comes up a lot. I learned this from students, is they don't know what to build. They haven't been hired yet, they're trying to think of projects they can flex their muscles on, and they have no idea where to start. With the How To Read Code, Taylor, we're actually going through the Laravel.com source code. I haven't told you about this. Taylor Otwell: Nice. Jeffrey Way: We're just pulling it up on GitHub, and we're figuring out every step, like, "Okay, if there's this repository for the markdown files, well, how is this project getting access to those markdown files and how is reading it and parsing it and replacing the URLs? How is versioning being handled?" What's fun about it is I don't have any experience with that codebase, so it's how I would exactly figure out how things are constructed. It seems like the feedback's been pretty good. Once again, I think, for so many, it's a black box. You're kind of scared to dig in because you don't know where to start. I encounter this a lot, so I hope it's useful. Then, other than that, I've been working with this UI guy. It's been fun because most of the time, I do things myself. That's a lot of coding in the browser, writing a lot of CSS and zeroing in on something that doesn't look horrible, which I'm not very good at. He is so much more systematized. He has me set up with this-- what is this app called? Marvel? Are you guys familiar with this? Marvelapp.com. It's new to me. It's amazing. He'll share a link with me and it's like an interactive website where he can swap things out, he can show me interactions and animations. Then, once I signed off on it, he sends me a link to this Mac app called Zeplin, zeplin.io. It's amazing because I'm so used to-- When extracting designs, I use Photoshop. If there's some SVG, I have to cut it out and save it as SVG. Very hard, creating new layers all the time. With this, everything is just clickable. If I need a particular icon, I click on it, and there's a button that says "Save as SVG." This is all new to me. I don't have any experience with tools like this. It's been a huge benefit to me in the last couple of months. I love it. Matt Stauffer: It's very cool. I'm going to try and go back through, listen to this, put all this in the show notes, everybody. Well, real quick going on with me. I'm updating Laravel, up and running for 5.5, so that's exciting. We finally got approval - actually, 5.5 or 5.6, I'm not sure I remember. I think we might be doing 5.6. I was going to do LTS and I think we've picked 5.6. Finally got my editors to sign off in doing that. I've got Wilbur Powery, who's doing some of the groundwork for me, and just reading through all the change logs, and making a list of all the things that are out of date, so that I don't have to do that work, so that he can just give me that list, and I'm going to sit down and write. The hope is for that to be some time in the fall for us to have edition two, so that's fun. I just left a project where I had been writing code, basically, for 20 to 30 hours a week on top of doing my normal job at Tighten just because we had a project that hit a point where no BLs was available. I felt that I just needed to fish it out. That's part of why I'm feeling so good right now because I'm going back to being a real boy again. [laughs] I'm not going to make any promises I keep making like, "I'm going to blog again. I'm gonna newsletter again." I'm actually feeling this possibility, especially when that new employee joins in May that I might actually start being a human again. I have said that at three or four times since my daughter was born two years ago and it hasn't happened yet. Who knows? Maybe that day will come. Jeffrey Way: That's great. It's great news. Matt Stauffer: Yes. That's very exciting. Okay, so I have a topic for us to talk about. I didn't prep you guys for this, so sorry about that. There's a couple of topics of conversation that have been coming up really recently at Tighten about - and if anybody listens to Twenty Percent Time podcast, you'll know at least a little bit about this. Talking about JavaScript versus PWAs versus straight Blade apps versus Blade apps that have some JavaScript components. First off the bat, before we go to the deeper conversation, I want to talk about PWAs. I want to see, have you guys dug into that at all? The iOS has just pushed out some of the core features that would make it so that you can actually write a PWA and have it work on iOS. This is the first day where you can actually even realistically consider building one that would work on the most modern devices. It's like when Flexbox first finally actually worked versus like, "This has been a thing for a while." We haven't written any production PWAs for anybody, but it's finally a point where we're like, "We can." Is that something you guys have dug into that you're even interested in or is it like, "Hey, it just became legitimate a week ago, so now, maybe, I'll put my brand on it"? Jeffrey Way: Yes. Beyond a blog post or two, I have no experience with that at all. Like you said, it's always tricky. Do I try and invest my time in this if I can't use it too much yet? It sounds like it's now becoming a possibility, but, for now, I have no experience at all. Taylor Otwell: Yes. Me either. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Well, I have no experience other than I did a whole bunch of research to write that blog post, November 9. Jeffrey Way: Right. It's one of the ones I read [chuckles]. Matt Stauffer: Yes. Nine months ago I did all that and then, basically, I said, "I'm going to go build some." Then, I discovered that it didn't even work on iOS, and I said, "Well, maybe I'll hit pause and all that until iOS supports it." They do, and I know that Keith, who works at Tighten, has been doing a lot more thinking about that than I have. I've been pushing him to-- with all his copious free time he's on at this point, he and Samantha are nearly as busy as I am - to see if he can do a part two write-up now that it's viable. I'll see if he can do that. Jeffrey Way: I'm curious to what extent it's viable. In the latest browsers, that's the idea? Matt Stauffer: Yes. Basically-- Jeffrey Way: What's the fallback look like? I wonder. Matt Stauffer: In theory, PWA should work on fallback browsers. In theory, it's not like it's not going to work, but it's more like it's just going to be a website with JavaScript versus the value that a PWA is going to provide. You don't want to really go hole-hogging to something, expecting it's going to be a PWA where people can use it offline, they can use it when their internet goes out, it's going to save stuff, stuff like that, and then have it not work on the major browsers. We're basically at a point where all the major mobile browsers are going to be little work with it. I don't know what the whole mobile Opera situation is like because I haven't dug into that. I know that we're at a point where literally all iPhone users couldn't even use PWAs up until a week ago. It was very non-viable up until a little bit ago. Now, your mobile Chrome, and your mobile Safari, and all those are all possible to use it. The biggest thing with the PWA is just it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, and it's a lot of learning, and it's a lot of different ways of thinking about things because you're having to make things, basically, function regardless of whether or not the internet is there. It's that biggest shift in perspective over anything else. There's a lot of complexity in architecture that you need to introduce to make that happen. The good thing is, people are building tooling to make that easier, but it's something where you're not going to do it unless the client definitively needs it. I can imagine maybe you eventually building a Laracast PWA if you really wanted to so people could go on a Laracast, open up the PWA in their phone, in their iPad, and then tap the seven videos they want to download so they can watch them on a plane or something like that. That might be the possibility for it. But I still think the vast majority websites won't be PWAs because it's cost and you got to be sure that you're actually getting the benefit. Like you said, if most major browsers can't use it, then you're not going to get that benefit. We're now to the point where most major browsers could get the benefits so people should start learning about it. But again, it's just really early days right now. Jeffrey Way: Okay. Yes, I find in general, most of the apps I build are that combination you said. A little Blade, a little Vue, sometimes they're interconnected, that and something that the sort of apps I build. Although I find it gets tricky. I find that I do want to reach for something a little different. I do sometimes feel like, "If I just built this as an SPA entirely, this would be a lot cleaner." I think a lot of Laravel developers probably end up in the same boat where you're trying to do both at the same time. It gets tricky because you often end up reproducing the same logic in two different locations: one for the comments side and one for your back end. I think it's a common thing developers in our space are going through right now. Matt Stauffer: That's the second part of this conversation so I'm glad you transitioned to it. We're having this internal chat where Daniel Coborn is basically saying, "Look, most of the sites were hired to do or eventually are going to have some JavaScript so why don't you just go whole hog in the first place?" Caleb is saying, "I want to build Blade apps that have little widgets, and I'd rather explicitly do all the work in my controller and then pass it in these props to the Vue, which is when it comes up." I'm saying, "I want to do all Blade until I find a definitive need the JavaScript's going to happen. When that happens, then I'll modify it the way it should be. We have this kind of continue or whatever. We chose as a different side. I wanted to hear from you guys. If you were to start a new app today, are you in the world where you say, "You know what? I'm going to do Blade and then I'll modify it." Are you in the world where you're like, "You know what? I'm just going to do single-page app all the way." Or are you somewhere in between? Jeffrey just answered a little bit so I guess Taylor, what's your approach right now? Taylor Otwell: The latest thing I wrote which hasn't been unveiled yet, I did basically build it as a single-page app using Vue and Vue Router. Honestly, I really like it. I think Vue Router is pretty nice and easy to use. I think for this particular use case, it just solved the bunch of problems that we would have had trying to make it all Blade. I feel like my use cases, both times I've interacted with Vue Router, which is Horizon as a single-page app, basically, and the new thing. But then, there are unique situations where I wasn't having to duplicate a lot of rules on the front end. Either you authenticated to view the whole thing or you're not. There wasn't a bunch of other authorization that had to happen for various little features. That made it a little simpler, I feel like, to build it as a single-page app because I wasn't having to duplicate a bunch of junk. But if I was going to build something like Forge as a single-page app, I probably would have a little more duplication on various things. I don't know, man. I see Daniel's point to an extent that it does feel good to just go whole hog and embrace it because it feels nice to do it all in JavaScript if you go down that path. I don't know. I think Caleb's point, I feel that pain most often on authorization. I feel like than anything else. Jeffrey Way: Yes, absolutely. Matt, I'm curious about your point. Because I have seen a bit of a backlash to JavaScript in general, where people think, "Okay, you're getting some extra interactivity but the complexity you introduce to make all of these work is sometimes insane." Just the fact that Mix has to exist to make that build process somewhat easy to understand, shows how complicated this stuff can be. I understand exactly what Taylor's saying but I also get the angle of, "Let's put this off as far as we possibly can." Has your thinking on that changed in the last year? Matt Stauffer: Yes. I would say that I love Vue, I love React, I love single-page apps when they're appropriate. I think that knowing what a lot of projects Daniel has spanned recently, and that type of thing that I know Taylor is working on right now. I would pick SPA. I pick Vue Router SPA and I'd pick an API first in that context but I think that we can do that and we can then assume that that is always the right way to go forward. To me, that's not the case at all because of what you just said. I think testing is harder. I think debugging is harder. I think NPM and all the node modules issues breaks more. I think the entire complexity of this system is significantly higher. I think onboarding new developers in the system is more complicated and I want to make sure that it's not because I know PHP better than I know Javascript. I've been writing Javascript for as long as I've been writing PHP. Granted I haven't been writing React and Vue as long as I've been writing Laravel. I think I understand them relatively well and just the whole system everything is more complex than an all Javascript app. I am willing to make that statement and so to me- Taylor Otwell: The testing is definitely more complex. Jeffrey Way: Yes. Matt Stauffer: Yes. So to me, if I'm in a place where I can accomplish it with Blade then I'm not going to introduce any Javascript. If I can accomplish with Blade and the occasional Javascript widget then I'm going to use it with Blade and the occasional Javascript widget. That doesn't mean I don't believe that there are plenty of apps that are better as all Javascript or maybe even not using Vue Router or whatever but like a Javascript page that navigates to another Javascript page so you're doing your React containers or whatever else it ends up doing. I'm 100% on board with that possibility but I need to be convinced that that's the way to do it before I go there. Jeffrey Way: Taylor, for the SPAs you're building, when it comes to testing, are you doing endpoint testing for your backend code? In addition to that, how much client-side testing are you doing? Do you have tons of [crosstalk] Taylor Otwell: I wrote all of the endpoint test and there's hundreds of them for a new project and then we haven't even written the front end test yet, mainly because I'm working with other people on this. Of course, I have Steve, my designer, and then I have another person working on front-end stuff. It's also complicated by the fact that this is a package, it's not an app that Dusk is really easy to pull in to and so we haven't really toyed around with making Dusk work in a package environment yet. I don't know what Dusk's going to look like. We may end up using some kind of Javascript solution. There's just so many little subtle interactions on the front-end that are going to be one, important to test and two, hard to test I think. I don't know, we'll see I haven't gotten there yet. Jeffrey Way: Yes, I'm curious to see how you figure that out. Taylor Otwell: I would like to pull dusk in and just use it to test the package. Ideally kind of like the test bench for the back end which I used to write all my endpoint tests. Hopefully something similarly -- we can do something similar to that with Dusk, we'll see. Matt Stauffer: I hadn't thought about that because I was like, "Oh yes, Javascript just use Java--" but it's not, it's multiple pieces. We have found that once you put the work into the Javascript testing if that thing is full-on Javascript you can get it to be tenable? I feel like Javascript testing is, in our world, is probably the next great hurdle for us to make simple for people. Basic Laravel testing was one hurdle and then, what do you call it?, your package Jeffrey that was eventually pulled in the core like application testing that was the next hurdle. Gulp was a hurdle and Mix was a hurdle. These are hurdles where they're really complicated things that we look at and said, "You know what? People in the community are needing this to be simpler" and someone sat out usually one of the two of you sat out to make it a lot easier. I know that there's at least two people talking at Laracon about testing. Testing in Javascript and stuff like that. I'm super excited about the possibility that -- I thought there's two. I know that Samantha is at least. Her talk is about full-stack testing strategies. The reason for this is because at Tighten we're always asking this question of, what are our different ways of testing the whole way up and down the stack? Samantha's our resident React guru and we've had quite a few React developers at this point but she's the lead in thinking there and she's been asking this question a lot of like, "What does testing look like?" what I told her was like, "I'm going to wait until you give this talk to demand this of you of you but I want you to make it really easy for me and any app to write a Javascript test" I know Dusk and I know Laravel and PHPUnit but I want you to make it super easy for me. I'm hoping that that's what her talk is going to do for me and for everybody else. No pressure, Samantha. [laughs] Jeffrey Way: That would be great. I think so many times developers don't think about that. I think maybe they get too deep in the woods thinking, "okay, this is quite you have to do. You got to get this and this and this and this and this and then pull in these 8 dependencies then you're ready to go." They forget that to a newcomer that's horrible it's so frustrating. The view test utils library works great but just to get to the point where you can start writing your first test it's a lot of work. In many cases like this, it's not spotlighting them specifically but in so many cases like this you find situations where, "This could be significantly easier to get started" and it's not a badge of honor that you have to go through so many hurdles to write your first test, it should be easier. Matt Stauffer: I like that as a metric. I would like to have the ability to write a Reactor Vue test out of the gate. The same way that with a new Laravel app, I can write a test out of the gate without. I literally open up example test and just change some letters and I'm writing my test, that's brilliant. That was not what writing tests in PHP unit used to be like. It's not as if PHP unit is easy to bootstrap but Taylor and company did the work to make that easy, and you did the work to make it easy with application testing upon the core. I'm hopeful that we're we're moving in that direction. Alright. JavaScript, backends, Laracon , Laracasts, Laravel up and running. What are you guys learning these days? Are there any books you're reading? I know Taylor you've been talking about stoicism a lot. I started that one book, the really old one is it Marcus Aurelius or something like that? Taylor Otwell: Yes. Matt Stauffer: I started the book and I'm just moving really slowly through it. Could you could you give me the TLDR elevator pitch for stoicism? Is that is that possible? Jeffrey Way: What is stoicism? Matt Stauffer: Yes. What is stoicism, Taylor? Taylor Otwell: I think the one-sentence thing is this? It reminds me of that serenity prayer, I don't know if you ever heard that where stoicism is very focused on not worrying at all about the things that are out of your control. They define the things that are in your control as only your own boss, basically. Your health is not in your control, your job is not really, it's influenced by external factors. That was a little confusing to me at first because some things, say you're in a tennis match and you're facing someone, and whether you win or not is partly in your control, but it's partly not. I was always confused by that from a stoic perspective. There was one book that helped me resolve that situation, where it was like, You want to internalize your goals a little bit. To succeed at the tennis match is basically to give it your best so to speak. Whether you win or lose, is out of your control at that point, but you're still succeeding as long as you prepare and practice to give it your best shot. That's the main gist of Stoicism is not worrying about anything that's out of your control. Only worrying about the things you actually can control. Everything revolves around that. Matt Stauffer: I like that. Taylor Otwell: Basically Marcus Aurelius' book re-visits that theme a lot in various circumstances. One of the other popular stoic books, probably the other most popular Seneca's letters. He visits that topic on a variety of issues. Death and dying, sickness, what it means to be wealthy, and be a stoic because he was pretty wealthy. Of course, Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor so he was extremely privileged and wealthy. I think Marcus Aurelius' book is surprisingly relatable for a Roman Emperor that lived 2,000 years ago. [laughter] A lot of the things he mentions struggling with are very relatable. I was surprised at how modern it all came across really for someone that you would think would be very disconnected from our life experience. Matt Stauffer: Did I remember you saying something along the lines of Ryan Holiday, the guy who's speaking doing something about stoicism? Taylor Otwell: Yes, he wrote the Daily Stoic which is a really popular book. There's 365 little chapters, every day it's like a little daily reading. He expounds on it in a couple paragraphs. It's a pretty cool little book. Matt Stauffer: Cool. Taylor Otwell: On the tech side what I've been looking into a lot recently is containers, AWS, deployment, stuff like that. Serverless stuff like AWS Lambda. I feel there's gold in those hills somewhere. [laughter] I just feel like it's not really being presented and packaged up in a very approachable way right now. Because AWS feels very low level, it gives you all the tools you need to make things happen but you still have to tie them together in pretty complicated ways to build something useful. Probably the person that ties that kind of thing together the best is something like Heroku but just playing with some of those technologies. I think AWS Lambda is really cool. I really love the idea behind it, where basically you start out with just a function. By default, it's just like a JavaScript function that receives some arguments. You think of it like a little artisan command that receives a payload from the command line. You can invoke this function and pass it, little arguments. Then you can do whatever you want, you never really have to think about the underlying server. I think their concurrency limit is like 1000 concurrent tasks running at a time. It's pretty scalable for most situations, but you can actually do pretty interesting things like you can run a Laravel app on AWS Lambda which I actually did this week. I'm using some tutorials that people had written. It's a really interesting technology and like I said I feel like there's cool stuff there that just needs to be mined out, repackaged, and presented to people in this sort of digestible way. I've been trying to digest it myself and it's very complicated and there's actually a real lack of quality, like guides and documentation on how to do anything actually useful. There's lots of like, "Let's deploy a hello world" nginx page to elastic container service but how do I do zero downtime deployments reliably? How do I set up all my key workers reliably?" All that stuff is not there. Jeffry: You guys are making me feel bad. I'm trying to think of what I'm learning right now and the answer is nothing. I can't think of anything. Taylor Otwell: I've been playing Rocket League like an hour and a half a day. [laughs] Jeffrey Way: I think sometimes it's good to not always reach for something new but to get yourself in a habit of just a daily routine of every single day I'm going to chip away at this. There have been plenty of times where I'm really pushing my boundaries for a little bit trying to learn something new but I can't say that right now. I'm feeling horrible right now. Matt Stauffer: I can tell you, Jeffrey, I'm not learning anything about code right now so don't feel horrible. Jeffrey Way: Really? Matt Stauffer: I'm learning things. Let me tell you the things I'm learning and I bet you you'll have something related. I'm listening to this woman, Esther Perel, who's this relationship expert. I'm listening to her stuff nonstop. My wife and I are both listening to all her stuff. It's really good. It's like this progressive thinking about relationships but every time I've listened or read to people who are talking about this type of relationship stuff they're like, "By the way, you should just have open relationships and be married to 20 people and have sex with all of them. It's no big problem." I'm like, "That's not me so much." But she has progressive thinking that kind of throws of some of the old croft that we brought along with us but stills very much focused on, "Well you're married to this person, stay married to this person." It's helpful. It's like opening up my mind a little bit. The other thing I'm thinking about is money. I may have talked to you guys a little bit I've been- Jeffry: Yes, you're into that lately- Matt Stauffer: I'm so into it. I just got obsessed with how much I hate having a mortgage. It became this massive thing for me. I literally just looked at my mortgage statement and I think this is it, beginning balance, applied balance, and ending balance. I lived in my house for I feel like several years now. It's atleast one year and it might be two years. I'm paying thousands of dollars a month towards my mortgage and I've applied $5,000 to my balance because I'm paying everything to the interest this whole time. I just feel like I'm in this awful system. You guys know this but I've been listening to these audiobooks. One of them is the millionaire one, what's it called? The Millionaire Next Door and then the other one is The Simple Path To Wealth and just focusing on like really simple investment strategies, really simple decisions you can make. I'm not going to talk about -- I could talk to you guys your ear off in the next half hour but to me, the two things I've been learning about are simpler, healthier approaches to money and investment. Then relationship stuff where it's kind of like helping you understand what kind of garbage you're bringing into your marriage or your relationship but in a way that is for the focus of you staying there, to that person long-term versus a lot of the other alternative. You know, half ways to thinking about it. Jeffrey Way: I live everything you say on the finance stuff because you think the more you can simplify your financial situation the better it's going to improve your relationship as a result, too. I think it's the number one or the number two cause of fighting in relationships, is financial issues and of course, not everyone is in control of it. The more you can simplify your finances then and not buy a new car and instead buy an older car or something you can afford. The more you can simplify it, the better it's going to improve your relationship with your wife or your spouse and your kids. I see nothing but good things there. One thing I am doing, though -- This may interest you, Matt, when we had the Laravel podcast months ago I said, "Years ago I stopped playing guitar and the interest I had left" it's come back in the last couple of months. Matt Stauffer: That's awesome. Jeffrey Way: I know and I'm very happy about it. I went and bought a guitar and an amp. I've been playing lately. You can maybe see it in the back there and it's funny to see the parallels with code. I'm kind of getting in -- I'm approaching guitar from a more mature point of view, I guess. I'm getting more into this idea of like, "Okay, every single day I'm going to be working on this. I'm going to take a very fundamental approach to building up skills, whereas when I was a kid it was more, "I want to learn how to do this. Let's figure out how to do this as quickly as possible." Now, I take a very different approach to it, which I feel all of this parallels with code. It's very funny. I noticed on Twitter the other day a bunch of people were talking about how many coders have some interest in music or have some experience with music. It's interesting, the overlap there. Matt Stauffer: I just read the intro to this Imposters Handbook thing that I tweeted out. I wish I could remember the guy's name because he's a well-known software author but he's talking about being a saxophone player. I remembered having read a book by him in the past where he is making a lot of those parallels. Do you know who that is what is? Jeffrey Way: What is it? Hanselmann? Matt Stauffer: It wasn't Hanselmann. He wrote one but then it was the one after that. You guys would definitely know who this guy is but I just remember that he had studied saxophone. I remember him talking about that in his book that I read but yes, who knows who wrote that. Anyway, I'm only a chapter into this Imposters Handbook but I like that. Jeffrey Way: Very cool. Matt Stauffer: We are at 50 minutes, which is usually when we start ramping it down. Is there anything else going on with you guys, anything you've been thinking about or learning or exciting about that you want to get a chance to chat about? Taylor Otwell: Not for me that I haven't already discussed, I don't think. No, just what I already discussed but we're working on new Forge things, trying to make people's lives easier and Envoyer is getting redesigned, which it hasn't gotten since I originally wrote it in bootstrap, so that will be nice. Other than that, I think that's about it really on my end. Jeffrey Way: Matt, can you share any news about who's coming up on the podcast? Matt Stauffer: Oh man, I don't actually know who's next but let me go pull up my Trello board real quick. Basically what I'm trying to do is, I've been a little sneaky on this but I'm trying to mix up people who everybody knows, who everyone's been waiting for because every once in a while people are like, "Why has Adam not been in the podcast or whatever". I'm trying to mix up those people who I know that people are anxious about, for the people who they're not anxious about but I know that they're going to be really excited when they hear it. There's a couple of people who I know everybody want to hear and I'm trying to spread them out like every three or four guests and then be like, "Yes, but there's these other people that you don't know are super awesome." Some of my favorite responses have been people like, "I've never even heard that person's name before and now I want to be their best friend", I'm like, "Yes, I did my job well." Of course, the well-known names in Laravel are all going to get interviewed. I've got a list of dozens and dozens and dozens of people. I know that Adam's going to be coming up soon for sure and your Eric Barnes and your Chris Fidao's and them are going to be up in there, of course, as well and Freek and folks like that. One of the things I did also, was I didn't interview anybody from Tighten because I didn't want to seem like it was nepotism, but there's quite a few really interesting people at Tighten, so I think the Tightenites are going-- I'm going to start slipping in some Tightenites and some Vehikl and Spatie folks. I'm going to start slipping in some of those folks as well too. There's a huge list, I mean, you guys, I could do dozens and dozens and dozens of more just from the list I originally spit out before even touching any of the suggestions I got on Twitter. There's a lot of good ones coming. Jeffrey Way: I'm excited. It's been fun hearing from people that I'm not overly familiar with. I think that's a very wise choice you've made. Matt Stauffer: I'm happy to hear it, I had so much fun. Of course, I miss you guys which is why we're back here for today. I figured we can do this one, every dozen or something like that, keep that lines of communication going. Jeffrey Way: Yes. Cool. Matt Stauffer: All right guys, feeling good. Anything else? Jeffrey Way: That's it. Matt Stauffer: It was a ton of fun talking to you guys and I can't wait to see you in a couple months. Until then, thanks for hanging out and we'll see you all later. Taylor Otwell: Alright. See you. [music]

David chats with Jocelyn Glei of the Hurry Slowly podcast about killing distractions, disconnecting from our devices and getting more done by doing less.

Jocelyn K. Glei is obsessed with how we can find more creativity and meaning in our daily work. Her latest book is Unsubscribe, a modern guide to killing email anxiety, avoiding distraction, and getting real work done. Her previous books include Manage Your Day-to-Day, Maximize Your Potential, and Make Your Mark, which offer pragmatic, actionable advice for creatives on managing their time, their careers, and their businesses. She was formerly the founding director of the 99U Conference and editor-in-chief of 99u.com, which earned two Webby Awards for Best Cultural Blog. Jocelyn has given talks at leading creative companies and conferences all over the world, including Google, The Guardian, How To Academy, The Next Web (TNW), and CreativeMornings, among others. Her writing and ideas have been featured in outlets including NPR, New York Magazine, Fast Company, BuzzFeed, SELF, Harvard Business Review, GQ, and Brain Pickings. You can find her online at jkglei.com.

Getting up early is a common trait among many of the worlds top CEOs, creatives and top-performers. Jocelyn Glei, Editor-in-Chief at 99U has found this trait is nearly always present among the most productive people. If you'd like more productive hours in your day consider getting up early and working from 5-6am (which is one of my favourite times of the day). Now, I'm not saying that if you don't get up early or if you prefer to work late at night that you're an unproductive person. At the end of the day, you need to do what works for you. In saying that, if you're a night owl, here are some reasons why you should reconsider your late night habits. Show notes: PaulMinors.com/69 If you want to be more productive, start my free 3-part video series to supercharge your productivity and get more organised!: PaulMinors.com/training If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast. I'd also love it if you could leave me a review. Doing this will help more people discover the show so they to can get more done and get more out of life. Intro/Outro Music: "Synthia" by Scott & Brendo --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/paulminors/message

If you've ever struggled to find the time to get the things done you want to get done, or to finish your day feeling you've been productive and on-task, then do we have the time management show for you! Today I'll be talking with Jocelyn K. Glei, formerly editor-in-chief and director of 99u.com and the editor of a new favorite book on organization I wish I'd had years ago, Manage Your Day-to-Day. Today we'll be talking about just that managing your day to day and Building Routines, finding your focus and sharpening your creative mind. That plus we'll talk about the ultradian rhythm, the best use for a post-it, why we all want to get lonely, the dangers of email apnea, and what in the world is a technology Shabbat. Self-Help and Self-Improvement Questions & Topics Include: How Jocelyn Glei got good at time management What's the importance of a routine? What Steven King says about routines? What's the importance of front-loading (doing creative work first, reactive work second) How do we train people that we might not get back to email right away. Why we want to beware of the cycle of addiction with our email, social media and our smart phones What's the concept of ‘random rewards' and how we become trained to our email and smart phones What's the hangover effect, and how does this rule our day. What are the building blocks of a great daily routine What is a creative trigger – a concept from Mark McGuiness How Michael wrote College Confidence with ADD with the music of Vivaldi One of Mark's saying “If it won't fit on a post-it, it won't fit in your day” What's the Benjamin Franklin method and when's the best time to do it? What's the importance of making a daily to-do list the night or day before? What can Gretchen Rubin The Happiness Project tell us about time Management and the power of momentum What Seth Godin can tell us about honing our creative practice? How do we build renewal into our work day Why is sleep more important than food – from Tony Schwartz What's the ultradian rhythm and research from Eric Anderson on how long we can perform at a high level While looking at Facebook is not taking a break Why Jocelyn uses swimming to take a break, and has a dog, which helps her to take a break. What's the importance of solitude and creating the first block for your solitude Leo Babalta who writes the zen habits blog talks about how we've become incredibly uncomfortable with solitude How do we realize to shut the screen, step back, and get away from our computers (buddhify and headspace are mindfulness and meditation aps) How we can keep our long-term goals on our minds – from Erin Dignan In her future book how you can create a mental hierarchy of who matters to help you get things done (and get through your email) see Jocelyn Glei's next book coming out this fall, Unsubscribe Why Inbox zero may not be as great as you think What's the difference between a compulsive behavior and something that's constructive What we can learn from Jeff Bezos and preserving unstructured time What's a technology Shabbat – from filmmaker and founder of webby awards, Tiffany Schlain. What are email apnea and screen apnea – from Linda Stone who has a great Ted Med talk (The Wonders of a Wandering Mind- http://www.tedmed.com/talks/show?id=293027 What's the importance of getting out of the fight or flight mode when working, checking email, or at any time! What's it mean “In imagination we trust”? Why do we practice unnecessary creation (Scott McDowell) Why it's so important to kick the perfectionism habit What Anders Ericcson of Peak has to say about deliberate practice and feedback What he said about Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule What we can learn from Bill Bradley (John McPhee wrote it) “A Sense of Where You Are” Why is repetition the enemy of insight? What Stefan Sagmeister talks about very creative or ‘oblique' strategies. What Steven Pressfield means about going pro, being a pro, and doing the work Why ideas aren't the hard part, execution is What we want to know about Unsubscribe coming out in October. What's the importance of self-love or being kind and gentle on yourself through this process? Why we have to watch our inner-critic jkglei.com – Jocelyn's website What we can learn from Toddy Henry, Julia Cameron, and morning pages Jocelyn Glei shares incredible time management tools from Seth Godin, Gretchen Rubin, Steven Pressfield & Cal Newport! Inspiration | Meditation | Inspirational | Motivational | Career | Spiritual | Spirituality | Self-Improvement | Self-Help | Inspire For More Info Visit: www.InspireNationShow.com

Shawn Blanc is a writer, small-business owner, productivity coach, and creative entrepreneur living in Kansas City with his wife and their three sons. Shawn has been teaching and learning about creativity, diligence, and focus for over a decade, and his online courses have helped thousands of people do their best creative work while learning to thrive in the midst of life's tensions. A while back, Shawn sent an email that caught my attention. He wrote about the importance of creating a customer avatar and developing a content strategy to connect with them and help them achieve their goals. I liked the email so much that I emailed him back and asked him to come on my show to talk about his journey to making a living through writing online and what he's learned about growing an audience. Shawn also shares my passion for productivity and deep focus; so much so that he's gathered 12 incredibly smart people for a free 5 day online summit about the power of focused life. In this episode, Shawn shares how he was able to make a full-time living by writing online, and we discuss how you can grow your audience by creating a customer avatar (your ideal listener) and creating content that addresses their needs and desires. Highlights, Takeaways & Quick Wins: Interview your customers to get a real life picture of your audience. Start selling products as early as possible. Your customer avatar is a real person that exists out there. Use the language of your customer avatar in your content to create a deep connection with them. Be in people's weekly cycle at a minimum. Your niche is going to draw your audience but your ancillary interests will keep people interested. Show up consistently to earn people's trust and create an anticipation of future value. Do guest-based podcasts to grow your audience. Reach people that are far outside of your social circle by connecting with the people you can connect with right now. Show Notes Aaron: Shawn Blanc is a writer/small business owner/productivity coach/creative entrepreneur living in Kansas City with his wife and their three sons, and Shawn is a member of our Community. He's been teaching and learning about creativity, diligence, and focus for over a decade now. His online courses have helped thousands of people do their best creative work while learning to thrive in the midst of life's tensions. A while back, Shawn sent an email that caught my attention. He was writing about the importance of creating a customer avatar, that's knowing who you're creating for and what you want to help them achieve, what kind of person you want to help them become. I thought it was really interesting, so I sent him an email right back. I said, “Shawn, do you want to come on the show to talk about this? I think podcasters need to hear about this idea of customer avatars and also content strategy.” Shawn agreed, and he also shares my passion for productivity and focus, so much so that he has gathered 12 incredibly smart people for a five day online summit about the power of a focused life, and that's going to be starting, I believe, as this episode comes out. If you're listening to this in your podcast player, it's starting today, I think. I'll give you that link later. In this episode, I want to talk with Shawn about why you as a podcaster need to create a customer avatar, know who you're creating for, develop a content strategy, and then also the benefits of deep focus, what we call deep work. A few small changes in your daily habits can lead to big improvements in your productivity and creative output. Shawn, that's one of the longer intros I've ever done. Thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate you being here. Shawn: Thanks, Aaron. I love it. Super excited to be here. Shawn Blanc Aaron: I think of you, Shawn, as a writer and as the creator of an online course called The Focus Course, which is great. You're so much more than that. Do you want to give everyone a quick introduction, how you got here and where you came from? I would also like to hear what your biggest struggles have been over the years of getting to the point where you're at right now. Shawn: Absolutely. I'm in Kansas City. Originally, I'm from Denver. I'm a Colorado guy at heart. I've been married for going on 12 years, and my wife and I have three boys. It's insane at our house. We used to call the first two the Twin Tornadoes, but we just had our third eight or nine weeks ago. Aaron: Congrats! Shawn: It's awesome. Love it. I love being a dad. I used to be a drummer. I know that we have a lot of musicians around here. Sean McCabe plays a little bit of music, I think. Aaron: Yeah, he used to write music, just like he used to do lettering. I still play drums. Shawn: I used to play drums for a large ministry here in Kansas City, and I ended up transitioning out of that. It's a long story, but I ended up becoming a marketing and creative director. I ran a team, an in-house design team, with about 17 people—web developers, print designers, web designers, writers, editors, project managers, whatever. We did a bunch of stuff. One of our huge things was that we would host a conference at the end of the year that I was running. 25,000 people would come out for that. I did that for several years, and then my wife and I got pregnant with our first kid. I was like, “I don't want to do this work as a dad.” Part of it was just super demanding. Anyone who has experienced working in the corporate design scene knows that it's a very demanding spot. Everything is urgent all the time. I was doing like 80 hours a week, and I really enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun, but I was like, “There's no way. I don't want to do 80 hours a week as a dad.” I had that, plus I had this little blog on the side, where I had been writing about marketing stuff. I felt like, “This would be a good opportunity to quit what I'm doing and take a leap, see if I can take my website full time. Could I blog for a living?” That was the thought. I was doing about $1,000 a month in advertising and some affiliate stuff. I figured that if I could give it 40 hours a week, I could get the revenue up to a spot where it could pay the bills. I figured that it could grow from there. Aaron: How old were you at this point? Shawn: I was just about 30, not quite 30, like 29, when I made that jump. I asked everyone that was reading on the site. I said, “I'm quitting. I'm going to do this thing full time.” I asked people if they would be interested in supporting me to write the site for a living. I was like, “If you like what I'm doing, I'll write more if you want to give me some money to do it.” I did this little membership drive. I was going to charge $3 a month for membership. I was doing a daily podcast as a perk of membership. Aaron: You aren't still doing that, are you? Shawn: It's on hiatus at the moment. We'll see. I'm going to be diving back into the podcast scene starting early 2017. I miss podcasting. It's fun. Aaron: You decided to ask people to support you, give you $3 a month, to go full time with your writing? Shawn: Basically. I figured if I could get 500 people, at $3 a month that's $1,500, plus the other $1,000 I was doing, and that would be $2,500 a month. That's not a ton, but I figured that would be enough to cover the bare necessities. I figured that things could grow from there. People signed up, and I hit the 500 person mark by the end of the month before I had even quit. I started my new job, April 4th 2011, basically fully funded as an independent blogger. Aaron: I bet that was exciting. Shawn: It was really exciting. I felt like I got this permission slip from my audience to go for it. As a creative person, sometimes you need that. Sometimes you want to be like, “Do you guys care? I'm here. I'm making this stuff.” A lot of the work we do as creative entrepreneurs is for your audience. I know that we're going to talk about this in a little bit, the customer avatar profile. It's for these people that you really want to serve. When you hear back from them and they go, “Hey, we like what you're doing. Let's keep the relationship going,” it's like having a DTR with your audience. There's something cool about that kind of permission slip moment. It's like when you sell your first product, or whatever it is. People are interested. You get your first positive review on iTunes or whatever. Obviously, there's going to be the junk that comes later, but whatever. Aaron: Some of the haters that come later? Shawn: You forget about that stuff and you keep moving on. Aaron: That's awesome. Asking for Money Aaron: When you think back, do you remember any big struggles or hurdles that you really had to overcome about that period in your life? Shawn: There were so many. It's hard to say, “If I could do it differently, I would do it this other way,” because who knows? If I had done things differently, maybe it wouldn't have turned out the way I thought it would. One of the biggest struggles for me was asking for money. It was a huge challenge related to the membership drive. I was asking folks to support me on a regular basis to write for a living. I was like, “Who am I? What kind of a dork says, ‘Give me money so I can blog for a living.'” Aaron: Nobody pays for things online anymore. Nobody wants to pay for writing. Shawn: Exactly. That was a huge challenge. It has continued to be a challenge for years. I have been doing this for almost six years now, full time. When I came out with my first book, it's called Delight is in the Details, and it was an eBook package thing. I did some interviews. I charged $29 for my book, and I felt like this huge hypocrite. It was this feeling of, “This is information. Information should be free on the internet. Why would anyone ever buy this?” I felt like there was no value in this thing that people would pay for. I was like, “I have to do it. I'm going to charge for it.” Aaron: Sorry to jump in, but at the time, did you really feel like $30 was a lot of money? Shawn: Oh my gosh. I woke up feeling sick to my stomach the day I was going to launch it. I was like, “I can't believe how much I'm asking for this.” Aaron: What did you think was going to happen? Shawn: I thought that people would buy it because they trusted me, and then they would read it and come and burn my house down because I had ripped them off so bad. I charged so much money for something. Aaron: It was your first time launching a product, right? Shawn: It was. It was my first product launch ever. It ended up bringing in like $5,000 in that first 48 hour launch window. It made $5,000 that first couple of days. In hindsight, it was this huge inflection point for me. I think I spent about 100 hours building the thing, made $5,000 from it in the first week, and I thought, “Woah, that was a great return on my time investment! Now I have this product that I can continue to sell.” Since then, in the last four or five years that I've sold it, I want to say that it's sold $50,000 over the years. That's awesome. There's something great about creating a product, and it changed a lot. Producing and selling a book changed my relationship with my audience. Now I'm creating products for them to buy. That initial hurdle was huge. $29 was so much money. I think that was probably the biggest struggle, of being able to properly identify how much value I'm providing people and to price it correctly. That's just hard. I think that's why you should start selling stuff as early as possible, because you have to learn. There isn't a formula for how much value you're providing and how much you should charge for it. You can't just plug your stuff into a worksheet and get a number back. You have to feel out the market, your market, your audience, your skill level. How much polish are you doing? How much depth of information are you providing? Whatever skill, service, or product it is you're providing, you have to learn how to make money and price your stuff! It's hard to do it when you're starting. The biggest challenging for me at first was becoming comfortable asking for money and learning to accurately price my products. Aaron: The other thing is that once you launched that book and got familiar with all that stuff, that was a stepping stone to your future products, your future books and courses, and everything else that you're doing. I'm sure, at that point, you felt like, “Okay. I've done this once before already. Now it's like riding a bike. I just need to get back on and keep peddling, keep going.” Shawn: Yeah, absolutely. It really was a huge stepping stone. One thing I loved about creating and launching a product was that there was a start and an end date to it. This thing has to ship. I worked on it, and I was done. I put it out there. Boom, now it's there. I'm done. It's out in the world. Obviously, you iterate on it. A year later, I added some new interviews. I added some new chapters. I created some videos. I remastered all of the audio for the audio book. Product Launch Hiccups Shawn: Super random story related to this. It was the relaunch of Delight is in the Details, a year after it had come out, and I put it out there. People are buying it during that relaunch period. I get an email from someone going, “I was just listening to the audio book, and the last chapter sounds like it's not edited correctly. Something is weird about the last chapter. You should check it out.” I recorded the audio book and edited it by myself. I go and I open up the audio book for the last chapter and I'm listening to it, and it is the original take that I did of the book. The way I did the audio book, I'm reading it into my microphone in GarageBand. If I goofed up in the middle of a paragraph, I would just take a pause, say, “Okay, again,” and then I would start talking again. That was my marker. The last chapter of the book was that track, the whole thing. The audio track should have been 10 or 12 minutes for that chapter, and it was 30 minutes because of all my edits, retakes, and pauses. The whole thing. What's worse is, it was there from the very beginning. For a year, I had been selling that thing. I was mortified. For a year, I had been selling my book with the last chapter all messed up, and I was mortified. Aaron: Nobody said anything?? Shawn: They didn't. Either no one listened to it, or when they listened to it, they just assumed… I don't even know. I was so mortified. There you go. What worse thing can happen? Earlier, I had been so concerned about selling something that people weren't going to consider valuable. Here's this huge, huge mistake. What a goof! Aaron: I need to remind everyone that this audiobook is called Delight is in the Details. Shawn: The irony, right? That was one of the selling points of the book, too. I was like, “If you buy this book, it's a case study in sweating the details itself. You'll see all the areas where I've sweated the details in this product.” Whatever. Oh man. I was mortified. Aaron: Thankfully, no one came and burned down your house, and it was over a year before anyone even said anything. A lot of us are so curious about people who do such good work, so when a mistake does happen, it's almost humanizing. It's like, “Now I can relate to this person, because they're not 100% on top of everything all the time, either, like I struggle with. I make a lot of mistakes, so it's kind of nice when you see a really awesome musician on stage mess up a part and then jump back into it. You're like, “Oh, they are humans, too.” That's really cool. Nobody burned your house down, thankfully. Shawn: That's why it's so helpful to ship early. You get stuff out the door and you start learning. I love it. Aaron: I tell people this a lot, too, when it comes to podcasts. If you're thinking about making a podcast, there are so many things you can tweak, improve, or work on forever, but it's so much better to say, “What's the minimum I have to do? I want to try and do a good job, but let's do this, ship it, and iterate and improve on it every single week.” If you don't ship something, you'll just pick at it and tweak it endlessly. Before you know it, it's been a year and a half, and you've got three or five episodes you recorded 18 months ago that you're still working on. In the meantime, nothing has happened. Start Moving Shawn: As well, we have this picture of what we want something to look like and what we want it to be, but we have zero experience. I like the analogy of those lifesize mazes. Especially around Halloween and Thanksgiving, there are those corn mazes. They're these giant things. Imagine someone standing at the entrance of this life size maze, staring at the entrance to it, and in their mind, trying to figure out how to get to the end so they can get straight to the end the fastest way possible without making any mistakes along the way. Impossible! Not going to happen. You have to go in the maze and go left to realize that you should have gone right. Then turn around. You have to go through the thing to make it through. I like the phrase, “Action brings clarity.” Action brings clarity. You're waiting for clarity before taking action, and it's not going to happen—you have to start moving. You just have to get going and you adjust course as you go. You start to realize what you should major on and what you shouldn't. Aaron: That's an incredible analogy. I'm totally going to use that in the future now. It's perfect. You sit there and you imagine yourself being at the end of the maze. That's where you see a bunch of other people. Your friends have gone through the maze and they're at the end, so you're like, “I have to get to the end fast. I can't make any mistakes. I can't take a wrong turn, because that's where all my friends are, and that's where I want to be.” You do have to go through it. That's really incredible. Creating a Customer Avatar Aaron: Shawn, you sent out an email and you were talking about this. I want you to explain how you think about customer avatars, and then if you did something like that for yourself when you were just starting, or if this is something that evolved over time. Customer avatar and content strategy, go! Shawn: This is great. When I first started as a writer, I was doing ShawnBlanc.net. My entire job was publishing articles and links on my website. I didn't have a customer avatar or a customer profile, what I had was an ideal reader. I think, in terms of podcasting, it's very similar. Who's your ideal listener? For me, I actually had a person who was my ideal reader, who's name was Shawn Spurdee. He was a really good friend of mine. He and I had become friends through the blogging Twitter-sphere back in the day. When I wrote articles or links, I had him in mind. I thought, “Is this something he would find interesting? Is there a story in here that he's going to want to read? Is this a link to something he would like?” You had that ideal reader. John Gruber wrote about this for his site, Daring Fireball. He talked about his ideal reader, and he called it “a second version of himself.” He goes, “This person is interested in all the same things I'm interested in, and he cares about what I care about. All the design decisions I make on the site, all the articles I choose to link to, the stories I choose to tell, all of that stuff is with this ideal reader/listener in mind.” It was instrumental for me to have an “ideal reader” for all of the work I was doing. You know who you're trying to target. I'm still the writer for sure, but we've switched a lot more of our focus onto direct sales, building a customer base, and selling products to our audience. I still don't have that ideal reader. Who am I writing this for? Who is this product being created for? It has gone beyond just an individual person that I know. We did a customer profiling thing. I have a guy who works for me full time, and his name is Isaac. We took a couple of big, giant sticky pad things, two feet by three feet, they're huge, these giant sticky notes. Aaron: Where do you get those? Can you get those on Amazon? Shawn: You can get a lawnmower on Amazon, so I'm sure you can get sticky notes. We got ours at Office Max, an Office Depot kind of thing. It's weird. You drive to this store, and you can walk in, and they sell products on their shelves. You have to pick it up with your hand and drive it home yourself. Aaron: It seems like a waste of time. Shawn: For this customer profiling session or whatever, basically, we had these four quadrants. What do they think? What do they feel? What do they want? What do they say? Something like that. You're trying to get this picture of this person. Who is this person? What are the things that they say? Like, “I love my family. I like to watch Netflix.” Whatever. Aaron: “I want to learn how to make a podcast.” Shawn: Exactly. It's not just business, it's just life. What are the kind of phrases they might say? If you ask them what they care about, what things would they list? What are their pain points that they're feeling in life? For us, creating this customer avatar, we named him Brian. We found a random picture of somebody and stuck it up there to begin to humanize the person. Your customer avatar is a real person that exists out there. We talked about, “Here's Brian,” and we came up with this stuff. Brian has a job that he kind of likes, but he's got these other creative ideas that he really wants to pursue. Maybe he wants to take it full time. Maybe not. That's not really the most important thing for him. The most important thing for him is getting his best creative work out there and being able to do it and feel like he's making progress on the areas of life that matter to him. He's also a dad and a husband, and he cares about his family quite a bit. He cares about his kids. He still wants to be available for them. When he comes home from work, he's really tired, so the evenings don't feel like a good time to do his creative work, but he's not a morning person either, so he doesn't know when he's going to get the time. These are some of the scenarios, the stories, that begin to emerge as you begin to write stuff about this person. What are the pain points that they feel? When they look around, what do they see? What kind of car does Brian drive? Does he like minivans? Does he have a minivan? How many kids does he actually have? You really kind of start to come up with this stuff, and there's a lot you can do to get to a higher level of doing these customer profiles. You can actually do interviews with your customer base. Aaron: I do this! I try to meet people and talk to them, especially when it comes to podcasting. When you interview your customers, you can actually begin to get a real life picture of your real life audience. Creating an Empathy Map Shawn: There's this thing that we did, an empathy map, and you take the empathy map to create your customer profile. We ran this survey to our email list, and we ran a separate one to our customer list. It was, “When it comes to focus, what's your single greatest challenge?” It was just this open-ended question where people could write stuff down. Some people say, “Time.” Or, “I can't focus. I'm distracted.” Then you get some people who go, “I'm trying to build my photography portfolio website on the side because I love photography and I'm trying to grow it. I'm working this other job, and when I come home in the evenings, family is first. I spend time with family, so by the time the kids are in bed, I've only got about an hour left in the day. I'm so tired, and I don't want to spend time trying to work on my photography website, so I don't know where to get started.” The person who gives an in depth answer to the challenge like that, vs. someone who just says “time”, they're really in touch with their pain point. There's a book called Ask by Ryan Leveque, and you can find it on Amazon. He teases out, “You ask these questions, and you separate the people with the longest answers. You put their answers up at the top.” You cut the list at 20%. The bottom 80%, forget about those people, and look at the top 20%, these “hyper-responders.” What are their challenges? What are their pain points? Aaron, you could do this. You could say, “When it comes to building a podcast, what is your single greatest challenge?” You'll probably have someone who says, “Building my list.” Or, “Building my audience.” Or, “Technical stuff.” But then you might have someone who really gives this heartfelt, in-depth answer. If someone gives you a heartfelt, in-depth answer, they're hungry for a solution. That person is going to pay for a solution. That person is going to digest this, and when you give them something, they're going to check it out. Look for these hyper-responders and cater your response to them. That's what we did. That's how we figured out that our biggest pain points for people who go through the Focus Course are one of four primary buckets, so to speak. It's time management, getting traction on their business or side projects, finding clarity on what's important to them and what they should be doing about it, and a lot of people also feel overwhelmed by all that's already happening in life. Or, they look at the thing that they're trying to make progress on, and they feel overwhelmed. They don't even know where to start. Really, all of these things feed off of each other. When one is in a rough spot, the others start to be in a rough spot as well. We go, “Okay, these are the main challenges we're going to address as part of the Focus Course, in all of our writing. This is it.” The people that fit within these four buckets are the ones who are willing to pay for a solution. Use Your Audience's Language Shawn: Read the actual responses, the answers, and take the language that people are saying and use it in your articles. Answer their actual questions in podcast episodes. You use it in your marketing language. The landing page for your product, or your podcast, or your sign up, or whatever—use the actual language of your hyper-responder customers. Now, not only are you listening to them and you know who that ideal customer is, but you're also even speaking their language. A) it's going to be cool because hopefully you'll do more sales, but B) you'll actually get to connect with the people you want to connect with. That's the whole point. That's why we're here. That's one of the huge benefits of having these customer profiles. It can help you stay focused on who you're trying to talk to and what it is you're trying to talk about, to help them. Aaron: That's mindblowing. That's fantastic. At the core, I kind of know this stuff, but hearing you explain it made it even more clear to me. I love that. I want to take it in this direction. How to Grow Your Audience & Create Deeper Connections Aaron: One of the most common questions I get about podcasting is about growing an audience. It's always, “How do I get more attention? How do I get more listeners? How do I grow an audience?” I love what you said right here. Use the language of your customer avatar in your content to create a deep connection with them. That's where listeners come from. So many people think that they'll magically get 100,000 people to listen to their podcast, and they won't have any idea of who these people are. They're nameless, faceless avatars on the internet. No! Especially in the beginning, you start small. You develop relationships with people who care passionately about the thing that you're talking about. By investing in them, getting to know them, and asking them questions—regardless of whether you're doing some kind of business thing or not—by just talking to them and getting to know their language, that's how you're going to resonate with them and even more people. What methods have you found effective for growing an audience and developing deeper relationships? Shawn: I think that's a great question. Everyone wants to know the answer to this. For me, there are three primary keys to growing an audience: Consistency Honesty and transparency Relationships. 1. Consistency Shawn: Consistency is core. This is a phrase in the seanwes Community, and it's a phrase I like to use, and that's this: show up every day. That's consistency. We're just people of habit. The internet is a thing of habit, so you have to have that consistency where you're in people's regular cycles. Sean McCabe talks about this a lot. You want to be in people's weekly cycle at a minimum. Show up on a regular basis. Also, that's how people know you're going to be there. There's something about that consistency. One of the ways you develop an audience where people are tracking with you and paying attention when you're showing up consistently. When you show up consistently, not only do you earn people's trust, but you create an anticipation of future value. You want to have that. That's huge. People are like, “I want to know what's next. I want to follow this story and be here.” Consistency is huge. 2. Honesty & Transparency Shawn: This comes out in a lot of ways. In some ways, you want to have the transparency like Nathan Barry talks about, to “teach what you know.” Share what you know. Also, there's a human element, passion and persona, who you are as an individual. Humanizing yourself is so helpful. We don't want to connect with brands, we want to connect with people. As indie entrepreneurs or indie creative folks, when you are running your own thing, you are a brand but you're also a person. You've got to keep the person aspect of it, the human aspect of it, you have to keep it there. Allow your mistakes to show through. Allow your passions to show through. For me, at ShawnBlanc.net, I cut my teeth and grew my audience originally by writing about Apple stuff. I wrote tons of product reviews. It was super nerdy, gadgety stuff. I would also write about coffee, camera gear, books I was reading, music, and things like that. Aaron: Stuff you cared about. Shawn: Exactly. Other interests that were related to Apple gear because it was my site, and I can write about whatever I want. That humanized the work that I was doing. So many people came to my site because of the Apple stuff but they stayed because of the coffee stuff. Your focus, your niche, is going to draw your audience, but your ancillary interests will keep people interested. You're a real person with real interests who is not just this robot spinning off the same thing all the time. 3. Relationships Shawn: This is huge. I stink at it, but I'm trying to reply to emails. When people email me, replying back to them. Also, here's a prime example, having me on your show, Aaron. The practicality of it is that when this show goes live, I'm going to tweet about it. I'm going to link to it. I'm going to point the people that track with me over to your stuff. That's a way for you to grow your audience, but it's also a way for me to grow my audience. Your listeners, a lot of people, don't know who I am. Now, hopefully, some of them will come check me out and sign up for our stuff. There's a really cool dynamic here of introducing your group to someone else. Hopefully, that person will also introduce their audience to who you are. Doing guest-based podcasts is an awesome way to grow your audience. I did some back in the day, when I was first starting my site. I did interviews, blog interviews. The whole thing was conducted over email, and it was just this back and forth email. I did one with Daniel Jalkut, who used to work at Apple and then started Red Sweater. He has the best blogging app on the planet for Mac, MarsEdit. It's a super great app. I emailed him and did an interview with him. I did an interview with John Grubar. I did an interview with Brett Simmons, all these people who are super famous Apple people. I'm going back and forth with these guys and posting their interviews. They link to me on my site, and I get this influx of new readers. Or you find software that's awesome. I would do super in-depth reviews about this stuff, and then people would link to those reviews. Honoring other people, connecting with other people, and doing stuff that's worth talking about. Then the word will spread. That consistency, being transparent and honest about who you are, having that passion and that human dynamic to the work that you do, and then just trying to connect with other people. Do things that people are going to want to talk about. Another example is the summit that we're doing, the Focus Summit. I'm punching way above my weight class here with some of these folks, and it's a chance to hopefully get some of their audience to discover the work that we're doing and visa versa. I hope that people who sign up for this summit will get introduced to some new people and that they'll find some incredible resources. It's just fun. We're all just folks trying to do our best work, right? Aaron: Absolutely. I love that. That's one of the best answers for building an audience that I've ever heard. The Importance of Investing One-on-One Time in Your Listeners Aaron: The thing that I'm working on, and I just want to share this, is investing more time in my listeners. It's hard sometimes, because you can spend all the time in the world talking to people on the internet, as I'm sure you know, Shawn. I'm sure people are constantly emailing you, asking for your thoughts, your advice, and your feedback on stuff, and you try to stay really focused. Something I've wanted to do is spend a little bit of time every day, like on Twitter, reaching out and telling people that I appreciate what they do. Or, if somebody emails me, having a conversation. In depth, giving them 15 or 20 minutes of focus time to reply, and even asking them questions. Someone says, “Hey, thanks for doing your show. I really appreciate this thing.” I'll reply and say, “Thank you so much. How is your podcasting journey going? What are you working on right now? What do you want to get better at?” Some great conversations have come out of that. I'm trying to invest a little bit more in my listeners. I'm at the point now where I've started inviting some of them on the show. “Hey, you sound like you'd be a cool person to talk about podcasting with. Would you like to come on the show?” It just spreads. It's the building of community that will eventually attract people to you. When I started, I had 30 or 40 friends, maybe a couple hundred followers. Every new person that finds my show and gets to know me as a person, who respects the work I do, they might have 200 people that follow them, and they share my show with those people. It just spreads out from there. It becomes this big net. You can eventually reach people that are far outside of your social circle just by connecting with the people you can connect with right now. Let them do the work of sharing your stuff with their people, too. Shawn: Yeah, exactly. Focus Summit & Products Aaron: That's fantastic. We're getting close to the end of the episode. We need to wrap it up. I told everyone in the beginning that I would get you to talk about this Focus Summit that you've got coming up. What's the deal with this? Tell us a little bit about that. Shawn: The summit! I'm so excited about this. We have Jocelyn Glei, who just wrote this book called Unsubscribe, which is a fantastic book. It's about email distractions and stuff like that. We've got Josh Kaufman, who wrote The Personal MBA. Anyone who is trying to do anything related to business, you need to read The Personal MBA. It is a bargain. Aaron: So much good advice. Shawn: It's like a $35 book, and that book is so packed. Excellent, excellent stuff. Sean McCabe is on it, and Sean and I talk about how quantity leads to quality, which ties right into this stuff on showing up every day. The summit is going to be really, really cool. When this podcast drops, the summit is going to be kicking off. Here's the link: The Creative Focus Summit. After the summit wraps up, we're opening up registration for our Focus Course. That has become my flagship product. It changed everything for me, in terms of what I was focusing on. I came up with this course as the next product in a series. I had done Delight is in the Details, and I wanted to write a book about diligence and productivity. I wrote the book, and then, long story short, I realized that it needed to be a course. I felt like the way that I wanted to get these ideas across wasn't a book that someone would read, highlight, think was cool, and then puts back on their shelf and returns to life as usual. I want something that's really going to effect change. I knew that a book would probably go farther, broader, and reach a total number of more people. I would rather fewer people go through the course but have a higher number of them really get real impact. For me, the book ended up turning into the Focus Course, and we've had close to 1,300 people go through it. It's basically productivity training for creative people and entrepreneurs and leaders. It's way, way more than that. It's not tips and tricks. It's what I call “meaningful productivity.” It actually gets to the core, the heart, and the foundation. What do you really care about? How are you really spending your time? This is not a “Five Life Hacks That Will Help Me Go Through My Email Inbox Better.” It's hard questions that will make me challenge my assumptions about my family, my work, my down time, and my rest time. Anyone that thinks that taking a nap will improve productivity, the Focus Course is for you. Aaron: That's me! You have to have a healthy life to do your best work. Shawn: You can't sprint this. This is a marathon, so you have to have that breathing room. The Focus Course opens up after the summit is over, and I'm super excited about it. We're going to have a whole group of people cruising through in January. We're doing a winter class for it. We've got some forums, so everyone can share their progress. It's going to be a blast. I'm really excited about it. The summit is free, and the Focus Course itself is going to be something we charge for, obviously. Aaron: You have to charge for things, or else people won't take it seriously. Shawn: It's so true. Aaron: You have to invest. Shawn: That's something else. We didn't get into that earlier when we were talking about the pricing stuff, but that's another reason to charge for your work. Someone is actually going to have skin in the game. They're going to find value for it. Aaron: They have to ask themselves, “Okay. Do I think this is going to help me enough in my life journey to actually put money towards it?” If they answer that question for themselves and then make the choice to give you that money, they are going to say, “I told myself, I believe, that this is worth my time, so I need to invest my time in it.” Shawn: Exactly. Very true. Aaron: Where should people go if they want to follow you, connect with you, or ask you questions? Shawn: Twitter is a great spot. I'm @shawnblanc on Twitter.

Shawn Blanc is a writer, small-business owner, productivity coach, and creative entrepreneur living in Kansas City with his wife and their three sons. Shawn has been teaching and learning about creativity, diligence, and focus for over a decade, and his online courses have helped thousands of people do their best creative work while learning to thrive in the midst of life’s tensions. A while back, Shawn sent an email that caught my attention. He wrote about the importance of creating a customer avatar and developing a content strategy to connect with them and help them achieve their goals. I liked the email so much that I emailed him back and asked him to come on my show to talk about his journey to making a living through writing online and what he’s learned about growing an audience. Shawn also shares my passion for productivity and deep focus; so much so that he’s gathered 12 incredibly smart people for a free 5 day online summit about the power of focused life. In this episode, Shawn shares how he was able to make a full-time living by writing online, and we discuss how you can grow your audience by creating a customer avatar (your ideal listener) and creating content that addresses their needs and desires.Highlights, Takeaways & Quick Wins:Interview your customers to get a real life picture of your audience.Start selling products as early as possible.Your customer avatar is a real person that exists out there.Use the language of your customer avatar in your content to create a deep connection with them.Be in people’s weekly cycle at a minimum.Your niche is going to draw your audience but your ancillary interests will keep people interested.Show up consistently to earn people’s trust and create an anticipation of future value.Do guest-based podcasts to grow your audience.Reach people that are far outside of your social circle by connecting with the people you can connect with right now.Show NotesAaron: Shawn Blanc is a writer/small business owner/productivity coach/creative entrepreneur living in Kansas City with his wife and their three sons, and Shawn is a member of our Community. He’s been teaching and learning about creativity, diligence, and focus for over a decade now.His online courses have helped thousands of people do their best creative work while learning to thrive in the midst of life’s tensions. A while back, Shawn sent an email that caught my attention. He was writing about the importance of creating a customer avatar, that’s knowing who you’re creating for and what you want to help them achieve, what kind of person you want to help them become.I thought it was really interesting, so I sent him an email right back. I said, “Shawn, do you want to come on the show to talk about this? I think podcasters need to hear about this idea of customer avatars and also content strategy.” Shawn agreed, and he also shares my passion for productivity and focus, so much so that he has gathered 12 incredibly smart people for a five day online summit about the power of a focused life, and that’s going to be starting, I believe, as this episode comes out.If you’re listening to this in your podcast player, it’s starting today, I think. I’ll give you that link later. In this episode, I want to talk with Shawn about why you as a podcaster need to create a customer avatar, know who you’re creating for, develop a content strategy, and then also the benefits of deep focus, what we call deep work.A few small changes in your daily habits can lead to big improvements in your productivity and creative output.Shawn, that’s one of the longer intros I’ve ever done. Thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate you being here.Shawn: Thanks, Aaron. I love it. Super excited to be here.Shawn BlancAaron: I think of you, Shawn, as a writer and as the creator of an online course called The Focus Course, which is great. You’re so much more than that. Do you want to give everyone a quick introduction, how you got here and where you came from? I would also like to hear what your biggest struggles have been over the years of getting to the point where you’re at right now.Shawn: Absolutely. I’m in Kansas City. Originally, I’m from Denver. I’m a Colorado guy at heart. I’ve been married for going on 12 years, and my wife and I have three boys. It’s insane at our house. We used to call the first two the Twin Tornadoes, but we just had our third eight or nine weeks ago.Aaron: Congrats!Shawn: It’s awesome. Love it. I love being a dad. I used to be a drummer. I know that we have a lot of musicians around here. Sean McCabe plays a little bit of music, I think.Aaron: Yeah, he used to write music, just like he used to do lettering. I still play drums.Shawn: I used to play drums for a large ministry here in Kansas City, and I ended up transitioning out of that. It’s a long story, but I ended up becoming a marketing and creative director. I ran a team, an in-house design team, with about 17 people—web developers, print designers, web designers, writers, editors, project managers, whatever. We did a bunch of stuff. One of our huge things was that we would host a conference at the end of the year that I was running.25,000 people would come out for that. I did that for several years, and then my wife and I got pregnant with our first kid. I was like, “I don’t want to do this work as a dad.” Part of it was just super demanding. Anyone who has experienced working in the corporate design scene knows that it’s a very demanding spot.Everything is urgent all the time. I was doing like 80 hours a week, and I really enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun, but I was like, “There’s no way. I don’t want to do 80 hours a week as a dad.” I had that, plus I had this little blog on the side, where I had been writing about marketing stuff. I felt like, “This would be a good opportunity to quit what I’m doing and take a leap, see if I can take my website full time. Could I blog for a living?” That was the thought.I was doing about $1,000 a month in advertising and some affiliate stuff. I figured that if I could give it 40 hours a week, I could get the revenue up to a spot where it could pay the bills. I figured that it could grow from there.Aaron: How old were you at this point?Shawn: I was just about 30, not quite 30, like 29, when I made that jump. I asked everyone that was reading on the site. I said, “I’m quitting. I’m going to do this thing full time.” I asked people if they would be interested in supporting me to write the site for a living. I was like, “If you like what I’m doing, I’ll write more if you want to give me some money to do it.” I did this little membership drive. I was going to charge $3 a month for membership. I was doing a daily podcast as a perk of membership.Aaron: You aren’t still doing that, are you?Shawn: It’s on hiatus at the moment. We’ll see. I’m going to be diving back into the podcast scene starting early 2017. I miss podcasting. It’s fun.Aaron: You decided to ask people to support you, give you $3 a month, to go full time with your writing?Shawn: Basically. I figured if I could get 500 people, at $3 a month that’s $1,500, plus the other $1,000 I was doing, and that would be $2,500 a month. That’s not a ton, but I figured that would be enough to cover the bare necessities. I figured that things could grow from there. People signed up, and I hit the 500 person mark by the end of the month before I had even quit.I started my new job, April 4th 2011, basically fully funded as an independent blogger.Aaron: I bet that was exciting.Shawn: It was really exciting. I felt like I got this permission slip from my audience to go for it. As a creative person, sometimes you need that. Sometimes you want to be like, “Do you guys care? I’m here. I’m making this stuff.” A lot of the work we do as creative entrepreneurs is for your audience. I know that we’re going to talk about this in a little bit, the customer avatar profile. It’s for these people that you really want to serve. When you hear back from them and they go, “Hey, we like what you’re doing. Let’s keep the relationship going,” it’s like having a DTR with your audience.There’s something cool about that kind of permission slip moment. It’s like when you sell your first product, or whatever it is. People are interested. You get your first positive review on iTunes or whatever. Obviously, there’s going to be the junk that comes later, but whatever.Aaron: Some of the haters that come later?Shawn: You forget about that stuff and you keep moving on.Aaron: That’s awesome.Asking for MoneyAaron: When you think back, do you remember any big struggles or hurdles that you really had to overcome about that period in your life?Shawn: There were so many. It’s hard to say, “If I could do it differently, I would do it this other way,” because who knows? If I had done things differently, maybe it wouldn’t have turned out the way I thought it would. One of the biggest struggles for me was asking for money. It was a huge challenge related to the membership drive. I was asking folks to support me on a regular basis to write for a living. I was like, “Who am I? What kind of a dork says, ‘Give me money so I can blog for a living.'”Aaron: Nobody pays for things online anymore. Nobody wants to pay for writing.Shawn: Exactly. That was a huge challenge. It has continued to be a challenge for years. I have been doing this for almost six years now, full time. When I came out with my first book, it’s called Delight is in the Details, and it was an eBook package thing. I did some interviews.I charged $29 for my book, and I felt like this huge hypocrite.It was this feeling of, “This is information. Information should be free on the internet. Why would anyone ever buy this?” I felt like there was no value in this thing that people would pay for. I was like, “I have to do it. I’m going to charge for it.”Aaron: Sorry to jump in, but at the time, did you really feel like $30 was a lot of money?Shawn: Oh my gosh. I woke up feeling sick to my stomach the day I was going to launch it. I was like, “I can’t believe how much I’m asking for this.”Aaron: What did you think was going to happen?Shawn: I thought that people would buy it because they trusted me, and then they would read it and come and burn my house down because I had ripped them off so bad. I charged so much money for something.Aaron: It was your first time launching a product, right?Shawn: It was. It was my first product launch ever. It ended up bringing in like $5,000 in that first 48 hour launch window. It made $5,000 that first couple of days. In hindsight, it was this huge inflection point for me. I think I spent about 100 hours building the thing, made $5,000 from it in the first week, and I thought, “Woah, that was a great return on my time investment! Now I have this product that I can continue to sell.”Since then, in the last four or five years that I’ve sold it, I want to say that it’s sold $50,000 over the years. That’s awesome. There’s something great about creating a product, and it changed a lot.Producing and selling a book changed my relationship with my audience.Now I’m creating products for them to buy.That initial hurdle was huge. $29 was so much money. I think that was probably the biggest struggle, of being able to properly identify how much value I’m providing people and to price it correctly. That’s just hard. I think that’s why you should start selling stuff as early as possible, because you have to learn. There isn’t a formula for how much value you’re providing and how much you should charge for it.You can’t just plug your stuff into a worksheet and get a number back. You have to feel out the market, your market, your audience, your skill level. How much polish are you doing? How much depth of information are you providing? Whatever skill, service, or product it is you’re providing, you have to learn how to make money and price your stuff! It’s hard to do it when you’re starting.The biggest challenging for me at first was becoming comfortable asking for money and learning to accurately price my products.Aaron: The other thing is that once you launched that book and got familiar with all that stuff, that was a stepping stone to your future products, your future books and courses, and everything else that you’re doing. I’m sure, at that point, you felt like, “Okay. I’ve done this once before already. Now it’s like riding a bike. I just need to get back on and keep peddling, keep going.”Shawn: Yeah, absolutely. It really was a huge stepping stone. One thing I loved about creating and launching a product was that there was a start and an end date to it. This thing has to ship. I worked on it, and I was done. I put it out there. Boom, now it’s there. I’m done. It’s out in the world. Obviously, you iterate on it. A year later, I added some new interviews. I added some new chapters. I created some videos. I remastered all of the audio for the audio book.Product Launch HiccupsShawn: Super random story related to this. It was the relaunch of Delight is in the Details, a year after it had come out, and I put it out there. People are buying it during that relaunch period. I get an email from someone going, “I was just listening to the audio book, and the last chapter sounds like it’s not edited correctly. Something is weird about the last chapter. You should check it out.”I recorded the audio book and edited it by myself. I go and I open up the audio book for the last chapter and I’m listening to it, and it is the original take that I did of the book. The way I did the audio book, I’m reading it into my microphone in GarageBand. If I goofed up in the middle of a paragraph, I would just take a pause, say, “Okay, again,” and then I would start talking again. That was my marker. The last chapter of the book was that track, the whole thing.The audio track should have been 10 or 12 minutes for that chapter, and it was 30 minutes because of all my edits, retakes, and pauses. The whole thing. What’s worse is, it was there from the very beginning. For a year, I had been selling that thing. I was mortified. For a year, I had been selling my book with the last chapter all messed up, and I was mortified.Aaron: Nobody said anything??Shawn: They didn’t. Either no one listened to it, or when they listened to it, they just assumed… I don’t even know. I was so mortified. There you go. What worse thing can happen? Earlier, I had been so concerned about selling something that people weren’t going to consider valuable. Here’s this huge, huge mistake. What a goof!Aaron: I need to remind everyone that this audiobook is called Delight is in the Details.Shawn: The irony, right? That was one of the selling points of the book, too. I was like, “If you buy this book, it’s a case study in sweating the details itself. You’ll see all the areas where I’ve sweated the details in this product.” Whatever. Oh man. I was mortified.Aaron: Thankfully, no one came and burned down your house, and it was over a year before anyone even said anything. A lot of us are so curious about people who do such good work, so when a mistake does happen, it’s almost humanizing. It’s like, “Now I can relate to this person, because they’re not 100% on top of everything all the time, either, like I struggle with. I make a lot of mistakes, so it’s kind of nice when you see a really awesome musician on stage mess up a part and then jump back into it. You’re like, “Oh, they are humans, too.” That’s really cool. Nobody burned your house down, thankfully.Shawn: That’s why it’s so helpful to ship early. You get stuff out the door and you start learning. I love it.Aaron: I tell people this a lot, too, when it comes to podcasts. If you’re thinking about making a podcast, there are so many things you can tweak, improve, or work on forever, but it’s so much better to say, “What’s the minimum I have to do? I want to try and do a good job, but let’s do this, ship it, and iterate and improve on it every single week.”If you don’t ship something, you'll just pick at it and tweak it endlessly.Before you know it, it’s been a year and a half, and you’ve got three or five episodes you recorded 18 months ago that you’re still working on. In the meantime, nothing has happened.Start MovingShawn: As well, we have this picture of what we want something to look like and what we want it to be, but we have zero experience. I like the analogy of those lifesize mazes. Especially around Halloween and Thanksgiving, there are those corn mazes. They’re these giant things. Imagine someone standing at the entrance of this life size maze, staring at the entrance to it, and in their mind, trying to figure out how to get to the end so they can get straight to the end the fastest way possible without making any mistakes along the way.Impossible! Not going to happen. You have to go in the maze and go left to realize that you should have gone right. Then turn around. You have to go through the thing to make it through. I like the phrase, “Action brings clarity.”Action brings clarity.You’re waiting for clarity before taking action, and it’s not going to happen—you have to start moving.You just have to get going and you adjust course as you go. You start to realize what you should major on and what you shouldn’t.Aaron: That’s an incredible analogy. I’m totally going to use that in the future now. It’s perfect. You sit there and you imagine yourself being at the end of the maze. That’s where you see a bunch of other people. Your friends have gone through the maze and they’re at the end, so you’re like, “I have to get to the end fast. I can’t make any mistakes. I can’t take a wrong turn, because that’s where all my friends are, and that’s where I want to be.” You do have to go through it. That’s really incredible.Creating a Customer AvatarAaron: Shawn, you sent out an email and you were talking about this. I want you to explain how you think about customer avatars, and then if you did something like that for yourself when you were just starting, or if this is something that evolved over time. Customer avatar and content strategy, go!Shawn: This is great. When I first started as a writer, I was doing ShawnBlanc.net. My entire job was publishing articles and links on my website. I didn’t have a customer avatar or a customer profile, what I had was an ideal reader. I think, in terms of podcasting, it’s very similar. Who’s your ideal listener? For me, I actually had a person who was my ideal reader, who’s name was Shawn Spurdee.He was a really good friend of mine. He and I had become friends through the blogging Twitter-sphere back in the day. When I wrote articles or links, I had him in mind. I thought, “Is this something he would find interesting? Is there a story in here that he’s going to want to read? Is this a link to something he would like?” You had that ideal reader. John Gruber wrote about this for his site, Daring Fireball.He talked about his ideal reader, and he called it “a second version of himself.” He goes, “This person is interested in all the same things I’m interested in, and he cares about what I care about. All the design decisions I make on the site, all the articles I choose to link to, the stories I choose to tell, all of that stuff is with this ideal reader/listener in mind.”It was instrumental for me to have an “ideal reader” for all of the work I was doing.You know who you’re trying to target. I’m still the writer for sure, but we’ve switched a lot more of our focus onto direct sales, building a customer base, and selling products to our audience. I still don’t have that ideal reader. Who am I writing this for? Who is this product being created for? It has gone beyond just an individual person that I know. We did a customer profiling thing. I have a guy who works for me full time, and his name is Isaac. We took a couple of big, giant sticky pad things, two feet by three feet, they’re huge, these giant sticky notes.Aaron: Where do you get those? Can you get those on Amazon?Shawn: You can get a lawnmower on Amazon, so I’m sure you can get sticky notes. We got ours at Office Max, an Office Depot kind of thing. It’s weird. You drive to this store, and you can walk in, and they sell products on their shelves. You have to pick it up with your hand and drive it home yourself.Aaron: It seems like a waste of time.Shawn: For this customer profiling session or whatever, basically, we had these four quadrants. What do they think? What do they feel? What do they want? What do they say? Something like that. You’re trying to get this picture of this person. Who is this person? What are the things that they say? Like, “I love my family. I like to watch Netflix.” Whatever.Aaron: “I want to learn how to make a podcast.”Shawn: Exactly. It’s not just business, it’s just life. What are the kind of phrases they might say? If you ask them what they care about, what things would they list? What are their pain points that they’re feeling in life? For us, creating this customer avatar, we named him Brian. We found a random picture of somebody and stuck it up there to begin to humanize the person.Your customer avatar is a real person that exists out there.We talked about, “Here’s Brian,” and we came up with this stuff. Brian has a job that he kind of likes, but he’s got these other creative ideas that he really wants to pursue. Maybe he wants to take it full time. Maybe not. That’s not really the most important thing for him. The most important thing for him is getting his best creative work out there and being able to do it and feel like he’s making progress on the areas of life that matter to him. He’s also a dad and a husband, and he cares about his family quite a bit.He cares about his kids. He still wants to be available for them. When he comes home from work, he’s really tired, so the evenings don’t feel like a good time to do his creative work, but he’s not a morning person either, so he doesn’t know when he’s going to get the time. These are some of the scenarios, the stories, that begin to emerge as you begin to write stuff about this person. What are the pain points that they feel?When they look around, what do they see? What kind of car does Brian drive? Does he like minivans? Does he have a minivan? How many kids does he actually have? You really kind of start to come up with this stuff, and there’s a lot you can do to get to a higher level of doing these customer profiles. You can actually do interviews with your customer base.Aaron: I do this! I try to meet people and talk to them, especially when it comes to podcasting.When you interview your customers, you can actually begin to get a real life picture of your real life audience.Creating an Empathy MapShawn: There’s this thing that we did, an empathy map, and you take the empathy map to create your customer profile. We ran this survey to our email list, and we ran a separate one to our customer list. It was, “When it comes to focus, what’s your single greatest challenge?” It was just this open-ended question where people could write stuff down.Some people say, “Time.” Or, “I can’t focus. I’m distracted.” Then you get some people who go, “I’m trying to build my photography portfolio website on the side because I love photography and I’m trying to grow it. I’m working this other job, and when I come home in the evenings, family is first. I spend time with family, so by the time the kids are in bed, I’ve only got about an hour left in the day. I’m so tired, and I don’t want to spend time trying to work on my photography website, so I don’t know where to get started.”The person who gives an in depth answer to the challenge like that, vs. someone who just says “time”, they’re really in touch with their pain point. There’s a book called Ask by Ryan Leveque, and you can find it on Amazon. He teases out, “You ask these questions, and you separate the people with the longest answers. You put their answers up at the top.”You cut the list at 20%. The bottom 80%, forget about those people, and look at the top 20%, these “hyper-responders.” What are their challenges? What are their pain points? Aaron, you could do this. You could say, “When it comes to building a podcast, what is your single greatest challenge?” You’ll probably have someone who says, “Building my list.” Or, “Building my audience.” Or, “Technical stuff.” But then you might have someone who really gives this heartfelt, in-depth answer.If someone gives you a heartfelt, in-depth answer, they’re hungry for a solution.That person is going to pay for a solution. That person is going to digest this, and when you give them something, they’re going to check it out. Look for these hyper-responders and cater your response to them. That’s what we did. That’s how we figured out that our biggest pain points for people who go through the Focus Course are one of four primary buckets, so to speak. It’s time management, getting traction on their business or side projects, finding clarity on what’s important to them and what they should be doing about it, and a lot of people also feel overwhelmed by all that’s already happening in life.Or, they look at the thing that they’re trying to make progress on, and they feel overwhelmed. They don’t even know where to start. Really, all of these things feed off of each other. When one is in a rough spot, the others start to be in a rough spot as well. We go, “Okay, these are the main challenges we’re going to address as part of the Focus Course, in all of our writing. This is it.” The people that fit within these four buckets are the ones who are willing to pay for a solution.Use Your Audience’s LanguageShawn: Read the actual responses, the answers, and take the language that people are saying and use it in your articles. Answer their actual questions in podcast episodes. You use it in your marketing language. The landing page for your product, or your podcast, or your sign up, or whatever—use the actual language of your hyper-responder customers. Now, not only are you listening to them and you know who that ideal customer is, but you’re also even speaking their language.A) it’s going to be cool because hopefully you’ll do more sales, but B) you’ll actually get to connect with the people you want to connect with. That’s the whole point. That’s why we’re here.That’s one of the huge benefits of having these customer profiles. It can help you stay focused on who you’re trying to talk to and what it is you’re trying to talk about, to help them.Aaron: That’s mindblowing. That’s fantastic. At the core, I kind of know this stuff, but hearing you explain it made it even more clear to me. I love that. I want to take it in this direction.How to Grow Your Audience & Create Deeper ConnectionsAaron: One of the most common questions I get about podcasting is about growing an audience. It’s always, “How do I get more attention? How do I get more listeners? How do I grow an audience?” I love what you said right here.Use the language of your customer avatar in your content to create a deep connection with them.That’s where listeners come from. So many people think that they’ll magically get 100,000 people to listen to their podcast, and they won’t have any idea of who these people are. They’re nameless, faceless avatars on the internet. No! Especially in the beginning, you start small. You develop relationships with people who care passionately about the thing that you’re talking about.By investing in them, getting to know them, and asking them questions—regardless of whether you’re doing some kind of business thing or not—by just talking to them and getting to know their language, that’s how you’re going to resonate with them and even more people. What methods have you found effective for growing an audience and developing deeper relationships?Shawn: I think that’s a great question. Everyone wants to know the answer to this. For me, there are three primary keys to growing an audience:ConsistencyHonesty and transparencyRelationships.1. ConsistencyShawn: Consistency is core. This is a phrase in the seanwes Community, and it’s a phrase I like to use, and that’s this: show up every day. That’s consistency. We’re just people of habit. The internet is a thing of habit, so you have to have that consistency where you’re in people’s regular cycles. Sean McCabe talks about this a lot. You want to be in people’s weekly cycle at a minimum.Show up on a regular basis. Also, that’s how people know you’re going to be there. There’s something about that consistency. One of the ways you develop an audience where people are tracking with you and paying attention when you’re showing up consistently.When you show up consistently, not only do you earn people’s trust, but you create an anticipation of future value.You want to have that. That’s huge. People are like, “I want to know what’s next. I want to follow this story and be here.” Consistency is huge.2. Honesty & TransparencyShawn: This comes out in a lot of ways. In some ways, you want to have the transparency like Nathan Barry talks about, to “teach what you know.” Share what you know. Also, there’s a human element, passion and persona, who you are as an individual. Humanizing yourself is so helpful. We don’t want to connect with brands, we want to connect with people. As indie entrepreneurs or indie creative folks, when you are running your own thing, you are a brand but you’re also a person.You’ve got to keep the person aspect of it, the human aspect of it, you have to keep it there. Allow your mistakes to show through. Allow your passions to show through. For me, at ShawnBlanc.net, I cut my teeth and grew my audience originally by writing about Apple stuff. I wrote tons of product reviews. It was super nerdy, gadgety stuff. I would also write about coffee, camera gear, books I was reading, music, and things like that.Aaron: Stuff you cared about.Shawn: Exactly. Other interests that were related to Apple gear because it was my site, and I can write about whatever I want. That humanized the work that I was doing. So many people came to my site because of the Apple stuff but they stayed because of the coffee stuff.Your focus, your niche, is going to draw your audience, but your ancillary interests will keep people interested.You’re a real person with real interests who is not just this robot spinning off the same thing all the time.3. RelationshipsShawn: This is huge. I stink at it, but I’m trying to reply to emails. When people email me, replying back to them. Also, here’s a prime example, having me on your show, Aaron. The practicality of it is that when this show goes live, I’m going to tweet about it. I’m going to link to it. I’m going to point the people that track with me over to your stuff. That’s a way for you to grow your audience, but it’s also a way for me to grow my audience.Your listeners, a lot of people, don’t know who I am. Now, hopefully, some of them will come check me out and sign up for our stuff. There’s a really cool dynamic here of introducing your group to someone else. Hopefully, that person will also introduce their audience to who you are.Doing guest-based podcasts is an awesome way to grow your audience.I did some back in the day, when I was first starting my site. I did interviews, blog interviews. The whole thing was conducted over email, and it was just this back and forth email. I did one with Daniel Jalkut, who used to work at Apple and then started Red Sweater. He has the best blogging app on the planet for Mac, MarsEdit. It’s a super great app. I emailed him and did an interview with him.I did an interview with John Grubar. I did an interview with Brett Simmons, all these people who are super famous Apple people. I’m going back and forth with these guys and posting their interviews. They link to me on my site, and I get this influx of new readers. Or you find software that’s awesome. I would do super in-depth reviews about this stuff, and then people would link to those reviews. Honoring other people, connecting with other people, and doing stuff that’s worth talking about.Then the word will spread. That consistency, being transparent and honest about who you are, having that passion and that human dynamic to the work that you do, and then just trying to connect with other people. Do things that people are going to want to talk about. Another example is the summit that we’re doing, the Focus Summit. I’m punching way above my weight class here with some of these folks, and it’s a chance to hopefully get some of their audience to discover the work that we’re doing and visa versa.I hope that people who sign up for this summit will get introduced to some new people and that they’ll find some incredible resources. It’s just fun. We’re all just folks trying to do our best work, right?Aaron: Absolutely. I love that. That’s one of the best answers for building an audience that I’ve ever heard.The Importance of Investing One-on-One Time in Your ListenersAaron: The thing that I’m working on, and I just want to share this, is investing more time in my listeners. It’s hard sometimes, because you can spend all the time in the world talking to people on the internet, as I’m sure you know, Shawn. I’m sure people are constantly emailing you, asking for your thoughts, your advice, and your feedback on stuff, and you try to stay really focused. Something I’ve wanted to do is spend a little bit of time every day, like on Twitter, reaching out and telling people that I appreciate what they do.Or, if somebody emails me, having a conversation. In depth, giving them 15 or 20 minutes of focus time to reply, and even asking them questions. Someone says, “Hey, thanks for doing your show. I really appreciate this thing.” I’ll reply and say, “Thank you so much. How is your podcasting journey going? What are you working on right now? What do you want to get better at?” Some great conversations have come out of that.I’m trying to invest a little bit more in my listeners. I’m at the point now where I’ve started inviting some of them on the show. “Hey, you sound like you’d be a cool person to talk about podcasting with. Would you like to come on the show?” It just spreads.It’s the building of community that will eventually attract people to you.When I started, I had 30 or 40 friends, maybe a couple hundred followers. Every new person that finds my show and gets to know me as a person, who respects the work I do, they might have 200 people that follow them, and they share my show with those people. It just spreads out from there. It becomes this big net.You can eventually reach people that are far outside of your social circle just by connecting with the people you can connect with right now.Let them do the work of sharing your stuff with their people, too.Shawn: Yeah, exactly.Focus Summit & ProductsAaron: That’s fantastic. We’re getting close to the end of the episode. We need to wrap it up. I told everyone in the beginning that I would get you to talk about this Focus Summit that you’ve got coming up. What’s the deal with this? Tell us a little bit about that.Shawn: The summit! I’m so excited about this. We have Jocelyn Glei, who just wrote this book called Unsubscribe, which is a fantastic book. It’s about email distractions and stuff like that. We’ve got Josh Kaufman, who wrote The Personal MBA. Anyone who is trying to do anything related to business, you need to read The Personal MBA. It is a bargain.Aaron: So much good advice.Shawn: It’s like a $35 book, and that book is so packed. Excellent, excellent stuff. Sean McCabe is on it, and Sean and I talk about how quantity leads to quality, which ties right into this stuff on showing up every day. The summit is going to be really, really cool. When this podcast drops, the summit is going to be kicking off. Here’s the link: The Creative Focus Summit.After the summit wraps up, we’re opening up registration for our Focus Course. That has become my flagship product. It changed everything for me, in terms of what I was focusing on. I came up with this course as the next product in a series. I had done Delight is in the Details, and I wanted to write a book about diligence and productivity. I wrote the book, and then, long story short, I realized that it needed to be a course.I felt like the way that I wanted to get these ideas across wasn’t a book that someone would read, highlight, think was cool, and then puts back on their shelf and returns to life as usual. I want something that’s really going to effect change. I knew that a book would probably go farther, broader, and reach a total number of more people. I would rather fewer people go through the course but have a higher number of them really get real impact.For me, the book ended up turning into the Focus Course, and we’ve had close to 1,300 people go through it. It’s basically productivity training for creative people and entrepreneurs and leaders. It’s way, way more than that. It’s not tips and tricks. It’s what I call “meaningful productivity.” It actually gets to the core, the heart, and the foundation. What do you really care about? How are you really spending your time?This is not a “Five Life Hacks That Will Help Me Go Through My Email Inbox Better.” It’s hard questions that will make me challenge my assumptions about my family, my work, my down time, and my rest time. Anyone that thinks that taking a nap will improve productivity, the Focus Course is for you.Aaron: That’s me!You have to have a healthy life to do your best work.Shawn: You can’t sprint this. This is a marathon, so you have to have that breathing room. The Focus Course opens up after the summit is over, and I’m super excited about it. We’re going to have a whole group of people cruising through in January. We’re doing a winter class for it. We’ve got some forums, so everyone can share their progress. It’s going to be a blast. I’m really excited about it. The summit is free, and the Focus Course itself is going to be something we charge for, obviously.Aaron: You have to charge for things, or else people won’t take it seriously.Shawn: It’s so true.Aaron: You have to invest.Shawn: That’s something else. We didn’t get into that earlier when we were talking about the pricing stuff, but that’s another reason to charge for your work. Someone is actually going to have skin in the game. They’re going to find value for it.Aaron: They have to ask themselves, “Okay. Do I think this is going to help me enough in my life journey to actually put money towards it?” If they answer that question for themselves and then make the choice to give you that money, they are going to say, “I told myself, I believe, that this is worth my time, so I need to invest my time in it.”Shawn: Exactly. Very true.Aaron: Where should people go if they want to follow you, connect with you, or ask you questions?Shawn: Twitter is a great spot. I’m @shawnblanc on Twitter.

Your email functions like a slot machine. Most of the time you pull the lever and you kind of lose. You get something that's kind of disappointing. Maybe it's an email from a frustrated client or it's a message from your boss asking you to do something you don't really feel like doing. But then every once in a while you get as I did the other day, an email from a long lost childhood friend or an invitation to speak at a conference that's very flattering. So it's kind of this idea that these random rewards are mixed in with all that annoying stuff, and mixed in with all the junk that activates this kind of seeking mechanism in our brain and makes us want to go back and check again and again to see if there are any of those random rewards in our inboxes. You never know what to expect and that's part of the driving force behind that addiction. – Jocelyn GleiJocelyn K. Glei is a writer who's obsessed with work, careers,and creativity. She is the author of 4 books, including Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode we speak with the co-founder of 99u.com Jocelyn Glei about email, productivity, creativity and her new book Unsubscribe.

Jocelyn Glei is the author of the new book Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done and was the founding editor at 99u.com. Bottom line: She is a pro at making creative ideas happen.  On this episode, we talk about her new book and the problem of email overwhelm, including why it's a problem and practical solutions for solving it. (Hint: You can let go of inbox zero! It's really okay!). We also talk about what she's learned about productive creativity with her work at 99u.com and in her own creative practices.  If you suffer from email overwhelm, idea overwhelm, or task overwhelm, this episode is for you! You'll learn how to focus on your work that really matters while coming up with systems to manage the rest. It's time to get some stuff DONE y'all!     Show Notes: Connect with Jocelyn: Website | Instagram | Twitter Jocelyn's Book: Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done Jocelyn's Creative Mornings talk 99u.com BatchedInbox for gmail Inbox Pause Duet App Registration for 100 Rejection Letters is now open!  (exclusive $50 off offer for podcast listeners using discount SAYYES)  Subscribe in itunes Get your Invite to join the RYHSY FB group

Jocelyn Glei is the author of the new book Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done and was the founding editor at 99u.com. Bottom line: She is a pro at making creative ideas happen.  On this episode, we talk about her new book and the problem of email overwhelm, including why it's a problem and practical solutions for solving it. (Hint: You can let go of inbox zero! It's really okay!). We also talk about what she's learned about productive creativity with her work at 99u.com and in her own creative practices.  If you suffer from email overwhelm, idea overwhelm, or task overwhelm, this episode is for you! You'll learn how to focus on your work that really matters while coming up with systems to manage the rest. It's time to get some stuff DONE y'all!     Show Notes: Connect with Jocelyn: Website | Instagram | Twitter Jocelyn's Book: Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done Jocelyn's Creative Mornings talk 99u.com BatchedInbox for gmail Inbox Pause Duet App Registration for 100 Rejection Letters is now open!  (exclusive $50 off offer for podcast listeners using discount SAYYES)  Subscribe in itunes Get your Invite to join the RYHSY FB group

1. Why is email addictive and how to combat the addiction? 2. Hacks to make meaningful work more addictive 3. What is switching cost and why it kills productivity and what to do about it? 4. How to write high quality emails that will get people to take action?

Jocelyn Glei knows how to get the right stuff done. The founding editor and a key member of the team that built the massive 99u community, website and conference and the Behance platform for creative professionals, she’s a brilliant thinker in the realm of focused creation, with a track record to back up her ideas. […] The post Jocelyn Glei: Unsubscribing as an Act of Creation. appeared first on Good LifeProject.

If you've ever felt inundated, overwhelmed, or drowning in email, then do we have unsubscribe show for you. Today I'll be talking with Jocelyn Glei, productivity, time management and creativity expert, and author of 3 fantastic books, Manage Your Day-to-Day, Maximize Your Potential, and Make Your Mark, and her latest productivity extravaganza that I've PERSONALLY needed to manage my email, Unsubscribe. And that's what we'll be talking about today, how to manage your inbox, kill email anxiety, avoid distractions, and get real work done. That plus we'll talk about rat brains and random rewards, the power of emoticons, nibblers vs. batchers, the importance of a power-nap, why you'd want to send 600 Christmas cards to random strangers, and how not to be an email idiot. Email Time-Management Self-Improvement & Self-Help Topics Include: What's wrong with email today What B.F. Skinner found about positive rewards and rats (and how that affects our careers and email behavior) What is email doing to us from a stress point of view When we do not want to check our email What's the importance of writing your to-do list What's the progress paradox and what's wrong with Inbox Zero What's a negativity bias in email What's an inbox guilt complex? What's the rule of reciprocity? What is the Newtonian physics of email What is FOMO and what's it have to do with email? How to get your goals up on a board in front of you – to see your long term career, business, and life goals What's a good daily email routine What's a reboot ritual? How often should we check our email daily? What she learned about checking email from working with writers when at 99u.com What's the importance of setting expectations A good way to use folders, but why she doesn't use them (and what she does you) What David Allen's 2-minute rule has to do with Email (David Allen – Getting Things Done) What's a switching cost Why multi-tasking makes us stupid What's an email audit How to make pitches, and when is it polite to respond What are pitches or emails that provoke action? Why we need to take another look at how we write emails How do we keep from being an idiot on email? Why you want to be as positive as possible via email Any advice for parents for kids with their email (or millennials) What's the importance of a technology Shabbat, or an email Shabbat How to find Jocelyn Glei – go to www. jkglei.com and jkglei/unsubscribe Jocelyn Glei on How to Retake Control of Your Email For Sanity & Success (Time Management)! Business & Career | Health | Inspiration | Motivation | Mindfulness | Inspirational | Motivational | Self-Improvement | Self-Help | Inspire For More Info Visit: www.InspireNationShow.com

What stands between us and meaningful work? Email! It is killing our productivity and distracting us from the creative work we crave, yet we spend over a quarter of our work week on it. What is behind our addiction and what can we do about it? Jocelyn Glei, author of the book, Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done, explains the science behind our addiction and offers strategies for prioritizing meaningful work. Jocelyn is the founding editor of 99U and editor of three productivity books, including the bestseller, Manage Your Day-to-Day. In this interview, we talk about:   The challenge of living in an age of distraction Why it is easier to be busy than to focus on meaningful work How, on average, we check email 11 times an hour and process 122 emails daily How we spend over a quarter of work time on email How the random rewards of email keep us addicted How completion bias makes us strive for inbox zero How designs like progress bars and percentages speak to our completion bias How our negativity bias influences every email that we read How empathy, emoticons, and punctuation can compensate for negativity bias The fact that email goes awry because of a missing social feedback loop How empathy goes a long way in overcoming email negativity bias Email is great for asking but awful for declining The difference between an email asker and an email guesser What it means to do creative, meaningful work Steps we can take to ensure meaningful work rules the day The role momentum plays in doing meaningful work Why we need to synchronize calendars with to-do lists How scarcity of time and resources impacts capacity, mindset, and attitude Tech setups to help us avoid frequent email checks How the best way to fail at email is to rely on program defaults Why the more we check our email, the less happy we are How segmenting emails senders helps us decide which emails to ready by when The fact that not all email messages are created equal How quickly we respond to emails sets expectations How to ensure your emails stand out How productivity can be about what we choose not to do Why we need to spend more time deciding than doing Why it is about leaving a legacy Selected Links to Topics Mentioned @jkglei http://jkglei.com/ B. F. Skinner Daniel Goleman and emotional intelligence Mark McGuinness Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much Gloria Mark Manage Your Day to Day Clayton Christensen If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening! Thank you to Emmy-award-winning Creative Director Vanida Vae for designing the Curious Minds logo, and thank you to Rob Mancabelli for all of his production expertise! www.gayleallen.net LinkedIn @GAllenTC

1) How to design our days so that we give our very best when we are at work? 2) How can we enjoy guilt free play? 3) How to stop feeling like yet another day just went by without any real sense of progress and fulfillment? 4) Why Hard edges are important in our days 5) Moving from compulsive to conscious behavior

If you've ever struggled to find the time to get the things done you want to get done, or to finish your day feeling you've been productive and on-task, then do we have the time management show for you! Today I'll be talking with Jocelyn K. Glei, formerly editor-in-chief and director of 99u.com and the editor of a new favorite book on organization I wish I'd had years ago, Manage Your Day-to-Day. Today we'll be talking about just that managing your day to day and Building Routines, finding your focus and sharpening your creative mind. That plus we'll talk about the ultradian rhythm, the best use for a post-it, why we all want to get lonely, the dangers of email apnea, and what in the world is a technology Shabbat. Self-Help and Self-Improvement Questions & Topics Include: How Jocelyn Glei got good at time management What's the importance of a routine? What Steven King says about routines? What's the importance of front-loading (doing creative work first, reactive work second) How do we train people that we might not get back to email right away. Why we want to beware of the cycle of addiction with our email, social media and our smart phones What's the concept of ‘random rewards' and how we become trained to our email and smart phones What's the hangover effect, and how does this rule our day. What are the building blocks of a great daily routine What is a creative trigger – a concept from Mark McGuiness How Michael wrote College Confidence with ADD with the music of Vivaldi One of Mark's saying “If it won't fit on a post-it, it won't fit in your day” What's the Benjamin Franklin method and when's the best time to do it? What's the importance of making a daily to-do list the night or day before? What can Gretchen Rubin The Happiness Project tell us about time Management and the power of momentum What Seth Godin can tell us about honing our creative practice? How do we build renewal into our work day Why is sleep more important than food – from Tony Schwartz What's the ultradian rhythm and research from Eric Anderson on how long we can perform at a high level While looking at Facebook is not taking a break Why Jocelyn uses swimming to take a break, and has a dog, which helps her to take a break. What's the importance of solitude and creating the first block for your solitude Leo Babalta who writes the zen habits blog talks about how we've become incredibly uncomfortable with solitude How do we realize to shut the screen, step back, and get away from our computers (buddhify and headspace are mindfulness and meditation aps) How we can keep our long-term goals on our minds – from Erin Dignan In her future book how you can create a mental hierarchy of who matters to help you get things done (and get through your email) see Jocelyn Glei's next book coming out this fall, Unsubscribe Why Inbox zero may not be as great as you think What's the difference between a compulsive behavior and something that's constructive What we can learn from Jeff Bezos and preserving unstructured time What's a technology Shabbat – from filmmaker and founder of webby awards, Tiffany Schlain. What are email apnea and screen apnea – from Linda Stone who has a great Ted Med talk (The Wonders of a Wandering Mind- http://www.tedmed.com/talks/show?id=293027 What's the importance of getting out of the fight or flight mode when working, checking email, or at any time! What's it mean “In imagination we trust”? Why do we practice unnecessary creation (Scott McDowell) Why it's so important to kick the perfectionism habit What Anders Ericcson of Peak has to say about deliberate practice and feedback What he said about Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule What we can learn from Bill Bradley (John McPhee wrote it) “A Sense of Where You Are” Why is repetition the enemy of insight? What Stefan Sagmeister talks about very creative or ‘oblique' strategies. What Steven Pressfield means about going pro, being a pro, and doing the work Why ideas aren't the hard part, execution is What we want to know about Unsubscribe coming out in October. What's the importance of self-love or being kind and gentle on yourself through this process? Why we have to watch our inner-critic jkglei.com – Jocelyn's website What we can learn from Toddy Henry, Julia Cameron, and morning pages Jocelyn Glei shares incredible time management tools from Seth Godin, Gretchen Rubin, Steven Pressfield & Cal Newport! Inspiration | Meditation | Inspirational | Motivational | Career | Spiritual | Spirituality | Self-Improvement | Self-Help | Inspire For More Info Visit: www.InspireNationShow.com

Jocelyn Glei is the bestselling writer + editor of three great books we featured: Manage Your Day-to-Day, Make Your Mark, and Maximize Your Potential. They’re all awesome. She was also the founding Editor-in-Chief of 99U--an award-winning resource that provides the missing curriculum on making ideas happen. Today we’re going to talk about some of my favorite Big Ideas from her great books. (And, get a little preview on her upcoming book UNSUBSCRIBE!)

Jocelyn Glei is the bestselling writer + editor of three great books we featured: Manage Your Day-to-Day, Make Your Mark, and Maximize Your Potential. They’re all awesome. She was also the founding Editor-in-Chief of 99U--an award-winning resource that provides the missing curriculum on making ideas happen. Today we’re going to talk about some of my favorite Big Ideas from her great books. (And, get a little preview on her upcoming book UNSUBSCRIBE!)

We all want to do meaningful work that gives our lives purpose and lets us be creative. And yet, the very tools that help us stay organized and connected can cause the kind of distractions that erode time spent on meaningful work. Jocelyn Glei, bestselling author and editor of Manage Your Day-to-Day, Founding Editor-in-Chief and Director of Behance’s 99U and the 99U Conference, talks about this and more in this episode. And she helps us rethink what we know about creativity, meaningful work, and happiness. In this episode, we talk about: why creative work is so important how being busy can distract us from doing work that matters the creative rituals and routines that result in more meaningful work why we need to redesign and manage our relationship with technology the positive roles of productive procrastination and anxiety in creative, meaningful work short-term happiness versus long-term purpose and meaning Jocelyn also gives us a glimpse into her upcoming book on the distractions of email. She is the author of two additional books, Make Your Mark and Maximize Your Potential. Selected Links to Topics Mentioned @JKGlei Brene Brown Jonathan Adler Zine MIT Press The Acceleration of Addictiveness by Paul Graham Hooked by Nir Eyal The Achievement Habit by Bernie Roth Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer Miranda July Evernote Scrum The Gift by Lewis Hyde The Concept of Anxiety by Soren Kierkegaard Seth Godin If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening! Thank you to Emmy-award-winning Creative Director Vanida Vae for designing the Curious Minds logo! www.gayleallen.net LinkedIn @GAllenTC

One of the more challenging transitions for a creative person is to see themselves as a business. Today's guest writes about work and creativity in the age of distraction. She is interested in inspiring you to be creative, and get into action, so you can make your amazing talent available in the world. Jocelyn Glei is a writer who's obsessed how we can infuse more creativity and meaning into our daily work. She is the bestselling author and editor of three books that have sold over a quarter of a million copies: Manage Your Day-to-Day, Maximize Your Potential, and Make Your Mark, which offer pragmatic, actionable advice for creatives on managing their time, their careers, and their businesses. She was formerly the Founding Editor of 99u.com, which earned two Webby Awards for Best Cultural Blog and a rabid fan base of productivity nerds. She also led the curation of the very popular annual 99u conference, which hosts an incredible array of creatives.

Joining Host Kelly Scanlon on Smart Companies Radio is Jocelyn Glei,Director & Editor-in-Chief, 99U. They’ll discuss her latest book. “Make Your Mark; A Creative’s Guide to Building a Business With Impact”, called a 2015 MUST READ by Fast Company Magazine. Glei is also the executive producer of the 99U conference, April 30th through May 1st 2015. The conference as well as the popular website focuses on creatives and the people who want to get creative with thier businesses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We spend a lot of time thinking about the legacy we're building. What is the thing that threads everything you've done together? What is the mark you're leaving on the world, both in the career or work you do and the way you live your life?These are big questions. And they're what we're exploring in this week's episode with Jocelyn Glei.From the time she was a kid, Jocelyn had been drawn to writing, publishing and entrepreneurship. In high school, she launched her first "zine," printed on copiers at her dad's office. Her interest in language deepened through college, and upon graduating she moved through a series of ventures that kept putting her in charge of bigger and bigger editorial teams and budgets. Then, in 2009, Glei hooked with Behance founder, Scott Belsky, to head up now legendary creative mega-site and the annual conference for creative pros, 99U.Along the way, she's also curated a powerful three-book series, the latest of which, Make Your Mark, releases this week, boasting extraordinary essays from creative legends like John Maeda, Warby Parker co-founder and CEO, Neil Blumenthal, SY founder, Keith Yamashita, Sugru inventor, Jane ni Dhulchaointigh and many others.

Jocelyn Glei, Director of 99u, returns to the podcast to share three big movements that are affecting creative pros and businesses, and to talk about the brand new book Make Your Mark. The post AC Podcast: Jocelyn Glei on Make Your Mark appeared first on Accidental Creative.

Jocelyn Glei, Director of 99u, shares her career journey and talks a bit about how creative pros should be thinking about career paths and voice. The post AC Podcast: Jocelyn Glei of 99u appeared first on Accidental Creative.

Jay and Linda Kordich the man who is universally known as "The Father of Juicing," is back on the scene with a great new book that he and his lovely wife, Linda, have written called Live Foods Live Bodies, Recipes for Life. You guessed it.  It's filled with the more than 100 juicing recipes that are designed to help you ward off illness and reach optimum health.   Jocelyn Glei Editor-in-Chief of the Webby Award-winning website www.99u.com, a resource for insights on making ideas happen,  the Executive Producer of the popular 99U Conference in New York City, and the editor of a new book on productivity and creativity called "Manage Your Day-to-Day."  Charles Clapp is an Atlanta-based attorney at CMC Law, a firm specializing in consumer bankruptcy for individuals, families, and small businesses.  He has represented both debtors and creditors and helped thousands of debtors to receive a bankruptcy discharge.  His areas of expertise include foreclosure, repossession, garnishmnet, collections, and bankruptcy related litigation.   Bill Butler was dismissed on 10/311998 at Chrysler corporation by Compuware's division called professional services .His Chrysler supervisor was not there.  He told them he did not want to know why and just left. He started his job search in Massachusetts where he was born and had several good interviews with no calls for another interview or job offer.

Jocelyn K. Glei is the Editor-in-Chief of 99U.com, Behance’s effort to provide the “missing curriculum” for making ideas happen. 99U has won two Webby Awards for “Best Cultural Blog”. Jocelyn is also the Exec Producer of the 99U Conference, and Editor of 99U’s latest book Manage Your Day-to-Day which will give you a toolkit for tackling the new challenges of a 24/7, always-on workplace. Manage Your Day-to-Day will show you how to: Stop letting other people (and incoming messages!) dictate your daily to-do list. Fend off constant interruption and carve out a sacred space for “getting into the zone”. Conquer information overload and break your addiction to obsessively checking your phone or email. Let go of the idea of “inbox zero” and optimize the time you spend on email and social media. Find the right balance of working productively and recharging to keep your energy high. Hotwire your brain for a-ha moments and push through creative blocks. Make sure to grab the book here. Write a review in iTunes Please connect with me Subscribe, rate, and review in iTunes Follow @ErikJFisher Check out more Noodle.mx Network showsThe Audacity to Podcast: "How-to" podcast about podcastingBeyond the To-Do List: Personal and professional productivityThe Productive Woman: Productivity for busy womenONCE: Once Upon a Time podcastWelcome to Level Seven: Agents of SHIELD and Marvel’s cinematic universe podcastAre You Just Watching?: Movie reviews with Christian critical thinkingthe Ramen Noodle: Family-friendly clean comedy