An Insider's Perspective with Pranav Kale: Jonathan’s Productivity System for Soloists
DH 389 Pranav Kale
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Introduction
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Jonathan Stark: Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark, and today I'm joined by Pranav Kale for another reverse interview. Pranav, welcome back to the show.
Pranav Kale: Thank you. Thank you so much. This ought to be fun.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. So today we are going to talk about my time management system. I don't know if it's a productivity system. I don't know what it is. I think it's a time management system. I think it's a productivity system. It's somewhere in there. It's certainly how I decide. It's how I get anything done at all, honestly. So I guess that's what you call that productivity. I suppose so.
Pranav Kale: I guess. Yeah, I guess they merge with each other.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah. So yeah. So the idea is to just let Pranav interview me about that. I've been thinking about it quite a bit for the past maybe year and outlining the ideas for a book on it. So this will be really helpful for me to get a little Q&A and figure out. I'm sure I have tons of blind spots, so this will be great.
Pranav Kale: Cool. So I want to start with an application and then probably lead to the bigger ideas.
The Three Buckets Every Soloist Needs
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Pranav Kale: Considering that we are mostly talking to soloists, I'm hoping to lay down a context, lay down some of my real-life situation, and then hopefully get you to coach me through that and basically guide me to think about how I manage my time. So I want to start with maybe like the bigger umbrellas, the bigger things that I'm focused on, because I'm guessing that everything that we do day to day is a downstream effect of your strategy. So maybe we start there, if that's okay with you.
Jonathan Stark: Sure.
Pranav Kale: So let me quickly, in a couple of minutes, lay down the context. So I started my formal entry into being a soloist, I believe, in January 2024. But for most of 2024, I did what we call hands work or implementation work. So I was primarily a LinkedIn ghostwriter for founders, did some good work there. But then by the end of the year, I realized that, okay, I need more leverage. I need to solve more interesting problems for my clients. And so I started offering a strategic service known as the Big Idea Sprint, where I essentially work with my clients and try to find a good North Star for their content that they can commit to, which becomes a guardrail for their authority brand. And then eventually, hopefully, they become known for that one big idea. Now, since I got into it in 2025, so it's been what, 12 months now, 13 months. And there has been like a decent amount of service market fit, because there have been 14 paying clients and the clients are happy. And I have a good lifetime value for the clients as well. So it's like a lot of them are sticking with me as well. So there is the entry-level offer. And then there is the ongoing offer, which I call the thought partnership offer. Now, this has created new problems for me. And those problems are that the clients that I sold the entry-level offer to, most of them actually, like I said, they decided to continue working together. Now that is, it's taking a substantial amount of time, which is keeping me from doing other things. And maybe I'll just take a pause here because I want to like take us to a different direction and then come back to this. What I realized that for my business, and I'm hoping that a lot of soloists will resonate with this, that for my business, there are primarily 3 buckets or 3 umbrellas that I need to focus on, which are needle moving. One is my creative practice, which is where I do a lot of my thinking, writing, content creation for my brand. Because if I don't get smart enough, I will not be able to have smart conversations. I'll not be able to deliver good value to my clients. So that is a very big priority for me. The second is obviously the client delivery. Because if I don't actually invest time in delivering good results to my clients, then the lifetime value is going to be low. And then I'm going to keep on hunting for new clients all the time, which is not ideal. And thirdly is business outreach, which is more of trying to get new business. At this stage, I'm not a conventional thought leader where I have a lot of leads coming in. So there is an element of me proactively reaching out to others. So these are the 3 buckets. There is the creative practice, there is the client work, and then there is outreach. So even before we zoom into the problems, do you agree with these 3 buckets for a soloist? Or do you think I'm missing some kind of a trick here?
Jonathan Stark: I don't think you're missing anything. Those are the 3 big ones I would say. I might frame them a tiny bit differently, but not much. I mean, I might put different names on them, but it's the same 3 things. It's like getting better at what you do. For delivering the client work, that's a pretty high priority. Doing marketing so that you have more clients in the future. And getting better at what you do. There's probably some overlap between the other 2 categories with that last one.
Pranav Kale: Yep. Yep. Okay. Cool. So if you're aligned with that, then circling back to what I was saying. So I am now feeling this tension between how do I divide my time? How do I invest my time into these 3 buckets? And at the same time, the emotional problem here would probably be that the days are getting a little bit exhausting. I'm nowhere close to Elon Musk. I'm not putting that many hours. But the mental energy that I'm spending is substantial. So I do feel a little bit drained at the end of the day. And I feel, oh man, I wish I could have accomplished more. And this is not me being able to keep up with my weekly to-dos. So this is like a big mess, right? So how would you advise me on solving this problem?
Get All Your To-Dos in One Place
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Jonathan Stark: Okay. I guess there are two things immediately. I've worked through this with three private coaching students so far. They've been in this sort of situation where they've got too much on their plate and they have this drowning feeling. They feel like or they know that things are falling through the cracks. They're not getting to stuff. They're forgetting to do it. They're doing it late. And they're always worried that they're forgetting something. It's like this feeling of bees swarming around your head. You can't even think because you're dodging bees. It just feels super duper reactive. Nobody seems to like it. They don't like it. So when I work with people on that, one of the things we do, really the first thing we do, is take an inventory of where all their to-dos are. In all three cases, they were all over the place. One person literally had behind their desk a wall of sticky, physical sticky notes on the wall behind their monitor. When we went through this process, she found a whole bunch that had fallen on the floor behind the desk that she didn't even know about. So things were literally falling through the cracks. Another example was I was working with another student and he had his projects kind of in a digital sense, had project folders. Inside of each of those project folders, he had some unknown number of to-dos in like 20 different project folders. So in order to see what he had to do, he would have to open up 20 different project folders just to see what was on his to-do, like in addition to having a regular to-do list. Other people, they've got to-dos jammed in their calendar masquerading as events. They've got a to-do tracking system, some kind of task tracking system. A lot of times people's email inbox is a huge to-do list or mixed in with non-to-dos. You could have physical papers. You could have a pile of mail. Your desktop of your computer could have a million folders full of unedited podcast episodes. They're just everywhere.
Pranav Kale: So those are the bees. That's what's flying around your head. So, okay, let's take an inventory of all those things. Where are all of them? And put them down in one big, huge list. And then you're like, oh, no wonder I feel like things are falling through the cracks because they are. I've got too many. I've no one place to look for all of these things. And when an opportunity arises or I have a bright idea about maybe, I don't know, starting a new podcast or somebody says, hey, let's grab coffee or you do this, you have no single place to look and say, I can't. I've got way too much on my plate because this stuff's not on the plate. It's all over the table and it's on the floor underneath. You don't even know how much you've committed to. So step one is taking an inventory of all of your to-dos. Where do they all live? Where are they hiding? And putting them in one gigantic list. So that's one big thing.
SOPs and Checklists: Stop Winging It
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Jonathan Stark: Another big component when I've worked with people is that they don't have systems for anything. So the work that you have to do, a lot of times there's a way to do it much, much more efficiently.
Pranav Kale: So this isn't a question, none of this is a question about deciding what's the right thing to do.
Jonathan Stark: This is just the stuff you have to do. You've already said yes to. It was true in every case where we could go through and say,
Pranav Kale: All right, what kind of client work do you do? All right, where are your systems for doing it?
Jonathan Stark: I don't really have one. I just sort of wing it every time. And I'm like, all right, let's create an SOP or a checklist or those sorts of things and start creating those. And you keep them in a place where it's zero friction for you to open that thing up and follow it when the situation arises. So for me, a really obvious one is doing the Ditroville live sessions every other week. I've got an SOP or a checklist, whatever you want to call it. It's probably like 150 things on it that I run through every other week. And since it's every other week, it's not like I do it every day and I would just remember it. Plus it's so long, I probably wouldn't remember it. And when I used to do that, I used to wing it every time. I would just flip on the camera and people would show up and I would just answer questions. And then as it got more, I don't know if it got more complicated, but I would make mistakes. Like I would forget to unmute the microphone or I would forget to, what were some examples? I'd forget to turn off my notifications or I'd forget to shut the door and the dogs would come running. There's just little things. I'd forget to check to see if my hard drive was full. And then the recording would fail because the hard drive filled up while I was recording. So there's all these things that I'm never going to... Oh, another one was like am I on the right Wi-Fi network or am I tethered over my phone by accident? Am I going to run up my cell phone bill by accident because I did an hour and a half long video call? So there are all these things that I could kind of remember to do, but then I'd forget to do one one time and then it would screw up the video and then it would cause all of this other work because I'd made this dumb mistake in the middle of this thing that I do on a regular basis. So I wrote everything down and it just got dramatically easier. So there was maybe before a call in the past, before I had an SOP, it would take me an entire hour just to get ready for the phone call because I'd be checking settings. Oh, that's another thing, checking your Zoom settings, all these things. And I'd have to get in there early and I'd be doing all of these things just in my mind. I'd be like, okay, is everything set? Is everything set? Have I got water? Is the air conditioning turned off? That's another classic one. And it took forever. So then by the time that hour was over, I was almost creatively drained and I was kind of nervous because I was afraid I was forgetting something, something was falling through the cracks. And then I'd do the call and then afterwards, if something was screwed up, it could take me hours to unscrew up the thing. So maybe I'd have to rerecord parts of the video or merge the audio from the backup to turn it into a mess. But once you have the list, it takes me like five minutes. I can just show up, it saves me almost an entire hour just because I have the list, I run through it. I don't have to think about anything. One of the things is read through the questions first and then as I'm running through my checklist.
Jonathan Stark: My brain's kind of like grinding on the answers to the questions because I don't have to think about setting up Zoom or whatever because I'm just reading it. So that's an example. You already have to do and making it dramatically more efficient. So those are two things that I would say right off the bat. One is to take an inventory of all of your to-dos and put them in one place. And then the second thing is to create systems for the things that you do on a regular basis so that you can do them much more efficiently. It used to take an hour and then sometimes maybe an hour or two hours afterwards, like three hours maybe on average, two hours I get back in my schedule just by having a process to follow and not winging it every time. So with students, I'd say, what are some things that you do on a regular basis, especially weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly? Daily, it's usually, I mean, if there's a daily thing that you have that's that long, then let's definitely create a checklist, but usually there's not a daily one. But a lot of times there's a weekly one or a monthly one where it's a webinar they do every month, or they've got to do outreach once a month, or they need to balance their books or close their books. And every single time, it's like the first time they ever did it. So that's another thing. So here's this stuff that I have to do now. It's all in one big list, and for the things that are complex procedures, there's a checklist to follow so you don't screw it up, so you don't have rework, and you also don't have to expend the creative energy or that sort of fear that you're gonna forget something. All of that goes away. It becomes very easy, so you can do the things you have to do faster. You know how much stuff you actually have committed to, and that helps you say no to more things. One of the things that might become a theme here is with almost every case, yes, every single case of the three that I'm thinking of, all three people need one of the things that they're getting better at. They need to get better at to protect their sanity is to say no to stuff. And it makes it a lot easier to say no to things when you can see how much stuff you actually committed to instead of it hiding behind your desk on the floor. I think it also means saying no to yourself at times because you might be coming up with a lot of creative ideas going behind, what's the right English, going behind the shiny objects.
Pranav Kale: When you're coaching your students or if you were to coach me, what you did right now is you jumped into what I'm doing currently, what I'm already taken on, and then the two broader points that you made were one is the to-do list, which I want to zoom in on, and the second is more of a system or SOPs. At what point do you, like, is that step number two for you that, okay, now that we have some quick wins, we actually make an attempt to understand if we are doing the right things in the first place? Because I could be still doing wrong things because we have never really made the connection with the strategy, right?
Jonathan Stark: Right. It could be. Usually, I mean, in the case of my coaching students, we've usually already done that. That's usually the very, very first thing we do. And in all three of these cases, it was someone who already went through that whole process, and they knew what they needed to do, but now they needed systems to do it. So that's when this comes in because then they're like, okay, I know what I need to do. I sort of, I know what kind of business I'm building toward. I've got a strategy for doing it, but now I'm just like, they're feeling the way you described yourself where you're just like, I'm exhausted. I'm getting to the end of the day. I feel like I haven't done everything I need to do. I'm feeling drained, all those sorts of things. So the process of deciding what to do, I think for the purpose of this conversation, I kind of want to hand wave over it a little bit and be like, you know, you need an objective, you need a strategy to reach the objective, and once you have that strategy, then the things that you need to do become pretty obvious because the strategy rules out 90% of the possibilities, and then you've only got the 10% left over of what to do for someone like us, let's say a soloist or somebody who runs a small firm. But I don't even want to get into the firm thing because then it turns into a management of your employees, but maybe you have a VA, maybe you have someone that does your books, and that's not really a firm. So you're basically a solo professional. You're probably doing advisory style work or certainly expertise-based work. Maybe there's some execution, some hands work, but there's a mix of hands and brains work, and your business model is kind of like that. Then it's the situation where you have, since you don't have employees and you don't have a boss, you have so much freedom that you kind of need someone to tell you what to do. So the system is set, my system is set up to tell me what to do when I don't know what to do. Basically, it's like, what do I do next? And I've got a system that will tell me what to do next because younger me did me the favor of telling future me what to do. So I just give myself instructions when I'm in the mode. Well, I don't want to go too far down that path yet. I feel like I'm, I don't want to go in too much of a tangent, but does that answer your question at all?
Pranav Kale: Well, okay, so one last thing to wrap up, I think, to answer your question. You have to do more, a classic situation, a classic problem is you have to do some kind of business development.
The Feast-Famine Trigger
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Jonathan Stark: You have to do some kind of marketing if you wanna stay in business, full stop. That's, you have to. So that stuff, when you do a little bit of it, and then it starts to work, you end up buried in delivery, and then you stop doing the biz dev marketing stuff, and you end up in the feast-famine cycle. That is, that's the trigger, that's the inciting incident for me to have set this up for myself, because I might forget to do the things that I need to get leads. And it's not the kind of thing, necessarily, most people don't want to, let's say, post three times a day on LinkedIn, or let's say, do a podcast every week, or let's say, release five short videos on YouTube every week. So they're really easy to forget to do those things, because they feel like they're optional, because they don't produce instantaneous results. Meanwhile, you've got all of these things that you have to do for your clients that do produce instantaneous results, and the clients are gonna be angry if you didn't do the thing, or you're late with the thing. So keeping up with that stuff is probably the inciting, that's what caused me to do it in the first place, is like, okay, I don't want to forget to do marketing.
Pranav Kale: Yeah, so let's assume that we have done the work of identifying what right things we need to do, and then you said that, okay, the first thing that you need to do is actually get all of those to-dos in one place. So we will keep aside the SOPs for now, but let's just focus on the to-dos. Now, that to-do list without any constraint or without any rule could stretch, right? It could become a list of five, 10, 15, 20 things. I mean, at this point, at least we have not applied any sort of logic to it. So how do you do that?
Why Your Calendar Is Not a To-Do List
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Jonathan Stark: Okay, so the first thing, where's the best place to start here? So I think the next thing to talk about is the calendar. For me, it is very important that the calendar is not my to-do list. It's very important to me that my calendar is appointments that I have agreed to meet where I've agreed to meet with someone. So if you look to my calendar, it is, I think, exclusively an appointment with someone else, not with myself. Sometimes they'll be in there. A couple of other things will come into my calendar and they're dependent things. It's like dependencies on those meetings. So I might have a meeting that can't be moved unless the meeting's moved. So like yesterday, I had to go to the dentist. So I've got the dentist appointment. It's an appointment at three o'clock. And then I had a 15-minute block before that where I have to get to the dentist. So that 15-minute block isn't an appointment with someone, but it's because of the appointment that's coming up. So they're kind of like the same thing. I don't put stuff in my calendar like, you know, a month from now, I put an all-day event for, I don't know, let's say something like I said I would follow up with Pranav about this thing on this date. That's a to-do, a dated to-do. Don't put it in your calendar. And the reason why is because just the nature of the application. The calendar application, the time just goes into the past. So like the view of the week just goes into the past. Yes, you can scroll back, but it just goes into the past and you're focused on the current day or the current week, the immediate future. And if you didn't do something this week and then now it's next week, unless you manually move that thing, if you remember to move that thing, it disappears into the past. So just the nature of the application. Even if it's paper, it's just like you flip over the page to the next month and anything that you didn't do on that previous month just disappears. And that's not good. Like I had this one bad habit, which is exactly the thing that I just described where if I said to someone that I would follow up with them, in my mind, I was like, well, that should go in my calendar because it's a promise I made to someone else. But usually it didn't have to be on an exact date, but I would put it on a date and I'd say, ah, I said I would follow up middle of January with Pranav. So I'll put that in like January 15th. And then if I didn't get to it that week or I just didn't see it, cause it's not really super duper in your face.
Jonathan Stark: And like the holidays and other stuff are up there, and it goes into the past, then I forget about it basically. I just completely dropped the ball. And when I started talking about this stuff a little bit more seriously, I went back into my calendar and I just looked, and there were like 10 of those that I just completely dropped the ball and going back like a year. And I was like, oh wow, it sort of proved my own point. So calendar, not for to-dos, calendar is for promises you made to show up either online or at some place with someone else. And the difference between that and like an appointment with yourself or work on book from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., you can just, I just move those. I end up moving those like, oh, you know, I don't know. The kids were sick in the morning and like that time got nuked and I need a more flexible, I need more flexibility in my day. I'm not good with a rigid schedule. And so I would end up just moving those appointments with myself all over the place. And that ends up taking me a lot of time to move them around and then sometimes they slip into the past and they never get done. So just the nature of a calendar application is not a great place to put to-dos. So my calendar is for appointments that I made with other people and then like related travel time or preparation or something like that that cannot be done at some other time. Then the to-do list contains regular to-dos, like one-off to-dos. They either can have a date or they don't have a date. And then recurring to-dos that have some frequency like daily, weekly, monthly, every other month, whatever, every other week. And yeah, so the, and then we can go into the to-dos that are on the list. When you first do this, when you first do that inventory and you take all these to-dos from all over the world, wherever you keep them and you put them in one place, then you're gonna have a massive amount of stuff to deal with way more than you're like, oh, I feared that this was actually what I had to deal with. And there's a phase where you like have to grind through that and spread it out over time to get through all that stuff. But at least you have it all in one place and you can sort of prioritize which things need to get done first and which things can wait a little bit longer. But once you have, you've gone through that initial cleanup, I guess, and you've gotten better at like not over-promising to other people or over-committing to things, then it gets to this, a nice rhythm where I feel like I almost have this event loop for my day.
The Event Loop
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Jonathan Stark: An event loop is like a thing from game programming or even web design, where there's this kind of circular logic that happens, or it's like, it's a loop. So after we get off this phone call, and I do it 100 times a day probably. So after we get off this phone call, I'm gonna look at the lock screen on my phone and I'm gonna say, are there any emergencies? There's probably gonna be some notifications, might be some stuff from Ditcherville or other Slack rooms, might be a voicemail, but I'm just gonna look and see if there are any emergencies. Did one of the kids have a problem? Does my wife have a problem? If the answer is no, and well, if the answer is yes, I'm gonna deal with it. If the answer is no, I'm gonna check my number two inbox. My number two inbox is my calendar. Do I have another meeting coming up? Yes or no. If yes, I'm gonna go into that meeting or I'm gonna prepare for that meeting if it's coming right up. And if the answer is no, I don't have a meeting coming up. Then I look at my third inbox, my last inbox, I only have those three, my to-do list. So when I look at the to-do list, it's got, it probably has 20 things on it right now. Some things are client delivery types of things. Some things are business development types of things and then. And other things, and most of those are recurring, but some of them aren't. And then, like I've got a bunch of to-dos on there right now for migrating from Slack to Circle. And then I've got recurring to-dos that are things like, you know, stretch, practice my karate forms, do 100 push-ups, you know, like things, send the daily email. So I've got these different categories of to-dos. There's like the undated ones that would be nice to get to, maybe someday, and maybe someday I'll get to them, but probably not. Then there's dated to-dos that don't recur, and that's stuff that is on my radar and I need to get to it at some point. And then there's stuff that comes back every day. And in my mind, those all have a different priority level depending on the specifics of what they are. So if I've got this space in time between this, we get off this meeting and then when's my next meeting? Oh, it's three o'clock, and I'm getting off this phone call at noon. So we've got three hours. So when I look at the to-do list, I'm like, what three-hour thing can I fit in here? Or how many one-hour, you know, is there a three-hour thing that I can do now? Is there 10, 15-minute things I can do? It's like whatever I'm in the mood for, whatever I feel I have the energy for, maybe I feel like doing push-ups in the middle of the day. Maybe I don't. Maybe I feel like editing a podcast episode, or maybe I feel like doing one of the migration tasks for Ditcherville. But I just do whatever I feel like that I have the time for, and then when the next meeting comes up, I do the meeting, I get off the meeting, the event loop happens again. I check the lock screen, check the calendar, check the list, and that loop just keeps happening all day. So as long as I have the right things on my to-do list and the right things in my calendar, I'm gonna be moving my business forward in all of those three categories that you started off with. So, you know, it's, so the feeling is, I don't feel like there's bees flying around my head. I don't feel like things are falling through the cracks. I feel, what it feels like is I'm just doing whatever I feel like all the time.
Pranav Kale: Yeah, which is very intriguing to me because I guess, so every year I travel to two places. Okay, one of them is like a vacation near the beach where I have an empty schedule. And then at the end of the year, I like to go to a meditation retreat in the mountains. And the thing that I like about going to the meditation retreat is that the schedule is already taken care of. Like I just have to show up and I don't have to decide what to do next, which is in a way a little bit bizarre. And maybe this means that I need to do some therapy because if a vacation is making me anxious, maybe there is something wrong in here. But that aside, what I'm gathering from your process is that there is this intuitive calmness that you are bringing as you sift through those tasks or as you go through those to-do lists and you are very intuitive and you are grabbing which feels right in the moment. But I can totally see that someone else in that situation could look at that and get overwhelmed, just deciding and wondering if he's picking the wrong thing to do, although there is no wrong thing.
Jonathan Stark: Right, there isn't one.
Pranav Kale: Yeah.
Procrastination Is a Signal
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Jonathan Stark: So that's the, well, yeah, I think that's the answer is there isn't a wrong thing, but it does lead into another topic, which is if I see myself, or let me put it another way, you can see yourself procrastinating. It's in your face because the nature of a to-do application is to-do's don't disappear until you've done them. So if you keep postponing a to-do, that is a huge signal that you don't wanna do that thing. You never feel like doing that thing. Or maybe it's that your calendar is so packed that you never have time to do a big enough, maybe it's a big, like a three-hour thing, which is probably, I never have a three-hour task. The most of the tasks is usually an hour. So it's a huge signal to you that you don't wanna do that thing or your calendar is set up in a way that you never have enough time to do the thing. So if it's the calendar issue, then I would say that thing is too big, break it down into something smaller, and or blockouts, just clear your schedule. Another thing that I do put in my calendar is blocks. So I'll say like, if it's a Monday holiday, I'll put a block in my calendar because I send out links where people can schedule things in my calendar and those links are scattered around the internet. I send them out in email. So I don't know who all has them or what all's coming or people to book interview times and stuff like that. So rather than mess around with my calendly, my scheduling system and do these custom blocks for this week or whatever, I just put eight-hour events in my calendar, like from nine to five, just blocked.
Pranav Kale: What's an example of this?
Jonathan Stark: So an example of this is like, I took my third-degree black belt test in the fall and the week leading up to that, I just blocked every day because I had so much stuff to study. There's a lot of memorization. So I had a whole bunch of stuff to memorize and I didn't want to be distracted with other stuff. So I just blocked all of those days. So that's not a to-do and it's not an appointment with myself. That's just me protecting my calendar, preventing anybody from sneaking another event into one of those days. So if there's a to-do on your list that you're never getting to and you think it's because you haven't got the time, then it's time to do something I talk about in 10-Day System Challenge, which is block out a me day every week, a recurring me day, like Thursday is usually a good one. Monday's hard, Friday can be hard because sometimes deadlines crash into Friday. So like Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, a lot of times, if you look at your calendar and you're like, I don't usually have a lot of calls on Wednesday, just block that thing out forever. And then you're like, okay, I have time on Wednesdays to do that thing because whatever that thing is, now I've blocked out the time. And for people who think they can't block out a day, you can and I can prove it because if you got sick tomorrow, you would just reschedule everything. So just reschedule everything now. Not like lie and pretend you're sick, but just reschedule everything. So if you've got only one recurring meeting on a Wednesday, change it. Or if there's one day a week that doesn't have a recurring meeting, that's your day. Block that day out. And that's your day to kind of like catch up on the to-dos that haven't been getting done. If it's not that you don't have time to do it, if it's not, maybe you do have space in your calendar.
Jonathan Stark: But you keep seeing this to-do and you go like, I don't wanna do that, then delete it, you're not gonna do it. So there's this whole other topic here is there are all these things that people tell you you have to do, maybe you don't. Maybe they don't really align with your strategy. Maybe they don't align with your personality or your values. Maybe you don't wanna be on social media all the time. If you just see this to-do on there and every time you see it, you just like get drained. You're like, oh God, I wanna do this. Come up with a different thing. Find a different way to achieve whatever that thing was for that's gonna be more fun. And if it's this thing that's just like way overdue, just delete it or put it on your maybe someday list, but you're not gonna do it because you don't wanna do it. And we have the kind of like, we don't have a boss saying you've gotta do this thing or I'm gonna fire your ass or you're gonna get detention or whatever. So it's like we have nothing to go. I mean, you might as well, if you're taking all the risks to run your own business, you might as well have fun doing it. So why put to-dos on your list that you don't wanna do? It's like you can just think outside of the box and find some other way to accomplish the thing that that thing was supposed to do.
Pranav Kale: You said fun. And even though you have not articulated your productivity system using that word as much, I wonder if subconsciously that is like a not stuff for you. It's like you are depending on, of course, that is not to take, I don't mean to take it to an extremely absurd level where you're doing things just for the fun of it. Of course, there is a lot of strategy and thinking behind it. But once that is done, what I'm suspecting is that you are letting enjoyment and fun take precedence over other things. So do you agree with that?
Jonathan Stark: Not exactly. So it's not, fun's not, I wouldn't use the word fun. I would say, I do the next thing on my to-do list that I feel like doing. I might not like it, but that's. So what I'm doing really is creating the conditions for, I'm creating the conditions for it to be easier for me to do the thing than to not do the thing. So.
Pranav Kale: Can I give an example?
Jonathan Stark: Yeah.
Pranav Kale: Yeah. One of the things like just to combine two, two thoughts, right. Or two, two threads here. Like one is, one is what you're talking about already, which is creating conditions that you feel like doing it. I think, I think that's what, that's what you said. And on a podcast with Russia, you also mentioned that you are not, you, you don't like, you don't wish for that habit to become a habit, right? You create systems for that. So that it becomes almost inevitable. I think that's, so those, those two threads are similar or run parallelly in my, in my head. So one of the things that I want to, I want to do is, I want to be more. I want to show up more on video. So I've been doing it a little bit, but I'm not, I'm not very consistent with it. And, uh, when you said that, uh, maybe you don't want to do it. That's not entirely true because I love the thinking part. I love the recording part, but I hate the editing part. I hate creating the thumbnail and putting like, and doing all of that. Like it's done. Like, you know, my, my curiosity, thirst has been quenched. I feel that I'm good. Now just take this off my, off my plate. If I am, if I want to implement this particular habit and it's, it's a habit change because I already have a few things to do and now I'm introducing this. Right. So, so how do I make this habit inevitable? How do I create conditions so that this is something that I feel like doing?
Jonathan Stark: Yeah.
When You Hate Part of a Task, Cut It
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Jonathan Stark: So you've identified something important. Like there's a piece of it that you do like, and you don't find you have to really force yourself through some effort of self-discipline, but then there's a piece that seems required that drains you. So the first half of it energizes you and the editing part drains you. So don't do the editing part. Just do them live. So that's the kind of thing where it's like when you have this checklist for a long task, which that would be a pretty long checklist. Cause video editing is a pain. I hate it too. You just look at the list and you say like, what things on this list do I absolutely have to do? Or, or what's the other thing you could do is say, maybe there's a way to automate this or delegate it. I'm not a big delegator cause I feel like the things I delegate are mostly would all be small things and I feel like it just turns into a meeting, which is, I don't want a meeting in my calendar. I'd rather just either not do the thing or if I'm going to delegate something, it has to be, it has to be so completely and thoroughly hands-off that I never have to have a meeting about it. Like my taxes, the stuff like that. Like my bookkeeper just logs into my accounts and does everything. We never talk maybe once a year, probably not even. Um, so that's, I'm okay with that kind of delegation, but anything where I've got like a VA or, and I have to have a meeting about it, and this was true for, for at least one of the, the coaching students I mentioned earlier had a couple of pseudo employees that were helping with a lot of stuff and the pseudo employees were making as much, they were making as much work as they were completing. And, and it's expensive. So we went through the, these, like all of these things that they were doing. And it was like, okay, what's the purpose of this thing? What's the purpose of this thing? What's the purpose of this thing that they're doing? And in every case, the answer was like, I'm not sure, or I don't really need that. It's work that they created for themselves to justify their fee. And it's not moving the needle in any, any way that we couldn't do some other way. So if you hate editing video, don't just do it live. And the cool thing about doing it live is, uh, it has a certain energy to it. It might be scary at first, but you'll get better at it. And there's, I think the, the expectation of the production values is lower. So you can actually do a worse video, worse air quotes, worse video. And it's, it was live. So you, you know, everyone's expecting it to be like a live stream Q and A or AMA or interview and, uh, and you get, you get cut more slack because you did it live. It was a performance. The other thing is why does it have to be video? Why couldn't it be audio? Cause audio is way easier to edit and upload and move the files around and all that stuff. It's way, way easier. It's it's weight is just so much easier. So, you know, I would question all of the things. It's like, although you're, um, most people's base assumption with this, I want to do a podcast or I want to do, I want to have a video, a YouTube channel, or I want to be on LinkedIn or I want to do this thing, but it's a lot of work. It's like, well, do you really have to do all that work? Could you, where's the Pareto principle here? What's the 80, 20, what's the 20% that gets you all the juice. And what's the 80% that doesn't really add anything. And maybe you can just cut out the 80% and leave the 20. And I do that a lot. It's that's the very first lesson in five day podcast challenges. Like you think you have to do this list of 20 things, but you really don't. You don't need to worry about advertisers. You don't need to worry about music at the beginning. You don't need to worry about editing. Even you don't have to worry about your microphone. You, if you, if you're running zoom calls with clients, your setup is already fine. People are paying you money for this setup. Free podcast doesn't need to be any better than your zoom calls with your clients. And if your zoom calls with your clients are bad, then you should get a new microphone anyway. So, you know, bad quality. I mean, so there's a lot of advice about all sorts of aspects of running a business online that don't really apply to us because we have a particular kind of business.
Pranav Kale: And, and I think there are a lot of things where people are overwhelmed by nice to have stuff that they don't even need to be doing.
The Love-Hate List
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Jonathan Stark: Yeah. One of the, there's two things I do on the go. I am, I think I'm unusually good at noticing how I feel when I look at the appointment in the calendar, look at the to-do on my list. It is like a blaring red flag to me if I don't feel like doing the thing or if I'm excited to do the thing. And if I notice a pattern there, I actually have a list called my love, hate list. And when I notice I hate doing something, I put it on the list. And when I noticed I love doing, I put it on the list. And when I look at the list, it's like, okay, what have I collected with my loves and hates? How can I do more of the loves and less of the hates? It's like really basic. But if you sat down to do that without collecting them as they hit you in the moment, it'd probably be pretty hard. But if you just collect them for a month, you're like, wow, I really love working with that client. I really hate editing video. I really love, um, I don't know, speaking on remotely. I really hate traveling. So you come up with this list of stuff, or maybe I hate air travel, but I like driving or taking the train. So you just make this list of totally random stuff. And then, okay, how do I decrease the number of hates I have to do? And how do I increase the number of loves I get to do? And, and then in service of your strategy, just change the activities of your day. So you still have your objective and you still have your strategy. You're just maybe going from, um, uh, from a video podcast to an audio podcast or the other way. Maybe, uh, maybe you're forcing yourself to write every day because I told you, you should, or someone read that they should do that. Well, maybe, but you love doing video. Well, maybe just do video and then use AI to translate that into a summary or something that goes out and just say, Hey, this is an AI summary of a video I did, but that's your mailing list. Boom. There you go. And with the link to the video, so just come up with something creative so that you can do more of the stuff you love, unless the stuff you don't.
Pranav Kale: Nice. I hope this podcast experience doesn't go into the love, hate.
Jonathan Stark: I love podcasting. For example, I know I love podcasting. It's great. It's I'm really, really good at showing up when I say I'm going to show up. If I have an appointment with someone, I'm really bad at showing up when I make an appointment with myself, which doesn't make sense, but I know a lot of people do that and a lot of people, it works for people. Rochelle was, she could put, you know, at 10 o'clock tomorrow, I'm going to do this. And then I got at 10 o'clock tomorrow. She did it.
Pranav Kale: You know, I want to talk about that. It's, it's bothering me a little bit that, that you are so freely being able to switch tasks up and like, you know, pick things up on, on the go, because I can totally see myself getting stressed about it. My, my question is, do you, how, how do you think about energy? Uh, and, uh, not, not in the woo-woo way, but like, you know, when I say energy, what I mean is like, I'm, I'm most creative in the morning and I want to get all my deep thinking done in the morning because in the afternoons, like I just don't like afternoons, I, I'm sleepy. I've had, uh, I've had a heavy meal, uh, perhaps. And then, uh, like I am, I'm like my, my caffeine is a caffeine effect is now
Jonathan Stark: So, how do you think about the time of the day and then mapping the particular activity to that particular time? This is, I guess it's a two-pronged approach. You need to have a certain amount of awareness around that. I'm trying to, I have an answer for you, but I'm trying to come up with a general answer. I'll start with my answer. How do I do it? First, I notice when I want to do, just like you said, I notice when I have the energy to do certain kinds of things. I think Dan Pink has a book called "When," where he talks about this. In my sort of world, I feel like it works itself out because when you look at the list, you do what you feel like at that time. If you feel low energy, guaranteed there's something on the list that doesn't need a lot of energy, like responding to 15 LinkedIn comments or something like that, that can be pretty brain dead or clearing your inbox. That can be pretty brain dead. Anything that's really reactive and doesn't take a lot of deep thought is a good thing to do in that after-dinner crashing caffeine thing. There are things on my list that fit into there; it could be exercise. It could be, you know, that's a good time for you to do pushups or sit-ups or stretch or meditate or whatever. My to-do list and my calendar are not, I don't have a work version and a home version. It is just me. I only have one day, and all of my personal and business to-dos and appointments are all mixed in the same place.
Jonathan Stark: So I usually have something I can pick at any moment. If I had no appointments in a day, this would automatically happen. I would automatically do whatever I felt like in the moment because of where my energy is. Part of the consideration is my energy level. Like, I'm fried right now. There's no way I can do my daily email right now, or I'm super up like, "Oh, I've got this great idea. It just hit me. This is the perfect timing. I'm going to bang it out right now." So I'm always surfing that energy wave. It happens. I'm not saying it doesn't happen to me. It totally does. You know, where my energy is up or down, right? But a particular kind of energy, like maybe I have physical energy, but not mental. This just magically works itself out because when I have no appointment coming up, I can just look at the to-do list and just grab the one I feel like doing right now. The one that seems like fun, I said fun, but it's really the one that I feel like doing. The problem is that if you have no awareness of where your energy levels are for certain things, and you're just constantly blocked with appointments at that time. So like if your best time to write is first thing in the morning, but you have a recurring daily standup every day at the exact time, then you've got a conflict. The first thing would be, you'd have to notice that that's a problem. I'm not sure how to advise someone to help them notice that it's a problem, but somehow you got to notice that that's a problem. So how would that manifest? It would manifest because you've got this to-do on your list that you really wish you could have, like, you know, you want to do it. It's not that you're avoiding it, but you never have the energy for it. You still have to know that, well, I would have had the energy for it in the morning if I didn't have meetings all morning, every morning. So then it's like, okay, you have to rearrange your schedule. I mean, it's as simple as that.
Pranav Kale: Yeah.
Batching vs. Gardening Your Business
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Pranav Kale: How do you think about batching versus planning a perfect day? Because I've heard you say that you would rather eat away at a task one bite at a time, even if like, and you would prefer doing it daily as opposed to, let's say, batching it and like, you know, maybe I don't know, putting like every Thursday for the whole afternoon, I record videos or like, I don't think you could fact check me on this, but I don't think you are, you're that kind of a guy. You are probably more of that. Okay. Like, you know, this is my perfect day and I would rather, you know, chip away at tasks slowly. So how, but at the same time, I do, I have felt that there is, there is certain merit to batching, especially let's again, like, let's take the example of recording a video, like if I'm going to put on a nice t-shirt and adjust my lighting, then I might as well get like, you know, two, three, four videos recorded as opposed to doing them every day. So, yeah, I'm just like wondering, how do you think about these two contrast approaches?
Jonathan Stark: Okay. So there's actually, I feel like there's two different situations in there. So batching, I've tried it. It doesn't work for me. I like, like, it's kind of like, so here's an example. When I was doing, I was goofing around with YouTube several years, maybe it's probably five years ago now, because I can remember the office that I was in and I had a VA at the time I was experimenting with that, who would, I would put out the word on social media and in my mailing list, if you post somewhere on, I think back then it was still called Twitter or LinkedIn or wherever, with the hashtag askJonathan, I'll just, the VA will search those two platforms and collect all the questions and then I would go on, and then I would answer them and then post them on YouTube as individual question answers. And it was like, I was basically copying a thing, Gary, askGaryVee. And I really like it. I love answering questions. That's on my love list. When people have questions, I love answering them. It's, it gives, it's great. I like it a lot better than just like alpining. Like, that's why I said yes to this. I like, I'd much rather have someone ask me questions and trying to answer them based on their context, then come up with like theory and just say like, Oh, this is the basic idea. So, uh, so I, I hated doing video, still hate doing video. And I batched that and I just don't, I still didn't like it. So it's like, it's like, it's kind of like, um, trying to think of a food I don't like. Um, let's, you know, I love broccoli, but let's say I didn't like broccoli, but I had to eat it. Well, it's not going to make it any better that I eat all of it at once. Like my monthly allowance of broccoli in one day, I still hate it. I'm just making it less painful, I guess. Um, what you're doing when I, when I was in that example, I was just making it more efficient, so it was taking up less time, but I still hated it. So it didn't stick. So it's like the batching, it's like, why are you batching it? Is it because you hate it and you're trying to get it over with? I think in many cases, yes, that's the answer you're trying to be. Uh, you, you just, you don't like doing it. So you're trying to get it all over with as quickly as possible. It's like, but I see, I see running my business is more like gardening. You can't do all of your gardening for the month in one day. It has to be spread out over time. And that's the way I like to do it. Um, the other thing is not that necessarily that you hate doing it, but your other, your second half of the example where you're like the lighting's already set up and all of these things that take time to do it, I don't hate them, but the conditions take a minute to get set up and now they are set up. So shouldn't I just batch the things? And, and the answer there is maybe yes. Uh, I don't, but I wouldn't call that batching. That's just being efficient.
Jonathan Stark: So I don't think batching is necessarily an efficiency thing. I think it's more like, I just want to, I don't want to eat my broccoli, so I'm just going to, but I will, I'll force myself to eat my broccoli, but I want to get it all over with at once. The other thing I can give you an example from my life. So every other Thursday I do like a video call for Ditcherville, Ditcherville live and you know, whatever, shave, take a shower, get, you know, get gussied up, have some lighting and get the camera set up and get everything set up. So then after that, if I was ever going to do like, um, let's say I was going to do more like lives on, let's say I was going to do more video than after that call I could right there. Maybe this is a good idea, right after that call, I've got all of these questions that people just ask me, and then I can take generic versions of a couple of those questions, and then just flip on YouTube Live. I'm already dressed, I'm already ready, the lights are already on, the microphone's already on, and I've got questions in front of me. I could just do that thing that I did with the VA, but instead of recording them individually and collecting them over time and scheduling them out, we had a big Kanban board of the progress of each video and where it was in the system. It's like, nah, who cares? I'll just like, here's three questions, I just flip the video on, everything else is ready, I might as well do it. So this isn't the same thing as habit stacking, but it does kind of remind me of habit stacking from Atomic Habits, where if you wanna learn a new habit, you stack it on top of an existing habit. Because you don't need discipline to maintain a habit, you need discipline to create a habit. Once the habit is created, you don't need that much discipline to maintain it. So if you always drink coffee at the kitchen counter at 10 in the morning, and you want to start a daily newsletter, you could try writing it while you're drinking your coffee instead of whatever you normally do while you're drinking the coffee, which is probably something that you don't need to do, like scrolling your phone, reading the physical newspaper, or whatever else it is. So if you're by, I'm assuming you're by yourself, let's say you're not talking to someone else, your spouse or something. So you can take an existing habit and stack something on top of it. So if I said, okay, every other Thursday, I do this Ditroville Live thing, right after that's over, I could start doing a YouTube Live thing where I answer a couple of questions in a generic, anonymized version of the questions I got from Ditroville Live, and then people will show up live and ask me more questions, and it could be like a half an hour thing where I just keep it really low maintenance and like that. So yeah, now I'm thinking of the, I tried to do LinkedIn videos, and that was just so high friction, it was ridiculous. So I like to keep things incredibly low friction. So I'm just doing the piece that I'm like, 90% of it is just the piece that energizes me, and I absolutely minimize anything that drains me, because I'm not gonna do it, I'm not gonna delegate it, it's just gonna make me stop doing the whole thing.
Pranav Kale: There are a few questions from ditchers.
How the System Came Together
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Pranav Kale: Are we good on time? Can we do like a rapid fire thingy?
Jonathan Stark: I have time if you do.
Pranav Kale: Okay. I think one of the first ones was, how did you actually arrive? I think it was Clements who asked it, how did you arrive at this particular system? I'm sure, I'm guessing there was a lot of trial and error involved, or maybe it wasn't, I don't know. So how did you actually come here?
Jonathan Stark: It's a hybrid of, just organically, so I was a big Getting Things Done fan by David Allen, and there's a lot in common, I have a lot in common with what he has people do, what he suggests in that book. But when I read it, it was much more physical world, paper world, it wasn't as much of a digital world, so, and I know there's new versions of that book, but I didn't read them. So that was probably, that's the first time I remember really thinking about time management, and that would have been, it was when I, yeah, it was probably 2006, so 20 years ago, and it might not have even been a current version of that book, I don't know where I got the book, I don't know when he started adding things like email inboxes and stuff to it, or social media. So that was a big thing, but I do disagree strongly with some of the stuff in that book, actually, like the two minute rule I think is a disaster, I don't think that's a good idea. This is mostly that, I'm also a fan of, there's this concept, it's not from EOS, but I think most people know it from EOS, of, what is it, it's like boulders, rocks, stones, pebbles, you know, like where you've got these big things, and if you fill your day doing the little things, you'll never have room for the big things. It reminds me of like packing the back of my car if we're going on a long drive, or going to the storage space or something, you have to put the big things in first, and then you can fit the little things in, but if you put the little things in first, you're gonna find that you have no room for the big thing. So you have to start with the big things. So that is in the back of my mind, that's like a thing that I believe in. So at the same time, that's more of a strategic, that's not like to do, it's not really, depends on how you think of big. So if the big thing is the important thing, then yeah, that is represented in my to-do list. If the big thing is a time-consuming thing, then to me, that's a project and you need to break it down into tasks. So it's always a short thing, like I don't have any tasks that would take,
The Segovia Principle
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Jonathan Stark: that I couldn't do in less than an hour, I guess is one way to put it. Another way to put it is, because I know people are gonna be like, well, what about deep work and what about writing? So, okay, so here's another thing that is always in the back of my mind. So there's a really famous, I don't think he's alive anymore, but there's a really famous classical guitarist, perhaps the most famous classical guitarist of this century named Andres Segovia. And he was just phenomenal, just absolutely unbelievable. And I remember reading an interview with him, they said, and this is when I was in music school and I was practicing like 18 hours a day, like every waking hour, I had that guitar in my hands. To the point where I gave myself like carpal tunnel syndrome, like it was ridiculous. And I remember reading this interview and they asked Segovia how often he practiced a day, and he said about an hour. And that was so opposite of the way I was operating that it blew my mind. And the interview is a long, long time ago that I read this, but it was basically, he was like you can, he's like people will play the guitar for five hours a day, but only about an hour of it is really moving the needle. Only about an hour of it is really making an improvement. And he's like, so just do that hour and get rid of the other ones. And that would just like hit me like a ton of bricks. And I still believe that's true. Like if I was gonna write, I don't think you could, like deep work for me is writing. So if I'm gonna do deep work, I can't do it for more than four hours. Like if I'm doing it for more than four hours, everything I'm doing after that is garbage. And four hours is pushing it. Two hours is more like, for me, 90 minutes to two hours of just writing is total bliss, uninterrupted bliss. I can get it done in less time. Like I can get done what I need to get done for the day in less time than that. But if I get into it, then I know I'll be, if I don't, if I have the time to do it, it'll expand to fill like 90 minutes to two hours and it'll be super fun and I'm gonna love it. But I could shorten it, but I'm just having fun. I don't know if I'm, I don't know if this is, does this landing at all, like, does it make any sense?
Pranav Kale: It is. It's already taking me to very interesting places. So I do want to touch upon this one particular thing. So when you said you were practicing for 18 hours a day, right?
Jonathan Stark: Yeah.
Pranav Kale: I wonder if it was, and this is like, you know, me taking this to like a psychological or a philosophical direction, but I think this is important because I do believe that a lot of, yes, there is like strategy and tactics and systems thinking that needs to be applied to productivity, but there is also like the emotional part to it. Because I can totally, and I put myself in this category that even if I've had a productive day and if I'm used to working, let's say in the evenings, but I'm taking the evening off, a tiny part of my brain would go, like, you know, will the gods punish me now that I'm like taking the time off? So circling back to you playing guitar for 18 hours, I wonder if it was genuine love for the guitar or there was like an element of fear there, an element of, I don't want to fall behind.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah. There was a lot going on back then. Wasn't fear so much as drive. So I get very obsessed with things, more so when I was younger and I didn't know what to focus on. So, okay, so I mean, anybody thinking that way, so it reminds me of technicians, the technician mindset from Michael Gerber's book, The E-Myth Revisited, where he says there's three personalities in a business, the entrepreneur, the technician, and the manager, and the technicians, and really all of them think without them, the business couldn't exist. But you actually need all three, but where each one of them thinks the other two are not adding value, they're the only ones adding value. Anyway, I work with a lot of technicians. I was a technician in the software space. I thought managers did nothing but waste my time.
Jonathan Stark: The boss didn't have any respect for what the boss, not the person who was managing me, but like the founder had no effect on my day-to-day work. They didn't do anything. And when I went solo, or when I went to the firm, or when I was going to quit a regular job and go work at an agency, I felt like if I just got better at my craft, software development, I would have a successful business. And I think it was the same when I was in music school. If I was just a God-level guitarist, I would be successful. Because what I wanted was, I wanted to have a career in music. I wanted to make a lot of money playing music. And I thought that the way to do that was to just be glued to my instrument and be a virtuoso. Even at the time, I should have recognized that that's dopey. That's a dumb way to think. Because there were hundreds of kids at the school who were way better than me and had graduated. They still lived around there. They were just like absolute gods. And they were still struggling. They're probably still struggling. You know what I mean? Being great at the instrument is not necessarily gonna do anything for you at all. There are other things you need to do. And in a business context, it's like being the best software developer out there, if you could even measure such a thing, isn't necessarily gonna do anything. That's just table stakes. It's not gonna get you business. So you have to do these other things, like marketing, for example. Or at least positioning yourself as something to someone. How did we get on this subject? You asked me why I was so obsessed with playing that much. And it was because I thought that that was the only path that I could see from where I was to being a rock star. And I was on the wrong path. Not only would I have hated being a rock star, because I don't like being interrupted, and you'd just constantly be getting interrupted if you were famous. It was a horrible goal. The whole thing was horrible. I just had fun. It felt fun. And I was like, oh, I would like to do this all the time, therefore I have to get paid because I won't have time to have a job. So it was just complete, like, 18-year-old fantasy. But I don't think, so here's the God's punish you, though. Like, oh, if I take the night off.
Pranav Kale: Yeah.
Jonathan Stark: If you trust your system, I think it will help with that.
Pranav Kale: I think so.
Jonathan Stark: Because when I look at, the thing that makes me feel like the gods are going to punish me is like when I skip two days in a row of a recurring daily to-do. That's, I'm like, that's the thing, that's where I'm like, you're a bad person. Like, you know you need to be doing this. Like, you know what's going to happen if you stop doing this. And you just missed two days in a row. So it's like, to me, that's the red flag. So if I did the thing, if I did the thing today, if I did all of the things today that I was supposed to do today, then I am off the clock. Like, I can do whatever I want. Like, I am, the feeling is almost, it's definitely that off-the-clock feeling. It's that, like, Friday night work is done that I used to have when, like, I waited on tables. Like, there was nothing to do. Like, there was nothing to think about after you got off a shift waiting tables. Like, you were done, you know? There's no, like, making up for anything you screwed up. There's nothing to study for the next day. You are off the clock. And that's how it feels, like, when my daily to-do, when all of my to-dos are done, it's just like, I almost don't know what to do.
Pranav Kale: Yeah.
Pranav Kale: Cool.
Adapting This to Your Personality
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Pranav Kale: And I think we'll wrap up with this one because I think this is a good one to end. This question comes from Carly, who says that, how do we, like, take this and shape it as per our personalities? Because it's clear that I cannot just take the Jonathan Stark productivity system and apply it to me because I might have different preferences. Maybe I don't like to write for 90 minutes straight. I like to write for 45 minutes, then, you know, do some shallow work for 30 minutes and then come back. So how do we sort of break it down to first principles and, like, you know, still do what, still have the best parts of your system, but adapt it to our context?
Jonathan Stark: Yeah. I do think that this system is, I think I said this already on this interview, but I think it's best for people, it's, like, this is not a system for someone who's working a nine-to-five job. You know, maybe for your side hustle outside of work, but, like, when you're, if you have, like, a nine-to-five job the way I did, which I only ever had one, really, you're just getting interrupted all the time and, like, you weren't really in control of your day and, I don't know, it doesn't, I don't think this would have worked in that situation. This is for people who can design their whole day. So that probably means self-employed and it probably means no employees also. It probably means you're not getting interrupted by employees. So it's probably, this is probably a soloist time management task tracking system. It's very, very flexible and it's based on how you feel at any given point in time. So if that is not enough structure for you, you're not gonna like it. But I feel like there are already tons of productivity systems that have lots of structure. This is very, this is for people who that doesn't work for. So it's very unstructured. It depends on, it's for maximizing how you feel. It's for maximizing your energy at all times and doing stuff that is gonna energize you in the moment and decreasing things that are gonna drain you. So I feel like for people that have, I mean, if you have extreme ups and downs in your energy level, that's probably a different, time management's probably not your issue. But in terms of making sure you get all of the things done that you need to get done to grow your business and no one's in charge of you and you've tried structured approaches and they haven't worked, then this seems like a really good fit to me. I mean, I don't know that much about ADHD specifically, but I have a sort of general understanding of it. And to me, this seems like the, I don't think she said ADHD in that thing, but I think there was another question that had something to do with that. And this seems perfect for that because to me, it's almost like productive procrastination. Like I'm always, I've always got something to do that maybe there's a thing that I probably should do right now because it's due tomorrow and I didn't do it yet. But when I procrastinate, I'll do one of the other things from the list. So it's like I'm always chipping away at the list, even when I'm procrastinating, which doesn't make, it feels weird. But I think that with ADHD, you like context shift a lot. And to me, this seems perfect for it because you can context shift like crazy and still get things done. And see that you did progress that day. Like you can see that you did. Yeah, so I guess I would say try it and see if it works. But if really structured calendar-based systems have never worked for you, then they never worked for me either. So this seems like an alternative.
Pranav's Takeaways
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Pranav Kale: Yeah, thanks. Thanks so much for this, Jonathan. I think the recurring themes for me, if I had to give you my list of what I took away, one would be, I think, ruthlessly cutting things, removing things, not depending on standard business advice on how you should run your business or live your life. Secondly, is being aware of your energy levels and making a note of that. Noticing how you're feeling and trusting yourself to pick the next task depending on what would probably energize you in that moment. Yeah, those are three. And I think maybe I'll put an outer layer of, you know, like, just take it easy. Like, you know, trust yourself, you know, it's okay. Like, I think that's what is emerging for me from this conversation.
Jonathan Stark: Cool. Hopefully it's helpful for you or someone listening.
Pranav Kale: Yep. Cool. Well, before we wrap up, can you tell people a little bit about your big idea services and where they can go to find out about that? Because I think it's great.
Jonathan Stark: Oh, thanks. Thanks for the plug. So it's a four-week sprint. I'm also sort of playing with a one-week version where I work with soloists, I take them through a process and because all of us have a lot of expertise. If I were to take your example, Jonathan, I know you have your hands in multiple places, positioning, publication, pricing, proposals, but all of them are unified by a single idea, which is hourly billing is nuts. And I think that's what I help my clients do. I help them find their one true big idea because then not only does it unify their content, but it also helps people know them by that one idea. So they can find out more about this at pranavkari.com, which is P-R-A-N-A-V-K-A-L-E dot com.
Pranav Kale: Great. Awesome. Well, thanks for hosting me on my own show.
Jonathan Stark: Thank you. It was fun as always.
Pranav Kale: Cool. We'll do it again sometime soon.
Jonathan Stark: Yep. Bye-bye.
Pranav Kale: Bye. All right, folks, that's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark and I hope you join me again next time on Ditching Hourly. Bye.
