Dean and Dan discuss the building blocks of procrastination.
Links:
StrategicCoach.com
DeanJackson.com
Transcript: The Joy of Procrastination Ep022
Dean: Mr. Sullivan.
Dan: Mr. Jackson.
Dean: Yeah. Here we are.
Dan: So far, and yet, so near.
Dean: That's right, exactly. I love it, it's been a long time.
Dan: For the listeners I phone Florida on telephone, but actually, Dean is just a few miles away from me right now.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Dan: And the weather's much nicer in Toronto.
Dean: Exactly, I've been watching everything unfolding here, and just right now, just before I got on, the streets of Miami are flooding. Looks like a river down there.
Dan: Yeah. So we're recording on the Irma hurricane, Hurricane Irma.
Dean: Yep.
Dan: Yep. Lots of clean-up to do after this one
Dean: Yes, exactly. You know, Dan, I've been thinking. It hit me yesterday. I've been thinking a little bit after we had our get together yesterday. You showed me your new tool for our ten minute block, so we got a lot to catch up on, on that, but it struck me about the constructs that we've been creating here. I was looking at the value of each of them, and thinking about starting with this idea of a 25-year vista as a foundation of things. To have that 25 year framework there, where we're on the right track, that we're involved in something that's fascinating and motivating and is going to be here 25 years from now. To have that kind of long-term vision gives you a sense of abundance, because it does feel like a long time away. And just breaking that down the way you've poured it out, is that 25 years is 100 quarters.
Dan: Yes.
Dean: That feels like a luxurious amount of time to get stuff done. It feels like we've got this abundance of quarters to work with. Then, the timeframe of using, within those quarters free days, focus days, and buffer days, gives a sense of purpose for looking at your calendar and blocking off the days. It feels like what we've stumbled on here now, with the ten minute blocks, 100 ten-minute blocks per day as hour allotment, feels like we're bringing an abundance of time into that daily level. That's when we can actually make things happen, and I've been experimenting with it for the last couple of weeks.
Really, it's amazing it's only been a couple of weeks since we really talked about it, but I'm finding an amazing difference.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Just putting it in perspective like that, of the turning down the magnification, I guess. You know, getting it down to this level of ten minutes feels like the right amount of time. I mean, it feels like a usable unit and it's not as intimidating or big a commitment as a full hour. Certainly, it's more than counting the minutes kind of thing, you can actually get something done in a ten-minute amount of time. It surprising, actually, as I've been experimenting with it.
Dan: Yeah, it's interesting, Dean. Sunday Mornings, Babs and I ... one of two things will happen on a Sunday morning. One of them is, we have a long-time massage therapist, Kim Porter, when we first got to know her. Kim was one of the very, very fortunate Vietnamese boat people that escaped when the Americans withdrew from South Vietnam, and then it all collapsed, the South Vietnamese government collapsed and the North Vietnamese came in. It was very hard on lots of families and individuals, and her family was kind of on a hit list.
They had ten children in the family, and they started moving them out a couple years before the fall, but Kim and her sister ... She had a sister, they're the two youngest ones in the family. They were the last of the children out, and they were ten days on the South China Sea, just the two of them. You know, with a huge overloaded boat of other refugees, and they ended up in Malaysia at a refugee camp. And then, gradually, however these things work, they ended up in Canada as their final destination.
We met her quite a bit of time after she had moved to Canada, here in Toronto, and we really liked her. I mean, Babs, she had a practice, massage therapist and nutrition practice when I first met her, so she's always been really big in massage. If you're around Babs, you're going to be around massage.
So, anyway, that's just a long context to get to my second point. Kim will come to the house, and Babs and I will both have massages. Or, if she's not coming, there's this great little French restaurant, one that you haven't been to. You've been to two of my French restaurants, but the third one is called Bonjour Brioche, which I think means "good morning toast."
It's largely a breakfast place, it's on Queen Street East. You know where the GO train tracks cross-
Dean: Yep.
Dan: Yeah, well it's right there at that corner. That's part of the ambience if the restaurant, is the trains going by. So, we were there. I got up this morning, and I always do a really intense interval training for about 20 minutes to 30 minutes if I'm getting up in the morning, because it jump starts my whole system. I was thinking this morning I was going to get a Vasper session. Vasper, for those listeners who don't know what it is, is a really quite remarkable piece of exercise technology that combines three or four different things, that ina 20 minute exercise, gives you about two hours impact of intense interval exercise. If you want to look it up on Google, it's V-A-S-P-E-R.
It takes about 20 minutes, 25 minutes, to do the session. So, we got back after breakfast and I was reading, and then I was keeping my eye on 12:30, because that's when our podcast is. It's about 11:30, 11:45 and I said I'll to the Vasper after the podcast, and then I said wait a minute, how many ten minute blocks do I have?
Dean: How many units is this? Right.
Dan: How many units. I said, I got four units, I only need two and a half units. I immediately went up, got my exercise clothes on, came down, did my Vasper session, had a cool down, and then I was just looking at a couple of things on the internet up until 12:30. It was interesting that in using your idea just for a week, my brain is already using it as an active tool for estimating do I have enough time, do I not have enough time.
Dean: That's what I've found, too. I find it most useful just like you're describing. I have a lot of in-between time, where ... I don't schedule things tightly back to back to back, because I don't like to feel that pressure of, I gotta wrap this up to get to this, kind of thing. I usually have some space between things, and this is the prefect kind of thing to recognize that time in between things useful.
When I look at it and say, yeah I can spend two units, or two and a half units here between this and comfortably be done with something.
Dan: Yeah. I mean, we've had some interesting talks, and this is our ... We talked last Sunday and then we had the ten times workshop on Thursday, and we chatted throughout the day. We had lunch yesterday, and we even had an additional after meeting, so we've talked a lot. Probably talked more this week about a particular topic than we ever have before.
We've been continually updating each other on new insights about this, and of course, this is all within the context and the framework of procrastination priority, which the joy of procrastination is big context for the podcast series.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: But, we were on number three last time, caused by your ambition. This is the mindset that procrastination is actually a function of the fact that you have ambitions for the future. Immediately, when you view the thing in the future, you're reminded that now, in the present, you see this bigger and better payoff in the future of something that you're ambitious about. But, you come back to the present, and all of a sudden you say ... Well there's two things. I don't have the capability to get to that thing, so paralyzes me, and I don't have the time because all my time is presently used up.
Can you talk a little bit how you think that the 100 block a day, and that's just if you used every waking minute, but I'm shooting for 30. I found after the first week of using it, I'm going to us 30 out of the 100 blocks for very specific, very intentional things.
Dean: Right. That's the realization that I've had. The way I feel about it now is that, thinking in terms of having the 100 blocks to use during the day, 100 ten-minute blocks is basically a 16-hour waking day. I've found that, not so much to sort of fetishize the tracking of every moment in ten minute increments, that's not at all what it's about. It's not about laying it down like that. It's about, in my mind, thinking and seeing how many of those ten minute blocks I can consciously and intentionally deploy during the day, as if it's like a step counter, in a way.
Right? I've got things that I want to do. I'm not counting the ten minutes as things that, you know, I woke up, and then I was reading, or surfing online, and then I had a shower ... you know, I'm not looking to track those kind of things because those things are going on. They're just living my life. What I'm most interested in tracking is the amount of those units that I can deploy in the furthering of my big picture here. For the three things that I want to get done to day, and the procrastinations that I'm kind of immediately addressing.
What you were saying, I like this idea of 30. If you can consciously deploy 30 or these units, that would be 300 minutes. That's five conscious hours addressing your top priorities, the things that you really want to accomplish in those times. And I find that a great aspiration because it removes me from the chronological, rigid time blocking, or the time, you know, I'm going to do this from this time to this time. I don't care when I do it, it's let's see how many of these I can deploy doing the things that I actually want to do.
Dan: Yeah, and you know, what really struck me as you were talking about that, you were talking about the tyranny of most peoples' time system. I would say, as I've talked to a lot of entrepreneur about this, the tyranny comes from two thoughts. One is that they've only had a good day if they've totally maximized all their time in that day.
Dean: Right.
Dan: And that, if there were teen minute periods, or half hour periods when they weren't doing anything, somehow they have failed because they've wasted time. I've just been conscious this week, because everything that I do in this type of setting within our podcast series, is going to be a subject of discussion with clients, when they come in. And increasing number of strategic entrepreneurs are actually listening to the joy of procrastination, so they'll talk to me.
They're going to ask me a lot of questions throughout the quarter, this has already happened. It happened on Friday, you were in on Thursday so they could ask you the questions, but on Friday people were already bringing up the topic. I said, "The biggest difference ... Somehow the notion of wasting time seems to have disappeared during this past week.
Dean: Yes.
Dan: I've got 100 blocks available to me, and the goal is to use 30 of those.
Dean: Right, which feels abundant and it feels like-
Dan: Yeah, well it does.
Dean: Yeah, and it feels like it's okay if I don't start right now, or it's okay if this takes a little bit longer. I can start that ten minutes at any time.
It's funny how our vista changes, right? I mentioned at the beginning, when we think about 25 years as the big picture, and then thinking about the 100 quarters. And then, breaking that down into free days, focus days, and buffer days; all of those set a context for everything. But then, bringing it down to this 100 blocks is really ... It's more than the novelty of it. I think that we, for me, have really stumbled on something that is a difference-maker. It removes the chronological element of it. Which we've seen most people have these attachments to the top of the hour, and the bottom of the hour. We kind of break it down into those kind of units, but it feels good to be able to deploy it at that kind of currency level.
Dan: Yeah. One of our conversations at lunch yesterday was if fish swim in water, human beings swim in time. In other words, the environment in which we operate from the moment that we show up as infants, is a time. We live in a time motion, and there's better swimmers that others.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: What I've noticed is that there's a lot of people who are ... I think of the Pixar movie, or Disney, I'm not sure what it was. I guess, it's the same thing now, but Nemo.
Dean: Yeah, right.
Dan: Nemo, and there's this stream off the coast of Australia, and if you catch it you can go a lot faster. I'm sure that water creatures have all sorts of tricks that allow them to use water better than humans, when we go in. It's a foreign element for mos humans, but what I'm noticing is, and you know, I have a tremendous sense that, for the most part, entrepreneurs are more skilled at time than people who, they're in a job and they don't feel like they have much control over the job.
Their time therefore, is very different. Kind of like their time isn't their own time. Their time is weekends, or their time is after hours.
Dean: Right.
Dan: Where entrepreneurs look at that same time as being, fundamentally, their property. When they're on top of their game, they're really treating it like their property. Sometimes they feel like they're in a job, but it seems to me that these considerations that you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, the different lenses, different vistas that we're giving to time, the reason why we can do it is because we own it anyway.
Dean: That's great. Yeah, it is. It's ours. That's true. That's one of those things, I loved that analogy of the ocean. That really is the one thing that we all have in common. Every single person is swimming in that same time motion.
Dan: Yeah, and I've always found this, kind of, magical thinking because playing with time has always been magical thinking. I've got thinking processes and strategic coach, where you can go back decades, and I've seen people with an exercise which is called the experience transformer, where I'll say this to the entrepreneur, "Think back to a really negative experience you've had." Could've been business, could've been personal, but it's more than 25 years ago. "I want you to think back and I want you to pick that one that, even today when you think about it, you still experience negative emotion over it." It's almost like there's something unresolved about this experience.
You oftentimes don't like thinking about it, because every time you do think about it, you still get little daggers, old pain daggers. I said, "I just want you to be willing for about 20 minutes, to go back and actually think through that experience. The first thing I want you to do ..." And I have a sheet of paper with a form on it. I said, "What was good about the experience? What worked about it?"
It's hard, usually, for them because when I remind them of it, they don't want to think about it because there was nothing that worked about it. But then, I take them in, and one of the first things that worked about it was that it was so painful that I never did it again. I said, "So what worked about it is that you never did it again."
Dean: Right, yeah.
Dan: You know. Once I can get them thinking, getting into well, let's see what was it ... One guys said, "Well I didn't marry her." I said, "Well that's probably good, right?" And he says, "Oh yeah, that was really good." Or it could've been a woman saying, "I didn't marry the guy." I work with them, and this takes some real work for them, and they write down, I can get them down to about five things that they can say, big things and little things.
They write it down, but you can see them shift because they've granted themselves, in their own mind, looking back, that there was something actually valuable and useful about what happened, which they had not seen before I ask the question. Then we spend an equal amount of time on what didn't work about it, which is very easy for them. They write that down.
So, this whole set of thinking can happen between ten and 15 minutes. And I said, "Now, based on what you've just learned about this long-ago experience. You can't go back and re-do that experience, but what can you extract in the way of lessons from that past experience, that could be useful in the future for you?" I give an example of that, and pretty much, all of a sudden they start writing down, next time don't do this, do this, don't do this. And they've taken this piece of unexamined experience, it's been unexamined for maybe 30 years, painful, you know?
All of a sudden, they've created a future lesson out of it, and this experience, suddenly ... And I get them to talk to each other about it, so they can share with them. People are fascinated with other peoples' experiences. Then, a half hour after we start, I say, "Now let me ask you a question. How many of you, that was a very painful experience, but now the pain is gone?" And every hand goes up. Then I say, "How many of you, that was kind of a worthless part of your experience, and now it has a tremendous value for you?" And they raise their hands.
I said, "Now, I have one more question. Could that not be true about all of your experiences, what we just did?" With all of them.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: And all of a sudden, Dean, it's really interesting, somehow ... You know, there's a lot of talk about people creating their future, but I said to them, "Haven't you just created your past by doing this exercise? And your past got changed in the last half hour."
So this is another time ability. Most people think about present time ability, and future time ability. I said, "You know you can do the same thing with your past."
Dean: That's really fascinating because Thursday, when we did the exercise of looking back at the game changer jumps, you could frame that as the most positive experiences that we had. The most positive decisions or changes that we've made, and that sounds no very valuable, but I think we can do that same thing.
I'm envisioning looking at right now, and looking 25 years back, which is where we started the ... I don't know whether that was the instruction, or that's where I ended up starting.
Dan: No, it's just at the beginning of whatever your entrepreneurial career was. Whatever the timeframe.
Dean: Okay.
Dan: That's, more or less, 25 years for you.
Dean: Yeah, exactly. So I looked back at that and I found that very interesting. Now, there are so many. I just picked the ... We did five or six, however many, five we did?
Dan: Five yes.
Dean: Yeah we did five, and I found that very insightful, and what I'm imagining now is what you just talked about. Looking back and identifying what were the 25 experiences that I would have loved to be different in those 25 years? Whether you call them negative experiences, or things that you would've wished didn't happen, or things that you would love to transform.
Dan: Yeah, well I think that the specific criterion that I put out there was that it's something that still feels unresolved. In other words, it's still got active negativity to it.
Dean: Oh right.
Dan: I had a lot of negatives things that happened, you know, physical injuries, competition failures I've had.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: But none of those much bother, I mean, I never think about them.
Dean: You win, you lose, it's not big deal. You get hurt, you heal and everything else. But there are some situations, I believe that our brain hangs onto painful experiences, certain kinds of painful experiences because the brain has a logic. There was something valuable that you should have learned in this experience, or you could have learned in this experience, that will be valuable to your future. And you haven't learned it yet, so we're going to just keep the pain level up every time you think about it. Until you extract the lesson from it here. That's something.
Dan: Yeah, I believe that we have painful memories until we've extracted the lesson. Once you've extracted the lesson, the pain disappears because you've moved the lesson from being buried in the past, to active in the future.
Dean: Yes. I like it. I'm definitely going to-
Dan: Psychiatry or psychology is not my framework, but I just have noticed that everybody I've tried this exercise with can do it. It seems to me that's within the ability, it's within the skill level and the capability level of anyone. I mean, if you lay out the instructions, it's their content. I don't know what they're writing down. They're filling it up with their content, but I've not run into anyone, yet, who can't do this exercise if they're given the framework and the process to work on it. The result is always the same. They feel, gee, that feels a tremendous relief. That thing always bugged me, and now it's not going to bug me anymore.
We're time traveling, again, what we're doing since we got into the procrastination topic, into the thing. You and I seem to be time traveling. And what's great about it, is we're doing it as a partnership.
Dean: I agree. Even just looking back at what we've ... It's been just over a year now, and I look at so many of the things that we've talked about, and the difference that they've made, and how they continue to build on each other. It's exciting.
Dan: Yeah. Here's another way a lot of the strategic coach participants know, that I'm starting a whole higher level of strategic coach. I've done this a couple times before. The ten times was a huge level, which we started a little more than six years ago, and now I'm going higher with one, which is called the game changer.
Since you gave me this new tool this week, I told the team after our workshop on Friday, I says, "You know, I'm a lot further ahead with this project than I thought I would be at this time." So, yesterday after I got back from seeing you, I cam home and I went back and I measured the crucial actions that I had done to get this new level off the ground, and it added up to 18 ten-minute blocks.
Dean: 18 units. Not so great.
Dan: It took me 18 units to get this project to its present state.
Dean: Wow. This the thing, it's like the more I think about this, these units are the gateway for getting something from our head out in to reality here.
Dan: Yep.
Dean: Especially when we're thinking about the thinking tools. I imagine that your 18 units included two or three units in an impact filter to start the whole process.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: So, I know that, that tool is-
Dan: Well, that was six of them. There were two crucial impact filters.
Dean: Okay.
Dan: And then there were two units attached to each of those impact filters because of followup meetings. So there were five units, 50 minutes, sections, which I was talking to a team and I was talking to an individual. But, it's been phenomenal, actually, the ... No, I lied.
Dean: Uh oh.
Dan: I lied. I didn't take into consideration the six units that were in each of the panel discussions.
Dean: Oh my goodness. Well, then there we go. That's 30 units all together.
Dan: Well, let's say 32 units. But that's pretty good. I mean, that's not even half a day.
Dean: Now, an interesting thing, Dan, that we have available to us as entrepreneurs is the wonderful opportunity to engage other peoples' units. I think when you really think about, you've got 32 units in this, and then how many other people units do you think are involved in this so far? More than 32?
Dan: Oh yeah. I would say, you know, it would be five times my ...
Dean: And that's an interesting thing, right? That's where things like doing an impact filter, this is where I think that we're going to find some really rich distinctions going forward, with adopting this as our metric system, the standard system. International for time units here is 100 units per day. We're going to find that one of the distinctions is deploying those units in a way that has an attached multiplier to them.
Creating an impact filter, and then spending units in a discussion about that impact filter with somebody else, who then, is going to, as a result of that impact filter, engage 5x or 10x those units in actually getting that thing out into the world, is one of the greatest multipliers that we have.
Dan: Yeah, and, I mean, it's really interesting. Something else is revealing itself here, to me as you were talking about because ... So, I did two workshops Thursday and Friday. You know, I'll go back. I'm going to go back and do a more thorough analysis of the number of units that have been employed here. That was just my first crack at taking a look at that.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: For example, you were in the workshop, so this is meaningful to you. One of the things that I was running into, because I have a way of approaching the world that resembles a strategy circle. It's the very first thinking tool I ever came up with, and what you do is you simply state a goal in terms a critique, or day in the future. In this case, it's April 10th of next year. And I have, and then I have a series of statements of what's true on that day. In other words, when we get to this day, we will have our first game changer workshop, and by 5:00 that night, this will be true, and this will be true, and this will be true, and this will be true. I've got this all laid out.
And then, I created a strategy circle about a month and a half ago, where I said, well what are the obstacles I have immediately that I will have to transform into strategies and actions if I'm going to have April 10th turn out the way that I want it to be? And that's straight strategy circle. You have a vision, and then you allow the obstacles to come up, and you transform the obstacles into actions.
One of the obstacles came up immediately was that entrepreneurs who are actually doing game changing activity, don't see that what they're doing is a game changer. They don't see themselves as game changers. That was one of my big obstacles. They're actually doing it, but they don't see themselves in that framework, and I said, until they see themselves as game changers, it seems like a foreign concept. And they can see other people being game changers, but they can't see themselves as being game changers.
That's where I came up with the notion of game changers so far. I went, then, back to identify five game changers, where it was their game that they changed. They actually changed their game five times. It's remarkable how that exercise has moved, I would say, easily two thirds of the room in the direction. I said, oh now I know what a game changer is.
Dean: Yeah. There we go. And then, having that vision to think, wow. I think what was fascinating about my reflection on the game changers that I chose was that, between the game changers there was no way to see the next game changer coming.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: It was only because of the one previous to it that set up the circumstances and the environment for the next game changer to present itself.
Dan: Yeah, I mean, Edison probably, and the other five or six people on the planet within a ten year period, came up with the light bulb. And he wasn't even the first, but he was, by far, the best marketer. He was, by far, the best entrepreneur. But, I'm always struck when I fly back to Toronto, how bright Toronto is at night. Of all the cities in North America, Toronto is one of the brightest cities I've ever see. They just have massive amounts of lights in the city. I mean, they have Niagara Falls, just 100 miles away, so they've got massive amounts of power coming in.
It would be, Edison finally figuring out the filament that actually lights up the vacuum bulb. That's phenomenal game changer. The light bulb was probably one of the greatest game changers ever in history, and then the experience. So, that's one event in time, and then there's another event. I'm coming back from Chicago on a Friday night, and we're coming in for a landing, and I'm just marveling at all the lights. That's kind of a game changer, too. You know? Edison could have no comprehension of what I'm experiencing.
Dean: Right, exactly. Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. And I'm the only one, probably on the plane, that's saying, "Jeez, look at Toronto, it's all lit up." What do you mean Toronto's all lit up? Of course Toronto's lit up.
Dean: Oh that's so funny, yeah.
Dan: But, think about how recent in human history, if you take the span of human history, how recent it is that we have these massively lit up cities at night time.
Dean: Yeah it's something. I was thinking about that with-
Dan: Florida's going to get a chance over the next week, to experience what it was like before that.
Dean: I think you're absolutely right, You're watching all of this; they're expecting to have six million people without power.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: That's something.
Dan: Yeah so, interesting to outline some sort of study projects, Dean. Between now and-
Dean: Yeah, what are you thinking? What struck me was what happened yesterday when you showed me the tool that you're using for the deploying of them.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: And. Actually I showed you, Dan, I'll tell everybody listening how we had somebody who listens to our podcast, and has really got a lot from the first time we talked about these 100 blocks, and sent me an email with a mock-up, offering to create an app to show the deployment of these 100 blocks. So, I appreciate that. I've been in our workshop, and then my mastermind, and then Gio's event yesterday, so I'll have a change to connect with them this week.
But, when you were showing yesterday, your tool for how you measure them with your aspiration of 30, that struck me as very parallel to the way I'm thinking about it. Looking at it as a step counter in a way. That I'm looking to see how many of the blocks I can deploy intentionally, with purpose, on things that are moving forward, that I really want to do.
And that's, I think, going to be a nice barometer for me to see the change there. Because, paying attention to something is going to breathe its importance in my mind here.
Dan: Yeah. Well, here. I'm just going to check something and maybe it's easier for you. I'm just check my calendar to see when I'm next ...
Dean: Okay.
Dan: Do you have your schedule there?
Dean: You know, I don't, sorry.
Dan: Okay, I'm going to be there in a second here.
Dean: You mean when our next podcast is, okay.
Dan: Yeah. I'm just looking because we can put a time frame on it, just.
Dean: Yeah. And see what we can do. I really-
Dan: Yeah, here's what I'm going to do. I can talk and click at the same time, here.
Dean: Okay.
Dan: What I'm going to do ... I'm a great believer in forming good habits.
Dean: Right.
Dan: I like forming good habits, so what I'm going to establish for myself is that I will do 30 ten-minute blocks for seven days running.
Dean: Okay.
Dan: And then I'm just going to keep notes of the insights I have, as I do those. So, it isn't so much what they're bing used for, it's just that I'm going to do 30 blocks for something minimum each day, for seven days in a row. And come up with five useful insights from that exercise. It might be a procedural insight, it might be an impact insight, and everything like that. You do it once, and it's one thing. You do it seven times in a row, where you hit a number, and it's a totally different experience.
Dean: I think what's really also going to play in this is the cumulative effect of even one unit every day, moving toward something that, the cumulative effect of those units is going to be big. Like, you look at the, even the game changer app.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: If you look at the less than one unit in really filling out and thinking about reflecting on your three wins for the day, and setting up your three wins for tomorrow, that one ten-minute thing done over a period of time is an amazing win on its own.
Dan: Yes, and it has been. Probably because I've been doing that for a number of years, when you brought up your 100 time blocks, I think my brain was so prepared because I'm doing something like that. During those 30 time blocks, I'm going to do my three most important things. I'm just laying one system on top of another system. Habitual system, yeah.
Dean: Right.
Dan: Okay. Dean, just to bring us back to the framework that we started here with the podcast.
Dean: Yeah.
Dan: How is this relating back to procrastination? What do you see as, that this is a valuable new perspective that we can attach back to the original procrastination idea?
Dean: Yeah. Well, I see in the immediacy of being able to take action on something. Like, as soon as I recognize, or bring up a procrastination. As soon as I say, "What have you got for me?" The immediate thought that you draw your attention to is, well, is this worth ten minutes? First off. If it's not worth ten minutes, then let's just dismiss it right now. But, if it is worth ten minutes, it's what can I do in this ten minutes? Can I free myself of this in ten minutes. That would be the first thing that I look at.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: And then a lot of things, if I'm expanding my idea of using these ten minutes that, if it's going to actually take me ten minutes to resolve something myself versus having to ask somebody or explain it to them to remove that, for me. It might be the best thing for me just to do it. That may be true even for some things that may spill over into two units. I found that just in the explanation of on of the findings that I had in our last episode about the baking situation.
I look at it that, it really is helping me see how to take immediate action on something. And the, also in my ability to estimate time. To get a sense of how long ten minutes is, because when you think about our most common unit of time that we think in, is the hour.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah, and I don't think that I've been used to, or skilled at estimating how long something takes. I think that paying attention, at this granularity, helps to hone my ability to estimate how long things take, or what you can actually do. Like, I've had the experience of knowing that you can really get a nice brainstormed, kind of, outline of something in ten minutes.
Dan: Oh yeah.
Dean: If you really think about it, even with the strategy circle, I had a few of the index cards sized strategy circles that you have.
Dan: Yes.
Dean: I don't know whether you call them a quick strategy circle, or whatever. You can get the basics of a strategy circle really done, to see whether something makes sense to continue. And in ten minutes, you can get a lot of clarity.
Dan: Yeah, yeah. I was just saying, I'm overhearing a conversation and people are saying, you know that Dean Jackson, he was never a very good hour guy. He couldn't handle the hours.
Dean: Watch him with these units.
Dan: Yeah. He's a good ten minute guy, but he was never a good hour guy.
Dean: That's so funny.
Dan: Yeah.
Dean: I'm like the short closer. The guy that comes in at the end of the game with half an inning left. Short reliever.
Dan: Yeah. Anyway, this is very exciting because I'm on the commitment board now for actually doing this. But it's going to be interesting because, at a certain point, this is going to overflow from the two of us out to other people. It's really interesting to see ho the system works. Of all the work that we've done, work and fun that we've done over the last year, this is where something brad new has been created. And, I think we'll find, each of us, that if we bring this up in conversation with other people, between our podcast, that we're going to find that there's actually an intriguing quality about this in other peoples' minds. I think there is a real tyranny, the way that the normal time system has been set up.
Dean: Yes. Yeah, I agree. Every time I have these conversations, Dan, I get inspired, is a really ... It's been a delight to continue and have these conversations.
Dan: Yep.
Dean: I love these, and what it's doing for both of us.
Dan: Yeah, I mean if I look back where I was September of 2016, and I look at what I'm doing now. How I'm thinking, how I'm communicating, how I'm getting things done, there's been as much a shift in one year, as any year in my life. I've got to say that this has been a terrific activity.
Dean: That's awesome. Cool, did you find when our next one is?
Dan: Yep. Next Sunday, it's next Sunday.
Dean: Oh perfect, that's the perfect amount of time. Good.
Dan: Okay, I hope you arrive back in Florida and find out that everything is secure-
Dean: I hope so, too.
Dan: Everything is secure.
Dean: Hopefully we'll have telephone power, I'll be able to call in.
Dan: Yeah, that would be good, that'd be good. Okay, Dean. Have a great week.
Dean: Thanks, you too. Bye.