 When you work and live in the same place, the line between work and between your personal life becomes blurred and that can bite you on both sides. When you're working it can be very easy to get distracted and to go indulge in, I don't know, playing a video game for a while or something, but also at the end of the day when you should be relaxing your computer is five steps away. You're listening to Barbell Logic, brought to you by Barbell Logic Online Coaching, where each week you take a systematic walk through strength training and the refining power of voluntary hardship. Welcome to the Barbell Logic Podcast. This is Matt Reynolds. I am with Thomas Frank, good buddy of mine. Thomas is man, you have run a massive YouTube channel for years and you started as a guy that really, well, maybe the thing that really made people figure out who you were was you had this leading YouTube channel for mostly students, college students and probably high school students, about how to study effectively, how to work effectively, how to be more efficient, and over time you are no longer a college kid, right? What are you, in your mid-20s? Yeah, 28, it's been several years since I was in college. Yeah, so you have started to transition more towards work productivity and things that are a little broader audience and you have focused over the last several weeks and will continue to focus for some time on what it's like to work from home and so you've worked from home for a long time. I've worked from home for a long time but so many of our listeners are working from home for the very first time and so I wanted to talk about what it's like working from home. So first off, thank you for being on the podcast. Absolutely. Thank you for doing this. Why don't you tell us really quick about the YouTube channel and how that sort of blew up and what were the things you focused on maybe over the last decade and what it looks like now moving forward. Yeah, so believe it or not, I've been on YouTube since 2006 which I believe was just a year after it launched. My brother and I started a channel when I was probably 13 years old. We had Ninja videos and dumb songs we put up there and then it was dormant for a long time and in college I was absolutely obsessed with doing as well as I could in my classes but also in the extracurriculars and I had come across Life Hacker. Everyone probably knows Life Hacker but I'd come across another one called Hack College which was basically the Life Hacker for college students and near the end of my freshman year they had put up this call and said, hey, our founders are graduating. They can't write for us anymore because we're a whole like student run thing so we need some more student writers. So apply if you want, send us a guest post proposal like a full article along with your resume and I thought that would look good on my resume. No intention to become like a pro blog or anything. Just like, hey, this would be a good extracurricular thing to have to show to employers I went and did something. So I spent the better part of an entire night writing this five productivity tips. I think it was five time management tips article just stuff that I had been learning. Sent it in, sent in a resume, sent in like a fully fleshed out LinkedIn page thinking I was a shoe in and I got a rejection letter. So my instant thought was, well, if you can't join them, beat them. So I had like a Wordpress blog and it was just a, it was a journal, just me journaling things that were happening in college. So I kind of had a little bit of experience with setting up a Wordpress blog and like, well, let's just do that again. But this time it's going to be a college tips blog. And I don't remember the original name I wanted, but it was taken. So I was like, you know what, I'm a management information systems major. So I'm just going with college info geek. Why not? And for about four or five years, it was just a blog and a podcast starting in 2013. So when did you, when did you start that blog? What year was it? 2010. Okay, the blog. And then ran it just as a small side project in 2012. Near the end of 2012, it went full time. Iowa full time. So you know, enough money to live with your roommates and pay your expenses in Iowa. We're Midwestern guys, we like that stuff. Yeah, I don't know if I would have made New York full time. That's right. You know, when your expenses are 800 bucks a month, that's right. It's pretty easy to go full time. How was your traffic at that point? So you're talking about two, three years in, I would assume traffic had jumped quite a bit enough for you to be like, I think I can do this. Yeah, I can't remember the exact numbers. I know like right now we're getting around 20,000 page views a day. At that point, it was probably like a thousand, 1500. Okay. But there were a few key articles that brought an affiliate revenue and things like that. 2013, I had been wanting to do a podcast for a long time. My friend Pat Flynn has the smart passive income podcast. You know, you've probably listened to that before. Of course. And I think in 2012, I had gone to a conference where he gave this great talk about why having a podcast is such a good idea. You feel like you know people, you feel like the listeners feel like they're hanging out with you. It's a much more intimate experience. And that was kind of like the light bulb moment for me. I needed to do a podcast too. But I was so afraid to speak into a microphone in my room on my own, like a crazy person that I waited six months. So 2013 is when I started that. And then 2014, I started getting the idea to do video. Now this was not so I could become a YouTuber. This was so I could basically spice up the blog. And my inspiration was the Fizzle guys. So Fizzle, if you don't know, it's like this kind of membership site for people who want to do the kind of work that you know, we do online content creator, and they have all these courses and at one point Chase from Fizzle was like, Hey, let me take a snippet of one of my courses and make it a YouTube video and just like make it the featured image of a blog post. So instead of just a static image, it's a video. So that was my inspiration for doing YouTube. I chose YouTube as a hosting platform, not really knowing the potential that it really had. And then as I started making videos, I realized, Oh, this is fun. And I started watching YouTubers with an eye towards what they were doing and the editing techniques they were employing and kind of got into it. And then I think like eight videos in one of my videos went viral, quote unquote on Reddit. And that was sort of the tipping point where I realized, Oh, YouTube is where I should be focusing my efforts because there's this gigantic promotion engine built into it where if you make something good and you get lucky, I guess, there is a machine there. That's right. That is going to promote it for you. You don't got to go to Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn and be spamming forums and all kinds of stuff anymore. It's like, no, just make something good and the algorithm will put it out for you. Yeah. What was that? What was that video, by the way? What's the first video that went viral? That was, I think it's video number seven or eight. And it's called, I don't feel like it is a mindset for amateurs. It's the whole idea of in the war of art, they talk about how professionals show up every day at a specific time, whereas amateurs wait to be inspired. So if you're a writer, say, and you're like, I don't feel like writing today. Well, if you're an amateur, you would let that kind of just halt you. But if you're a professional, you'd say, well, I don't care that I don't feel like writing because I write at 8 p.m. or 8 a.m. every day, whatever hour it is. And the funny thing is that video was a response to, or I guess the video was made because I didn't have time to get the bigger video I was working on that week out because I was on a strict professionals deadline every Friday. I'd make a video. So I'm like, well, I got to put something out there and threw it together, put it out there. And I guess it just struck a chord. That's amazing. So you won't say this. So I'll say this, but Thomas is. So your video, your channel on YouTube is called Thomas Frank. It's your name, right? Thomas Frank. And you've got, you're pushing 2 million subscribers, 1.8 somewhere in that ballpark. It's a big something like that. It's a big channel. And again, you won't say this, but the quality of your videos, you would be hard pressed to find any videos on YouTube that are higher quality than your videos. And I know they weren't like that. They weren't that certainly you and your brother sword fighting with samurai swords at the same level. But over time, you can see that you really cared about quality over quantity. And I think it's one of the reasons that you stuck out. And so a lot of my leadership team knows about you. You're actually a client at BarbiLogic. I coach you. It's been a blast, but they know you not because you're a client at BarbiLogic. My leadership team knows you because of the quality of your YouTube videos. And while you're making videos about productivity and, you know, we've looked at a lot of your videos about studying and college kids and things like that. It's really the style of your video that caught us. Like it's super eye catching, very high production value, very efficient videos. You don't do 40 minute long videos. They're pretty tight and packaged and everything that's in them is sort of valuable information. And so, yeah, we love your channel. And so it's been awesome to sort of build that friendship over the last couple years and talk through those things and talk through training. And so now you have, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, you've started to then transition from that college info geek styled videos to more professional videos for really not just college kids, but for the working class and for people who are lifestyle things, productivity things. What does that look like today? And how is that morphed over, say, the last year or so? To me, it's less of a hard division than I think a lot of people kind of imagine. And I think the reason for this is people who haven't gone through this particular career path tend to see a bigger, more clearly defined division between student life and work life. And as somebody who went through student life and then transitioned into work life focusing on students, I realized that a lot of it is very, very similar. The exact same techniques for focusing and staying on task apply to homework as to whatever work you're doing, the exact same planning techniques apply. All this stuff is very, very similar. So for me, a lot of it is just an issue of branding, not having college info geek in the header or at the end of a video title, not always calling out my book on earning better grades as my opt-in at the end of the video, which I don't have an opt-in for working people as such. So I just send it to my music channel sometimes. I bet it's coming though, right? I wouldn't be surprised if there's something in the pipeline at some point. I mean, I guess my tough thing with that right now is at some point, I would like to make actual products for a broader demographic, but I focused on Skillshare over the past few years just because their barrier to entry is so low for people needing to pay and the classes I wanted to make there were what I thought were very fundamental material and I didn't want to lock them behind a pretty big paywall. So at some point, I may make more professional focusing content where there is an actual sales funnel and I host the courses myself. Anyway, so for me, it wasn't so much like, all right, I am now too old for students. I'm not doing that anymore. It was more like just gradual discussions I had with Martin, my podcast co-host, like, hey, we're still hosting a podcast called College Info Geek and we're nearing 30. What are we doing here? So I've just been making subtle shifts over time, also realizing that I personally don't have a huge passion for talking about study tips anymore because I don't have to study a whole lot anymore, you know, research, but I don't have to take tests. And then you probably see an aesthetic shift in the videos and I think that was less of a response to, you know, wanting to have a more professional image for a wider demographic and more to just coinciding with me getting very, very interested in gear and filmmaking techniques, probably October or November last year. When I went to see my friend Matt Diabella and interviewed him about his process, actually, it's kind of what kicked it off. It seems like you can actually see and I think when you do things like podcasts and in-depth, weighty, high production value videos and you do them consistently for a long period of time, you can see that that content is really a reflection of the person that's making it, right? And so it's probably a pretty good reflection of, like, if you went back and watched all your videos for the past five, six, seven years, up till now and you listened to your podcast, you could see and feel the morphine that you're going through, the transition process that you're going through from college student to professional to, like, this is where my interests are. And so it's hard to make content about things that you're not super passionate about anymore. And like what you were passionate about three, four, five years ago, you might not be today. But I would agree that a lot of this stuff has got a lot of carryover value that when you're a student, your job is basically being a student. And so working efficiently and all of those skills to doing that well probably 80, 85% of them carry over to the workplace. And so much of what is done as a student, like the real work that's done as a student is actually not done in the classroom, but is done at home in the library on your own. We are in a unique place now with the coronavirus and everybody's in quarantine that the vast majority of the workforce in the United States is not at work. But in fact, if they're working, they're working from home. And so I want to really focus this podcast on your work from home series and the things that you're starting to flesh out for people. Because I think it's incredibly practical. So your very first video you came out with, it's been a couple of weeks ago now, was on having a setting up a specific workspace to facilitate efficient, focused, dedicated work from home. And that's that's much easier for people at the office, right? Lots of people walking into an office, they shut the door, they sit at their desk, like this is where I work. And they separate themselves from that at 5pm or whenever and they go home and like work is at work and home is at home. And now work is at home and home is at home and everything's at home. And so what are some of those practical takeaways for people if you want to go through even sort of a systematic progression in the same in the same way and chronologically that you did in your videos, what are the things like practical takeaways that people can do to to efficiently set up a workstation at home that is sort of separate from the rest of the stuff that's going on? Yeah. So I guess a couple of the issues that I identify with home versus work. Number one is separation from everything else that involves your personal life. And this is kind of the toughest thing for me is when you work and live in the same place, the line between work and between your personal life becomes blurred. And that can bite you on both sides. When you're working, it could be very easy to get distracted and to go indulge in, I don't know, playing a video game for a while or something. But also at the end of the day when you should be relaxing, your computer is five steps away and your phone's in your pocket. Maybe you have your email app installed on your phone. So the lines can start to blur and it can result in a lack of efficiency when you're working and then a lack of relaxation and that needed rest and reset time when you're done working. And then the other thing is the presence of people who have a different kind of relationship with you because your family has a different kind of relationship to you than your coworkers. Now you mentioned like being able to go into the office and close the door. Maybe a lot of people listening to this podcast have that ability, but I know a lot of my younger colleagues are getting hired at companies that have open office concepts. So a lot of people even go to the office like there is no privacy, but at least your coworkers are there in the same context as you are. They're there to get work done. So you may struggle with some interruptions. And I think some of what we'll talk about when with regards to working at home would apply to an open office concept and dealing with it, but it does present an issue. But when you're at home, it's family, right? So it might be kids, it might be a spouse, somebody who doesn't really innately know that you're like you're in work mode because you're home. It's a natural just inclination. Oh, he's at home. Let me talk to him. So the couple of things I went over in my video where you want to gain separation and isolation. And the way that I do that is just having a room that is a dedicated office and it looks like you're in a dedicated office room yourself right now, which is great. You can close the door. You can set it up to be a single purpose workspace. Now I don't mean single purposes and like you have to have one room for every different task to do, but this room is the work room. I don't play in this room. When I'm done for the day, I will go downstairs and if I'm going to play a video game, I'll do it down there. I'll read here. I'll research here. I'll write here, do emails here that like that's about it. So if you can create a space that sort of communicates to you, puts you in the context of I'm in work mode, that's going to help you out and staying on task and feeling like you're in work mode. And then if you can be isolated from other people or at least set up some systems that allow you to come to an agreement that you are in work mode and hence isolated, if not by space, but then by an agreement, that is also very helpful. So the biggest thing that I wanted to talk about in my video is like, not everyone has a dedicated room to turn into an office. Some people live in like a one bedroom apartment or something like that. So the thing that I would do if I was lacking in space, which I have been at that point in my life several times is number one, try to set up at least a desk that is not facing those things that represent your personal life. And if you can't set up a permanent workspace, just make a part of your routine, like get at a folding table, set it up every day, put your laptop on it. And that actually has a nice benefit because at the end of the day, you put it all away and you can't really work anymore. That's right. I mean, I guess you could use your phone, but your workspace has been put away for the day. And there's this concept called the 22nd rule. It's in Sean Anker's book, The Happiness Advantage. 22nd rule refers to this other concept, which he calls activation energy. To start doing anything, there is some required amount of activation energy, which is a combination of energy and the time that it takes to get into it. So my guitar is right there. If I want to play guitar, the activation energy is incredibly low. I can pick it up in two seconds and be playing it. But if it's in the case with the humidifier stuck in the strings, packed way in my closet, very high activation energy to start playing the guitar. So because guitar is a great habit to be in and because I want to become a better player, I want to lower that activation energy as much as possible. And the 22nd rule kind of refers to this arbitrary benchmark of make it take less than 20 seconds if it's something you want to be doing more of. On the flip side, make it take more than 20 seconds, make it as inconvenient as possible if it's something you want to be doing less of either altogether in the case of a bad habit or at a specific time of the day in the case of working past your designated work stop time. So that's a kind of a nice benefit there. I love that stuff. I was going to say on a personal note, I started working from home five, six, seven years ago. We homeschool our kiddos, my wife's a stay at home mom. And I thought I had this idea when I sold the gym and I went from working at the gym to do an online coaching at home that I had an idea what homeschool looked like. I was wrong because I wasn't at home. And so I thought, well, you know, everybody is like working quietly at the dining room table. We've got this big dining room table, like a big sort of conference table that I built and it's giant. And I thought there's tons of room and we can all just sit down and work together as a family and I'll be on my computer and they'll be done. No, no, no, no, that worked not first off, not at all. And that lasted about eight days. And then I was like, okay, I can't do this. And I went out and bought a desk and put it in my basement and set up the dedicated workspace and I had the thing. And so and here that and then and then you have to have those maybe uncomfortable conversations with your family sometimes that are like, hey, I had to teach my family what a Pomodoro was all of our listeners know what Pomodoro's are and you're a big fan of those as well. Like, hey, I'm doing a Pomodoro, which means do not unless the house is on fire, you are do not interrupt me. And then I've, I've taught my family, we often will do Pomodoro's together. Now my, my kids, I'm downstairs right now, my kids are upstairs doing homeschool. And sometimes we'll all kind of yell at each other like, Hey, let's do a Pomodoro. Here we go. We're going to start in 60 seconds. And we start the and we do it together and then nobody speaks, right? And so it works really, really well. I have the advantage of having an office here. I have a library upstairs. The library upstairs is half books, half whiskey, which is fantastic. And so I, I have this thing at about two in the afternoon. I don't want to be in this office anymore. This office feels more corporatey to me. I'm doing more of the urgent, urgent and important jobs, but not non urgent and important, not creative jobs, not building. So a lot of times I will, I will make that context switch. And I will do my afternoon work up in the library. Maybe I have a drink of whiskey. I have got, I've got nice leather chairs and I've got good books and I've got good desk and I'll go up there and I'll do the creative work up there. Because down here doesn't feel creative. Down here feels like this is what somebody, a CEO is doing and sort of kind of running the business and the ins and outs and the X's and O's and so it works really well. But I love, my favorite part of your video was actually the part you just talked about was for the people who live in the small apartment who don't have an office. And you actually show like you're setting up the card table, like you set up the card table, you put the laptop down, you face the wall, you're not facing the TV, you don't see the family and you sit down and you get your work done. And then when it's over and you decide like, hey, the work day's over, you fold up the card table, you put it back in the closet, you do it. And you, again, you've got this sort of transition from work mode to family mode. And I think that's, that's extremely valuable for people to learn how to do. There's probably a ton of people right now that are trying to figure out what that looks like for them. And they haven't quite figured out the balance there yet. Yeah, I used to do it in my apartment, even though I didn't have to. I had a dedicated, like our two bedroom apartment, one of those bedrooms was my studio. And my editing computer was in there, but I hated writing in there because I had blackout curtains over the giant windows. And my computer could only go right in front of those curtains, which meant that opening them was basically just never going to happen. You know, and I had to have it blacked out because they would change the light levels of my videos and make very jarring cuts. So I'm like, I don't want to write and do creative work in this dingy, dark editing cave. And I still don't like my basement is a studio, my editing computer is down there, but it's there's no natural light. So I don't do creative work down there. It's in this office. But yeah, I mean, if you even if you have like a home office, like there's always the potential to set up a little mobile workstation somewhere. That's right. You had talked about context switches and how the first part of your day is sort of the more corporate CEO hat on. You've got the white filing cabinet in the corner. And then the rest of the day is up in the library. Well, that's an instance of being able to context switch by going to a different location. I love doing that, especially when, you know, we're not in quarantine. I can go do one part of the day's work at one coffee shop and then take a walk to the other coffee shop. But for me, the big benefit of doing that is not so much the new location. That is nice. It is the break in between where I get to go for a walk and go somewhere. And at least for most people listening to this at this point in time, I believe you're still allowed to go outside and go for a walk. You have to put a mask on. But that's a big way that I context switches. I'll get something done and I'll just go out for a walk around the block around the park or do something or go do some pull ups in my door frame thing. Just get myself out of the office for a little bit and take a short break. Yeah. We're the same way. It's interesting how I spent a lot of time thinking about, I'm sure you do too, how to avoid unintentional context switches and then how to do intentional context switch as well, right? So you think about that, doing Pomodoro's in the same place, you know, one of the things you talk about in the podcast that I'm a huge fan of are good headphones, things that block out our senses to help us be better at ignoring. And so I've got, I would be embarrassed for my people to know how many of my listeners to know how many, how many headphones I have. So, you know, I mean, I've got, I've got the Sonys and the Bose noise canceling headphones to go over the ears. I've got two or three different sets of the podcast headphones. I've got the Jabber elites that go inside my ears, the earbuds. I've got all because I have different reasons for using some of those things. But for me, I'm pretty good at not getting distracted with vision. And some people aren't, right? Like I can go work in the coffee shop or I could go work in the, at the park, but it's the sound. I have to put on some to block out the audio and that's for me. And so that helps me avoid those unintentional context switches so I can stay in work mode and that kind of deep work, that kind of Cal Newport sort of stuff. I love that. But then there comes a time during the day where I'm like, okay, this has to end and I need a true context switch, a true change of environment because I'm changing who I am. And then I do the same thing when I'm done with the creative work, when it's time to go into family mode, to dad mode and to husband mode. And one of the things that we'll often do, we're pretty early to bed early to rise. So then we're also relatively early dinner eaters. So we eat dinner at five or five 30 or something. And so we like cooking dinner as a family. So we, we turn on the Alexa and we turn on music and we listen to maybe it's classical music or, or bluegrass or something that we enjoy and we cook together as a family. And that becomes a transition period out of work, out of homeschool mode, out of those things and into like, hey, it's family time. Now we don't work, we keep our phones put away, phones are facing down on the counter on the other side of the, of the room and it works really, really well for us. And so it's, all of those I think are good practical takeaways for things that you have to think about. How do I avoid the unintentional context, which is that take lots of time, right? That's just five, six, seven minutes of distraction all of a sudden. Like it takes me a long time to get back into deep work. But then how do I do the ones that I really want well? I think they're important. Well, you brought up sound and I think it's something that people don't often consider. But unlike sight, sound is an involuntary sense. It's always on. And you don't really get to choose whether or not you perceive sound unless you block it. I think about this a lot with my fiance, because she is a visual artist and draws a lot, whereas I'm a musician and I make videos. So unfortunately, for two people who are always in the house with each other, my form of art, she has to experience whether she likes it or not or block it out. Yeah. So like the way I've adapted to this is vocal practice. I have to go up in my closet and do it into shirts. That's funny. Otherwise she's going to have to hear it, or guitar. Weirdly, she doesn't care about the guitar as much. Maybe that says something about my vocal quality. There you go. But for her, it's like she's on the couch on her iPad. I don't see it unless I physically walk over there and go see it. So getting a good pair of headphones or at least a sound isolated space is kind of an important thing. And most people don't have a sound treated space. So headphones are the good way to go. That's right. Let's transition a little bit into from the workspace to the actual productivity of the work itself. And that was the next video you put out about things just about how to be efficient. And you give all kinds of practical examples there about how to do lists. You've got lots of videos on your channel about this sort of thing, about Pomodoro's and how to do lists well and apps that do lists and great ways to do it and how to prioritize what to work on first. And so let's start with some of the most basic things that people can start with today who have maybe never worked from home. And now they've got the space that they can work at, but they're used to being this dedicated I drive to the office and I go to work and I do this thing and or my or even the office schedule dictates dictates the daily schedule. I've got to be there at eight in the morning, I take the lunch break at noon, I get off at five. What do things look like when you get to home? What are some of the big practical takeaways that our people can can take that are working from home for the very first time? Yeah. So that second video is about planning and prioritization. I've got another video coming out about pure motivation and productivity staying on task. But the big problem is when you work at home, every decision becomes yours. And this is something that I think most people experience to some degree in college transitioning from high school to college. There are no parental figures anymore. You do at least have a class schedule. When you work at home, there is no class schedule. So seemingly mundane decisions. And these are things that a lot of people would say like, Oh, you know, if you can't deal with that, like what's wrong with you, you're not productive at all. But a lot of people struggle with the fact that every single decision becomes theirs. When do I wake up? What do I wait for breakfast? In what order do I do things? Do I shower first? Do I eat breakfast first? When do I start working? Where do I start working? There's all these things. So I like to divide myself into kind of two characters. There's the CEO mode or the planning mode. And then there's the robot mode. So I will go into a planning mode and plan what I'm going to do at a different period in time. So that way I can then go into robot mode and my job becomes to execute upon the plan set by my prior self. And for me, one of the biggest things is making myself accountable to some kind of external system. In fact, working with you as a coach is incredibly valuable for me. I mean, you probably saw my workout came in at like 730 or 8pm last night. I woke up. I made breakfast. I had a lot of work to do. I was working until about 730 in the evening. My brain said, I don't want to lift today. I've been doing pretty good. I could skip. But wait, if Matt doesn't see those videos, he's going to yell at me. So I'm going to work out. So I worked out. And the fact that I have to send you videos means I can't sandbag. I can't only do two sets or do one set. I have to do all three because the videos have to go to you. It's like, it's a perfect system of accountability. So everything for me is like, how do I get accountability and doesn't have to be to another person? Now, if you're working from home and you're not working for yourself, you probably have a boss, which is great. But I have a whole career's worth of experience knowing that you can get the work that the boss expects to get done done, but you can do it in an unhealthy way, such as waiting until like the day before the deadline to do all of it. That's right. And I mean, I'll be honest, I'm kind of terrible about this. I'm a very deadline, crunchy kind of person. So if I can get some sort of system there, whether it be a plan, like a daily plan that I write out on a whiteboard every day with three or four tasks in the order I intend to do them, that's helpful. If I can, you know, talk to a friend who's also working at home and be like, Hey, what are you doing today? I'm going to do these things. I'll tell you at the end of the day when I get them done. That helps too. Uh, for planning and prioritization specifically, the main thing I would say is try to keep your list limited. It's very easy to just dump everything you think you're going to get done onto the task list. And then what a lot of people find is they are not getting anywhere near the amount of tasks done as they planned. And this creates a gap between your intention and your ability to do things. And if you let this gap go on for too long, you no longer understand what your ability is on any given day. You just have these outsized intentions and constant disappointment. So you want to be constantly making observations of when that gap manifests itself and then working to close it over time, either by working more efficiently, more actions per minute, more hustle, or by scaling back and being a little more honest with yourself. Yeah. Yeah. That self honesty, I think is a huge piece to argue even maybe from, I don't think I'm wired quite the same way you are with this sort of stuff. I'm not, I am not a procrastinator. I probably was when I was a student. I wasn't crazy about being a college student and whatnot. I just wasn't passionate about it because I'm passionate about my job that I do now. I am, if I'm not careful, I will make lists and I will not be able to relax and transition into husband and father mode. If I have things hanging over me. So I can't procrastinate because I can't relax. And so what I do and I noticed what you said in the video a lot of times, you make this sort of list of a clearly manageable list, three, four things that you can manage. And you talked about tackling the most important one or the biggest, most audacious one first, because that's the one that really makes you feel like you accomplished something that day, right? Yeah. And I do something very similar, although what I do a lot of times, I get up super early in the morning and I've got a list that I work through every day pretty quick, pretty efficient at building the list. I will spend my first hour of the day, which is often like 5am to 6am, knocking out as many of the small things as I possibly can, but I only give myself an hour. And so when it gets to, if I get about 5.30, it'll be 5.30 to 6.30. But my first hour of the day is knocking out small things because I feel like, oh man, I knocked out 13 things in the first hour. And then I move on. And then there's also sort of part of this, like I'm waking up. There's a little more distraction. I'm making coffee. And then by the time I'm an hour in, I'm really in work mode. And then wham, I hit that big thing. Like, here's the thing I have to work on and really, and then I get that done. And now I go, okay, now I've had the, I've completed the biggest, most important thing for the day and 11 other small things. And so I feel pretty good. And it's 10am. And I'm like, now what do I get to do? Well, what that does for me is that, again, by lunchtime or shortly after lunchtime, it allows me to transition into creative mode because I can't go up to the library and do creative mode and concentrate on building the business and how are we going to expand and reaching new markets if I've got a bunch of those urgent things on the list. And so it lets me do both. I think, again, I think one of the great takeaways there is to establish the system that works of lists and accomplishing and being accountable to something, whether it's that list, whether it's an app, you've got lots of apps that you talk about about productivity apps and list apps and things like that. I love that stuff. I'm constantly doing that. And I love the feeling of checking off something. Like, it feels great. Yep. And so that's why I use a white board. Yeah, it's what I like checking it and making the shape. Yeah, me too, me too. It's funny how that the apps have actually gone that way, right? It's interesting how the apps that few years ago apps didn't often have automatic, you know, like that now it's got to kind of fill in the bubble with the checkmark. And it wasn't like that a few years ago. And I think the apps realize like people, there's something satisfying about touching that little bubble and be like, it's, it's over. I filled it in. So yeah, go ahead. I was just saying, I love your tip about giving yourself a just an hour to do those small tasks. Because that my big thing is if I do the small tasks, I have a way of spawning them, either spawning more tasks out of them or making them way bigger than they should be. I mean, yesterday I was like, all right, gonna clear my inbox. One email was somebody asking me questions about YouTube sponsorships. I wrote him a book. Right. And then after that, I'm like, hmm, I wonder if this could be an interesting business relationship. So I like started up a conversation with my agent and like, Hey, you know, let's evaluate this creator and like see if we want to talk to them. That took like an hour. Sure. Sure. So, you know, one email. Yeah, to me, nothing is more frustrating. The most frustrating days are when I get to the end of days of the day, I feel like I've literally worked my butt off. And I'm, and you know, my wife is like, what did you do today? And I'm like, I don't know. Like that's incredibly frustrating, right? Like, yeah. And even for us, I was thinking about this when I was watching, watching that second video that you made, we are very much an output oriented business. I actually don't care about your action. I mean, your actions lead to the outputs. But I think I've used this as an example, like 10 times on my podcast at some point, it's going to come back to bite me, but I don't think he's hurt yet. I have an uncle, Uncle Danny, I'm going to call you out. So this guy works his butt off all day every day and has never accomplished anything in his entire life for like 40 years. He's the guy that decides like replace the drywall in his house tears all the drywall out of his house. And like two years later, there's still no drywall in his house. Well, like that's to me, that's worthless. Right. And so yeah, as, as a, as a boss and CEO, one of the things I'm, I'm constantly preaching to both myself and my, and my leadership team, especially my staff, is that output is what matters. I, and I, I don't pay hourly way. I don't pay anybody hourly. I hate paying hourly. Hourly encourages slow work. I'm paying for output. We get things done. And if my leadership team who makes, you know, people that are make good salaried money can do everything and accomplish all this stuff on 20 hours a week, beautiful. If it takes you 60 hours a week, that's fine too. But what we're doing is we're doing output. And so to me, that action, I mean, you, you can be very, you can get caught up in the busyness without actually accomplishing anything. And that's, you know, if you work on a video for three weeks straight, but you never post the video, what good was it until you get that video up? And so that's, or in my case, I will, I will focus on elements of the video that don't really matter. Right. Like, oh, hey, the easing curve in this movement of the transition, it doesn't please me enough. There's not enough motion blur in it. And then my fiance will be like, nobody cares. No one's going to notice that with you. Right. Nobody cares that your EQ dip is at 400 Hertz instead of 600 Hertz. Right. No one cares. And it's very hard for the artist and me to understand that. Yeah, that's good. So we've talked about where you set up your space and how you sort of create some separation between your workspace and the rest of the world. And we've talked about some of those strategies. And the best thing to do is to go to your YouTube channel, the Thomas Frank YouTube channel, watch those last couple YouTube videos and then explore for a while because you got some great stuff on there. And again, I've watched a ton of even like the college style videos that are, I can pick up the carryover and the, you know, the theory and the philosophy that you're sort of, we're preaching at that time to 19, 20 year old kids still works tremendously for me. So there's lots of stuff to explore there. What you said you're, what is the next video that you're about to launch the video number three in the series? Yes, the next one is going to be the just the best remote apps. And I need to figure out how to make that video without listing a zillion apps because man, I seem like every day I go to product time, there's something new for work for home. People are stepping up, which is great. So it may have a companion article that lists off some more. And then the last two in the series are going to be one on general motivation, staying on task productivity, and then a work life balance episode. Awesome. I think it'll be pretty important. Awesome. I love it. Please go see like we've kind of, hopefully we've sort of wet your appetite for this sort of thing working from home and being more efficient. And here's the thing I tell my kids all the time and with homeschool, especially I've got one that's 15. And the curriculum that we use is incredibly difficult. And so it's a lot of work for her. But I remind her that for most of us, the work is finite. And the more efficient you are at it, the more time it opens up for the things that you really want to do the things that are truly important, but not urgent. And so I remind my kids frequently like, hey, if you get up early, and you hammer the homework, the schoolwork, then often by lunchtime you're done and you can go do whatever you want. You want to go play with your friends, you want to have them over to the house, you want to go play video games, you want to watch Netflix, you want to watch YouTube, all of those things are now available to you. And so I think that is one of the great takeaways from this is that the more efficiently we work, the more time we have to spend on the things that we really loved on our relationships with our family and our friends and those things that really build value for us. Maybe that's reading books that are outside of work, maybe it's reading fiction books, maybe it's whatever those things that we do that bring us value. I want to create as much time as I can for those things. And that's why I think I'm crazy about studying all these things like you about work efficiency because I want to get the stuff done quickly. Absolutely. I love it. Dude, thanks for being on the show. Again, Thomas Frank, Thomas, what's the easiest way to find you? Obviously your YouTube channel, what else do you want our listeners to know about you? The easiest way is probably to put my name into Google. Yes. But then don't click on anything about the older Thomas Frank. There we go. Because there's another well-known Thomas Frank. YouTube.com slash Thomas Frank is the YouTube channel. And then Twitter, Instagram, those are both Tom, frankly, or thomasjfrank.com. Are you still doing a podcast? Yeah, yeah. So we are going to end the College Info Geek podcast as it is so named at episode 300, which I think is the end of May. And then we're going to roll right into just a name change. And we're going to keep going. Nice. I want to change the name so we have more freedom to talk about things that don't necessarily have to do with productivity in student life. I want to talk about like, hey, we set up a video editing server. And here's the whole experience behind that. I would love to be able to just geek out about just interesting stuff. That kind of stuff sometimes. So yeah, it's going to be kind of like Martin and I talking with a sort of productivity bent. That's awesome. And yeah, that'll keep, that'll just be going right from June. Oddly enough, I'm not in, I know that this very podcast is right in, this might be number 300 for us. It's within one or two. I think we put out 297 the other day. And so it's definitely within a couple 300 podcasts, a lot of podcasts. It's a lot of podcast. It's a lot of talking. And then I did 200 with Listen Money Matters. So I think I've done your 500 podcasts. Then how many videos have you put out, especially since you started the College Info Geek and that kind of first group that then eventually kind of took off? I count main videos. So I'm working on video 195 right now. Okay, man, that's a bunch too. I need to look and see where we are. I think we're maybe at 100 or 110 somewhere in that ballpark, maybe a little more than that. So it's a lot, right? Building out content. And for you, you are a content producer. I would assume that's your job. That's what you consider. I think for us, one of the things that's interesting for us is that we are a service company. The thing that, the pipeline that pays the bill is online coaching. That's what we do. So content for us, well, at this point, the numbers are good enough that the content brings in some revenue because of the size of the business. The content is really the free thing we put out to sort of build pretrust and education in future potential clients and also to continue to educate our current clients. But it's a lot of work because we're putting out, you know, a video a week, three podcasts a week, two articles a week, plus a newsletter a week. That's a lot of content. And we're not a content company. We're a service company. And so I'm like, whoo, this is a bunch of work. So it's, you've been doing it for a long time. You've been doing it for a decade now, really, at this point, just about, right? Yeah, came up on a decade. That's crazy. So thank you for being on the show, dude. I'm excited about what you're doing. So interesting story really quick about Thomas as we wrap this up is Thomas started, he, we talked about doing barbell logic and you were going to train and do barbells and you were excited. You are a rock climber. That's kind of one of your, that's one of your physical passions and talked to me about getting him strong and not driving up his body weight very much. And just as he got ready to start barbell logic, the quarantines hit. And so he had to start his training at home, kettlebell, body weight, pull-up bar in the doorway. And you're a pretty tall guy. So those pull-ups, those chin-ups in the doorway are not super easy because you really got to yank your feet up underneath your rear end. And so you've done a great job though. So we are working on building work capacity in you. And eventually they'll open the floodgates and lift the quarantine and we'll put the barbell on your back. I'm excited to see where you go from a strength and strength perspective and how it then carries over to your to your rock climbing for sure. I'm excited to where that's going. Yeah. And I cannot wait for that rock climbing gym to open back up. Yeah, you'll love it. That's also my barbell gym. So right, they're both there. How much do you get to, so you live in Colorado, how much do you get to do you get to rock climb on real rocks as opposed to inside the gyms? I've actually never done it. Really? Only inside? Yeah. I've gone hiking a bunch. I've done like a little bit of light bouldering, but I've always looked at the slabs and I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not, I shouldn't safely do this, you know. And obviously I don't even have the gear. I don't own a rope. Right. So I've been climbing the gym for a couple of years. And if all this quarantine stuff lifts by the time that it's, you know, still warm enough to climb outside, I would like to find somebody to go with. Yeah. And teach me like, Hey, this, you know, I'm sure there are things that I need to know that are not taught in the gym. Yeah, they're different from an inside gym with, yeah, with the synthetic handles and stuff. Well, thank you again for being on the show. Again, Thomas Frank at YouTube where you can just Google his name. That's what I tell people at this point. If you can't find this guy, then you probably don't deserve to find his content. He's pretty, he's pretty easy to hunt down. Thanks for being on the show, man. And we, for the new listeners, we will talk to you here in a couple of days.