Ep 49: BEHIND THE SCENES

Your Ideal Week with ‪@darrenandrewcooper‬ of 1898 Creative

SUMMARY

Ever feel like you're constantly switching between tasks without making real progress? In this special behind-the-scenes episode of Creativity Made Easy, I sit down with my friend Darren Cooper, owner of 1898 Creative in Indianapolis, to coach him through creating his ideal weekly schedule using energy zone optimization.

This isn't your typical podcast episode—it's an actual coaching session that Darren generously allowed me to share because the insights were too valuable to keep private. If you've ever struggled with time management, energy depletion, or feeling scattered throughout your workday, this episode will give you a practical framework to transform how you structure your week.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • ⚡️ Key Takeaway #1: Identify your natural energy zones and protect your Green zone time for high-value activities that only you can do.

  • ⚡️ Key Takeaway #2: Batch similar types of mental work together to minimize context switching and maximize deep focus periods.

  • ⚡️ Key Takeaway #3: Use tools and boundaries to protect your most productive time, treating it as non-negotiable for business growth activities.

NOTABLE QUOTES

  • 💬 "80% of your time, if you can afford it, needs to be up here [high-value activities]. 20% of your time you can afford being down here to keep you connected to what the real work looks like, to keep you humble, to keep you hungry."

  • 💬 "You're not planning. You're setting boundaries for yourself. That's what you're doing. You're setting boundaries."

  • 💬 "By you not doing [the low-value tasks], you're denying [your team the opportunity to grow]. So don't feel bad about it."

EPISODE RESOURCES

TRANSCRIPT

You have one... let me go on video. You have 100% permission to use this to scale your content creation to millions of people. Awesome, I'm gonna use it.

Hey everyone, welcome back to Creativity Made Easy. I'm your host Dustin Pead, creative coach and consultant, and I'm very excited today to bring to you a special episode—a little bit of a peek behind the curtain in one of my coaching sessions, consultation sessions with a good friend of mine, Darren Cooper. He's the owner of 1898 Creative out of Indianapolis doing incredible video work, sharing different stories of brands through video.

I've known Darren for a long time and I was super excited to sit down with him recently to kind of help coach him through some organizational processes around his ideal week and really help him get the most out of his time as we entered into 2024. We recorded this back in December over what at the time was just a private Zoom conversation between the two of us. But as you already heard right here in the beginning, Darren was like, "We need to share this with people." And so I'm super excited to share that with you. I'm so thankful for Darren being willing to kind of share and open up this learning process for all of you.

If this is something as you're listening to this that you would love for me to come alongside and help you with, you can go to dustinpead.com, click on the "let's chat" button, and I would love to walk through this process with you as well.

So today's gonna be a little bit longer of an episode. If you're watching on YouTube, I want to thank you for doing that. I want to encourage you to subscribe, like, ring the bell. Every time we drop this content, you'll be notified. If you're listening to this on an audio podcast platform, thank you for listening. I would love for you to leave a five-star review as it helps get this content out even further.

Because it's a little bit longer of an episode, I'm just going to go ahead and jump right into it. Here is my session with 1898 Creative's Darren Cooper.

Let's talk ideal week.

We do, man. Let's talk it, man. I've been on the phone all day today, so it'd be good to talk this stuff so that I plan things like this where it's done in a legit succinct way. This made sense. I had back to back calls today. It was like, "Oh, this is nice. I should tell Dustin I should do it this way."

Right, or it's like when do you take calls and when do you set up meetings and that type of thing? Have you read, listened to, or watched a YouTube video or anything like that on Carey Newhoff's "At Your Best"?

I have not, no.

Pull that up. It would be worth a YouTube watch if I'm sure there's something out there whether it's him or someone else, but I'm gonna break it down for you here. Carey Newhoff's "At Your Best" talks about—it's very similar to kind of what you did already with your energy audit, but "At Your Best" talks about energy zones.

It says that everybody has a certain amount of hours of these three energy zones. Typically you only have two to four really green zone hours a day, and then you'll probably have three to four red zone hours during the day while you're awake. And then the rest will be yellow.

So he says in your green zone, this is where you want to do the heaviest thought type stuff. If you happen to write a script or storyboard, or if it's an edit that's gonna take you some really deep thought, this is where you want to do it in that green zone.

Yellow zone is more meant for things that you can either do on autopilot or have minimal brain interaction. So these might be for a lot of people their meetings, their calls, their admin type stuff usually falls in yellow zone.

Red zone, he says, is the only thing you're good for here is if it requires zero thought whatsoever.

Now I will tell you the standard that probably 99% of the people in the world, their zones look like this: They're typically green sometime between like 7 and 11 AM. They're typically yellow then for a couple of hours from like 11 to 2, then they might get a little bit more burst of green from like 2 to 3, and then they're red from like 3 to 6 or 7, and then they may be yellow until bedtime. This is typical.

But what the book asks, what the book kind of designs, is a way for you to be able to evaluate and determine the schedule for yourself. When looking at your ideal week, I think it's important to look at the stuff that Dan Martell had you do, but I also think it's important to look at your energy zones, which you could probably—what I just did, what I just showed you is probably all you're going to see in a YouTube video. He may talk about how to determine your energy zones a little bit better, but most of us, as you get to understand what these three zones are, then you get to understand you'll start seeing where you fall in at.

So this is the reason. This is pretty much me.

Yeah, I would echo that. Yeah, 99% of people would. The only people that won't are people that are extremely not morning people. Most of those people don't have kids, and theirs might be flip-flopped. Theirs might be flip-flopped where they're heavy green zones would start to kind of hit right around in here. Rather than a true musician—I mean, you know what I mean? Like the ones that are just like, "I was up until 2 in the studio and then I slept till 11 and then I'm just getting my day started by noon or 1." Like those types of people still have similar breakdowns, it just moves. It just flip flops.

Now he probably has findings—now since he released this book a couple of years ago, he's probably seeing similar results, but for the most part, this is everybody's zones.

So with this in mind, I try to look at building my days and my weeks out with these things in mind. As much as I have control, where this really comes into play is with my calendar and my meetings. I will typically protect—and he'll tell you this too—you want to protect at least the bulk of your green zone. You might have a little green zone here, but you really want to protect the bulk of your green zone as much as possible because that's where you're going to get 80% of your work done for the day is going to be in that zone right there.

So when for you in particular, I would look at yes, Calendly, yes meetings, but I would also look at shoots as much as in your control. I know things like an Early Wine or a Stone Table breakfast, like those things are kind of out of your control, but as much as you can control, if you can get shoots to live in these zones right here, you'll be way more productive because you've completely opened up that time right there.

Yeah, and that's where you're going to get the majority of your stuff done. So when I'm looking at your thing and you've got eight edits to do that day, you could probably knock out at least six of them right around in here if it was blocked out and didn't have any of these things over here blocking that up.

Right, or you might look at an admin thing and you go, "Oh well, that's easy. I'm going to start the day with an easy win." That's the easy trap, right? Because what happens is you'll start doing this admin thing and this admin thing and this admin thing, and next thing you know, it's 10 AM and you've wasted half of this time up here.

This also speaks to just even like starting work because normally I'll come down in the mornings and help some with the kids and then do that, and then all of a sudden it's 9 o'clock and it's probably a conversation of, in '24, I have to start work at at least 8.

Yeah, and it's all rhythms too. I will tell you that for me, I do seasonal rhythms. A lot of people call them routines. We call them rhythms in our house. This comes from my wife because she's smarter than me, but we do seasonal rhythms because they're more flexible than routines. Routines are more rigid.

So literally every time the seasons change—winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall—I have a running note on my phone that lists out, "This is going to be my flow for my kind of what my mornings will look like, what my midday will look like, what my evenings will look like." And that's how I'll run it because like you're saying right now, "Oh yeah, well then this makes sense. I need to sit down with my wife and just tell her what's what and tell her I'm coming downstairs at 7 o'clock and it doesn't matter if she needs my help or not."

That's probably not going to fly. You know what I mean? I did not say that. It would be great if we could start working at 7 AM when we had our green zone, but that's not realistic for either one of us in this season. But it might be in a different season. It might be by the time you get to spring, things have changed, different people have different schedules in your house, and you have different things going on. Or summer—if your kids go to public school, summer rhythms are different than other rhythms. So that might open itself up more and you just kind of have to be willing to give and take a little bit.

I use probably really 7 to 8:30—so I'm using about an hour and a half of my green zone every day not working, but with my family. Because right now, what my rhythm looks like is if my wife can wake me up in time, I'm up by 6 and I'm trying anyway. So 6:30, some kind of physical activity, some kind of workout, Peloton, something or other. And then I'm praying, reading scripture, doing my morning pages, which has been amazing, especially with the Remarkable. It's been really, really great.

I'm doing all that, then by 7 o'clock-ish Sarah and I are going for a walk together because our kids are old enough now where we can leave them at home for 15 minutes alone without having to worry about them killing themselves. And then we'll come back.

What's that like?

It is refreshing, but I will tell you I do miss the early days. It was easier. Every parent has said that.

Well, I'm just telling you, my boy turned 13 this year and I died a little bit inside. So don't wish the time away.

So we walk together and then we'll come back and we'll do some coffee. We'll read or talk depending on if we have anything to continue talking about from our walk. And then at 8 o'clock I'm reading with my daughter because I'm trying to get her in the habit of reading her Bible every day. Right now she won't do it unless I do it with her. And then my goal is to do my workday startup by 8:30.

Now my workday startup is something from the Full Focus and what they'll tell you—and the workday startup, they basically say you need to have an intentional kind of ease into your workday. Like what gets your brain firing on it? My buddy Blake, he spends on his workday startup—I just talked to him about this yesterday. He spends his workday startup doing 20 minutes of like creative thinking on anything. He'll pick a topic that he's got a project in front of him or something like that, and he'll just pull out his Remarkable and he'll just write ideas down and stuff like that for 20 minutes to get himself cranked into the day.

Me, I check email, confirm calendar things. Now that I've got Slack with you and another organization, I'm checking Slack, responding to things that I might've missed overnight. That type of thing. And then I'm usually reading something called The Pour Over, which is like a nonbiased global news email that I get twice a week kind of thing. So I'm doing this and then by 9 o'clock I'm hitting the first thing on my list.

Now you might look at that and go, "Well, you just wasted two hours of your green zone," but it's about priorities, right? These things are priority to me right now. Do I want to—that's why the book is called "At Your Best." Do I want to give my best to these things? Yeah, I do. Because to this point, 3 PM to 7 PM, I am pretty shot. Especially 5 to 7. And I'm the one that does a lot of the cooking. I usually walk upstairs right into the kitchen and it's like, dude, I—and you've been talking about like work cool downs or whatever you call it where they shut down. I would really love to do the Peloton there rather than the morning. I was just telling Sarah that.

We were talking about that recently, but I just know in my season right now, it doesn't work for me because I have to take Aubrey to gym on Mondays and Thursdays. Wednesdays we have to have an early dinner because Ethan has students that really only on Fridays is our pizza and movie night. And I'm usually, I end my day a little earlier on Fridays. That really only leaves Tuesday for me to actually do what I want to do on a workday shutdown.

Right, so normally I'm even thinking like, you know, workday shutdown of like just go walk outside for a second.

I've done that and it's great. I have not—I've done that maybe seven times this year. It's like every time I do it, I'm like, "That was the best decision I've ever made."

An easy thing there is tell your family, "No one gets to check the mail but me." And when you end your work day, just go walk to the mailbox.

That's a good one. You have a purpose. You're out there. It's not like, "What am I even doing? I need to be starting dinner," you know, something to do. Or if you have a dog, go take it out in the backyard, whatever. Those are really great things. And in the summer, get barefoot with it and step in the grass, get in them. You know what I mean? It sounds kind of new agey, but it really doesn't. I've been watching those videos where they have like the electrical pulse and stuff where you—I don't get it. And when you take it off, you do like weird wild stuff. I mean, you think the creator of the universe is pretty epic. You think he figured out stuff like that.

Well, dude, I echo that. And what's funny to me is as I'm hearing you say this, these are things I'm already practicing subconsciously in some way, shape, or form. But now it is that intentional and it's hilarious because I feel like I'm very—you said 99% of the world's like this anyway, but this is very much me. And what I'm trying to do is I've actually been trying to get up at 5:30. I've failed this last week, but I'm up by 6, I'm trying to beat my kids awake. I just like, if I could do some like coffee reading and prayer and some stretching before they wake up, I am golden.

That's why Sarah would get up at 4 if it didn't mean that she would be crashing by 7:30 or 8, but she's like—she's the one that's kind of taught me how to like, if we can get up before the kids get up, then we can actually have a minute to ourselves with the Lord, with each other. Those types of things and like I say seasonal and I am an external—this is learning Enneagram stuff and learning all that. I am an external motivator. I need external things. So like if I knew that you were gonna be on Zoom at 4:30 in the morning, you know where I'd be? I'd be on Zoom before 4:30 in the morning because that is my—that's the way that I do it.

So maybe it's that'll help me if I go, "Hey, Lauren, let's get up together." And then we can kind of maybe, you know, motivate each other. She's not as much of a morning person as I am. So it would be—there's always one, right? Like Sarah's more of a morning person than I am. Like right now in the winter, it is way, way harder for me to get up than in the summertime when the sun's coming through the windows. It's a lot easier for me to get up. Getting up while it's still dark outside, I think, is a bit of a—and winter should be banished back to hell where it belongs.

Maybe part of this then is even though you're not a morning—dude, I'm up for any of that stuff. It's way easier for me to get up in the summertime than it is right now. But that's why I say it's seasonal rhythms. You're going to—especially, this is one of those things where you're going to look at it and you're going to plan your quote unquote ideal week and you're going to get to April and you're going to be like, "Why did I even spend time doing this? This isn't working." It's because a lot has changed between now and April. Your life will look a whole lot different in April than it does right now in December. It's just the way it goes.

So that's why I force myself to do it every three months. I have an Asana task that goes off every three months that says "rework your morning and evening rhythms."

Let's just add that to mine.

Does this help at all? Are we getting off topic?

No, no, no, no. This is all foundational pieces.

And I think what's nice about this foundation is now we can go, let's time block. Let's block it out. By the way, I just want you to know that I really like Asana and I really—it's one of those things that people kind of go, "Do I have to?" And then everyone that I've ever walked through and they're like, "You know what? It actually works." I'm like, "You know what? It doesn't—it could be anything. It could be Post-it notes. It doesn't matter." It's just easy for me because I know it really well and I know how to manipulate it.

But like the whole thing is just like, you just set your future you up for success. That's all it is. Like this stuff, like the three month thing you just said—you're not going to remember that in three months. It's going to go off and you're like, "Man, Darren from December was awesome. Thank you, Darren from December." You're just going to forget it.

I'm going to assign that to myself. I'm going to do that at the end of March, leading into April. And then is it under—set to repeat. Do a custom or do monthly and then do every three months. Boom. Look at us already taking it next level.

As far as my ideal day, like what that looks like, I have it on a note on my iPhone, which obviously you can open up on your desktop as well. Let me actually, let me share this with you. I'll show this with you so you can kind of see exactly what that looks like for me from a day perspective, because when I know the days, it helps me know the—the other thing because it's really about boundaries. You're just setting boundaries for yourself. You're not planning.

I don't have terrible boundaries. You know what I mean? Like that's what you're doing. You're setting boundaries. You're not adding things to your calendar. That's why I don't really particularly love the whole calendar aspect. Here it is, winter rhythms. You're going to see how far off I am.

What I want to do, whether you do it on here or not, you just want to have it somewhere that you can quickly reference so that when the arrows of life start being shot in your direction, you know what target to put up. Well, that was a weird analogy, but you understand what I'm saying.

I'm 100%. I got you.

That's where I would look at it. And so what I would consider—the reason I started with the energy zone stuff is because I think in order for you to build your ideal week, you have to kind of build your ideal day. That makes sense.

So this is an ideal day for me. Really, I'm really only focused on from like 6 to 9. This stuff over here, whatever. But I do know like, because I've gotten the boundary stuck in my head at this point of, I try not to take meetings before 11. Now there are exceptions, right? Like we have our meeting at 9 o'clock on Mondays because that's the beginning of the work week. I'm not going to ask people to work half a day and then we have a launch meeting for the week—that's ridiculous. So like we're going to—that's what we're going to do.

So there are those times, but literally on my Calendly, it's impossible for any of my meeting types. I've blocked off anytime before 11 for people to choose that time. You can't go on my calendar. Like when you booked this, you couldn't have chose a time prior to 11. It wouldn't have let you. It would say I'm not available. Because I set that boundary in place.

So there are certain boundaries that you're going to be hard and fast with. Again, they're going to be exceptions, right? But for the most part, just say like, "Hey, I'm protecting my green zone."

So I think what you need to start with is thinking through seasonally. What does your green zone look like right now? And that'll take you all the way to 11, which is past half your day. And then once you kind of know that, like I hardly ever do a walk or a meditation at noon. I'm usually heads down in whatever I was doing at 11 and I'm still rolling and I look up and it's 2 o'clock. And I know it's 2 o'clock.

So I think you figure that this out and then the rest of your day will come. You need to ask yourself—so this is the time where you can look back on your time and energy audit that you did, where you go, "Okay, if it gives me energy, then maybe that's something, if it doesn't take too much brain power, maybe that's something I need to put in more of a yellow zone because my energy is starting to fade a little bit."

Just because it gives you energy doesn't mean you have to have a ton of energy to do it. This conversation right here gives me a ton of energy, but I'm in my yellow zone right now and I'm only 20 minutes away from my red zone, but it's giving me energy. So I'm going to end this call going, "I feel like I'm in my green zone right now." You're kind of working against that. You know what I mean? A little bit.

Totally. But sometimes it's okay to let a red zone be a red zone. When you're talking about transitioning and you're going upstairs and having to jump right into making dinner, like maybe you need to work on ending your workday at 4:30 so that you have a moment to walk.

With that said, I would look at your time and energy audit and I would go, "Okay, these things suck the life out of me, but they also take a ton of brain power." Then you're probably going to have to put them in your green zones and you're going to have to protect them. If it is important, that's where the value thing comes in with Dan Martell. How much value is this adding?

So like on mine—did I send you my template for this for the time energy?

Yes. Yeah. So you know how there's—I haven't moved mine over yet, right. But how I had those different dollar signs, that was the part that I struggled with the most. I was asking Will a ton, like how do I know what to assign value to when right now most of everything I'm doing is for a future ROI, not a today, you know?

And he's like, "Well, I think there's some things that only you can do. Those are the high dollar values and the things that you can delegate to others are the low dollar values." So that's when we look at your ideal week and we look at your energy zones and we look at your time and energy audit and all these things we're looking at. Okay. What can we give Emma? Those $1 to $2 signs are the ones that you can be like, "I can show her how to do this. She doesn't know how to do it," which by the way, I've Loomed how I do all of Early Wine's posting, put it into Cipher, titling, all that, turned it over to her yesterday. She walked through and did all the next three weeks, all cut up. She did it all day yesterday while I was doing the things that I needed to do. I was not overwhelmed by yesterday, but was just walking through doing the stuff that I needed to do. And I was like, "This is golden."

Right. So posting videos is at least a $4 sign task because the value is that you're—to use a Dan Martell term—you're buying back your time. It might seem like this is a little ticky-tack kind of thing, but the point of it is that you never have to do it again because you're handing it to somebody else.

And I'm struggling with the "buy back your time" because I hate to ask people to do things like that. Like the typical struggle with, "Oh, Emma, I hate to have you schedule all of these." Emma's a different situation because it's not like I'm paying her physically to do this. You know what I mean? So that's where some of the struggle comes in, but I have this fantastic asset that's basically like, I've got an assistant without having an assistant. And I'm not using it to the full capacity because I'm nervous about using it to the full capacity. You know what I mean?

So there are some things in that book that I'm like, I have to get better at doing that. Even like the first thing he tells you to do is to have somebody take over your calendar. I'm like, "Yeah, that's scary." But he even says it in the book, "This is going to be scary for you." And I'm like, "Oh God, you're reading my mail."

If you have the ability to do that relationally and financially, he's right. But that's where I use Calendly. When someone asks me, "What does my calendar look like?" I'm not spending the next 30 minutes trying to figure out what works for both of us. I'm just sending them a link and saying, "You know what works for you. You can see what works for me. Do the math. I'll see you when I see you." Like it's the whole back and forth of "When are you free? No, I can't. Well, do you have this? No, I can't do that. I can't. Well, I'll have to get back to you."

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Ep 48: New Opportunities