Yesterday I spoke to the local high school. One of the students asked me what my number one value is.
I paused. Then I told him the same thing I am going to tell you.
If you are not taking care of your mind and your body, you are showing up at a lower percentage of who you can be. Not just for your business. For your family. For your friends. For anyone you come in contact with.
That answer is also the reason my dashboard is laid out the way it is.
The 95% and the 40%
When I walk around at 95, I am magnetic. Slept well. Ate well. Moved my body. Hammered my work. Low stress. Low ego. Calm. Patient. I can laugh at things. I can be easygoing. My wife gets a better husband, my kids get a better dad, my clients get a sharper consultant.
When I walk around at 40, everyone downstream of me pays for it. Slept late. Drank too much. Skipped the workout. Ate garbage. Road rage in the car. Short fuse at home. Annoyed by small obligations. Unable to be present.
The amount of people who can consistently show up at 95 is small. It is also a lower bar than most people think. Sleep. Nutrition. Movement. Mental input. Those four things.
This is the input that drives every other output.
The top of the dashboard is not business data
This is where most founders get it wrong. They build dashboards that surface revenue, pipeline, and hours worked, because those are the numbers they measure themselves by. None of those numbers move without the operator first.
So the top row of my dashboard is not revenue. It is:
Sleep (hours, HRV, bedtime, wake time)
Activity rings (move, exercise, stand)
Steps
Resting heart rate while I sleep
Workout scheduled for today, yes or no
All of that pulls straight from Apple Health into the dashboard. I wear the watch, I sleep with it on, the data shows up. When I wake up, before I check anything else, I see whether I showed up for myself yesterday.
If I did not, I already know the 95% version of me is not going to show up today. I do not need someone to tell me. The data tells me.
Resting heart rate during sleep is the one I watch closest. On the days I feel terrible (tired, slow, unfocused), my resting heart rate from the night before was always elevated. Every single time. It is the most honest metric I have found for sensing where I am before the day starts.
The middle is family and organization
Underneath health sits the organization layer. Not the business layer. The organization layer.
This is:
Today’s calendar with next block highlighted
Today’s to-do list in high, medium, and low priority
This week’s blocks: what has to happen by Friday
The outdoor projects I am chipping away at
Date night on the calendar, yes or no
The whole point of this section is not to make me more productive. It is to make me more present.
If I know that my to-do list is organized, that my high-priority tasks are clear, that my week’s blocks are accounted for, I can close the laptop. Go chop wood. Take the dogs for a walk. Take my kids somewhere. Have a real conversation with my wife.
The more organized you are, the more quality time you get with a free brain. Presence is the metric, not hours.
The business panel goes at the bottom, on purpose
Business data lives at the bottom. Pipeline. Content metrics. Inbox. Website analytics.
Not because it is unimportant. Because if the top two sections are not solved, nothing in the bottom section moves.
I lived this for 16 years running Friendship Fitness. A burned-out operator can grind through business tasks all day and not move the ball. A 95% operator can make two calls, send three emails, and change the trajectory of the week.
The layout is the argument.
A note on AI before you go build this
AI is only useful if it gets you time back. If it gets you to a more present version of yourself with your family. If it closes the loop on work faster so you can actually log off.
If it is not doing that, you are using it wrong.
I have fallen into this trap myself. You sit down with an AI and spend three hours tweaking a logo, running endless prompts, or having the agent “do research.” You come back and feel like you did a lot of work. You did not. I call that mental masturbation. Fun. Not productive.
This is the failure mode for AI tools right now. People sit with them, feel busy, watch output fly by. The tool confirms the feeling by generating a lot of stuff. Nothing actually moved.
If your AI work does not result in more revenue, more time back, a real problem solved for a client, or a simpler system, you did not do work. You played.
Phase 1 shipped Wednesday
I shipped Phase 1 of JB Command on Wednesday morning. It is password-gated on a subdomain of cbusaiagents.com, hosted on Netlify. I am the only person who can get into it.
Phase 1 is the health layer. Sleep, activity rings, steps, last night’s resting heart rate. That is what I see when I wake up. Nothing else.
Next week ships Phase 2. Calendar, to-do list, inbox. The organization layer.
The week after that adds the business metrics panel. Substack views, podcast downloads, GA4 sessions, pipeline. Six weeks of build, six weeks of content, one tool that gets me time back with my family. That is what AI is for. Nothing else.
If you missed the full walkthrough of the dashboard design and what goes on each layer, Tuesday’s post on the Substack covered it.
Closing
A thousand hours on a website is a number I have actually lived. That is roughly what I spent across 16 years rebuilding the Friendship Fitness website five or six times. The current cbusaiagents.com was rebuilt in about thirty minutes with Claude Design.
Thousand hours versus thirty minutes is not an efficiency story. It is a priorities story. What you do with the reclaimed time is the real question.
Use the tool. Log off. Go be with the people you love.
In life, what matters is your health, your family, your relationships, your loved ones, touching grass, having more time with them and having more quality time when you are with them.
The dashboard exists to protect that. Nothing else.
Talk soon.
Jeff
Dublin, Ohio
Transcript
All right guys, what’s going on today we’re going to be here talking about our owner dashboard that we are currently creating and At first I’m kind of building this out for myself for a couple of reasons one as I’ve you know started working on The new business. I’ve found that I have kind of a bunch of different balls in the air, right I’m working with a bunch of different AI agents for myself and my company and the things I’m trying to create and then I’m also doing that in tandem or in parallel With my clients agents and the things that they’re trying to create and when you work with a lot of different businesses Right, you’re jumping from back and forth you’re jumping from you know a fitness studio in a gym over to a construction company over to a landscape company And you’re just kind of bouncing back and forth. So trying to keep things really organized is Helping my brain number one B a lot more present in the moment when I’m working, but also be able to like shut the laptop and Log off and then be able to be present with my family and still focus on my priorities
So what I’m trying to build here is not just a like dashboard where we can get a one Look snapshot at our lives our priorities and everything But also be able to get to a point where we’re getting time back we’re getting hours back and we can see you know How we’re doing on what our individual and our business priorities are So
I’m a believer and I actually I spoke to our local high school yesterday and you know one of the questions that one of the students Asked me is what is your number one value and my belief is that if you are not Taking care of your mind and taking care of your body than you’re showing up on a day-to-day perspective at a lower percentage of who you are and what you can be For your family for your friends for your business for anybody you come in contact with right if I’m walking around at 95% I’m high energy, so I got a good night’s sleep. I woke up. I ate a great breakfast. I’m fueled properly. I get a great workout I hammer my business and you know It’s time for me to show up for my family and like I’m gonna show up at 95% of who I can be. I’m gonna be high energy I’m gonna be able to laugh and have fun and you know be able to be easy-going and not stressed out and That’s the type of person that we want to be that we want to show up to work that we want to show up with our friends and our family We want to put that best foot forward as often as possible and to do that we have to take care of ourselves And I believe that everything else is downhill from that
You have to achieve that first and then if you achieve that everything else will come to you And you can compare yourself to who you are when you’re at a lesser percentage, right? You’ve probably gone out too late drank a little too much not eating a good meal Wake up early because you can’t sleep because you treated your body like crap And then you’ve felt how you feel that next day when you’re hung over and And you’re low on nutrients and you’re tired and you’re lethargic You just want to lay around and take a nap and then anything you have to do feels like this big Obligation you get annoyed and you’re frustrated and if you’re in your car you have road rage and that’s that like lower percentage version of ourself All right, let’s say that’s like 40%
And I believe the entire key to life is walking around at 90 or 95% as often as possible and Avoiding walking around at 40% or letting people see you or experience you at that lower percentage level as often as possible And if you do that You’ll be magnetic right people will want to be around you people will want to feel your energy They’ll want to talk with you they want to engage with you build a relationship with you work with you have you on their team all those things The amount of people who can show up consistently at 95% Be low stress like easy going right? They’re not getting worked up about too much. They have a low ego You know, they’re calm and they’re patient. They laugh and they can have fun with things and You know, they’re cogent in aware. They’re not sleepy in lethargic. They show up on time You know like those types of people. I just believe that it’s such a separator And it’s actually I think a pretty low bar like it’s not that hard to do I don’t think right for some people. Maybe it is maybe it’s super unnatural for them but we’re gonna think about this and going back to this idea with our dashboard right we want Our priorities to be reflected in what the data and the metrics that we’re looking at every day so If this is our number one priority this idea needs to be front and center
So how I’m doing it right now is I’m tagging it into my Apple watch so really quickly. I can see steps. I can see sleep I can see HRV. I can see exercise hours You know all the things that come from that right daily clork burn, etc So I can get all that on my dashboard and that just pulls right from my Apple health, right? So that’s automatically put in there every day if I wear it and it’s charged and I sleep with it and all the data is there It just pulls right to my dashboard and I can look at daily I can look at weekly and again I can aggregate that data however I want Maybe I want to look at like my weekly trends of resting heart rate while I sleep That’s one I like to look at and if you guys have never looked at that on the day where you feel like holy crap I am operating at a low percentage. I feel like crap today. I’m tired. I’m slow I’m lethargic. I’m not focused go and look at what your resting heart rate was the night before I guarantee you was elevated So that’s a quick snapshot for me. That’s one that I look at a lot That’s kind of my general, you know health priorities then underneath that it’s like scheduled workouts. What am I doing? In the days where I’m not scheduled to work out then I have to start thinking about okay What’s my activity gonna be so right now that’s super easy? That’s like chopping wood and taking the dogs for a walk And I try to get both of those done for a day So if I can chop wood for 45 minutes to an hour and I can take the dogs for half hour 45 minute walk I guess pretty good amount of activity. I’ll push 15,000 steps easily and then my average heart rate when I’m chopping woods around like 120 so it’s like good low zone two and Core work if we’re getting into the nitty gritty of health and fitness So that’s kind of like how I think about building this dashboard out right on top of this What I’m starting to look at is how do I want to gauge mental right so I’m building this out right now And I’m probably gonna go through a few iterations, but iteration one is just gonna be a simple One through 10 test right so every day I log on to the dashboard I’m just gonna click one through 10 basically 10 being like I feel amazing. I slept great. I’m super focused I’m not stressed out et cetera one being the exact opposite right like couldn’t sleep last night. Got up early feel stressed like crazy You know not doing well not patient with the kids whatever it might be and I’m just gonna score myself as a quick one through 10 Second from there is gonna be probably some Assemblance of reading time podcast time or time in brain development learning right now I’m learning from a couple of different places that are a little bit unique different than how I was learning in the health and fitness space And so sometimes I’m in like different platforms. I’m in webinars I’m maybe on x watching a webinar from the claw design team or something like that and I’m getting a little bit of different exposure to learning so my mental is a little bit different there that might be Challenging for me to like automatically log and I have to manually log that and just in terms of you know Brain development space. So I have a couple of different ways that I think about that not every day is learning based sometimes It’s just like you know, okay, maybe I’m gonna read some philosophy or I’m gonna read like a history book or listen to You know more of a philosophical or a different topic maybe like a like a light business podcast, right which for me That’s like it’s like light easy going relaxing
So this is again We kind of talked about this already right the input that drives every other output, right? If you’re operating at a higher percentage then you are going to be the best version of yourself And I think if you just put that foot forward every day where we do take some dedicated time to work on you know mental physical An emotional health and you know our sleep hygiene or nutrition We put some extra focus effort and energy on that and then we get a really nice dashboard One of the things I’m not gonna do but you could very easily do is You could tie this in with something like a macro stacks or a nutrition tracking app and you could have it aggregate all your data Directly to you from a nutrition coaching app Or a nutrition logging like macronutrients or Types and qualities of food whatever you want to do with that again We could pull that data in and you could get your nutritional picture really quickly too So that’s kind of like our general health panel and for me that’s gonna be Probably my like front and center like that’s kind of where I’m focused first making sure that I’m checking the block They’re making sure I have some checks and balances on me and on my life and the way that I’m you know Trying to live and not just like making sure. I’m not just talking about it, but I’m being about it, right?
Now as we move on to our next one This is kind of the thing I’m creating this for right is I want a one-stop dashboard for me To be able to go through both my Business life and organization but also my family life and organization and My general to-do list. Okay, so right now you guys if you guys have been listening you know We have a lot of outdoor projects going on So I’m trying to kind of book and schedule time where it’s like okay I’m just gonna chop wood here for an hour 45 minutes or I’m gonna You know right now we have so much dang wood that I actually have to like build all of these extra stacks to actually hold the wood So I’m trying to like book and schedule some time into that then I’ve got you know general like okay We’ve got to go get the kids out of the house. We’re gonna go take them somewhere fun or do something together Date night these things right we got to organize that but for me to arrive at those things Focused and clear-brained. I have to make sure that my general work to-do list and the things that I know I’ve got on my plate that I have to get off my plate by the end of the week are either Organized and scheduled or are just done right so my hope with this for me is I can get a Quick snapshot and again, this will be a built-out iteration of how I do it right now from a work perspective It’s like you know things that have to get done this week So these are like high priority tasks and then things that need to get done within the month So these are like medium priority tasks and then like low priority tasks are things that maybe need to be done So a good example is I want to reorganize my entire file set for my entire AI thing like the AI is gonna help me with that and But that’s just gonna be kind of like a process to reorganize all of our files in the way that the AI reads and communicates the file system If I start to reorganize things things that point to where a file might live might no longer be read properly So we need to make sure that we don’t miss turning over any stones when we do that and that’s something that like I’m gonna do when I have like what would be actual free time like I have no other things on my Daily or weekly to-do list everything is done and caught up Once that stuff’s done then maybe I could spend some time doing that So those are low priority tasks. So that’s kind of how I think about them in my head high medium low adding things to the to-do list and making sure that those to-do lists stay manageable and That’s going to be a whole column for me right those will tandem in with my calendar in my gmail inbox and That’s kind of like just my general prioritization right These are things that are gonna help me stay organized and the whole idea behind this is being able to like Quickly before I log off look at the dashboard and then go and be with my family or go and do whatever the task that we had calendar Next is because everything is properly organized I have my to-do list I know exactly what I need to get done and then I can communicate effectively of like hey, you know I’m I’m gonna we have this on the calendar. You know, I’m gonna go work outside for 45 minutes But then I’ve still got a pretty decent to-do list for today that I need to get knocked out So I got to get back and that might be after the family goes to bed or that might be before they wake up the next morning, right? But that helps give me a nice snapshot of kind of how I’ve got to organize my day
So again, we’re thinking about it more as like You know my whole idea with this is AI is only actually useful right these agents these dashboards These things that we create with it the code that actually is generated from the AI is only useful If it allows us to Get better data show up and have more presence with our family have more hours with our family get more done faster Or get the same amount of work done faster be more efficient be more productive and then really in reality like Be able to truly log off and be more present with our family and if it’s not doing those things then number one I think we’re not using it right and we maybe need some like help or coaching around that But number two, I think it’s it’s then it’s being a detriment. It’s not being helpful to you and I will tell you I’ve told Maria this multiple times Yeah, I can definitely be that right. It’s a really fun tool to play with But not actually be productive with right so
It’s kind of this like and excuse the term It’s a little bit of like mental masturbation right where you’re just like okay You’re working with it. You’re interfacing with it. You’re doing a lot where you’re maybe creating new designs You’re doing all these things and like things are happening But you’re not actually like doing anything right like you’re not actually doing productive work That’s gonna help you you know get things done find new clients make more revenue get more bottom line get more time back Help your team, you know make it life easier for your employees pick whatever thing you want to do with it Like you can sit there with AI even for like four hours. Just like redesign logos and You you’ll be blown away. You’ll get it come back and be like oh my gosh. Hey, I was incredible This is so amazing look at the logo it created and it’s like have an in reality you just wasted like three hours or four hours Right, and I think a lot of people are falling victim to that and I mean, I’ve fallen victim to it too, right? It’s it’s easy to fall victim to and so we have to get to a point where We have a firm understanding of how we are driving our lives in our business forward To get more time back to move the ball forward and if we’re not really laser focused on that It’s gonna turn into this kind of thing that just spins our wheels makes us spend more time But doesn’t actually like help us in any real tangible way. So we’re trying to stay away from that
And again the more organized you are the more quality time you get with a free brain So this is a part of my morning routine It’s like check the dashboard. What do I have to do today cool? Do I have time to just have a loose morning with the family or like today? I don’t have time to have a loose morning with family. So I’m down here super early And I’m knocking out to do list because last night we had date night And I had a lot more family time and so you know, it’s like the to do list is still there right so I got to start knocking it out
All right, now we’re thinking about the professional dashboard
And as we start kind of going through this I’m in the Aspect of like I want to get this done First thing in the morning like this is my wake-up snapshot, right? I’m not a big roll over and look at your phone thing But I want it to be something like where if you roll over and look at your phone What are the things that you’re rolling over to looking look for right? Is it going to Gmail? Is it checking your credit cards? Is it you know like where are you at? What are the things that you check right now if you check social media? I can’t help you if you’re rolling over and first thing you’re checking social media That’s like an addiction problem you got to work on that on your own because I can’t really help you with that But if you’re rolling over and you’re checking your Gmail or if you’re rolling over and you’re checking You know bank accounts or calendar or to do lists or reminders or Whatever like thing or text messages anything like that That’s all stuff that we can get right in the dashboard Wouldn’t it be a little bit nicer for us to just kind of pull up a one-pager and it gives you everything Here’s the things you have to do today. Here’s your calendar and terms of task list priority A we’ve organized your email inbox into prioritization. Here’s your high priority emails that are sitting in your inbox Here’s the text messages that came over from last night like again, we can build all this out So there’s like a one-stop stop shop dashboard for you Also and it’s like it’ll be nice to because they’ll show you how you slept right away too And I’m building this out for people based on what their priorities are right different businesses different business owners different people have different priorities You might just be entirely focused on your health right like let’s see you had a health scare Let’s see you had like a heart problem or whatever and whether you’re a business owner or not Your health is just your priority your entire dashboard might just be health focused It might be like nutrition column on the left center column is steps general activity and sleep Right column might be general exercise and you know looking at like okay, total body whatever things We’re focused on scoring your workouts et cetera like you could have just a whole dashboard for this just for health and fitness You could change it and make it just business Maybe it’s a critical time for you and your business and your employees And you’re trying to sprint and you’re trying to you know hire more people and get software out the door Whatever it is your entire dashboard might just be you know all the stuff that you guys have going on in the business It might be all your project management software links in it might be slack it might be Gmail and all that stuff Just kind of links right in so this is fully customizable it can be whatever you want to make it and I don’t expect everybody’s to be the same
So I shipped my first phase one on Wednesday the really cool part about this is this lives right on my website It is password protected by me and so I’m the only person who can get into it or I obviously could share the password with it But as I start to build this out My phase one was my health aspect so I shipped that yesterday. That’s all I’ve been working And in the password protection was kind of a cool element Again, that the AI helped me with this wasn’t something that I was super comfortable doing myself But it helped me set up all the proper coding for that And helped me ship that on netlify and showed me exactly how to set up a password protected back end sub domain of my website So really really cool
And as we start kind of going through this Just think about you know what you want out of your life and what your goals are specifically And then this is something where we would start to have a discussion on like okay What would that dashboard look like you can brand however you want right you can make it light and airy You can have your podcasts live directly on there you can have live music like it can be like an old school My space page you can make it whatever you want and I just think the Potential or the possibilities in this domain are just so cool Right like this is something that before it just wouldn’t have made sense to spend the time To figure out how to manually go through and do all this But now the AI agents are just like building it in the background right like I’m working on other stuff right now Doing a podcast my agents are over here on my other screen working away with for my clients doing stuff and building things And they can just be doing that like while I’m out playing with my kids and they can be you know shipping the New dashboard items So when we ship next week we’re going to start working more on the business and productivity end of things social media Analytics we’re going to talk about all kinds of stuff next week and All that stuff when it ships like it’s all going to be doing that stuff or working with it while I am focused on other tasks And I just think that that’s so cool or while I’m out playing with my kids or working on my yard doing whatever we’re doing And I just think that that’s really unique
So it’s not like a huge extra time component It does take some brain power and it does take a lot of imagination for you to think about what those things are But if you already have that direction if you already have that focus if you already know exactly who you are and what you want What you want to work on and what you want it to look like in your head if you can visualize that if you can have that imagination Then bringing it to life is very realistic and very simplistic so
Hope you guys are following along for the journey. I hope you guys are sharing in that ethos and you know Staying healthy and staying focused and that’s kind of the biggest thing What I want to bring to people with this right is like I want you to have a better mental and physical health picture Because of the tools now because of the productivity and how how much we can get done with these tools that before Just used to be a three or four-hour manual task. I mean that’s what I’ve been talking about these business owners every week Is these people saying like man? I used to spend hours doing this like for me I used to spend hours building our website the amount of time. I’m probably you know A thousand hours down on the friendship website over 16 years probably like five or six full rebuilds Just continuing to work and work and work and grind and learn first one I had to write by me hand with Tom html like working on updating the blog post and whatever the Adobe website html builder that he put us up in was and Now it’s like the stuff that’s being built like if you go and look at my website now That was all clawed design and that happened in a half an hour and it’s better than anything I could have ever done and it’s just like having the imagination and communicating well with it And I just think that that’s amazing a thousand hours versus 30 minutes like what does that look like? It’s just like you think for these kids these days like they’re gonna be able to go so fast um And it’s exciting But it also really really Zooms in on how good you are at prioritizing logging off tuning out focusing on things that matter because remember like all these things are cool right but
In life what matters is your health your family your relationships your loved ones touching grass being able to have more time with them and more quality time with them And we have to use this as a tool to get us those things So that’s my message for today. Hope you guys are doing well. I’ll talk to you soon
