Focused - 112: Productivity & Creativity

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

David & Mike consider the relationship of productivity & creativity and how it shapes the work that they do. They dive into their personal knowledge management stacks and the tools they currently use, share some tips for tagging, and discuss where to draw the lines between tools for managing tasks and ideas.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, the one and only Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. Thanks for that glorious intro. How are you doing? week last week, we, you know, the wildfires came through town and talk about lack of focus, you know, when the police are driving up and down the streets saying, get out of your house. It was, uh, it was just a mess, man. I, I, uh, I was out of the house from Monday through Friday and it's like a lost week, you know, I almost got nothing done. Well, it's pretty understandable. I think, uh, I saw some of the pictures you were sharing look pretty scary. So if you survive the fire and everything's intact, you know, I the, uh, it's crazy, but you know, it happens when we live in the foothills and, you know, I was with family, but just, you know, kind of like managing, taking care of the kids, taking care of the dog, um, being good guests to the people that took us

in. It's like, by the time you get through all of that, I had these great plans of getting all this work done and it really didn't happen, But that was a focused challenge, I guess. But like you said, I think maybe I was just unrealistic with myself going into it. I should have just realized, okay, this is going to be a survival week and not a get-ahead week. Right, right. Which you don't even have to be displaced in order to take one of those, by the way. Yeah.

I feel like there's a lot of people who could use a survival week. A good friend of mine said, hey, look, it was like a sabbatical week that you didn't expect. I'm like, nope, it was nothing like that. No, exactly. But we've got a big show today. Before we get into it, uh, the 2021 focus calendars are still on sale. You should go check it out. $24. We got them dry erase this year. That was a big request last year. So now you can get a dry erase calendar. Uh, you go to new year in E U Y E

A R.net slash product slash focused. We'll put a link in the show notes. They're beautiful calendars and having that on your wall can really make a difference. I think in 2021, hopefully we'll be able to move around a little bit more and I'm looking forward to using mine. Absolutely. I am so excited that we have a dry erase option. I used the paper one last year because I guess inside baseball, we weren't sure we were going to sell enough of them to justify the additional cost to us. And we didn't want to be on the hook for a bunch of calendars that wouldn't sell. It's significantly more expensive to set up and produce the dry erase than it is the paper calendars. And at the beginning of using the

paper calendar, I thought this is good enough. You know, I'm writing stuff in my notebook every day, pen, paper, like I'm not erasing and changing that. So this is no different. And it worked fine. But now that I have the dry erase one, it just feels like home. It feels so much better. I'm really excited to have this. And I'm really excited to tear this paper 2021 off the wall here and put the new one up. Yeah. The 2020 year just had so many surprises in it that a lot of things that we put in ink in January didn't make sense, uh, later in the year. Um, but either way, uh, they're cool calendars. Uh, it helps us keep the show afloat. So we appreciate

your support, but also I think this is something that can help you out. And, uh, so go check it out. Link in the show notes. All right. We also launched a new thing with the last episode. We launched Deep Focus, which is an extended version of the podcast where we can geek out about some of the stuff that maybe doesn't make sense for the majority of listeners. We have a special topic today that we're going to cover in the Deep Focus section of the special feed. So basically, in order to get Deep Focus, you go to the relay.fm focus page, and you sign up to support the show either monthly or yearly. And that'll get you access to the relay back end with all the wallpapers and all the

other special feeds. And one of the special feeds that's in there will be Deep Focus. So you plug that into your podcast catcher, and then you'll get a different version of the show with a different artwork that is kind of black and it looks kind of cool. But there are extended versions of the show where we geek out about stuff. So the last one, which was actually the first episode of Deep Focus, Eric Fisher actually hung out with us and we nerded out about how we were doing the weekly planning stuff that we kind of touched on in the episode itself. Today, we're going to dive into the weeds with some of your personal retreat stuff. I know some of the people in the forum have mentioned that we talk about this a lot, so thought this

would be a perfect topic for the deep dive for people who really want to know how your personal retreat went. David will kind of do that interview style. But for everybody else who is sick of it, you know, you don't have to do anything. You're not going to you can go watch the video that you put out, which is great as kind of the TLDR. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Shiny new objects. You you got something cool this month, didn't you, Mike? I did. And actually, it wasn't this month. I've had this for a while. This was something that I saw as like a pre-sale, and they always give like a big discount when they're trying to sell a bunch of them before it's actually available. So this is the Spark Guitar Amp. It is a tiny little 40-watt solid-state guitar amp made by the Positive Grid Company, which is the company that creates the application BiasFX, which is what I use to play live guitar through my iPad at church. So I wrote up an article about this on the Suite Setup a while back about how that all

worked. And this application, this company, really the effects that they build in for like electric guitar playing are top notch, in my opinion, and better than just about everything else on the iPad. If you go search for like guitar effects on the iPad, you'll see a bunch of different things. But you got to be careful because a lot of companies will come out with stuff and then they just won't ever update their apps again. So this was kind of like the one company I found that really is dedicated to the mobile guitar playing experience. And when they launched this amp, it was basically a smart amp. I just have it in my office as like a practice amp. There is an application that goes with it,

which not only has the effects, but you can load up like a YouTube video and it will analyze the YouTube video and it'll create like a chord sheet for you. There's like the Logic drummer track, you know, where it kind of listens to and adapts to what you would record and then fills in like a backing track. Well, it's that kind of thing, but with an entire band. So you can just pull up like a style of music, kind of like I real, I guess. And then you can practice along with it which is great for developing your chops and I have started using this because when we recorded with Michael Hyatt in episode 110 he talked about the value of having a coach and I've played guitar for years, but I have never been very good at it, in my opinion. I grew up playing classical violin, so I could read sheet music, I could play like

Vivaldi's Four Seasons, all that kind of stuff. But I really had trouble just like jamming off of chords or freestyling. And so when I picked up the guitar, that's kind of what I did. But I just learned chords. I didn't learn any sort of theory. So I'm actually taking guitar lessons right now. And I'm using this amp to practice every single day. And it is both very challenging and very rewarding. I feel like I've learned more theory in the last two weeks than I had in the previous 15 years. Yeah. So this has been a lot of fun. Yeah.

You know, having a music teacher really makes a difference in terms of your practice. You know, I used to give saxophone lessons when I was in college, like to high school kids and junior high kids. And one of the things I would do if they got to the lesson and they hadn't practiced, and it was obvious when they didn't practice, I would just tell them to go home and say that, you know, there's no point. You didn't practice this week. And one of my former students became a music teacher and reached out to me like 20 years later and said, hey, that day you told me to go home was like a big day for me, you know, because he just needed that kick, you know. But that's cool.

Yamaha has a new electronic saxophone coming out. I think it's called the YHS-150, which isn't out yet. But I'm like looking at that. It's like, I don't know if I can afford it or not, but you can play it at night because it's electric, but it still feels like a saxophone. It has an actual mouthpiece. We'll see. But I think any way you can find to practice more

with music is the key. I never realized you were an electric guitar player, though. I always thought you were an acoustic guitar player. Well, I did start off on acoustic, but I really enjoy playing electric just because all the effects and things it's kind of like a big toolbox for creating new sounds yeah and uh like you can like i said i don't really think yep yep exactly you can tinker with it and uh you know i like i said I don't think I've ever been good enough really to justify like a really expensive electric guitar or anything. But I am learning a

lot. I have not been told to go home yet. The part of the way that we're doing this, it's Zoom, it's virtual lessons. And afterwards, my teacher basically records short videos of every single thing that he wants me to practice. So I'll get in a message in a iMessage thread, five, six, seven, eight little one and a half minute videos. And I actually am uploading those to to YouTube. I am making them private so only I can get to them, embedding those in my guitar lesson pages in Rome, and then watching those and using those as I practice. So yeah, it's challenging. This is one of the hardest things that I have ever done. He's really pushing me, but it's good. I can tell already that I'm growing a lot in my musical ability. Wow, it makes a huge difference having a coach. Well, I'll tell you what's new and shiny for me.

I've mentioned it on the show before, but it's really sinking in for me. The last month or two is my subscription at read wise.io. And this is a web service that connects to your Kindle account, but it does much more than that, but starting with your Kindle account and what it does is it takes all of the highlights and notes out of all your Kindle account, but it does much more than that, but starting with your Kindle account. And what it does is it takes all of the highlights and notes out of all your Kindle books, and it combines them on this website for you. And I've been reading Kindle books, particularly Kindle nonfiction books for as long as there's been a Kindle. I bought that first one with the sharp edges that everybody hated. And I have over a hundred books of nonfiction that are fully highlighted.

And this has been really great for me because I wasn't accessing those highlights very easily. You know, you'd make the highlights at the time you read the book, but you know, how do you really get more out of them? And I always found it very tedious to get into them with read wise, you just connect it to your account and it collects them. It just goes and slurps them all out of your Kindle account for you. But then it also connects to services like, you know, read it later services. Like I use Instapaper and it connects to that as well. So every article I highlight in Instapaper, I mean, like just today, Mike published an article about how he's doing task management in Roam. I added it to Instapaper

when I read that tonight, if I highlight anything in it. And of course, I'll highlight stuff because Mike's a smart guy. That will get added to my Readwise library, and I can go in there and see them. And then Readwise also has the ability to export all those highlights as a markdown file so you can add it to your personal management management system like we're going to talk about later in today's show or and it has a daily thing where it sends you an email or on the app you can do it in their iphone app the you can go ahead and go through it and see five random highlights from your library. So with these five reminders a day, I can go back and kind of rediscover stuff I've highlighted. It's a great way to reinforce things. You can favorite them into the app. You can tag them in

there. But I really like the ability to export things as well. It's just, it's kind of a bit of glue in between the consumption and absorption of material. And I know it's expensive. I think I pay like 70 bucks a year to have this service. And, uh, and a lot of people have complained to me when I talked about that it's too much money, but, and I get that, but I feel like I'm getting my value out of it. And I've just come to really like this service. What's the part of it that you use the most? Like, how does it impact your daily work? In two ways, really, like I was saying, the daily review, I think I do it every morning, because I get that email every day at 5am. And I find that starting the day by finding,

you know, five highlights from things that I've found worthy in the past to be a great way to kind of start the day on the right foot. And then the other thing is, we're going to talk about personal acknowledgement management later in the show, but the ability to just grab all of my highlights from the bullet journal method book and put them into a text file as a markdown, that has a lot of benefit as well. So those are the two things that I get out of it that I like the most. But I like the way it's put together. And another thing they do is some of the books I've read in paper. There's a couple books I've read in paper edition that weren't on Kindle, but they're in there already. And you say, I have read this already, and they add the most commonly used highlights from those books

to your account. So it's just really nice. Nice. So those kind of popular highlights, kind of like medium style, does it do that by default or only for the books that you say you've read but you don't have any notes for? Yeah, just for the books I ask it to. I mean, you could also do it with books I guess you haven't read, but I haven't done that. But it's just any books you add that they've already got in their library, you can add that way. Cool. And then when you turn them into a markdown list, is that something that you manually export and put somewhere else? Or does it automatically get piped in somewhere for you? Yeah, you'll love this. If you're a Roam Research subscriber, it automatically pipes them in every day. So like in my Roam library, if I read that article you

wrote tonight, tomorrow morning, anything I highlight, it'll be in my Roam library. It'll be attached to that date. And you can set the template of how it does it so you know like it saves the author name as a as a link and it's very convenient with roam because it just puts it in there it's currently a beta feature but it works fine uh because i've been doing more with obsidian i actually have to copy and paste them in but you, it's not a big deal. Right. Yeah. That sounds pretty cool. I may have to look at this. This may be enough to convince me to start reading Kindle books. Well, it's just real. I've always been a fan of Kindle books and this is, I think it's an age thing for those of us that grew up with LPs and paper books.

You know, the revolution represented by digital media is something I think we have appreciated fully. Like I remember carrying around bags with, you know, so many books in them. Like even just like this fire last week, we had to head out. We had an hour. I put my Kindle in my bag. And while I wasn't very productive, I was able to read a book while I was out of the house. And my Kindle has many books on it. So I was able to pick and choose what book I wanted to read once I got where we were going. So it's just, I find the convenience of that remarkable. And the highlighting is just one more step, you know, putting everything in digital form. Very cool. I don't think, I i mean i've got a whole bookshelf full of physical books here and that's

typically how i i read books but it would be nice to just have those things automatically piped in i can definitely see the the value in that yeah well and and the the rome research for you is the ultimate like um aphrodisiac. You know, I mean, the fact that you can highlight it tonight and you're going to wake up tomorrow and there'll be a note in Rome already for it. You'll love that. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move and enter code FOCUSED at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase. Just go to squarespace.com slash focused. Squarespace lets you easily create a website for your next idea

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domain and to show your support for focused once again that's squarespace.com slash focused and enter code focused f-o-c-u-s-e-d to get 10 off your first purchase we thank squarespace for their support of the focus podcast and all of relay fm squarespace make your next move make your next All right. So one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about, David, is this relationship between productivity and creativity. And the reason I want to talk about this is that I feel like for maybe a lot of people, the standard definitions of these terms can be at odds with each other.

But as I think about the work that I do, I actually think they're very similar. All right. So why are they at odds? Well, I think when most people think of productivity, they think of checking things off. And I don't have it in front of me, but I am recalling a tweet by Jason Freed, the Basecamp guy, who basically said that productivity is for machines. And I think that there's a certain perspective that is pretty obvious in a statement like that. Whereas creativity is really making things up. And it occurs to me that you can be, according to that standard definition of cranking widgets,

very productive working off of your list. You could get a ton of tasks done and you could be very busy throughout your entire day. And that does not mean that you are at all creative during that same amount of time. However, like I said, the more that I think about the work that I do, I feel like my creativity is the measurable output of the productivity. So I've been kind of thinking through how these are linked together. I think it's really easy to get lost in these words. I mean, historically, productivity, I think for a lot of people has meant really more something like efficiency, like being productive is how many widgets can you crank out in, you know, in an eight hour shift. But I also, for me at least, productivity has a very different meaning.

It's like me being productive means that I make progress on the things that matter to me, that are most fundamental to me. I move the needle, as we've talked about in prior shows. That's, I guess, why earlier in the show, I was talking about how I was unproductive last week. I mean, I read a book. I kept my family safe. But the self-expression stuff that represents me didn't make a lot of progress. So I wasn't, in my head, very productive. But the starting point of getting lost between productivity and creativity, I think, is a matter of how do you define productivity? Yes, definitely. And that's really what I want to talk about here, because I realized that for me, being creative is being productive. But how do you actually measure that? actually measure that. I could be very creative and be chasing this idea and building out the bones of this really in-depth article or video or podcast. And that idea management side of it, there isn't a way to measure that sort of output those flashes of inspiration that you get you can't say

well this one has a productive value of 10 and this one's only a 2 you just have the ideas and you kind of work themselves out you know through the course of time and uh that's so that's kind of like something i've been struggling with a little bit is I can feel internally, like I have no problem thinking I've been very creative today and therefore I've been very productive today. But I'm also part of a remote team and we're supposed to be sharing what we're working on. So sometimes it's hard for me to just in a couple of sentences at the end of the day say, this is what I accomplished because a lot of it is making things up, being creative. And so maybe you've got some insights for me on how to measure that sort of stuff, because I don't think it's as simple as how most people would do it, which is,

did I publish the article or did I write a certain number of words or things like that? I've used those sort of measures in the past. But again, like you can take a garbage idea, crank out a couple thousand words on it, say there that was productive. But if you just had a couple hundred words on a really powerful, big idea, you know, I almost think that is more valuable. Yeah. Have you ever heard the story about Apple's lines of code? You know, when Apple was starting to get big, they brought in, I guess, productivity or managers to help kind of run the business. And there was a programmer.

He's the guy who made MacPaint. And I forget his name now. I've even met this guy. But anyway, he was kind of a legendary programmer at Apple. And he was known for being very efficient with the way he wrote his code. And Apple brought these managers in. They said, OK, we want you to report every week the number of lines of code you write. And we're going to be judging you on how, air quote,

productive you are with the number of codes you'd write. And he would turn in every week his report, and he'd say, this week I wrote negative 10,000 lines of code. And they're like, what are you talking about? He's like, well, I figured out a way to do something faster, so I was able to eliminate 10,000 lines of code. So under their definition of productivity, he was negative productivity. But for actual use on a product, he was actually very efficient. Yeah. And that's the thing that I think is worth unpacking here in this episode is specifically

with creativity. I do think that there is a formula to this, that it is an acquired skill. And I know lots of people who think that I am just not creative. In fact, I gave a talk at MaxTalk, I think it was last year, was the theme of creativity. And I mentioned this at the end, that every single person, I believe, is born creative. You have to learn to care what people think at the end that every single person I believe is born creative. You have to learn to care what people think about the stuff that you create. And eventually you judge yourself against the output of others. And you convince yourself that you don't have the ability to do this because you're not as good in your own mind as that person over there. And in fact, this is exactly what I dealt with for a

very long time. I said myself, I guess that I am just not creative because I can't come up with anything that's completely original. We were talking about my guitar playing earlier with the shiny new object. I have played guitar, I think I picked it up in college, which is longer ago than I care to admit right now. But one of the things that I've always liked doing once I had the basic building blocks of the chords and things figured out is I've really liked writing songs. And I used to write songs, and then I would hear a song on the radio and realize that I stole my melody line from that song. And I would get borderline depressed about it. Like, man, I guess I am just not creative. And I stopped. I stopped doing it for a very long time. And it wasn't until I read

the book Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon, which I know I've mentioned here before, but this is really like a tipping point type book for me. Because in that book by Austin Kleon, which I know I've mentioned here before, but this is really like a tipping point type book for me. Because in that book, Austin Kleon talks about how creativity is simply connecting dots. And at that point, the light bulb went on in my brain and I'm like, creativity is a system. So if I want to create better outputs, I just need to collect better inputs. And for me, that means reading books. It means watching TED Talk type videos, those things that are going to give me more dots in my mental toolbox. And then at that point, it's kind of like, okay, brain, do your thing. And I, for a long time, did not have any sort of system to connect those dots for me.

And that was completely okay. I was fine with the output because I knew if I put the right dots in, then whatever came out was simply the logical outcome of all of these dots being mixed up together. And at that point, I didn't have to judge the songs that I was writing or the things that I was writing or the podcasts I was recording or the videos that I was creating because it was just, that's what I had to work with. And I feel like this is kind of revolutionary for people who do any sort of knowledge work because you can control the dots that you put into the machine. You can control the barriers that you put around your time and around your attention and around even your energy. And at that point, you can just let it rip and you're productive

because whatever comes out is what's going to come out. You take a look at what came out, and you look for ways to improve it, but at the same time, you're not staying there. You're constantly looking forward, and you're looking for the next dots to collect. Yeah, yeah. And I do think that one of the mistakes people make, you know, kind of getting back to terms, is if you equate productivity with efficiency,

efficiency is at odds with creativity because creativity is drilling a lot of empty wells. You know, it's exploring an idea long enough to realize, ah, this isn't the right idea, and then trying again. And if you look at that in terms of efficiency, it's not very efficient, again. And if you look at that in terms of efficiency, it's not very efficient. But that's how this process works. Exactly. And the other thing that kind of jumps out to me as it pertains to productivity and creativity is that, you know, I mentioned a lot of people, myself included, have thought at some point in their lives, I'm just not creative. But I don't know anybody who has ever thought I'm just not productive, or I don't have the ability to be productive. Because that's what people mean when they say, I'm just not

creative. It's like, well, I don't have that creative gene. I wasn't born that way. But almost everybody I would venture to say recognizes that their lack of the standard definition of productivity is simply because they lack discipline or they don't take the time to create the systems that they know will produce the results that they want. They maybe even know the results that they want. They know that their system isn't good enough. But sometimes, you know, you're just in the machine. You had a week like you did last week and you don't see any way out

of it. You're just completely exhausted and you don't feel like you have anything to give to tweaking the machinery of your life to create the outcomes that you're looking for. Yeah. And so much of this is tied up in self-image too. I like the point that you make about people saying, I'm just not creative. There's a person in my life who I'm thinking of right now who doesn't call herself a creative person, but she's obsessed with making the world's best chocolate chip cookie. And I swear to God, every time I see her,

she's got like two cookies. She's like, try this one and this one and tell me which one you like better. And like she has over years been working on the world's best chocolate chip cookie. And I know that is a creative process. You know what she's doing? She's taking famous recipes and she's tweaking them. It's inherently creative.

But she doesn't recognize that. Yeah, you got to give yourself some credit. The other thing that I think is important here as it pertains to productivity and creativity is recognizing where creativity comes from and figuring out a way to reproduce that at scale, which is kind of where the whole idea of the Zettelkasten comes from. Now, I know you talked about this a little bit on the Mac Power Users episode where you dove into the specific applications for research. I did a presentation on this for Virtual Mac Stock this year, and I think this is a really powerful idea. So I just want to unpack this a little bit because this is not something that is

like pie in the sky, which is what I thought of it initially is like, well, that sounds great, but there's no way I could ever do that sort of thing. The Zettelkasten is created by a guy named Nicholas Lumens, who wrote a ton of research papers, and he accredited his output to this system he had, which was a file drawer with index cards in it, kind of like the card catalogs at the library from back in the day. And he would basically keep track of his ideas on these cards, and he would link them together and say, this idea connects to this idea. And I've always thought this sounded kind of ridiculous. I picture this guy walking around with one of those card catalog drawers under his arm. And as he's thinking of things, he's moving

around the cards in this thing, which is not appealing to me in the least. But the digital version of this has always felt too far out there until Rome and Obsidian and those types of applications. And I know people have been trying to do this sort of thing previously using different applications, but it's just never really clicked for me. In fact, I read a book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sanke Ahrens, where he kind of unpacks this whole idea of the Zettelkasten. And he talks in that book about some digital tools and things like that. I went and looked at all of them. I'm like, no, this isn't going to get me where I want to go. And the thing that is rattling around in my brain right now is, does it make sense, since my productivity is tied to my creativity, to keep the information, the dots that I use for the creative work and the tasks

that I typically would track in a separate system in different places? I think an argument could be made for that. I mean, there are certain applications that are designed for certain uses, and they function really well in those use cases. I'm not going to try and collect information into OmniFocus, and I'm not going to try to manage my tasks in Evernote. But as I've been playing around with Roam Research, which we'll get into in a little bit here, and I know you've been playing around with Roam Research, which we'll get into in a little bit here, and I know you've been messing around with Obsidian. And I feel like, by the way, we're just at the tip of the iceberg with these sorts of things. These applications are already inspiring a lot of different changes in a lot of the note-taking applications that a lot of us use

every single day. And they're just going to become more and more powerful for tying these things together. But kind of what I'm thinking over in my head is, does it make sense to tie all this together in a single application again? Where I've got the tasks, I've got the dots and I can just mix them all up and see what comes up. Well, you know, I feel like, you know, this revolution of knowledge management

that we're going now as a software based revolution. It's like new tools are emerging that make stuff easier. Um, and, but I also acknowledge I've been doing this since I started law school. I mean, I've had, I mean, for a long time, it was an analog system for me with multiple highlighters and folders where I would have copies of cases. And I would, I kind of had my own note card system for lack of a better term. But years ago, I may, I turned that into a digital system. And I, I have, if you look at anything I work on analytically, there are many PDFs with many different colors of highlights and many tags. And so I, I built my own system. I mean,

one of the reasons why I've always been such a fan of these collection tools like Devon Think and even Scrivener is the ability to combine research with thought. And I think that I've kind of been there for a long time, but I feel like as someone who's had a kind of homegrown system that really didn't have a lot of intentionality behind it, this emergence of these new tools makes it so much easier that I think everybody can get in on it. And I will say that I think it absolutely helps you with the creative process because the human brain is great at thinking about things. It's not so great at retaining things. And if you have an external version of the brain that keeps those research materials for you and can help you draw those lines, you are going to be more creative. You're going to come up with more creative ideas.

So you mentioned you've been doing this for a while and you've been using a bunch of different tools back to those folders that you were talking about. Do you see any difference in the amount of creative output using the tools that are available now versus what you had previously? I guess what I'm getting at is with the digital Zettelkasten thing, for example, is there a tipping point for where that just makes it so much easier? Well, to me, the big difference with these tools is I've never really had a good way for macro tracking this stuff. It's always been micro tracking. Like a lot of the legal work I do involves trade secret law. You know, what is a trade secret? You know, the kernel Seven secret herbs and spices

are a trade secret. You know, and I have a lot of knowledge. I mean, I'll talk about on podcasts about what that is, at least in California. So I've got all these cases and notes and thoughts, and I've got this Devon Think database around that issue. But I've never had the ability to say, take all the legal concepts I work on them and combine them into one database. And I know you could kind of do that in dev and

think, but I feel like these new tools make that macro view something that, that is available to me that really wasn't before. And like thoughts spirituality, thoughts about anything that is an intellectual pursuit of mine, what if I threw all of that in the blender, right? And I've never really had a good system for that. And that's what I think these new tools are offering. So where do you think the line is personally for throwing things in the the blender where are sort of the delineations between the buckets for you i'm figuring it out now to tell you the truth but i will tell you that i'm not i'm not sold on the idea of turning these apps these these knowledge management apps into more than knowledge management you know um i like you, consumed a lot of information

and done a lot of own personal research in Roam and Obsidian and some of their competitors over the last several months. And while I understand, like, I know you've turned your task management system into Roam and I know people run their whole calendar and there's people that use it as a blog writing platform and all sorts of cool things i don't think that those tools are very good for that just my general you know um sure like i i feel like my omni focus is a much better task manager than rome could ever be and with the

magic of url links i combine them all i glue all together anyway. So why not just like pick the best in class for each tool and then use, you know, technology to tie them together. Which is definitely a valid approach, I think, especially with tools like Zapier and IFTTT tying things together on the web. You know, there was a report by Nest Labs, which was available to subscribers. It's 50 bucks a year to get access to the report. And I bought it just because it looked interesting and then started poking around the website. And it's a phenomenal website.

So nestlabs.com. And the PDF was the state of personal knowledge management. In that PDF, she talks about how there's different stacks for personal knowledge management. In that PDF, she talks about how there's different stacks for personal knowledge management. And this kind of gets back to like the architect, engineer, gardener type people. But one of the stacks that's in there is like you collect knowledge using Readwise, you curate it using Roamer Obsidian, and you share it to the web. And like you said, you can definitely have different applications for each step of that process. I guess what I'm kind of falling into, and I'm asking if there's some warning to be heated here, is just doing all of that in a single place. I have tried to do that

sort of thing in other applications in the past, and it has always burned me. But for whatever reason, it feels different in Rome. It feels like all the pieces are there for me to cobble together this system, especially since there's so much overlap between productivity and creativity for me. I totally agree. And there's people who are running their entire lives out of Rome. It's their diary app and it runs the whole stack. And I don't, you know, I'm not here to say that's a bad idea because I think it can be a great idea. You know, having everything in one place really puts a lot in your blender. Right. Um, but the, uh, but for me, I, it's just not the right tool. I mean, I, I looked at task management Rome and I was like, this is missing

so many features that I rely on every day. And I need a big boy task management system with the different careers I have. But I know for a fact that you you've never been a real like in depth micro task manager and probably to your benefit. I mean, honestly, the less time you spend on that stuff, the more time you spend doing tasks. So I could see how Rome's task management tools would be good enough for what you do. Yeah, that's the thing is, as I'm thinking about all the different tools in my workflow and the type of work that I do, it's really what's going to give me the structure and the support that I need to stay on target and then get out of my way and let my brain do what it needs to do. And this is, again, personal knowledge management. This is a popular topic right now.

There's lots of people who are talking about this. One of them is Tiago Forte. He is the creator of the Building a Second Brain course. Forte. He is the creator of the Building a Second Brain course. And he talks about the four levels of personal knowledge management in an article, which we'll link to in the show notes. And he's got this thing in their code, which stands for capture, organize, distill, and express. And as I'm thinking through, for me, productivity and creativity, I realized that... I don't know if I 100% agree with the way that he has codified that process, but I think that he's kind of nailed what is actually going on there, where you're

capturing the ideas, you're organizing them, you're distilling them. So it's not just regurgitating a bunch of information, but it is synthesizing it and saying it in a new way based on previous information and previous knowledge. And then the expression, that's where and saying it in a new way based on previous information and previous knowledge. And then the expression, that's where it comes out in a podcast like this or a blog post or a video or whatever. And so that process, kind of what I've been kicking around in the back of my head for the last couple of weeks is, okay, I know that the more I do this intentionally, the better I get at it. So what are the systems that I need, which are going to kind of start spinning that flywheel?

And then once I've got that thing moving, then it's just don't get in your own way. Yeah, I think let's get into that next. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Woven, the all-in-one calendar which is perfect for busy people. We talk a lot in this show about intentionality and making sure that you're following through on the thing that you mean to be doing at any given moment. And that's really the key. Everything that you need to do needs to get done within the context of time. Whether you are working from home, making your own schedule, or you're in an office environment and have back-to-back meetings, you need to know what you're doing when. And this gets more

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make time for what matters most. You really need to check this out. Take control of your calendar and improve your workflow. And as a listener of this show, you can try Woven free for 21 days. Go to woven.com or click the link in the show notes. That's woven, W-O-V-E-N.com. Our thanks to Woven for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. So the idea that you're talking about, and Tiago mentions as well, is just, you know, what's the next level? You read a book, let's say you read a book and you make highlights on a book. What are you doing to incorporate that knowledge into your operating system, for lack of a better word? How are you doing it currently? Well, I am trying to experimenting, I guess, with whether I can do all of this stuff inside of Rome research. And the more I play with this,

stuff inside of Roam Research. And the more I play with this, the more I think that I can. Now, you mentioned an article which went out on the Suite Setup. We'll link to that in the show notes about how I tried to cobble together a GTD-style task management system inside of Roam. I also have learned the hard way that web apps will get updated and any customizations that you make might break. So I'm trying to do this without a bunch of fancy plugins and things, just using the standard tools that are in there. So for Roam, that's like queries and filters and the way it's set up as kind of like a digital bullet journal. And I think that that might actually work. There's a bunch of other use cases that you can use it for. And that's kind of where I started with it. I started using it for these sermon notes that I've been taking sketchnotes on for years. The

first thing I did with Roam is I went back into GoodNotes and I exported every sketchnote file that I had since I started doing them digitally, which is from September of 2017. And I created a page for every single one of those sermons, uploaded the sketchnote file. And then from there, scriptures, which link to like a King James Version public domain Bible that I was able to import. From there, I started doing the same thing with book notes. So I've got the MindNode files from the books that I read.

I export those. I upload them to the page for the book. I create a three-sentence summary of what's in the book. And then I also export from the same MindNode file a text version, which I can go in, Command-C to copy everything, Command-V to paste as an outline below the PDF file itself. And so now you can kind of see where I've got all these different dots from all these different domains. And Rome is the thing that allows me to link all this stuff together. So I really do like the way that it links those things together. In addition to the journaling stuff. So I use like these, this, these sliders that are built into Roam, which are like an easy way to rate something

from 0 to 10. And I have implemented the daily questions thing that I got from reading the book Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith, where it's just seven or eight questions every single day. And I rate myself 0 to 10. So I've got some links to some of the different things that I've written about these, and I'll put those in the show notes too. But so far, I have not hit the point, and that's kind of what I'm testing out right now, is will I hit the point where I have too much unrelated stuff in Rome where it's actually getting in my way more than it's helping me

synthesize this stuff all together? I mean, one of the things about Rome is the idea that you put data in without structure. And it's one of the most liberating things about it. I think when you start using it, I don't have to think about where this fits. but the problem is multiply that times 200 books, you know, once you have 200 books, you know, the blender gets really dense with a lot of stuff, right? And you're not sure how anything really ties together. And, but you can add a bit of structure at the input level. level. So the way I've done this historically is, I talked earlier about highlights. It started kind of through law school, because in law school, you're not assigned textbooks, you're assigned cases. You just read cases. And then you're randomly called on in class. You never know when it's going to be your turn. So you've got to be really ready to answer and analyze. And I would use a yellow highlight, and then I would use a yellow highlight and then I would use a blue highlight and I would just go through and that would be the first and second passes. And then

the third pass, I would write summaries of the key points on a piece of paper. And then over the years that turned into text files. And I have many, many text files from, and this has gone way past cases for me. This is like basically anything non-fiction i read even like extended blog posts i have where i'll write these notes out and then but i never really tied them together i didn't have a system for tying them together i use my brain to make the connections um and that's why the attraction of things like rome and obsidian are there because you can add tags or keynotes or just even links between them to draw the lines for you. So to answer your question, is Roam a good place for this? Where I would argue Roam isn't a great

place for task management. Roam is the perfect place for this knowledge management system that you're talking about. It is an outline-based system. I mean, Roam is, I think, one of the best outliners for this type of problem because it gives you the benefit of outlining plus cross-linking. Did I answer your question or am I just rambling? No, you answered the question. The next thing then is how are you managing this? Because I know that you've been playing around with Obsidian, and I'd love to get your perspective on this, but in my mind, the big differences here are that Rome is basically all in the cloud. And even like the videos that I wanted to upload into Rome, I had to upload them to YouTube first so I could embed them because they were too big. Whereas Obsidian is all the local stuff, and there's advantages and disadvantages to both of those approaches.

Is that accurate? And how are you doing this? And how specifically are you overcoming some of the challenges that are presented with using the local file-based stuff? Well, this cross-linking idea really has been revolutionary for me personally. So I'm pulling a lot of these text summaries I have into these systems. I've also, in the last several years, I had a separate Rhodia notebook, one of the black ones, you know, they have the kind of the orange one and they have the black one. I had the black one where I would take notes from books I was reading and media that I consumed like YouTube and whatnot. And that was real fun writing those out by pen, but now I regret not making the digital because I think connecting them is so valuable. So I'm going to at some point try and re-encode those digitally. But

to answer the question, I have been adding more structure with Obsidian than you have with Rome. With Obsidian, in Rome, the fundamental building block is a outline bullet point. That is it. And then you build on that. And you can have sub points and parent points and children points and sibling points. Everything is linkable. And that is the drug that makes Rome so attractive. points, everything is linkable. And that's, that is the drug that makes Rome so attractive. With Obsidian, the building point is really markdown files. You can link individual blocks of a markdown file in Obsidian, but that's not really the focus. The focus is these markdown files. And with a group of markdown files, and a lot of people use obsidian just keep one directory with all these hundreds of files in them but i have been adding structure where i have folders in my

obsidian vault and you know they're separated by resource type and sometimes areas of my life i really define my whole life by a set of roles that I play, and everything kind of fits in one or the other, so I put these resources as subfolders in these vaults. So I'm adding structure at the beginning with Obsidian that I was not adding with Rome, and that has helped me kind of keep some sense of order in the chaos. Does that make sense?

I think that's, yeah, I think that's the way to do it if you're going to use local files. I think that one of the things I like about Roam is that I don't have to consider where it's actually being stored. Just like for a long time with iOS, you didn't have to consider where files were being stored, but there's limitations in that too. With Obsidian though, like the people who put everything in a single folder, and I don't think I've ever seen anybody do that sort of thing. But then again, I don't have as much experience with Obsidian as you do at this point. I kind of view that as like people who store every single file on their computer, on their desktop. I don't want to have to wade through all that junk.

And so if you're going to have that sidebar and you're going to have the hierarchical organization structure, you may as well use that to your advantage. I do think when it comes to idea management, you can get to the point where you're moving things around and you're putting things in the right place and you're focusing on the storage and the management of those things instead of the ideas themselves. But I don't think it necessarily has to go there either. And that's a problem in Rome too. I mean, one of the things I've realized with Rome for me is that I can't just dump everything into Rome. If I dumped everything into Rome, I would have a much higher noise ratio than I do right now.

And that's kind of why I write everything and capture everything in the notebook first. I'll jot down 10 different ideas during the day in the notebook, but only one of those will be transferred to Roam because the rest of them, I realized by the end of the day, when I do my shutdown, those aren't actually very good ideas. And that helps me make sure that the stuff that's in roam is a high quality dot worth connecting yeah i i do think that so the disadvantage of of putting some structure in it on the entry point is it takes extra time and sometimes you're not sure where things exactly fit when you create them um but i think the advantage of that is once you hit some number of things you've reviewed,

and it gets to be overwhelming. And if you don't have any structure, you can't find things, and you're not sure where things fit together. And I felt myself in my test with Roam even getting to the point like, I know I covered this, but I'm not sure where it is or how to get to it. And it can feel that way when you've got this massive web-based library that really has no structure to it. And we've been talking in terms of books and then legal cases, but I, I find this methodology works for articles. It works for you.

I mean, there's so many great explainer YouTube videos that I watch and incorporating those into the, a system like this also help. Like you were talking earlier about TED Talks, you can do that. Now with Roam, they've got a command where you can just copy a YouTube link and it embeds the YouTube right in your Roam database. With Obsidian, the way you do that is with an iframe because it's marked down. All you do is you go to YouTube and copy the iframe, like an embed iframe, and paste it into a Markdown file, and Obsidian renders it the same way you can play it right in the Obsidian file. But it's a little more time consuming. But, you know, all these various media

that we can consume now are subject to this type of analysis. And as humans, it is that last step of going through and really taking the parts out of it that are important to you and then even kind of the final final step for me is the tags i create i create tags related to the media i consume and it can be about some spiritual thing i'm interested in it could be about productivity it can be about, you know, trade secrets, whatever. But I add all these tags once I'm done kind of consuming and digesting some of this media or books. And then all of a sudden that's where the payoff is with Rome and Obsidian, where you go to a graph view and you can see everything that connects to it. Or you can look at a backlink and say, oh, wait a second,

I didn't realize that both this and that kind of point to the same thing in accordance to my own tags, which, you know, something that I came up with, you know, suddenly, boom, you've got creativity. Exactly. Now on the tagging thing specifically, I've recognized the same thing. Tagging is really where you can start to draw some really cool connections. I have also never been very good at tagging. So I feel like this is kind of V1 of the Mike Schmitz tagging system. Have you been tagging using whatever application? I know you can do it in the Finder. you could do it in mail with certain add-ons. What have you used tagging for in the past and what sort of tips would you give a newbie

like me? Well, I think the tagging you're going to do in Roam is way different than the tagging I've historically done. I mean, historically I've done tagging to like group files together or to trigger Hazel rules or things with roam i think though you or if a personal management system of any type roam obsidian you know bear whatever drafts you should sit down and develop a tagging system and you don't have to come up with the final tagging system but you should have some kind of, you know, taxonomy to begin with. Like for me, a big part of this thing I've developed over the years,

I know we've talked about it and I've heard about from some of the listeners, the Sparky OS, I mentioned it on Mac Power Users. Now people want me to explain it, but it's a little more detailed. Maybe we'll do a show on it at some point. But, you know, there are a bunch of ideas in my life and things that are important to me.

And a lot of them are natural tags as I'm reading through stuff, because things that are important to me are the things that I'm going to be attracted to read about and learn about. And I just apply these tags. And I don't apply the tags with the idea of, all right, let me see how does this idea relate to that idea? But if I just apply the tags on an intellectual basis, as I finish the material, the software makes the connections for me, which is why I'm really excited about this kind of recent development. I get the power in

that. I mean, we were talking before we hit record about that's one of the switches that you have to make if you're going to try to use Roam for task management is essentially all the dates that you would put in there. Those are tags. It's not a due date. It's not a start date. It can mean whatever the heck you want it to mean. But when you put a date on it, then when you go to the page for that date, then it's going to be there. And so I get that for dates. And I have a couple of use cases that I've done so far. Like I actually take all of the quotes from all the books that I've read, and I create blocks for those under the author's page, and I use a tag of Quotebook. And what that allows me to do is create a page called Quotebook, which has a query,

and it shows every quote that I have collected inside of Roam. And it shows every quote that I have collected inside of Roam. The thing, I guess the sticking point for me is just in figuring out what are the things that I want to tag when it comes to the idea management stuff. Like the quote book and the date for the to-dos, those have very specific applications of where I would want to see those things together. And for somebody who is approaching this for the first time, I guess I'm a little bit nervous about like, well, do I create too many tags? Is there a sweet spot number for the number that I should be developing?

And yeah, that sort of thing. I think there's no single answer, but I can tell you what I've done. I have a page with my tag taxonomy on it, just to kind of keep up with things. So I can tell you what I've done. I have a page with my tag taxonomy on it just to kind of keep up with things so I can see what I'm tagging. And then the way I apply them is when I, let's say I, right now I'm working through, I haven't told you about this cause I wasn't sure if you'd approve or not. So I'm reading some Robert Green books, you know, I think he's kind of controversial. I have some books by him. I get it, but I'm okay with it. All right. I wasn't sure. I didn't want to make you mad. But anyway, so I'm reading the Laws of Human Nature. And it's an interesting book. And in some ways, it's pretty deep. In

some ways, it's pretty shallow, I i think but he's got these different like each section of this book is like a mini book it's not really like one idea running through the whole book as much as it is some general ideas like rationality versus irrationality and and i think there's it's worth my time to read the book so i'm going through it i'm highlighting it read wise is giving me all these highlights. And I go into my Rome page on this book, and then I read the highlights. And when I see something in here that ties to my Spark EOS tags, I will tag individual quotes out of it. And when I see a theme or something that is of particular relevance to my operating system or how I think, I may already have kind of like a rule in my life that applies to this. And I use those as links, right?

So I'll have a page about, you know, okay, I mean, this is people. It's hard to talk about this stuff, Mike, because people, you sound like such a blowhard, right? But like one of my themes or thoughts is teach my children with action, not words. You know, like I don't want to be the dad that lectures my kids every day. I feel like that doesn't really work. but when I deal with a problem in my life, I really try to deal with it in a way and share with them what I'm going through and what I'm going to do about it. And I feel like that is a better way to teach my children than to lecture them at the dinner table. So, so I,

I have a, a link called deeds, not words, you know? And so I'll see something in this, this Robert green book that relates to that that to me or resonates with me, and I will apply the link to the individual passage that I highlighted. So I'm much more a fan of tagging and linking ideas more than entire works. Does that make sense?

It does. Yep. And it's given me a few ideas. sense? It does. Yep. And it's given me a few ideas. And then if you go to my deeds, not words page, I've got stuff I've written about it, about my own kind of discussion with myself, my operating system about how am I going to do this and why is this important to me? But the thing that Rome and now Obsidian have added to me is the ability to backlink in everything that I've ever seen that reinforces that for me. And before, my old system didn't really do that. Yeah, so it's not a, okay, I'm going to create this tag and now I'm going to use this going forward, but you have the ability basically to

go back and backdate every idea that you've had that's tied to that. Yeah, and it's very easy with these links. And I'm kind of slowly migrating into this and um the reason i chose obsidian over rome is i'm just not that comfortable with the web base element with it i talked about this on mac power users they really don't have an answer to the security problem yet and um and obsidian is stuff that i control on my device um unrelated well actually I don't want to go down that rabbit hole yet, but I can talk about some other things I'm doing with Obsidian later if you want. Sure, whatever you're willing to share. I've got a couple ideas here for challenges,

but basically, I think, you know, whatever you want to share, and then we'll wrap it up. Okay, so the tagging thing, I think I've explained. So you develop these tags, but it's also links to ideas. I think somebody on the internet has written about this. Have you heard the term evergreen notes? I think that's a concept I'm aware of, but I haven't really explored.

But I think it's very similar to what I do in terms of rules of the road. Or in my case, I call it the operating system. You know, what are, you know, what are the kind of the rules that I operate by? And as dumb as it sounds, having this stuff written down and thinking it through when you're under fire actually makes a difference, you know? So, so I've got this system I've built and I've been able to kind of backlink into it with stuff I've read better using these tools. But another thing, a problem that I wanted to solve

that I've been trying to solve for years is just keeping track of work and in context. Um, the legal stuff I do, there's lots of phone calls and contact made with people. And, but a lot of it takes place sometimes over years. Some of the stuff I work on as a lawyer takes years to come to fruition. So, you know, I've tried all these different methods for it. I've tried keeping a running note on each item, but it doesn't really scale that well on longer projects and then i've tried like using day one like a specified day one library it's end-to-end encrypted so i feel safe writing in there but it it never really worked either because like the process of applying tags and and searching it really it's a it's kind of a square peg in a round hole for day one it's not really what it was made for

yeah but looking at rome and obsidian i realized this would actually be a great place for that so I have a daily page now that I use and in it I log the substantive work I make kind of the moving the needle stuff I do on legal projects as well as personal projects and max parking projects. And all that stuff is on my secure files. So people can't see it, but it's all linked. So like if I, and not only do I link like calls with a person, I also link it all to a specific project. So, you know, we'll say, well, this acquisition project, I can look at now the page for that created through Obsidian or slash Roam and then look back historically to see who I talked to. When I talked to them, I can create links to the emails that I sent related to it. And all this stuff is safe with Obsidian because of the way the security model works.

the security model works. And that also allows me to apply the maker, manager, consumer tags to the stuff I do. And I can very easily see using those tags, what did I make in the last week? What did I consume in the last week? Where was I a manager in the last week? Which is another part of my operating system, for lack of a better term. But the feedback I get off that is very useful. And I've, I've tried a ton of ways to do this over the years and I wanted to do it in Rome, but I didn't trust their security. So I've been doing it now with Obsidian and this is by far the best way I've been ever been able to track and manage this stuff. I'm very happy with that piece of it. And that's completely independent of like idea tracking and note management. Right. Yeah. I like those tags that you mentioned, the maker, manager, consumer. I can definitely

see how that could be useful. I'm curious, does that tie into any sort of time tracking that you're doing? Or you just look at the stuff in Obsidian and look at the tasks or the projects that you were working on for that and make your judgments off of that data alone? Yeah, I've thought about tying that in time tracking. I have a tagging system with my time tracking where I could, but I've not bothered. I do track time also for moving the needle, which we've talked about in the show. So that number is more important to me than whether I move the needle by being a manager or a maker. But I do, in my head, there's a balance for the stuff I do.

I want to be spending like 60% of my time making and 20% managing and 20% consuming. That's in my head. That's the number. So I really probably should take that into time tracking, but I look more kind of as quantifiable results than time. Yeah, an argument could be made that that's the better way to do it, honestly. I think that's a pitfall in time tracking, to be honest, for a lot of people, especially if you're new to it is to just focus on the time that you're spending on things and going all the way back to the beginning of this episode, you know, the time that you spend

on things that doesn't necessarily mean that you were productive or creative. So maybe that's the wrong measure. Maybe you should be judging it on the things that you consumed or the things that you made, you know, stuff like that. Yeah. Well, that was a long path, man. Yeah. Anything else you want to share about your obsidian setup? Uh, not yet. I'm still figuring it out. Um, but I, I really am digging the model, you know, I I'm nervous about an app that has two developers, you know, obsidian is getting millions of dollars. I'm sorry Obsidian is getting millions of dollars.

I'm sorry, Roam is getting millions in startup capital. And who knows, maybe six months from now, I'll be all in with Roam. But I think just the idea of markdown files that I control, maybe I'm too much of a control freak, but that really is appealing to me. No, I get it. Especially if you have sensitive data

that you need to keep secure. I mean, Roam's not really even an option. Yeah. But it is exciting times. And I think for people that are interested in focus, these tools are something that you should be aware of. And it's just emerging right now. It's just exciting kind of seeing how it all works.

Definitely agree. And I think you're not the only one who's figuring this out. I think I also am still trying to figure all this stuff out. And that's a little bit scary is that this is a little bit like the wild west where there really isn't, in my opinion, a clear, this is the right way to approach this for the type of work that I do. It's kind of the thing that you got to figure out for yourself. And there's a lot of different paths that can get you there. But like you said, it's exciting too, because we've got all these technological tools, which for lack of a better term, are kind of like force multipliers for the creative output for people like you and myself, where we need to be able to

create on demand, basically, having the right tools makes it a lot easier to do that where you're not staring at a cursor blinking on the page and you're frustrated because you can't think of what you want to write about stuff like that. Yeah. And we covered this in depth, like the technology pieces of this on Mac Power Users on episode 559. I'll put a link in the show notes. But kind of a big overview for me is Rome is excellent for outlining ideas, and Obsidian is better for writing.

But that's just a very pedestrian kind of look at it. There's a lot more going on sure well i i credit you for bringing this to my attention because you were the one who told me first about rome and um and but it really is scratching a bunch of itches that i've had for a long time and not really a good answer for nice i've I've got a challenge for you, David, if you are up to the task. Okay. Because we have talked a lot about

our personal knowledge management systems and stacks. You've mentioned how you don't feel like Roamer Obsidian alone is the right place for everything and you got different applications for different uses. And I think that's, like I said, totally valid approach. So the challenge here is to spend some time evaluating your personal knowledge management stack, according to the Nest Labs article. That's the term that they use. The way that things tie together, Readwise, Obsidian, tie together, Readwise, Obsidian, OmniFocus, whatever, and find one thing that you want to improve or change and then report back. So basically what I'm looking for is you look at

what you have right now, and you've already been doing this as you've gone from Roam to Obsidian and trying out all these different things. But I would basically, what I want is for you to consider this intentionally and then find kind of the weak spot for you right now, and then either make the change or talk about what you're going to change in order to address that. You know what, that's a great assignment, because I've been thinking in the back of my head that I haven't really put to paper exactly what I'm doing top to bottom. And I think I almost need to do that for myself more than anybody else just to kind of see it because then I'm going to see where the problems lie. Can I turn that on you and give you the exact same assignment?

Yeah, absolutely. I think we both need to do this. And let's also share what process we went through and kind of figuring, quantifying it like i i've seen a piece of paper that you drew on once but i feel like it's out of date at this point yeah actually i was thinking about that that's part of the hybrid bullet journal system article that i wrote back in may or june and to be honest a lot of the pieces in that flow chart are still the same, but the way that they are connected is a little bit different. So I don't know, I could get very specific with this one. All right. I feel like we've got work to do. All right. So we are the Focus Podcast. You can find

us over at relay.fm slash focused. Thank you to our sponsors today, Squarespace and woven. Please consider signing up for deep focus, which is our extended show. Um, uh, people are tired of me talking about my retreat, Mike, but you're going to get more of it if you sign up for deep focus. So how's that for an enticement? I am excited. Can't wait. All right. So we'll do that. And otherwise, we'll see you next time.