Focused - 114: Inputs and PKM Stacks

Episode Date: December 8, 2020

Inputs! We all have too many of them and not enough of us have a plan for them. In this episode, Mike and David talk about those pesky inputs and how to deal with them.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? I am excited, as always, to be able to sit here and talk to you today about focused and focused-related things. I just look forward to making this show. I don't know what to say.

It's a fun one. Yeah. Thank you for all the positive feedback. We've been getting a lot of great feedback from listeners. And I'll tell you, Mike and I are both putting a lot of effort into the show. We really want it to be great, but it's a weird show. It doesn't kind of fit the usual mold. And we appreciate all of those of you that are listening to us and coming along for the ride. Today, we've got a lot to cover, but before we do, a couple business items. The Focus calendars are still available, so go get your Focus calendar.

We got the vendor to work with us this year to get that dry erase, so I think it's going to be even easier for those of you that want to be able to make changes. After 2020, I think the ability to make changes is an important piece of a calendar. Yes, absolutely. You got to be flexible. But they look great. They make great gifts too. It's not too late to get one and give it away as a gift. But there's really something to be said. We talked about this last year when we first started selling the Focus calendar. But I really think there's something to be said. We talked about this last year when we first started selling the focus calendar, but I, I really think there's something to be said for having a big calendar on the wall that you can look at. Um, one of the most important reasons I have one is so when I'm on the phone with

somebody and they ask me to do something, I forced myself to look at my existing obligations on that calendar before I say, yes, it's a, it's a tool for no, for me. Love it. That's a great use for it. Yeah. Well, either way, we've got a good price on them and they're out there and we'd appreciate if you bought one. So go check it out. We'll put a link in the show notes. And related for the members, we're getting great feedback again on the deep focus segment that we're now regularly adding to all shows. In fact, we've got an interesting one planned for you today. For all subscribers, you're going to be able to get that deep focus, that additional feed with the additional in content where Mike and I go down rabbit holes that show up in the show that don't necessarily fit in the show but are interesting topics for people interested in in the general idea of focus and you can sign up for a membership right at relay.fm yeah and it's not just us we've

had a couple of guests who have contributed deep focus segments to britney smith eric fisher and uh those conversations are some of my favorites because that's where we get really nerdy yep all right um we've got a lot of business to follow up with, but you've got a shiny new object you wanted to share with the focused audience. Yes. So I bought recently a Bluetooth water bottle, which is called the Hydrate Steel.

It's the evolution of their Spark line. So Spark has been around for a while. I had a Spark water bottle back in the day because I love the idea of having a Bluetooth water bottle that would automatically log how much water you drank in a day. Drinking enough water is one of those things that I know I should do it for my health,

but I have trouble doing it without a constant reminder. And logging things manually for me just does not work. So I need to make this as seamless as possible. But the problem with the old water bottles was it was one of those circular batteries that you had to replace manually. And it was in the top of the lid, I believe. And it was supposed to last for several weeks. Mine never lasted more than a couple of days. So I was constantly changing this battery. And I very quickly gave up on it. When I saw this one, however, number one, the water bottle looks a lot better.

In my opinion, it's a steel, kind of like a clean canteen style water bottle with a light at the bottom. And so the battery is now removable. There's a built-in battery and the bottom of the water bottle lights up whenever it's time for you to take a drink. Basically, it has this chart, X, Y axis of your goal based on your height and weight and how active you are during the day, how much water you should be drinking. And then there's this line that if you fall below that, it'll flash the water bottle for you. So it's kind of like an in-your-face notification. Instead of just getting it on my phone, you know, it's sitting on my desk right in front of me. I put my phone to the side and I try not to look at those notifications. We'll talk about that a little bit here today, I think.

just in my face as a physical notification. And it's a reminder to do something which is just something that slips my mind, reach for the water bottle and take a drink. So this has been working for me ever since I got this, which now is three weeks ago. I have met my goal for drinking enough water 17 days in a row. So this is like the perfect application of mindful technology, in my opinion, where it's trying to support a positive habit that I'm trying to create. And in this particular case, it is absolutely successful in doing that. It's a little bit more expensive than a standard water bottle, but it's not too bad. I think I paid 50 or 60 bucks for it off of Amazon, which you look at like the hydro flask, the same size, you're looking at 20, 30 bucks. So it's more expensive, but it's not ridiculously expensive. The battery actually

like unscrews from the bottom. It's this big puck, which I can then just, I have got a, the charger is sitting on my desk. So I just plug it in whenever it needs to be charged, which is usually about every two weeks or so. So the battery lasts pretty long. It doesn't take that long to charge it. And when I do need to charge it, it's really simple. I just unplug it while I'm sitting at my desk, attach the little magnetic charger thing to it, and then put it back in when I'm done. So two thumbs up. There's got to be like a Venn diagram between focused listeners and people who want technology that automatically logs things for them. Yes, yes, exactly. The more things I can automatically log,

the better. Yeah. The new and shiny thing I've got this month, and if you listen to MPU, this is no surprise to you, is I got a new M1 Apple laptop. And this is, I think it's a focus tool because it's so interesting what Apple has done. They've really reinvented the laptop, even though it looks exactly like the prior version. But with this M1 Apple processor, it's got, you know, three times the performance, double the battery life. But it also just acts like an iPad in a lot of ways where you open it up and it's instantly on and the app launching is really fast. I've sold my old laptop back to Apple, but I haven't sent it in yet. In fact, I'm using it today to record the show. And I can't get over how slow things are on this computer, which was a few weeks ago perfectly adequate to me.

But the ability to have a laptop that instantly responds to you for a lot of the things we do in our efforts to stay focused, I think is really a tool to consider. It's expensive, a new computer. I'm not telling you to buy a new one, but I'm just saying that, man, it's making a difference. And the good news is Apple's going to have even more of these, and they're going to get even faster. But it just really is a game changer for people. There's a lot of people who like using the iPad, but other people who prefer the Mac, well, people who prefer the Mac, you just got something that's going to give you a lot of the benefits of the iPad. I have a M1 Mac Mini on the

way and I am excited to get it. Although after I ordered it, I realized that one of the applications that I need is not supported on the M1 chip yet, which is ScreenFlow. No, it's not. Wow. No, not currently. Not even in translation mode using rosetta so uh looks like i'm going to be hanging on to my macbook pro for a while as a screencasting machine yeah i mean eventually they'll make an imac one and i'll i'll be right in there but i'm guessing that's a year or two away and hopefully screen flows got their act figured out by then well either way um it is it's just a monumental change in computing for for mac users and that is something and steve and i covered a lot if you're uh if you haven't listened to mac power users lately we had a guest in from apple and we kind of went deep on it on

the show so you can learn a lot more over there um uh also we have some challenge follow-up. And in the last episode before our guest episode, we talked about our personal knowledge management, or if you're a fancy nerd, you call it PKM. What is your PKM stack? And find one thing you want to improve or change. You and I have both been doing a lot of exploration with this lately, and I wondered, what, you know, what'd you do? What came out of that challenge, Mike? Yeah. So that PKM stack, if you're not familiar with that episode, I should put a disclaimer here, I feel like, because PKM, as we described it in that episode, is more like a life management system. It's not like a lot of the people who are hardcore PKM zealots.

They might take issue with our use of that term. So it's a simple version of defining, you know, you want to make sure that everything that is in your brain has a place to go. But it was really cool to go through this because this is kind of what I was hoping would happen when we started doing these challenges, is I would get a challenge, I would have no idea what I was going to do for this. And then through tinkering with it, actually find a bunch of things that made my life a little bit better. And that's kind of what happened here. So one of the things that I noticed was broken in my current system, the personal knowledge management stack, if you will, is that I have a place to capture things when I don't have my fancy notebook on me, and that is

drafts on my iPhone and on the Apple Watch. I will typically put things there, and then if I want to keep them, I will transfer them to Roam at the end of the day. But the part of this that was broken for me was that sometimes things would go into drafts and they would not come out of drafts. I was trying to go through it as part of my shutdown routine, but the last several weeks have been a little bit crazy and I sort of let my shutdown routine slip a little bit, I'm ashamed to say. So when I went into drafts, I realized that I had like 70 things in there and I needed to classify them. Yep. Wow. Which isn't a ton when you look at people who...

It's a ton. Yeah, it's not a ton if you're keeping everything in there, but that wasn't the way I was trying to use it. I was trying to use it as an inbox for ideas and then transfer everything out of there. So after Thanksgiving, kind of looking at everything, hitting the reset button, being like, okay, I need to fix this. So what I have done, and this is working really well, granted small sample size, but so far this is awesome. I just turned the badge icon on for drafts. So now it's in my dock always, but every time I open my iPhone, I see that red badge that says there's something in there that needs a home. And I'm not really opening my phone a whole lot during the workday.

It typically is after I'm done with work. So now if I get through my workday and I'm opening my phone and I see that red badge on my home screen. Oh, yeah, I got to process that stuff. So that has helped. Another thing that I did is that I added weekly planning to a page inside of Roam Research that I've titled This Week. There's a link I'll put in the show notes here for an episode or a post that I created on like GTD style task management, because this is one of the holes that I recognized with Roam Research and the way I manage tasks there is there wasn't a real good way to see at a glance like everything that was coming up in the next seven days. So I created this page that basically just has a query and it pulls everything that is tagged with those days into a single

place. But I've taken that a step further and I'm now using Roam Research to plan my week. And I've basically got like an overview header. And then because of the way the nested bullets work underneath that, I've got some time, which is just something that I need to get done throughout the course of that week. And then every single dayay tuesday wednesday thursday etc and so if there's something that has to happen on a specific day i'll just slot it in there i played around with using this as a as a kanban view i'm not sold on on that specifically but as i learned when i used roam research for my personal retreat not too long ago this outline based format is great for just emptying your brain. And so as part of a weekly planning process, this is great.

And then it's on that This Week page. So the idea is that every single weekend, as I'm thinking about my week, typically Sunday afternoon, wipe the slate clean and start over. It doesn't take very long. Look at the calendar, transfer the things in there that need to be there, and off we go. Yeah, when I was using Roam, I did that as well, and I used a reference block to the current month and week plan on my SparkyOS page, so I could always see what my current week plan and month plan was on the page where I spend the most time. It was just always there. And Roam has a really cool thing called a reference block where it can just display text from another part of your database and just drop it in wherever you want it. So

that was one of the features I really liked about Roam. And I think doing weekly and monthly planning in a personal acknowledgement system is a huge benefit. I had historically done them on paper, but I found that that is, and I still do journaling on paper, but I found like the weekly planning, typing it made more sense for me or dictating it because I felt like I was getting a more complete idea. And because it was in a digital system, it was always in my face. The problem with writing it in a notebook is once I turn the page on the notebook, I really am not forced to look at it. And by putting it into my digital kind of PKM, now I see it more often and I check it on daily and monthly. And it just, I think it works better for me. And I think a PKM system is an excellent place to do that work.

Yeah, totally agree. I still have my pen and paper sitting right next to me. I'm jotting down notes as we go through recording here, pen and paper. But that's basically kind of just the daily notes thing. At this point, I don't really do a whole lot with the notebook in terms of planning. In the first part of it, it's basically just for like the daily planning and the time blocking and writing down the tasks that show up on my daily notes page when I look at the tomorrow view in Rome, which is actually another thing that I changed here. I started using do again on iOS, D-U-E, because it has these nagging reminders,

which are great for someone like me who just tends to dismiss things. I don't have a whole lot of stuff in here, but one of the things that I have added is a nagging reminder to every single day at 5 p.m. remind me to time block my day tomorrow. And that phrasing is enough for me to initiate the shutdown routine if it happens to be a work day or if it happens to be on a weekend, I still want to time block the next day even if it's on a Saturday or a Sunday. So this shows up at 5 p.m. and it nags me over and over and over again, increasing the likelihood that I do this at 5 p.m. instead of right before bed when I'm pretty exhausted or at the beginning of the day. I have no trouble following through and actually time blocking my day, but I needed a little bit of help to do that at the beginning of the day. I have no trouble following through and actually time blocking my day,

but I needed a little bit of help to do that at the end of the workday and not put it off until the morning. Every single time that I do it in the morning before I get started, I feel like I'm starting a little bit behind the eight ball. Like I put myself in a bad position because I'm spending mental energy

trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be working on and when I should have done that at the end of the day prior. Yeah. I mean, I've talked about that a lot on the show, how the evening shutdown to me is the best bang for buck time of the whole day if I do it. And yet part of me fails to do it sometimes. I'm much better at it than I used to be. I think I've got it as a habit now. I don't use do, I use, I have an alert from a shortcut, a time-based alert, because you can do those now without, you know, having to confirm. So I've got a time-based alert that shows up on my phone to remind me, hey, buddy. But, and I'm much, like I said, I'm just much better at doing them now than I used to be. But, but that was a struggle for me. And it was a weird struggle because I knew it was a valuable investment of my time, but I could just never seem to find time to do it anyway.

problem and then i'll have a period like the last couple weeks where everything just breaks for some reason it's not like something catastrophic happened uh it's just you know a series of unfortunate events i guess where i wake up and i realize oh i didn't do this i didn't do that and didn't do that and you call yourself a productivity expert yeah you know but i the trick is not to let that stuff define you like don't get upset about the fact that you've failed figure out why and try to create systems that will prevent you from doing it again which is exactly what we're doing with this follow-up um one last thing that i, a change I made here, I was listening to Mike and Gray on a recent Cortex episode. And Mike had mentioned that he has different notes, pages for the different shows that he does. And he just keeps like a running list of

follow-ups. So things he wants to talk about on those shows. And I thought, hey, that is a great idea. So I created a focused follow-up notes page in Rome and I added a couple things to it. Just things that I come across on Twitter, whatever. There was an article not too long ago, Cal Newport wrote it, about the rise and fall of GTD. I think that would be an awesome topic for Focused. It doesn't really fit probably with today's episode. So I just jotted it down there. And I've got a Kanban basically where the things have been captured. And then as we talk about them, they get moved to the done column. And I feel like just having those buckets within even Rome, which is a big bucket, but having specific places for that sort of stuff increases the likelihood that they get followed through on,

which is the whole idea of the PKM stack in the first place. Yeah, I do something similar. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move with Squarespace. Squarespace lets you easily create a website for your next idea with a unique domain, award-winning templates, and more. It doesn't matter what you want to create. Maybe you want to create an online store. Maybe you want to create a portfolio. Maybe you want to create a blog or even a podcast. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that lets you do any of those things with nothing to install, no patches to worry about,

and no upgrades needed. You don't have to worry about any of that stuff. Squarespace has got it covered. They have award-winning 24-7 customer support if you do need any help, and they let you quickly and easily grab a unique domain name. And all those award-winning templates are beautifully designed for you to show off your great ideas. Not too long ago, my wife and I started a podcast. And even though I have put together all of the internet pipes, and I know how to build the site and host the files and manage everything by hand, we went to Squarespace because Squarespace made it super easy to publish the podcast episodes.

And what that allowed me to do is focus on creating the content itself. I didn't have to worry about making sure that plugins were up to date or worrying about whether things were going to work or fixing things if they happen to be broken. I really just wanted something simple so I didn't have to worry about any of the technical stuff. And Squarespace gave me exactly that. And Squarespace plans start at just $12 a month. So if you want to do something like that, you can start today. You can start a trial with no credit card required by going to squarespace.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D. When you decide to sign up, use the offer code focus to get 10% off your first purchase of a

website or domain and to show your support for the Focus podcast. Once again, that's squarespace.com slash focused and the code focused F-O-C-U-S-E-D to get 10% off your first purchase. We thank Squarespace for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. So that challenge of revisiting PKM, what it means, how can you refine it, was a good one for me too, because I've been on, I feel like I kind of grabbed the tiger by the tail when I first started down this journey, when my good friend Mike Schmitz told me about Rome Research, and I started fiddling with that. And I've been on this crazy journey, and I think I've probably spent too much

time in it, frankly. But sitting back and thinking about, well, what does PKM mean to me was a great exercise because then it allowed me to get some clarity about what PKM tools make more sense for me and where the whole thing fits in my life. And like Mike said, there's a group of people out there that not only will they disagree with anything we call PKM as PKM, they would also disagree with the way I say Zettelkasten. You know, they would say, hey, man, you got the German part wrong. You're not doing any of this right. Nicholas Lumens would not approve.

Yeah, and I get that. And especially like a lot of academic research folks who really kind of embrace this for what it was originally designed for. But for me, it means a couple of things. And I wasn't really fully kind of conscious of what I was doing with it till I stopped to watch because these workflows evolve very organically. But I mean, there is kind of what I would think of historical as PKM, where there's a bunch of things that I have to keep on top of. I'm tracking changes in California laws as to trade secrets for software companies because I represent a bunch of software companies. And then, you know, so I've got like all these areas of legal inquiry where I'm trying to keep track of things and a bunch of resources coming into me.

track of things and a bunch of resources coming into me and I do summaries and, you know, it's just a great, you know, the historical traditional kind of research PKM system works great for me for legal research. It also works for me for research I'm doing as Max Barkey into field guide titles and even personal interests of things that I'm interested in. I mean, we live in this great world now where there's all this information available to us. And for a lot of us, it can become a problem because we go down the wrong rabbit holes. But when you find a topic that you're intellectually interested in, there's just such a great benefit in summarizing it in your own words and kind of keeping all that

together. And historically, I was doing that with like Apple Notes and Drafts and all these different apps I was using. And I just didn't have a good, complete system that these PKM systems are offering me. So it's been kind of a great and exciting time for me to kind of revisit those workflows and build something new. So I do what would be more considered a traditional PKM workflow. So that's one of the things I'm doing with this tool set. But then when I started thinking about it, I'm also doing a lot more because, um, another thing I need to track is for the projects I work on. I like to keep notes on what I'm doing for them. And it's not even just like, um, my curly was talking about with like ideas for a podcast,

but for me, it gets more granular than that. I mean, I keep notes on individual podcasts, like on this show and Mac power users and automators, we plan shows into the future. So I've got notes for shows that haven't even been outlined yet and, you know, thoughts and ideas. So I'm collecting all these things on the legal side. It's the same thing. Like for each one of my legal clients, I'm a business attorney. So I'll have a single page for the company. So if Mike Schmitz, Inc. hires me as its lawyer, I'll have a page on Mike Schmitz, Inc. It'll have all the details with the Secretary of State and the company shareholders and all the various bits and pieces I need, general knowledge as to the company.

all the, you know, the various bits and pieces I need, general knowledge as to the company. But then inside that, I'll have a list of projects that I've taken on for that company, and each one of those gets its own page. So if Mike says, I need you to write a specific, you know, transactional agreement for me, I'll do that, but it'll have its own page with the details of who are the parties, what are the terms, and what are the links to the folder with all the documents, and what's the link to the OmniFocus project. And so there's all these bits of data I'm holding together. And that stuff, which I had traditionally tried to use in plain text and drafts and in Apple Notes, which was really just not powerful enough,

has all evolved over to my PKM system. And now it's much easier for me to get to that stuff. It's much more in my face. And so that's something else I do with a PKM system is I track all these things that I'm working on. And as I go through my day, I'm jumping in and out of them constantly. I had a call from a client this morning on a contract I've been working on for a few weeks, and she gave me some instructions. So I went into the note and added a timestamp and said, this is what she wants me to do with this part now. And now I've got kind of documented in my own system where that stands. Are you with me so far? I know I've been

talking a lot. Yes. And you're describing the value that these programs are trying to deliver in tying all of these things together very well. I mean, that's really the point of using something like this, that you don't have bits in all these different buckets and you're trying to figure out where did I put that thing? Because you can get to it no matter where you are. And one of the advantages is they are so easy to link together ideas and thoughts, but also concepts and just general notes. So with the system, linking from the person

to the person's company to the contract project is trivial. So these links start showing up all over the place, and that's really powerful. And then when you add backlinks to it, it really helps too. Like sometimes I'll get an email from someone and I'm like, who's that person? And I'll type them into my PKM system and I'll say, oh, this is opposing counsel on that contract I wrote two years ago. And I can jump right to

the thing I did with them and even see a chronology of everything we talked about. And it just is a very handy system. It really is, you know, kind of the offloaded brain thing for me so I can get access to that. Now, you talked earlier about kind of the daily notes thing. And one of the bits of enlightenment I kind of got for myself going through this over the last couple of weeks was, you know, I'm not sure I've been doing this right. When I started with Roam, Roam Research has a single page for each day. That's kind of the one thing it does every day. And a lot of people use that as a page to log their day and they log their time and, you know, and they can link with those easy roam links over to the specific projects or the research they're doing. And everything is kind

of tied together nicely. And one of the advantages of that is, is these backlinks. So then I can go into the project and say, show me everything that backlinks to this project. And I can say, oh, I see there on December 1st that I got that call and, and, you know, talk to that person about this because it's in my daily note for that day. So, um, and so I've been doing that in Rome. I left Rome eventually. In fact, I think today in the deep focus, we're going to kind of go into the nerdy details of these apps. I think that might be a good topic for deep focus, but, but I left Rome because I want to use it in my law practice and they don't really have an existing security model that, that really is worthy of that. So I I've been doing it now over

in obsidian and I'm also looking at some other apps like craft and some of these other ones, but, but the, uh, they all have this idea of a daily log page. And the more I look into it, the more I realize this daily log page for me is nonsense. Now that I've been using it for a while, when I get the call from the client and they say, well, what's going on with my project? I've got to go into the project page and then I've got to look for backlinks to the project and then try and decipher those into individual pages. It's just the whole thing is nutty.

Whereas historically, I did it in an Apple note, and it was all on the page right there. And I realized in this audit that you triggered in me that the daily pages don't make any sense for me. Historically, I did journaling in my paper journal in day one and i kind of tried to put those aside to like keep it all in this one tool but this one tool does it worse you know i mean um you get attracted to these workflows and these systems where you want to do everything in it and i the more i looked at the more i realized i'm just being silly here so

i have as a result of this quest I've been on, I've abandoned the daily page. I'm not doing that anymore. When someone calls me on their project, I log it in the project itself. I guess just because you can do a link doesn't mean you should do a link. You know what I mean? Yes, exactly. And that is, okay, so that's a very important point. Let me back up just a little bit because you said that you had all these things in one place and you realized it wasn't working. That has been the fear in the back of my mind since day one of starting to use any of these tools. Because I tried to do that sort of thing with Evernote back in the day. And it just made all of the things not work.

And I don't want to get to that point again. And I feel like the more things I put in there, the more nervous I get that that could be the ultimate outcome. So I have been trying to be very careful about what sorts of things I am choosing to do inside of Rome, and which things I am intentionally keeping separate, like time blocking my day, working out of the notebook. I know that that is an element of the bullet journal that is much more efficiently done inside of Rome research, especially since I'm sitting at my computer with Rome open on one of my monitors two feet from my face all day. I mean, the notebook is about six inches closer, but it's not a lot. And my hands are already on the keyboard. So the temptation is, oh, just capture everything there. I don't want

to capture everything there because I don't want to end up with a daily notes page that has a bunch of garbage on it. I use my daily notes page for my journaling. I have the sliders for like the daily questions and then the tasks that I really am 100% sure these are the things that I want to do. I will create those as to-dos for that daily page as well. And all the other notes and things, I try not to just capture little bits and bobs inside of the daily notes. I try to have other places for those, like the focused follow-up page. I don't want that stuff sitting on the note for the day that I had the idea, because I'll never find it again, even with all the backlinks.

Yeah. Well, and that's really kind of the wake-up for me, is I've abandoned the idea of a daily notes page, and I've been doing it through Obsidian. And we'll go into this deeper and deep focus but obsidian the advantages is they're all markdown files so you're not really stuck there forever yeah but either way um i don't do the daily tracking in a pkm anymore although many notes that i take through the day end up in the pkm but they're attached to projects sure that makes sense and And like, for instance, I have a note for this episode and yesterday you and I did a planning call and I took some notes on that and that's on the page for this episode in my PKM. And I've gone back to using day one as kind of the personal journal and also the paper journal too. And it's just kind of depends

on where I'm at and what I can do. But a lot of times when I'm struggling with a problem, I will use a paper and pen. And when I just want, and other times when I'm just want to like capture what happened today, you know, today we decorated the Christmas tree and the dog and I went on a walk and I'll have a picture and that'll go into day one. And whenever I do write something in my journal, it's not every day, but it's probably three or four days a week I do that. I'll take a picture of it and put it in day one. So the system has kind of like calmed down. You know, the anarchy, I feel like I've kind of got over a hump in the last two weeks with

how I'm using these tools. And the PKM is very good for what it does, but it's not everything. Just like, you know, when I see people doing their task management in PKM, I'm like, I don't know why I would do that. OmniFocus is way better. And with OmniFocus linking, I can link to an OmniFocus database from anywhere on my computer. So it's just, I'm really trying to look at this as use the best tool for the job. Don't try to force everything into one tool. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And I think that's important. Again, we'll get into this in Deep Focus, but we talked a little bit about this a couple episodes ago. And one of the observations

I made was that these types of apps, Roam and Obsidian specifically, they're going to spawn a whole bunch of backlinking type features and a whole bunch of other note-taking applications. spawn a whole bunch of back linking type features and a whole bunch of other note taking applications and we're starting to see that when just about everything and what's cool about this is that for some people the backlinks and drafts or devon think or whatever they're not going to be enough but that's completely okay they can use obsidian or. And for everybody else who doesn't need to tie the entire ball of wax together, then those applications are giving you even a little bit of that backlink support is great. But this really kind of all ties to the next topic

that we had for today, which is this whole idea of inputs. I mean, really what the PKM is trying to solve is you've got all these inputs, all these ideas, all these tasks, all these bits of information that you want to be able to recall later. And what do you do with them? Yeah. Input management, I think, is an underrated problem. And that's why I wanted to cover it on the show. I mean, because there's two sides to this coin. You know, you have inputs coming into you, and Mike and I are going to get tactical later in the show about how we handle specific inputs. But the big problem is, as inputs come in, if you ignore them and focus on whatever it

is you're focused on, you're going to drop balls. a good example of this is just the other day, I had agreed to guest on a podcast, and then I ignored email for a day and a half because I was working on a big project. And the person who wanted to interview me sent me an email that I missed, and then I turned into a flake, right? Because I didn't manage the input. Yeah. then I turned into a flake, right? Because I didn't manage the input. Yeah. You know, and then the flip side of that is if I spend all my time managing inputs, there's no focus. Like every time an email comes in, you stop and check the email. Or even if you just try and stay on top of the inputs with some kind of managed system, it's very easy to let the inputs get in the way of the work.

it's very easy to let the inputs get in the way of the work. So inputs, you have to pay attention to them, but you can't pay too much attention to them. Yeah, this kind of reminds me of like, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Which came first, the distraction or the task? And this isn't a problem that you just solve and it's over. It is a constant battle, right?

I mean, it sounds to me like you've had a rough week or so. You were saying you were kind of getting behind on shutdowns and things. And my guess is your inputs are out of control right now, too, because that's just what happens when things get a little upside down and then you try and correct for it. But correcting for it may take you an entire day to get caught up on inputs and everything handled. And for that day, you don't get any focused work done. Well, I have my own email story to tell here real quickly. So I recently did a presentation for BiggerPlate, which has a bunch of MindMap templates as part

of a membership community. They were hosting an event called ReadWriteMap, and I did a presentation on how I take book notes from books that I read using a MindMap, and then the whole transferring that to Roam and connecting all the ideas part of that after the fact. But I have been in a company culture where we don't really use email to communicate. So I don't check it all that often. And this is something that I had agreed to months ago. And the last correspondence that we had, I didn't realize that they had wanted me to reply with a confirmation for something. And then the day, two days before, they sent me an email. One day, I didn't respond.

They sent an email the next morning. I didn't respond. They sent another one at like 1130 that late morning to both myself and somebody else at Blanc Media saying, hey, is Mike okay? We haven't heard from him in a long time. In my mind, I'm going like, well, it's been like two days only. And I forgot basically how the rest of the world deals with email and how I came across as a jerk because I was doing it my own way. Yeah. And that is the challenge of inputs. And I think that you must bring intentionality to bear to inputs just like

you do anything else in your life. And I thought for today's show, it would be fun to go through and talk about, to the extent you and I have any intentionality with these topics, how are we managing inputs? Yeah, I'll tell you the first thing that I have done with regards to inputs is I have eliminated a bunch of them. I recently went you the first thing that I have done with regards to inputs is I have eliminated a bunch of them. I recently went through the book Brainwash for Bookworm, which is about how your brain is designed to function, basically. And all of the stressors in our current environment that kind of work against that. And so social media would be the obvious one here, but there's other things like exercise and diet that affect kind of the chemical reactions that happen in your brain, which allow you to either

focus or not focus. And as part of this book, there is a 10-day brainwash process they call it at the end where like the first day is a digital declutter and then another day is like practicing meditation which from that book by the way i've shared this with you previously i've picked up a meditation habit again using 10 happier it's first time it's stuck for more than a week i'm like day 14 or something now good and so i went through this whole big thing and in the digital declutter section, when I went into that one, you're supposed to do one a day, basically.

When I went into that, I'm like, oh, this is going to be the easiest one because I have already been thinking about this for a long time. I've got a whole column over at the Suite Setup, Mindfulness Monday, on positive intentional uses of technology. And there were a couple things

as they were going through there. Like they mentioned, turning off your notifications and deleting unnecessary apps off of your phone and stuff like that. And that was in line with all the other stuff that I kind of have been doing already. So when I read those, I was like, oh yeah, those will be easy. I'll go in there. I'm sure I don't have that many. those, I was like, oh yeah, those will be easy. I'll go in there. I'm sure I don't have that many. I was shocked at how much stuff I turned off or deleted as a part of this action step. And some of it was just things that were sitting there that I never really went into, but I realized that I

had them there and the notifications were turned on, even though they didn't bug me all that often. Every once in a while, at the most inopportune time possible, a lot of times, you know, I'm getting that notification and it's breaking my focus. And then I questioned myself, why is this thing still installed there? So I had this action step, I went through and deleted about half of the apps that were on my phone, and I turned off notifications for everything except what was essential, what I deemed to be essential. This was really interesting and provided an immediate benefit that, like, I don't have a tangible measured response, like, these are the number of notifications I got before I did this, this is the number of notifications I got after that, but it was enough that I noticed it just in

my day-to-day. And again, it's any one of those little things that goes off in the moment you're thinking, oh, I should really turn off notifications for that type of application. But maybe you're driving somewhere or you're in the middle of something and you don't want to just stop what you're doing and go deal with that thing. So you just leave it. I realized that I had done that a lot. And there were a lot of things that needed to be cleaned up. And right away after deleting all those things and turning off notifications for everything except what I explicitly decided to leave open, you know, I kind of flipped the default there where you install an application and it says, hey, you want

to allow notifications. I guess I had accumulated a lot of debt from that over the years that I wasn't even aware of until I went into the system preferences on all my devices and just got rid of everything. So now Do Not Disturb is on on my Mac. Do Not Disturb is on all the time on my iPad. It is not on my phone. That is the one place people can reach me. I've turned things off on my watch and on the phone, it is very, very minimal. Yeah, and Apple's made it, if you're on an Apple phone, an iPhone, they've made it a lot easier to manage those notifications. You can just swipe on it and you can do what they call deliver quietly

where you don't get a notification, but it shows up on your notification list, or you can just turn it off entirely without digging through the system preferences. And at one point on the Mac Power Users like years ago, I said, that's a good toilet job. You know, go through and watch your notifications. Man, I got a lot of bad email about that one. But either way, I do think that is a way to go through. But I wanted to talk through how you and I are actually processing the inputs that do come to us. And I have definite thoughts on that. So let's talk about that next. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Woven, the calendar with the most powerful scheduling tools. Try it free for 21 days. Just go to the link in the show notes. Woven is the all-in-one calendar perfect for busy people. Mike and I talk a lot on this show about

blocking time and scheduling. I think it's the only way to really stay focused is to make time for the things most important to you. You know, having a disorganized calendar impacts your life. It makes you feel like you're unfocused and just makes it hard to get your work done. A great calendar is important for your workflow in fighting these things. And Woven syncs all of your calendars in one place. It includes your Google, G Suite, and Microsoft 365 accounts. So you can see all of your time, both personal and professional. Woven builds scheduling links directly into your calendar, so you can use one-off scheduling links. You can quickly time block your week using Woven's smart templates,

so you can plan your perfect week. Woven also has built-in analytics, so you can easily calculate where you spend your time, so you can make time for what matters most. You really need to check it out, take control of your calendar, 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 Wohlen for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Hey, before we get into the specific inputs, I wanted to share something quickly from a book that I'm reading. Seth Godin has a new book out called The Practice.

Yeah. And it's basically about shipping creative work. And there's a couple things that Seth says in here that are kind of genius, which I think articulate the battle that we're fighting when it comes to inputs. and calculated. So there are just a couple of sentences here that I want to share. So from page 186, he mentions that there is time to engage with the world after we do the work, which I thought was pretty brilliant. He's defining in this book, the internet is our enemy because we never really know what it's going to bring us. And the internet is the source of a lot of these different inputs. And this is from a whole section about mise en place, which is what chefs use in the kitchen where everything is in the exact spot that they need it.

So there's no surprises. And when we think about the inputs that we get throughout the day, those are essentially surprises. Those are things that are going to disrupt our flow. We just don't know how bad or in which ways. And so the other thing that he says shortly after that on page 188 is he says, set up your tools, turn off the internet and go back to work. And I love the way he just says these things so succinctly and you read it and you're like, yes, Seth, that is genius. I will absolutely do that. So I've kind of had that in the back of my mind as we've gone through the PKM stuff. And as I've been thinking through these different categories we're about to get into when it

comes to handling inputs. Yeah. And I think that really kind of does summarize what the point of all this is, is, you know, figure out how to manage the inputs, but don't let managing the inputs become the job. Yes, exactly. So like I said, let's get tactical. Email. For me, email, and we've talked about it on this show, I think everybody wants to talk about email, is a problem that I feel like I have never fully solved.

I get a lot of email because I'm fortunate enough to have some things on the internet that people are interested in. And most people that write me as Max Parkey, it's not like bot-based email. It's email from humans that have questions or ideas that want to engage with me on them and with whom I want to engage, but the problem doesn't scale. You know, it just, if I had one of those a day, it'd be really easy and it's fun, but I get too many of them and there's debt involved with that. Then I've got email from the legal practice, which is a different kind of email. As a lawyer, the email I get doesn't usually lend itself to a yes or no reply. Most things require considered

response. People are making decisions based on what I tell them that could drastically affect their lives. So I've got to be careful what I say and I've got to think about it. So like email is this pit of doom for me where if I go in there, I can get lost in it very easily. And so I am very careful about email. And what I do is I draw boxes around it. And time boxing is something that I think is a common theme around managing inputs. Because Mike wasn't answering the email for the conference. I missed the email about the podcast guesting.

If you don't go in there every day, plates fall to the ground. But going in there every day could be a big problem. So I've decided, because the mornings are so important to me, that morning email checks are very short, but they're important. So in the morning morning and not the first thing you know i in researching for this i i saw somebody that wrote um your oh no it was that a social media um show on netflix what's it called the social dilemma the social dilemma i watched that and at some point somebody says there's only two ways to check email you either check it before you get out of bed or you check it on the toilet in the morning but there's no other option and I'm here to say there is another option. I mean, I don't check email. I get up pretty early, but I don't really get into checking

email until about 10 o'clock. I try to have one block of productive time before I look at email. But even then, that first morning check is looking for, is there anything on fire? Is there something that I need to be handling that I'm not handling? If it's not, then it all gets pushed into the afternoon. And I put enough time in that shutdown routine to substantively get through the day's email. And that's when I look at email. I mean, after I'm done doing the initial check in the morning, I close it. I don't think about it. I don't have any notifications turned on.

I don't view email. If somebody, you know, if a client has a problem and they want immediate response from me, they should not email me. They should call me. And that's just, you know, the way I handle it because I cannot be a slave to email so uh you know the short version is i time box it i give it about 15 minutes in the morning for a

quick kind of check through i guess you would call that a um i forget now what's the french term for when they check the patients when they come in the hospital. Are you dying? The triage? Yeah, I look at it as a triage in the morning. And then in the afternoon, I give it substantive effort. And then on top of that, there's a whole bunch of workload nonsense that I do for tagging and different things for different kinds of emails. Because my two jobs are so different, the way I treat email on the two sides is very different. You know, like answering email to people who listen to the show is like fun for me. That's like enjoyable, but I just can't do

it all day. Whereas the legal stuff is kind of like serious work kind of thing. So I treat them differently, but in terms of managing the input, it's a short period in the morning and a long period in the afternoon. Yeah, I typically go through it once a day, sometime in the afternoon. I don't have a time blocked piece around it. I basically do it whenever I hit a wall. I used to, when weather was nicer, you know, use that time to go take the dog for a walk, whatever. But lately, it's, I mean, it's 20 degrees Fahrenheit here in Wisconsin today. So I've just kind of moved some things around, including my exercise habits. And now I'm kind of using that as a stopgap. And that may be a mistake, you know, time will tell, I guess, if, since I don't have a specific time for this, if I end up falling behind when it comes to email. But kind of the realization I got with

working with the virtual conference the other day is that I'm never going to please everybody. As clear as I may be about how I'm going to approach email, there are going to be people who approach it differently, and I'm going to tick them off. And that can cause the people pleaser in me to be like, oh, no, I should be more responsive, make sure that I get to everything the day that I get to it. There must be something wrong with my system. I need to fix it. I think I'm at the point where I just realized that I am just not going to be good at email. According to some people, if you're defining good as able to do creative work, then I'm great at email. And I think therein lies the root of a lot of this stuff for me historically, and maybe for

a lot of other people, is that you don't want to miss out on those fun emails from the readers and the customers. You know, you don't want to let those people down. There's a bunch of people you don't care if you let down, but you can't tell which ones are which without going in there to see what's there. on the opportunities that may be there. And then I look at people like Cal Newport, who wrote that article, The Rise and Fall of GTD. And a big thing in that article is that GTD is great, except if you're working with other people, which all of us are. At that point, it falls down. But I look at people like Cal Newport, who doesn't have a social media presence, and he's just doing his work, his way on his terms. And he's getting what he wants out of life. Young guy, tenure at Georgetown, I think is where he's a professor. I can't remember. But anyways, he's not letting other people define his success. And I know that you're working in a company, people are using email using email so at some point you have to just kind of figure out what you can get away with and do the an acquiesce to the norms of the organization in the way that they're they're going to be doing things but email is the one

specifically where i'm just going to go through it you know once a day i'll get through everything once a week i've got my sane later folder set up where i'll go through that it's the inbox that i typically check every day so it's not you know hundreds of messages i'm trying to get through everything once a week. I've got my SaneLater folder set up where I'll go through that. It's the inbox that I typically check every day. So it's not hundreds of messages I'm trying to get through every single day. And that's going to be good enough. And I'm going to miss out on some stuff. And that's okay. Yeah, but that is a privileged position.

You have to acknowledge. I recognize that. Yep. Because like there's stuff, emails I answer could be exhibits and trials one day, you know, and, and my clients expect me to be there for them with email. I mean, on the legal side, email is absolutely just a part of the business. And I'm sure a lot of people listening to have jobs where they have the same issue.

Um, but my, my position would be, even if you are that person, that email is a big deal for you, you have to manage that input. And the way I've done it, I feel like, is the balance. So you get a morning and an afternoon check, so there's twice a day you can get in there. But managing the input of email by turning on notifications and trying to develop the self-images that I'm the guy who answers every email sent to me within 10 minutes is a bad idea. Yep, exactly. Now the flip side of that for me, because Blank Media doesn't use email to communicate very much, is that Slack, which is another one on the list here, and Notion is another tool that we use for managing projects.

That is something that I pay attention to on a regular basis. So Notion, basically I treat that as the email inbox for creative work that I'm doing at the suite setup. And then Slack is kind of the tool that if you need something right away, then you ping somebody on Slack. So with Slack specifically, the thing that makes this work for me is taking a little bit of time again to configure the notification settings. I got everything turned off on the weekends and I've got it set so that I'm only notified if somebody tags me. They add Mike Schmitz, you know, on Slack.

I'm only notified if somebody tags me. They're at Mike Schmitz on Slack. And then I'll get that and I'll realize that, oh, Josh or Jeff or Marius or Rose or whoever, they need me to do something. And so at that point, it's worth stopping what I'm doing and helping them out because otherwise they wouldn't be interrupting me and asking for my help. And then the stuff in Notion,

that's typically on the tasks for the articles that are being written. So if you need something from somebody there, you mention them. And then the expectation is that you're going to check that in the morning and you're going to get people unstuck. So kind of like a 24-hour turnaround if you use Notion. So while I don't do a whole lot of stuff with email, you know, I basically just move that to these other tools.

Yeah, I think the advantage of a system like Slack is it's a closed system. You know, email, anybody in the world can tap on your shoulder with an email, whereas a Slack system is a work-based system usually, and it's a very limited number of people that have access to you. And Slack isn't the only one, you know, Microsoft has a similar product. All of us that have a work life with others have some probable platform where like the internal communication tool like Slack. And the way I manage, because I have that for the stuff I do with Relay.

I've got it with a couple clients, but most of my clients don't do Slack. They do other kind of platforms. But I still look at that. I treat it like email in the sense that I have a set time for the day that I go in there and look at it. Notifications are extremely limited coming out of it for me. But it is important that I get in there on a daily basis because in that case, it's not just some stranger I'm letting down.

It's my business partners if I don't show up and answer their questions or do whatever they need. At the same time, though, I still need to be mindful of my time and my focus. And I try to draw a box around those as well. My system is basically the same as email, where I'll check in the morning and then I'll check it in the evening. But quite often, like if Mike or Steven or some of the other people I work with send me a message in Slack, they're not going to hear back from me right away because I'm not even aware that they've messaged me. Yeah. Yeah, and that just comes back to the communication expectations that you're going to define in your own organizations.

And like you said, email, the benefit of using Slack over something like that is that it is a walled garden, so to speak. And the people that are going to be potentially sending you messages, depending on all the automations and stuff that you have in there, is going to be from people who you've chosen to let in, as opposed to just anybody who stumbles upon your email address on the internet but you still have to do what you can in order to separate the signal from the noise there all right i want to talk about another input that maybe this is one you don't have at all um maybe i'm dating myself but phone calls are an input. Do you get phone calls? They are. Not many. So the majority of the calls that I get are robo-spam, which regardless of what app I use or any sort of settings that I set in the system preferences or the settings app on iOS, they still somehow sneak through. I've found that I get just enough

phone calls from people that I don't know, whether it be the dentist office or you order something from a sporting goods store. We did this. We bought a foosball table for our kids for Christmas. And you get the automated phone calls to remind you your pickup is ready, that sort of thing. I get enough of those that I can't just block all unknown callers. But for the most part, every single call that I get during the workday specifically is going to be from a number that I don't recognize and it's going to be ignored. I would say probably about once a week, usually I will try to intentionally make a phone call to somebody and talk to someone that I just haven't seen in a while. Although this is

another one of those intentional habits that needs to be revived. So the Schmitz house has a ping pong table. They are getting a foosball table. Correct. We want this to be the place where once coronavirus is over, everyone wants to come hang out. get get a get a stand-up donkey kong machine and i'll move in that's all i'm saying all right um no but i i do think phone calls are a challenge for people i can tell you for me um i screen calls if a call comes in and i don't know who it is i don't answer it you know like if it just shows up as a phone number i i just don't answer those calls at all and i always assume that if it's somebody that actually is a human that wants to talk to me, they'll leave a message. And that works out fine. The challenge is client calls and

just like kind of figuring that stuff out. So historically, what I've tried to do is be very deliberate in telephone calls, because once a call comes in, especially on the legal side, there's a whole bunch of things, protocols that kind of come in place. I take notes on the call. I've got to store the notes when I'm done. There's a whole bunch of stuff that has happened. So I like to not get on the phone with people related to my law practice unless I have like prepared for the call. Like I know I I've looked at my PKM page on the thing they're calling about. So I'm up to date on what's happened most recently and where the project stands and I'm ready to like converse about it intelligently without sounding like a bozo that can't remember anything.

intelligently without sounding like a bozo that can't remember anything. So I, for calls to clients and other lawyers and people I work with as a lawyer are almost always planned. And I send the message out and I use the fantastic Cal scheduling system and I give people, and here's a tip. Don't say, when do you want to talk? Say, hey, let's do a call on this. How about tomorrow at 2 PM or Wednesday at 3 PM? You know, just give a couple options in the email and nine

times out of 10, they'll pick one of those and you don't have to do the whole crazy scheduling thing, but it's planned when calls come in from clients that are not planned. When calls come in from clients that are not planned, I don't necessarily pick them up. Usually I let them get a message. If I have time, if I'm not focused on something, I will take them. But if I'm in the middle of doing something, I am not going to stop doing that just because they chose to call me out of the blue. And if somebody does it more than a few times, I will actually kind of address with them. They'll call and say, hey, is everything okay? I'll try and attach the urgency to the call that I would put to calling someone out of the blue. I mean, even with you, Mike, you and I are

friends. I don't call you out of the blue. You and I, our calls are usually scheduled, you know, I don't call you out of the blue. I, I, you and I, our calls are usually scheduled, you know, because I feel like I have too much respect for you and I'm not going to just like interrupt you out of the blue. And, um, so I try to, um, with like calls that are not planned, I try to kindly explain, you know, that that's not the way I usually work. Yeah. And the thing that you just mentioned there about like sending the text message first be like hey you got time for a call and then you know usually uh if it's not if i'm not available you're not available we'll get back and be like well can't do it right now but how about 10 minutes uh i feel like that's kind of

I feel like that's kind of standard protocol for a lot of the people that I interact with is the expectation is that you're not going to answer a phone call out of the blue. Although I can see why certain occupations specifically like yours, maybe the expectation would be that you're sitting there waiting to answer the phone whenever somebody has a problem. But it's worth defining that stuff. And I think that that's actually a pretty good way to approach it. If you expect me to answer when you call, then it's on you to send me the text message first and make sure that I'm not in the middle of something. Otherwise, I'm just going to get back to you when I can. Yeah. And I actually try to plan calls for late afternoon because that's when I'm kind of cooked anyway. I try at all costs to avoid talking to people in the morning because that's when I get my best work done. And I don't want to be shooting the breeze. I do think that telephonic communications absolutely have a place. I'm not one of these nerds that thinks I don't ever want to talk to someone on the phone. Contemporaneous communications can be really effective for a lot of things. A lot of times when I'm talking to

clients, I can hear in their tone of voice what their real concerns are that I don't get out of a text message or an email. And it just gives you room. And I think professionals, you know, and part of my life is being a professional, um, need to convey to their clients that they are important to them. And that when we're on the phone, I'm going to stay on the phone and be a hundred percent devoted to your, you know, your questions and this this conversation right now and i don't try and rush them but but the trick that you know to it is to managing it is to plan those calls and just plan time for them not only when i plan a call do i set time a time like 15 minutes in advance to prepare for the call i also spend time after the call catching up. Like if I make commitments on

the phone call, I do them after I hang up or I set up an OmniFocus project to get them done. So taking your time on that stuff is important. And I think that's an input that I think can get a lot of people into trouble. So on the topic of the scheduled calls, I don't think this is something probably that you or I deal with a ton, but I know it's something that people do deal with, especially now when everybody's having to adjust their the way that they work and a lot of people are working from home. How do you manage inputs for video calls? video calls. If you are just putting yourself in the shoes of somebody who is working for an organization, you've got a manager or a boss who has just lined up a bunch of virtual meetings all day, every day, what sort of advice would you give somebody like that? You know, log your time. I mean, just like any job where you have suddenly your your employer is taking time for non-productive work and it's getting to be you know getting away of you actually finishing

the work uh you just address it to them you address it to them nicely but you still do it i mean i back when i worked for other people and if they suddenly had a lot of meetings for me, and also I had a lot of work to do, I would just make a, I would take a week calendar and just fill it out. And then my next meeting with the boss, and that would be something I would schedule as well. I wouldn't just walk in their office because, you know, that does not the way it works. Say, hey, I need 15 minutes of your time. When are you available?

And then you show up and you say, here's my last week. You can see that in a 40-hour-to-work week, I spent 12 hours in meetings. So almost 30% of my time went to things that weren't actually getting work done. Can you help me figure this out? Right, yeah. I think this is something, and bosses want to hear that. They want to know when they're... A good manager's job is freeing up their employees to produce. Yep, eliminating the roadblocks.

And that's really the whole goal with the meetings is to make communication more efficient so everyone can do their work more effectively. But a lot of times that's not what happens. And I just think that the problem with video calls is that it's a new technology in the sense that people are aware of it now. And people are abusing it and saying, well, and also you get these people who say, well, my employees aren't here with me. I want to make sure they're working, so I'm going to get them on camera six times a day or something. And when they were in the office,

you never saw them six times a day. And I think this is just kind of an adjustment, and people will sort this out. But it is kind of funny to me how video calls have become the new PowerPoint presentation, you know, dirty word. It's true. I mean, I've done some stuff with the suite setup.

We had, when we launched Calm Inbox, we had some implementation calls with people, and I was kind of shocked at some of the stories that I heard from people who literally were in virtual meetings all day from the beginning of work until the end of work. And they were still expected to get all their work done. And they were just overwhelmed by the scope of the work not being changed, but also all of the time that they had to do the work being taken away. And it seemed like their bosses or managers didn't even realize what was happening. Yeah. Well, and that's your job is to inform them of that. And if they tell you, speak up, tough luck, that's the way it's going to be, then you've got a different problem.

Yep. then you've got a different problem. Yep. Another old timey input is paper mail. I mean, I actually get mail, you know, from my office and I get mail as a, as a human too, but the, on the legal side, that mail comes in, it's actually kind of important that I open it and read it, which is an input I need to handle. Um, pandemic hit, there's a, so I have like a remote office that I don't actually go to anymore. They mail me the mail once a week. I could have them mail it to me on a daily basis, but then, and if I had a different kind of practice, I would, but the nature of my practice is once a week is fine. But when it shows up, that goes into the shutdown for that day. It does not wait till the weekend or whatever. I get through it immediately. Yeah. I don't have a whole lot of physical mail.

None of the work that I do requires mail. We do have just a physical inbox sort of a thing in our kitchen. So we'll go get the mail from the mailbox and any bills or whatever that we need to take care of, we'll go there. But that's more of a personal application for the physical mail. Still an input, but not one that I have to worry about a whole lot. We've kind of talked around instant messages messages i think they kind of fit in a similar category as slack but that's actually a difficult input for me on the legal side because i don't really like to talk legal business through instant message it's a something that's difficult to record a record of it yeah and a lot of the problems are more nuanced where they don't lend themselves to a text conversation. distinction between work and life, but I like the idea of having the work conversations take place in Slack and the personal conversations take place in messages.

So for Blanc Media, for example, if there's something regarding an upcoming article or anything work-related, I like being able to go see that stuff in Slack. And then when we're on a sabbatical and I get a text message from Sean, I know that it is not work related. And we're talking now as friends, not as coworkers. Yeah. Yeah. That is a nice kind of line to draw. But when messages come in that are like from friends, often I look at those as a welcome intrusion. But if I'm working, I look at those as a welcome intrusion. But if I'm working, I won't see them because I don't pay attention to that stuff. So like when I take, you know, when I hit a break,

you know, when I've finished an hour or two of serious work and I come up for oxygen, texting back a friend, like you and I are always texting each other about nerdy stuff, that's like a welcome diversion and a kind of a way to recharge. Clients that text me, I do not respond immediately because I don't want to set that as an expectation from them. And then I also often, if it's anything substantive, I have to screenshot it and kind of get it into my system. And it's like, it just adds work.

shot it and kind of get it into my system. And it's like, it just adds work. I don't think I have the entire answer to managing inputs on messages on some parts of my life. To plug our friend Chris Bailey's book, Hyperfocus, he's got in that book, four types of distractions, interruptions, which is exactly what you were talking about. And I remember reading this and I'm like, oh, that's pretty genius. Like the four square grid, you know, you've got the, on the Y axis, you got the ones that have, you have no control over and the ones that you do have control over. And then on the X axis, so from left to right, you've got the annoying ones and you've got the fun ones. The ones that you were talking about, text messages from people that you want to talk to that lands firmly in the no control fun quadrant and chris's advice there is enjoy those go ahead and be distracted and then

when you're done go back to to work but don't be upset that those things have have happened that's the point right i mean why if you can't enjoy life with your friends, what's the point? Yeah, and this is something that regarding inputs, I find I have to keep an eye on. Because the ones that I have no control over, those can be either annoying or fun, according to this grid. And the ones that are annoying, those are the ones that you deal with and you get back on track. But the ones that are annoying and fun and you get back on track. But the ones that are annoying and fun, you're supposed to be enjoying those. And I found that just the fact that I didn't have control over this distraction and it cropped up, I was getting upset by the fact that it had happened.

And so I was treating that whole thing as like, this is annoying, get it over with and get back to work, which, you know, you're just stealing from yourself at that point because there's nothing you can do about those things. They're going to pop up no matter what. The other sets of inputs I think you should give thought to generally fall under the category of the internet. And that's things like news, social media, things like that. I, for one, have got way better at news. News was kind of my kryptonite for the longest time. And I'm just not paying as close of attention to the news as I used to. And, you know, I was a political science major in college. And, you know, so it's easy for me to go down these rabbit holes, but I just don't anymore. And I find that I'm still able to get enough news without making news like the problem. Sure. I don't have any access to news at the moment. Well,

I have access, you know, I can pull up the websites, but I have cut it out completely because I realized that nothing good ever came of it. There's that belief in the back of your mind, like, oh, you should be informed about what's going on. And I have found almost no negative ramifications from not being informed. If it's really important, it ends up getting on my radar anyways. I don't have to go looking for those things. And really the thing that kind of got me going in this direction was again that brainwash book. They did the science. You mentioned Social Dilemma. I watched that too. You watch that and you want to just like burn it all to the ground. You don't want to have any of that stuff on your phone anymore. But in Brainwash, they talk about how it doesn't really take a lot for the negative effects of looking at the news to start producing those

chemical reactions. It's like 10, 15 minutes. And at that point, it's like, well, you're not going to get what you came for in 10, 15 minutes a day anyways. So why even bother? Yeah, I agree. Do I need to read the brainwash book, Mike? You keep talking about it. I don't know. You can listen to the bookworm episode if you want the cliff notes version. It's on my, it's on my feed. I just haven't got there yet. Yeah. Maybe I'll just, I'll start with the episode. I like that topic. I like the, the, the idea of like the chemical reactions that are happening inside of your brain. That just fascinates me. So, so news was a problem for me that I think I have at least temporarily licked. Social media,

this is one where I have dodged a bullet and I'm not sure, maybe it's my age. So I'm in my, where I have dodged a bullet. And I'm not sure, maybe it's my age. So I'm in my, you know, I'm in my young 50s. So social media wasn't a thing when I was growing up. So I never developed social media habits. I don't have a Facebook account. I actually have to set a task to go in and check Twitter because I like engaging with Twitter as Max Barkey, but I don't, it's not something that occurs to me to do every minute of the day. You know, like same thing with the forums. I have to like set, I have to manually tell myself to go and engage with them. I don't have a problem with getting stuck on social media. And I don't mean to say this and like, look at me, I'm fancy and better than everybody.

But for whatever reason, that is a vice that I just never picked up. Yeah, I think I have the tendencies here where this could be a major problem for me. But I put some systems in place where it's not. I have deleted Facebook entirely. I no longer have Instagram on my phone. I do have Twitter. That is the one social media platform that I do use. And the thing that has made it bearable for me to separate the news side of it is not to use the default Twitter app. I'm a Twitterific subscriber specifically for the muffles feature. So I have everything politics related I can think of in my list of muffles, which means that all of

that stuff gets removed from my timeline. It's basically productivity and Apple stuff at this point, which is the stuff I want to see. I do think that is an input. We're not giving anybody a lot of good advice on that, but if that is something that's a problem for you, that's an input you need to manage. Yes. The other one that's an input to me, just kind of brainstorming what are the inputs that distract me, is frankly ideas.

I get this stream of ideas all day long. Maybe it's something I want to add to a blog post or something I want to do on the next field guide or a way to handle this pesky client problem. But the thing about ideas is they show up at the most inconvenient times. And so you need an input system to manage those. I think letting yourself go down the road of an idea the moment it occurs to you is probably the road to madness. Because you'll never be able to finish anything because ideas are always occurring. But also ideas are precious in those first few moments. And if you don't capture them, you will lose them. So my idea input management system is drafts.

I open drafts, I write down the idea, and like Mike, I have the badge turned on. So at the end of the day, I clear out those ideas. And sometimes I look at them again at the end of the day and say that was a dumb idea, but sometimes they turn into something big. And that moment of capture is very important. I completely agree. This was kind of the thing that got me moving towards putting everything

inside of Rome Research, is the things that I was capturing. I recognized that at the essence of what it is, no matter if it's a task or it's some information that I want to remember or it's something I want to talk about on the podcast or if it's an idea for a blog post I want to write, they are essentially all ideas. They are essentially all ideas. Now, you have something a little bit here about a little further down here about documenting your inputs. I think this is a really cool idea. I'm not sure if you've done this yet. I have actually done something kind of like this as part of the post I wrote back in May or June of this year about what role the notebook was going to play in my task management system. And just doing that, I've realized that the idea is the information,

the tasks, essentially all of it is an idea at some point. And ultimately, the place I wanted all that stuff to end up in was Roam Research. I think there's a lot of value in this exercise. And I would be willing to go through this again. As I reflect on that diagram, I've got it open right in front of me. I realized that the system, the flowchart for me really hasn't changed a whole lot. But how I use the different things in this flowchart kind of has. And I think that's important. Maybe that's the challenge for both of us this time is to consider what are all the vectors where stuff is getting into our field of view and are there any holes that we need to plug with these? All right, let's do that. Let's make that our challenge. I think the idea of writing down

your input management thing is a good exercise because it really forces you to think through the whole process critically. But it also allows you to create a mechanism in your brain that you're more likely to stick to because you've documented it. The answer to your question is I have not done it yet. the answer to your question is I have not done it yet. Instead, Mike, instead I spent two hours learning Mermaid JavaScript coding, which allows you to make diagrams in Obsidian. And at the end of that two hours, I realized I hadn't actually flowcharted anything.

And that what I'm going to actually do is get a piece of paper or open an app on my iPad with my Apple Pencil and document these with a pencil. So that is a good example of why I have no business making a show called Focused. But either way, yeah, I think that's a good idea. Let's make that our challenge. Some other kind of big ideas around inputs is I think the concept of time boxing trouble inputs is a good one and one that you should always go to. The if any one of these things, whether it be social media,

news, email, whatever seems to be an input that you're having trouble controlling block time to manage the input and stick to it. And we talk about time blocks as a way to make sure you make time to do stuff important to you. But time blocks can have the inverse effect too. They can box in things that take over. So that's true. That's a big one. I have an end of day checklist. It's part of my shutdown routine. And I check mail and I check Slack and I check text messages. And on good days,

when I get through that whole checklist, that is the best input management system that I know of, because everything is done at the end of the day. There are no badges on any apps and I can start the next day fresh. And that, that really helps me. And I think you also need to just generally pay attention to your input volume. I wrote it down the outline. I call this a focus barometer. I think when you have a lot of inputs coming in more than you have time to manage, that's a good sign of bigger problems that you have. Yes, absolutely. And that's really the nasty side of this is that any one of those inputs in and of itself is no big deal, but

you drown under the sheer volume of them. It's death by a thousand paper cuts. Yeah. Or 10,000. it feels like it can get overwhelming. Well, I hope as you're listening, you're giving some thought to your inputs and how you're managing them and maybe coming up with a system for inputs. Mike and I are committing between now and the next non-guest episode that we're going to document our inputs. I'm going to publish mine. I'm just going to say it. Let's just do it.

Put it out there. And that'll give us something to talk about in the future as we kind of get deeper down the stack on inputs. But hopefully we're helping you too out, dear listener. Thank you to our sponsors today, Squarespace and Woven. Mike and I are going to go into deep focus today on these PKM software and talk nerdy stuff. So for members, you'll be able to hear us go deep on that. But otherwise, thanks for listening and we'll see you in a couple of weeks.

All right, Mike, where are you on