Focused - 124: Reading and Learning

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

In this episode, Mike and David talk about PKM planets and how they read, process, and learn from books and other media.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great. How about you, David? It's been a crazy week. As we record this, we're coming off an Apple event with a whole bunch of new products, and life has been just throwing a lot at me the last couple of days. So Focus has been on my mind. I'm

glad we got a chance today to sit down and talk about a little bit. Excellent. Yeah. Before we get into the meat of this episode, I want to follow up real quick here with Nick Milo. He was on recently and we had a great conversation about personal knowledge management, PKMs. And he recently came out with a video on the PKM planet. This is on his YouTube channel, the Linking Your Thinking channel, which we will link to in the notes for people who want to check out his stuff. But it's per Nick Milo, really good, really straightforward. I love the mental model that he's presenting here. Did you get a chance to watch this video? I watched it twice, Mike. Nick does

a great job with this stuff. And it's something that's really on my mind because I feel like, you know, the idea of PKM and focus really fit together nicely. I mean, one of the barriers to focus is all the noise in our brains. You know, we're not wired to be carrying a lot of RAM type memory in our brains and we're much better at analysis. But having, you know, that external place to put stuff, I think can make a huge difference. I know that my system has made a lot of progress on this over the last year and I'm glad Nick is covering this. He's looks like he's got a whole series going here. Yeah, I'm excited to see where he takes this. But the first part of this is this PKM planet where he really breaks down personal knowledge management into six different areas and really recommend that you go watch the video to get the full gist of it.

But I like the way that he breaks these down. He's got different terms for all these different areas, but just real briefly, the different areas that he identifies are ideas, writing, productivity, which includes tasks and projects, which that's an interesting one to me. We'll come back to that in a second. Skill, relationship, and memory. And basically, you're in a different mode for each one of these areas when you are in your personal knowledge management. We've called it a stack. I really don't know exactly what to do with this because the more I understand about personal knowledge management, PKMs, I'm beginning to realize that it's kind of all-encompassing. And in the past, I've thought about apps serving specific purposes and all of my journaling

happens in day one and all of my writing happens in Ulysses. And I'm realizing more and more that these things are interconnected. And yeah, you can do that through callback URLs and things like that. But Obsidian makes it really easy to connect this stuff all in a single application. Yeah, well, and it also kind of points out a question that we really haven't answered. And we did a whole show on mac power users on obsidian so i don't really want to get into the app specifics but more of like the focus angle of this is pkm means almost a different thing to every person that engages with it and i think nick did a really good job in this video of explaining different areas of personal knowledge

management. Like one of the things I do is I track work done on legal projects and, you know, keep track of where contracts stand as we negotiate it and all the different pieces this goes through, because this is the kind of work where I'm really focused on one thing. And then I may not see it again for 10 days. And then I need to come back and pick up where I left off. And that's not, you know, developing ideas from reading books. That's completely different. But to me, it's also an element of PKM. And I, I like this series that he started because I think it really gives everybody kind of room and oxygen to look at the different elements of this and figure out where it fits for them. Yeah, I agree with you. Which ones are the biggest ones for you? And I guess, are there any that you think are missing from this

list? I know there's a couple that kind of stand out to me, but I'm kind of curious as you think about your own PKM planet, you know, where do you spend the most time? You know, it's funny because this video was, was really good for me because I have been struggling with this myself because so much of the discussion around PKM is about deep thinking about heavy topics, you know,

people running PhDs or, or, you know, and I do some of that, but I don't just do that with a PKM system. And I won't bang on about Obsidian. I've done that enough already in other places, but the one feature about Obsidian that makes this possible for me is end-to-end encryption. You know, this is a system that I entirely trust, that I've got the keys to and nobody else does.

So I feel free to write anything I want in there. So looking at my system, and I know you're kind of still developing yours. You just went through Nick's course, but mine developed organically over time. And I have checked off most of these boxes and in one way or another, although I didn't really use any of the words that nick uses for his his pk and planet like the the big one for me is sparky os i've mentioned this a couple times on the show but i do have like a repository of thoughts and ideas on concepts and philosophy and just how i should live my life and there's just something i think to encoding your own operating system, you know, to writing it down. And I know that all of us carry around ideas in

our head about what's right and wrong to us or what we believe and don't believe. But in forcing yourself to write it down, I think it becomes a lot more solid in your actions. And I'm not necessarily saying that, like, you know, I'll have thoughts in here about religion and philosophy, but I also have thoughts in here about, you know, the Oxford comma. So it just really varies on different things. And I don't necessarily think you need to make the argument to prove you're right or wrong on your core beliefs. I know a lot of stuff is faith-based, and some stuff, it's not about evidence, but some stuff is. But the process, whether you're trying to do it with solid proof or not, is a very good process to go through and write it down.

So I've done that. It's not complete. And one of the things Nick said in his video that really resonated with me is he says, develop your ideas over decades. And I feel like this Sparky OS is where I do that. And, you know, even in the few years I've, you know, evolved this, I can see where my thoughts have changed on topics. And that's okay, because as you get older, hopefully you get a little wiser and your mind changes. Just to use a very shallow example, right? I used to be vigilantly angry with a lot of what I call fake jazz, right? Okay. Just bear with me for a minute. All right. Uh,

when we got married, I wrote into the DJ's contract that she would not play any Kenny G at my wedding, you know, go back to 1993. And Kenny G was, was the, was the thing that, and I said, just, I said, do whatever you want. Just please don't play any Kenny G. We wrote it in the contract. I mean, what a jerk, right? I mean, who, who does that? And, um, and then now just recently somebody, uh, sent me a video of Kenny G and I just kind of, you know, watched it. I'm like, you know what? This guy has made a living playing a saxophone his entire life. And maybe I'm not a huge fan of his music, but good, good for him. You know, she can hold her, you like get more mellow about stuff like this. But so that's a very basic example, but I have like, as part of Sparky OS, I write down thoughts about music and I went and updated it about, you know, you know, being more willing to listen to things that historically I

wasn't willing to listen to. And, um, that's a very silly example, but I don't really want to get into the heavier examples. And so I do have that first part of it. And I guess what Nick would call this would be ideas. But for me, it's Sparky OS. Sure. Okay. Well, I think you hit on something real important there with the Kenny G example. hit on something real important there with the Kenny G example. I recently finished the book Think Again by Adam Grant. And that I think fits perfectly with this discussion of developing your ideas over decades, because essentially what Adam Grant is saying in that book is that you have to be willing to change your mind about things. So you're watching the video on Kenny G and you're saying to yourself, maybe I was wrong about that. Maybe it's not as bad as I thought it was. And we've all got those areas where we have had a firmly held belief, conviction, opinion about something. And if we're

willing to challenge it a little bit, which that's the whole idea behind personal knowledge management, in my opinion, is you're collecting all of these ideas and you're trying to discover the truth of what is really there, what is really in your brain. And you see things that you didn't see before. And if you just hold on to those things and say, well, I made this decision a long time ago and I'm sticking with it, then you're probably not going to be interested in the whole idea of PKM. And you have no interest in using an app like Obsidian with the GraphView, Roam, RemNote, all those other ones that have that sort of thing where you can see the connections between the ideas because you've already made up your mind about these things. But that's where the magic happens, in my opinion.

I really like this whole concept of ideas. And what really excites me about this stuff is I feel like I am just beginning to understand what has been happening in my brain for the last several years already. I've shared before how I read Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. And that was kind of the thing that gave me permission to consider myself creative. Because before that, I would realize that, well, I can't make up

anything completely original. I'm just ripping off this chord progression or somebody else said this a different way. And now I don't have to feel bad about that because really what I'm doing is I'm remixing this stuff into my own thing. And Obsidian is the app that I happen to use, but really that's the whole idea of PKM in my opinion is that you kind of see how those connections are made and you can sort of see these things begin to materialize inside of an application.

It's like an external brain. Building a second brain isn't, I don't really like that term because a lot of the connotations that go with it, but that's not a terrible description of what we're trying to achieve with this kind of stuff. Absolutely. And you look at writing your ideas down, there's two ways to look at that. You could say, I'm setting my ideas down, I'm carving them in stone. So here is a record. This is what I believe. This is who I am. And to me, it's a much more malleable thought. By writing it down, I'm laying the thought on the lab table. And now I'm going to start walking around and looking at

it from different angles. And when I pick it back up, it may be different than it was when I laid it down. And the process of putting together a structure to write them down, the PKM in essence is the creation of that lab table that lets me kind of set it aside. I mean, I just recently watched the Harry Potter series again. I really liked those movies, But if there's one thing I could get from the Harry Potter world and make it real, it would be a pensive. And that's this idea of this bowl where you can pour thoughts into and then go study them later. And that is kind of what a PKM can do for you in this regard. Sure. One of the interesting things about the different areas that Nick outlined is really the connections between the different areas. So I kind of view this PKM planet. It's like a globe with these different continents for ideas, for writing, for productivity, for skill, for relationship, for memory. memory another maybe analogy that hits home a little bit more for you is like different lands inside of disneyland right you're still in the the park but you're in a different area when you're focusing on these things but they're connected right so that has me thinking about the ideas

which connect to the writing for me and then the productivity piece of this, this is the task and the project piece, which, again, I'm still kind of formulating my ideas around this. But the more I understand how this is all part of the same PKM planet, maybe it's not so bad to have these things connected a little bit more. I know you have your system and everything in OmniFocus. And I've talked before about how I feel kind of bad. I've tried to use OmniFocus and I've used it successfully in the past, but I don't have a whole lot in it. People look at my OmniFocus and they're like, that's it? So I don't really have a whole bunch of little tasks that I am trying to track. I really have big creative projects that I'm

trying to move forward and publish on a regular basis. And that has me thinking about, well, where do these tasks really belong for me? And I think the key idea here between all these different areas, I use that one just as an example because it's top of mind for me, but my advice would be don't get locked into this needs to be its own separate thing because really it is part of the same entity, the same planet, same personal knowledge management system. And there has to be an easy way for you to get from one section to another.

And whatever way happens to have the least amount of friction, that's probably the best one for you to get from one section to another. And whatever way happens to have the least amount of friction, that's probably the best one for you. Yeah. And, you know, in watching Nick's video, and then looking at my Obsidian database, those connections are very clear. Like, like one of the things I've talked about on this show is the ultimate importance of roles in my life, how I really judge my progress on my roles and my RTA. And so I've got a separate segment in the database just with each role. And I track it on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. And I'm really aware that there are these things I've decided that I want to be good at. And I keep them at front of mind by having them built into the things I do in Obsidian. And I can connect those easily

to the Sparky OS as well, because everything links together. And it really is. And this is the reason why I keep banging on about those guys. I just feel like having a system you can trust with secure data to try and put this stuff together is really an improvement in the way you think and live. And it's something we can do with computers that suddenly is here and was never here before. Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of opportunity in the world of PKM right now. We won't get into all this stuff. Obviously, today, we got some other things that we want to talk about. But I just want to put out a plug real quickly, because a big part of this for me is journaling. And as part of the deep focus episode last time, we walked through some of the daily question stuff that I was figuring out at the time. And I have since made a video if people want to see what that looks like. And I think all of these little pieces, really, you just kind of have to connect them for yourself. But consider what

things you want to insert into your own PKM system. I think if you try to just do everything that you see everybody else doing, you'll quickly get overwhelmed and it'll be more effort than benefit that you get out of it. But if you can select a couple of them that are really important to you, that really hit on the roles and the RTA like you were talking about, these are really important to me. These really hit the mark for me and helped me become the person that I want to be, helped me to grow in a specific way where I am continuing to get better, develop that growth mindset, challenge my preconceived notions about things and change my mind so I see things more clearly. Then there's a lot of customization that can be done here, but it doesn't have to be intimidating

either. It's not something that you have to spend a ton of time mastering all the ins and outs of all of these programs and all the things that you could possibly do with them. Therein lies the way to madness, in my opinion. Just find a couple of things that really are going to help you and then do those things. Yeah. Another element that Nick talked about in the video is productivity. And I kind of have that addressed in what I think of as work benches. I have like a segment, it's a whole folder of dealing with the law practice, one dealing with Max Barkey.

And in that it's a combination of product of project tracking of draft writing of just a, it's like a combination of a tracking, of draft writing. It's like a combination of a lot of things Nick is talking about. But it is funny to me, now that I have all this in one bucket, how often the lines cross over between the Workbench work and the Sparky OS work. It's just really, I don't know, it's really fantastic. And I sound like a broken record, so I should stop. The other thing he said was, you know, just tracking information. I do that stuff in that relationship tracking. I talked about that on my power users, but I basically have a CRM system

that I can build into any individual person in the library anytime I want. And I would recommend watching Nick's video and seriously considering something like this. You don't have to use Obsidian. There's some great apps out there. If you're focused on the iPhone and iPad, maybe you look at craft Rome research, you know, still a great app and continues to improve. There's a lot of ways to do this. You know, Devin think is another good one, good one. But I think putting together a system like this, I guess I'm a recent believer. And so that's why you can't shut me up on the topic. Sure. Well, there's one area specifically that I want to dive into a little bit deeper,

which is this whole idea of reading and book notes, which I think kind of hits on the skill memory and ideas categories. But maybe we'll tackle that after this first break. This episode of Focus is brought to you by our good friends at Memberful. Memberful is the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience used by the biggest creators on the web. Generate sustainable recurring income while diversifying your revenue stream. You might have heard us talking about the RelayFM membership program, but what you might not know is that Memberful is the platform that we use for that program. And they make it super easy to generate that extra revenue stream and deliver bonus content

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free trials, private podcasts, and tons more, while still leaving you with full control and ownership of everything that relates to your audience, your brand, and your membership. If you are a content creator, Memberful can help you monetize your passion. Get started for free at memberful.com, M-E-M-B-E-R-F-U-L.com, no credit card required. That's memberful.com. Go there now. Check it out. It could be the start of something exciting. Our thanks to Memberful for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. So as I was thinking about Nick Milo's PKM Planet and the different areas, I realized that there's something that I've been doing for a while which hits on multiple areas, and that is reading books. Now, I already talked about Austin Kleon,

Steal Like an Artist. That was the thing for me when I started reading these books. I was just trying to get more ideas. I was not trying to collect a whole bunch of outlines with everything that the authors read, but I realized the value of just improving my inputs and then letting the output kind of take care of itself. And I want to dissect this process a little bit and talk about how and what we read and then maybe what we do with that afterwards. Like, is it just something that we, well, that was nice. We put it back on the shelf. Do we continue to develop these ideas in our PKM systems? You know, that sort of thing. Well, I mean, to start off, you said something very

important. You know, like when you read, what can you get out of this for you? I believe that reading a book or watching an educational video or any of this stuff, you should go at this with an extraordinarily selfish attitude. Your job isn't there to document everything the author wrote. It's not there to try and learn everything the author wrote. It's to consider and take what's useful to you and don't worry about the rest, in my opinion. Yeah, I completely agree. In fact, I was just talking to somebody about this the other day. If you pick up a book, especially one that you've heard a lot of people rave about, there can be an expectation going into it that this is going to completely change my world. And more than

once, I've picked up a book like that and been completely disappointed by the book as I was reading it. And at that point, I feel almost bad, like there's something wrong with me because the book isn't speaking to me. And I just want to clarify here at the beginning that it is not your job to extract every bit of information that you can out of a book. If you are not getting anything out of a book, and the same thing could be applied to any medium, you know, video courses, YouTube videos, stuff that you read in your RSS feed. in your RSS feed. You don't have an obligation to change your life and conform to the picture that the author or creator is painting. And that is very freeing. As it pertains to my own reading habit, it means that I can continue to go through... For me, it's primarily books. I like to read a lot of books. And that relieves a lot of the pressure and allows me to go through them more quickly. Even the ones that like for Bookworm, I have to finish them because we're going to talk about them. If you

don't have that sort of accountability system, the temptation might be, well, I don't want to even finish this book. And I would say that is completely fine. I don't mind going through and finishing the book, but I will pick up the pace a little bit and not read it as carefully, I guess, if I am going through it at the beginning and I really haven't made a connection. And I don't feel bad about that anymore. I used to. And that was the thing I realized that actually is what kept me from reading a lot in the first place. Yeah. The obligation. The author doesn't care. The author doesn't know you're reading this book

right now. And if you decide to ignore a bunch of it, but you find something in the middle that you want to incorporate, then you should. But it's different from reading fiction. You know, reading nonfiction is truly a self-serving act to find things that you can find it to use and to help. And going back to Harry Potter, you don't read Harry Potter to, you know, learn the finer art of spell crafting. You read it to have a story and go through with the story. And of course, you can throw a fiction book away too, if you don't like it. But you just kind of go along for the ride. But I feel like reading nonfiction is a very active process where you should be engaged with it, but always asking yourself the question, am I getting enough bang for my buck? Is this

worth continuing? Yeah, you bring up an interesting point because I actually don't read much fiction. I don't remember the last fiction book I've read in the last several years. I mean, I've read like the Lord of the Rings and stuff like that, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy back in the day, but it's not something that I actively do. And it always comes up in conversation, usually in the form of, Mike, you should really be reading more fiction. And my question is always, why? I understand if you enjoy reading fiction, great. I enjoy reading nonfiction. And the reason I enjoy reading nonfiction, I think, is my approach to selecting the books that I read. I mentioned the Bookworm podcast I do with my buddy Joe Buehlig. So every two weeks, we read a book. And sometimes I pick

it, and it's one that I'm really interested in. Those are easy. Sometimes it's something that Joe picks, and it's not something I'm interested in. And those can be a slog sometimes, but I have to get through them because we're going to talk about them. But the other ones that don't get selected because of Bookworm, I got this piece of great advice from a friend of mine several years ago. He picks books to read in order to solve a problem that he is facing right now. When you are motivated to solve a problem, and the book that you are reading is speaking to that specific problem, motivation is not an issue because you want to discover the way other people have solved this problem. And this could be a lot of different things. This could be, you know, you want to create better habits. You want to get into journaling. I mean, there's so many great books out there. Deep Work by Cal Newport, you know, if you want to really understand the benefit of deep focused work sessions and

how that can help you develop your skills in today's digital economy, that sort of thing. Pick the things that are really scratching the itch for you right now. And don't feel bad about the ones that are coming out or have all the accolades that you're really not interested in, put those on the shelf. Maybe they'll be of interest to you later when you are motivated to solve a specific problem. Maybe not. Don't feel bad about that, but just try to fix the systems in your own life. You can't fix everything and you can't fix other people's problems, but you can take ownership of the problems in your own world and you can try to make your situation a little bit better. And those are the ones that I find are easy to engage with and I tend to not be able to put down. solving a problem gives you a much higher, you know, a much higher level of engagement and, you know, probably much more beneficial use of it. But, but I don't really just look for

solving a problem with every nonfiction book I pick up there. There are authors that I trust, um, Chris Bailey and, uh, Cal Newport are too, like anything they write, I'm just going to read because I feel like they're very smart guys. And smart guys and I want to hear what they say about something that was important to them enough to write a book about it. I also, but one thing I do when picking what to read is I actually have a fairly complicated and varied filter system. I use the Bookworm podcast. I don't know if I ever told you, Mike, I'm a member of your podcast. I, uh,

thank you. I signed up for it, but the, but I think you guys do a great job of summarizing the general content of a book that I can listen to in a podcast while I'm washing the dishes. And sometimes I'll listen to you summarize a book and say, okay, there's really nothing in here that is that interesting to me. And then you'll talk about another one and I'll be like, oh, wow, that sounds like something I'd really like to learn more about. So I'll use your podcast as like a screening process for a book. So much so that like when somebody recommends a book to me, I'll go and look and see if bookworms ever covered it in the past and go listen to the episode. So, and I guess, you know, a general theme of the way I handled nonfiction books is the opposite of fiction books where I actively seek out spoilers. You know, I want to know

generally what this book says before I read it, because I only have so much time to read these books and I don't want to waste my time on something that's not going to give me any bang for the buck. I'm very mercenary about it. In addition to the focus to the Bookworm podcast, I also like these book summary services. I mean, we used to have Blinkist as a sponsor. They aren't anymore. And I know, Mike, you're not a fan of that. But I think it's great that they're going to give me a 15-minute summary of a book. Another really good one that I've been looking at lately is Short Form.

And they do a little bit longer summary. But it just depends on what you're looking for. But I'm happy to read a summary of a book like this before I pick it up to just try and figure it out. I mean, a good example is I've been hearing about this book Eat That Frog. We talked about that on this show a couple years ago. to just try and figure it out. I mean, like a good example is I've been hearing about this book, Eat That Frog, you know? Yep. We talked about that on this show a couple of years ago. And, you know, I've just never got around to reading the book.

I got the short form summary and read that, which was about 15 pages. And I felt like, you know, there wasn't really anything in the summary that I am not already actively engaged with. I don't need to read a 300-page book that's going to have a bunch of samples of stuff that I think I already know. And I'm not going to read the book now. It didn't make it through the cut. But then I'll find other books that I'll read the summary and I'll be like, okay, you know what?

This is really useful. I need to get deeper into it. And then I'll get and read the book. That's a really important point is the way that you engage with the services like Blinkist and Shortform as, do I want to dive deeper into this topic? I think that's the ideal way to use these. And the reason I personally don't use those services is that I have developed just a regular reading habit. I'm reading typically about an hour every single day, so I've got a bunch of stuff on my bookshelf and it's just waiting for me. But if you're not really sure which direction you want to go next, that can be a great way to figure it out. My word of caution,

way to figure it out, my word of caution, I guess, would be that if you listen to one of those or read one of those short versions of something, you have not gotten the entire idea out of the book. That's the thing that bugs me is when I am talking to somebody about a book that really impacted me and they say, oh yeah, yeah, I read it on Blinkist. No, no, you didn't. You heard a summary. Yeah. I think the way I look at it is if I am inspired to action by hearing a Bookworm episode or reading a Blinkist, then I want the book. I want to read the book. But a lot of times I'm not inspired to action. In fact, I feel like, well, there's really nothing there that I haven't already heard.

And this is something I get already or something I'm just not interested in. And then I feel like, okay, that one, I, you know, the FOMO of reading that book is now gone. I don't need to worry about that. Move on to the next one. And that's the way I use it. And, you know, I do think that a lot of people don't have the time to read an hour a day. I get it. And I think I'm one of those. So that's why I use all these goofy systems. My favorite way to do it, frankly, is Bookworm. And that's not me trying to make you feel good, but I just, I love having it in my ears and two people I trust. And you guys even rate the books, which also kind of helps me get an idea of as to whether I'm going to be interested in it or not. Well, thank you for, for people who

aren't familiar with bookworm, what it ends up being is Joe and I debating usually the things that speak to us from the books and kind of putting it in context of all the other stuff that we've read. So it's not just a short summary of the book itself. The episodes end up being usually about an hour and a half long, but just so people know what they're getting into if they're interested in that sort of thing. But the audio format is interesting too. Maybe this is a good segue into how we read these books because typically when I read a book, it is a physical book. And that is because several years ago, I tried the Kindle, I tried the iPad, and I don't have enough self-control to stay out of other applications on my iOS device when I am

reading. The Kindle just never really clicked for me. I don't really like the feel of that particular device. And the physical book, in addition to not having any other distractions, book, in addition to not having any other distractions, there is just something that feels awesome about reading a physical book. And then you put your bookmark in the page when you're done and you can see your progress as you go. That's very motivating to me. I tend to take notes using MindNote on my iPhone, which I know I just said that I have trouble disconnecting from the distractions on the iOS device when I'm trying to read. But for whatever reason, when I just have to pull out my phone, unlock it, my nodes in my dock, pull that open and put in a couple of things that stand out to me from the book that I have no trouble doing and then putting that down again and then going

back to the actual book. It's when everything is on the screen that I have trouble staying in the right lane. But the exception to this is biographies, which that's, I guess, the closest I get a lot of times to fiction. I do really like the stories in the biographies. Creativity Inc., for example, is a great story behind Pixar. Yeah, I read that. Yeah. And I actually like Audible for those. I like those being read by the author. I feel like with those stories that they are telling, the voice inflections that you get, especially if it's the author and it's not somebody interpreting the author's work, it's kind of the way that the author intended the story to be told. And I'm also not trying

to jot down a bunch of notes about all the history of Pixar when I'm listening to a story, you know, in Creativity Inc. I'm just, at that point, listening to those typically to be entertained. And so I'll use audiobooks for that, but that's basically it. So audiobooks for me are fiction books. I have not read a fiction book as a physical book or Kindle book in years, but I read many fiction books via my ears. I like it when I'm walking the dog or just have some downtime. Does it surprise you that I like and make podcasts and I like fiction audiobooks? I think that's a great medium for it. And having someone tell a story, that's something I'm not doing to be necessarily fast.

And I like the idea that I can just start this and maybe I'll listen to it for 15 minutes while I'm cleaning the garage. And then maybe tomorrow I'll listen to it again 15 minutes while I'm cleaning the garage. And then maybe tomorrow I'll listen to it again. And it's fun having a little ongoing story. I have to take eye drops every night and I have to keep my eyes closed for 15 minutes. And that's one of the things I do is I lay in bed at night as I listen to a story while I'm waiting for that to end. And I don't really want to listen to knowledge content at that point. I want to unwind. So I find audiobooks great for fiction. I'm not going to try and convince you to listen to fiction or read it, but I feel like someone

who reads as many books as you do, it's just odd to me that you don't read any fiction. But hey, to each his own. Although I am completely on the opposite corner from you in terms of nonfiction books. I read everything on Kindle. I love my Kindle so much for this. It's just the perfect device. I think part of it is age difference because I grew up when you didn't have a choice but physical books. And I remember carrying those bags full of, you know, 50 pounds of books around with me everywhere. I mean, go through law school and you want to talk about heavy books. And so I've been carrying books my whole life and I don't want to do that anymore. And just the idea that

I've got this Kindle that weighs mere ounces and I've got, you know, 50 books on it at any one time I can read. I just, I love everything about that. And also the nerd in me loves the connectivity of it all, you know, um, with, with the Kindle, I can read the book anywhere and on any device. I mean, I get books sent to me by friends and, you know, publishers sometimes to read before they release the book. I've got the, I've got the new Michael Hyatt book right now, which isn't out yet I'm reading, and it's a physical book. And just the other night I wanted to read it,

but it wasn't in the room with me, and I had to go figure out where it was. And I'm just so used to being able to read on my phone, iPad, or Kindle anywhere, or even on my Mac. They've got a Mac app too. And I love the way the highlighting all links across devices, because for nonfiction books, I do a lot of highlighting in them. And whichever device I read on, the highlights are just there. I fully embrace the idea of digital reading.

I get it. And there's a lot to like about the Kindle. And I think in the next segment, we'll talk about what we do with the notes that we take and being able to import those automatically is a pretty big deal. I just love the feel of a physical book. I've got my bookshelf behind me and I kind of have a dream of someday having one of those libraries with the sliding ladders. And it feels really good to look at the stuff on that bookshelf. And I haven't read every book on my bookshelf, but probably 70, 80% of them I have.

And just taking the time to look through the different books that are on my bookshelf and seeing the titles and recalling some of the ideas, it's sort of a reflection on some personal triumph. Like, I actually went through and I put in the effort and I read this book, and it's sort of like a trophy in a trophy case at that point. Yeah, I get that. And I just have no interest in it. You know, once again, I am so mercenary about this book. You know, I look at a fiction book, a nonfiction book and say, what are you going to give me?

And I'm going to completely use you. I mean, yep. I got to put a plug out here real quickly for an Audible book, which kind of breaks all of the lines that I just drew about how and where I read books. And that's the one by our friend Chris Bailey, How to Train Your Mind. Audible Original. And it's basically on the productivity benefits of mindfulness meditation. And built into this, the reason that this is so brilliant as an Audible project is in addition to the content and the research, which Chris is great at, he also has different spots where he walks you through guided mindfulness meditations. And so you're actually putting into practice what he is talking to you about. So we'll put a link to this in the show notes as well. But I'm not sure if you've had a chance to go through the whole book. I have, and it's really well done. Yeah, yeah, I've listened to it. So consider what you're hoping to get out of the book, I guess, when you are deciding what is the

best medium to consume it in, because this is the type of thing that had I had the option, I probably would have just not even thought about it and ordered the physical book. And after listening to it, I really am a firm believer that Chris made the right choice in making this. This is the available format. But a lot of the books that you read, you've got a whole bunch of options. And so it's worth, I think, considering what's the ideal way for me to go through this information. How am I going to get the most out of it without a whole bunch of extra effort? And then Amazon does this thing where when you buy the book for Kindle, they say

they put a little checkbox at the bottom and say, you know, just for another $5, we could give you the Audible version too. And so often they get my money that way. Yeah, me too, actually, because I like to review books via Audible. But when I'm reading for the first time, I like to read them in the physical format. Yeah, and that's how I use it too. If I'm not in the mood for fiction, I'll just go through one of the nonfiction books and listen to that or listen to a targeted section of it. This episode of The Focus Podcast

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your PDF problems. Our thanks to PDFPen from Smile for their support of the Focus, and all of RelayFM. All right, so we've decided what we're going to read. Now what do we do when we read it? Right. Well, I mentioned briefly, and I can get into as much detail as you want here. I take my notes while I am reading in my node on my iPhone. take my notes while I am reading in MindNode on my iPhone. And the reason that I do that is I like having the mind map at the end that I can very quickly kind of see the structure of the book. I can very quickly see the things that stood out to me. I can very quickly see if there are any important diagrams. I'll just take a picture of the chart or the diagram in the book and embed that right in the MindNode file.

So it's sort of a book summary for me when I am done. And you mentioned that you were a member of the Bookworm Club. That's the thing that Joe and I do for a couple bucks a month. I don't want to really push this too much. But if you're interested in those MindNode files, I actually make those available to club members as well. So when I get done with those, I upload them. And then anybody can download the PDF or the MindNode file and kind of take it from there. But it's got the different chapters,

the different sections. So like I've got one here for we're recording shortly work the system by Sam Carpenter. So there's the intro in orange, part one, the system's mindset is blue, part two, make it so that's purple, you know, so I have like the visual, the different sections, and then each individual chapter there, and then individual notes that I collect, which sometimes I will use different emoji at the beginning to denote what this is. So like I use a, and you could do this with tags too, I guess, but I've just used emoji for so long that this is just kind of stuck. I've got a key emoji that I use for key ideas. The light bulb is kind of like an inspiration point for me. I've got a quote bubble for quotes that I want to remember. Let's see what else. I think there's a I don't see any other ones in here. I've got a talking head. So like if there's a talking point that I want to hit on when we

record the bookworm episode that helps to make the outlines real quick. I've got a talking head. So like if there's a talking point that I want to hit on when we record the bookworm episode, that helps to make the outlines real quick. I've got a mind-blown emoji when there's just something that just really rocks my world. I don't use that one very often. But all that stuff makes it really easy to go back and see where the key points in the book were for me. And I don't do this super often, but I do it often enough that it's worth me putting these things in there. And then the next step for this is moving it into Obsidian, but I will, I'll talk about that in a minute. Yeah. I think that one of the focuses of this section is to ultimately get to the point of summarizing yourself. And the ultimate end of this is to not just read the book and say, oh, that was interesting, and then set it down and

pick up the next one and start, but to learn something from it and make a change based on it if change is merited. Although I think, I mean, what you do really, you start the summarization process at your initial read. And for me, I don't. To me, the initial read is just, again, judging the material, even on a chapter-by-chapter basis. And usually in these nonfiction books, the general concept is described in each chapter pretty early. And then there's a lot of examples. And so I, I'm always looking to say,

okay, is this something I want to learn more about or not? Do I move on to the next chapter? And, um, I use highlighting at this stage because on a Kindle, it's just so easy to add a highlight and I'm liberal with them. And so that first phase of highlights,

there's a lot of them. And I'll even highlight chapter names and things. So when I get the highlights later, I can kind of understand the structure. But I think probably what you do is more productive than just highlighting. But what I do is easier. Sure. But I'm giving myself more work later. I guess I can explain that if you'd like, but I, um,

that first time through the book is just a lot of highlights. And I think about it as I go through and, and I'm actively thinking the whole time, you know, not only is this a book I want to read, but what can I, what can I do with this information to get better at something or improve my life? So when I get to the end, I've got this collection of highlights and I've got my Kindle account connected to Readwise, which I think we've talked about already on the show. But readwise.io is a subscription service that will grab all your Kindle highlights for you. And then I can take those and put them into Obsidian. And then I highlight the highlights, if that makes any

sense, because I was so liberal the first pass, I'll go through and then add obsidian highlights to those of just the stuff that I think is really important. And then I finally get to the thing you're doing at the beginning is I start writing down, you know, what I think about the stuff and what the key points are to me and the stuff I want to act on. And a lot of times that'll end up into links into roles and the Sparky OS. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I probably would be doing something similar had Joe not picked How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler for one of our books for Bookworm. And this is one of those classic books. I don't know exactly when it was written,

but it was a while ago and was not one that I was anxious to read. Didn't really enjoy it when we read it, but it's also interesting to see how that has continued to impact the way that I read since we covered it. So in that book, he talks about how to get the most out of a book that you are reading, basically. And he has a whole process for looking at the cover, looking at the back cover, looking at the table of contents, understanding how the chapters are put together. And he's got in that book four levels of reading, the elementary reading, which is basically like, what does this sentence say? The inspectional reading, which is what is the book about? The analytical reading, and this is where you're kind of having an internal

make-believe dialogue with the author. This is one of the points that really shaped the way that I read too. Instead of just agreeing with people who write these books because they're smarter than I am, this part actually is all about asking questions and challenging the arguments that the author is making. And I definitely, looking back, see how this has impacted the way that I read. And then the last level of is the fourth level synoptical reading which is where you place all of these books in relation to one another and that's where looking back now a hundred and something episodes into bookworm I can see the value of that of like well I heard this idea from this book and I heard this other idea from this other book and this other idea from this book, and I heard this other idea from this other book, and this other idea from this other book, and I can see how these things kind of speak to the

same topic, and they paint a more complete picture of what's really going on here. But this is really the driving force behind how I make these MindNode files. So when I pick up a book typically to read it, I'm creating those sections, I'm creating the chapters before I ever start reading. And then I'm filling in as I go, which maybe sounds like a ton of work. Maybe it is. I don't know. I guess I've done it long enough now that it's pretty quick for me. I don't think it really adds a whole lot of time to the reading process for me. lot of time to the reading process for me. I also noticed that the more that I read, the quicker I get at reading. I'm not a speed reader by any means, but I do think that it is something that you can continue to get better at. So that's kind of the approach behind the MindNode files. of the approach behind the MindNode files. I'm looking to understand really the arguments that the author is making and then react to them myself inside of the MindNode files. And so I kind of do

some prep work at the beginning to set it up for me to do that. Since you're so analog about all this, you should probably print that MindNode and just stick it in the jacket of the book before you put it on your ladder shelf. That's not a terrible idea, although I do something else with these MindNode files at the end. Yeah. I'm just saying, if you pulled it off the shelf five years later, it would be nice to just have it right there in front of you. Yeah. Well, I know that there's people who will create their own like indexes in the back of the books that they're reading yeah just like highlighting with a pen and then putting the page number so you can quickly go back and see those different things so i don't know there probably is an argument to made for that but i read through the

the books in order to get the dots collected. Like I said at the beginning of this episode, that for a long time was good enough for me. But I also like the ability with the applications that we have now to be able to connect these things together, which when you've read the volume of books that I've read, you start to see the same stories popping up in different books over and over again. One that comes to mind is In Atomic Habits. James Clear tells this story, I think, about the Polger sisters, and that appears in a different book as well. And so you can create a page inside of Obsidian for the Polger sisters, And you can point all of the other books that that appears in, you know, to that specific story, and you can add more details. And it really helps to see like all

the different vectors of the the ideas, talking about personal knowledge management, you know, Nick Milo, we talked about the idea emergence, kind of the top down and the bottom up, that was one of the big things I got out of the Linking Your Thinking workshop, is that in the past, if I take these notes and I just keep them in the MindNode files, well, that's great. I've got these ideas and maybe they show up in my writing, maybe they don't. And if I wanted to, I could go back and I could use the search feature and I could find a specific thing in any one of these MindNode files. But it's not doing me any good until I have the thought, hey, where was that story on the Poldre sisters? And then I go find it. But I want to be able to kind of navigate back and forth between these things and see where the stream of consciousness goes, like see where

my curiosity can take me when these things are linked together, which takes more effort. But I think this is really exciting from a creative standpoint. We have the tools that allow us to do this sort of thing and not just connect everything. Every instance of a particular word automatically gets connected. It's really just identifying where you want the connections to exist and then being able to kind of ride the wave in and out of these different resources and these different notes that you've collected and see things, you know, open them all up side by side and get a complete picture when you're studying something out because that happens to be fascinating to you at the moment or it's a problem you're trying to solve right now and you oh yeah i had this

thought about this thing previously and then here's this other thought and so that spurs a lot of new ideas yeah yeah and to me that's why the highlights of the highlights and the summary all end up in obsidian connected to sparky os and it allows me to intentionally create connections without going overboard. I think one of the big mistakes you can make in a PKM system is linking too much. Yep, I agree. But I don't just use this system for books.

I also use it for articles, like any articles that really stand out to me. I have an Instapaper account and the same thing. It's connected to Readwise. I can highlight the article in Instapaper and then I can process it the exact same way. I can bring the links and whatnot into a page in Obsidian, connect it to ideas, write my own summaries. And I made too light of that last step earlier, because for me, the payoff of the whole process is at the end when I connect it to my life and how I think this is useful to me. And I try to think about it like I'm writing the note for a different person,

because I really am. I'm writing it for future me, who is a different person than current me. because I really am, I'm writing it for future me, who is a different person than current me. So I really am deliberate with the notes. So future me doesn't have to decrypt what I was thinking. And, um, and that's the process for me where it really sinks in and becomes usable information. If I just shut the book and didn't go through those extra steps, it wouldn't be worth it to me. Right. That's a piece I have yet to figure out, the other things that I want to collect. I do have, I use Feedbin for my RSS, but I don't really go through that consistently. It ends up being a big pile of things

that I read when I get to it, but I don't have like a process for going through it regularly. I think I'm okay with that. I think the stuff that I get from the books, that's kind of like if I were to prioritize the different inputs, that's the one that's going to be at the top of the list for me. inputs. That's the one that's going to be at the top of the list for me. But I do think I need to figure out a way to connect those sorts of things. And the idea is that I would get from those in an easy way to my personal knowledge management system, because occasionally I do get inspiration from that sort of stuff. Well, I'm really a believer in this ReadWise service.

And I wrote on the blog that I thought I was going to stop using Instapaper because of the new Reader app has its own ReadLater service. I thought I could save some money. But the integration with ReadWise means I'm probably going to ultimately keep Instapaper. And I love just sitting there on the couch and with an iPad and going through those articles and highlighting them. And those highlights, not only do I get an easy way to export them into Obsidian, but also Readwise has this, you know, service where every day you get fed five or 10 quotes or highlights that you've randomly took of the books you've read. And it's just like a great way to get nice reminders of stuff that you thought

was important. And you can then say, yeah, this is really important. Keep this or don't show this to me again. But I do that every day. It sounds like a gimmick, but part of my morning routine is to go through the randomly chosen Readwise highlights that it feeds me. And I find it a great way to start the day. So I'm really happy kind of with my digital workflow on articles and books through Readwise. I think that makes a lot of sense. And that touches on another aspect of like the whole personal knowledge management with uh the memory aspect like the uh what do they call it the where you recall things spaced repetition yes you know you you wrote this down or you highlighted this and read wise and you forgot about it so it's going to show it to you again after some time and you review it then. I don't really have any sort of system for that. And I have been historically okay with that,

but probably it just means that that hasn't been a problem for me yet and I'll solve it at some point. What I do is I take the mind maps that I create, I actually embed those in the pages for the books in Obsidian. And then I export from my node the markdown file. And I'll copy that markdown and I'll paste it below on the same page below the mind map. i have the text version of it as well and then there is this really cool plugin called note refactor which allows you to take a section of text and then turn that into a separate note and automatically create a link to that separate note in the original document. Have you played with this plugin at all? Yeah, I use the plugin, but I don't use it with my book and kind of research tools.

But it's a good plugin. I use it. Sure. Yeah. And this is the thing that makes, you know, I take all these notes and I have all these stories. And then as I'm going through and I'm kind of reviewing them when I put them in Obsidian, I am cleaning them up basically. And that's when I'll create the different notes for different things. If this is something that I feel,

and it's just a gut feeling basically, is this important? Should this be its own note? I'll turn it into its own note. It's got the link to the book that it came from. But I'll also, at the top of the book page, after I've added the my note and all of the text, I will write a three-sentence summary of the main points of the book. And this is really challenging sometimes, but it's also really good because I find myself having read, you know, I'll read a book and I'll think, oh, this is really good. And then someone will ask me, you know, what's a great book that you've read recently? And I'll say this book and then they'll say why. And if I can't explain it in a sentence or two, then they're not interested. So I find it really helpful to think through that myself and actually write it out.

You know, it's kind of amazing to me the clarity that I get around some of these ideas, the moment that I forced myself to write them out on or use using a keyboard. Yeah, my my book pages and obsidian are are they're a little hectic. It depends on what I consumed in relation to the book. If I went all the way through and read a book, are they're, they're a little hectic. It depends on what I consumed in relation to the book. If I went all the way through and read a book, I'll have all the highlights. I'll have my highlighted highlights. I'll have my lessons learned. I also have a title in the template just called action items. And when I finished the process, I like to write down things that I'm going to do that I learned from this? How is this going to

change my conduct? I may have a link to a bookworm episode, or I may have a link to, you know, something on the web that summarizes it. I, it just, I, anything I have in relation to it, I'll do it. Like I'm looking right now at my deep work page and I, I went and read it again because I read it like when it first came out, what was that four or five years ago? I went and read it again a few months ago like when it first came out. What was that, four or five years ago? I went and read it again a few months ago. And I've got my notes from the second reading here and lessons learned. So, you know, it's very fluid for me. I don't have like a set format, but I just have one place I can go with anything related to it.

The other thing I do is I name each of those pages with a lowercase b and a dash. So book dash. And then if I want to search for it, I can just type b dash and it just gives me a list of all books. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Indeed. The key to success is finding an edge and leveraging it. If you're hiring, that edge is Indeed. Indeed is the job site that makes hiring as easy as one, two, three, post, screen, and interview all on Indeed. You can get your quality shortlist of candidates whose resumes on Indeed match your job description faster. Plus, you only pay for the candidates that meet your must-have qualifications. And you can schedule and complete video interviews in your Indeed

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at indeed.com, I-N-D-E-E-D.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D. Get a $75 credit at Indeed.com. Indeed.com. This offer is valid through June 30th. Terms and conditions apply. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. So we didn't talk much about video, but since we've gone down this rabbit hole, how do you learn from video? That is a great question. I don't watch a lot of video. Occasionally, I will consume a video course. Linking Your Thinking was probably the last video course that I went through,

which is sort of self-study, but the the valuable part of that in my opinion was the like the live workshops but I typically and again I don't do this all that often but I will consume videos I've got a rowing machine that I got I guess it was late fall last year when it started to get cold and I could not run or bike outside in Wisconsin anymore. So I got a rowing machine as a way to get a good cardio workout without having to go outside in negative 60 degree temperatures. And I would load up some videos in order to pass time on the rowing machine. And I would just watch them, you know, one right after the other. But that's really one of the only places that I consume videos. Very rarely, I will watch YouTube videos.

The one from Nick Milo on the PKM Planet, I saw that one surface via Twitter. And so I made time to watch that one, but I wouldn't normally do that sort of thing. I would really just kind of think about what is in my queue and then pull those things up when I get to the rowing machine. Mike, you're such a purist. You are such a purist. It's true. It's true. I like YouTube videos. There's a lot of great educational content on YouTube. And the nice thing about the YouTube algorithm is that if

you start watching some of it, it finds even more for you. You know, I wanted to learn about Emperor or Kato the other day. And so I started watching a Kato video and then it gave me like three more. So when I find something I like, and it's something that I want to learn from, I actually have a process for that. And what I do is I just open a Markdown file using iframes, I can embed the video in it. So I've got a link to the original video and the ability to play it inside Obsidian. Man, I got to stop saying Obsidian on the show. I'm really sorry, gang. But anyway, I can link to it. And then I just put time codes down on things of importance to me and write kind of a summary as I'm going through it. It's not a summary of everything in the video. It's just

summary of things that I find useful. And then at the end, I do the same thing. I have the same prompts, you know, you know, summarize in my own words, action items. So I just go through and treat it just like a book or an extended article. And I do that a lot more than Mike does. I, I watch, you know, videos all the time to learn from them and I find it really useful. And a lot of times I'll, if I'm not sure about a video, I'll just watch it once and have it play in the background. Like, uh, when when i every week i have to scan all the paper from the week and do some administrative stuff so i'll i'll have two or three uh learning videos queued up in youtube and i'll watch them while i'm doing that and if one of them stands out to me then i'll be like okay this one gets the full treatment you know and the way i do that is i save

the video to instapaper just as a reminder and then I'll sit down and treat it like actual learning material. But yeah, for most media at this point, I have a way to capture and link to it. And I don't do it for everything. If you listen to us, you probably think we're crazy that we would sit down and engage with a YouTube video like that. But if it's something I can learn from, I'm going to use it. It's that simple. I get the appeal, and I don't think you're wrong for doing that. I guess for me, I just freak out when things are moving at a certain pace and I'm trying to take my own notes.

Maybe that sounds really weird, but I used to actually use Audible a lot more than I do now. And I realized that when Audible is just going and someone is speaking to me and there's an idea that I want to capture, I feel this panic that I'm going to miss something important if I don't stop it and then write it down. Oh, you know what? There's a new technology for that. You probably haven't seen it yet. It's called the pause button. Pause. The pause button. Yeah. Well, I don't like doing that though, because then it takes me forever to

get through things. So kind of the way I've landed on this is that the stuff that I'm just going to hit play and I'm going to listen to, I'm not going to take notes on those things. I'm not going to take notes on audiobooks. I'm not going to take notes on podcasts that I listen to. This is just going to be purely entertainment. And I think probably I need to, YouTube and video specifically, this is a great medium for learning things. I understand that. As I'm dissecting my motivations behind this now live, I'm realizing that that's really the thing for me process. You know, I don't want to be watching something and feel the pressure. Oh, this was really good. I better capture this. And so pause my rowing workout and pull out my phone and jot something down in drafts. I'm just going to let it go. And I have that expectation at the very beginning. And because I have that expectation at the very beginning, that frees me from feeling that pressure, I guess, to try to dissect everything out of the medium.

I was talking about that with books at the beginning, how you really don't need to feel the pressure to have every single book that you read be life-changing. But I do kind of feel that way for whatever reason when I'm watching these video courses and YouTube videos specifically, just based on the type of stuff that I tend to watch. I know YouTube is not all cat videos and all entertainment stuff. Some of the people that I've learned a lot from have YouTube channels. Matt Ragland is one that comes to mind, but I just, I just don't, that type of material, you know, it's, my brain doesn't shift into that learning mode with that medium for whatever reason. You should play with that. You should play with that because I think that

there's room there for you. I think you would think you would like that if you figured it out. Is that my productivity challenge? How do you inspire people that listen and say, you know, this is a great idea. I want to read more books. I want to learn more from the stuff I consume, but I just don't have time. How do you get someone to try and make time for it? That's a great question. I think my advice, if someone were to ask me about that, would be to consider all of

the things that you do right now, which tend to be time wasters. And that doesn't necessarily mean that they are wrong things. We talked about Chris Bailey the first time he was on. If you intend to watch eight hours of Netflix a day and you watch eight hours of Netflix, that's the most productive thing you can do. But where do you kind of float from this was my intention to this is what I actually did? And then try to replace those things that you naturally gravitate towards with reading, which that was the big thing for me why I needed to read physical books. Because if I was going to naturally try to go do something on my iPad, if I didn't have my iPad with me and I had a book that I was carrying around instead, that was a visual cue of this is the thing that you are supposed to be doing.

And then that was the big thing that worked for me at the beginning was just carrying that book everywhere that I went. I don't really go that many places anymore. But that was a visual reminder that, hey, you said this was important. You should read this. And even if it was just a page here and there to begin, I started to fill in those cracks of time that I had with my desired activity of reading. And then that just continued to gain momentum over time and it became easier and easier to do.

Yeah, I would give similar advice. I think it's like meditation. Reading 15 minutes a day is better than reading two hours on Sunday. I think that the daily process of it is more useful than one extended process. And you don't need to spend a lot of time. And honestly, you don't need to read. You can watch video. You can do audiobooks. One of my roles is Padawan learner because I'm a Star Wars nerd. But the idea of I want to learn every day. And I hold myself accountable in the way I journal and day log. And with my week and month review, it says, what did I do as a Padawan learner? So I'm like that guy I'm lost in that room with the computer where you got to type in the numbers or the world ends. You know, I see that every day. And if I

didn't do anything to learn today, I really feel it the next day. And I make sure to make some time. And even if it's only 15 minutes, at least I got back on the horse. And, um, I, I think about that James clear statement, you know, habits aren't broken with one day, they're broken with two. Yep. You know, if you miss it one day, just don't miss it the next day. So I, every day I, I write down something I do as a Padawan learner. As I get to the end of the day, maybe I'll say I didn't do anything on that today.

And I'll stop and watch a couple of YouTube videos. Cause I don't feel like reading a book or I'll read a book or whatever. But I think what I would say to someone is, you know, find mediums that work for you and just make it a point to make some time for it. You know, I feel like, you know, Mike reads an hour a day and he has a podcast about books and don't, don't look at that as your starting point, you know, just find some time to do a little every day. And you'll be, you'll be surprised where you go with it. Because I do agree. I think that this stuff is addictive. The more you do it, the more of it

you want to do. And things will take care of themselves. Yeah, I didn't start off reading an hour a day. I started off reading a couple minutes a day. But once I started to realize what the environment looked like when I had the time to read, then I recognized those opportunities and I engaged with them more often and it became easy to read an hour a day. I don't read an hour a day every single day. That's probably an average and maybe that's a little bit high. But I will say that one of the things that really helps with this is like you were saying, build it into a routine. Now, I have this listed as a shiny new object, but I got these big hammock chair swings, which you sit in them and they're big enough that you can almost lay down

in them. And I absolutely love sitting in these things. And this is the perfect place to sit and read a book. So I just bring a book with me when I sit down in one of these swings and 20 minutes goes by and I've read for those 20 minutes and it didn't even feel like 20 minutes, which is important at the beginning when you're trying to create these habits, because if it's not something that you've been doing regularly, you might have a resistance to doing these things. And so you want to eliminate as much friction as you can from the system. And one of the things that you can do is you can set up your environment to make it easy, make it more pleasurable, make it, you know, make it fun.

Yeah. I mean, kind of going back to some of our focused fundamentals is, you know, create a context to learn, you know, maybe you have a comfy chair in your house or whatever. You have a place that you go to, to read a book or watch a video and really learn from it. And by setting that up, you create an environment where when you go there, your brain automatically engages in that mode, which I think makes it easier. And overall, I feel like the type of learning we're talking about today is an excellent place to engage the focus muscle. You know, the fundamental precept of this podcast is how do we become more focused? How do we get better at this? And I don't think there are many better ways to do that than to sit down with material that you

can learn from and not think about Twitter and not think about Facebook, but actually say, what, you know, what can I learn from this this? And I'm going to fully engage with this material. And the rest of the world doesn't matter for the next 30 minutes. Exactly. Just practice. That's how you get good at anything. All right. Well, that was a lot of detail about learning, but hopefully we helped you out.

Just like with the books that we were talking about, my goal with every podcast is to give you at least one thing you can take away from it. Hopefully you found that as we went through these topics today. You know, Mike, we haven't done for a while, a focus challenge. And I,

I think that an obvious one has appeared today. Yeah. I think we need Mike Schmitz to try and learn something from YouTube and figure out how he's going to document that. All right. Challenge accepted. And I'm just kind of dropping it on you. So you don't have to give me one if you don't have one, but I would love to, to hear how you deal with, with YouTube and, and, and find some good, there is really good material out there and adding, you know, the with YouTube and, and, and find some good, there is really good material out there and adding, you know, the visual component might, might be helpful. Yeah, no, I, uh, I will

accept this, this homework. I don't have a challenge for you. You seem to have a better handle on a lot of the different inputs for the ways that, that learn but i think that maybe the next episode when we talk about some uh some of the different ways we are dealing with task and project management maybe i'll i'll have one for you oh boy okay i'm ready and i want to echo real quickly something that you said about you know the one big takeaway i think the big takeaway from this episode is to embrace a growth mindset. One of the best books that I have ever read is Mindset by Carol Dweck, and it talks about the growth versus the fixed mindset. And I think that if you are listening to Focus right now, you are probably already at least leaning towards the growth mindset. It has to do with

everything we were talking about at the beginning, challenging your ideas, being willing to be wrong, all those kinds of things. But the way that you embrace the growth mindset does not have to be reading physical books like I do. There are lots of different mediums that you can use. And I think the big takeaway is to just consider how you can keep learning and keep growing. I agree. That's one of the best books I've ever read. All right, that wraps it up for today. Before we head out, I want to thank our sponsors today, Memberful, PDFPin from Smile, and Indeed. There have been developments with the way I'm tracking time on my Mac. We're going to talk about that today in Deep Focus.

But before we go, I want to take a moment to talk about another podcast on Real AFM called Clockwise. Clockwise hosts Dan Morin and Micah Sargent invite two guests every week from a diverse pool of tech professionals to cover four tech topics in 30 minutes. I've been a guest on the show frequently, and it's super fun because not only do we get to cover a lot of technology, we always keep it to 30 minutes. So go today to relay.fm slash clockwise or search for clockwise wherever you get your podcasts. The show is fun and informative in just 30 minutes. Once again, that's relay.fm slash clockwise.

Check it out. We are the Focused podcast. You can find us at relay.fm slash focused. You can find our forum over at talk.macpowerusers.com. We'd love to hear from you more there. We'll see you next time.