Focused - 126: Productivity vs. Grinding

Episode Date: May 25, 2021

Mike and David get into note-taking (and note-making), listener feedback, and the pesky problem of productivity vs. grinding.

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. Hey, David. How's it going? Good, good. I am looking forward to talking to you today. We were discussing before the show how much feedback has piled up on the show. So today, instead of taking on one big topic, we're going to take on the feedback and a couple other smaller topics that we've been wanting to talk about for a while. Yes, sounds good. The first one here is from Ryan J. Murphy from episode 123, which was

a focus on time. And this is a very important piece of feedback, I think, because we didn't actually call this out, but this is at the underlying all of our time tracking workflows. Ryan had mentioned, is anyone else worried that the toggle rug could get pulled out from under Timery? What do you think, David? Are you worried about this? No, I'm not. I mean mean i guess if they did pull it out and so the so getting technical for a minute toggle is a free web service but they do have paid tiers and they have a very good api which allows other programmers to plug into it and one of the reasons for their success is because so many web services and apps have plugged into it that that helps feed their subscribers. So if they were to turn that API off, you know, making apps like Timery unable to use it, I would imagine a lot of the paying customers would leave because they're losing their interface.

they're losing their interface. So, and secondly, it doesn't seem like Timery is like spending a lot of time and money making their own interface any good. So I don't think, I think they kind of realized that they've got into this ecosystem of third-party developers and that's one of the ways they pay the bills. So Ryan, I understand that fear, but I wouldn't worry about it. And I guess if they did pull the rug out, my guess is that the Timery developer would come up with his own backend and maybe you'd have to pay a subscription to him or something. But I just feel like Timery is too successful to not go away or to go away if something like that were to happen.

Yeah, I agree. You can use Timery without actually having a toggle subscription and i think that's where the fear comes from is like well you're paying for these additional features in which are built on the free api and toggle what if toggle got smart and started charging for that stuff now you got to pay for two subscriptions yeah but i think toggles target customer based on their website the people they're trying to get money from are more the corporate customers not the niche apple nerds yeah and i think we're probably a relatively small portion of that yeah um there are a few things though that, that I would like to mention.

Since we recorded the show, Timery, as we talked about, is actively developing a Mac application. And there are good things coming to Mac users. Like I am now able, and still in beta, so I don't want to get into the details, but I am now able to fully automate time entries on my Mac just like I can with shortcuts on the iPhone and iPad using Timery. So just sit tight. Pretty soon that thing will be out. And I know this is kind of Automator's crossover here, but we talked about time tracking, and you can make it a lot easier on the Mac very shortly.

Sure, yeah. Timery just turned two, by the way, so happy birthday, Timery. Yeah. Joe, the guy behind it, it's a one developer app who, you know, these are some of the best apps out there by an obsessive guy who wants to make an app that, you know, does the thing that all of us want,

you know, a really nice interface on top of Toggle, and he did it. Yep. We've also got a bunch of feedback from episode one 24, which was on reading and learning. The first one here, Jaeger 52 had some very compelling reasons why you might choose a Kindle instead of physical books. I said in that episode, I read solely physical books. And a couple of things, we talked about some of the advantages of the Kindle, but there were a couple that are worthwhile that we did not touch on. Number one, Jaeger52 mentioned that the Kindle is actually easier to read in low light, which I could see that being an advantage. I mentioned that they

want to read while their significant other is asleep in the bedroom and they don't want to turn the lights on. So Kindle is perfect for that sort of situation. You can also customize the font size. So if you need a little bit larger font or even if you just like a little bit larger font, or even if you just like a little bit larger font, you can do that. And he also pointed out that Kindle books are often cheaper. And this is absolutely true. And we should have called this out when we recorded, actually. Yeah. A couple things on that. Talking to folks since that show published and hearing from listeners, I really think there's an an age thing involved here i think younger folks are into the analog kind of artisanal i want to have the book and put it on my shelf thing and older folks you know i guess i i'd like to think i'm kind of in the middle i don't know i'm

over 50 but those of us that used to have to do analog books because that was the only books were not so precious about it. I feel like a lot of the older folks just like, you know, I've done the thing where you carry the books around. And then like 20 years later, you got to decide what to do with them all. And I am definitely on the Kindle side of that equation. Yeah. Do you think there is a parallel here also with music media? I mean, I'm guessing that if this is true, that older people who were used to, this is the way they had to keep their books for a while

and they don't want to go back to that. Maybe they have the same approach with vinyl and music and stuff like that. Yeah, so it's so true. When I was a kid, I mowed lawns because i wanted to get there was like a classic miles davis album that i wanted and i spent my hard-earned money i got it there was a record player in my room and i had one of those you know classic 70s and 80s desk lamps kind of like the luxo and the pixar logo you know and i was getting hot

under it so i just pushed it to the side without thinking and then i looked over in like 10 minutes and it was right on top of my miles davis record and it melted it melted my miles record no you know and i was just thinking and when cds came out we were all so happy yeah uh i've never been a big vinyl fan but uh i don't know maybe that's the the next thing for me if i if i fall into that younger category who uh and that's the reason you know the the millennial hipster sort of a thing yeah maybe that extends beyond the physical books at some point i don't know we'll see yeah i think we fast forward like five years and mike schmitz has his fountain pen in his pocket um he is he's wearing a pocket watch not even a wrist watch you got a

pocket watch and a monocle you're definitely heading towards monocle territory, I think, Mike. Get my top hat and grow a mustache, too. Yeah. Just on that, though, I do think the Kindle is a great option. The books are cheaper, and I just love being able to carry them all. I understand the attraction of books and being able to write in the margins. I was just telling mike offline recently i found my old copy of the um the myth of sisyphus which when i was in college that book was very influential on me and i am looking through my college notes and so those were written in 1987 um so it just

it was kind of fun to go back and read them so i understand where you're coming from but i don't understand it enough to want to actually buy physical books anymore. Fair enough. Yeah. So on the topic of Kindle books, UGM had a question about how to handle highlights that aren't in Kindle books. And I'll just share a little bit that I discovered from Readwise, which actually integrates not just with the Amazon Kindle highlights, but also Apple Books and a bunch of other sources. You can clip stuff from the web. But I'm wondering, do you have any other insights for how you might handle highlights that are not in the Kindle format? And then what do you do with those highlights? Yeah, there's a few different steps involved, U the um i feel like one of the common ones for people is stuff on the web

and um and the way i handle that is i pay an instapaper subscription and instapaper you can highlight in their app so anything that i want to like read read you know their web stuff you just browse you're like oh apple has new colors of the iMac let me look at the article on that that's that's one thing but things that are like things i want to learn from or things i want to like think about i save to instapaper and i read them in instapaper it's a better writing environment you can do highlights right in there this is very much an ip thing for me. And Instapaper hooks into Readwise. So I get the highlights automatically into Readwise, you know, just from a different source. Nice. Now regarding Readwise, there is a plugin for Obsidian. We won't talk a whole lot

about Obsidian, hopefully, for people who are sick of it. But it's called ReadWise Community that can pull in anything that you would get in ReadWise into Obsidian. So if you are trying to find a place to store those highlights from the different sources that you get them, ReadWise is great for getting the highlights. And then this plugin basically just takes everything and dumps it into notes based on titles. So if I have a highlight, for example, in the book Deep Work, then when I sync Readwise with Obsidian, if that does not exist yet, it will create a new note called Deep Work. It'll put some metadata at the top. It'll tag it with hashtag books and then it'll pull in the

highlights with a line in between. As I'm reading the book and adding more highlights let's say it will append those at the bottom of the note and this is a pretty cool plug-in if you are using obsidian and you want a way to sync your readwise stuff into a central notes repository and for the non-obsidian obsessed the um um readwise has multiple services it does this with there's a plug-in for roam research if that's your thing there's a plug-in for evernote so you there's a whole bunch of different sources you can automatically send your obsidian data to and the other thing you can do with with readwise is you can with one right click you can export all of your highlights as a markdown file. So then you can put them anywhere.

Like if you want to drop them in a word document or drafts or whatever your thing is, or maybe, maybe this would be a good entry for your day one journal. Um, uh, you can get those markdown, um, highlights out of read wise very easily. I, you know, I continue to really value this read wise subscription. It wasn't cheap. I think it was about 70 bucks when I signed up for it. But I got the like the there's like two tiers and I got the second tier with the spaced repetition. And, and I just, you know, I it's really helped me kind of as a, as a transitory service to get data from things like the web and books into a trusted system. Yeah, that spaced repetition, that is a whole other concept that we should probably unpack. That is probably valuable enough for a rewired subscription for some people. So basically what this does is it takes all of your highlights and it will bring them back in front of you periodically uh and you can control the the frequency with that i'm assuming

you can i've not used it for this mine comes in every day i just opened i haven't checked it today i've got an imposter syndrome quote here from the practice by sethin. I've got a highlight from Kourash Dini's book about OmniFocus. I've got one here about Buddhism. I've got one here from Michael Hyatt book. And I've got one from The Little Book of Stoicism. So just things that I've highlighted, some of these I highlighted years ago. And they just show up randomly, seemingly randomly. I'm sure there's an algorithm behind it every day.

And often it gives me something to think about as I start a day. And it's just a great, you know, it is spaced repetition. It allows you to reinforce things that were important to you before. When you see it, you can discard it and say, I don't want to see this one anymore. You can mark it as a favorite. And there's just a, you know, it's just a very nice service. And there's a couple ways you get it. You can get an email in your inbox every day that has those listed so you don't have to go to their website. If you're on an iPhone or iPad, they have an app that scrolls them to you. If you're on a Mac, you just go to the website and you can say, give me my daily lists. And it's one button and it puts them up on a screen one at a time.

So there's a bunch of ways to take care of this. The one warning I will give on this is the fool's errand of trying to keep a streak up. You know, you know, we did a show on habits and I get it, but read wise will tell you, Hey, you've now done this. Like I just did it 32 days in a row now that I've done this, but once in a while I'll miss it for a day. And that is okay. Don't get hung up on getting the streak. I think the more important thing is to actually stop and consider each quote as you look at them and to get the value out of it. Don't turn it into a box checking exercise. Turn it into a true learning thing. Yeah, that's a great point. I do think this is a pretty genius solution to the problem

with a lot of the way that we take notes. We'll talk about this a little bit later, you know, where you just dump stuff in and then you never see it again until you have the thought, oh, I should go find that note again. And then you can search for it and you can surface it that way. This kind of just grabs those things that maybe you've forgotten about and throws them in front of you so you can recall them without that manual effort, which if you're really trying to get the most out of the notes that you take, that's a pretty good approach. One of the things I do in my daily page is I have what I call daily meditation and it's not necessarily a meditation mantra. It could be something like a Seth Godin quote about imposter syndrome. But I usually go through the ReadWise stuff in the morning, and I will pull something

out of the daily ReadWise group. Or if I don't see anything that really strikes my fancy, I'll get one out of one of my other highlights or one of my other books. But the point is, I'll put it in there in the morning. And then when I get to the end of the day, I often do some reflections at the end of the day and I'll go back to that and try and write some of my thoughts on what that means to me. But I don't do that part until the end of the day. So it's kind of just a subroutine, you know, for the subconscious to grind on

throughout the day. And that's one way that I kind of put this stuff into my gray matter. Makes sense. Speaking of putting things into your gray matter, there was another question from somebody who wanted to know how you take notes from the YouTube videos that you watch and how do you handle timestamps specifically? Do you jot these down when you are taking notes? And do those end up somewhere? Or how do you handle this? What's your workflow look like? I mean, it's not super techie, but I am going to invoke Obsidian.

So sorry, gang, if you hate Obsidian. But I open an Obsidian page. But you could do this in an Apple Notes page or choose your poison. But I happen to use Obsidian but I open an Obsidian page but you could do this in an Apple Notes page or you know choose your poison but I happen to use Obsidian that one bit of techiness in Obsidian is they use a resource called iframes and it's a very simple bit of code that I have in a text expander snippet so I put up an iframe text expander snippet that embeds the YouTube in the markdown file. So when I see the file, it actually can play the video for me. If you don't want to do that, you could just play the video in your browser and have a text file next to it.

But I have it. I'm fancy, right? So the first thing I do is I set up an iframe with the video. And my thought about learning from YouTube videos is that it's not really something I want to do while I'm doing squat jacks. You know, if I want to learn from a video, I want to give it the same attention I would as if I were reading a book. So I will sit at my desk and watch the video. I won't be doing it while I'm doing email or scanning bills. I'll actually just watch the video to learn from it. And I'll just take notes as I go through the video. Sometimes I'll go through it a couple times. It just depends on how, you know, how much the video connects with me. But as I take notes,

I will create a little bit of an index and it's just a timestamp, you know, and I'm not even that accurate with the timestamp. I don't like pause it and say two minutes and 32 seconds. I'll just say around two minutes, you know? So, and, um, and just write down what they're saying and I'll watch the video once and then I'll stop and say, okay, you know, being the, um, the selfish learner, like that was great that that's what this person shared. What does this mean to me? You know,

what do I suck out of this that will be helpful to me as a human? And then I write that down and, um, and sometimes I get things out of it and sometimes I don't, but that that's basically how I do it. Sometimes if it's a really good one, I'll go back and watch it a second time. All right.

Well, I have a, a challenge followup relating to this, but maybe we can visit that after we take a quick break. This episode of Focused is brought to you by TextExpander from our friends over at Smile. Supercharge your team right now with the power of TextExpander. Your team can do more with the same resources using TextExpander, meaning less repetition, fewer errors, and greater consistency in your messaging.

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available on a lot of different platforms, Mac, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, iPad, and focused listeners can get 20% off their first year. Just go to textexpander.com slash podcast right now. That's T-E-X-T-E-X-P-A-N-D-E-R.com slash P-O-D-C-A-S-T. TextExpander.com slash podcast to get 20% off your first year. Our thanks to TextExpander from Smile for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. All right, you had a couple challenges with our last show. I like that, where you have multiple challenges and I don't have any. That's kind of nice.

Yeah, I get to do all the homework. Well, one of the challenges, which if you are a member of the Focus podcast and you get the Deep Focus episodes, you're already aware of this, but I read a fiction book thanks to you and Joe Bulek hounding me over all these many years. We covered Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as our member special episode, which was kind of fun. It was a mini version of the Bookworm podcast about a fiction book. It was a very different process for me, but I went back and listened to it after it got published, and I was really happy with the way that it turned out, and I really enjoyed my first fiction book in probably about five years yeah I mean you say it was me and Joe that got you to read it but it was your son your son was reading it and you wanted to yeah that's true that's true you guys planted the seeds yeah my uh my son

definitely reaped the harvest. He loves to read. And we were looking for some books that he could read over the summer. And we do like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. So I found the set. There's five books in the series. So we bought those. And then he started reading them. He really enjoyed the first one.

He cranked through it in a couple of days. And then wanted to talk to me about it. And then after the show, I sent you another fiction book and a note to your kids. So I feel like I'm just going to get you to read fiction by working through your children. That is a very effective strategy. Well done, Obi-Wan. That is a very effective strategy. Well done, Obi-Wan.

But yeah, that was a fun exercise for me, not something I normally do. Fiction is very different for me. I mentioned in the members episode, I had to check the mental tick in my brain to keep going back to my MindNode file and taking notes because there really wasn't anything that I wanted to capture, but I felt like I should be capturing something because after all, I'm reading a book. And then the other thing that both you and Joe had mentioned to me prior to reading this was that you can learn a lot from fictional characters. I definitely did. In the member special, I mentioned that I kind of saw a lot of myself in Arthur Dent, which actually was not a good thing. But it showed me that I need to lighten up about a few things. There you go.

Hey, man, it's working. Yep. I feel like in the next book, I also sent you the Last Dragon Slayer. I want you to see how much you relate to the Quark beast. That's all all right the uh but you had another mission that's more related you know more productivity related and i just walked through my workflow for youtube video and you said you were going to try it out what you end up doing yeah well i don't normally watch a lot of YouTube videos. My YouTube time I have identified as on the rowing machine, which is in our bedroom. And it was something that I got to kind of stay in shape when I couldn't get outside riding my bike or running in the winter in Wisconsin. I ran most of the time. I've got even like these special spikes that I put on my running

shoes so I can run in the snow and the ice. But occasionally it gets like negative 60 degrees Fahrenheit here in January. And at that point, you know, I don't care how motivated, dedicated you are, like you're not going outside. So the rowing machine fits that need. And then the machine itself, I get very bored while I'm on it. So YouTube kind of takes my mind off of what I am doing. And if it's something that I can learn from, then even better. Prior to the challenge, the types of videos that I had been watching while I was on the rowing machine were like the videos from Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking course when I was going through that. Stuff like that. I have a YouTube account, but I've never been one to make a playlist and save the videos for later,

and these are the ones that I'm going to do. So that's kind of the approach I took for this action item. What I ended up doing here was I watched a bunch of tutorial videos from a bunch of people who had set up and used a, um, my shiny new object, which we'll get to in a second, but that is the line six pod go. It's like this all in one floorboard pedal for guitar players. Uh, it comes in this really small package. It's got a foot, foot, uh, foot uh foot controller and everything so it's kind of like the guitarist dream you can bring this thing and has all your effects in it but it's uh not something that i'm used to using i had a a floorboard previously with all the analog effects and you have a switch for each and every one or i run everything from my ipad using a

an application called called bias but for several reasons that was not working for me anymore so I was looking for something to replace that I got this foot switch I had no idea how to use it I'm like well I bet there's a bunch of really cool tutorials for this sort of thing on YouTube so I queued a bunch of them up and I've been watching those while I've been on the rowing machine. And I basically like without even touching the floorboard itself, I have taught myself how to use all the different features of it, which was kind of cool and the perfect sort of thing for me because I don't typically like jot down specific things that I want to remember. And this was the kind of thing where it would show me how to do something and then I could go do that once I was done with my workout.

Yeah. I mean, I think people don't realize how much we've gone to visual learning with YouTube videos. The hallelujah moment for me, I was actually thinking about what to do with the iBook store. Apple seemed to be not really supporting it and it didn't seem like it had much of a future. And then I bought a new razor and I wanted to clean it. And I just went and looked up a video on YouTube. And as I'm halfway through watching this video, a guy cleaning a razor, I realized, oh, wait a second, this is just the way we learn now. And that's the day I decided to make learn.max Sparky and start making all of my books into video courses because that's the day I decided to make learn.max Sparky and start making all of my books into video

courses because that's it. And so that's a, that's a good use for YouTube. I, I feel like you didn't really do the right homework though. It's like, I asked you to do math and you did, you did English. Um, I actually want you to watch a video about something that you want to truly, you know, something that you want to truly think about into your mic OS, like my Sparky OS. I mean, watch an educational video about something that's really important to you. I don't know, maybe some element of Christianity or maybe some area of study that you're interested in. Watch a serious video. Gotcha. Well, I do have a couple of those queued up as well. There's this concept we talked about with Nick Milo when he was on the show of the maps of content and idea emergence, PKM, stuff like that. So I have a bunch of those queued up by people who I actually don't really know anything about. Obviously, Nick has a bunch of really cool stuff stuff but i've seen a lot of that already i wanted to get some different voices on the topics and so i have some of those in the the queue but i haven't gotten to those yet because the the new shiny was the the thing i wanted to

figure out all right well let's talk about that really quick then we we do have the shiny new object segment in today's show so you got a new guitar pedal stomper effect thing right yes the the guitar pedal stomper that's the technical name you know as a horn player none of that stuff makes any sense to me honestly yeah yeah i get it yeah so this is called the Line 6 Pod Go. For guitar players, the Line 6 Pod name may be familiar. It was the little kidney bean type thing that you could just plug your guitar into that and then plug that into any sort of PA and it would simulate an amp and it would simulate some effects. So it was intended to make you sound decent without a bunch of work. And that was a long time ago.

The Line 6 pod, that particular line has been untouched for quite a while. Line 6 has come out with this whole new line. They call it the Helix. And this is the one that is taking advantage of all of the new technologies and all the digital signal processing. And this is the one that professional musicians will walk around with this board that costs several thousand dollars and they'll play through that and they don't have all of their amps and pedals and things because it just sounds so good or it's mounted in their rack and they have a foot controller for it. So very, very high end stuff.

However, the problem with that sort of thing is it's very fiddly. You can control just about everything with it. That's the benefit of it. But it's also the problem is that you can control just about anything with it. The Pod, the Pod Go that I got, this is kind of a brand new product in the last year or so. And it is basically the simplified version of that really nice signal processing stuff. So you can't run delay after delay after delay after delay, but you get all of the delays that are in that Line 6 Helix stuff for a couple grand. You can access those inside of this pedal board. And for me playing at church, this is the ideal solution because it is one thing that I can bring, plug in, and then when I'm done, I can unplug it and bring it home. And it sounds the exact same.

I can make the changes when I am at home, messing around with it, I can set up all my signal chain in the amp, you know, the, the, the thing and, and save it, uh, bring it with me and just access my presets right there. It sounds exactly the same, whether I'm listening to it through my headphones or through the PA, because it's all happening on that, that little device. There's a couple other things that it has, which is nice for guitar geeks, but that's the, the general idea is it's this guitar playing supercomputer which actually is very easy to use and built out of this really solid you know metal type stuff where i'm not going to break it by stepping on it which can't be said about some of the other solutions that are are out there nice nice i you know the saxophone, the biggest kind came on our show a while back.

And he's a professional. I mean, he plays with very good bands. He's on recordings for people that we all know. And he's still using the mouthpiece he got in high school. It's not the mouthpiece, honestly. It's just how you use it. So that's a great reminder for me, and it could be applied to a lot of contexts.

The shiny new object, I don't really have any. I have a shiny old object. I'm having an issue with the Bluetooth in my Mac Mini, so I've been advised to turn it off for a while. And as a result, my fancy keyboard doesn't work any longer unless I plug it in. I don't really want to do that. So I pulled my Logitech Craft keyboard out of mothballs.

And I had forgot, you know, about having a keyboard with a number pad on it and with a whole bunch of built-in UI features. It's kind of nice. I got to admit, I don't like the way it feels compared to my fancy keyboard, but it is pretty nice having all those tools. So this is a wireless keyboard yeah it's wireless but this you know uses the little dongle logitech house okay it's got it so that's that's why you can avoid the bluetooth issues with it huh exactly it's got the dial on it which you can use to turn the volume up and down but like in screen flow i can use it to scrub the timeline you can like do it on a per app basis like i've got it

programmed in in safari to switch through tabs if i just twist the dial so it's kind of nice you know i like all those features i i don't know you know right now it's it's like i said it's an old shiny thing so i'm kind of on a little bit of a honeymoon with it but you know i think eventually if i ever get my bluetooth radio working again i'll probably want to go back to my other keyboard i dug out one of my old keyboards which was a dos keyboard that had blank keycaps and the whole thing was just completely black and gave it to my youngest son a couple of years ago just to like bang around on he liked pressing the buttons and hearing the clicking sounds sure now he's at the point where he can actually use a keyboard so he wanted to hook it up to the the family mac mini upstairs and there were no keycap legends on the keyboard so i ordered a set of key

caps from amazon for like 15 bucks and surprised him by changing all of his key caps into his favorite color. And now he takes this keyboard everywhere with them. Nice. Nice. Yeah. You know, that's a real thing. My kids are really into it now that they saw mine, they want them to, and they want to get their own custom caps. And we're kind of figuring out what that means for us. Um, kind of a related topic is this new, there's several manufacturers now making devices out there that are portable, battery-powered computers that do nothing but write text documents. Have you seen any of these? I've seen them, just seen people talking about them, though. I've never actually seen one in the wild, and I have never used one.

But they almost look like little digital typewriters, right? Yeah. Um, yeah, I've got a couple of friends that have these as well. I think the popular one is called the free, right. And, um, they're at get free, right.com. And the idea behind it is that all you can do with this thing is type words into it, you know, and then it's got a, usually I think they have a wireless radio where you can like upload it to your computer and then work on the words from there. But like, you know, go into a coffee shop with one of these things and it's not possible to check email or surf the web because the hardware isn't even capable of it. But, you know, I was looking at them recently, just out of curiosity, I thought I might write an article about them for Mac Sparky, but they're like $500. And honestly,

this just really isn't a problem for me. You know, I can take an iPad and write it. And if I decide I'm going to go coffee shop and just write, assuming I can go to a coffee shop again, I just don't really need, I don't need the constraint. shop again. I just don't really need, I don't need the constraint. Yeah. No, I had the same thought when I saw them is what problem is this really trying to solve? And I don't think it's a problem that I have. I think it's a valid approach for some people. I guess you got to kind of know yourself and how you work and establish those barriers and those constraints to block out the distractions. You know, if you need to use a totally separate device in order to do that, then I could see

the role that this would have in your life. Just like, by the way, the Kindle would have a role for someone who is concerned about accessing Twitter from their iPad or something like that. I mean, there are other reasons you might use a Kindle device specifically, but the same argument could be made for, I'm just going to read inside of the Kindle app on my iPad, right? Yeah. No, I, you know, and I never really made that clear in all these shows we've done about reading. I do own a Kindle. It's an older one and I keep it in my bedside table, but I also read Kindle on my iPad and on my iPhone and sometimes even my Mac. So I have the app installed

everywhere. That's another advantage of it, frankly, is that no matter what I've got with me, I can continue reading my books and I don't use the Kindle device just because I need the distraction free but because it was like cheap on amazon and i wanted something i could keep in my nightstand so like if i go on a trip i don't bring my kindle reader with me i'll just read on my phone or my ipad yep i have to admit that when i first saw this free write type thing my the person i saw sitting behind this typing on it was that guy from you've got mail that meg ryan is dating at the beginning who has multiple typewriters in his apartment and refuses to use a computer that's totally the guy that i saw using this well it brought back

memories for me because when i was going through law school in the ripe years of 90 through 93, laptops were prohibitively expensive. And I didn't have the money for one. But Tandy or Radio Shack at the time made something like this. And it was like $200 in 1990 dollars. And all it was was a keyboard with like a eight line LCD above it. It was like each character got a like 16 by 16 grid. And I went all through law school on one of those. And I would just sit in there and outline the lecture and take notes on the

lecture with that into a plain text file. Because even back then I was still a nerd and i'd get back to my to my apartment and just upload the text file into my mac and and do stuff with it but the actual computer i used at law school was one of these tandy things i think it was the color wp2 i know we're getting a little nerdy for focus but um i'll put a link in the show notes but it was a great i mean it took two double a batteries and i changed the batteries every couple months and it was great so that's a that's a good point i think if you are going to be taking notes in a school setting specifically like a lecture hall type setting i wouldn't feel personally comfortable bringing in a laptop maybe

that's changed because it's been a while since I've been in that setting. I could see myself using something like this in that scenario, although I would probably just use my iPad with the keyboard attached. Yeah, no, I would absolutely. If I was in school now, I mean, iPad is so much better. You can record the lecture with notability. You can take handwritten notes. I, there was no, there's no way if I was in law school today, I'd be using one of these things. This episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by indeed go to indeed.com slash focus to get a free $75 credit to upgrade your job posts.

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There's an excellent thread in the MacPowerUser slash Focused forum about the idea of productivity versus grinding. And I think that is really core to why we make this show. And I just wanted to call it out because a bunch of people wrote in on it, and there was a lot of really good insight. And I mean, I think it should be obvious to people, but at the same time, in the day-to-day kind of productivity racket, it is really easy to try and use, like, tactical productivity to get more done in a 40-hour week, where instead we want to do 40 hours of work in a 30-hour week.

That's kind of the big challenge. And as you get into productivity, I think especially as you first get into it, it's very easy to get that formula wrong. I wondered about your thoughts on that? I completely agree with this. I think the core problem here is articulated really well in this comment that we often use our skills and tools to do 60 hours of work in 45 to 50 hours instead of that 40 and 30. And why is that? It's because we have defined the 40 hours as a minimum instead of a maximum. And that's the prioritized thing, right? Is getting that work done. How much I am able to output from the work that I am doing.

And I totally get how this is a very slippery slope. I think it's probably one of the first places that people come to productivity through is this perspective, though. It's like, well, I have this much work I need to get done, and it's too much. I can't get it all done in the time I have available. I need to get a little bit more efficient. So I'm going to go look for those tips and those tricks and those tactics and those life hacks that are going to help me squeeze out a couple more hours of my day. And the immediate benefit from that is that you feel a little bit of relief.

You have a little bit of margin. You feel like you are back in control of things. But the problem is then where do you go from there? Do you fight to maintain that margin and just don't commit to anything else? Most people, I would argue, are going to try to fill that with some additional work in order to maybe rationalize it by saying,

I'm going to try and get ahead. But you're never going to be able to get ahead. And this is kind of this hamster wheel effect where you can run faster and great. Now you're covering more ground, but your reward for becoming more productive, more efficient is that you actually get to do more work, which if you were to take that approach in the first place, you'd be like, well, why would I even want to become more productive? That's just making, that's raising the bar. You know, it's going to be harder for me to live up to this increased standard that I have set. Like no one in their right mind is going to do that, but that's where we find ourselves. I mean, let's, let's use the hamster wheel, right? I mean, if you get on a hamster wheel

and you feel like you can never get off of it, but then suddenly you start working out so you can run faster on the hamster wheel. You know, one idea would be I can work out so I can jump off and on the hamster wheel anytime I want. But taking the theory of that I'm getting stronger and faster, so now I can just be stuck on the hamster wheel forever but run faster that's a mistake you know and uh yeah and i think it's really kind of the first level productivity stuff i think we all kind of start there i mean um we've never kind of done our

productivity like origin stories but for me it was a guy named Hiram Smith, you know, who did the Franklin system. And I remember learning those tips. And they were all very tactical. And I used them to work longer. I didn't use them to work smarter. And this quote, by the way, that you said was from Corn Chip in the forums. But there's another one on this thread. And I would encourage you to go read the thread.

We'll put it in the show notes from Erwell. And he says the hardest thing is still to know when to say, well, thanks, but no, I currently don't have the capacity to commit to this. And honestly, that's the next level productivity thing. It's not just being able to manage the things you've got on your desk, but actually manage your desk. to manage the things you've got on your desk, but actually manage your desk. And until you get to that point, you are still that hamster on that wheel. Yeah. So the first pain point maybe that you're trying to solve is I'm drowning and I need to get my head above water. And then the moment that you are no longer in immediate danger, the next level is where FOMO kicks in. And well, I better go check out that other thing because after all, I've got a little bit more time now, a little bit more space that I can fill with things and I don't want to miss out on something that's super important. But like you said, the real productivity hack here is learning when to say, no, I'm good and I don't need to chase every opportunity that presents itself. fast as you can. I think there's a little bit of inertia here too when it comes to productivity

and how we work because we end up running faster and then we feel like if I stop right now, I'm going to fall on my face. So I just got to keep going. I just got to keep running. I just got to keep cranking. I just got to keep grinding. I think that might be at play here too. Yeah. And I also think an unfortunate thing in the world of productivity is, you know, the popularity of saying, you know, that you're grinding, that you're grinding it out,

that you're doing the hustle, you know, and I have certainly been guilty of this along the path for myself too. And that is not what we're making the show for. I mean, honestly, I mean, there, we, we debated whether we wanted to make this show because there's a ton of productivity shows out there. And the reason we decided we wanted to make it, cause I feel like our message is very different. I don't want you to be running downhill. I don't want you to be proud of the hustle. You know, I want you to, to have. I don't want you to be proud of the hustle.

You know, I want you to have a life where you make the things that are important to you, but also I want you to have a life. Yeah. And that's kind of the idea behind the sabbatical stuff. We don't have to revisit the whole topic, but that's different than the standard vacation mindset because with vacation, you're going to push really hard and then eventually you just need to take a break. And you use that strategically when you are absolutely at your limit. Whereas a sabbatical, the week-long sabbaticals, like I do as part of the Blanc Media team, as an example, those are just part of the rhythm. And so you're not sprinting as hard as you can and then you're

using that week to recover you're trying to design a lifestyle that is more sustainable that you can do for a really long time that you don't need to just say you know what i've it's all i can take and i can't take no more and you got to pull the plug and you got to just go to a desert island somewhere. And when you do that, the vacation mindset, I've done that before where I'll be somewhere and I'll be there for an extended period of time. If I'm on vacation for the old Mike going on vacation, it's going to take me probably four or five days for my brain to finally slow down enough that I can actually relax. And at that point, I don't have that much vacation left. And I resent the fact that I have to go back to work the next week. Sabbatical feels totally different to me. It just feels part of the routine. And because

it's part of the routine, I get the restorative benefits of that kind of stuff without ever feeling like that's it, I can't take it anymore, and I just have to unplug for a while. Yeah. So this is where the granola eating California weighs in. But I feel like if you had an active meditation practice, it wouldn't take you four days to be present on your vacation. That could be. That could be. I think that's the truth.

I do think all this stuff, though, matters. And I know in my life, looking back, I'm a little older than some of our listeners and I'm a little younger than some. So I, like I said, I'm kind of in the middle right now, about 15 years, I was checked out. I was learning my trade as a lawyer and I did nothing but grind. I mean, I, I did long trials. I put late nights in at the office. My kids were young and I was grinding and probably a part of me was proud of that. I don't know, but I mean, that's 15 years. I'm never going to get back. And, and, you know, it wasn't like I was totally checked out. I was still there and I, you know, you know, take, you know, I, I, I wasn't in an 80 hour a week situation, but I wasn't in a 40 hour a week situation either. And, um, you know, I, I do think that this stuff,

either. And, um, you know, I do think that this stuff, there's a better way. Yeah. And that 40 hour a week situation, even, uh, I think, I think the, uh, the original point here, you know, we using that as our baseline, is that a minimum or is that a maximum is work your life and everything fits around that? Or is work just the thing that supports your life? I'm reading this book right now called The Now Habit by Neil Fior, which is an older book. And it's all about beating procrastination. There's one really interesting section in that book on creating what he calls the unschedule. And he has a whole bunch of rules for creating your unschedule. But basically, it's that you put in your social commitments, you put in your exercise, play or dance. He says that you need to exercise, play or dance for at least an hour

every day. Essentially, you put all the fun stuff on your calendar, and then you work in the margin around those things that are on your calendar, but you don't plan your work. You just sit down and you work, and then you put in your work after the fact, only when you have been working for 30 minutes in a focused state. So those are the only ones that you get credit for, basically. Now, obviously, if you take this approach, you're not going to be working 40 hours per week. And he's kind of making the argument that it doesn't really matter because if you are trying to write or you're trying to create, you're not working 40 hours per week anyways, and you will actually get more done this way. Maybe you end up working 20 hours a week or 30 hours a week, but your output is going to be greater than when you were working 40 hours a week because you're going to be motivated for your work

sessions because you know that in an hour you get to take a break and you get to do this thing that you are looking forward to. I don't ascribe to everything in this plan, but I do think that putting the positive stuff on your calendar first, that is an interesting idea and I think it's a valuable strategy. If everything on your calendar is stuff that you have to do and not things that you have chosen to do because you want to do them, you will quickly resent every single event that is on your calendar. You need to put stuff on there that you're looking forward to actually doing. Yeah. I mean, for me, hyper-scheduling is not just about work. It's about scheduling the you know, the things that are important to me and work is important to me, but so is hanging out with my kids. You know, so it was taking my wife to Disneyland. So all of those things get on the calendar. And like Sunday for me is the day I do the big block schedule for the following week. And I, uh, I'm aware of that as I put the calendar

together. If I finish putting my calendar together and it's all work items, then I realize that some things aren't going to get done this week, and I have to move a few of them out and figure out which ones can get thrown overboard for a week so I can make time for my life. Because the other thing I'm aware of being over 50 is that it seems like a blink of an eye. I mean, it just seems like yesterday

that my biggest concern was riding my 10 speed to 711 and buying baseball cards. And now I'm north of 50, you know? So if you don't make time for that stuff now, buddy, it's not going to happen. Yeah. And that kind of gets back to the point in the original comment. It ends by saying, I'd only ask that more people ask themselves if they are actually doing the work or they are just accumulating money or prestige for its own sake. Basically asking, why are you doing what you are doing? Is it because you want to provide for your family? Well, is the best way to provide for your family to be working all the time? Or is it more valuable for you to be home and be present with your family? And I don't want anybody to feel bad about their current

situation. This is just something that I've wrestled with over the years is making sure that I'm balancing those things appropriately. And I always try to err on the side of my family. I can always go find another job somewhere and make more money, but I will never be able to get back the time with my family as my kids are growing up. So I try to make sure that if I'm going to make a mistake one way or the other, it's going to be the one where I'm home with my family. Maybe we have to go without a few extra things, but I don't want to compromise on the time that I have to sow into their lives and build a strong foundation for them going forward. And it's easy because work is the thing that tends to be the thing we spend

the most time with in a given week. It's easy to just say, well, that's the one where my mind is thinking about this thing that I have to do. And so I'll just close that open loop and I'll go work on this thing. You have to put some barriers around the thing that provides for your lifestyle, but you have to protect also and leave room for the things that you define are most important. But that's the beautiful thing about this, in my opinion, is that you get to decide what's most important. Yeah, well, the big takeaway for me from this thread is just the common misconception between being productive and grinding. And they are not related. In fact, they are adverse to one another, in my opinion.

And I think that one of the takeaways I would like to share with listeners is how do we recognize grinding in our lives? And do we have tripwires set up for grinding to make sure that we don't fall down that rabbit hole, which is very easy? Yeah. Well, the number one thing I think of when I think of grinding, and I went to business school, so I know a lot of people who took this path, and that is simply climbing the corporate ladder. And I would argue that that's not actually a direct opposition to productivity. If the most important thing to you is to get to the top of that ladder and have that job title,

if that is the thing that's really going to bring you happiness, then that could be classified as productive. That's not how I'm going to define it. That's not the most important thing to me. So where I tend to get off with this is I get excited about a project. Typically, it's something that I am making and I will just continue to work beyond normal work hours. I can get lost in the creative process. If I am in a flow state with video stuff specifically, it's easy for me to lose track of time. And so I have a nagging reminder in due at 5 p.m. every day, which is kind of like my reminder, like, hey, you're going to be done by now to time block the next day. And if I don't

do it, you know, it's going to show up every five minutes until I finally do it. And if I'm going to time block the next day, that means I'm done with this one. Yeah, I mean, for me, the battle against the grind is more granular than that. I'm not thinking about climbing the corporate ladder over the course of years I'm just thinking in the day-to-day activities of my life am I you know am I sucking the marrow from life am I doing the fun things and am I doing the hard things and am I learning you know am I am I engaged with life or have I just got my head down and I cranking widgets? You know, that's in our title. We're not about cranking widgets. And the tripwires for me are all in time blocking. You know, we've done whole shows on it. We'll probably continue to do it because it is such a useful tool for this.

Because not only do you bring intentionality to bear, you know, on Sunday night, I block the whole week. At every night as I do my shutdown, I revisit the block for tomorrow and I make adjustments. The other piece of it that I do that I don't know if I've really even talked about this on the show is I match the, the blocks at the end of the day, or as I go through the day as to what actually happened. Um, so if you look at my calendar today, I had three hours blocked for a field guide that I'm working on in the morning. But we got up and we had a family thing that took an hour that I didn't expect. So I moved that block to two hours when I was done. And two hours of the field guide

and one hour dealing with the family. And at the end of the day, I'll see in my calendar where the time actually went. And at the end of the week, I'll see where the time actually went. And then, um, I save a screenshot on Sunday night of what I had planned. And then on the one day of the week review at the end of the week, I compare what the plan was versus what actually happened. And, you know, if I wanted to get nerdy, I could actually store both of those calendars review at the end of the week i compare what the plan was versus what actually happened and you know if i wanted to get nerdy i could actually store both of those calendars and put them on the screen at once i don't i don't need to be that fancy but um that i feel like time blocking is an

excellent way to avoid grinding both in being intentional about not setting yourself up to grind and then looking back to see what you actually did. And I know I've been kind of railing on this too long, but if you're out there and you're worried about this in your own behavior, you know, the time blocking, the time tracking, that is where you're going to catch whether or not you're doing what you want to be doing. Well, I don't think you've railed on it too long. I mean, the title of this thread in the forum is, is the cult of productivity finally over? And I don't think it's ever going to be over for a couple of reasons. Number one, the cult of productivity, that term kind of sounds like the standard productivity, be more efficient type of stuff. And I think that as long as there

is more things to do than we have time to do them in, which is going to be the default until you start saying no to things, then you will constantly feel the pressure to look for ways to make them more efficient. But also, as there is more and more information and more and more opportunity in the world, that is going to be fighting for your attention as well. And that's why you said, David, and I wholeheartedly agree that focus is a superpower. This skill, this is the one that's really going to make a difference. And it's just going to become more and more important as the amount of information that we have to try to keep up with on a daily basis is going to continue to grow. Yeah, I mean, the distractions are not going away. fiction you know a lot of times you know science fiction set 50 years from now has a guy walking

through some urban setting where the every building has its own custom sign you know interacting with his augmented reality you know marketing specifically to him it's just like this bombardment with information and you know advertising yeah this stuff isn't going to get any easier as the technology advances. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Gabi. When it comes to car and home insurance, so many people know that they deserve better than what they're getting.

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It actually told me that I could save $1,116 per year. So there is a ton of money to be saved by using this free service. And they never sell your info, so there is no annoying spam or robocalls. Put your policy to the test like so many others and get a better insurance quote with Gabby. It's totally free to check and there is no obligation. So go to Gabby.com slash focused. That's G-A-B-I dot com slash F-O-C-U-S-E-D. Gabby.com slash Focused. Our thanks to Gabby for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. So we were just talking about information and along with that comes the topic of inputs and note-taking. And I want to ask you, David,

why do you take notes? So I don't forget? What is the saying on the field notes? I'm not writing it down, so I'll remember it later. I'm writing it down, so I'll remember it now. Right.

I mean, stuff that is relevant to me. I mean, I think the starting point is retention, but I also feel like note taking when done right can be also a source of inspiration and learning and change. an insight that I got recently, and I was thinking about note-taking versus note-making, which again is a topic that we touched on with Nick Milo when he was on. But as I was thinking about this, I realized that not every note that I capture is created equal. And it kind of goes back to episode 114 when we were talking about inputs and PKM stacks. We identified the places that requests could come and kind of the categories that those requests for our attention, what they looked like. And I think for me, there's a couple big ones.

There are the reference things, like you were talking about, the things that I need to remember. There are the tasks, which are the things that I need to do. And then there are the real valuable ones, in my opinion, which are the things that I want to develop, the ideas. And as I was thinking about these different categories, it seemed very unfair to me that they would all be stuck in drafts looking exactly the same until I processed them properly and put them in the proper place and did the right things with them. I just need to jot down so I have them later, like a phone number or an address or the things that I need to do. Those are going to be very different than the idea notes that I capture. The approach is going to be completely different. Note-taking versus note-making is kind of the way that I see this. And I wanted to talk through with you some of the different characteristics of these different types of notes from the information that we get, what these look like. You know, it's funny how we all build these constructs in our head.

But the thought I've always had is, you know, the dragon versus the jeweler. You know, a dragon gets a diamond and wraps his tail around it and protects it but a jeweler gets a diamond and does something with it you know and that's kind of what i think about my notes you know there are some notes where they're just capture for the sake of capture you know like i'm dealing with a problem with this Mac mini. I already talked about it once in the show, but like I have a note in obsidian for this computer where I've got details of it. And when I went and saw the genius and all that, that that that's a dragon note,

right? It's just held there for future reference. But then when I'm trying to explore some topic that I want to learn about or develop on, that's a jeweler note. That's something I want to go back and I want to learn about or develop on that's a jeweler note that's something i want to go back and i want to you know i want to study it and do things with it and turn it into something um so i actually use those as tags you know dragon jeweler because that's very easy to find um i know a lot of people do it with like cooking analogy, like it's cooking versus it's done,

like if you've got one. But I think part of the way of categorizing these differently is finding some way to distinguish a note that's there for reference versus a note that's there for development. Yeah, that dragon versus jeweler, I love that analogy and the differentiation that you made there. dragon versus jeweler i love that that uh analogy and the differentiation that you made there so in those situations both the dragon has a diamond and the jeweler has a diamond which one is more valuable well i mean it depends on the diamond you know if it's information about when my mac mini went to the genius i don't need to do much with it. But if it's something on,

you know, what do I really think about topic X or how does that tie into my view of the world? Then it's a jeweler note and I need to go back to it and study it and think about it. It's harder. It's harder to take those notes because maybe like going back to the earlier YouTube videos,

I can sit down and write down time codes of when he said this or that but what do i really think about it how does it change my life where where does it affect my future action that takes work exactly so i mean this kind of goes back to the beginning when we were talking about the book notes and read-wise and stuff like that. What category does something like book notes fall in for you? Is it a dragon note or is it a jeweler note? I think I know the answer already because I do a podcast with you, but I think also for most people,

they might view that as a dragon note. I am going to jot down all of the things that sound important in the moment from this book, and I am going to send them into my PKM stack, and they're going to be there if I ever need to find them again. But what value are those adding to you on a daily basis? How are you refining those? I think that's where the real value comes, in my opinion, is the process that the jeweler goes through to create that diamond. Yeah, exactly. And you have to make your choices there, right? I don't want to say that every book note I take is a jeweler note because sometimes I'll start taking notes on a book and realize that there's really nothing new for me or nothing that really inspires me.

But most books I read and most books that I finish do inspire me. And there's something out of them that makes me think a lot. And I was just telling you offline, I just started reading a book, Ikege. Japanese people, I'm very sorry that I'm mispronouncing, but it was a book written by some people that went to Japan and studied some folks that had lived a very long time and they were very happy and just things that were common to their life. And my notes in that book, I'm not even done reading the book and it's already full of my own personal thoughts and how I can apply things to my life. So that's very much a jeweler note for me at this point. Yeah. now let's unpack this a little bit further,

the jeweler notes versus the dragon notes. I love that definition. So the note-taking, those are the dragon notes, the ones that you capture and you just are going to use these for reference at some point. And then the note-making, that's kind of the jeweler notes and the approach to those is going to be very different. And as I've been thinking about this, I think there's some characteristics here for each of these, which can kind of help you identify which category these belong in. So with note taking, these are static notes, the phone number that you jot down, the address, the notes from a meeting, the notes associated with the Mac mini that you dropped off, you know, that is not going to change. That's just information that is there. And maybe you get an updated, you know, order number, whatever, and you go back and

you change it. But really, it's just there for reference. You can dig it up again if you need it. it's just there for reference. You can dig it up again if you need it. But the jeweler notes, the note making approach, these notes are dynamic. They are living notes and they are always changing. And that is very, there's a lot that goes along with that. Obviously they have to be, if they are constantly changing, they're constantly evolving, then our approach when we look at those notes is a little bit different too. We have to ask ourselves kind of what's changed. And there's this rule that I've kind of landed on recently, which has been really helpful for me with some of like the MOC type stuff that I have in Obsidian is every time I'm going to touch one of these types of notes, I'm going to make it better. I'm going to add another opinion. I'm going to add another opinion. I'm

going to add another line, a little bit more clarity, and that's going to help these things grow over time into something that is ultimately more valuable. And honestly, I keep referencing or teasing my Sparky OS, but that's what ties to the jeweler notes. It's like, what are my thoughts on aging? And then I've got notes I've written down from different books I've read and thoughts I put together. And this is why I went crazy when I found Rome Research and Craft and Obsidian, because they make it so easy to tie strings through.

I mean, Stephen Hackett has this joke that the inside of my brain is like the guy in the murder mystery who has the red strings and pins in the wall. But that kind of is true with what I'm doing with these tools. And notes are a big part of that because notes are the homework. They're the research. They're the reason why I think something. Yeah, I completely agree. The first time I saw one of those graphs, I was like, oh, so this is what it looks like inside my head. Now the big ones, that really doesn't do a whole lot for you. But when you drill down into like the local graph, which I've got an article that just went out on that inside of Obsidian. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes over on the suite setup with a video. But that's really,

that's a game changer. I know these connections are there in some way, shape, or form. But again, if I'm just capturing notes the old way and I'm sticking them in a drawer somewhere and I'm never opening that drawer again until I have the thought to go retrieve that, that connection doesn't really do me a whole lot of good. And that's really another point with note making is that these are cumulative. So you have your ideas in your Sparky OS on aging. So you have your ideas in your Sparky OS on aging. As an example, I've got a whole bunch of MOCs in mind, like on habits and idea development, journaling, mental models, project managers versus task management, them all up in front of me. I'm not looking at every note I've collected, but just the ones that are relevant to the topic. And I'm asking myself, how do these connect? What is the relationship between these notes? Because every single one of those notes, so those ideas represented on that workbench, that has influenced the way that I think about this topic in some way, shape, or form.

And I won't really know what I really think until I take the sum total of all of that stuff and I figure out what does this really mean to me. Whereas note-taking, I can say this is in this specific section, it resides in this specific folder. I can go to the library of my brain and find it based on the Dewey Decimal number. And I can see at that point all the other related notes, but that's not doing me any good in the day-to-day. So in that scenario, they're kind of self-contained and it's the content in that notes itself that's valuable. But if you take that approach to notes, I feel like you're missing out on a lot of gold to be mined there yeah and but it's hard i mean the thing is you need to be analytical with your notes you have to think about them and you have to study them and

turn them over in your brain and say well where does this tie to that and for a lot of folks if you know i guess we're trying to tie things together today, but I'd say if you are just treading water, getting back to if you're the person who's grinding, you ain't got time for that, right? You're just trying to keep your head above water. You don't have time. You say, well, what do I really think about 18? I don't have time to think about that. I'm just trying to make sure I pay the bills this week. Why are you bothering me with this stuff?

And I do think this is all kind of tied together. Yeah. I'm trying to think of the nice response I would have to somebody who would say that sort of thing, because it's sort of a chicken and egg situation. You can definitely, I don't want to discount anybody who's in that situation. All of the feelings of overwhelm that you're feeling are perfectly valid and rational. They make a lot of sense. But they are also the byproduct of your environment. And I think a lot of times we're our own worst enemies when it comes to this sort of thing, simply because we don't give ourselves time to think. And you can do that inside of an app like Obsidian or Roam or Craft or whatever using this note-making process. That's one way that you could do it. You could also do it just by going for a walk and not

listening to a podcast and just letting your brain sort of untangle these things on its own. That is one of the best uses of your time. One of the most productive things that you can do is absolutely nothing. We're wandering around a lot today, but it's like these are kind of thoughts that are all related in my brain. As an example, I just watched a show on Netflix, which wasn't really intended, but I just found myself, I got sick this week. So when I got to the end of the day, I felt like I just didn't have anything left. So I watched this show. It was called Jupiter something. It was about a bunch of aging superheroes

and it was just dumb. You know, I mean, I finished it thinking, you know, what was I doing spending three or four hours watching this dumb show that I don't even feel that I got anything out of, right? And I really want, as I go through my life, you know, however much time I have left on this planet, I want to engage with life. And note-taking versus note-making is one of those things where I feel like if you haven't tried it, there's an engagement level that is very satisfying when you start thinking about, well, what do I really think about this topic? And why do I think that? And what are my life lessons? And we all say that we know in our head what we think about things, but when you start engaging it, you start writing it down and drawing connections, you'd be surprised how plastic you are and how much you can change and improve upon it. Exactly. So the focus with note-taking is I want to collect all of the things.

And when I do, I check them off, they are done. Note-making recognizes that you're never going to be done collecting ideas. And so the focus is on understanding kind of what impact does this have for my life to the point that you were just making, David, I want to be present and I want to make the most of every moment that I have, then I'm not going to try and collect all the things, but I am going to try and make sure that I am really understanding the things that I am choosing to engage with. I've got a PKM article, which I'll put a link to in the show notes, kind of an intro to PKM stuff on the suite setup. And as I was thinking

through this, I was realizing that there's a couple different levels of knowledge. Level one is information where you know something. Level two would be, I call it revelation, where you understand something. But level three, that's the big one. That's the application. That's where you do something. If you are note-taking, you may know something. You may know where to go get something, a bit or a piece of information when you need it. But it's not really impacting your daily life yet. That's when you really are sucking the most value out of that thing, that idea. And that's the approach I want to take to the books that I read, the videos that I watch, the podcasts I listen to, anything that I engage with. Basically basically what I want to do,

my goal is to have that thing, whatever speaks to me from that thing, not everything in that thing, but the one piece from that book that I really connect with, I want that to have maximum impact in my life. And I'm not just going to just accept every argument that an author says in these books and say, well, I should be doing this, that, and the other thing. That's why I hate a lot of the systems books that say you should do X, Y, Z, and you'll get A, B, C. No, but I'm going to look at that system and I'm going to ask myself, is there anything here for me? And usually I pick like one or two things. And that's what I try to go deep with. Yeah. I mean, it's a, uh, it's a challenge I think. Um, but engaging with the things that you are interacting with using a

note system that does more than just the diary entry of what was in the book is just going to make a difference. It makes a difference for me and Mike. That's why I guess we're hanging on this so much. And if you're, if you haven't tried this, I would just encourage you to figure it out. You know, whether you do it with a piece of paper or a fancy piece of software, engage with the materials and try and figure out how it's going to change you.

One other piece of advice I would give on this is this is where you need to be completely selfish. You know, don't be writing things down so your future generations can look at them and try and glean some wisdom from it. You have to think in terms of yourself and what matters to you

and be absolutely vicious about ignoring things that don't resonate if you're going to make this work. Yeah, I was talking to somebody today and I asked them the question, what is more valuable to you? Is it having 200 okay ideas stored in your inbox and your task manager or having a couple really good ideas that you can actually do something with. And the key concept there is more signal, less noise. Anything that does not resonate with you is noise. But the things that do, that is a signal and that is worth taking a jeweler's mindset towards. Be a jeweler, not a dragon.

Before we leave, I just wanted to take a minute to point out another great podcast on Relay Network, and that's Parallel. If you like this show, there's a good chance you'll like Parallel. Accessibility in tech has come a long way in the past few years. Operating systems can speak, display high-contrast text, and support alternative ways to touch the screen and move around it. And big players in the tech space now speak regularly about their accessibility efforts. But are those efforts and all that software any good? Hosted by journalist and accessibility expert Shelley Brisbane, Parallel is a tech podcast with accessibility sprinkles.

Shelly and her guests put accessibility into a larger context. Sometimes it's about device and software. Sometimes it's about living in a world that's powered by more tech every day. Accessibility is the icing on the cake. Shelly Brisbane is a friend of mine. She's wicked smart about accessibility

and tech in general. This is a great podcast to check out. wicked smart about accessibility and tech in general. This is a great podcast to check out. Head over to relay.fm slash parallel or search for parallel wherever you get your podcasts. We are the Focus Podcast. We want to thank our sponsors today, Text Expander from Smile, Indeed, and Gabby. Check in at the forums over at talk.macpowerusers.com, and we'll see you next time.