Focused - 189: Focus & AI

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing pretty good. How about yourself? Always happy to start talking about being focused and all the ways we can do it. And today we have an interesting topic of focus is how does focus work with AI? Yeah, this is maybe one of those things that seems like

it is a little bit contradictory, but hopefully we're going to change some minds about that today. I know a lot of people are a little bit apprehensive of that term AI, but it really is a powerful tool set that you can use to help protect your focus if you use it intentionally. But before we get there, we should probably mention one more time the Focus New Year calendars, which are now available. And you can pick those up by going to newyear.net slash products slash focus. There'll be a link in the show notes. These are the same Focus calendars that I've known and loved for the last several years. Dry Erase. We talked a lot about how we use them in the previous episode, but those are available.

And on the website, they are $30. That does not include the shipping. And I know that there are some international users who the shipping is fairly expensive. And I apologize for that. That's the problem with shipping physical goods all over the world, unfortunately, but they are available. And if you are looking for a focus tool to help you think bigger and more strategically about what you're going to be doing over the next quarter or year, pick one of those up. Yeah. And I think shipping has just gotten more expensive the last few years. I think I guess it's fuel gets more expensive and global supply chain, yada, yada, yada. So we feel you, but there's not much we can do about it the uh the the good thing is these are printed by jesse out at new

year they're just top quality can calendars we didn't want to skimp on quality and and he's based in u.s and you know so that's where they kind of start. I just bought a hand plane from Australia and I paid a lot of money for shipping it, but man, it's a nice plane. Of course you did. One other thing I should, I should mention with the, uh, the calendars, cause I've had a couple of people ask me specifically, um, I had written an article for the suite set up a while back about time blocking, time blocking using my, uh, my Onyx books tab ultra. And I was using in there a template that we created for the new year focus calendar so there's this focused action pad we call it and it's a pdf that you could use as a template in a digital notebook like good notes or notability

or really insert you know any digital notebook app that that you can think of everything but the remarkable which doesn't support templates for some reason. It's perfect for that. It gives you the space to time block your day, put your most important tasks, what are you grateful for, what went well, all that kind of stuff. So that is actually included with the calendar.

And when you buy the calendar, you get the confirmation email that has the link to download the PDF template. Yeah, go check them out. This is the big fundraiser for us every year, and we really appreciate your support. But it's also just a really nice calendar to put up on your wall. I love using mine throughout the year, and it really is fun looking at it fill up as you go through the year. It's like the evidence of a well-spent year. All right, let's talk about

artificial intelligence. You good for that? Yeah, let's do it. Artificial intelligence is, it's, it's a topic that gets people wound up. I mean, we talk about it in the Max Markey labs a bit, and it seems like there's really two responses to it. People who are either all in and they just, you know, want the robot overlords to get started right away or the people who feel like it's going to be, you know, the end of humanity, you know, like suddenly the human species is going to give up primacy and the idea of,

you know, idea generation and creativity to artificial intelligence. I tend to think it's somewhere in the middle of that. I think it's easy to get wound up either way on this stuff. in the middle of that. I think it's easy to get wound up either way on this stuff. And I do think that it's years away from getting to the level of what you see in science fiction. But that doesn't mean I don't think it can become a tool to use right now for focus. Yeah, exactly. So when we're talking about AI, we're not talking about AI in the broader term, broader sense. Really, when people are talking about AI right now, because it's kind of one of those buzzworthy terms, they're really talking about generative AI. And that's the one that is interesting in terms of productivity and a creativity lens, because these are tools that you can use to focus on the things that are important and not do the things that aren't

important, that don't move the needle. There have been lots of models to help us figure out, you know, what are the high leverage activities. And in the past, the ones that weren't high leverage, you would find a different way to get those done or just not do them all together. And with AI tools, which we'll talk about a little bit in this episode, some of the ones that we're using and the ways that we're using them, you can use them intentionally. They can free you to focus on the things that are really going to make a difference. Now the caveat with that, or the warning I should say, is the cost of getting more efficient with your work has always been an opportunity to do more work, so you have to be careful with that. That will negate any gains that you would be able to get from deploying these AI tools effectively,

but if you're able to curb that, then these can actually create that space and that margin that you need to do what only you can do. Yeah, if you're doing five units of work a week and you're spending 60 hours doing it, and then you bring in AI and now you can ship seven units of work with those same 60 hours,

you're solving for the wrong number in the equation, right? Wouldn't it be better if you could work 40 hours a week and still ship those five units and get more time? And that's what we're really aiming for. I think also just to take the stinger out of AI a little bit. First of all, AI just did not spring forth in the last six months. It's not something brand new. It's been here for a long time. If you've got an iPhone and you take a picture, AI is working in the background on every picture you take. Apple calls it machine learning. I think they probably wisely don't want to use the branding AI because they don't know if that's going to

become a negative term in the public or a positive one. So they don't want it associated with their products, but it's all over the place. You know, there's services that we're going to talk about during the show. They've been around for years that are using AI all the time. And it's not like some magical thing. I think what kind of really freaked everybody out is the generative stuff

starting with the art and then even more dynamic or more um even more impactfully is that a word mike i i had a rough night guys it was a little sick so i haven't got a full night so with even more um even more impact was the um the idea of getting the ai to write words for you like when people saw that could write a college essay, that is when people really started to like get nervous about AI. It feels to me like that was a tipping point. Would you agree? I do.

And the, the thing that always stood out to me with those reports and those stories, it's like, Hey, I can do this now. Look out it at the moment moment it's not good enough um yeah i can write a college essay but i can't write a good college essay yeah and it will get better i understand that and really the point that we're at with all of this uh generative ai stuff

is that there's just simply a a large amount of data that we can train it on and then it can make better guesses about things. And that trajectory is going to continue. But I also feel like whenever you look at some of that, there's a distinction between the human-made stuff and the AI-made stuff. And it's hard to put your finger on it. it's hard to put your finger on it. And if you're just indiscriminately consuming information without any sort of gauge for quality, that's where I feel like this stuff is more scary, because if you're just glancing at it, it can trick you. It can make something that isn't real appear real. But if you have an eye for quality, ding, we just talked about that on the Bookworm podcast, I feel like you can kind of sniff this stuff out. And it's going to get harder and harder to do that. I understand that. But I kind of feel like there's always going to be certain tells if you know what to look for. The trick is just not to live the default lifestyle, in my opinion. And if you aren't living the default lifestyle, and you're not just indiscriminately consuming

all of this information, and you're curating the things that you are allowing into your world, going back to the last episode when we talked about the PKM stack, that just increases the level of the quality, and it increases the size of the gap that ai's got to to fill there but not everyone's going to notice that because when you are overwhelmed and there's all this all this uh barrage of information that that's coming at you it's hard to to tell what's what's good and what's real and what's not yeah and there's a lot of that out there. I was just reading the internet last night and I was thinking about a product and I searched for reviews of a product.

The very first hit that came up was clearly an AI-generated review. Did a great job of quoting the stats from the product page and no personal experience or anything. But at some point, AI is going to get good enough to be more tricky. It's going to feel

more like a human is writing this stuff. But that's kind of beside the point. We're going to talk about that later. We have a segment on that in the show. What I'd like to start with is just the concept of focus in AI and the idea that in a world where we're trying to get focused, can AI help make a difference in that? And I think it can, because when you look at technology, technology is a lot of the reason why we have trouble with focus right now, because it creates these small time increment distractions that so many of us are getting caught in. And it also puts small time increment demands on us with respect to our work. Like, you know, my dad never had to deal with, you know, multiple emails coming in a day and all the little like, you know know kind of microaggressions from the internet that you get and he was able to focus on his job from the moment he got there to the moment he left maybe ai can be a way that we start reclaiming some of that focus and and hopefully turn some of the the drudgery for lack of a better word you know over to the robot i really like that term that

you just used the microaggressions uh that's that's perfect because uh essentially every piece of information that we didn't ask for that's being presented to us is a demand on our time and attention and that is the battle for focus is to protect that as much as humanly possible. And technology helps us to do that. But you're right, technology also opens up the door for other people, other platforms, and anything else in the entire internet to show up and say, this is what you should be paying attention to now. So you have to have some sort of boundaries in place there. But that's always been the challenge, I feel. And it occurs to me that when we're talking about some of the things that AI can do, you kind of mentioned like you were looking for something and AI helped you find it. I feel like

that's what a lot of people are doing when they're going and asking chat GPT, but that's essentially the same thing as, that's next level Googling in my opinion. Yeah, yeah. There's a reason why Google is, you know, Google BART is so advanced and why they're putting so much money in it, because it's probably an existential threat to a Google search. Exactly. And it's all based off of the large collections of data that have been sucked up by a web crawler or a large language model. And I'm not an AI scientist, so I'm not the definitive source on any of this stuff. This is not something that is completely new and different. Maybe it feels that way because of the term, but the water has been heating up for quite a while in terms of boiling the frog here. And it doesn't mean that we need to just avoid it at all costs if we want to protect our focus.

Like I said, technology has always been a two-edged sword. The same computer that allowed you to go get distracted when you were supposed to be working on a project at work is also the technology that allows you to run a program like TextExpander and automate some of the repetitive texts that you would be typing over and over again. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that because you had a point in the outline about how AI is not the same as user-built automation. And I think I agree with that, but I don't think it's a huge difference here because that stuff with like TextExpander and Hazel, those are things that you are very clearly saying, when this happens, do this. And you're clearly defining it. But with the generative

AI tools that we'll talk about a little bit later, essentially what they're doing is they're kind of guessing based on everything that you've done in the past of you may be meant to do this, or this is probably what you're wanting to see right now. I don't think it's too far of a stretch. It just feels kind of magical if you never take the time to think through, well, what are the actual conditions here? But the data is there to say, you know, when Mike is doing this, he's probably thinking about this. So show him these calendar events that are popping up soon or something. Well, I mean, as I would argue, I'm one of the biggest advocates of automation on the internet,

especially on Apple platforms. I mean, I make a podcast about it. I write about it. It's a big thing. And I'll tell you, the stumbling block is the human. People don't want to do it. Like I, I make automations that are really simple and they still get hung up on it and they don't, it's not that they can't do it. It's just, they don't want to spend the time on it. So what will be revolutionary about AI and automation is that it, it cuts the human out of it. Like you were saying, it observes behaviors and then comes up with solutions that it thinks make sense. Now, sometimes that will go horribly wrong, I'm sure. But I think a lot of times it won't. And from kind of the personal productivity standpoint, I think a lot of times it'll be spot on. This episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Head over to

squarespace.com slash focus and get 10% your first purchase of a website or domain using the code focused. The internet is where we share all our things, whether it's a new business or a new baby, you want to build a website. And for that, you should go check out Squarespace. new baby, you want to build a website. And for that, you should go check out Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. You can stand out with beautiful websites, engage with your audience, and sell anything, your podcasts, services, and even the content you create. Squarespace has everything you need all in one place. Selling products couldn't be easier with Squarespace. Whether it's physical or digital products, Squarespace has all the tools you need to get started selling online, and your customers

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sense that artificial intelligence can generate automation to help you through your day. So if that's the case, let's say we go down the road two or three years and it's further developed, or even frankly with some of the tools we're going to talk about later today, it is developing. What are the things you want AI to automate for you? I feel like there are a couple of models that can help you define this, but again this is not something that is brand new. Smart people have been thinking about this for a while because when you have these mental models in your head, they can help you determine what's valuable, what's useful, what isn't. And when you have that filter, then it's easier to say this is the thing, at least for right now. Because ultimately,

essentially, let me just back up a second here, because I think this kind of pertains to the inherent desire we have to do all the things. And if you're going to approach this from like a task and time management perspective, there's two things that you should be thinking about that, well, two things on your to-do list. What you're doing right now, and then there's everything else. And there are some exceptions. Maybe you're listening to the podcast and doing yard work or working out at the gym or washing the dishes, whatever, but that you can't have your conscious attention applied to more than one thing at a time. And so people have been using things like the Eisenhower Matrix and Michael Hyatt's Freedom Compass to determine these are the things that are important and I'm going to focus on this

and those other things that are not important I'm not going to think about those. I put both of these in the show notes I thought it would be worthwhile maybe just kind of talking through these. Yeah well I mean both of these are I think they're kind of wrapped around different axles but the whole idea is figure out the stuff that you want to do versus the stuff that you don't want to do, right? I mean, isn't that kind of a simplified version of all of this? Essentially, yeah. The Freedom Compass specifically, I feel, is a little bit more nuanced. And I remember we had Michael Hyatt on the show and he kind of talked through this, but just like real briefly to review this, there's these different things that you

could be doing. There are things that you are passionate about and you are proficient at, and those things are in the desire zone. Those, he argues, are the things that really only you can do. And those are the things that really only you can do. And those are the ones that really are meaningful. You probably enjoy doing those. But then there are things that you are passionate about and you're not proficient at. And those are really things that from a business owner's perspective, which is what Michael was talking about, those are things that are a distraction because somebody else could

be doing those things. There's things that you're not proficient at and that you're not passionate about. Those are the things that are the drudgery zone, the things that maybe have to get done, but you really don't feel like doing them. And then there's things that you're proficient at, but you're not passionate about. So those are the disinterest zone. And it seems to me that the real opportunity for automation, as you think about the freedom compass here and where a lot of these AI tools can help with, are the things that you're not interested in, the disinterest zone, the things that you're proficient at but not passionate about. You don't want to do that, so let's figure out a way to have somebody else or something else do that. But specifically, the drudgery zone, the things that just zap your energy.

the drudgery zone, the things that just zap your energy. Because I feel like if you are doing the things that are in the drudgery zone, it's not just the time and the energy that you invest to do those things. The fact that you do those things you absolutely hate. I feel like there's an exponential decrease of the mental and physical capacity that you have available when you get done with those. I don't know, maybe that's not true, but I feel like when I have to do something that I've been avoiding and I've been procrastinating because I just don't want to do it, that feels like a monumental Herculean task. I know sometimes you put things off because you think they're big and then you get them done in 30 minutes and you're like, what was my deal? But more often than not, when I'm putting something off, I get done with it, I just feel

exhausted. Do you feel the same way? Yeah. And that is, you know, we keep using the word drudgery. I guess that's probably where I got it from Michael. But that's the stuff that pulls you down. And that's the stuff that maybe AI can be a help. Yeah, exactly. And it's not just that stuff. Like I said, really anything that you decide that you don't want to do. And that feels

a lot more subjective, maybe. I just don't want to do this. But from the business owner's perspective that Michael was talking about, you have to be realistic. There are things that you like to do, but maybe you shouldn't be doing them that's the distraction zone that could be prime stuff for ai tools as as well or at least delegating those things yeah now i really enjoy editing podcasts but with a couple different podcasts that's not really the the best use of of my time so being able to delegate that to somebody else who can honestly do it better than I can, that is a good investment from a time perspective. But when you think about the AI tools that are available to us and the specific jobs that you would hire them to do, that's the key here, I think, is you got to know exactly what it is that you are doing and why you do or do not want to do it. And then you can figure out what is the right tool to help me accomplish this specific job. And that's where if you get specific about it and you're not just downloading the next AI app. I mean, there are thousands of these that are out there.

And if you just kind of wanted to rock everything that's available in terms of artificial intelligence, generative AI specifically, I don't think you can do it anymore. It kind of feels to me like the point where when I first bought the iPod Touch and I had downloaded every single game on the iOS app store, that was a thing you could do at one point. You can't do it anymore. And that's kind of where we're at with these AI tools. But if you know exactly what you need help with, you can find something that's going to support you. And I think there's some steps for this. I think the first thing I would do is an audit of your work, of the stuff that falls in the Freedom Compass zones and, and maybe start comparing that to a list of what, you know, AI can do for you.

I mean, this is obviously also an opportunity to think about, you know, getting help and, you know, delegating and all the other, you know, like manual automation, like I do on the automators podcast. There's a lot of things that could come out of an audit like that, but just writing down the tasks you do and where they fit on that freedom compass as a starting point and then comparing that to a list of, well, what of this stuff could I subject to AI? I think that's probably a good way to get started. I 100% agree. 100% agree. I also want to bring in the Eisenhower matrix here because I feel like there's a little bit of nuance when you compare these side by side because the freedom compass is great when you're the boss and you have people working for you and you get to choose what things you're going to do

and what things you're not going to do. But sometimes you don't have the ability to do that. So with the Eisenhower matrix, this is the more popular one probably that's been around forever. I mean, I don't even know how many productivity books have mentioned the Eisenhower matrix in some way, shape, or form, but it's a lot. So in the upper left, you've got the things that are important and urgent. And I would replace that word urgent with maybe time-based. Things that have to get done by a specific time. So those are tasks or deadlines with consequences. And those are things that you will naturally do because they need to be done now and they

are important. And then you go to the upper right, you've got the things that are important, but they're not urgent. Okay, so these are tasks with unclear deadlines. These also are like habits and routines, which if you miss a day, doesn't seem like it's really going to make that big a difference, but in the long run is going to add up with the compound effect. So these are the things like from a focus perspective, we always encourage people think about the things that are important, but not urgent and try to

schedule those. But then you get to the lower left, the things that are urgent but are not important. And this is where, with technology, you will always find other things to do that are urgent but are not important. And not important, maybe that just means, going back to the Freedom Compass, these aren't the things that are in your wheelhouse. They're really not things that you specifically need to be doing. But sometimes you are the person who needs to do these. So the traditional advice with this box in the Eisenhower matrix is to delegate these things. They got to get done, but they don't require your specific skill set. So

find somebody else to do them. Or if you have to do them yourself, why not make it take less time by using some AI tools to help you do it quicker. And this is where, you know, something like TextExpander in the past has come in handy for me because I used to be in sales and I would do these webinar presentations and then I'd have to write these follow-up emails and hey, first name, just wanted to follow up on the webinar that we did. Choose the drop down yesterday, last week. Here's the link to the proposal. Did you have any questions? And text expander saved me a whole bunch of time because these were like multi-paragraph emails that I had to do like 30 of them in a day. And if I wrote them by hand, I frequently made

mistakes and it took me forever to do. As soon as I created a text expander snippet, I could crank through those more quickly. And I feel like if you have a clear idea of what you need to do, but you don't want to do, but it's just something that has to get done for whether it's at home or you're a solopreneur and it's a big part of what you're doing figure out a way to accelerate that maybe by using some of these AI tools a little bit of a sideline but I have a thing I do where I talk to people about the Eisenhower line. I've never shared it on the show, but I feel like one of the problems with the Eisenhower matrix is people tend to remove two of the boxes. And we think only in terms of urgency. So we combine, it's either urgent or not urgent.

And we put that on a line so the stuff that's important but not urgent always finds behind falls behind the stuff that it's urgent and not important and um it's just a very easy trap to fall into i think a lot of people do but yeah you're right i mean it's another way to index the work you're doing for something that you could turn over to an AI or some other method. Some other thing than you spending the time on it. Yeah, the traditional advice with the Eisenhower matrix from a focus perspective is eliminate the stuff that is really a distraction. So the things that are not important and not urgent, just don't even think about that stuff. And just recognizing these things that I am allowing to come into

my field of view, these aren't important. Why in the world am I looking at these things? That helps you create those boundaries. But sometimes there's nothing you can do about it. And I like to say that email specifically is a to-do list that other people can write on. So anytime you go into your email inbox, you will be presented with things that are urgent. They are time-bound and usually it's somebody asking for you to do something by a specific time. And because it's important to them, there is the appearance of importance with every message that you're going to look at. But you have to decide for yourself whether it actually is important or whether it isn't. And I know we've got a whole section on email specifically, but once you get past that level and you've got the filter of, okay,

these are the things that actually are important and things that I need to do, or maybe they're not important to you, but they're just something that you have to do because they're important to a team or organization that you're involved with. Those are the things that you want to crank through as quickly as possible. Meet the minimum bar for the quality, but maybe it doesn't have to be an absolutely incredible presentation. Maybe you just need a rough draft of a slide deck that you're going to use to present to a customer. That's a perfect opportunity to look for an AI tool that can help you throw that together. I think the focus here, though, in this section is to use these tools to figure out what could

be subject to AI. If you're going to use AI to get more focused, you need to understand what you can throw at AI. That requires you first to understand what you're doing, and second, what AI tools are available to solve these problems. So you've got to engage with this stuff. Absolutely. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Electric. When you think of the phrase boss move, you might think of making a bold business decision or maybe giving a big presentation in front of a crowd. But the reality is that sometimes being a boss in a small business means gathering up everything that your new employee needs to get started while your own to-do list keeps on growing. And the team over at Electric knows small businesses, maybe like yours,

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That's electric.ai.focus. Go there now and get your free pair of Beats Solo 3 headphones today for scheduling a meeting. Our thanks to Electric for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. I'd like to talk about AI and the creative process because I think this is something we need to talk about. We were mentioning earlier that, yeah, it can write like a human, but it's not quite like a human. And you can kind of tell if you look at it and if you aren't paying attention, you might get fooled. But it's not there yet, right? And the art is even weirder to me, like when it tries to make art, it just really looks like AI art to me almost every time. But it's going to

get better, right? At some point, AI will match a human with the way it writes. And that gets back to kind of the stuff that I'm not in favor of giving to AI. Like the easiest example for a guy like me is writing. I like to write. I like putting my words out in the world for people to read them and maybe change their thoughts about something, share my thoughts about something. I also like to write for myself. All of those things are important to me. And it leads to the question, if AI got good enough to do that for you, if I could just push a button and it would make an amazing blog post that's even better than something I could spend hours on, if I could just push a button and it would make an amazing blog post that's even better than something I could spend hours on, would I post it to MaxBarky.com? And to me, the answer

is obviously no. But when I talk to people about that, that's not always the case, which is kind of shocking to me. Well, think about the information that I think the things that I make and the things that you make are very similar in a lot of ways where we're trying to help people do a search or ask chat GPT. But they don't. They listen to the podcast. They subscribe to the RSS feeds, to the newsletters. Why? Because you trust the individual who is curating all the information and putting it together in a package. curating all the information and putting it together in a package. That's the thing that generative AI is really bad at. Especially the chat GPT kind of famously, there's a term for it, you know, when it goes down a rabbit hole and it just starts making stuff up, they call it hallucinating. It's easy to get to that point because there's just the data. There is no good, bad, right, wrong. There's just, this is what I found and this is what I'm going to regurgitate.

And it's hard to articulate specifically what the human quality control process is there. But I feel like people can tell. They can just by looking at it, just by reading it. And it's not just the writing stuff, by the way. You mentioned the writing, and I think that's the obvious one. But even with the images and art, I think there are valid use cases for that in the creative process. But I'm not just going to ask an AI tool to create a two-hour movie for me about a topic. There's a whole bunch of work that goes into the movies that actually get made. There's a whole bunch of work that goes into the books that actually get written. And they're different. It's hard to say why, but they feel different. And I think automating the actual product when it comes to art is the wrong approach. But I do think that automation can be useful in the

production of the art as a tool or a support for making the thing. Yeah, I totally agree. And we're going to get into that. But just the thought exercise of imagining the future, maybe not too distantly, where it doesn't hallucinate and it reliably gives you good product. Like you want to teach people how to use Obsidian and you push a button and it writes the perfect article on how to use Obsidian without you doing anything. I mean, I don't have any desire to do that. If it existed today, I would not use it because, and I thought about this because to me, the creative process is kind of what I live for. It's the stuff I want to do. I mean, I'm paying to put a website on the internet where I talk about things that are important to me and a few other people.

And the idea of letting a robot, an AI, create the content for the thing that I'm paying for instead of my words, that to me is really a troublesome, right? And I think that's why a lot of people don't like AI. It's one of the, one of the reasons, you know, people are like, I don't want anything to do with this stuff. And, and I don't, I just have, you know, the, the idea of it to me is really so contrary to everything I do with the internet. And I went down the rabbit holes we were prepping for the show. Well, why is it that I feel like that? And I feel like for me, it's a question of knowledge that none of us are getting out of this alive, that I'm here for a limited amount of time and I want to create while I'm here. And spending my clock cycles,

and spending my clock cycles, my precious clock cycles, letting a computer write instead of me, that's less that I can leave an imprint on the world. You know what I mean? It's just a robot writing words. And I just find that really offensive. And I understand why some people run away from AI because you think about it that way. But the trick is not to ever get to a point where it's writing words for you, but it's helping you write words better. And that, I think, is something where it can help. And I really think that there's a distinction there that needs to be made. Hopefully, I've done it sufficiently. But you have to think about that question for yourself. If AI were so good that it could replace you, would you let it? And maybe it depends on what job you have. Maybe there's some jobs where you'd be happy to let it do all the work. But for my job, I would not be interested

in that one bit. Yeah, I think it probably does depend on the job that you have. But again, this is not new. I've heard of people who got hired for full-time jobs and they created macros, which allowed them to work 15 minutes a week and they just didn't tell their employers. Is that AI? Kind of, I think. And I also think it depends. Your perspective on this probably is influenced by how you think the creative process actually works. And I think you and I know enough about it, we've studied it long enough to know that it's not this flash of inspiration that just gets downloaded in an instant and, oh my gosh, now I have the

finished product. I have the book written, I have the song created. I have the painting painted. There's a whole process to this. And I literally just did a presentation on this yesterday for the Focus Course group on personal knowledge management. We talked a lot about creativity. And the topic of templates came up. If you're writing songs and you're using loops, does that diminish the end product? Are you not creative because you use something that preexisted in some way, shape, or form? And I would argue no.

But the same thing in terms of writing could be said for templates and structures and forms. I mean, if you were to ask AI to write you a book, what it's going to do is it's going to go pick one of the seven formats that are available. There's seven different story arcs for fiction writing, and they just reuse them over and over and over again. They're different based on the details, and the details are the things that jump out to us. Oh, I like this one. I don't like this one. But a lot of them, there's limited options in terms of the actual story arc that the story will follow. And I don't think that diminishes the creative process at all.

So if you're going to ask instead, how do I use this in the creative process? I feel like you have to understand that. And then you can get very specific with the type of help that you're asking for. When you do that, that's really where AI can be very beneficial in the creative process. So I actually wrote an article about this

for the suite setup a while back, a few apps and tips for using ChatGPT to boost your creativity and productivity. I'll put a link to this in the show notes. But there's a section in there where it talks about crafting prompts. here where you're defining, you know, this is who I am. This is who I'm trying to help. As I'm talking to you, AI tool, this is who you are and this is what I need help with. This is what you're good at. This is the relevant information or definitions. These are the rules I want you to follow. Here's an example. Here's what I want you to avoid. Here's the format that I want this stuff in. You know, most people are not interacting with chat GPT that way. They're

just throwing in a single sentence and they're getting something random in return. And to think that you're going to get a quality output that way, I mean, if ChatGPT really was able to discern exactly what you're wanting in that situation, I think that is a little bit scary to be honest. But that's not how it works. The more data you give it, the better the outcome. And if you know exactly what you need help with, I think it's a great tool for helping to figure out, you know, what are the other problems that my ideal customer is facing? In the past, you would get data to solve that problem. You would hop on phone calls and you would talk to people.

And I still think there's no substitute for actually doing that. But the next level down would be to do some Google searches. What are the other questions that people are asking when they're trying to figure out this thing? And I think generative AI can definitely help in that regard. Yeah. But I was thinking about other forms of art I consume. And I certainly have this bias towards human creation. I guess, should I have to say that? But listening to Miles Davis' music, when I hear Miles Davis play music, I can hear his experiences of his life, some of the challenges he faced come through the music, right? the challenges he faced come through the music, right?

And AI could study Miles Davis music and it could generate blue scales and, and arpeggios and things he did, but it wouldn't be the same experience. And I guess the, the point I'm making, I think I'm beating a dead horse here is that while I think AI can be useful to generate creative work, it cannot generate creative work that I'm interested in. Either something I would put under my own domain or something that I would want to consume. But I think that's okay. Just because I feel that way doesn't mean I shouldn't be trying to take advantage of it. Exactly. Yeah, so I agree.

I'm not going to tune into an AI-generated playlist or completely original music that AI has decided I want to listen to. Or AI has written for you. That's the next level of it. Exactly. Yeah, that's kind of what I meant. If it's the actual artist, that I'm not interested in. But I do think that there are, that doesn't mean that creatives should

eschew AI altogether. There's places where it can be very valuable. Let me give you a really ridiculous example. This is in that sweet setup article. But a while back, the pastor at our church had a birthday party, and he's a baseball fan. He's from the San Diego area, so he's a fan of the Padres. And my role in this, I think I shared a picture with you, was as a baseball announcer. My brother-in-law and I were the baseball announcers, and we had the wireless microphones, My brother-in-law and I were the baseball announcers, and we had the wireless microphones, and we're going around and basically announcing what's going on throughout the entire event. And I played the part.

I had the suspenders and the bow tie and used ChatGPT to help come up with ridiculous announcer names. And then throughout the event, I had it create for me some silly ad reads that you would hear at in a baseball game like if you're listening to it on the radio you've got the announcers who are going to do the the ad reads so i i prompt was literally write a funny ad read to be read by an announcer during a baseball game for a made-up product and so it gave me this whole script that i read i'm happy to to read it on the air if you think that would be entertaining. No, it's okay. But I mean, it did the job. Yeah, exactly. And it was exactly what I needed because I could give it some very specific

parameters and I knew exactly how I wanted to use it. it gave me exactly what I needed. So it's four paragraphs on kicking ketchup, you know, and spicy ketchup that is available at the stadium. And it was, but that's, that was the thing that made it work was I had some very specific boundaries and rules that I wanted it to follow. And then also, you know, when you get something back, the first draft often is not the one that's actually any good. You need to give it some feedback. So there's feedback loops associated with this as well. And you say, no, that's not what I wanted. I wanted something more like this. So you have to work with this, which again, creativity is a process. But as long as you

view it as a process and you know how these things can actually supplement your process, that's where they can really add value. There's also the issue of societal change and challenges arising from the fact that the generative AI exists now. My daughter's a high school teacher and is talking about the challenges they're facing when students turn in papers and you don't know whether it was written by the student or by a robot. And she says, sometimes you can tell and sometimes you're not sure. And my solution, my suggestion was make everything an oral exam. Let's go back to Plato and Socrates and let's make them stand up and talk and tell about something that they've read or consumed or their thoughts. And I feel like,

honestly, that's a better skill anyway, being able to verbalize your thoughts and reasoning. But, you know, she'll tell me, Hey, that takes a lot more teachers because you need,

and I'm like, yeah, so let's get more teachers, you know, but the, but, but, you know,

we could turn some of this stuff on its head and make it make, make us as humans better because of it. And then it truly is AI does become the monkey that does the work and us humans do the deep thought stuff. You know, we've been dancing around this now for a while, Mike, I think it's about time we started talking about what we're actually doing to be more focused with AI. This episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by express VPN, high speed, secure and anonymous VPN service. Get three extra months for free. Just go to expressvpn.com slash focused. It's October and spooky season is here. So maybe it's time to make yourself a

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That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash focused. Go there now and learn more. ExpressVPN.com slash focused. And our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. All right, so I was kind of a tease before the ad break, wasn't I? But let's just go through some tools. Maybe we can go back and forth. but let's just go through some tools. Maybe we can go back and forth. And some of these tools that I use predate the explosion of thought around AI, but they've been AI and I've been using them for a long time. The first one I want to mention is Grammarly. I have never been a fan

of grammar checkers. I remember when they first showed up at Microsoft Word 20 some years ago, and they were moronic. All the suggestions they made were generally wrong. And I just turned them off and never thought about them again. And three or four years ago, somebody said, well, you should try Grammarly. It's a different, it's got, I think they said a machine learning model at the time, because I think AI wasn't as big of a term then. But either way, I went ahead and signed up for it, and I found it remarkably good and constantly getting better. Now, I'm not saying that Grammarly finds every error I make, but it finds a lot of them. I'm not saying that I take every suggestion it makes, but I accept a lot of them. And it is using artificial intelligence in

place of, you know, hiring a copy editor. And I guess just to kind of finish the thread on that, I do have another person that reads the posts before they go up, but this is the first step. And I find it a very good and quick use of artificial intelligence. Looking at the boxes we were talking about earlier, this is work that is often urgent. And I guess I would argue whether it's not important or important. I want anything I publish to be, you know, proofread and not have a bunch of errors in it.

Looking at the Michael Hyatt Freedom Compass, this is work that I'm proficient at, but not passionate at. It's in that kind of drudgery, disinterest zone. I don't want to spend all my time proofreading. And if I can use AI to take some of the work out of that, and frankly, it does a better job than I do, because when I write something, my bias in my brain reads what I thought I wrote, not what I actually wrote. Have you ever experienced that? So I go ahead and use Grammarly and it's a tactical deployment of AI that saves me time every day. I also use Grammarly, and I think this is a great tool that just about anybody can use if you are clear on the job that needs to be done there.

So yes, you could do it. You maybe can do it better than Grammarly, but if you're checking your own work, I've recognized the same thing that you just said. I will read it back in my head and know what I meant to say and completely miss the errors that I made. So everything that I publish, I try to have somebody else get eyes on it. Well, if the intention is just to have somebody else look at it quickly and make sure I didn't make any really stupid mistakes, then I can use

Grammarly to do that. I'm not going to use Grammarly as the editor if I'm going to publish a book, but for some of the low stakes stuff, this is perfect. So yeah, I'm a big fan of that as well. that as well. Another one that I've been using recently is Midjourney. And Midjourney is the AI image development tool that is baked inside of Discord. So the way that you use this is you sign up for the service and then you interact with a Discord bot. And again, you give it a prompt, and this is kind of what I'm looking for. This is the one that you probably saw images of or other, there are other tools like this. But a while back, they would create these images and they would be kind of freaky because the people would have a third eye or an extra arm or something like that. I just couldn't get people to look not like aliens, but it's gotten quite a bit better. And the way that I use this

is for specific photos that I need for my website. I've been building out the Obsidian University website. I've got a page for a starter vault that I put together. And as I'm adding more pages to the website, I find myself needing stock photos. And I have a long history with stock photos because I've been using them ever since I was working with the family business. And they are ridiculously expensive. And I've also had some negative experiences with stock photo. There are people who literally just look for stock photos online and then they write you emails saying you didn't have rights to use this and they threaten to sue you.

I mean, we've tried to license every single image that we have, but occasionally, you know, you're working with an outside agency and they got a stock photo and you don't know where they got it. And it's just a whole bunch of hassle. So I am happy to forego

the stock photo industry if I can. Now, there are other services I've been using in the past, like the Pexels has like the free stuff that you can use for personal or commercial use. And every once in a while I'll find something on there. They're like, Hey, this is kind of what I was looking for. But it takes a long time to search for and find the right photo. And with something like Midjourney, you actually have a little bit more flexibility because you can say, this is exactly what I'm looking for. And you can even kind of change the style. You can get multiple versions until you find just the one that you're looking for. So if you want to see some examples of this, the one that is on the Obsidian University vault page,

so obsidianuniversity.com slash vault, the image on the right there, it's like this guy going into this library and there's a bunch of stars above him just it's a kind of atmospheric uh fantasy style graphic you know that was made using mid journey and i took a little bit of time to dial in the prompts and figure out how to get a quality output but i've been very happy with the the results well another one for me i i haven't done much with graphics i'll be honest with you i just don't don't use them that often to go down the rabbit hole they do feel a little otherworldly to me in general so like the one you use makes sense but i feel like it's not quite there yet you know yeah um but you know hopefully it gets there at some point. But another one that is important to me is SaneBox, but we're going to do a separate segment on AI and email.

So let's put a pin in that one. But the big one is ChatGPT. That's the one for generative AI with text. That's the one that really hit the wire about six months ago and everybody started using. And because everybody was using it, I wanted to get to know about it. So I started, I got a paid account. You know, I decided, let me just go down the rabbit hole on this. Although I don't think I'm using it as much as I probably should be.

That's one of the reasons I was looking forward to the show and talking about it. Maybe that'll give me a little bit of a kick. But the things I'm doing with chat GPT, first of all, text cleanup is very good at. It's not as good as Grammarly for like checking grammar. Grammarly is a one trick pony. And that kind of leads me down a second little rabbit hole of I like the idea of compartmentalized AI. I think that for the meantime, one of the best ways for AI to work is to have specific jobs and just do that job like Grammarly does Grammar really good. ChatGPD isn't as good at it, but it does do things like clean up text. Like when I did the Obsidian

Field Guide, I had Otter AI, which is another AI tool I use, generate the transcripts, go through the videos and generate transcripts. But it only would spit them out as one long text file because it didn't have the AI muscle to figure out where paragraphs belong. So I would take the text out of Otter. I would dump it into ChatGPD and say, take the following text and add paragraph breaks where they make sense or something like that. I forget what the prompt I had made for it. And then it would say, okay, give me the text. And I'd put the text in and it would go through and it would break it up into logical paragraphs. Now I could have done that manually, but I had no interest in it. and chat gpt did a fine job of that but i've been talking a while i know you use chat gpt too let's kind of go back and forth a bit on that

yeah uh chat gpt is the service i actually use it inside of raycast which we'll talk about a little bit later but um essentially i don't use it nearly as often as you might think. When there's a specific research angle to some of the things that I want to do, that's when I'll craft the prompts and I'll put some significant effort into it, like I mentioned a little bit earlier. I like using it just to get my thought process started. Like one example from that Sweet Setup article using Mac GPT, which is a chat GPT just on your Mac, is what are 10 advantages of using plain text? And it spits back a list of 10 things. So those lists I find are helpful as a starting point. They're not going

to be the lists that are going to ultimately end up on like a course sales page or anything like that, but they're going to get me thinking about some of the other tangential things that I am maybe overlooking because I get so focused on this is how I'm using this particular tool. Did you have more that you want to talk about with ChatGPT specifically? Otherwise, I got a couple other which are not text-based I can mention. Okay. Yeah, just sometimes I use it to check my work for ideas. Like if I'm writing about a topic, I may ask it, well, give me six ideas that relate to

this topic and see what it comes up with. And sometimes it'll come up with something that I didn't think of. And then that gives me a launching off point for that, but that's about it. I I've never had it write a post for me, but I explained earlier, that's just not something I'm interested in. Um, my general experience is at this point, it's not good for fact checking it's not good I've tried it for title generation too and a lot of people do that like you know take this but here you know take this following text and create a title for this post and I'm sure it's going through and maybe using some kind of analytics maybe doing something smarter than I would do but titles to me

are just as important as the text. And sometimes my titles are quirky and they probably aren't that great for Google juice, but it's my title. And I've just never, the few times I've tried it, I've never seen something that was appealing to me. Yeah. Well, on the title generation specifically, I have tried doing that in ChatGPT. I've had the same experience that you had. I like my titles better. And part of that is because I've gone through Part-Time YouTuber Academy and I recognize the importance of the titles and the thumbnails. So I try to put some work into those before I upload the videos. But when you upload a video to YouTube, it does have a tool built in where

you put the title in the field and after it has analyzed your video it does like a transcript obviously that gets attached to the video and it'll look at the the content of the transcript and it will give you some suggestions for AI generated titles and I have not liked any of the AI generated titles that I have been presented with. So I generally skip those. Some of the other tools that I use, there's going back to the image idea. Photoshop has a tool built in, which that is, it's called Firefly. And that lets you do some pretty amazing things inside of Photoshop. I'm not sure if it's still just on the Photoshop beta or if it's publicly available at this point, probably publicly available. I signed up for the beta, I don't know, several months ago. And you have to be a

Creative Cloud paying subscriber in order to get access to it, obviously. But you can take a photo inside of Photoshop and you can select an area and you can insert a prompt. And one of the most useful ways to use this is let's say you've got an image which is cropped too closely. You want it to have more context. You want a bigger background. Well, you can use a prompt inside of Photoshop and it will generate the filler around your image. And it does a pretty remarkable job and you can add things in the background

and stuff like that. But if you are doing a lot with photo manipulation inside, if you have a need for a tool like Photoshop, then you should definitely take a look at the iTools that are available there. And then the other one that I use frequently is Mac Whisper, which I think this is using Whisper AI. And basically it takes an audio file and creates a transcript. I have

somebody in the Obsidian University community who is blind. And so they are on the calls and I try to always, as I'm going through, explain, you know, this is where I'm clicking on things in the interface and this is what the text says on the screen. But also I found that with these recordings in Circle, being able to upload a transcript that allows then closed captioning to be added to the videos. to the videos. And I just think that's a nice thing to do, whether people have a need for that or not, just having more accessibility with the stuff that I do. So Circle tries to get you to upgrade so that they can generate the transcripts for you automatically. I don't really want to pay an extra hundred bucks a month for that. So I bought Mac Whisper. I put the videos through there, get the file. You can download it as a VTT file, and then you can attach it to the videos,

and you've got your live transcripts. Yeah, I use Mac Whisper as well. In fact, earlier when I was talking about how I pulled the transcripts out of the videos, it was with Mac Whisper. Another tool I mentioned was Otter.ai, which is another voice-to-text transcription tool. And I find it really useful. And you can just open up Otter and start talking into it, and then you get a transcript back.

I like that as an alternative version of transcription, where you're not actually watching the words appear. You're just giving it the file. There is an app. One last point on Otter is like, if you do a lot of Zoom calls, you can invite your Otter robot into the call. And then it will not only transcribe the call, it'll summarize it, give you timestamps and do a lot of other stuff. We use that in the Mac Sparky Labs. And I also used it in the Field Guide Plus sessions we're doing for Obsidian right now. So those are very powerful AI tools. I feel like AI has really been doing great with voice-to-text dictation. In fact, if you're using the most recent release of the iOS and macOS platforms and you do any dictation,'re using ai google platforms are using the same

and they are so much better than they used to be now you can sit down and just talk and your computer types up generally what you say and that wasn't the case a few years ago one other tool i wanted to mention this is mac specific but it's something that i've just stumbled into the last month but i've been really enjoying it it's another one we covered in the max bracket last but it's called monica.ai and i like this because it's a um if you want to explore this stuff like if you're like when i said earlier you need to get an understanding of what you can do with ai monica is a great tool if you're on a mac because what it does is it gives you multiple engines that you can search. It works with Google Bard.

It works with ChatGPT4, Cloud2, Cloud Instant. It's got some artists and genius. The genius engine is the ChatGPT4, but it also has an artist engine. So you can take a query and run it against multiple engines inside a single application. It's very Mac friendly, easy to get stuff out of it. And I've been doing the $10 a month subscription and it doesn't give you as many queries as you get if you just have like a chat GPT subscription, but it gives me enough that I'm not exceeding my amount for $10 a month. But it gives me enough that I'm not exceeding my amount for $10 a month.

And it allows me to cancel my chat GPT subscription and just use everything out of Monica. And like I said, it gives you multiple engines. So you say, well, let's see what Google Bard says about this. Let's see what Cloud 2 says about this. And you can test these other engines at the same time. Nice. you can test these other engines at the same time. Nice. One other one I'll mention because it's somewhat related to that as just like a front-end for accessing some of these large language models.

We alluded to Raycast previously, but this is a phenomenal launcher. So think of something like Spotlight or Alfred or Quicksilver, depending on how long you've been using a Mac, I guess. And there are extensions that you can just download and extend the abilities that Raycast has. So if you use the Todoist extension, you can create tasks for Todoist straight from your launcher. Anyways, they've got a separate tier for Raycast. It's completely free to use. And then if you want to access the pro features, which essentially allow you to sync your settings across multiple Macs, and they give you some different themes and things like that, there is an AI section and that cost is $8 a month or I think $96 a year. And that is using the

ChatGPT 3.5 turbo model. And I don't know how much better ChatGPT 4 is versus 3.5, but ChatGPT 4, if you were to purchase a subscription to that because i had one i think it was twenty dollars a month and that one you can use it inside the web and you've you go to the website and type it in but you can get access to the chat gpt4 model inside of raycast which also eliminates all of the the number restrictions on the number of queries you can run, for example. That is an additional $8 a month, so it ends up being $16 a month in total if you're going to use this Raycast Pro with the GPT-4 model, which is still less than a ChatGPT subscription if you do it through the website. It's probably a little bit more limited.

And there are definitely stylistic design choices that the Raycast team has made in terms of how you interact with the AI model and the framing around it inside of the Raycast application. But that's kind of where I prefer to jump off and do things anyways, is in the launcher. I don't like having to go to the browser first. So if you're like me, then you may want to check out Raycast and the additional add-on of the GPT-4 model. Yeah, but I think the point is you should be looking at these tools to get familiar with them and start thinking about ways that they can help you be productive.

And I don't think I'm at the end of that journey in any way. The tools are getting more powerful and my understanding of better ways to use them are occurring every day. But this is something that can help you with focus and you're not going to figure it out if you don't get into it and kick the tires a bit. And you're not going to figure it out if you don't get into it and kick the tires a bit. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Indeed. When you're faced with what might be considered aggressive hiring goals, you don't have to be worried because you know that you don't need a miracle.

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and all of RelayFM. All right, I've been teasing AI and email because it's something that I've been thinking a lot about lately. I always struggle with email. It's a, email to me is a source of joy, but also it's overwhelming because there's so much of it. I was talking about this in a recent labs video, but the, when I was a lawyer, email could often

be the source of grief, right? You know, you get, you open your email and there's a email and they're threatening to see your client or some lawyer acting up or whatever and kind of ruining your day or week. But with my new life, that's not the case anymore. Most of the email I get is people thanking me or with a question that's interesting and curious. But the problem was when I was a lawyer, there was only so many cases I was working on. There was only so much email that came in. As Max Barkey, the volume is very high, right? And so I've been struggling to manage that. And also I have a business that sells products, you know, and people have questions about those. Recently on Mac Power Users, we had Merlin Mann come in and I can't remember if he

told me this before we recorded or after, but I was telling him, yeah, I'm struggling with email, like always, you know, he's the inbox zero guy. And I was telling him, I think I'm going to need to get better at sorting. And he told me sorting your email is like alphabetizing your recycling. And that's, you know, one of those things like Merlin says, right? He says little things that get in your head. And, and it made me like, ah, he's right. I'm not solving the problem. I would just be sitting there sorting. And then, but the more I thought about it, I realized that the problem I was having is that I'm getting jerked around

in so many different directions because like one email will be about a field guide problem. One email will be a lab subscriber. The next email will be about a podcast guest. And like going through your inbox, it just felt like, I don't know, it just felt like I was having trouble focusing because I couldn't like do one thing. And I thought, well, what if I, Mr. Contextual Computing brought that to email? So I made boxes based on

different contexts. Like I have the field guide context, the labs context, the podcast context, and like different things that are contextual for me. And there are times during the day I work on field guides. So why not make the field guide email part of that context? And in order to do that, you've got to sort it. So I set that up about a month ago and then right after the Merlin show and the, and I put together a bunch of Apple scripts where I can sit here with my keyboard and go through my inbox and put them in the right folders. You know, this email is about field guys, you know, hit this keyboard shortcut and it goes there.

This email is about labs go, you know, hit different keyboard shortcut. It goes to the labs folder. And, and that was working for me. And it's really been a big improvement for me in terms of managing email, knowing what's important and keeping up with the important stuff. And the change of context to me makes email less of a problem because I don't even think about it as email at that point. Once it's just part of a context, at that point, once it's just part of a context, it's just part of the work you do in that context. It's not managing the ever overflowing inbox. You with me so far? Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense to be honest. Yeah. Well, it's worked for me and, um, and you know, it was kind of in rebellion to Merlin's recycling comment and I, but, but just everybody's different, right? And I don't

think you can make general rules about email, but for me, this works. But then you and I decided to do this show about AI. And one of the segments we're going to talk about after this is things we'd like to see AI do more of. And I was writing in the document, boy, I would really like to see it do more email stuff, like to get better at email. And I realized, you know what, I could do that right now because I have that SaneBox subscription. And SaneBox has got the ability to look at the sender and the subject line, but not what's in the email. But it uses those two pieces of data to try and sort for you. But you can also, if you have the upper tier account, But you can also, if you have the upper tier account, which I do, you can have it create custom boxes for you and you can kind of teach it.

So all of those folders I had, those mailboxes I had for field guides and labs and podcasts and whatnot, I deleted them all. And instead I made same box auto folders with the same names. So I've got a SaneBox folder called field guides. And anything that comes in, I move it into that folder. But then over time, SaneBox gets smarter to realize, oh, every time he sends me an email that has the teachable tag at the top, he puts it in the field guide. So maybe that's what he wants.

And the AI starts working for that in the background.. So maybe that's what he wants. And the AI starts working for that in the background. And I've only been doing it for a week. We started work on the show a week ago, but it's already getting much smarter. And now I wake up in the morning and I don't even have to sort the inbox as much because AI is putting the stuff contextually where it belongs. Now there's some risks to this because it gets it wrong sometimes, especially during this kind of what I'd call training period. But it is working, and I want to continue to train it for another month or so and see how accurate it is then. But that is an example of using AI to be more productive and stay more focused. So now I don't have to go through and triage my inbox

by making these detailed, SaneBox rules-based automatic mailboxes and training it over the course of a month or so. I think I'm going to get to a point where it's largely handled for me. You know, something that stands out to me from what you just described is that it gets it

wrong sometimes. And my initial thought after that was, so do humans. Yeah, but I didn't get it wrong. When I went through the inbox and I manually sorted it, I knew exactly where it belonged. And now I'm going through and finding occasionally a red herring that says, well, here's something about the labs that landed in the field guides. But then I still have those scripts, so I move it to the right SaneBox folder, and SaneBox notices that. It's like, oh, he moved that one to labs. So okay, in the future,

we need to look at that more carefully. So it's getting better, even over the week that I've been doing it. And I imagine if I give it a month of training, that it's gonna get really good. I don, that it's going to get really good. I don't think it's ever going to get to 100%. But taking the burden for me of having to sort that inbox, because I get a lot of email, is absolutely worth it. And it's an effective use of AI. Now, I'd like to see email and AI go further than this. Like if people send me invites and

things, I could see a lot of things I'd like robots to take over for me with respect to email, but this is a start. Yeah. So when I was thinking of, of was if you are a, and probably not about people fit this description, but email is one of those things where it's like, oh, wouldn't it be nice if I had an assistant whose job was to curate my inbox so I only saw the really important stuff? Well, you don't have to hire an assistant to do that. And if you were to hire an assistant to do that, you would still have to go through the same training process. If you were going to delegate anything to anyone, you would have to invest more time to help them get it right. And for some reason, when it comes to automation with the machines, I think that can, speaking for myself, can be one of the things that keeps me from going through the process of creating the automation.

It's like, well, if it's not going to do it right right away, then I'm not going to take the time to actually train it to do it the right way. But that is what these AI tools require, is they require some training. And it's actually not a huge investment. I forget what the statistic was, but I read at one point the cutoff between where it's worth it to teach somebody how to do something if it's something that you really want to delegate versus actually just doing it yourself. Because that's the story that we tell ourselves is, oh, it's just quicker if I just do this. And I don't think that's necessarily true. And thinking of these AI tools as essentially an intern that you're training to do certain things, I think is a good perspective to have. The other thing I wanted to touch on is you mentioned the context with going in and looking through the field guide emails versus customer support emails versus whatever. Create the distinctions there for

yourself. I think that's a really powerful idea for people who deal with a lot of email. And Merlin's comment about sorting the recycling, I feel like that does indicate how he views email, and that's fine. I'm probably more in line with that. And email is just not a valuable medium for me. But I think if you are going to treat it as a source of potentially high quality information, you do have to have ways where you can sort through the cruft and find the stuff that's really important. And so having everything categorized so you could say, okay, today is Friday afternoon and I'm going to go crank through my field guide emails. That is absolutely a worthwhile approach. And Cal Newport kind of talked about this on a recent Deep Life podcast episode.

And someone had followed up with that and explained how they were doing this with Gmail labels. And that's sort of the same thing. And easier to talk about SaneBox, it occurs to me that that would actually be a really powerful AI powered way to create these contexts where you can go into your email for a specific purpose. I'm going to look at these emails at this time. And, you know, with the with the labels you essentially can just that's a way of organizing things you could use folders too i mean there's lots of different ways that you could group things together tags whatever you want to do but think through you know what are the characteristics that these emails of this type

tend to have and then use some ai power tools to look at you know the the sender the subject line things like that, maybe even the contents. Does it have an attachment? Whatever. And batching those together. If you want to not just completely disconnect from email because you can't, but you want to make it as efficient a process as possible, that's a great approach. Yeah, just looking as I woke up this morning, I've got four emails unread in my field guides folder and three in my labs folder. And I've also got a robot one called process

that's got four in it that's going to probably have receipts or something in it. But all that stuff was auto-sorted and that's really the selling point for SaneBox. And I'm not trying to sell SaneBox here, but the general service is it goes through your inbox and it creates what they call later box. It puts like stuff that's not essential

into the later box. But what I've done is I've just gotten more granular with it, which is a possibility when you have the upper tier account. So I've created boxes for every area of context and I'm trying to get the robot smart enough to, to get those emails in the right context. So, and then when it's time for me to go look at them, I don't have to deal with sorting them. Yeah. But you know, that's one step, you know, which leads to another question for me i mean the goal for me with ai honestly is i

want to have like a killer executive assistant one day that is a robot right i'll never have enough money that i can hire the person who follows me around and takes care of everything all day you know like if you're a president or a company owner or big fancy you know millionaire you've got an assistant that takes care of the little daily things for you. They've already got that. They don't need to wait for AI. They hire a person. But I feel like AI for the rest of us represents that opportunity to have that assistant that goes through it, sorts your email for you, tells you what's actually important, sets your calendar up for you, manages your tasks, all the drudgery that we're doing currently to

keep up with things. I feel like that's the goal for me with AI. That's what I want it to do. And that's what I'm looking for. Yeah, absolutely. It's a good enough job for a lot of people if they can be very specific with how they want to use it. Either way, you can get more focused with AI, and I think that story gets a little better every day. If you're interested in this stuff, take a look at some of the apps we've talked about, because I think all of this stuff is evolving and getting better constantly. So you need to be aware of it so you can take advantage of it. Don't be afraid of AI. Use it to get better at what you're doing.

We've got some other apps that use AI productively we want to talk about. We're going to do that in deep focus today. But before we get there, we wanted to add a new segment to the show, which I think, I don't know why we didn't do this earlier, but Mike and I often talk about books offline. We thought it'd be fun to share what we're reading with the audience. So Mike, what are you reading right now? Yeah, well, the book that I am currently reading is called Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish. And Shane Parrish is the guy behind the Farnham Street blog and also the co-author of some of my favorite books, which are The Great Mental Models. There's several volumes. Volume one in particular

was very impactful for me. That's where I first came across the idea of the map is not the territory. And so this is the first book that I've seen that is just Shane and I have just started this one. But so so far I really enjoy this now there are a lot of books it seems like that are speaking about this making better decisions or thinking more clearly so it it's probably not something that is like a completely new topic but I feel like Shane's experience, he shares some stories at the beginning of the book about how he's obviously changed some of the details and things, but he used to work for, he says, a government intelligence agency. He won't name the right

one, and he's changed some of the names to protect the innocent, but some of the stories that he shares, there are just kind of a unique perspective in terms of the high pressure situations we can find ourselves in where we really need to make better decisions. And so this is a book on basically how to, how to do that. What about you? I feel special because I have three books I'm currently reading or, or one I've recently read and two I'm currently reading.

I felt like when I introduced this segment that you are going to definitely outscore me on books because you are always reading books. And it takes me longer to get through them. But I just finished On Quality by Robert Persig. And you and I both read that book. We did a recent episode of the bookworm. I was a guest on it where we talked about it., um, yes, our journey with the Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

and Robert Persig and his on quality book, which was assembled by his, um, by his widow posthumously about some of his thoughts on quality. Um, on your recommendation, I bought master of change by Brad Stolberg. I'm about halfway through it. Again, there's not a whole lot new to me in it, but I think there's a lot new to people in that book. I think it's a very good read, and I'm very happy that I'm going through that one. And it's just talking about how everything changes, and you need to accept that and figure it out and take advantage of it. How's that for a one-sentence summary? accept that and figure it out and take advantage of it. How's that for a one sentence summary? It's good. It took me a lot longer when I put together the YouTube video on that one. Yeah, that's right. You did YouTube. So we'll put a link to that if you want to get a summary of that book. Mike made one. And then there's an excellent book I've been reading slowly over a couple months, and it's not a long book. And this is one where I bought the physical book. I didn't get the PDF. I don't even know if there is a PDF for it, but it's only, I think like 170 pages,

but it's called By Hand and Eye by George Walker and Jim Tolpin. And this is a woodworking book, but I feel like it almost has some relevance to the focused audience. It's, it's about the concept of measurements. And if you look at antiquity and classic furniture and lines and buildings, they all followed very specific proportions, right? A building wasn't built, you know, 10 feet by 20 feet. It was built two units by three units.

Like, does that make sense? So you've got a ratio between the line on the roof versus the line on the walls. And you've got the same thing in a secretary desk. And if you go back to Egyptian furniture, they all use this. And what they were using is a divider, which is a tool that you had where you could set a specific length. And then you could set a specific length, and then you could say, well, two of these units by five of these units gets you one look. And as a result, furniture, architecture, all this stuff got these natural lines that to humans look right.

And then we got factories, you know, towards the end of the 1800s, early 1900s, and the factories didn't use dividers. They used measurements like inches and meters. And the woodworking hobby and profession really adopted that. So everything is measured in units instead of these divided ratios. So we've got the unique circumstances here where humanity changed the way they do something because of industrialization. And Jim and George went back and looked at the way they used to do it and concluded that it's better with dividers and natural divisions and proportions and things look better when they're done. It's not as efficient for a factory, but you know, I don't run a factory and just the idea of going to ancient knowledge and

tapping into it to make modern things better. I really like that. And this book was written very artsy. There's a lot of good information in here about, you know, nature and how this stuff works. And, uh, I just thoroughly enjoying the book, but it's hardcover. It's made by a company called lost art press, which is a woodworker. The guy behind it's a woodworker, but also a bespoke publisher. He loves to make really nice books. And these are really nice books. Uh, they were just really well-made. Um, so anyway, I, I'm dragging you a little bit into my art game, but I think it's something worth reading if you have any interest in it or if you know somebody in your life that has

an eye for craft, this may be something they enjoy. Yeah, so I looked this up and it's like $200 on Amazon. But just looking at the cover, this looks like something I would love to have on my bookshelf. So I'm continuing to dig. And I found this Highland Woodworking website where they have a description for this book that is amazing. It says, they give you a roadmap instead of a plane ticket for you to follow in the journey

ahead. They show you the musical scales you need to practice. They show you how the instruments work. And they take you through nine projects to apply your new skills. I love that description. Well, the illustrations are beautiful and I'd like to share more with it on you, but if you're interested, you can go find this. I mean, even like the proportions of the human head as it influences ancient Greek vases, you know, it's like stuff like that to me is fascinating,

but it's true as well. This stuff did not come out of a vacuum. Awesome. All right. We are the focus podcast, not the woodworking podcast. So sorry about that. Um,

if you have interests in AI and focus, we have a forum, go over to talk.micpowerusers.com. There's a forum there for the Focus podcast. Let us know what you're doing with it. I feel like this isn't the end of the story. It's only the beginning. So I can't wait to see where we go from there.

We want to thank our sponsors for today. And that's our friends over at Squarespace, Electric, ExpressVPN, and Indeed. For those of you that are members of the Deep Focus podcast, that's the extended ad-free version. We're going to be talking even more about apps that use AI for productivity today. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.