Focused - 204: Analog Productivity, with Jeff Sheldon

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hey, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? It is going excellent. And we have a guest today. Welcome back to the show, Jeff Sheldon.

Yeah, thanks for having me back on. I guess you let me back in. Yeah, of course, Jeff. We really enjoyed talking to you. And Jeff is, I think, our, the focused analog expert, right? You can do a lot of analog work, you make products, and we're gonna be talking about a bunch of that stuff.

And I thought it was time to revisit that because that's a very common question from listeners about trying to figure out the balance between analog and digital tools. I know it is a constant struggle for me too. So we always like having you back. Yeah, I'm excited to dive in, share all things analog today. You even have a product called analog, but before we dive into the specifics of that,

who are you and what do you do for people who maybe didn't catch the first time that you were on the show? Sure. Yeah. So I'm Jeff Sheldon. I am the founder of a brand called Uggmonk and really kind of fell backwards into the whole entrepreneur journey. But I've always been into making things, building physical products.

The one that we're talking about today, Analog, has been kind of our hero product and the thing that put us on the map. But I've been at this for over 15 years from t-shirts to desk organizers to the analog system. I've learned a lot along the way and have made a lot of mistakes but happy to share that journey and anything that I can give insight to. You mentioned you kind of accidentally fell into the entrepreneurial thing. Do you mind talking a little bit about that? How did you get your start making all these physical products? Yeah. So I, my normal intro is I'm a designer by trade and an entrepreneur by

accident. And I think a lot of people resonate with that where they're doing something as the trade and then kind of build a business around it. A lot of times, a lot of times accidentally. And for me, it was making things, it was doing art, it was design, it was graphic design, anything that I could get my hands on growing up. And that led me to eventually start this side project, which I coined UGMonk, which was really just a little

experiment to make and design T-shirts that I wanted to wear. This was early before social media, before the whole e-commerce boom and Shopify was barely a thing. But I wanted to make these shirts and I kinda had to figure out how do I make them? How do I print them?

Who do I talk to? How do I design a website? And I launched that little side project that slowly turned into something much larger over the course of many, many years, but built a following of people that were like, man, these shirts are great, I want more more of them i was doing zero paid advertising it was all word of mouth organic blog coverage. And the tribe just kept getting bigger and people can keep wanting more kept wanting more and then i eventually started branching out from shirts to other objects because it was never meant to be a t-shirt brand. It was meant to be a design brand of designing things that I like. T-shirts just happened to be

the first thing that I launched and that led me next to the desk and the workspace because I found myself wanting things for my workspace that didn't exist from a leather mouse pad to a simple desk organizer to a nicer productivity system. And the thread has always kind of stayed the same with Uggmonk, it's about designing those things that are really, really high quality, that combine form and function. And if people understand that

and they understand that tactile quality and what it's like to use something that is enjoyable to use, they understand the Uggmonk brand and it's just kind of built from there. Doing a quick scan around my office, I think I count eight different Uggmunk products. Nice.

And it's kind of interesting to me, kind of how you got from t-shirts to coasters and notebooks. You mentioned the mouse pad. I've got one of those. Walk us through the journey, I guess. What were the lessons that you learned and how did one thing lead to the next? Was it just you started with t-shirts because you wanted to wear these things, then you started looking around and you're like, oh, I can't find a desk organizer that meets my needs, so I guess I'll build one. Like how do these things link together and how did you get to the point

where now you're building your own productivity system? Yeah, I mean, for me it was very organic because it was looking around saying, I want this thing. Even from the original monitor stand, that the desk riser that I built was an Ikea hack. And I posted a blog post around here's how you can make your own Ikea monitor stand for $25 or $50. And I just posted that because I was like, people kept asking, I was posted a picture of it and people were

like, how do you, where do you buy that? Can you, do you sell those things? I'm like, no, I sell t-shirts. Um, and that led me to think like, man, other people are looking for this stuff too. And if I like using it, other people are looking for this stuff too. And if I like using it, I bet there's an audience of people that also wants it. So it was for me first, designing out of like my own needs and what I wanted to exist, but then also incorporating feedback from people along the way. And the original version of the gather system, the gather desk organizer, I launched back in 2017 and that blew up on Kickstarter.

I think our goal was around $18,000. We raised $436,000 and it like made the t-shirts seem like almost nothing compared to where this desk organizer was going, but at the same time, I was able to apply all of the things I had learned about running a physical product business from doing the t-shirts for so long that I was able to kind of translate that into, okay, how do I apply that to this desk organizer?

How do I build out a system around it? How do we ship physical products? How do we make physical products? How do we manufacture them? Um, and all of that stuff really tied together from the learnings from just the t-shirt business. I mean, there, there is so many factors to consider with physical versus digital products that, that a lot of people just don't know how they even

get started with it. And then, so you had the Kickstarter and that blew up and now was that your design, I wanted to talk a little bit about that process. I mean, the desk organizer is very attractive. Do you do the design work as well? Yeah, so for the first version of Gather 2017, that was all my design work, collaborated with an industrial design engineer

to bring it to production. But that was really me just kind of hacking together things without any formal training in how to do industrial design. The new gather system that you see on our site today was more of a collaborative process. I worked with a different industrial designer named Jack Marple, and we collaborated from the ground up, the ground floor up, to figure out how do we design

a gather system within the constraints of can it be manufactured locally? Can we build it in a way that doesn't involve super expensive molds for injection molds or tooling? And then can we build it in also a way that we can expand on quickly and iterate on? So that one was more of a collaborative process and we kind of bounced those ideas back and forth, but I owe Jack a lot of the credit for helping bring that one was more of a collaborative process and we kind of bounced those ideas back and forth. But I owe Jack a lot of the credit

for helping bring that one to life back in, we launched that about two years ago. Yeah, well it looks great. And that's not the only thing you make. You also, as we were talking about earlier, you make the analog card system, which we're gonna get to in a minute. But you also, one of the things I like about your site,

I'm a fan too, Jeff, Thea, I feel like you curate good design as well. Like if you go to the website, you don't just sell things that you've designed and built. Like you've got like clocks there and pins and things that aren't necessarily yours, but are things you've chosen because you like them. I would assume.

Yeah, and that kind of fell, just it complements the products that we make. So I might not design a wall clock from scratch or a pen. I might someday or a mug, a coffee mug. But if there's things that I already like and there's brands that share the same ethos, we decided to bring those in and it kind of complements the analog and the gather systems really nicely because if you're gonna buy those, you're probably looking for a nice pen, you're looking for a nice clock. So it's worked really well to add the curation

in addition to the products that we make. Yeah, I've had the brown wall clock in my cart for so long. I always, I'm almost ready to buy one, but they were quite due, but yeah, nice. But today we really wanted to have you on it to talk about this analog system. And I think we need to kind of dig in deep on that. This episode of the Focus Podcast

is brought to you by ZocDoc. Go to zocdoc.com slash focus and find the right doctor right now. Sign up for free. You shouldn't have to feel awkward talking to your doctor. The good news is ZocDoc is a place where you can find and book doctors who will make you feel comfortable and actually listen to you.

And we're talking about tens of thousands of doctors here, all with verified patient reviews, so you can make sure they're the right fit before you meet them in real life. With ZocDoc, you've got more options than you know. ZocDoc is a free app and a website where you can search and compare highly rated in-network doctors near you

and instantly book appointments with them online. Once you find the doc you want, you can book them immediately, no more waiting awkwardly on hold with a receptionist. And these docs all have verified reviews from actual real patients. We're talking about booking appointments with tens of thousands of top-rated, patient-reviewed, credible doctors and specialists. You can filter specifically for ones who take your insurance, are located near you, and treat basically any condition

you're searching for. The typical wait time to see a doctor booked on ZocDoc is just between 24 and 72 hours. That's it. You can even score same-day appointments. The old system for finding doctors where you got the little pamphlet from your insurance company and you called and you sat on hold for a half hour and then were told that they still don't cover you or they weren't available, well that's over now.

Just use ZocDoc. You go to ZocDoc.com, you sign up, and all of that friction goes away. I've used ZocDoc personally and it just felt like this is something that should have existed a long time ago. The doctors are great, they're patient-reviewed, they always take my insurance, and it's just the easy button for finding a good doctor.

Anybody who needs to find a doc should check out ZocDoc. So go to ZocDoc.com slash focused and download the ZocDoc app for free and then find and book a top rated doctor today. That's zocdoc.com slash focused. Once again, zocdoc.com slash focused. And our thanks to ZocDoc for sponsoring the Focus podcast and all of Relay FM. Okay, so Jeff, I'd like to talk about the analog cards because I believe you told me once that this is also kind of a personal itch that you needed to get scratched when you came up with the

system. So tell us a little bit about your history with being productive and staying focused and how you stumbled into the analog tool system. Sure. So the analog system is very much the same path as gather and the t-shirts in the sense that I needed a simple way to get things done and I found myself trying like most of us every productivity app every iPhone app every browser based productivity app all the

different project management systems and for me in the way that I'm wired I none of them stuck I get distracted easily and I found myself kind of fiddling with the tool more than actually doing the work. So probably for the last 10, maybe even the entirety of my business career, I've been using index cards to jot down the things I need to get done. And then I was propping that index card up right in front of my monitor.

And that was after trying all different notebooks and physical productivity planners. But I kept going back to this idea of like, I liked the constraints of a three by five card and I can only put a few things on it. So after using those just standard index cards, the pink and the blue lines on them. I kept looking at that and looking at it next to the rest of my desk setup and saying,

there's got to be a nicer way of doing this. There's got to be a better way to turn this into a product, really just for myself. And at this point, early on I thought, who's going to sell index cards? That's kind of like, you can get them at the dollar store you can get them anywhere but the more i thought about it and the more i was really diving into other productivity experts the the david allen getting things done um reading cal newport's deep work and um multiple other productivity experts when i was like thinking about this and even bullet journaling i liked a lot of the principles but they still felt too complex and like too much work. So I kind of distilled all of those systems down into the absolute simplest version of it,

which is now the analog system. And I wanted to create a beautiful product, apply all the things that I had learned from the physical product manufacturing and design, and combine it all into one system. And that's the product that you see today. it was very much the same like scratch my own itch I want this to exist I think there can be a nicer version nicer paper stock nicer system let's make this in a nice little package and that was the the

launch of analog yeah so just to describe them they're there their index card size they're very thick paper I don't know what the weight is it's a They're index card sized. They're very thick paper. I don't know what the weight is. It's 100, yeah, 100 pound, I believe. Yeah. There's three different kinds of cards when you buy a set. And there's nice, the white ones,

which are kind of the daily cards, and then they've got planning cards and future cards. And then, so you get a box of these things. And if you buy the kit, it comes with a nice little wooden case, I like the walnut one, I think you have also a lighter colored, like maple or something one. And it's got a little slot cut into it, so you can tilt it up on your desk, and it's just really,

I guess what I would call bespoke index cards to run your system out of. I've actually talked about them a lot in the Max Barker Labs with the members, and some members are really into it, and some just buy index cards at the store for two bucks a thing. And I think both answers are fine.

I don't think it matters. But I do think, for me, I have now purchased two years worth, now that I've been doing this for a couple years with you, I do find that the nice ones are more fun to use. There's something about, if it's gonna be on your desk all day, why not have it look nice? And it'll take any pen, any pencil.

And I also like the ability that you write. The way you've set the line spacing, I think, for I also like the ability that, you know, you write the way you set the line spacing, I think for 10 tasks on a day. I don't have it. Yeah. Yeah, there's 10 lines. And then on the back, you've got a very slight dot grid. So I find that during the day, I may flip one over and take some notes on a phone call

or whatever. It's just a very good system. And it sits on your desk. I do find that having a analog list of the things you're gonna do as opposed to a widget or something, because I have a big boy task manager app I use, but just kind of at the end of the line, putting it on paper does help me and I like the product.

Thanks, yeah, it's good to hear that you're still using them after all these years. and getting it on paper does help me, and I like the product. Thanks, yeah, it's good to hear that you're still using them after all these years. It means a lot that it would stick with both you and Mike. I think there's a couple things there that you hit on that are why analog has really stuck with people, and one is because it's beautiful and it looks nice and you want to leave it out.

So we do things that are in front of us, or what's in front of us is what's gonna get done, is a pretty basic elementary principle around productivity and habit building. But if I was to put this in a notebook or if I was to put this in something that's not attractive, I'm gonna throw it in a drawer and it's not gonna get dealt with.

Posted notes are great, they're great for a lot of things, but they're not great when they're stuck all over your monitor and they're falling off and you open the window and they all go everywhere. The analog is meant to do one thing and do one thing really, really well. So that's, I think, some of the reasons and what I've heard from the feedback is like,

people like having this single task object on their desk. They don't use it for anything except for the task management. There's post-it notes, there's journaling, that's with journals, which are great. There's digital task managers, which are also super helpful and I still use. But this is designed for one simple thing. And I think just the simplicity of it is one of the stickiest factors of it. And the fact that it's that it's a quality product means that people want to continue to use it,

which I think is, you know, maybe a couple years ago I wouldn't have thought that that was that big a deal, but recently read Ali Abdel's Feel Good Productivity and it has a question in there, like, what would this look like if it were fun? And I feel like that's kind of what a quality product does even if there's something as simple as a note card is it it makes it fun to engage with your task list and we can get into the design and the constraints and all that kind of stuff but I think that's the thing that really resonates with the people that I've seen use it and I sent

you a email we were preparing for this show, Jeff, about how we had gifted these when I was at the previous day job to a team of digital growth marketers. I mean, you can't get more digital than these people. And we got these for the whole team because we were trying to create this culture, which was, you know, the computer is great. That's what we use to create and do the actual which was, you know, the computer is great. That's what we use to create and do the actual work, but that's not the place we want you to be getting your task list from.

And as much as you say, like, don't watch Slack and you've got time to respond to messages, it's just kind of ingrained. So we needed something that kind of like pushed our values of, you know, focus and deep work in a specific direction. I was like, well, I've used this for years. I think this would do the job. When we gave it to people at first, they were kind of like, huh, what is this?

But I can tell you like after probably six to eight months, I think everyone on the team continued to use it. And the more that they used it, the more that they loved it. And it was the fact that it was a nice object that they enjoyed using and it forced them into a different mode where on the computer everything was so reactionary. This just creates by using it because it's analog and there are no other distractions. This sort of sense of calm when you're engaging with the things on your task list, which is not the norm. Yeah, I love hearing that. I think that's a great story and kind of case study on how analog is not replacing people's digital workflows, because I bet if I surveyed people how they use analog, I bet it's 90 plus percent

of people are using it alongside a digital tool or a task manager or Slack or email. But it's almost like a, it's more of a focused tool than it is a actual project manager, right? Because it's extracting those important things, the few important things that you need to get done that day. And that might involve checking your, your project management software, checking your email inbox, checking your calendar.

But then once you check those and you transfer them onto an analog card, that's when the work is actually going to get done and having those things in front of you is the same way that people have been using sticky notes and journals and just the back of an envelope for many years, but it's interesting to see how many people that are primarily doing digital work really, really enjoy the analog system alongside it. Yeah, I call it like last mile analog. You just get for that last bit,

you put it on the analog tool. An interesting thing with these cards is they disappear because like I have a drawer, because I buy every year I get, you know you have a 12 pack on your website. So I just get the 12 months at once. And I notice that my cards for the year, I didn't have enough.

And it turns out my wife has been taking taxes too. So I think I'm gonna be putting a new order. But you also have an accompanying product. I wanna get into how we're using these in more detail. And this really isn't meant to be a commercial for analog if it sounds like it. Honestly, just go get yourself some cards at the cheapest dime store you can find.

I think Jeff would agree. We all just want you to consider this kind of last mile idea and then you can make your own decision about how you use them. Yeah. Well, I have a confession I can make here then that I don't actually use the analog cards. And I have the analog holder, but I'm sorry, Jeff, your cards are just not quite fountain pen friendly enough for me. So I ordered these like special ones from France that are from, uh, Claire Fontaine, I think is the company, but I use it the same way.

I make the list, I prop it up on my desk and you know, it's for, it's the forced mode switch. So yeah, you're absolutely right, David. You can use this with, uh, with other, other things. It's the standard regular note card size. So bring your own note cards. I was trying to tell people they can get them less expensive and Mike goes and gets them from France. So I'm expecting. Very extensive fountain pen. Yeah, we're actually working on a fountain pen friendly version because we've had a lot of people that are very passionate in the fountain pen community. So we are actually investigating that. So maybe we'll get you to switch.

But yeah, I mean, I think the point remains the same. The principles behind the analog system and getting things done and writing things down in an analog format can be done with literally any type of physical paper that's sitting in front of you. Yeah, and this last mile focus really, I think is something that you should give some consideration to.

Because the reason I tried is something that you should give some consideration to. The reason I tried it was because you sent me a box of cards at some point and said, hey, I'm trying this new thing out. Maybe you want to check it out. I was skeptical. And then I was within a few weeks I was sold. Because my first thought was, oh, this is going to take too much time. I have my task manager, everything's on the screen, but it takes like one or two minutes to fill out a card and having it in front of me all day is really beneficial. But I wanna get into, you guys keep sidetracking me. What I wanna talk about is there's an accompanying product

you now make that you hadn't made the last time you were on the show, and that is these, I don't know what the official name is, but it's the Analog Weekly cards. Is that what you call them? Yep, yeah, just Analog Weekly. Yeah, so explain that. Yeah, so I think in the productivity world,

we all know that just getting things done in any, just to get things done is not gonna move the ball, it's not gonna move the needle, because you can just be checking things off that are not important. So I also see the analog card as a zoomed in daily focus tool but it's really important to be able to zoom out you know from that 10 foot view to the thousand foot view to the 10,000 foot view to make sure that you're targeting what you want to actually achieve and what those goals are. So in

the background I've been designing and building a system that does that. The first thing that I've launched to compliment the daily analog are these analog weekly cards. And you might be thinking like I have a calendar, I don't need to write down my appointments on a physical card in front of me. But what I found was the similar to the analog daily cards,

having a week view, so it's literally, it's this longer format card, sits in a wood holder, there's 52 cards for the 52 weeks of the year. And what I do at the beginning of every week is I do open my digital calendar and I copy down all of the important meetings, notifications, recording this podcast is on there, pick up the kids from school, go to soccer practice,

whatever it is, and having this week view where I can only see seven days at a time and it's always there in front of me has been actually really calming to me because when I look at my digital calendar, it's just a bunch of colored dots and there's notifications and invites and so many things. So kind of taking it up one level from the analog daily

is this analog weekly view that can work with with the daily cards or just as a standalone week at a glance kind of idea. And it's taken off and it seems so simple, it seems so obvious and people are like, wow, this is like, you know, I could do this with anything. But the point is it is a beautiful object that's meant to be on your counter, on your desk,

and you want to interact with it. And it's fun to fill out that process for the week. So that's the next iteration of analog. And then I have other things that I'm working on that go beyond that, but that's kind of how those two work together. I think the weekly planning piece is something that is easily overlooked.

I know I overlooked it for a long time because I had a general idea of what I wanted to do for the quarter and then I would create the time block plan for the day. But having the weekly plan kind of allows the daily plans allows the daily plans to, I won't say be more accurate, but it feels different when you go about your day to day knowing that the things on your daily plan fit into this larger scope. And that's not to say that the weekly plan is as detailed or as specific.

It's one of the things I like about the cards that you've got is, you know, you got a whole week on this, this card. You can't time block every single day of your week. And that's kind of the point. It's just figuring out, you know, on Thursday afternoon, this is the big thing that's going to happen there. And I feel like when you look at the week, it kind of helps center you in terms of what you're going to try and actually get done in any given day.

Without that, you've got your list that your task manager is giving you, maybe, and the temptation is just to throw a bunch of things on there because I got to win the day. I got to just really crush it. But you do that long enough and then you get burnt out and then you have a day where you can't do anything. But when you have that weak view, I think it kind of stabilizes things. It prevents you from trying to bite off more than you can chew. Is that the intended effect? Yeah, that's exactly kind of where I see it fitting. Now people might be using it in different ways than that.

But it's not meant to be a task list because I think if it was a weekly task list, the cards need to be bigger in physical size. But the ability to be able to just quickly glance at this week gives me the sense of rhythm and flow and hey, I'm looking at Thursday and I know that's a wide open day. I'm gonna use that for deep work or Friday looks really busy.

So you're kind of getting this like sense of the flow of each week without being overwhelmed by the next 30, 60, 90 days worth of flow because we can't really do anything about what's 90 days from now. So it's not worth stressing out about that. But having a sense of those things in front of me has been really helpful. And honestly, I think that's why people like it because it's just always there i glance at this thing. Probably a hundred times a day like my analog cards i'm constantly glancing at out of the corner of my eye. I'm on a phone call and i need to schedule an appointment it's like i don't open my digital calendar i'm just looking and saying oh when say afternoons free but i'll write it down on the card. I'm just looking and saying, oh, Wednesday afternoon is free. I'll write it down on the card.

And there is some repetition there where you're copying things down twice and you're putting it into a digital calendar and you're putting it there. But seeing a week at a glance has been an interesting experiment because I used to just go full digital for everything longer term and then analog for the daily. But it's not meant to necessarily replace the other tools. It is a, again, a zoomed out or a, a priority and a focused tool, prioritization and a focus tool more than it is like, I'm going to carry this

thing around with me everywhere in my pocket. I'll just give a plus one to that. I keep the weekly card on my desk all week and I can't get over how often I look at it because like you said, you're on the phone or even just someone emails you and says, can we get on the phone tomorrow at 10? I know immediately and I know I've got a calendar on my computer but there's something about just having it

always in front of my face that helps me make sure I don't miss appointments. Also I find the process of filling it out very helpful. I fill them out on Sundays and it just kind of gets me ready for the flow of the week and good product. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Vitaly. Customer success teams today are facing a problem. How do they connect customer data back to their work?

Vitaly changes that. It's a new kind of customer success platform, an all-in-one collaborative workspace that combines your customer data with all the capabilities that you expect from today's project management and work platforms. Because it's designed for today's customer success team, which is why Vitally operates with unparalleled efficiency,

improves net revenue retention, and delivers best-in-class customer experiences. It's the solution to helping your customer success team keep a better pulse on your customers, which maximizes productivity, visibility, and collaboration. You can boost your bottom line by driving more revenue per customer with Vitality. And if you take a qualified demo of Vitality,

you can get a free pair of AirPods Pro. So if you're a customer success decision maker actively seeking CS solutions, working at a B2B software as a service company with 50 to 1000 employees, and you're willing to explore changing customer success platforms if you already have one in place, schedule your call now by visiting vitally.io slash focused F-O-C-U-S-E-D and get that free pair of AirPods Pro. That's vitally, V-I-T-A-L-L-Y dot I-O slash focused to get a free pair of AirPods Pro when you schedule a qualified meeting.

Our thanks to Vitally for their support of the Focus Podcast and all of Relay FM. All right, so let's kind of get into whatever systems we're using. I mean, I think one of the big themes of today is incorporating analog as part of your focus practice. All three of us have some degree of it that we're using and I thought it'd be fun to just kind of talk through that.

So Jeff, now that you're the maker of this thing, but how do you use it? And where do you find the balance between analog and digital tools? Yeah, so I use both the analog daily and weekly every day. I mean, ultimately that's why I designed it because I wanted it to exist. And I honestly, there are days where sometimes

I will get into the office and maybe I'm running late and I wanna just jump in and I open my inbox and like I have to stop myself and say, like literally close down my email and fill out my analog card first because as soon as that inbox is open or as soon as I start to open a tab and a YouTube video that was left up in a tab

from the week before or something like that, my day is gone. So I try to make it, the very first thing I do is write down my up to 10 tasks on my daily card. Many times it's really only three or four because I've found that 10 is actually really hard to get to, depending on the size of the task. But I'll fill out that card, I'll put my appointments on the bottom. So I know that if I have, let's say, three meetings or three calls that day,

three of those lines are already taken up because those meetings are gonna take up that time. I also reference my next and the someday cards. So there's three types of cards today, next and someday. And I will reference those other cards at the beginning of the week usually, and figure out what I wanna transfer, what I wanna push towards the front onto my today card. And it's a simple task, it's enjoyable,

it's fun to write down, there's a little bit of gamification there of trying to conquer those tasks and what you put on there and filling in the little bullets or crossing off those tasks that are accomplished. And then I will fill out my weekly card in the morning as well for the week or sometimes I'll do it on Sunday night as well. And that's how I start my day.

So that's how I'm using that. I'm trying to be proactive and be on the offense with analog as opposed to just reacting through my inbox and through everything else that's flying at me through Slack and all those things. Um, and then as far as digital task management goes, I've tried everything and honest, if I'm honest, I have not found something that I've stuck with very long. The thing that I go back to over and over

is the simplest version of task management, which is Dropbox Paper, which is essentially just a long checklist of items and some line breaks and some headers, but it's a kind of a running list and can feel pretty overwhelming, but it's an easy place to get everything in. There's no projects and multiple file layers of folders and where do I put things?

I've tried Notion, I've tried Asana, I've tried pretty much everything. And this just kind of goes back to my working style and the way that I have found is most effective for me. But right now, that's what I've been using and I reference those analog cards pretty much all day, every day. And it's been interesting to run an entire business

based off of that. I mean, the way you built the system, you could run it entirely off the cards because you could, I think it just kind of depends on the load and implementation. Like my wife takes them, I think what she does, she has a lot of projects for her work.

She's in a planning role where she works, so she has to do a lot of various projects. And from what I can tell, she makes a card per project. And then she just kind of, she likes having the cards. And I think that, like, depending on what your task load is, I think you could probably get away without a software. But I'm very much a software guy, you know? And I like to think of the, you know,

the software is kind of like the bank of tasks and then the card is the stuff that actually gonna get done. In fact, I noticed that now you're selling them where you can just get the daily cards if you want and you don't want the extra future planning cards and I think that's probably a smart idea. Yeah, I should mention one other thing

and I think Mike, you're probably gonna mention the same thing, but I use my iPhone and my iPad wherever I'm at for capturing tasks when I'm on the go. I don't always have a card in my back pocket if I'm running around with the kids in the backyard kicking a soccer ball. I'm not gonna pull out a pen, especially not a fountain pen, and write those things down.

So I use the Do app on my phone, which is essentially a reminders app that just keeps nagging you and nagging you and nagging you to get something done. And when I put something into the do app, the goal is I actually cross that off. I, I rem or complete that do app task while I write it onto an analog card. So it has to, all of these things that have to get done, have to make their way onto an analog card.

And I'm using these digital tools for capturing because I think that's actually a better way of capturing something or telling Siri to capture something while you're driving than physically pulling out an analog card. And I think digital really plays a big part in the capturing process. 100% agree. David, do you want to talk through your workflow? Sure. Mine is, I've been kind of teasing it throughout the show,

but for me, the task system is actually on the focus. I'm a big fan of the app. I've been using it for 15 years. That's why I didn't think I needed these cards when you first sent them to me, Jeff. And it's got like widgets, and it's got ways to display stuff on the screen, but you know, there's also other stuff on my screen.

And so I begrudgingly tried these cards and became a fan two years ago. Now I use them every day. And so what I do is I pick the tasks that need to get done that day. I also kind of work with them. Like there's a lot of repeating tasks in my life. And a lot of the stuff I do is block-based,

where like, I want to spend a block of time, like every Wednesday doing something for the Max RecuLabs, I make content and stuff. So like, at the beginning of the month, I will lay out a month's worth of cards on my desk and date them all. And like the repeating stuff, I just write down then. So I have cards filled out.

Like we're recording this on May the 7th. I've got cards filled out for the rest of May. And so for little things, I do find that sometimes they never get into OmniFocus. I'll just go ahead and write them down. Like one of the things I'll do is I want to send Jeff a thank you note once the show publishes. Well I just put it down on the card for the day

that the show publishes and then that one never made it into the digital system because as far as I'm concerned the cards are the end of the line, so if I can just put something on the card, to a certain extent I do avoid the digital system for some things, but honestly, a lot of my project planning stuff is more complicated and I do need a digital system for them. So I've got this balance between them.

And it was interesting because I've tried a bunch of experiments since I did this. You kind of opened my eyes to the idea of this last mile productivity. So I went down the rabbit hole. Like at the end of the year last year, I looked seriously at bullet journaling. Like, should I be doing that?

But the problem was with a bullet journal, you start each day fresh and you just start out wherever you left off. And for task management, I don't know when, you know, let's just for example, the day that the show publishes is two weeks from today. I don't know when that's gonna be in my bullet journal. So I can't write that down ahead of time.

You know, I've gotta wait or I've gotta have the system. And it felt to me just too much. Whereas the cards, I know exactly the location I can write down the task that I'm gonna do on the 21st of May. So I can just go and write it down any time I want. So it's not as flexible as a bullet journal, but in some ways it's more flexible

because it gives me the ability to feature plan. So that's how I use it. It's a mix of the digital plus the analog, and some stuff goes only on the analog, if that makes sense. Now, the weekly card, I already explained, but I fill that out every Sunday, and I keep it up to date. I do all this stuff with a number two pencil,

and that was an evolution for me. I used to do it in pen when I first started buying them. But, you know, stuff kind of moves around and changes, and I find pencil kind of really useful for that, especially on the weekly card. You know, as things kind of move around during the week, I'll just erase it and fix it if something changes. So pencil is actually a pretty good tool for this stuff,

which is why I don't need to write to France to buy my cards because I just use the pencil. But it's interesting to me because there's a side kind of related item to me is just journaling in general. Like this gets you wondering, well, should I be doing more analog journaling? And this is something I constantly struggle with because I do like the idea of writing a book.

I think it can be more meaningful when you sit down and write it. Going slow for journaling could probably be better. But I've got over 10 years of data in day one and I'm very fast at it and I put long entries in day one because I dictate them. And to be honest with you, the jury's still out for me. I don't know if I'm going to switch to be primarily

an analog or a digital journaler and I'm kind of in the middle ground right now. But these cards, they just kind of work for me. It's interesting because everything else I do is pretty much digital. All my planning, all my idea development, mind mapping, I've moved to digital tools for almost everything.

But this last mile of productivity and the existence of these cards on my desk is definitely a part of my day and helps me get my work done. Yeah, I love hearing how you guys are using it. It's interesting to hear how it fits into different workflows and it's not necessarily the prescribed workflow that I use personally, but the ability to kind of use

them in different ways. Even the idea of projects, sometimes I'll take a card, it might be a next card or a someday card, and I'll just call it project A and I'll just list out all the things. Sometimes it's three or four of those cards because the project is pretty in-depth. And I love having like this stack of physical tasks that I need to accomplish before I can launch the product. And just if there's something tangible about that. Yeah, I do the same thing with my Max Markey Field Guides. As I approach the end of the release of them, I usually give them a card. And because just little stuff comes up and it's faster to just write it down. I'm sitting at my desk and just kind of work through it that way. But the development, planning, and all the kind of

task management up to that point is all digital because there's often links associated, and there's all kinds of other stuff going on. And another thing I didn't mention is I have a person I work with now. And so we have a lot of our team projects in Notion that have some of their own lists associated with them. But to me, the things I'm gonna do today

are the things that get written down on the card, whether they come from my task manager or from the Notion database. This is kind of like the final resting place. And it feels very satisfying to get to the end of the day and look and see them all checked off. The other thing I've done which has kind of evolved is when I first got these cards,

I would only put tasks on them, but over time I've kind of evolved to putting the events of the day too, like the podcast recording or the meeting or whatever because that's often such a big part of the day that I kind of like having it there and it just gives me another way to see what's coming up and be more realistic with my planning for the day. One more thing I wanted to mention that we've touched on

or I've kind of said is the repetition or the, it feels redundant and part of the redundancy is what makes me actually get the work done. And by that, I mean, if there are tasks that are not completed, I did not get to fill in that little bullet at the end of the day. What I do for the next day is I immediately transfer those to the card for the upcoming day. And I've had tasks on there that I've had to write and rewrite 10, 15 times, and then I have to face it and I have to say, why am I not getting this done? Like, does it need to get done? Is it important or do I just need to do the thing? And I think that part, even though it sounds backwards,

like do I really need to remind myself and rewrite this task? That has helped me to accomplish the things that I really don't wanna do. And the physical copying over is so much more friction than digitally it just staying in your notes app. Cause I can ignore my notes app all day long. Like I've got stuff in my notes app that I will never touch,

but I, you know, I was supposed to do something two years ago, but physically copying it over and writing that down, that act of writing it down forces you to think about it and really like tackle it. Yeah. Friction can be a feature and not a bug, right? And I think that is the attraction for bringing an analog element into your system. I guess another clarification I make on my system

is sometimes the card is not the task, but a pointer to a bigger list of tasks. Like I've got one here today called customer support. Well, in OmniFocus, I've got 10 or so flagged emails that I wanted to reply to customers on, and that app is perfect for it because it saves the link to the email and it makes it very easy to send those responses, but I'm not going to write those 10 emails down on a card. But I'll just say customer support, and then I'll know, okay, I'm gonna spend about an hour

and go through those 10 emails and get those knocked out today. And so there is a lot of overlap with the digital systems for me, but it sounds complicated, but it's not, and it is actually, I feel like, less stressful, because I just know the things on the card are the things I'm gonna do.

Yeah, one of the things that you mentioned, Jeff, was the prescriptive nature of the analog cards. And I feel like that's important at the beginning because people need something to grab onto. But then I think the longer you work with a system, the more you recognize the little points where this doesn't really click for me, and you have to make it your own.

So that is definitely what I have done with my workflow. I like to use the computer as the brain, but analog as the list, and the differentiation there is, I can dump things into the big bank of tasks, that's what task managers are good at based on the appropriate metadata. They can surface a bunch of things that I should think about doing, but it's a terrible idea to just use that as your list for the day. So basically I look at that stuff and I say, okay, thank you for your recommendations.

These are the things that I'm actually going to do today. And then I figure out when I'm going to do those. The computer part of this has kind of changed over time for me. I've got a link in the notes here for my Obsidian based dashboard. I call it essentially what I do is I dump everything into obsidian into one single note. That's where all the tasks live. And then based on the due dates and the tags, things like that, I can have those tasks show up in the appropriate list. And I have these all these different lists laid on in this canvas. So I can look at this at the beginning and at the end of the day,

just kind of glance at that and see if I'm making progress on things. But then that's just at the beginning and the end of the day, I'm not looking at this during the day when I'm making my plan for the day. I'm actually doing that in another UG monk product, the heirloom journal, which is kind of like this a five size notebook ish. Is that, is that correct? Okay. Yeah. So it's not like the big eight and a half by 11. It's the smaller size, which I really like.

It's a disk bound system. So again, I buy my own fancy paper and I punch it so I can use it in this notebook. But then I time block from seven a.m. until nine p.m. on the left side of the page. And then I'll I'll create checkboxes on the right side of the page for usually three, no more than five things. I'm going to try to get done during that day. I make sure that those things are plotted in the time block plan, but that's the plan. And then when I sit down at my desk, I will transfer those tasks that I've identified to the note card, which is propped up on the UGMUNC analog. If I don't go to my office,

if I go to a core working space or something like that, I may not have those cards with me, but I will always have that notebook with me. So I have the notebook with the actual plan, the task get transferred to the card, and then at that point it allows me to not think about the actual going back to the computer to find out what is it that I should be doing. When I'm thinking about what's next, I'm looking at something that's in a totally different medium, which I find helpful. The weekly planning, I actually do that in Obsidian as well. I've got a YouTube video which I'll link to for people who are interested in this. But basically what I've done is I've taken, uh, Cal Newport's idea of like multi-scale planning and implemented that digitally.

So I've got a weekly plan in obsidian, which brings in the tasks for the week. But then also I forced myself to say, you know, these are the five to six things I'm going to try to get done this week. And then I also fill in a prompt, you know, this week is successful if, and then I jot down a couple of bullets there. And I'll use that when I'm doing my daily plan. I'll look at that to make sure that I'm still on track. But the actual, you know, the daily stuff all happens analog for me. And then David was talking about the digitaling. I am all in with a digital journal. I don't know why, you know, that in particular,

you know, I get the fancy feels when you're using a fountain pen on a nice paper, but I like using that data from the journaling that I do, even just like the journal entries, the gratitude entries. I like using that as part of my personal retreat process. So having that digitally and using the daily notes and obsidian that allows me to bring that stuff back in specific ways quarterly when I do those those personal retreats and it's easy for me to review those entries. I do this crazy like daily question style journaling where I'm not jotting down this is what I did but I'm basing my intentions so did I do my best to and then I've got several

prompts that I answer and then I give myself a score so as part of like the the review process I can look at those scores and I can see you know the the friend's bucket is a little bit low, so we're going to try and move the needle there over the next 90 days. And then for the nagging reminders, I use Do, like you mentioned, Jeff. That's just the perfect app for that kind of stuff. However, there's a difference here for how I capture tasks. You know, having everything in Obsidian, that's not a great place to just like capture whatever happens to be at the top of your head. So I actually use drafts for that,

but I've interjected space between when I capture things and when they get added to my task management system, which means a lot less of those things that I'm convinced in the moment that I should do actually make it over. I go through the drafts inbox maybe about once a week and transfer over the things that really should be there and I find that the vast majority of the stuff that I capture seems brilliant or I should totally do this in the moment and then once I get some space

I'm like, ah, that's not that important. So it actually helps build in a little bit of a little bit of buffer for me. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business Review is the leading destination for smart management thinking. These folks are widely known as the leaders in business leadership information, and they have a lot of sources. Most people know about their flagship magazine, but they also have their website hbr.org and a podcast, so you'll have interesting articles for your downtime and a podcast to get you ready for work during your commute.

And you'll learn practical advice that you need on the stuff that actually matters in business. Think leadership, management, and strategy. And get actionable tips that you can actually implement. You can expect transformative content like business communication, the art of setting expectations as a project manager, or decision-making and problem solving, leaders framework for decision-making, and hiring, retention, and recruitment. Stop eliminating

perfectly good candidates by asking them the wrong questions. This is the kind of stuff that was really helpful for me when I was an integrator at the day job where I literally had to revamp our entire hiring process. Harvard Business Review was one of the resources that I went to to find good information, stuff that didn't just sound good, but was actually helpful. It was so helpful, in fact, that I continued to subscribe to Harvard Business Review myself,

even though I've left the day job almost a year ago. But it's not just stuff that's useful to big teams and large organizations. For example, one of the articles I really enjoyed recently is Your Career Doesn't Need to Have a Purpose by Steven Friedman, which advocates for instead of having a single defined purpose for your career, to seek out work that is meaningful. It's very much in line with a lot of the stuff that I've been reading by Cal Newport recently. So it doesn't really matter if you're a C-level employee of a big organization or you're a

solopreneur like myself. If you are interested in boosting your business knowledge and understanding how business works, then you should check out Harvard Business Review. And because HBR produces dozens of explainer videos, case study discussions, and whiteboard sessions featuring ideas and practical advice for leaders, you can find anything to meet your personal taste or style. These videos, for example, provide the opportunity for insight from a variety of perspectives along with real world tools and solutions for better managing your team and business.

Plus, they have a number of leading business podcasts. While much of the Harvard Business Review's content is available for free after sending up on their site, subscriptions to unlimited content start at only $10 a month and I highly recommend it. So go to hbr.org slash subscriptions and enter the promo code FOCUSD, F-O-C-U-S-E-D right now and you'll get 10% off your subscription. Again, to save 10% off your HBR subscription, go to hbr.org slash subscriptions and enter the promo code FOCUSED. Our thanks to Harvard Business Review for their support of the FOCUSED podcast

and all of Relay FM. Jeff, one of the things I get from following you and I read your newsletter, which is really good, is you do have kind of a whole idea about physical spaces. I mean, it shows in the products you're developing, even just today recording with you, we had your camera on, it's like such a nice space that you work in.

Why is that important? I think it's probably one of the most overlooked things, honestly, is our physical environment and how it impacts the way we do our work and how we work and how we feel. We've all done work in less than ideal environments and some of us may have to go into an office setting that doesn't have the most aesthetic setup. There's no windows and you're kind of stuck where you are. But I do think there are small improvements you can make to your setup to make it more enjoyable, to make it feel better. And when we feel good, we're going to do better work.

We feel energized. We don't feel so much friction of, of trying to, you know, working off a tiny screen and dimly lit room with a keyboard that doesn't have functioning keys. Versus when you slide into the chair, your office chair, which is at the right height and your desk is perfectly laid out and your phone is being charged and your analog card is there. It's like sliding into your cockpit essentially.

And when you were to sit down at someone else's desk, it would always feel off. You'd be like, wow, their monitor is way too low or where's the pen? Why is the keyboard? Why do they have to use this type of keyboard? But when you create this space that you want to be in, you wanna get work done and you wanna do good work

and you don't think about, oh, my back hurts right now because this chair is off or you don't have to look for things. And I think our environments, including the, it doesn't have to be a home office, include it could be a coffee shop, it could be a coworking space, it could be a separate room in your house. I just think there's something to the mindset of wanting to be there and feeling good

about wanting to do the work that ends up being better because of that. And I've designed spaces that are simple. I have a small office within our big warehouse where we ship all of our products and designed that and kind of curated that to be something that's comfortable to do work in. And then I have my home office, which is what you saw on the camera there. Again, trying to make these zones that just feel, they feel almost productive

or they feel like something I'm gravitating towards versus looking at other spaces, like the other half of this room that you didn't see on the camera that is just full of junk and there's stuff everywhere. It would be really hard to get work done on the other half of this room that you didn't see on the camera that is just full of junk and there's stuff everywhere. It would be really hard to get work done on the other half of the room where we kind of put all of the extra stuff in the storage that doesn't find its way to somewhere else. And one side note is I think people see my desk or they see the gather system, they see

pictures on Instagram and they think, well that's great for Jeff, like he must be a neat freak. He's so OCD, he's got everything perfectly aligned. And that really couldn't be further from the truth because my house is not clutter free, my desk is not clutter free, but I'm using the structure of the gather system and analog to help me organize what I need on my desk

and then put everything away when I'm leaving work for the day. And that kind of ritual or process of having everything in its place just makes the next day, the next morning so much more enjoyable than coming back to a desk that's just full of stuff and I can't find anything that I had from the day before. So I think people sometimes get a little bit turned off from the idea of being a neat freak and super organized, which I'm actually not. But the flip side is I think you can do small improvements to your workspace in your work environment that will have a huge impact on the way you feel when you're doing your work. Do you have any examples you'd be willing to share about how certain design elements

of maybe the gather system or the way that you have set up your office actually helps you facilitate those routines when it's when you get there and you start to do the work and then also the shutdown routines where you leave the work in the office yeah I mean I don't want this to sound like one big ad for gather but this is literally why I designed the gather desk system is because without that, I consider it like the backbone or the skeleton of my desk. And without a skeleton,

you end up with just a bunch of floppy limbs flailing around and things gets all garbled up. The gather system gives me those places for all of the things to return to. It's like parking spots for having all of my stuff. So when I sit down at my desk, I automatically take my phone out of my pocket and I stick it right to the MagSafe.

It's charging, it's in front of me. I don't have to look for any pens because the three pens that I'm using are always in the pen tray right in front of me. All of the papers could slide into the tray underneath the monitor stand. The monitor's at the right height so I don't have to think about adjusting anything.

And I know it sounds like, well yeah, we all create our ergonomic setups and we all have a way to do this. But I know as soon as I take that gather system off my desk, and I've done this actually for shooting photos for our site, my desk just goes to chaos. And it's all of the same things that were on my desk,

but they all just end up all over the place. So I think there's something to be said about having that skeleton, having a structure, whether it's a gather system or it's anything. I mean, you can buy cheaper versions of things online. That really may, it makes a huge difference in the sense of like how much work it is to keep my desk, to maintain the organized desk. Yeah. That's the thing I want to I wanna double click on for people

is that it's not just this minimalist aesthetic, it's that every piece of the environment supports the work. It's intentional. You know what everything is for. And I think you can apply that digitally too in terms of the apps and services that you may choose to use. I'm kind of reminded of that saying everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. If you have to have some complexity, if you have to use multiple task

managers because you work with multiple teams, there's nothing wrong with that. It's when you add the unnecessary complexity and your brain doesn't really know where things go that it starts to feel stressful. It kind of clicks into that emergency scan modality David Allen talks about. It's kind of scanning the horizon for where's the next important thing going to come from. Yeah. I mean, imagine having a kitchen and the drawer, just one big drawer where all of the silverware and cooking tools just get dumped into and there's no organization. It's just one big bucket. All of the same things are there.

But when you're trying to find a fork, it's really annoying. And you can still find the fork and you can still get it if you dig down deep enough. But you've wasted several minutes of time looking for that thing versus when you have a little silverware organizer where you have each thing, the forks, the knives, the spoons, it takes the friction out of that and you can almost do it without looking. For me, that's what creating your own environment

in your ideal environment, and that's what Gather has done for me, is taking all of that friction and thinking out of it. And I don't have to dig through that drawer. And don't get me wrong. I have junk drawers in my house and I have junk drawers in my office where stuff goes to die. And I have, uh, you know, old papers and pens that I don't use and all that stuff.

But the things that are physically in front of me all have a spot. And that, that has been, uh, it seems like a small, like life improvement, but it definitely makes a huge difference. Um, for anyone that knows the feeling of finally taking ownership of their workspace. And I'd argue this goes beyond your desk. Listeners of the show know I'm a huge fan of the Annie Murphy-Paul Extended Mindbook.

And a big section of it talked about creating a workspace where you're comfortable in and how much more effective you can be. And I took it to heart. I spent a bunch of money and built a room on my house creating a workspace where you're comfortable in and how much more effective you can be. And I took it to heart. I spent a bunch of money and built a room on my house just to be my workspace. And now that I've been in it a year,

it's my happy place. I go in there, my mind settles, and I'm able to do good quality work. And I know that's not always possible. There've been times in my life where that's not possible. Stuck in an office in a big law firm where this is the room you get. But still, if you can find ways to make it your own space,

there are real benefits to it. For sure, I was gonna add one other side note to that. Getting outside and doing work can often be tricky when you're on a laptop or you're trying to work off an iPad and you can't really see the screen. And I've tried to do that and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I guess it depends on what part of the country you live in and how sunny it is. But one of the things I've been doing recently is just going out with my journal and a pen and nothing else and trying to force my brain into a different mode

or it forces my brain into a different mode because I can't check anything. I have nothing, no screen in front of me. So just sitting in the sunshine, it can be 15 minutes and writing, just the process of writing, brain dumping. Like I'll brain dump every single thought that comes across my mind, even if it's somewhere else already captured.

And I find like even just that, that the stepping away from a screen for a minute and then coming back to the screen once I've cleared my head has been really effective too. And also just finding different places to do different things. You find yourself ever doing like contextual work, like I only do design work at my home system and you know, this other type of work at the other system. And I think sometimes that's a good way

of thinking about it where I will go to a coffee shop, I will bring my iPad which is small and not great for doing design work, and I will only do writing, so I will write my newsletter there. And I find that just being in a physical space and not having access to everything, or in a physical space and not having access to everything or a different physical space and not having access has actually been helpful to get

different types of work done. What other things have you done with your physical space? Like you mentioned chairs, you know, what are the non desk related elements that you've paid attention to in terms of crafting a physical space where it's easy for you to do your work. If at all possible, I have natural light. I think having window light for me and just being able to glance outside is really nice. I know, again, not everybody has that option. My office is built in a bedroom in our house, so that's not necessarily like a fancy outdoor separate standalone shed unit. Although someday I hope to build one of those really cool backyard offices that can be a separate physical structure because I like the separation of that. Aside from the tools that I sell,

I think having a really good desk chair is important. And I can't really prescribe what the best desk chair is because that's like telling somebody what kind of mattress to buy, where they're gonna say, you know, they like certain things, like a certain firmness. Um, but I can say that the desk or the chair that I'm using is a Herman Miller Aeron chair, which you can find, uh, all over, um, Facebook marketplace

and things like that use where you can buy it new. The main thing that I realized about having, uh, about that chair specifically is that it comes in different sizes. And I remember sitting in one probably 10 years ago and thinking, why do people like this chair? This thing is not comfortable at all. And it wasn't until I was in the Herman Miller store up in New York and the lady said,

you're sitting in the wrong size chair, you're gonna need a larger size because of how tall I am. I sat in the different size and I was like, wow, this is completely different. Similar to fitting a bike frame, like if you've ever tried to ride a bicycle with the wrong size frame, it's just like it doesn't feel right. So having the right size chair and the right chair where you're not thinking about the chair when you're sitting in it, I think is a crucial part of the space. I'm trying to think of what else without... I don't want

to be too self-promoting with the things that we sell, but everything that we do sell is kind of adding those elements to a space, the non-digital clocks, the analog with the sweeping hand on it with no ticking. And then having, I have a little three drawer cabinet where all of the junk does grow to go that I need to get off my desk and it doesn't have a spot.

And it's nice to have somewhere to tuck some things away. So having some closed storage where not everything needs to be out all the time has been helpful to. You have now grown. You guys have a team, right? Yes. Yeah, there's three of us full time and, uh, and then I have four part-time people as well. So how does all of this system work with employees and coworkers?

You know, that's interesting because for me, going back to the analog system and the way that I've been doing task management and project management, it's always been about managing my own work. Um, the collaborative nature of it has always been a struggle. And I think that the problem there with collaborating with a team is that everyone has to buy into the system that you're going to use. So we've tried different things like Asana, um, and Trello and countless other ones. But if you, if you only have a part of the team that's buying into using that and updating it, it doesn't work well.

Because we are an in-person company, so I'm in the office most days with my employees, we will do in-person meetings and be able to walk through and take our own analog cards or our paper list or our Dropbox paper list or wherever we're keeping things and kind of review them. But I would say that's probably an area where we struggle is trying to find how does this translate into Teams. But I will say that my employees are using analog

and they've actually, they've been skeptical at first and then each person has found a different way of using it that they found helpful to manage their work and the type of work they do because they don't all do creative work. So we've been experimenting with some different things but I don't think we've found the system for team collaboration that is clicked

beyond just those in-person meetings and the analog system. My team is small enough that we just kind of, everybody does their own thing. And we do have a central depository, but everybody, you know, we don't look at each other's lists, if that makes sense. Yeah, one of the struggles with coordinating a bunch of people on a team is that everyone wants to live the async life, but it requires

a lot of alignment and the regular meetings that you're talking about. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes I've seen people make. And with my experience at the day job, it is like, well, if we just find the right tool and we put all the things we need to do in there, then the right tool will click with everyone on the team and everyone will just completely be self sufficient and get all their work done without any friction whatsoever. And that is never the case. Like people are complicated, work is complicated.

When people do the work, it gets more complicated. So the hardest thing in an organization is getting everybody to be in alignment and pull in the same direction. So I'm a big proponent of like the weekly meetings. And even like if you've got a manager that you're over several people you do the weekly one-on-ones but having a specific structure for those meetings which is not focused on like okay so what are all the things we have to do but really focused on like how do I as your manager remove the roadblocks for you and allow you to be more autonomous in the work and then whatever system you want to use to get the work done is completely fine as long as the work gets done.

And I know that when I delegate something to you, it's not going to fall through the cracks. But one of the things that I think people will tend to do is they'll try something like you mentioned a couple of different digital tools. So my word of advice for you would be don't just like pull the plug on the tools after eight months, 10 months, 12 months, whatever, because then what that does with the rest of the team is it just creates distrust for the next tool that you're going to try to use and really focus on, you know, why are we doing this work in the first place and empowering people to just get it done and trusting that they've got it covered? I mean, if they're not doing the work that you're hiring them to do, you've got other issues and

other conversations that need to be had. But the tool is not the savior of the workflows. It still is going to require some babysitting and some effort to maintain the alignment. But the good news is that when you can create that alignment, you get multiple people pulling in the same direction, they've bought into the why and the vision, it gets really powerful. So I think analog tools, not specifically your analog system,

although like I mentioned, we did use that at the digital marketing agency. It definitely can be helpful, but it's really more emotional than it is logical or analytical. Happy people are productive people. So when people can buy into the vision, that really is the thing that moves the needle in terms of productivity. And the tool kind of is secondary.

You can make it work with a lot of different things. It's just getting everybody on board as to this is the way that we're going to try to solve this problem. Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with the type of work too. So the type of business is going to dictate the type of tools. If you're doing web development, you're going to need a different level of granularity than if you're doing, if you're a marketing firm or if you're just a retailer and all of those tools can be kind of shaped into what needs to get done,

or what needs to fill that company's needs, and getting people to buy in is hard. And then at the scale too, it's a scale thing. So if you have 100 people working at your company, or if you have three people working at your company, there's gonna be very different needs for what needs to get tracked, what needs to get collaborated on.

But even Dropbox paper, Google Docs, Google Sheets, anything, Notion, they can all be used in the same way where you're at least logging and able to see what other things are getting done on the team. But I'm a big fan of the simpler the tool, the more likely it is to get used and overcomplicating those things. It, uh, leads you down a path of making it feel like nobody wants to ever log in and check and check things off and move things around.

So there's probably different, uh, people have solutions that work for their team that are, that are going to be all over the board and for us being such a small company, I'm a big fan of those regular weekly meetings and check-ins. And we use Slack for the day to day, but we haven't added another level of complexity to that management. Which is totally fine. I mean, that's exactly the approach you should have, I would argue, is to make it as simple as you can. And what digital tools allow you to do is pull in a whole bunch of data from a whole bunch of different places. And that is great in some sense, because you want these analytics, you want these reports, you want to know what's going on in your business. But also when you have all those

different numbers, you can track all these different things, it's easy for people to focus on the wrong metrics. So almost simpler is better and less numbers are better. Like I'm a big believer that everybody in the organization from the top down should have one number that they are paying attention to, that they are responsible for, that they can actually impact. So the things that they do day to day will influence what that number, whether it goes up or down. And when you have a whole bunch of things tracked in these digital tools and you create all these crazy dashboards and things, it's easy to get distracted by metrics that don't

really matter. 100%. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Indeed. Go to indeed.com slash focus and join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast. We're driven by the search for better, but when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search, match with Indeed. If you need to hire, you need Indeed. Indeed is your matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors,

according to Indeed data, and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. So ditch the busy work, use Indeed for scheduling, screening, and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster. And Indeed doesn't just help you hire faster. 93% of employers agree Indeed delivers the highest quality matches compared to other job sites according to a recent Indeed survey. Finding the right person is not easy.

You need to find someone with the right abilities and talents, but you also have to find someone with the right attitude. It really is a search for a needle in a haystack, and with Indeed, they get you that needle much faster. When I look back at some of the hires I made over the years, I really wish I had Indeed at my back. Leveraging over 140 million qualifications

and preferences every day, Indeed's matching engine is constantly learning from your preferences. So the more you use Indeed, the better it gets. Join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. And listeners of the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your job's more visibility at indeed.com slash focused.

So just go to indeed.com slash focused right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash focused, terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. And our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus Podcast and all of Relay FM.

Jeff, we didn't tell you until we showed up today, but we'd like to do a segment where we talk about books we're reading. And you have kindly agreed to partake. So we're all going to share what we're reading these days. I'm about to take a trip. Anytime I get on a plane, I always look at it as an opportunity to read a new book. And I just got an email from Derek Sivers. I'm on his mailing list, I guess.

He's got a new book coming out called Useful Not True. And I was able to purchase the beta of the book. So I got that and I am really looking forward to it. I like anything this guy writes. They're digestible, easy to read books. A lot of times I get some good ideas from them and this one is loaded up and ready for my trip. All right. You just cost me some money. I wasn't aware of this one, but I've read several

Derek Silver's books. They're all great. Yeah. It's not out for the public yet. I don't know. Maybe it will be by the time this podcast episode drops, but I think if you're on the mailing list, you get an early invite. Cool. Jeff, what are you reading? Yes, I'm reading, I kind of dove back into a book, I skipped around in the chapters,

but it's called Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage, and he's the guy, one of the guys behind Mythbusters, and it's a really great read. It's different than like productivity books and businessy books. It's kind of his life and insight into how he thinks as a maker. And I love obviously physical products and making things. And he's got different chapters in there that are like a whole chapter on deadlines or a chapter on like tolerance, like when do things need to be refined? When can things be loose?

How he organizes his workshop and his ideas behind checklists, which actually align very in line with analog and the way that I use checklists, but him as a maker, an insight into how he thinks and how he's had a successful career with Mythbusters and the movie industry is really interesting. I just read that book last month, Jeff. Loved it.

It was really good. I figured you would definitely like that one, because you're in the same. You love the woodworking and the making, and also the thinking about making. Yeah. Yeah, great book. If those topics are of any interest to you, go check it out. I think he has

a really interesting voice and he expresses it well in that book. Sometimes when a celebrity writes a book, they're a little soft, not this one. It's good stuff all the way through. Nice. This is the second time this one has been recommended to me this week, so I'm going to buy this one too. This is an expensive episode. All right. Well, the book I am reading is Super Thinking and this is by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann. It's a big book of mental models. This came on my radar because I have an office that I split with somebody at the local coworking space, who is a designer for DuckDuckGo. And Gabriel is the CEO of DuckDuckGo. And I am a big fan of mental models. I think at some point in the future, David, we should do an episode on mental models,

because we were talking about how like focus and productivity is really just kind of tricking your brain into like, this is the important thing right now. Nothing else matters. Well, that's kind of what mental models allow you to do. As an example, simple mental model is like Occam's razor, which is pretty popular. Like the simplest solution is the best solution or like the 80 20 principle, 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. That's basically a mental model. It's not accurate all the time. You can't use it everywhere, but there are these lenses you can use

to look at specific things and help you make decisions. And this one is, as it says, it's a big book of mental models. It's like 350 pages and it's got hundreds of these mental models. So it's taken pages and it's got hundreds of these mental models. So it's taken me a while to get through this one, but lots of things to ponder, lots of models to chew on. And my mind map for this book is enormous, but I want to go through it again now that I'm getting towards the end of this book and

figure out which ones I want to put into practice. I want to actually start implementing into my thinking time workflows and stuff like that. But it's definitely a good reference book. If you're into the idea of mental models, there are probably better books for learning some of the specific ones. I really like the great mental model series that Shane Parrish did. But if you want a single book that has a whole bunch of them as a desk reference, this is a good one. RL I'm not sure why, but this was free for me on Kindle.

I guess I had enough Kindle credits built up. So now I have it. So I'll be checking that out. This has been a very cross-pollinizing episode, I think. All right, well, those are some great books. Go check them out. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm.focus.

If you want to sign up for the ad-free extended version of the show, you can do it right there. On Deep Focus today, we're going to be talking about Jeff's newfound love for photography and his new Fuji X100. Jeff, where should people go to learn more about you and what you're up to? I'm uggmunk on all social media, so if you type in U-G-M-O-N-K on Instagram or Twitter, or if they wanna email me directly, it's just jeff at uggmunk.com.

Happy to connect and chat with people. All right, and thank you to our sponsors, ZocDoc, Indeed, Vitally, and Harvard Business Review, and we'll see you next time.