Focused - 219: A Focused Smorgasbord

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast with more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz. I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hello, Mike. How are you today? Getting over a cold. So I apologize if my voice is not quite where it normally is, but the show must go on.

How are you doing? I, you know, I'm really looking forward to this episode. We're going to be talking about feedback today and we do get a lot of really interesting questions, but we always have like show titles and ideas that we want to go on the show. So it's always fun to kind of catch up with that today. Also on deep focus, the ad for extended version of the show, we got the book of the year. We got it. We're both picking a book of the year.

So that's going be fun, too I don't know. I just looking forward to getting started talking to you Mike Sounds great. Yeah, I I'm looking forward to declaring a a book of the year That that sounds like it's a lot of fun and right up my alley Yeah, I don't know when I suggested it I didn't know if you were gonna jump or or if I was gonna break you because you read a lot of books every year No, my eyes lit up. Excellent. It'll be fun. But let's kick right in with the feedback. We did an episode about the Sparky language model and AI and that did bring in some interesting feedback. Yes it did.

One of the points that I thought would be a great topic here for the follow-up was from Jager52 who mentioned, I've wondered why it is that some writers seem to be comfortable using AI at all levels of the writing process, especially in giving AI some ideas and asking it to write their first draft. They feel like it's their creation because the main ideas come from them, although the words and perhaps the organization did not. Others have an issue using AI to write for them and would never consider allowing AI to write their first draft. There's a lot more to that, but that's it in a nutshell. And I thought that was a really interesting point. And I'm kind of curious. These are not mutually exclusive viewpoints as Clark Ching pointed out in the follow up necessarily.

But where do you fall on this scale? Yeah, I don't let it write for me, but I do use it as a tool. And there really is a spectrum to this. Like I was talking to our pal Chris Bailey who's now writing a new book and he won't use Grammarly, he won't use it. You know, he wants, he wants the exact opposite of any AI influence. And I don't go that

far down that side of the thing. Like I think AI is useful. And I do often will like throw something at it that I've written, particularly one of my favorite questions for AI is do you think I missed anything? So like when I work on outlines for screencasts or I write a long essay, I'll throw it at AI and say, do you think I missed anything? And then it comes back usually with some suggestions.

Usually there are things I've covered, but occasionally they're not. And then the question is, well, that's a pretty good idea. Do I want to add that in or not? And then I'll go and write it in. I don't have it actually write for me though. And the reason is I do feel like this is like one of my best expressions of my humanness,

the ability to write these words and publish them. And it's my connection to other people in a lot of ways. So I don't really want to hand that off to an agent. I want them to be my words. The other problem with having it write the first draft for me is I'm afraid it would lock me in to its ideas. And maybe I would miss some of my own.

But I'm not saying that judgmentally. I know several people who write for the internet and use it all the time for kind of writing drafts, and they absolutely view those as their words. And I don't want to sound like that guy, but for me, I prefer to write the words. I find the process of writing the words often expands my own mind and ideas. So, you know, I get a benefit from the work.

But yeah, I get it. I guess one other point, and I've been talking a while, that I get is I wrote an essay about this, why it's important to me to write the words, and I got a lot of feedback from people who are not native English speakers who said, look, that's easy for you to say, but I grew up speaking Egyptian and I find it very difficult to write English,

and this helps me communicate better with other people. All of that makes sense. Like I said, this is a no judgment zone, but I still write my words. Yeah, I get that. Um, for me, I, I'm not opposed to using it at any phase of the process. However, I find that I actually don't use it as much as I probably,

I was gonna say should, but would want to. As much as I'm an advocate for using it in the creative process, a lot of times I just go through the creative process without bothering to ask AI to be honest. And I think I'm okay with that. I do think from Co-Intelligence by Ethan Malik, he makes a very important point, which is that we should be inviting AI to the table.

And if I were to summarize my position on this currently, it's kind of that I've invited it to the table, but most of the time I don't care what it has to say. That's probably gonna change over time, but that's kind of where I'm at right now. But the other thing that is interesting to me, you're kind of talking about the first draft piece. And that's the one that I think it's easy to see the argument there.

It's like, well, this isn't a completely original idea because you just let the AI come up with it. And I've been thinking about that part of this and I kind of want to talk this through with you because I'm not quite sure where I land on this. On the one hand I understand you're not really putting in the ideation effort there and you're relying on this external tool which essentially all it's doing at this point with the large language models is it's connecting a bunch of dots. Okay, but also I've struggled with viewing myself as creative in the past. I've talked about that on the show and kind of the

revelation for me that allowed me to think of myself as creative was recognizing that when I am creating something new, all I'm doing is taking the dots that I've stolen and connected them in new ways. So the dots aren't original anyways. And I kind of think it's okay to ask AI for some help in connecting those dots and getting the process started. I don't think that invalidates the end result. Now that's different if you're just asking, you know, chat GPT to write your term paper for you

or something like that. But I don't actually think there's anything wrong with the first draft idea. I don't think it's something I want to do, but I think I'm coming around on using it that way. I think one of the interesting questions to ask yourself is, let's imagine a world in five or 10 years and AI consistently writes better than you do, even though you're a professional

writer. You know, it writes better than you do. Do you use it then? Well, I'm already using it because it's a better writer than me in some aspects because I use Grammarly to fix all of my mistakes. When I was putting together all the written material for Life HQ, I wrote over 60,000 original words. And the first draft, I just put all that stuff in and I kind of looked it over, but not real closely. I knew there was some grammar mistakes and the feedback I got from people was, Oh my goodness, this is so hard to read your grammar and your

spelling is so bad. So you know what I did is I took it and I ran each one of those notes through Grammarly, cleaned it up, put it back in and have had zero complaints since then. Yeah, well, and I get that. And that's a separate question. I'll just address that now. I use Grammarly. I feel like that is still me under those words. Grammarly does sometimes want to rewrite sentences for you. Um, I do not ignore that, but I rarely accept it. So occasionally I'm like, yeah, you know what? The way I wrote that is a little confusing. Grammarly suggestions better go ahead. Um, but, but generally I kind of like, I put whimsical and silly words

in my writing with intention. I think it kind of makes it more fun to read. And I guess that's one of the points for me is that I like the expressive nature of words. I like being able to turn a phrase. And AI doesn't really appreciate that. You know what I mean? It really is more about just getting the word,

the communication across. And I like that I can make it kind of fun. You know, when I wrote those books for Wiley Press that my editor kept crushing the Max Sparkiness out of the words and he's like, you can't do that in a book, you can't say that. And I've always appreciated that with the stuff I do these days, I can make it as whimsical as I want.

And AI doesn't really go that direction. But to get to the bigger question, let's say in the future there's an AI that can read, well, there already is one that can read everything I've written and try and kind of incorporate the way I write, and it actually gets really good and does it better than I do, I still think I would write because I

like, I think there's a self growth part of the process and there is a connection with the audience when they're your word. So I just don't see that I'm ever going to really have it right for me, but I will happily get advice from it and do things like, like when I did that college high school thing over the summer, all the communications I sent out to them, I had an AI that was like a expert in communications with teenagers and it would read it for me

and tell me where, well, I think you're not talking to them in a way they would understand. And that was okay to me, but I'm just not gonna have it right for me. Yeah so that scenario that you just described there I think that's an interesting use case and I think the perspective like there's a lot of nuance in that. Essentially what I'm paraphrasing what you just said so correct me if I'm wrong here, but you're writing to teenagers

and you want to communicate in a way that they're able to receive it. You're not quite sure how to do that. So you ask AI for some help. And I think right there, that's the tipping point. Whatever it gives back to you, are you going to say, well, it's good enough. I'm just gonna ship it, or are you going to look at it and try to you, are you going to say, well, it's good enough, I'm just gonna ship it?

Or are you going to look at it and try to learn something from it? And I think the focused audience in particular probably has a bit of a bias towards the growth mindset, so that's the natural tendency, but there's probably a lot of people who are like, well, let's just ship it. Yeah, so I, yeah, I didn't even have it rewrite it for me.

I just had to give me points that I thought I wasn't being communicative in a way that teenagers would understand. So I would re-write it. So that's why I did it. But yeah, I could have given it an instruction to write it in terms a teenager would understand. In fact, I did that without me asking the first time I ran it. And it was cringy. It was like, oh my gosh, there's no way teenagers would look at this and like this. It looks like something written by an adult for, well, teenagers are kind of adults.

It looks like something written by a 56-year-old man in the voice of a teenager. I didn't want that. You know, but the, hey dudes, you know, like, but the, I did feel like it pointed out weaknesses that I could improve upon. So it was, it was good for that. I mean, I, I use AI a lot more than I used to. You know, I also, you know, here's another kind of related question. Now that chat GPT can have a conversation with you,

how willing are you to talk to it? Yeah, turns out for me, not all that willing. But I know some people really are. Yeah, I talk to it more than I probably should. This is all going into some model somewhere. But I have long conversations with it about Aurete and Greek terms that I'm thinking about writing about. I use it as almost like a sounding board for ideas. Um, cause you

know, nobody in my house wants to talk to me about the Greek term Amethia, but Chai GBT will talk my ear off. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And the interesting thing, maybe I need more friends. The interesting thing for me about the, the way that chat GPT and tools like that have been, been used. I've heard a lot of people talk recently about how it's become their default search engine.

And I remember back when we recorded the episode after reading Co-Intelligence, that was my big takeaway is like, well, this is basically like a search engine. It's better in a lot of ways, but essentially it's being fed all of this data and it's trying to find the thing that, fill in the pattern for the thing that fill in the fill in the pattern for

the thing that you're you're looking for. Yeah. I don't know that that means that the pace of the advancement is slowing down or not you know. Ethan Mott talks about the different the different scenarios like where AI goes from here but I think it it's the perspective on this stuff is changing a little bit. And I think that's the that's actually a good thing. You know that what we have right now, that's kind of the best use case is to to use it that that same way. The things that you really care about, it seems like those are the ones that you really don't want to use a whole lot of AI tools for. And that's very much in line with what Kyle had emailed us about.

He wrote a very thoughtful email, but the section I want to call it is right here, the TLDR version of this entire piece is if it's something that I care about, I do it manually. If it's something that I'm required to do, but doesn't need my specific level expertise and I can't delegate it, that's when I'll turn to AI. I feel like that summation right there, that's a great way to frame where AI could really be useful. If this is something that I'm required to do, I don't really care a whole lot about the output. Why not shortcut it by asking AI to help me fill

in some of these these blanks? Yeah, agreed. Well, I was thinking about Kyle's email in terms of email. Kyle's email in terms of email responses, like when somebody calls or emails you and says, hey, I need the menu for the thing on the 31st or just kind of basic transactional email that requires some kind of reply, I could see a future where I would have an AI that reads that for me and prepares a draft reply that I can approve and send.

I think that's kind of my personal preference for something like that. I don't think I would want it where the AI was responding for me because the idea of AI actually controlling email sounds to me like a recipe for a lot more email, but, but I do think, um, like stuff like that would be useful, but I still don't think it would be that useful for most of the, like, the significant stuff that I get. Like when people write me and they, they want a question, I mean, a lot of times, heck, I'll just make a loom video.

Cause I want it to be more of a human connection than words. Um, so it really is a, uh, a, we're in just such a weird space right now. I mean, partly because it's new and partly because of technical advances and limitations. Like it's quite advanced, so it's something that you can think about in these contexts, but it's also very limited, so it doesn't always work in these extra contexts. And as a result, it's very interesting to think about it because we're gonna be setting, you know, kind of standards on how we think about this stuff

and through the future. And, you know, it only gets better. It's not gonna get any worse. Right. So since we talked about this last, we've kind of, I think in our discussion here today, kind of leaned a little bit more towards the human side and less on the AI side. So are you using AI more or less

than when we talked about it last time on the show? I'm increasingly finding uses for it. I'll say that I fire it up at least every other day, sometimes more than that. It just depends on what I'm working on. And like I said, my favorite use cases for it are to present it with something I've done

and say, do you think I missed anything? And just read the answer. Sometimes it will result in me adding additional content to what I wrote. Sometimes it won't. And then I also find it just for, you know, like ChatGPT has added search since we last talked about it.

So I've been doing more of that kind of stuff with it just to test it and see what it does. I increasingly use it for Apple scripting, regular expression generation, kind of like what I would almost call soft programming. It does a very good, it's getting better and better making like little bits of code where I can insert that into an automation. Yeah, I use it for big things and little things now, but I don't use it to write for me.

Another thing I do with it since we last talked, I believe this is a new workflow for me, is because of the way I handwrite, it actually does OCR of my handwriting where nothing else seems to be able to. So maybe I talked about that in the show when we did this, but that is really nice. Because one of my morning routines is I read every morning and a lot of times I'll grab on to something that I read. Like lately it's been going through this Oliver Perkman book

and I'll write down like a quote from the book and then I write like a page long essay on how I think about that and maybe how I might implement it or why disagree with it or whatever. But something that gets me in the morning reading I write about and I've got to the habit of doing it by hand. I don't even do it at my computer.

I do it at a writing desk. And I think it's really been a good practice that's kind of evolved for me over the last year. But I want it digitally. I want the benefit of it. So then I also do the, I take a picture of it, send it to chat GPT, get the text out, then I can put it in day one or notes or, or obsidian or whatever I needed, wherever it belongs. That's kind of a nice thing that I do.

And chat GPT strangely is the reason that I can digitize it. But then it's got all these weird essays I've written. So it's like, what have I done? I think since we spoke last time, I'm probably, I'm using it a little bit less. When we were talking about it, I was experimenting with a lot of different use cases for it. And, um, I guess not a whole lot of them have, have really stuck. Uh, with the exception of when I launched a couple of new courses,

I definitely used Otter.ai a lot for transcripts, which I then uploaded into Teachable for the course videos and stuff like that. So maybe there's a bunch of ways that I'm using it that I'm not really aware of. One last thing on this topic that I wanted to get your opinion on, it occurs to me that people tend to not want to be tricked

when they are consuming content online about whether this is something that a human made or something that AI made. And I don't think it's as simple as that. There's a lot of overlap there as we've talked about so far. But maybe this is sort of a solved problem already because you are required when you post links on a website for example to disclose when something is an affiliate link. A lot of affiliate programs are like that for example Amazon if you're gonna share an Amazon link You have to say you know there's affiliate link affiliate links may be used on on this website

and if you come across a site that has that then You at least know what you're getting into and that honestly that's that's why like the links to the books and things that we share On this podcast I use a service called genius link because it embeds that automatically. You see it every time you click on the link. So you know if you don't wanna use that, you can just remove the affiliate part of it. What if we had something like that for content where AI was used in the process, just like a disclosure?

Like if you came across an article from an author that you liked and they had a disclosure like that AI was used in parts of this process. Do you feel that that is a negative thing and you are now less likely to read that? That's a good question. I think I would just judge the content. I mean, I mean the weird thing for me is I don't think AI writes that well yet. At least it doesn't write with personality yet, if that makes sense. Like when I read something by AI,

it's very, it doesn't inject personality the way humans do. And that's a temporary problem. It's going to eventually figure that out, right? So if I find the writing boring, I probably will stop regardless of whether a human wrote it or an AI wrote it. But I think it's more likely to be boring if it was written by an AI. But I guess if it had the information I was looking for in it and the writing was

done well, I don't think I'd really care. Yeah, I think that's where I would fall. But I guess I don't really know. Um, haven't, haven't seen anything like that recently. I know we've got some, some friends who are considering like statements for their website, uh, about their use of AI and things like that. But I think we're probably a long ways from people being willing to disclose that more often than not.

Yeah. I mean, there was just a, um, a kind of a controversy. I don't remember which publication it was, but you know, with the talk of pardons going around some, but he wrote an article where they made reference to a pardon that was never issued. But it turns out the guy did the research and chat GPT and it, it fabricated a presidential pardon that he wrote about. And then they had to pull the article down and apologize. And like, you got gotta be careful with this stuff.

But yeah, I think a policy explanation on the website, I think that would actually be a good idea. But at the same time, the people who I follow, I kind of know the way they write, and I suspect they will continue to be the people that are doing the writing. Yep, agreed. This episode of the Focus Podcast

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Okay, sabbaticals are always a third rail on the show. Every time we talk about it, it gets feedback. Clark wrote, 20 minutes into this and decided I need a sabbatical, though for most people who have a proper job, they might just call it a summer holiday. So I think I'm talking about a month off starting next midway through next week.

I think a lot of people are just confused about the idea of sabbaticals versus vacation. KJW wrote, I must admit, why sabbaticals used so often now? Isn't it just a holiday? Rob said the same thing. The difference is that you get paid during a sabbatical. Other types of leave are normally not paid at the normal rate.

That would be, I think, the proper answer from Rob, but to me, it's a little different. But Mike, how do you think of a sabbatical versus a vacation? Yeah, so I don't think they're the same thing. I think our definition of sabbatical is probably different. So the comment from Rob, I included that in the outline, because that's probably the canonical

definition of a sabbatical. And Stephen hit on that a little bit that he knew a lot of people in academia and in the ministry who viewed them that way. But that's really not what we're talking about. I guess if I had to try to create a definition myself, I would say that a sabbatical is sort of an intentional unplugging so that you can recharge your creative batteries. And that doesn't just apply to people who do creative work, creators on the internet like you and I do. I think this is really important for people who do knowledge work in general.

We talked about how some companies like Sean Blanc has mentioned this before, they've got the work cycles and Basecamp did it before them. And I don't know, there's a lot of companies that are embracing different versions of this, where they're incorporating more regular they're incorporating more regular time off and that in turn makes the work better. So like I see even manufacturing jobs all around where I am in Wisconsin, there's billboards all over the place saying four day weeks, that's kind of a different version of this I would argue. But it's not just a, I say just a vacation.

One of these is not better or higher than the others. So that's a, that's a wrong way to frame it. But vacation, I feel like we know what that is. So that is, you know, I'm going to take off of work. And usually it's because I want to do something else specific. And as I was thinking about, even since the follow up from the episode where Stephen was on, I mentioned that I'm going to have like a forest sabbatical at the end of the year because my wife's family is coming, they moved to Hawaii a couple of years ago, they're back in town for a couple of weeks and so I'm basically not going to do anything.

And I was like, that's not really a sabbatical. That's a forest break, but that's not the same thing. I think when you're talking about these sabbaticals, as we're talking about them, they're these short-term breaks, regular short-term breaks from your work. And you're doing it to accomplish a specific thing, but that specific thing is sort of rest and recharging. And that feels so contrary to the way that most of us work, but it really is in service of the work. It's like a long-term investment. It's not, you know, a vacation, I guess,

is kind of like, well, I'm doing that because I want to maintain some personal, you know, work-life balance, and I just can't be working all the time. The sabbatical is, is a little bit different. It's like a long-term investment in the overall quality of the work. It's like, I'm going to disconnect from my work now because when I come back,

the work is going to be better. Does that make any sense? Yeah. I mean, I feel like it's, it's margin for people who don't get margins. That's a pretty good way to put it. Systemic margin maybe is another way to think about it. But also I think just having margin, just because you have margin doesn't mean you need to fill it.

I think you are kind of with a sabbatical, intentionally filling the margin, but you're doing it with intentional rest. I was thinking about my dad. Like, you know, I mean, one of the things, let me back up. Us nerds have adopted this, you know, Sean West started this idea, this term sabbatical, and we are definitely twisting it. It's not, this is not what was meant by the university,

you know, when they hire you and say, we're going to give you a half a year off to write a book or something like that. This is a completely kind of different interpretation of it. And then, you know, the thing I always worry about every time it comes up on the show is like, is this just a precious little nerd thing, right? You know, it's like, oh yeah,

we make our living on the internet, we're fancy, and we're just so tired that we take time off, you know? And I got thinking back to like being a lawyer after a big trial, after you finish a large trial, you know, you're kind of wiped. And I would always take three or four days off and just do nothing or work in the wood shop. That was kind of like my thing, like to kind of unplug from all of it.

And to a certain extent, that was like a sabbatical at the time for me, you know, and then, you know, kind of continuing the thought my father, you know, he, uh, he came back from the Korean war. He got a job loading lumber on a truck and eventually kind of worked his way up in the lumber industry. But when I was a kid, he had been working so long for this big company that he had extra vacation. And we had the family vacations where we would go to Yosemite or do something.

But then we would have dad vacations where we were all in school or whatever. And he would just take a week off and he'd build a piece of furniture in the garage and he was so happy to get that week off and just do that. I feel like this has been lurking, this is in the 70s. So this has been lurking for a long time under the covers. I think we're kind of putting a label on it now that may or may not really fit.

But the idea of unplugging, getting yourself some margin, I think it's a good one, whether you work for yourself or a big company. And I just think there's a whole bunch of tricks we go through to pull that off. But what you get when you do this thing is not a family vacation to Hawaii or, you know, the, what we would traditionally think of a vacation, but you get time just to unplug, like Mike said. And then, you know,

when you plug back in, hopefully you're a bit more refreshed and you come with some new ideas and a new energy. And, and that's how I think of all this. I think that's probably pretty accurate. Um, I think the, the problem maybe that Sean McCabe was trying to solve and we are clumsily continuing to try to solve is in the US anyways, Western culture, there is an overemphasis on the work. I think even if you were to fight for the normal 40 hour

work week, depending on the work that you're doing. If you force yourself to put in, you know, 40 hours of creative work, you're not going to be that creative. The quality of your ideas and what you make is just not going to be there comparatively speaking to the things when your batteries are full. the things when your batteries are full. Maybe that's why AI is so appealing for some of this stuff. It's like, we need to do this creative work where we got nothing in the tank and AI can help us get it done. It's a solution to an overwork problem. It's kind of curious to me and I'd be curious to know.

I guess I could kind of study some other cultures and see how they handle this, but they probably don't have the same, they're probably not solving the same problem as we are. And they would look at the talk that we do about sabbaticals and the emphasis on like, you have to take a break and be like, well, what the heck? What's wrong with you guys?

Just do it. Yeah, in fact, I've heard that feedback. In the Max Parkey Labs, there was a bit of an intervention on me saying, you keep making these podcasts about these things and you've never done one. I think that another piece of it is like, I find it kind of funny that like people need to use the, I will be more productive at the end of the sentence

anytime they talk about sabbatical. Like, yeah, I need to take this time off and I'm sure after I come back, I'll be better equipped to do, you know what I mean? It's like, we have to like say, oh no, the science is gonna make us more productive. That like, we will get a benefit from doing this rather than just say, maybe I just need a little time off.

We have to like justify it, that it's going to make us more productive, which probably is true, but at the same time, it's kind of funny to me that we have to always add that on. Well, I'm definitely guilty of that. I mean, I, I just did that on this episode, but I also have struggled to take them. And the reason is that there's more work to do.

So maybe that's, uh, my sort of justification for trying to convince myself to do something that I know ultimately I should do. But I definitely understand the case and it's probably the right one that maybe you should just chill about the work for a while. Yeah. Well, are you going to commit in 2025 to take one or two?

I am. I don't know exactly when they're going to be. I think probably for the next episode, we'll, because it comes out on New Year's Eve, so that'll probably be like the retro 2024, what we're planning for 2025. So I'll commit publicly here when we record that episode that I'll have an answer to that question. I don't know how many, I don't know how long, I don't know where they're going to be, but yeah, this is something that I know that I need to do. Yeah, I wanna just add one more point on this

and then I will also address it more fully in the next episode. But there's a part of me that thinks, I'm just being honest here, there's a part of me that thinks, I'm just being honest here, there's a part of me that thinks sabbaticals are just like precious nonsense, right? Like I raised my kids, I was a trial lawyer and built Max Sparky. I never thought about like I need margin and a break.

I just went hard for a long time. And like I see these people talking about, oh, I need a sabbatical. I'm like, come on, just gut it out. I mean, when I was a trial lawyer, the types of things I did and the stress I had compared to what I have now, it's night and day, how much worse it was.

And I never thought about sabbaticals, I just did it. And so there's a part of me that's resistant to them because of that, like, I don't need this, that's too, that's silly. And we even get emails kind of to that flavor once in a while when we write about this stuff. But I will say that I'm turning around on it and I'm thinking seriously about it.

And we're gonna talk about it more in the New Year show. So stay tuned. But yeah, it is not a vacation to me. A vacation to me is quality time with the humans in my household doing something fun. And when I think back, one of the insights I've had is that whether they call them sabbaticals or not, there are a lot of people in my family and in my experience who have done these forced kind of

retreats from jobs from big companies and small. And we're not coming up with anything particularly new here, but maybe we're just kind of acknowledging a human need. Yeah, I think that's, uh, that's exactly it. All right. Uh, anxious parenting, uh, Mike had some back and forth on blue sky about parenting. I can, I can introduce this one if you want me to. So SW Martin, uh, I had a little bit of back and forth and side note here. I'm really enjoying Blue Sky.

I know a lot of nerds are talking about it right now, but it is a fun place for me to be on the internet currently. So, if you want to provide more feedback like this, please do that there. But, SW Martin said, just listening to the last focus and very convicted. We have an anxious nine year old with ADHD to boot who got an iPad during COVID and we are very concerned about dialing down his consumption. The barn door has been opened. How do I get

the horses back in? Now I replied on blue sky, but I'm curious, David, what would you say to SW Martin here? Well, I mean, I don't think you hit it cold turkey. I think you just start, I would get a timer. There's something about kids and timers. They believe in the universal truth of a countdown timer and just say, you know, we're gonna, whether it's the kitchen timer or get one of those cool ones

that has the dial on it and rings the bell and just say, okay know, we're going to, whether it's the kitchen timer or get one of those cool ones that has the dial on it and rings the bell and just say, okay, time timer. Yeah. You just get so much time on this and then just start dialing it down over time and then, and make it a reward. You know, when they finish all their homework and they do something and say, okay, well now you get 30 minutes on the iPad, you know, and then I would also dial in the apps on the iPad. Obviously, don't let them run free through the App Store.

Make sure it's just stuff that you're comfortable with them having, but if they're already using it, I don't think I would just take it away. I would just make it something that you slowly squeeze out. Yeah, I like that, and I like the tactical tip that you gave about getting a timer. I'll put a link to the time timer in the show notes here, but that's the one. Our friend Jesse Anderson put together this YouTube video, which is like a gift guide for people with ADHD.

And I know Jesse is a big fan of the the time timer and I think he even mentioned it in that video but I'll put a link to that in the show notes if anybody is interested. But the time timer is great regardless of whether you are dealing with ADHD. We have one at our house and we've used it to help the kids self-regulate their video game time. So exactly what you're talking about David, they each get an hour and if they don't wrap it up by the time the timer goes off then they lose video games the next day. And there's enough of them and they watch each other

closely that we know if they went over. Yeah the kids will, they'll inform on each other. There's no question there. Yeah. So I think that's a great tip. The thing that jumped out to me from that original conversation was dialing down his consumption, that word consumption that stuck out to me because we've got this mantra at our house, create, not consume. So I mentioned this on Blue Sky, but I would also, in addition to what you were talking about, David, where you're not just cutting it out cold turkey, I don't think even like weaning yourself off of it is necessarily the right approach, but let's transform the way that we use the

technology. And this is broadly applicable to everybody listening to this podcast probably where if we were to monitor our own technology use and look at the statistics, like going to screen time and see how much time we are spending in each application, ask ourselves, is this okay? Is this in alignment with how I want to spend my time on this device. And if it's not, let's figure out what are the positive use cases for this. My wife and I were actually just talking about this the other day, because we kind of have this rule in our house where when the kids turn 13, they don't get a phone, but they get an iPad. So they've got the screens and they're using them obviously before

then. But that's when they have their their first device. And then when we introduce the, you know, this is your device will help you set it up. Okay, now how are you going to be using this? Because we're going to set up restrictions and you're not going to spend five hours a day just cranking through YouTube videos. So for Toby, it was, he was going to use it for audio engineering. He edits my other podcast, the Bookworm and Intentional Family podcast. For Joshua, he does a lot of illustrations. He is getting so good at drawing and good notes. He puts my sketch notes to shame.

So we have another one, Jonathan, who is about to turn 13. So he's going to get my old iPad. And thinking through like, how are we gonna introduce this? What are we gonna define as the positive use cases of this technology for him? But you don't have to have kids to do that, you can do that yourself too. Yeah, I mean that's kind of the joke

of this anxious generation book and all the energy behind that, is that it applies to adults too, and nobody the energy behind that is that it applies to adults too. And nobody wants to say that. Yep, exactly. It's easy to look at the kids and see the problem behaviors. But I believe, especially as a parent, like if you're seeing that stuff in your kids, it's,

it probably exists in you as well. It's just maybe amplified in what you see in your kids. Yeah. One thing I did this year that I've really liked, because to me, social media isn't really the big temptation is for most. Occasionally I do like Instagram woodworkers, but other than that, I largely stay off of all those things. Almost to a fault for somebody who makes their living selling things on the internet. I should probably be more engaged.

But I just, for whatever reason, it's just not me. But the news can get me, right? And these news sites are not there to give you the news. They're there to keep you on the news site. And it's just, it's kind of ridiculous what they do to you. So I decided I'm what they do to you. So I decided I'm not gonna do that anymore. This year I started buying of substack subscriptions

and like finding long form writers that I like. And so I'm paying for a few of them, others I'm not. But now whenever I feel the temptation to go read the news site or go to the social media, I just go to those apps. And then I also did a whole bunch of nerdy stuff on the back end where it all feeds into this reader app. So I can just go into this one app and read long form pieces by people that I think are interesting. And that's been really good for me this year. I like that approach generally. So I think it's important to ask yourself who are the voices that I

am allowing to speak into my life, what effect is that having on me, and then ultimately is that okay? That last question is important because you do have the ability to disconnect from those sources if they're having a negative impact on you. The interesting thing about what you're doing, I think, the the substack stuff, that has never really clicked for me. I don't know why I understand it conceptually. And I feel like an argument could be made. Like there's an alternative universe where Mike Schmitz is just crazy

into these, these private substack feeds. Yeah. But I've subscribed to a couple of them here and there and they've just never stuck. Maybe that's because I have kind of that mindset towards my newsletter. Like I want my newsletter to be on par with some of those paid sub stacks, but also it's my email list,

so I don't really wanna charge for it. I don't know. I'd probably need to think through this some more. also it's my email list. So I don't really want to charge for it. Yeah. I don't know. I'd probably need to think through this some more like it's successful. Like people are doing this now. There's gotta be a reason for that. So kind of what am I not not seeing with that? And is there an opportunity there for me as well? Well, I mean like we, uh, we talked about AI a lot earlier in the episode. And so when I read the Ethan Malik book,

I decided this is a voice that I want to hear more of on this topic. Rather than read random articles on AI, written by who knows who and who knows what, I just subscribed to his Substack. And like he did a great article recently on agents. Like in the future, not too distant future, your AI will

be able to download apps and fill in data. So suddenly it doesn't just give you a bunch of word salad. It also creates a spreadsheet or a word document or whatever. And so that's good to be on top of that as that stuff is developing and from a voice you trust. So you just, you know, you just find the ones that, that work for you. But when you have that moment of downtime and you're like, I want to consume, go to those sources rather than the dribble available in

news applications and a lot of social media. So a follow up question to that. If you're going through these sub stacks and it sounds like you're sending them to Readwise, is that accurate? Yeah, so Readwise is a service that combines all my Kindle highlights, which aren't as many now, thanks to Mike, because he's got me reading physical books. But they also made a reader application. And it's not really the most attractive one,

like Goodreads, there's a couple others that I would rather use, honestly, but Readwise is like the universal slurper. It has a special magic email, so you can feed it an email and it will pull anything in use into the email. It's got every way under the sun to get articles into it. And with some of the sub stacks, I don't wanna read them in my email application.

But they do have an app and I use their app as well. But then there's some of the ones I subscribe to that are not via sub stacks. Some people have gone with a different vendor or they just rolled one themselves. But I just want it all in one place. So through a variety of filters and trickery, most everything that I want to read that way

goes into the reader app from Readwise. So I can just open it up and start scrolling. Okay, so then the follow-up question is when you're going through that stuff in Readwise Reader, are you doing any sort of highlighting? Like if you are inspired by something, it's the seed of an idea or maybe an article that you want to write at some point. Do you pipe that into Obsidian that way or how are you doing that? Because I have an experiment that I'm trying with this,

but I want to hear what you're doing first. Yeah, that's what I, I mean, if it's something that inspires me to create something, then usually I make an army focused task and I send the article, I tag the article, or I'll send it right into Obsidian. So it just depends on how motivated I am. But like that article from Ethan Mullick on agency models

or agent models out of AI, I don't think I'm gonna write anything about it, but I feel like I'm up to date on it now. And so that's that. But I also may read something else that inspires a future newsletter or whatever, and then I'll be more formal with the process. But the fact is I spend my time reading that stuff instead of the less useful stuff.

Okay. So, yeah, I'm still struggling with that piece of my workflow. Readwise Reader, I have an account. I don't really use it a whole lot. I have piped some things in there and every time I go look at the the feed or the library or whatever they call it and I see the number of how many unread things are in there, it's completely overwhelming to me. So I've been experimenting with this thing and I

don't know if this is gonna stick but this is just kind of what I'm thinking right now. When I'm consuming things, usually it's on my iPhone. And if it's in social media, or honestly, even if it's in something like Readwise Reader, I can use the share sheet. And there's this add to reading list extension, which puts it in the reading list in Safari. I don't use Safari as my regular browser. I use Brave as my regular browser. But then when I am in work mode, I'm trying not to, I'm still sort of finding like the spot where this clicks. It's probably going to be either at the very beginning of my day as I'm getting rolling or probably the better spot would be like after lunch when I'm just doing admin type

stuff. I save the mornings for the creative work, the writing, and then the afternoons when I'm just doing admin type stuff. I save the mornings for the creative work, the writing, and then the afternoons when I'm not recording video or something, that's when I would go through my reading list. But the Obsidian team has come out with a phenomenal Web Clipper. Have you played around with that at all? No, no, I haven't tried that one yet.

It's so good. So you can go into highlight mode and you can pick these two sentences from this article that you're reading in your browser. And then when you clip it, it'll grab just those sections. It'll grab the URL and it'll put it in the metadata properties for you. They've even added they continue to improve it. As we were recording this, they just announced yesterday this like summarization thing, and it can like pull in even the transcripts from YouTube videos and give you a summation of the link, you know, that you're capturing into this note.

But you got the text summary below it. It's pretty cool. It's the perfect tool for capturing these seeds of these ideas that I want. The component pieces that I'm going to connect, the dots, capturing those into Obsidian. So I've been thinking through like, well, how can I use this Web Clipper to do this? And then, you know, where does my reading list? It is the reading list, but you know, my RSS essentially, like, where does that exist? And I don't think I want RSS. Kind of where I'm landing on this is, you know, I'll have those RSS feeds and maybe those will still go into Readwise Reader or

something. And I'll kind of poke through that. And if something jumps out at me, you know, I will send that to the reading list. And the reading list is the one, you know, where regularly I have some time and I'm going to go through and consume those things. But I've kind of, you know, added another filter there. And I've also disconnected from the guilt of having all those things in my inbox. You mentioned you were reading the Oliver Berkman book, The Meditations for Mortals, I'm assuming is the one that you're referring to.

But he talked in there about how your read it later list shouldn't be a bucket, it should be a river. And that really hit me when I read that. These things should just kind of float by you and if something's interesting, you pick it out. And I was like, oh, that's my problem with all this stuff that I've captured to read. Like I wanna read this stuff.

But when I go into those buckets, I feel this pressure that I have to crank through it all. And then I just immediately get overwhelmed and I close the app. Yeah, and like the other thing I would add to it as your friend is that you wanna systematize it too much. You're like, well, I must get something out of every piece of this to make me a better creator, right? And I don't think of it that way.

I mean, now that you've explained your kind of workflow, I think I have a better idea of your question. So for me, I'll go through and read wise and read stuff. And a lot of it will be like, oh, okay, that's good to know. And like I talked about the agent of AI kind of stuff. That's good to know. I'm not going to do anything with that. But maybe I'll see something, and there's really kind of two steps here for me.

One is like, oh, this is interesting. I want to research this topic further. And so I have a list in OmniFocus called research. And so I'll save the link to OmniFocus of whatever spurred the question. I don't get quotes out of it or anything. I just save the link. And I've got this list called research.

I've got about two, usually Thursday afternoons, I do a two hour block of research where I allow myself to go into that list and pick anything that looks like fun to me and research it further. This is where I explore apps and do all the kinds of things that would normally throw my day off. And sometimes things come out of that

that may change a workflow for me or they may turn into future content or you just don't know what's gonna happen but I give myself some freedom to go through that research folder and there's more in it than I'll ever do. As I go through it often, I'll delete things. I'm like, oh, that's been there six months. I don't care. I'll delete it. So I kind of weed the garden as you do during the research block. Now, the other list I have on OmniFocus is called content, future content or content ideas.

And I'll see some things and I'm like, oh yeah, I definitely wanna make a Max Barkie Labs video about this or I definitely wanna write a newsletter about this someday. And so I will save it to the content list with a tag for what platform it is I want to use it on. So then when I want to do something like, oh, you know, it's Tuesday afternoon, I need to make some labs videos, I'll look through all my content ideas for labs videos and pick a couple that are interesting and those will be the videos for the next week in the labs.

So I do capture it, but I don't really process it that much. I just get myself a link and back into it. Now, if I go to write a newsletter about it, obviously I'm going to spend a bunch more time and go down rabbit holes and do research and all that then. But all I really do at the moment is I either just note it, like in my brain, okay, now I know about the way this is, or I say this is something I want to go further on and I put it in a research list, or this is something I want to go further on and I put it in a research list or this is something I want to create something

about and I put it in the content list. Nice yeah that makes sense and I guess the the argument that people will have with what I'm trying to do here is can't you just do the same thing with piping in the the readwise highlights. For me there's something about the intentionally sending those things to Obsidian and then also I just like the way that the the Web Clipper formats things better. But yeah it's an experiment who knows if it'll it'll stick but I could definitely see how this could you know help facilitate the the creativity flywheel process for me. You know this is part of the problem is like

people get very judgmental about these workflows. Like well, you shouldn't need to do that or you shouldn't, you should do this. And all of our brains work differently and all of us are just looking for ways to make connections and if it requires you to have a very intricate obsidian database or whatever it is that works for you, you just do it. And don't let anybody on a podcast or in a book or whatever tell you that's the wrong way. Cause all of us monkeys are a little different. And you know, the trick is to figure out what works for you. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Indeed.

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Indeed. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus Podcast and all of Relay. All right. Richard Harris also wrote and said that David had spoken in the past about how he likes short form for book summaries. So it was notable to me that he did not mention that in episode 210 about consuming nonfiction, which was a while ago. Sorry, Richard. Does he still use those book summaries? And if so, how does it fit within his larger reading process? Yeah, I do use them. To me, there's like different levels of nonfiction books. Like when there's one that I get like a high recommendation from someone like Mike,

or it's from an author that I'm aware of and I like. Just this year we got new books from Ryan Holiday or it's from an author that I'm aware of and I like. Just this year we got new books from Ryan Holiday and Oliver Berkman, and anything those two people write I'm gonna read, right? So in those cases I would not bother with short form, but there's so many productivity books, right? And I do like to see the ideas that are being bandied about, but I don't have time or inclination to read them all.

So short form for me is like an audition process for an unknown author or for a book I'm not sure about. So I probably read about 20 books in short form this year. I definitely paid for my subscription. And some of them I went on to read the book. A good example of that was the Ali Abdaal book, what was that called? The-

Feel Good Productivity. Feel Good Productivity, it sounded just, I wasn't sure about that book, right? And then I read the short form summary, I was sitting on a tarmac for a slow airplane, and I'm like, oh yeah, you know what, this is good. So I bought the book. And then I read others, I don't really want to like

dish other authors, but I read a couple others. I'm like, no, I don't think, I think that's good enough. I don't need to go any further. So I use it as an audition process for unknowns. If it's an author that I already really like, I don't bother with the short form, but for people, I don't know or just maybe something that's out there on the fringe. I, um, I, uh, go through short form.

Yeah, I, I get it. And I like that use case for it. Um, I almost subscribed to Blinkist over Black Friday because they had a big, big sale. Uh, I guess I've got enough of a list of books that I know I want to read that I'm not looking for recommendations at this point and that is just because my approach to finding things to read has been whenever somebody that I respect their opinion about books or a specific topic recommends a book, I will instantly open the Amazon app and I will buy it.

And I do it on the spot because I know I'm not going to remember to do it later. And that results in a lot of books that I have never cracked open, but it also means that I always have something interesting to read. And even if I buy something because I was interested in a topic and I don't look at it for several months, eventually I'll come back to it and I'll look at it. And there's something to having those books that you can read that you haven't read. Ann Lora the Comf talked about this idea of an anti library.

I think she picked it up from somebody else, but I'm blanking on the name. I came across it because she wrote about it. And just like the creative benefit you get and the productive benefit you get just from having these items in your collection, even if you haven't read them yet, the fact that you can at any moment pick that book off the shelf, crack it open and start reading it. It changes the way that you interact with the information, which I guess that's the big thing holding me back from the short form stuff is that I only read analog books whenever possible. Occasionally we'll get like advanced copies of a book because we're going to interview an author or something and I'll have to read it on a screen. It's so hard for me, David. I cannot, I don't even know why. Like I open the PDF, whatever in Apple Books or something.

The interface is fine. The words are fine. Like the design is fine, but just having to hold the device in my hands, it feels so wrong at this point. I'm broken, I can't go back. Yeah, I've done a lot more physical books this year. I do like them. One thing I worry about is honestly space. I only have so much space to store books, but I'm starting to get over that.

Like, it seems like anybody who comes over my house to visit me anymore leaves with a book. So I just give them a good book. I read the Boys and Men book this year that I thought was really good. And we've got a member of our family who's got a boy and dealing with it. And I gave him my book. I'm like, hey, you should read this book. I think it would help as a dad.

And he did. So I've just been sending them out to the world. In fact, I think I'm gonna make one of those little book libraries for my front yard, where people can walk by and just look through it and take a look. I want one of those so bad. Yeah, that might be what I do during a sabbatical.

How's that for a, I love it. But if I did it, I would overbuild it. It would have like dovetails in it and be like ridiculous. But either way, yeah, so I do like any of paper books. Some of the, I feel like some of the productivity books, you are so much more optimistic about productivity books than I am, because I feel like a lot of them

are just like not that good. And the last few years, I've really got into kind of going back to the source material. I've almost got the complete Seneca set from Chicago Press now. If Santa is good to me, I will have it all by the end of the year. And, you know, I've gone through, I've been just reading a lot of ancients and I really enjoyed going back and reading their stuff. And that's stuff I will only read in paper. But when I hear the book of the week, a productivity book, I'm like, well, I could just get the Kindle. But to tell you the truth, I just don't read

that many of those. I only read productivity books that are vetted at this point, either by me through short form or recommended by you or somebody I trust. Well, I appreciate the trust that you put in my recommendations. I feel a little bit more pressure now to only recommend the really good ones. That's one of the great things about the Bookworm podcast is like maybe you don't need short form, just subscribe to Bookworm. And if they like it, then you're probably gonna like it too. Cool, yeah, thanks for the plug there. I will say that Bookworm,

I feel like Cory and I are kind of hitting a stride recently. He's been a great co-host filling in for Joe. So public shout out to Cory. Thanks for all the work that you do. Yeah, the show's better. The reason that, I mean, I love Joe. Thank you. I love Joe.

Don't get me wrong. Cory's really good. Yeah, Cory and I, yeah, I knew when, first time I talked to him, that there was something there and I feel like every time we record an episode, it just gets better. He has a really unique perspective too. We've been reading a lot of these like, quit your job,

go do the thing type of books. And he's a university professor. It's like he's not doing that. But I was going to say that the thing about Bookworm to me and the reason that I think I don't mind reading all these books, even though I agree with your opinion of a lot of them aren't great, but the fact that I'm going to have a conversation with somebody about them, I feel like that changes the, what I'm able to get out of the books. So if I was just going to read the books, I agree that life is too short to read bad books.

Like use the short form services, find the ones that you want. But some of my favorite bookworm conversations are books that I absolutely hated or Cory absolutely hated and just talking through the different perspectives on that stuff. That helps me really wrap my head around what I think. The mind map book notes, those are cool

and they move me down that direction, but that's where a lot of the crystallization happens is when I talk to somebody about it. I would say on the topic of short form, they sponsored me I think last year, so take it with a grain of salt, but I think short form is by far the best of those summary services.

Because their summaries are not that summary. There's like a one page summary, but then there's actually a lot of content in their summary. And I feel like they get the Goldilocks point for me. It's not just like a real short summary of the book. It's actually pretty substantive and you get a real good feel for it by the time you read 20 pages. Yeah. I'm definitely coming around to the idea of using one of those services, but the one caveat I will share here, I think the way that you're describing it makes a

lot of sense. I've heard Cal Newport talk about using these sorts of services as filters for whether he and his producer were going to read a book. But I would encourage people not to stop there if you read one of these short form things and you feel like this is a good book, this is a powerful idea, don't assume that you know about the thing or about the book because you read the short form.

Yeah, you can't say you read the book if you read the short form, it's not the same. Exactly, exactly. This is one of my pet peeves. And I think audio books are kind of like this too. I understand like audio books. Uh, I'm coming around to audio books a little bit too. You can use them specific ways. I like to use audio books like memoirs or, um,

I think actually fiction books would be really great for, uh, for, uh, an audible, like an audio book, especially if they're read by the author, because you get the voice inflections and that changes the way that the story is told, as opposed to just reading the words off the page. But for some of these books where you're reading them because you want to really unpack an idea,

you can't sit and wrestle with the idea when you're listening to an audio book. The audio just keeps moving. It's sort of like a podcast. You can tune out for 30 seconds and then forget what you and I were even talking about. That happens all the time to me when I'm listening to podcasts. So it has to be something, you know, it's an audio form where I'm like, I don't really care about this that much. This is sort of like an entertainment thing. Or maybe I want to review some material. I want to hear it again when I'm presenting the life theme cohort that Rachel and I are doing right now. I'll download the audio from the previous session that we did and I'll listen

to it again in the background when I'm out for a walk or at the gym or something before we sit down and we present it again. And that's helpful. But yeah, if you really want to get the most out of the time that you're going to invest wrestling with these ideas, you do have to move your eyes across the page. And as we learned when we talked to Marianne Wolfe, I think the best way to do that is with a physical book. You just engage with the medium differently. Yeah, also have a place that you read. I find that the context shift is good.

Well, now with all this talk of reading, Mike, it's time to share what we're reading. What are you reading these days? I actually have read this book already. I had this listed when we had the previous episode where Stephen was on, but we ended up talking so much about sabbaticals, we never got to what we were reading. But this is a book that I think a lot of the focus listeners

would like. It is Anti-Time Management by Richie Norton. So you were talking about how you dislike a lot of these productivity books. This is probably one that has a very contrarian take that you may really enjoy. So the Bookworm episode is actually out about this. So people can listen to that if they want. But there's all this emphasis in the productivity world, and I've definitely fallen into this too, where you just need to manage your time, you got to manage your resources.

And this kind of just like challenges directly that whole paradigm. And I didn't absolutely love this book, but I'm recognizing that it definitely planted some seeds for me, about thinking about things differently. And the more time that I get from this, the more influential it seems to become. So I'm going to put this one out there. Maybe this is a good candidate for one of those short form services, download one of those or listen to the Bookworm episode and see if you like the concept. But I think there's a good portion of the audience that this idea that Richie Norton talks about in this book

is really going to resonate. Yeah, we should probably do a show on this because I've been experimenting a lot with time blocking and hyper scheduling and anti-hapier scheduling, I guess I would say in the sense of how detailed do I need to be? One of the things I started to do, because I have someone that I work with now, he sees all my calendars and I feel weird, like putting all these blocks in for him. I know that's just a self-conscious thing.

But I also realized that to me, the important thing is doing the blocks, not necessarily having them all on the calendar in exactly the right order, if that makes sense. And so I've been doing some experimenting on it. I think there's probably a future show in this because I do find I still need them, but I don't think they have to be as strict as sometimes we make them out to be.

Absolutely. Well, I will add that to the idea bucket. What are you reading? I am a big fan of Derek Sivers. Hopefully someday we'll get him on the show The I just think he I just like the way the guy thinks, you know I I like his generous spirit and he's written a bunch of books over the years They're all really tiny and I've got a couple of them as ebooks over the years and then I Think it was Black Friday or just something recently.

I read his website and he had a deal where you could just buy all of his books in hardcover. I bought the same deal. It wasn't even that expensive. It was like 80 bucks for all of them. And I ordered them. And so now I'm reading through the hard copy of Hell Yeah or No, What's Worth Doing. And man, this guy, he really speaks to me, Derek Sivers.

Yeah, that's a good one. And that idea comes up a lot in other books and discussion in the productivity space. But yeah, that's a good one. I've actually got, at one point, he was selling signed copies, that's a good one. I've actually got at one point, he was selling signed copies of that book on his website. So I've got one of those as well. But yeah, I think if anybody listening to Focus has not read that, that would be a good recommendation too. And it's pretty short.

Yeah. All his books are short and they're just full of good nuggets, but I'm kind of enjoying reading that and I'm finishing Oliver Berkman's 30-day project. The other thing I would say about Derek Sivers is he has a great idea. He calls it the Now page. And basically it's a page on your website. Of course, you have to have a website to do this. But he called it his alternative to social media. If he saw a friend that he hasn't seen in a while, and they said, well, what are you doing these days? He writes it all down on his Now page. And he says, that's kind of like bringing an old friend up to date.

And I added that to Max Sparky. If you go to maxsparky.com up to, just go to the Now page, it's all there. And there's an added benefit when people ask you to speak and stuff and you have a video, and you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this.

And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. And you're like, oh, I'm going to do this. And if you want to know what I'm up to, just go to the Now page. It's all there.

And there's an added benefit when people ask you to like speak and stuff and you're like, I can't. And they're like, really? Are you that busy? I just send them to the Now page. I'm like, yeah, I am. So it gives you an excuse to say no as well. But I got that idea from Derek Sivers as well.

So I got that idea from Derek Sivers as well. So I like that. Nice. Well, I like the framing of it as a way to say no. I should probably do that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Should I sign up for Blue Sky Mike?

I don't know. I never do this stuff. I sign up for these things. I don't know. I mean, if you are going to use a social media platform to build an email list or something like that, I feel like Blue Sky is the one because out of all of the services out there,

they don't down rank links that you would share. So it's good for audience building that way. And then also I like the moderation controls. Like anytime anything political pops up, I just open the thing and say, show me less of this. And it's pretty tuned at this point where I don't see that stuff anymore. And it's only the things I wanna see,

which is kind of nice. All right, I'll think about it. That's not an immediate no. Either way, yeah, Derek Sivers, go check him out. Nice fellow. Awesome. All right, we are the Focus Podcast. You can find us over at relay.fm slash focus.

If you want to sign up for Deep Focus, which is the ad free extended version of the show, we'd love to have you. We really enjoy making those deep focus bits. We're going to be picking our best book of the year today in deep focus. The heat is on. I'm really curious to hear what Mike picks.

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