Focused - 234: Intentional Friction

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

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. Hello, Mr. Mike Schmitz. How are you today? I'm doing great, Mr. David Sparks. How are you? I have missed podcasting with you. I feel like it's been because of schedules and whatnot.

We got ahead and then we got a little behind and we're getting caught up and it's kind of nice talking to you, buddy. Agreed. And I'm very excited about the topic we're gonna talk about today. This is something that's been on my mind for quite a while. And me too. It's funny, we were both kind of talking about this before we hit the record button today.

I've just been thinking lately about the idea of optimization and fast. Like a lot of the stuff we talk about in the tech world and, you know, in just kind of modern productivity discussions is always about how can I do it faster? But when should we not be solving for fast? And that's something we're going to tackle today. All right. Ready to dive into it. Yeah, let's do it.

All right. So I think the place to start here really is to have a brief discussion about systems because I think that systems are everywhere and a lot of times we don't notice them. The things that happen to us feel like they're random, but they're really more often than, than not, they're the result of the systems that are in our lives. And I remember this phrase, can't remember where I heard it, but it really stuck with me that our lives are made up of both independent and

interdependent systems. So the systems function on their own, but they also influence other systems in our lives. And all systems have three parts. There's an input, what goes into the system. There's the process, the parts of the workflow. And then there's the output, so what comes out of the system? The output is the thing that people see and it's easy to look at the output and say I didn't want this output. This is a negative output. This result that I got, I don't like this. I want to change this. But you can't just hope for a better output because a lot of times these systems they work the way that

they're designed about 99% of the time. So if you really want to improve the output, the result of the system, you kind of have to take a step back. You have to look at the beginning part of this. You have to look at what am I really feeding into the system? And then what are the parts of the workflow that the information that are feed into this system, for example, what does it go through before I get that end result? Yeah, I think one of the things about systems is the word implies intentionality.

When you hear about systems, you're like, well, I don't have a system for that and often systems arise spontaneously if you don't bring intentionality and I think that is something in my mind that you need to wrap your head around is you are constantly making systems and a lot of times if you're getting unsatisfactory results, it's because of the lack of intentionality you put into the system to begin with. Exactly, yeah. So you can live your life by design or by default.

And I think a lot of us, myself included, there are different times in our lives or even different circumstances, probably even currently, where I take my eye off of the system and I just go through the motions and you have to be looking at the system periodically at least and ask yourself, is this still functioning in the way that it should? Is it still serving the purposes for which it was designed and then giving yourself permission to change the system if it's

not in alignment with your vision and your values? The default I think is that the systems in your life produce the outputs and you just react to those outputs, which is really the whole idea behind the title of this episode on intentional friction is that when we feel a little bit overwhelmed, we feel like how can I just get a little bit more breathing room? How can I make this just a little bit more efficient? I mean, this is how I got into productivity. I was working with the family business and I was in charge of a development team that had people working all over the world. And kind of my first experience with this, you know, I'm getting notifications after work. People are posting work to be reviewed by the next

day. But I've got a smartphone at home and I'm getting the notifications and I catch myself responding to those and working, you know, when I'm supposed to be home with my family and I wasn't paying attention to it, it just sort of happened. And then once I had the realization, I'm like, this isn't OK, I got to put up some some boundaries. But the thing that I was feeling that caused me to get to that moment of clarity was like, it's just too much. that caused me to get to that moment of clarity was like it's just too much and the failed approach I tried was well I'll just get more productive. I'll get the the apps, I'll implement GTD, I'll do all of these things so I can do my work more efficiently. I'll put all the information in the right bucket so I'll have the 43 folders, everything will be in projects, everything will have next steps,

you know, and your reward for getting work done more efficiently is is often more work to do. I discovered that the hard way, the hamster wheel just continues to spin faster. And so efficiency is not the thing that we should be optimizing for, or to borrow the phrase you mentioned at the beginning, you know, we're not solving for speed because that just creates a situation where we end up going faster than we can control. And so the solution, I guess, is this concept of intentional friction. Friction is when things rub together, it causes systems to slow down. Now that can be good and it can be bad. I think the default is that productivity, you know, you should do more, you should do it faster,

you should crank more widgets, and the whole reason for focused is to push back on that. Doesn't mean that, you know, efficiency is always bad. That's really what I wanted to talk about today is when that friction, you know, is beneficial. And then when that friction is actually a bad thing and deciding for yourself, you know, where do I apply friction? Where do I remove friction in these systems in my life?

Yeah. If you're listening to the show, there's a part of you that, that does believe in the, you know, the myth of speed that it's always better to go faster on all this stuff. I know I think I had that belief for a long time. It takes a little bit of rewiring to accept that not always does it make sense to go fast. To me, it's related to kind of process and result. And like sometimes a little sand in the gears makes a better product, depending on what you're working on.

Yeah, exactly. And then also, you know, the piece of this, which really kind of opened my eyes to the fact that there are these systems. And then when you apply friction strategically in certain places, it can have a positive benefit, was when I was trying to create on the regular

and I kinda did this experiment where I had this theory, if I read more books, I would have more and better ideas and that would eventually make it easier for me to create content which was blog posts, which was video courses, which was podcasts, a lot of the same types of things that I do today. So I started going to the public library and I started getting all of these books and I would carry a book around with me whenever I would go somewhere. I did a lot of reading when I was sitting at the music store waiting for my kids at piano lessons.

And that was a moment where I typically would have just picked up my phone and scrolled through the endless feeds, dipped into the infinity pools. And instead I would read a couple pages here, a couple pages there. Did that consistently and lo and behold, you know, I changed the input. I didn't even actually change anything else about the system. Over time,

I changed the process and how I took my book notes and things like that. But I did notice within a couple of weeks the improvement in the output. And when I had to sit down and write something because I had these blog posts that I had to write every so often I had the ideas whereas before it would I'd sit down I got to write something and I have no idea what I'm gonna gonna write about simply by changing the inputs and I would argue adding some intentional friction to the default activity of picking up the phone, putting up some boundaries, which made it easier for me to do the desired activity

and harder to do the thing that was undesirable for me in that moment. That had a very positive impact on my creative life. So maybe the idea of bringing some friction in can help. And I think both of us would agree on that. That's the argument of this episode really. But it also depends on what area of your life you're working on.

I think there's certain points where friction makes more sense than others. Speed still is beneficial in some ways. But let's start with the idea of where friction can help. Yeah, there's a couple that I just jotted down here in the outline. But I think one of the best examples that I have of friction being a good thing is when I am doing my daily planning. is when I am doing my daily planning. So I have this weird ritual where I have all my tasks and projects inside of a digital task manager,

but I use that as the brain. And that just makes suggestions for the things that I am actually going to put on my list. The list is the thing that I am going to work off of throughout the day and that is actually using a completely different medium. And we've talked about this in episodes, we probably have whole episodes devoted to this topic.

But actually using my fancy fountain pens and making my time block plan for the day and selecting the three things that I am going to work on, putting those as my most important tasks on the side of that page, sliding them into my calendar, and then writing those three things on a notecard, propping that up on my desk. That whole process takes about 10 minutes. It's not a ton of time, but it is significantly slower and it takes longer, you could argue, it's much more inefficient in the moment

than just opening up the task manager using the metadata and getting a curated list of, hey, here are the things that you should do today. So the reason that I think this is good friction is that I have fallen into that trap where you just put things into the task manager and then you look at the list for today and it's got 15 things on it and the minute that you open it you immediately feel overwhelmed you immediately feel behind all of your motivation is gone the rest of the day is a complete slog and you're not looking forward

to anything that you're going to do. You're just trying to muscle through it and ultimately I think that means that the work that you do is of lesser quality and also you get less of it done. Motivation is really powerful and so that daily planning using an analog system for that and even though you know there are limiting it to three tasks so that's not a lot you know I could probably select more things on any given day and actually get more things done for that one day but I know that that's kind of stealing from tomorrow then if I overload today so I have this this system set up which applies the friction instead of me just cranking out the the tasks and the

projects it forces me to go a little bit slower and what that does is it means that I'm a little bit more intentional about the things that I decide to do. Yeah I have a similar practice and I think the extra analog step really is beneficial. I've thought a lot about it because it seems so counterintuitive. Like you said, if you're using a digital task manager, you already have all this stuff written down. So what is the point of spending even just 10 minutes writing it down? And I think this is where we're talking about the sand in it gears. I think in addition to the benefits you were talking about, I just think the

process of, you know, committing to it with a pencil, you know, looking at it there in front of you all day, there's just, that is a clear example to me of where slowing down allows that coding to enter the very slow processor between my two ears. And it just makes it easier for me to focus on what needs to get done today and not worry about the rest of it. There's a physical separation between my list of everything that needs to be done

and the stuff that I'm just worried about today yeah, and the thing that makes that work is you have a Step in between where you decide what is actually going to get done it's It's tempting I feel to offload that decision making to machines, which is why I don't like the idea of AI in my task manager. I don't want the computer telling me what to do. I feel like I've been there, fallen for that before. So fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. And there's,

there's something about just deciding for yourself what is actually worth doing in the, the, the given, given moment, I guess, the, but the term I'm looking for is ownership. You have to maintain ownership of the process. I think that the AI discussion I want to have later, because I think this does tie into one of the reasons why this is on my mind right now. But I've been doing an experiment,

I just shared it with you in the notes, where, because I've got this whiteboard in my studio that I don't use very often. And so I started this in quarter two, but what I do is I put in it on a top. I just write down my goals for the quarter. And underneath that I write down the, the goals are kind of plans for each week of the current month. And then underneath that at the end of each day, when I'm doing my shutdown,

I write down just the list of tasks to finish that day. Like the one I'm sharing with you is today. So you'll see that I've got focused in Mac power users recording, but I've also got some things I wanna do today. And it's not three, I think I've got seven listed here. But I find that's one more kind of like slowing down the process, writing it down. In order to check something

off, I have to get out of my chair and walk over to the whiteboard, take a look at it, see what I want to do next. This is kind of partly as a result of our discussion with Paul Lumens, but also just one more way for me to slow down the daily task management. And I find that really useful. Yeah, so slowing down the daily task management is definitely a place where I would argue friction can be good. Any other areas you wanna discuss?

One that is very clear for me is journaling and reflection. And this also kind of ties into the general discussion of AI and how efficient you can make things like this. But I find that when I really have to think something through quite often, the best way for me to do it is really slow with paper and pencil. And that's just a lesson that I continue to learn. That's actually the context for me realizing that journaling is something I

definitely don't want to make efficient. I want to make it slow and ponderous. I think I agree with you, although, uh, I've been experimenting a little bit with just talking through things and audio processing has never been something I felt like I was good at. I never felt like it worked for me, but I feel like I've had some success with it lately and I think that that could be that could be helpful in the area of reflection and journaling. It's not I think exactly what you're describing here though and I do have a very specific journaling. It's not, I think, exactly what you're describing here though. And I do have a

very specific journaling workflow which is not me just rambling and thinking through things. I do think that when you force yourself to sit down, you eliminate all the other distractions and really you just process what has happened or you force yourself to think through things and decide you know what you think about these things, think about what happened. That is a very beneficial practice and that I can definitely see where friction would be good in that scenario. Yeah and a dictated memo to yourself can be a starting point to that, but I think a common thread to all of this

is that the friction is best when the real work is happening between your ears. When you're really thinking through things, trying to speed bump that using technology usually means that you do less of the thinking between your ears. And that's a problem. And even though we've got these great devices that are getting smarter and smarter every day and with the rise of artificial intelligence, which is just getting started, I think it's

going to be very tempting for us to offload that thinking work. And I think you're missing out if you do that. So this is something you should be really focused on. Yeah, and actually that leads to maybe implicit point, but I wanna just call it out specifically where when you need to focus on something, when the real value that gets added is that you are applying your full attention to something, that is definitely a place where you

should look to add some additional friction so that something that is maybe not as important, you've pre-decided that it's going to be harder for those types of things to reach you. So in the outline, I kind of just labeled this as minimizing distractions because I don't know how to make this a little bit more specific, but I think that it's going to be different for everybody in their different workflows. But the real value to be gleaned from this is really thinking about what are the vehicles where distractions typically come to me and then how do I make it a little bit harder for that information to reach me? So, for example, really basic example, maybe for some people who are listening to this. But if you find yourself getting pulled into email at work,

maybe you should not have your email app opened in the background. Maybe you shouldn't have those things. Even if you feel like you're able to push past those whenever you get them, if something's really important, it still does something in your brain. And so just closing the door on that for a short period of time so you can focus on the thing

that's in front of you can make a huge difference in how effective you are with that particular task. The real question being asked here really is what are you optimizing for? And if you're not optimizing for something, you're really optimizing for nothing. And I feel like, you know know we've talked about multitasking and attention residue and having your attention being split a bunch of different directions means you're not able to fully engage with the thing and and ultimately you're not gonna do it very well. So just thinking through ahead

of time how you can prevent some of that stuff I feel like is is important and then kind of related to that, if the same thing applies to, I would say, learning or synthesizing information, if you're really trying to glean a topic, you don't want to just put on a YouTube video in the background and play it at 2x speed. Same thing with podcasts,

which is why I don't really listen to podcasts as a form of education and I want to learn things. It's really entertainment. And if I happen to learn something, that's kind of that the cherry on top. I try to pick podcasts and conversations that I feel are going to be beneficial. But if I'm really wanting to learn something, I'm going to grab a physical book and I'm going to wrestle with it. I'm going to force myself to take those crazy mind node notes because even though it is more work as I go through the book, I'm investing the time to read this thing anyways. I may as well engage with the material and get

as much out of it as I possibly can. I feel like if you force yourself to engage with the material at a deeper level, you can't help but retain more of it and it kind of sticks with you and has an impact even if you don't see it right away. The whole idea like the syntopical reading and the things that you read, you get that information and if you really understand it then you start to subconsciously even compare it against other things that you've read other things that you've learned in different areas and you sort of like work through all this stuff and how it all fits together how it all ties together and

decide for yourself what you actually think about things that's that's where the the real the real magic happens but it's really not just you know how do I get through this course as fast as I can, how do I get through this course as fast as I can, or how do I get through this book as fast as I can, but it's really how much can I actually get out of the material I'm choosing to engage with here? Yeah, I really think the whole productivity racket is wired for speed, and so much of what people advise

and tell you is ways to do things faster. And I've done that as well, because I think there are some things that can be faster. But I really think that the stuff that really matters, speed is not the measure. And the other piece of that is with the rise of technology, artificial intelligence, speed is increasingly the currency of that stuff. So people are always going to be thinking about how I can do things faster. But I think the whole premise of this show is that give some thought to the parts of your life, the things you do, that speed should not be the factor.

And I think we've identified a few of them already. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com slash focus to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code FOCUSED. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or scaling your business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, to showcase your offerings with a professional website, to grow your brand, and to get paid all in one place. I've

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with the offer code FOCUS to get that 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the FOCUS podcast. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of the FOCUS podcast and Olive Relay. All right, Mike, so we've talked about the benefits of slowing down, adding some friction, but friction can still be a bad thing, right?

Well, it can be a bad thing, yeah. I mean, really, there are places where you want to eliminate the friction because it gets in the way of the pieces of your system working. And it's not always just the things that really should be done more efficiently. So one of the prime examples, I think for me is

with the idea development You've probably heard from from GTD, you know on the paper off the mind because if you don't write it down You're gonna forget about that idea and it may never come back to you again. So Having a simple way whether it's a Field Notes notebook in your back pocket or drafts on your iPhone where you have an idea and you have a place where you can capture those things quickly and easily, I would argue you want as little friction as possible in that part of the process. Now what's interesting for me is that I've got this whole

system for how I actually develop these ideas and make make things out of the ideas that I've I've captured. I've curated, cultivated, connected, and ultimately I create something with I call that my creativity, creativity flywheel. And so there's different parts of that flywheel where I actually want friction like the curate phase. You know, when I'm choosing the high quality ideas that I really want to noodle on, I don't want a constant bombardment of, hey, new shiny. But when I am capturing these ideas in the first place, I want to make sure that there is zero friction or as little friction as possible there. Because if I tell myself, oh, well, it's a a good idea I'll write about that when I get home or something and I don't don't have a record of it it's it's never

gonna happen yeah I think that I think you're right there like there are automated speed tasks that make a lot of sense we have a lot of information thrown at us in modern the modern world a lot of sense. We have a lot of information thrown at us in the modern world, a lot more than our parents did. And ways to track and find that information, indexing it, all that stuff. These are things computers are good at and adding speed to that makes perfect sense.

It's not gonna really help you do the thinking part, having you manually index everything. I guess somebody might argue with me that that could help, but I think the bang for the buck is not there. There are definitely parts of this where I'm also in favor of using the automation tools and whatever's available to me to take what I would call the donkey work out of this stuff and allowing me to focus on the thinking part. Yeah. And the thinking part really, you know, that's a little bit broader than I intended to go with the, you know, when friction is, is bad, you know, really it's just the capturing the ideas, recognizing really what are the good inputs,

and then opening the door for those, and then also recognizing what are the bad inputs, and closing the door for those. That's really this whole thing in a nutshell. But some of the specific examples I feel maybe are helpful as you're trying to think through where do I want to establish those boundaries. Another place where I think friction is bad is when you do need to go look something up. Now this is a tricky one for me because a lot of the work I do in regards to PKM and personal knowledge management, how am I actually working with the notes that I keep inside of my Obsidian Vault? One of the things I kind of rail against is this filing cabinet approach where you stick things in this archive and then you just go dig them up

when you have the thought and you can retrieve those things. I actually have a YouTube video it'll be up by the time this goes live on the difference between note taking and note making which you know I'm not the one who came up with with all this stuff but I still think this is an important topic and a lot of people have a history, myself included, of just sticking a whole bunch of things inside of Evernote. I've captured these things. I can always go back and get them later. And I recognize that I don't always do that. I'm missing out on a lot of the value in that specific part of my workflow. But that doesn't mean that there's not a need to just stick things in an archive

and then be able to go look them up. I think prime example would be tax time. You know, you've got all of the receipts that you've collected, you need to give them to your accountant. You know, being able to go collect all those things and then upload them to the website, that's really important.

And that's not the only type of information that you may need to go back and retrieve. If you've got, you know, manuals or something in your Dev and Think database and you need to go see, you know, how to reprogram something, that's an example of when looking up that information can be valuable. But there's a difference between, you know, just looking up information and actually working with your your ideas And so the information that comes in it's text-based. Maybe it looks the same you have to be able to decide You know, this is actually this thing and this is something else this belongs in this type of tool this belongs in something else and

I'm going to optimize those tools and I'm going to set up my systems so that the the correct flow happens. I want to change the defaults. Essentially, I want to be able to follow this process if I'm developing an idea inside of obsidian. And I want to limit the additional distractions that are going to come from that thing. But when I'm in Devon thinking, I'm trying to look something up, I want to be able to find that thing as quick as humanly possible. And so being able to, uh, to dig that up, you know, when I, when I need it in that particular case, you know, friction is a, is a bad thing. Yeah, it gets complicated. I still feel like a lot of it has to do with, for me, just the stuff where I wanna really bring intentionality

and thoughtfulness to what I'm doing is when I need to slow down. And creating systems that optimize for speed under those circumstances makes the actual product I make worse. I was just thinking, I, so I'm working, over the summer I'm doing this course with kids. I do the productivity field guide for kids every summer,

it's the second summer I'm doing it. And I needed to write an email to them. And I was struggling with it at the keyboard, went to bed, woke up the next morning and I had a really good idea what I wanted to say. And I wrote it out longhand before I then transcribed it, typed it and sent it, you know, off to them, which is not optimized for speed, but it's optimized for, you know, trying to get a voice to talk to teenagers about stuff like this.

And that is an example, I guess, just, just to give an example of where I, I put friction into the system. Yeah. So I think that can be beneficial, but it's not always a bad thing to have friction. I think, or I don't think it's always a good thing to have friction when you are creating something. So as I mentioned, I got this creativity flywheel framework, which the last part of that is the create phase. And that is where historically, if I just jumped to that without actually developing the ideas, that's where the friction is good. Then I struggle because I'm not

really clear on what I want to say. So it feels like an example that you shared, that's really what you're doing there is you're trying to figure out what you want to say. And then for me, when I actually do the writing, that is if I've done the prep work, I actually do not want friction in that writing process. I want a minimal text interface. I want, you know, some music and the focus music playing in the background. I want to create this environment where it's easy for

the words to flow. And for me, that happens to be when I am at my desk and I'm using my fancy keyboard. But I know that you've done a lot of like dictation and things when you're out for a walk or something and that could be another way of just eliminating the friction. You know, I have this thing I want to say. What is the easiest way for me to say it and to get it out so that it can be turned into a newsletter, a video script, a blog post. You know, when it's time to actually do the writing, I feel like at that point, you want to eliminate as much friction as possible. Yeah, writing is weird because I feel like

automation can really benefit writing with the setup, but when it comes to dragging the cursor across the screen, that's when you have to slow down, let the human take over, right? And I guess it just depends on what part of it you're working on. But I've done all those things. I like to use dictation.

I do like to use different formats, and a lot of times I'm using technology in order to make that possible. So, yeah. Yeah, and I would argue that at that point, really what you are doing is you are using the tool that provides the least amount of friction for that last part of the step.

It can't be the thing that is helping you figure out what you actually want to say. The clarity does not come from efficiency, but once you have that, then you want to eliminate the friction and you want to be able to do the thing as efficiently as possible, I guess. But it's really also not just cranking out X number of words. There is a quality aspect to this as well, which maybe we'll get into in the next section when we talk about AI and friction. But one other thing that is maybe obvious but is worth calling out here. If you've got a big, difficult task or project that you're

procrastinating on, you got to ask yourself why. And a lot of times, just speaking for myself, I think the thing is going to be bigger and harder than it really is. And so a lot of the productivity advice that's out there is really just these like mental hacks to get you to just sit down and do the thing like the Pomodoro method, for example, I'm only going to do this for 25 minutes. I can do this for 25 minutes, even though this thing I think is going to take me eight hours to do, I can commit to just doing this for 25 minutes and we'll see if I make any progress. And then by the time you've done with 25 minutes, oh my gosh, I got the thing done. Right. So it's we don't see things clearly. And so at that point, you know, whatever

you can do to eliminate the friction to just get started with something is is really important. And so that's where a lot of the tactics, I think, can come into play. But you don't want to just jump from tactic to tactic to tactic and just crank as many widgets as you can during the day either. You have to, at some point, decide what is actually worth doing.

But then when it's time to do the thing and you find yourself procrastinating on it, and it's hard to actually just sit down and engage with the task or the project, that's because there's friction there. And the question you should be asking is, well, what is the thing that I'm dreading about this? How can I eliminate that friction and just get going?

And I would argue that for getting started quite often, what happens is you create an artificial block. I guess you call it friction if you want, but you give yourself some reason not to start. And that is very different than the type of friction we're talking about that we want to introduce when we're doing difficult thinking work. So yeah, just do the task. You're right. Just get started. But you know, also I'm reading Anne Laura LeComf's book again, and it's like a perfectly legitimate response is to ask yourself why you keep doing that on that project too. Maybe that's not even a project you should be working on if it's that hard to get started. Yeah, she actually just listened to a podcast episode.

She was on Nathan Berry's podcast and she talked a little bit about the different experiments that she's running her creator business. And she brought up the YouTube experiment and how she was gonna do that for a couple of months and she did it. And the YouTube channel was successful, but she hated doing it and just decided, you know,

this isn't something that I want to continue to invest in. So the big takeaway from that conversation for me was to consider that emotional data when you're trying to decide whether something is worth doing as, uh, as well. It can't just all be based on, well, what is the output that's gonna, gonna come from this? There's some internal things to consider there as well. Now, we've been teasing this idea of artificial intelligence and friction throughout the episode because I think we're at a bit of an inflection

point on this, where suddenly methods to remove friction on things where we think friction is good are available to us. And I think this is another way to look at this whole artificial intelligence kind of disruption we're in the middle of. And to me, the more I think about my reaction is to jealously guard the friction, good friction tasks of planning, journaling, things like that, that I want to continue to hold the reins of as a human. And this is something that we have to intentionally do because right now there are AI tools available to me right now that can do my daily planning for me. They can do my journaling for me.

I can just throw a few simple sentences at it and it can write a beautiful journal entry for me. And that is not what I want. And I think all of us kind of need to make that decision for ourselves at this point. And the lines are getting blurred. Yes, yes, they are interesting that we're talking about this part right now, because by the time this goes live, I'll have already presented it, but I'm working on a Mac stock presentation called think different using AI as a creative co-pilot. And it's all really thinking through what is the positive way I define positive myself here, you know, what are the the good ways to use this technology to to get the output that I want? How do I apply it in my own workflows,

add it to my existing systems in a way where it eliminates friction in certain places, but also to your point, I don't want to eliminate the friction in other places. And I absolutely do not want AI just cranking out blog posts on topics. There are tools out there that will do this. And this is kind of where I draw the line, you know, where you can upload samples in your voice and then say, give me a blog post on this topic. And I have no interest in that. I feel like that is, I don't know where I heard the term, but AI slop. Like that. That's what I consider that.

And maybe that's a naive perspective. And in, you know, certain number of months or years, AI will be a better writer and video producer and podcaster than I am. I guess that's a that's a possibility. But I don't want it to do that. However, it's really useful if I tell it, you know, this is my business. This is what I talk about. These are the people I'm trying to help.

And this is these are some of my, you know, core beliefs. Now, give me a bunch of ideas. And you know what? trying to help and these are some of my core beliefs. Now give me a bunch of ideas. And you know what? I've done this sort of thing where I've got those prompts and it spits back all the ideas and it gives me 20 different ideas. 18 of them are garbage.

One of them is okay. And one of them I'm like, hey, actually there's something there. And then I'll take it and I'll put it through my human process and I'll refine it. And what comes out on the other end is something that I'm actually proud of. So yeah, I agree. It's easy to just automate these things that should never be be automated, but also I think as a brainstorming

partner, it's really effective. And we've talked about that in other episodes. I don't know how deep you want to actually go into that topic, but for me, that's kind of where I'm drawing the lines is, if I can have a conversation with you, and whether that's an actual person or an AI agent, then that can help me kind of crystallize my thoughts on things and it will help me to more clearly communicate what I want to in the piece of content that I'm going to create.

I've even actually been messing around lately with the GRAC AI model because I've heard that it's good for this in terms of like arguing with it. Now you may think like, why do you actually want more frustration in your life? Why would you want to argue with an AI agent? But just using a prompt like, work-life balance is a myth, argue with me. And then it's like, well, why do you say that? And then you make your case and like,

well, I can see why you say that, but I don't think it's actually a myth. And this is why, having that conversation, it's kind of like discussing it with a friend. And by the time you're done with the conversation, you have a much more clear idea of the piece that you want to create. So if I know that, you know, I want to talk about something, but I really don't know what I want to say yet, having those conversations with the AI tools, that's where it's really helpful for me. Yeah, and what you're doing, if you listen to yourself,

is you're creating friction with AI. AI becomes an agent of friction. It's arguing with you. It's not accepting what you're telling it. And that can be good. Like an example for me is in the journaling thing, because I do dictate a lot of journal entries with my voice. It's very easy for me to throw that at an AI and say, okay, correct any grammar.

Don't change the voice. You know, just get the grammar right. So that's the first step. That is a friction removing step that I appreciate because grammar checking to me is not something I want to spend my time on. All right. Next step, correct the grammar

and then ask me five to 10 reflective questions on this. All right, I've just added friction. It's adding, asking me, it's reading it for me and asking me difficult questions based on what I've said. You know, when you journal about this relationship with that person, are you giving them a fair shank? Are you, you know, that kind of stuff. For me, even more particular,

I like to include the stoic virtues and the idea of our attain and have it ask me questions about those. Great. Now I say, okay, now I'm gonna answer the questions you've asked me that I want to take all of that and combine it into an entry.

That is where I hit the brakes because then suddenly I've removed the friction of writing the journal entry and the journal entry wasn't even written by me anymore. And that's a problem. So, you know, it's like we all kind of find where we're comfortable with this stuff. And I find that when I really want to do something

thoughtfully, I don't mind using the AI to make it harder on me to ask difficult questions, but I want to own each word at the end. And that's just kind of my take on it at this point in time. You mentioned earlier, well, in a few years, this stuff will be better at writing this stuff than we are, and it can perfectly imitate your voice,

but then at the same point, it wouldn't be my voice. And even if it could do a better job, I mean, part of this whole reason we do this is the process, the transformative effect on us as humans. When we go through the process, you gotta go through the process, the transformative effect on us as humans when we go through the process, you got to go through the process. So I don't think that solves the problem either, that it's better. So this is something to think about as we go forward.

And it's just interesting that both Mike and I independently have been mulling over this idea of intentional friction or not solving for speed. I'd like you, dear listener, to think about that in your life. What are the areas that you've been solving for speed that you need to stop doing that on? This episode of Focused is brought to you by Incogni. Almost everyone experiences those annoying robocalls

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via the link in the show notes and you'll get 60% off of your annual plan. Check it out now, incogni.com slash focused. Our thanks to incognito for their support of the focus podcast and all of relay. Shiny new objects, Mike, you've been buying stuff. What's up? Well, it's kind of your fault. Okay. And Jason Snell, you had Jason on a episode of Mac power users a while back and he mentioned the insta 360 link cameras. Yeah, and I I have two of them now Okay, shortly after that there was a big summer sale on their their website and they were like 50% off

so I got them and I have them hooked up to a video switcher which took a little bit of finagling, but I have... yeah I have... so the YouTube set up in my long skinny office where I record my videos and then I have a desk on the other side now which is an L-shaped desk and that's actually where I do a lot of my writing. And one of the Insta360 link cameras is on a little bit of a boom arm and hangs down in front of the monitor a little bit. So it, it forces the eye contact for like zoom calls. And then the other one is set up on the L of the desk for a top-down shot.

If I'm going to sketch something out. And I love these little cameras. They're 4k cameras. They're, what is it pan tilt zoom, the PTZ. Yeah. So, um, they, they move around hence the, the name, I guess, and so 360, you can point them just about anywhere. There's a auto tracking feature, which I don't really use, although I'm thinking through like, maybe that would be cool to set that up. And then I could go over to the whiteboard and record a video of me diagramming something on the whiteboard.

But these cameras are great. The video quality is much higher than I thought it would be and would highly recommend these for anyone looking for a quality webcam. But get the Insta360 link, not the link two. The link is like a little square base. It's got a little arm on it and then it's got the tiny little head that moves in a bunch of different directions. The link 2 looks different. It's more rectangular and these squarish Insta360 link cameras are the ones that Jason told me, you want to get these not the the link twos and He was right. I love these I

You know, we just had Father's Day and my kids got me an analog watch Nice. Yeah, I have not worn an analog watch in a long time. So I've been having a good time Wearing that and I am not giving up on my Apple watch, but I feel like there's times in my life where it'd be kind of nice to have something that is completely incapable of bothering me on my wrist. So I've been kind of just figuring out where this fits in my life.

But it's kind of fun having a bit of a less technology on my wrist. At this point, you know, I'm not sure I could go back to wearing a, an analog watch. I love my Apple watch. I use the fitness stuff all the time on it though. So I'm sure there's ways around it, but Well, I mean, there's other like fitness trackers, but honestly just like I do wear the Apple watch when I go to to do workout type stuff and you know like I said I'm just figuring it out but it's it is kind of fun and it's a nice little watch and another thing to to allow me to have a little less digital in my life so I get it. Do you have to wind it? Is it battery operated or is it one of those?

No, this one winds itself when you wear it, but if I leave it in the drawer for a week, I'll probably have to wind it. Sure, nice. What are you reading these days, Mike? I am reading Lean Learning by Pat Flynn. People who are listening to this podcast probably know Pat Flynn from his Smart Passive Income brand. He's one of the OG internet creators, I would argue.

He has an interesting story. He started off, he was in architecture school and was creating these study guides and sold them online. And that was kind of his foray into the the creator economy and then from there he taught people how to how to do that sort of thing but more recently what he's known for actually I should ask you do you know more recently what he's known for no I don't okay I didn't think so. He basically decided I'm going to start another YouTube channel from scratch and it's going to be about Pokemon. And it was something that he could do with his son.

And he grew that channel to millions of subscribers to the point where like people are paying him to go to Ford Field in Michigan during the Thanksgiving football game. You know, at halftime, he's on the field, opening up a pack of Pokemon cards. And I have to admit that I know nothing about Pokemon. So this is like a a world I am not familiar with. But what's interesting to me is how he decided to do something so drastically different and he did it successfully.

So Lean Learning is basically a book about how he built both of those channels. He gave a talk at Craft and Commerce and he kind of shared some of the the takeaways from the different you know experiments and things that he was running in the different takeaways he he got from different videos and different types of videos that he was creating. And the whole idea behind the book is that we tend to accumulate much more knowledge than we actually need to get started doing the thing we wanna do successfully. And I feel like he is personally attacking me

with that description. That's totally me. I tend to over research and over research and only when I have completely figured something out do I actually do it. And yeah, I feel like this book is about how people learn effectively, but it's not written by the academic person who typically writes these kinds of books and so far it's a it's a breath of fresh

air I really enjoy this book. Check it out I'm I'm rereading as I mentioned earlier tiny experiments in the Max Recky labs we're doing we have a book club and we're doing tiny experiments right now we're gonna be doing a couple meetups to discuss the book actually later this week. So I'm just rereading it for the second time. You know, we had her on the show. This is a great book.

I feel like this is one of the better books of this ilk that I've read in a long time. So good on her. Yeah, so I got to meet her at Craft and Commerce. She was one of the keynote speakers and she did an amazing job. But even before that, I was there for, Jay Klaus has his lab community

and they did a live in-person event a couple of days before Craft and Commerce. And as part of that, Jay had a couple of, of, uh, special guests that he didn't announce ahead of time for like these fireside chats. Yeah. Um, one of them was Ann-Laure LeCunf and, uh, was able to talk to her then. And, um, she's just super smart, super friendly. One of the nicest people you will, will ever meet. I'm really glad that her book is taking off. I did a video review of that book, by the way, recently, and she ended up finding it and sharing it

and reached out to me and said, thanks for the, this is an incredible summary of the book. I'll put a link to that video in the show notes that people are interested in it, but I'm really happy to see the success that she's having couldn't have happened to a nicer person. Yeah, and if you haven't read that book yet, check it out.

Agreed. All right, we are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm slash focus. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Incogni. If you'd like to get the ad for extended version of the show, sign up for Deep Focus. You can do that at relay.fm.focus.

We'd love to have you on board. Membership helps keep the lights on around here. Today on Deep Focus, Mike and I are going to be talking about his new improved writing workflows and some very cool obsidian trickery he's up to. So I'm looking forward to getting into that. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.