Focused - 255: Get Your Machete Out

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast, but more than there's cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you, my friend? I'm doing great. I'm pretty chill. I've been meditating lately.

Yeah, we're going to talk about that today in deep focus. I feel like there are words that need to be said. I'm glad that you're doing it. Yeah, me too. And of course, being the nerd you are, you turned it into a tracking event. So I want to talk about that. too. Either way, yeah, we're at the Focus Podcast. We like to talk about the topic of staying on Target in a world that's always distracting you. And occasionally we get a bunch of feedback and it

piles up and we do these feedback shows. And I really enjoy doing this because it lets us kind of free range a bit talk about a variety of topics related to focus. And it also lets us kind of showcase our brilliant listeners. So we get a lot of great questions this time. So I think without further do, Mike, we should just dig in. Let's do it. From James, we did a show on burnout just recently and got a bunch of feedback on that. James said, how do you tell the difference between legitimate burnout and just a bad week? I like that question.

That's a great question. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts first on this. I feel like I rated very low on the burnout index. So I really feel like I'm much more inclined to feel like I'm having. a bad week than burning out. But I would assume burnout is something more systematic, something more ever-present. On the topic of weeks, my daughter recently shared with me her theory that the week is like the World Series.

And you need to win four of seven to have a win. And she's got a whole theory. She says, you know, you always win Friday and Saturday. You know, and then you just need to get two more wins of those other five days. and then you had a good week. And I thought, you know, a kid, you're pretty smart. Yeah. Yeah.

That's an interesting framing. And I'm trying to reconcile in my brain how that might be used to determine, you know, what is a bad week, first of all, and then what's the difference between a bad week and actually being burnt out? I think maybe the cause of this is maybe that motivation. or that temptation to label the week as bad. Yeah. Because when you're explaining the World Series and the four out of seven,

my first initial thought was, well, it's not a very high hit rate. That's barely over 50%. Would I really consider that a good week if I only followed through on 50% of what I actually wanted to do, had four out of seven good days? And so maybe, maybe, you know, We mentioned in that episode that the people most susceptible to it are the high achievers

and the productivity nerds. So maybe we just set the bar a little too high. Maybe we just set ourselves to fall into the gap more often. In terms of the difference between burnout in a bad week, though, I think those could be, that's not an either or a situation. That could be both. I think you stack up enough bad weeks and you get to the point where you are dealing with some of those symptoms of burnout.

And recalling from that episode that burnout is sort of a spectrum, there's not, you know, one single definition, now you have entered the land of burnout. Yeah. You know, so I think the weeks are, for me, just a good indication of, okay, this is what's going on. And if you've got some sort of way of tracking that sort of stuff, you can notice, you know, that's three bad weeks in a row. Better be careful or something's broken.

Maybe it's time to make some drastic changes, you know, figure some stuff out. That's how I think I would approach that. I feel like for me, burnout would be more like the feeling that you've been on the horse too long, right? You know, and like I occasionally find myself doing that. Like I had a really busy six months from like October to frankly now. Because of a variety of reasons I released a couple of products I didn't expect to. I've committed to a lot of time in relation to that. So I see myself like in a very busy period, but I also see the end date of that and I promise myself to slow down the second half of this year. And I think I'll make good on it. But something that got me curious, Mike, listening to you those. How do you measure whether a week

is good or not? What's an alternative to the World Series thing? I think it's ultimately just the regular act of reflection. I think that's going to come back in another one of these. these questions, but I don't have a formal quantified way of measuring the week was good or bad, but the regular reflection of, okay, so what actually happened and what am I going to do about this? What adjustments am I going to make? That is where the magic happens, I think. I think for me, the key to liberals are a big piece of it. Like, did I show up ready to record focused podcast, you know, did I do the things I promised my partners I would do? That's obviously, I think, important, but honestly, I do that stuff. It's very rare that I miss something. But I think for me,

as I do the weekly reflection, something I'm always paying close attention is what I call my non-negotiables. Like, did I regularly get time in the shop or with my plants? Or did I read and reflect every day? did I meditate, did I exercise? Like those things, in fact, those things I talked about as my antidotes to burnout in that show to me are a key metric as to whether the week was good.

If I get through a week and I'm like, well, I hit all the deliverables but I didn't spend any time of the shop. In my guts, that's not a good week. That shouldn't have happened. So that's kind of how I measure it when I think about it. And I think that's great.

You know, I, when I reviewed that episode, before publishing it, I was kind of struck by, there's some really good stuff in here. I love all my podcast children equally, but I might love that one more than the others. That one was really good. So if you've skipped that episode, I don't really deal with burnout. I think that might be one of our best ones, and I would encourage people to go back and listen to it. All right. You're in a gang. You need to go. You got homework now. More on burnout from Lynn. is there such a thing as burning out on a hobby?

And what do you do when that thing that used to recharge you stops working? This is a great question. And I think it is possible to burn out on a hobby, but the definition of burnout here maybe is a little bit different than we would apply the broader definition of burnout. I would define a burnt out hobby as something that's not bringing you joy anymore. and it's easy for it to slip into that. I think if you at all try to monetize your hobby.

Yes. I have a story on that. Yeah. I remember when we had Mike Curley on the show and he was talking about his interest in fountain pens and then he ends up doing the pen addict podcast. And the term he used to go from a hobby to something you make money from was a joby. And that really stuck with me. You need to have some hobbies, not jobbies.

Like it's fine to do things that you like and get paid. paid for them. I mean, that's essentially what I'm doing with the PKM stuff. We're independent creators. So on the, I won't through one lens, that's exactly what we do. But also, uh, it does change the relationship with the thing. You're now trying to create content on a regular basis about this thing. And you kind of lose this, this whole idea of, I'm just going to play with this. And I'm going to have fun with it. I'm going to see where it goes. I'm working on a newsletter right now. It'll be out by the time this goes public on the amateur advantage. And it's kind of inspired by the Rick Rubin quote,

playing to, some people play to win, some people play to play. And playing to play is like, you just having fun with it. And it kind of ties back to the word amateur, which the root of that literally means love or lover. So we think of amateur as, well, you're not good enough to get paid for it. You're not making any money from it. Really, amateur is just someone who does it because they love to do it. And the minute that you start taking money for it,

it changes the relationship with the thing. Yeah, I mean, you see this constantly. My own personal experience with this was years ago, because I love woodworking and making things, a couple of friends asked me to build some cabinets for them. And almost immediately I realized that I hated that, you know, being on a clock, you know, having them want me to do things that I thought were dumb with the design.

But, you know, they're the customer. and I realized, boy, this will never be something I could do to make a living. Like if things went upside down in my life, I thought, I'll just be a cabinet man. I think I'd probably be terrible at it because it just sucked the joy out of it. And it was remarkable once I delivered those and I said, I'll never do that again. It went back to making stuff and I loved it again. It was really that simple. And I think that's something a lot of people see.

But I also think it's possible to burn out on a hobby with expertise. I think for a lot of people, hobbies are the way that you get to expand your brain, you know, really build that gray matter. And when you pick up a hobby, there's just so much to learn. You know, I feel like that with my hobbies, the woodworking, the bonsai. I'm not an expert at that stuff. But so every time I do it, I'm like expanding. And I know people that get into a hobby so hard that they kind of graduate out of it

and then they kind of lose interest in it. And that's, it really depends how you're wired. up, but I think that's another way you can burn out on a hobby. Yeah, I think the important thing for me with a hobby is I don't have an end state I'm trying to reach. I'm not trying to achieve a goal or a certain level of mastery or proficiency in the thing. If that is the goal, I think that's the situation that you're describing there where you get to the pinnacle of the thing, or at least the pinnacle in your mind of what, you know,

excellence in this area looks like and then you're like oh that's kind of disappointing you got to love the journey yeah exactly exactly from jason you talked about burnout but what happened what about the guilt that comes with slowing down how do you manage that you know that was a great question i was thinking we probably should have covered that during the episode but if you're recognizing burnout in you know the thing you have to do is slow down but a lot of us are wired to feel guilty about the act that heals us. It's a very vicious cycle. Yeah, I was actually talking to somebody about this just the other day. They're trying to get something off the ground. And it's one of those things where you can only do so much. And so he was kind of in this situation where he's spending

four hours a day building this thing. But then like basically after 12 or 1 o'clock, he's time, it's not, whatever effort he puts into that is, is not going to help move the thing forward anymore. So it's not, you know, a full 40 hour a week job. And he's trying to figure out, you know, what do I do? Because this thing isn't off the ground yet. He believes that he's supposed to be doing this. And he's seeing growth that's coming from it. But he's got this identity that he's created as, you know, I am the provider for my family and all of these things, these expectations, which a lot of them, you know, when you have the conversations with your significant other, you can kind of work through that and we'll piece this together from over here and over here.

But without identifying that, he's got this vacuum of time. And he was telling me that he just feels so guilty when he's not working on this thing. And so it's a lot like what we do, we can do it from anywhere, virtual on a computer. He's trying to get into like date trading and stuff. So like the markets, you know, after a certain point, they're not doing anything else. you got to wait till tomorrow. And he's trying to, you know, go through all these courses and learn all this stuff. And like, that's good.

I've done the same sort of thing on my creator journey the last couple of years. But there's a limit to the how useful that stuff is. You kind of just have to get the feedback loops. And when you're in something, there's this temptation, I think, to try to accelerate things by pushing harder. And I think when you push harder and you don't see those immediate results, that's where the guilt comes from right here. Number one, you know, I don't know what I don't know. There's something I'm missing.

I just need to push harder and figure it out. And the minute that you take your foot off the gas at all, it's like, what are you doing? Don't you know? You got to figure this out. But sometimes the best thing that you can do is just slow down. So I don't know that this actually ever goes away. If I were to give somebody advice about what do you do with this, recognize that it is going to be there and then identify the things that you can actually do that

are going to move the needle. And then you're just going to have to fight back against it and be like, you know what, I'm not going to be pushing right now and whatever pockets of time you identify that and say that is going to be okay. And my theory, I guess, even though I'm really bad at this myself, like this question resonates because I'm in the middle of fighting the same thing. You have to get okay with things not being perfect. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of elements to this question. One big one is, you know, the whole saying no challenge.

Like when you use the word guilty, that implies like what are you guilty towards probably other people? like you're saying I'm not doing something that they want me to do. And we've talked about this extensively because I think a key to being focused in your life is saying no to a lot of things. And that includes other people. And it's just something you selfishly have to work on if you want to live your best life. I think another piece of this is kind of that knowledge guilt that Mike is talking about

that like you want to do something right. Like you want to do everything. And you get the self-image of your, yourself that, hey, I'm the guy who answers all the email, who reads all the books, who knows all the stuff. And I have to keep up with that if, you know, I am to maintain myself image. And I think that can get in a way. I think fundamentally you need to understand that when you give yourself margin, you're actually making yourself better. You know, it's like if you were going to go and become fit and you just worked out all day long every day, you're going to. You know, it's like, if you were going to go and become fit,

you would actually wreck your body. The muscles need time to recover in between. And that just applies to everything you do. So I think the guilt you have to let go of, and you have to get to the bottom of, what is it, Ralph, that is triggering this for you? And what exactly are you feeling guilty about? And you should address that specifically.

But also understand you're doing good here by protecting yourself. you're actually making it more capable for you to support your family. You're actually making you better at what you're going to do. And getting that margin is just absolutely key. Another piece of this that I've noticed is age. You know, I'm in my late 50s now. When I hit my early 50s, suddenly I cared less about what the world thought of me.

And it's like a secret language I'll tell young people listening. when you're over, when you get to a certain age. And just yesterday I was talking to my Pilates instructor. And something came up. She was like, yeah, I said, and I said, but do you really care? And she's like, absolutely not. And she's like 65, you know. And I think that it is, it's like a hidden language between people after they hit middle age,

where you just don't get hung up on that guilt as much, you know. Not only towards other people, towards yourself, towards your expectations, you start to live your life more deliberately. because probably because you recognize the eminence of the end and you're like, well, I better make this work, you know? But that's a little insight that I've had. Personally, I've never shared that on the show, but I feel like there is kind of a thing that happens when you get to a certain age.

But the big answer to Jason is there's a lot going on when you feel that guilt. And what I would do is meditate on it, you know, sit down, think about it, get to the bottom of what the source of the guilt is for you because it's different. you know, we've identified the resources just here and address that. But also understand you're doing the right thing. Stick with it. It's okay. And I don't mean by giving yourself margin that you ignore the people around you and you're a jerk, but, you know, you don't be jerk to yourself either. Right, right. You know, the, as you get older, your perspective changes. I heard somebody say the other day that when you're 20, you're worried about what other people

think when you're 40 you don't care what other people think when you're 60 you realize other people weren't thinking about you at all true yeah I didn't with my kids growing up because we had a lot of dinner table conversations and a theme that I repeatedly hammered on was whenever somebody acts rude remember it's not about you you know and and now they they voice it back to me I hear them saying, oh, such and such sense, but I know it's not about me. You know, they, they like preface it because they've heard me say it so many times. And I feel like as a dad, that was a win for me, that I got that drilled in deep enough that they think about that. That is absolutely a dad win.

Okay. Systems and Tools. Next topic. I just kind of put these roughly. From Mark, picking a tool, omnifocus things, notion, obsidian. At what point does the tool choice matter less? than just committing to something. And I would say that at the point at which that insight that Mark had of the tool matters

less than committing is at the beginning. Yeah, I, this is, this is interesting. I'm working on a video script right now on, I use different AI tools to like, to identify outliers in my niche. And usually like it gives me ideas based off of these other types of videos that people have made. Most of the time I'm like, I don't really have anything to say about that. Thanks for the suggestions. I'll do something different.

But recently, there was a whole bunch of stuff about like obsidian versus Claude. And the key there is the versus, right? And the videos that it was surfacing is people basically saying, you don't need obsidian. Just go all in with Claude. And I was like, well, wait a minute. That it's all marked down files. It's not either or. It's just which UI do you want?

So I've been thinking a lot about this and I kind of feel like we're at the point now where the specific tools don't really matter. You need to pick a tool. So go ahead and pick the one that fits or resonates or looks the best, like the one that you enjoy using and then figure out how to use it well and then don't worry about the other stuff because there's a minimum level that has been achieved for just about every productivity tool on the market, I feel. Back in the day, Omnifocus was the tool because it had these defer dates or start dates and no other

task manager had those. Almost every task manager has those now. And we keep finding more ways to bolt on additional complexity to these things, which gets in the way of actually doing the work. Yeah, I mean, what you just said was very insightful, you know, 15, 20 years. ago when I got started in this racket, there weren't very many good tools. And so you really had to focus on the few that are good. Now, if you don't have the tool you want, you vibe code it up for yourself. It's just there's so much abundance of riches here. The way of trouble here, Mark, is when you

start comparing features and saying, well, this one does this, but that one does that. I think if you don't know what tool you want, do a quick search for what are the tools people want here, you know, maybe even feed those to an AI and say, you know, give me decision criteria for deciding between these, you know, help me figure out the questions that are important to me in deciding which tool to use. And then what you land on them, then just use it and don't go nuts. I'm experiencing that myself right now. I'm teaching this course using Obsidian and clawed together. so to me it's Obsidian and Claude. And a lot of the people going to course are using No Plan,

which is a nice alternative to Obsidian. It's a native Mac app, which I like that. But honestly, when I get down to it, I think I'm just going to use Obsidian because it's working. It's doing what I want. And I've taught people how to make the transition, but I'm not sure I want to. And it's just one of those things where you just get hung up in the gears

that prevent you from doing the work. But it's a real thing we feel, Mark. All of us feel it. But just pick a tool. And if you pick a tool, even if it doesn't have all the features, but you master it, that you're going to be fine.

You know, I mean, the goal is not to be a master of the tool anyway. The goal is to do the work. The goal is to get the job done. And that's the thing is you've got to be clear on what job you are hiring the tool to do. If you're clear on that, then I feel like there's less compulsion to jump from tool to tool or system to system

because you understand how the process works. And so when you pick the tool and you figure out how to leverage it in a specific way where it's actually providing value for you instead of, well, I just got to make more connections and I got to dump more notes in. And eventually that graph view is going to reveal all these insights to me. You know, that payoff never comes. This episode of the Focus podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Go to Squarespace.com slash focus and save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code focused.

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All right, the next question's from I. I have to say as an aside, one of my best friends growing up was a Vian, a guy name I, and everybody called him Al all the time. And I, when you sent this message to me, you made me think of my old friend. And I was thinking, his name is spelled AI. I'm like, how terrible it must be for you now.

It used to be Al, but now your name is AI. Anyway, sorry, I'm guessing I is Vietnamese as well. I keep building elaborate productivity systems and then abandoning them. What's the minimum viable system that actually sticks? That is specific to you, I, it depends on you. But my guess is it's a lot less than you think it is. Yeah, that's an interesting question. And it is probably a little bit subjective.

But I think in terms of a spectrum here, the minimum viable system could be a note card where you write down the three things you're going to do every day. Yep, yeah, I got mine too. You really don't need more than that. All the other stuff is in support of that list right there. Yeah, yeah. I don't want to go down the analog rabbit hole right now, but there is something very satisfying

in this digital age of writing down a few things on a piece of paper and working from that through the day. What I would say, seriously though, I do think a lot of us build systems that are more complex than we need them to be.

And we probably, Mike and I probably bear some guilt here because we teach about this stuff. And like, well, Mike has a special way to try track this an obsidian, I need that too. And like, you just start, like, building on and on. And before you know it, you've got a system that you spend time managing as opposed to doing the work. One thing I would ask yourself, especially if you've got a complex system, is like,

how good is it at the ultimate goal of you moving the needle on the things that matter? You know, when you get to the end of the week, think about that question. Or, like, if you have recently changed systems, you know, And you had that fun excitement of changing systems and rebuilding your tags and whatever it is that makes you happy. And then a month later, you know, am I getting any more done now that's matters than I was with the old system? And I can tell you from personal experience, usually the answer is no. You know, this is just scaffolding you erect around your life. It doesn't necessarily help you move the needle.

So just be really aware of that. constantly. And I think that'll naturally allow you to scale things back to kind of the minimum viable system. And I think that is the goal here is you don't want the most complex system. You want the minimum viable system. Anything that lets you focus on what's important to you is all you need. What do you think are the components of a minimal viable system? I've just been thinking through this a little bit. I think it's probably a couple of pieces. I mean, you can have offshoot the three main things. But in terms of productivity, getting done the things that really matter, you've got some sort of planning where you figure out what you want to do. You've got the

step where you actually do the work. Yeah. And then you've got some sort of reflection to close the loop and figure out what changes you want to make for next time, right? That's basically it. Yeah, But I also think practically you need a calendar of some sort. You need a place to write down notes about what you're doing. You need a place to keep a list of things you're working on, which is the scaffolding around those big questions that you just answered. Like if you have a plan, how do you keep track of it? It doesn't need to be fancy, but you need to have something to make it real.

I think just carrying that stuff around your head isn't enough. You won't follow through. True. Yeah. You're right. You do have to have some tools that are going to support that process, although the complexity of those tools and the number of them is probably far less than you would think. Even at calendar, I feel like that's necessary because on some level, we've got too much

going on. Our ancestors didn't have to worry about going to the meeting at the place. They just, you know, oh, it's time to go harvest the crops. I haven't like, you know, my grandfather was, he worked in a coal mine and then a shoe factory. So he was time to go to work, you know, and then he came home. He didn't have to manage a calendar or task list. He just went and made shoes, you know? Yeah. I think, though, that the point Mike makes is a good one is that, you know, the system really is surfacing what's important and finding a way to do it. And the tools that we all love to fetishize

are just support roles to that. Like, and at the end of the day, you've got to be working on the important stuff and have the tools that make that possible, but no more. Yeah, they are not the main character in this story you are. I really think, you know, just to get down a rabbit hole here, as I continue to work with this robot assistant stuff, that that is dramatically changing for us anyway. I don't think the general population is aware of it yet, but we are very close to what I'm calling the Star Trek moment, you know, where you just talk to the computer, it manages your calendar, your task. It just does that stuff for you. We're abstracting the tools out of the human management and putting them in the AI management. And honestly, it's already there for me. I have a thing called today's menu that the robot generates from me at 6 a.m. every day. And it has a list of the things I need to do that day. And it's got a list of available tasks.

I call it a menu because I choose from it. I don't let it dictate to me. But that has kind of become the system. I'm holding up air quotes that I use now. And like I don't go into apps and fiddle around with. start dates and all that. I just the robot puts this list in front of me. I write a few of them down

on a note card and I get to work and I just think that is the way this is going to be for everybody in the not too distant future. This is the way. Are you going to go see that movie? The new Mandalorian? I don't know. I mean, I would love

to but we're in the middle of the busiest season we've ever had with musicals and choir concerts and the end of year stuff. I have been kind of down on Star Wars the last few years, but I watched a John Favreau interview and I got excited, so we're going to go see it, and I'm looking forward to it. As a totally unrelated note there, huh? Okay, from Ralph, how often do you revisit and prune your task manager? I feel like mine has become a graveyard.

How do you do that, Mike? not very well um so i i think i recognize the same thing that uh ralph is recognizing in his task list which is why i almost never captured tasks to my true task management system anymore i have uh creative projects so if i'm going to write an article i'm going to put that as its own node in obsidian and track it in a compound board but it's not my task manager per se and then the other like I guess they're one-offs, but they're really like repetitive tasks, like publish-focused. That happens every other Tuesday. That exists in due so that I get the recurring reminders.

And there's a couple of those that happen on a regular basis, just so I don't forget to do the things, but they're pretty much all scheduled. I guess the things that I typically would have assigned firm due dates to, I've kind of let those go. Like a lot of the video projects and things, they're done when they're done. You know, when I feel good about the video is when I actually ship it. And that's probably most of the task type stuff that I work on. That's not part of a regular whirlwind, like the podcast stuff. So I don't know that I'm a great, great person to follow here. But I think the principle that I've kind of leaned into, we sort of talked about the last question. I,

want enough structure there to help me focus on the things that need to get done at the specific times and then nothing else additional. And so I recognize that that means I don't capture a whole lot of those one-off tasks into my task manager anymore. I don't know. I guess I'm a bit of a weirdo that way. You and I, we lived charmed lives. I mean, I used to be a trial lawyer and I I know exactly what Ralph is talking about here. And I had a lot of tasks. I have a lot fewer now. The new system I've built out with robot help is,

there's three categories. There's bench, shelf, and idea. That's it. And, you know, so I call them ideas because I may never do them. And then if I'm actually thinking I might do it, it goes on the shelf. And if I'm going to do it today, it goes on the bench. but one of the things I've done, just to get back to my point earlier

is when I do the monthly review, I have the robot nominate old tasks for deletion, you know, and just say, okay, give me a list of things that you think I should probably delete. And it'll say, well, this one's been around a long time. This is no longer,

it's just like having a little assistant, you know. And I am very liberal with those deletions every month. So my task list is smaller than it's ever been. But also I have a lot of automation. stuff as well. Like there's a whole process we do after we finish this show and I'm responsible for the YouTube stuff. So like I don't have any of that stuff as a task. I just, you know, know that every Friday afternoon I do the video processing for the focus podcast. And so it's kind of autopilot kind of stuff. So, so yeah, I'm careful about that. But to get to

Ralph, bigger point is if you feel uncomfortable to deleting them, you can put them in some kind of stasis, you know, make a status called stasis and just put them there. And then, but give yourself permission at some point to delete them. I used to joke with Ken Ks at Omnifocus that if a user defers a task five times, we should have the option that it just goes to the trash at that point, you know, which of course doesn't make sense, but kind of does. You know, and using the robot assistant, I've actually kind of implemented that, you know, where it's like, okay, I was just talking to somebody in one of the labs meetups recently, and she made a role with her robot that 30 days after she creates a task, if she doesn't do it,

it just automatically deletes it. And I said, well, has anything fallen through the cracks? She's like, no, if I don't do in 30 days, I'm just never going to do it. And I thought that was very mature. That's the thing. Like, recognizing when things fall. through the cracks. I think that's the fomo that's underlying that pressure. Well, I got to go in and I got to review all this stuff because I want to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. And I guess the question I would ask is, what am I worried about actually happening here?

Because my experience, when I've tried to keep everything in a fancy system and I'm doing the regular reviews, I'm touching all the tasks and all the projects and things like that. And I'm trying to make sure that I'm GTDing the heck out of everything and it's all buttoned up and ready to go for me. A lot of the stuff that I'm concerned about falling through the cracks is a lot of stuff that I just don't want to disappoint somebody. Yeah. And a lot of those types of things for me typically would come through messages or email

and I would take the time to create the link to the message so I get to it easily, create the task in Omnifocus and put all the dates, the tags, the context, all that kind of stuff with it. And then I just got to the point where it's like, you know what, I don't really care. When I, when something did fall through the cracks with somebody who wants something from me via email, I'm just, at this point, just apologize and saying, you know, I, I'm sorry, I'm not, I'm not good at email. Some people are annoyed by that, right? And there's a little bit of privilege with that, but also I think it's really just clarity. You talked about, you know, I don't want to be the person, I don't want my legacy to be like he was really good at email. I want to be the guy who

makes stuff and you got to make choices about what is actually important here. And then a lot of the complex task management I feel like for me is just a temptation to prioritize other people's urgency as false importance in my life. Yeah. And it also becomes a way to avoid doing the hard stuff because, you know, organizing your tags is a lot less taxing than doing your most important work. So you just got to be careful. But Ralph, I would get your machete out and just do it, man. Just delete a bunch of stuff. Who cares? On that note, we, there's an article that Joan Westenberg wrote about deleting her second brain. You know, she had 10,000 notes saved. And she talks about this article, we'll link in the notes. It's a medium post. How she got the sense of relief by just getting out

from under all of that digital detritus she had built up. And I got thinking, we got to talk with this. I got to get Mike on the line. We got to know what he thinks about this. Yeah. So this is a medium article, and it has been making the rounds recently. I've heard about this multiple places.

I actually think this is an important point. and she's hitting on something that a lot of people who practice personal knowledge management at PKM, whether they use obsidian or craft or Notion or Rome or whatever, they feel exactly what she is describing here. So there's this unfulfilled promise of PKM as what I call it, where you capture the notes, you create the links, and you expect that by doing that,

you're going to have this tool for thought that is going to just all of a sudden create all this additional insight and revelation into what you have captured. And that doesn't happen. And people get frustrated. People get disillusioned with the whole process and they want to just chuck it.

So Joan actually checked it. On the one hand, what she's saying in this article, I raised 10,000 notes, seven years of ideas, every thought I tried to save. Those thoughts and those ideas, those are actually the seeds of the things that you ultimately need to do. So there's parallel with this to the task management question we were talking about earlier. I feel like we tell ourselves we can't just chuck all that stuff.

There's some important stuff in there. Use this article for if for nothing else as evidence that all that stuff that you think is really precious. It really isn't all that you think it is. And I love my obsidian, my obsidian vault and the notes that I've collected there. But I don't worship those things. I don't assume that the fact that I have these in a specific place and organize a specific way is going to unlock things. There's another thing I think here at play.

So if you scroll down to the bottom of this page and the recommendations for me, this is more from Joan Westenberg. In October 29, she's got an article. This is why you should write every day, even if you're not, writer. So these two things are connected in my opinion. The notes and ideas in obsidian or in whatever your second brain tool happens to be, that's great. And you can surf through those and find connections and things like that. But ultimately, like the real important thing is that you're producing your own thoughts and your own ideas. You're creating something out of them. And it's not just, well, this is the the synthesis of all these connections that I've made.

You could completely get rid of your second brain like Joan did and then just get into a regular writing habit and probably get 98% of the benefit that your second brain is currently giving you without any of the maintenance. So I don't know, that's in a nutshell. I can go further with that. I have thousands of notes as well that I've collected and I look at them as a resource.

I don't really think of them as a second brain. Maybe that's part of the reason why I'm not as hung up on this. But like if I want to work on something, I'm like, oh, what do I have on this already? I find that useful. But also, I think the act of creation is the most important. The most important notes for me are the, I've been calling it lately in Corridian.

It's a thing, right? But it's just kind of my thoughts on different things. honesty or, you know, priority values, all sorts of judgments and things that are important to me. But the act of creation of them was the pivotal moment. It wasn't the ability to go back and read them. I'm also reminded of my day one database that has now 6,100 journal entries. And I don't go back and read them all, but the act of writing them helped me clarify in the moment what was important to me. and it makes me, I think, more focused as a person on what's important. So I find the process of creation is absolutely instrumental.

And we talked about this on MacPower users. Stephen asked me, well, what if it just got deleted, you woke up one day and it was all gone, would you be upset? I mean, I think I'd be a little disappointed because I think there's probably some good ideas in there that I might forget. But honestly, I would just start doing the same thing again. I wouldn't stop because this stuff is useful to me. And I also don't think about it as a corpus the way a lot of people do,

like Joan does, frankly. I mean, I don't think about it like this weight of thousands of notes that I'm carrying. I don't think of it that way. It's just like I said, it's a resource. And I'm really, of course, as it keeps coming out in the show, I'm really sold on the idea of using a language model to help me manage that stuff to go through and say, hey, what's a good idea? I wrote about, you know, five years ago that I should probably update, you know, and it does a pretty good job of finding that stuff.

And it's because I have this corpus that it can find that. And it knows what's important to me. So I find it as a useful piece of luggage, but I don't carry it on my back. Yes, exactly. And then kind of tied to, again, the conversation about the task management, there's a line in here which is really important. is the act of deletion is a reassertion of agency. So what she's saying here is by throwing out all of those notes and ideas, she's taking agency over her creative process. And that's one way to do it. But I think there's another way to do it where you're just not so worried about

do I know exactly where everything is and exactly how everything connects. the people who use their PKM systems that I've seen to create regularly don't have a very clean, orderly process that they follow. They have a basic process. They have steps to the creative process. But if you look at their obsidian vaults, it's a complete mess. There's a whole bunch of stuff all over the place that isn't organized. It reminds me a lot of those threads of like the most creative people in history and

the how crazy messy their desks were. Yeah. Like, and that's not to say they were creative because it's a mess, but they get so focused on the thing that they are making that they don't really care if everything gets put back exactly where it was while they're in the moment creating the thing. You can go back later, you can clean that stuff up if you want. And if you never get to it in terms of your digital files, I would actually argue, don't worry about it.

Because if you really want to go dig in and find something later, you can use. use Cloud or you can use any of those other search tools to surface that stuff for you. And I'm a big advocate of making intentional connections between notes and using them in the creative process. But I think you don't have to make sure every orphan note has a link and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes it's just, well, that's in there for now. And if I never stumble upon that again, that's okay. Yeah. I definitely am not going to waste time pruning through that. Yeah. And that's a great way to describe it is wasting. time. Sounds a little bit aggressive maybe with the whole idea a couple years ago about it being a

digital garden and you got to tend to it. And like there are a lot of people talking about that whole metaphor. And I think there's an element of truth to that. But it's so easy to go from this is actually productive and helping me think to this is just a complete waste of time. And you can feel the moment that it switches because it goes from something where you're just kind of curious and you're following the trail to, oh, I got to maintain this thing. Yeah, and see, again, though, if you combine it with an AI, that's such an unlock because it does the maintenance for you. Like, when I want to write a newsletter, I say, you know, I'm going to write a newsletter. Surface, you know, ideas I've had in the last 30 days and surface things I put on the bench, you know,

and just, you know, give me ideas because every time I have an idea for when I write down some notes on it, you know, I mean, this is an example of when we finish. this podcast, I'm going to give it the transcript and say, did I talk about anything in this episode that would be a good newsletter? And if I did, it'll give me a list of three or four things. I say, okay, items one, three, and five. And it'll take what I said in the transcript and make a general outline and save it. So then when I go to write a newsletter, I say, well, surface some newsletter. Oh, yeah, I remember I talked about the thing I'm focused. I want to turn that in a newsletter. It pulls out the record and I write the newsletter. So the maintenance is handled by the robot.

I'm sorry, gang. I feel like I'm talking about this too much. But it's just been transformative for me in letting me have these types of tools without the burden of them on my back. We also got feedback on this Eduardo wrote in. I have hundreds of notes I've never looked at again. At what point does a second brain become a second addict? I like that term, by the way, Eduardo.

That is a great term. And it's very accurate for, I think, how most people think about their PQM systems. And I think that it's okay. I think it's completely fine not to look at those notes again. If you know where they are, you know how to get to them when and if you ever need them, that's great. I think when it comes to your PKM system, and I'll just talk about Obsidian specifically. because that's how I use it or the tool that I use for this sort of thing. There's got to be an output. So as long as it's not slowing you down trying to find those things so that you can make something out of the notes and ideas that you've collected, maybe you're not referencing every note. Maybe you're not looking at every relevant note when it comes down, comes time to write about something.

That's completely fine. You don't have to try and cram everything into every piece that you would ever write. but that's the that's the criteria I would use is you know is it getting in the way of me creating things doing the thinking and that's really what writing is I mentioned that other article

on Jones piece the recommendation that Medium had for me where she's advocating that even if you're not a writer you should be writing every day and I believe that I think thoughts is entangle themselves your lips and pencil tips and I would also add clicky keyboards

but if you want to you know dictate super whisper or something like that totally fine but that process of outputting your own original thoughts about whatever the topic is that's how stuff gets codified that's how you really it becomes part of your your first brain where you can reference that stuff in the in the moment that's really where the value lies and so I think we put too much pressure on ourselves and we spent too much time worrying about, you know, how does my graph view look and is everything nice and neat and organized? And the truth is that that whole act of creating is messy. You need enough structure to alleviate the resistance that you're going to feel when you sit down

to write and then it should just get out of your way. You don't want it to be too messy where it's a distraction, but also like, who cares? Amen. Amen. Absolutely. have nothing to head to that, Mike. You want to move on to shiny new objects? Let's do it. Okay. I bought myself something. I'm going to call this a focus tool. It is spring. I have a little bonsai collection, and spring is a busy time when you own these trees because you've got to prune them, and this is the best time to do it. I got these printing shears, I don't know, like 10 years ago. I don't remember I got them, but they were cheap, and they always fight me. They're, you know, they just don't do a very good job and I've been dealing with it forever.

So last week, I bought myself a nice pair of Japanese-made bonsai printing shares. And I consider this a focus tool because when I work on the trees, I don't listen to podcasts. I just sit there and work on the trees, just like the things I do in the shop. I try to keep my mind empty, you know, and that is sometimes where my best ideas come from is the mindless. process of pruning a little tree. And so that's my new focus tool. A really nice pair of pruning chairs. These will be the ones that I keep for the duration.

David's making happy little trees. There you go. Awesome. I've got a shiny new object as well. It is a pulsar coffee brewer. Now there is context to this. A couple years ago, I went to a coffee roastery. There is a roaster in Wisconsin in a town called Nelsonville, which has 161 people.

The name of the roaster is Ruby Coffee Roasters, and they roast really, really good coffee. These are premium beans. They have a subscription service, which I've been subscribed to for probably 10 years at this point because they're a local Wisconsin business and the coffee is really good. So I can order a bag. It shows up the next day, super fresh. It's great. I actually went on a roastery tour a couple of years ago. and the guy who started it was on the tour. And Toby and I were there and we're the only like real coffee snobs on this tour. Everybody else is like,

yeah, I like Starbucks. And so like the owner, you know, he's kind of like going through the motions. He's like, I got to be here, but this kills me a little bit inside. Yeah. Talking to people about their pumpkin spice lattes. And then I, so I ask him like,

what's your favorite brew method and his eyes light up? Right? because he just showed us, you know, the ChemX, the V60, like all the standard like pourover type stuff. And he's like, oh, I've got this new one that I've been playing with. It's a combination of this guy who is really into coffee and then like a physicist and they put together this thing and it's gives you all, all this crazy control over the pour over process. And this was the thing that he was talking about was this pulsar coffee brewer. So I just picked up one of these. And it's, uh, it's kind of this crazy contraption.

where it's like a little plastic container with the dripper hole, but you can actually close that. There's a little valve, so you can close it completely. And then there's like a little shower screen above it. So what that does is when you pour water into it, it diffuses the water so you don't like pour hard into a specific spot. So basically you can control every bit of the process with this.

And there's a whole bunch of like crazy recipes if you want to try some really wacky stuff. But yeah, If you are a coffee nerd like I am, this would be a fun toy to pick up. And it's not super expensive. I think it's like 60 bucks. Nice. Yeah, I just never got in a coffee. So I have dodged that bullet. So Mike, what are you reading? Well, we just finished a book by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. I'm curious, do you know who either of those guys are? Bill Burnett. Is he an actor, like a comedian? No, this is a little bit of unfair question. I put you in the spot. But I believe Bill Burnett, maybe it's the other guy, because they write as like one voice. It's hard to tell who's talking a lot of times. One of them is the person from Apple who helped design the first mouse. Okay.

And so together they started the Stanford Design Lab. Gotcha. And they've recently gone from, well, I say recently, but the shift over the last 30 years. has been from designing products to other places that you can apply design principles. And they have written a couple books about designing your life and their most recent one we covered for Bookworm, and that is how to live a meaningful life. So this is an interesting book, and it's very much in line with a lot of their more recent stuff. I'm trying to think of what the other book that we covered was. Maybe it was Design Your Life.

and really the whole idea here is that you have agency in deciding the type of life that you're going to live. This one's interesting because they basically taught people these principles and then they opened it up with a story about this woman who got her moment of clarity. This is what I want to do. She made these changes. Then she came back to them after they were speaking at a conference and she's like, I'm still miserable.

What gives? And so this one's really about not finding your purpose, but like, or, not finding like an overall life purpose, but finding purpose and meaning in the day-to-day moments. So that is something that you're interested in. This is a good, fun, entertaining read. It's about 200 pages, but there's a whole bunch of, I guess, action item type stuff at the end of every chapter. They've got different, you know, try stuff sections where they have these different little exercises that you can try to implement some of the stuff that they're talking about. I like it. I recommend it. And these two guys, I've heard them on podcasts and stuff before. You can just tell they really love what they do. They love the topic that they're talking about. So if nothing else, it's a pretty short read and it's a pretty entertaining read. So it's got a thumbs up from Mike Schmitz. It's got a thumbs up, yep. All right. I'm going to order it because it sounds interesting to me. My book is also design related. It's called The Good Eye. It's by Jim Tolpin and George Walker. It's a it's another

furniture design book. But it's more generic. It starts out talking about general design principles and what to look for. And it's beautifully made. Anything that they make at Lost Art Press is always, it's like these are books like they used to make books, you know, the hardcover and really well-bound and printed. Great typography, great layout. And of course, a book called Good Eye should have good layout. And it's got lots of good diagrams if you're interested in that kind of stuff. I don't know that it's going to have a whole lot of appeal to our audience, but it happens to be the book I'm reading right now. Nice. And it looks great, you know, just from what you've shown of it on the video feed. I guess we should mention that. You know, if you want the video feed of these episodes, we've got a YouTube channel so you can go check it out.

But that's the type of book I want to, when I write a book, I want it to look like that. Yeah. I want it to be that sort of cover and all the custom typeface. cool drawings and sketches, all that type of stuff. Yeah, why not, man? Do it right. Yep. So we are the Focus Podcast.

You can find us at Relay.fm slash focused. We'd love to have you check it out. If you can join Deep Focus, if you want to get the ad-free, extended version of the show. Today we're going to be talking about meditation in Mike's newest experiment. Thank you to our sponsor today, Squarespace. And thanks to everybody listening.

Mike and I love making this show. We love having you listen. to the show. Have a great week, everybody. We'll see you next time.