Focused - 261: Metrics of Success

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Welcome to Focus, Productivity Podcasts, but more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz. I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How's it going? I am ready to focus so hard today. I can't even tell you.

You've got all the focus, huh? It's coming out my ears. Let's share the focus love. All right. Well, before we do that, I'd like to just for a moment here talk about something new that I'm going to be kicking off. this will be the last time you'll hear about it before it goes live. But I have been thinking a lot about where AI fits in the creative process. I personally believe it's not a switch. It's a

dial. It's not you use it or you don't. I am fascinated with using it intentionally to amplify your human voice and taste. I think there has never been a better time to be a creator and I hire AI to do specific jobs. And so that's what this cohort is going to be about. I'm going to be teaching people how to build their own AI powered creativity flywheels. So if you are a creator or an aspiring creator and you want to apply AI in some intentional ways to help you create better and more effectively increase the quality of what you are making, then you should check this out. It kicks off August 11th and you can find out more information at amplify cohort.com. I think one of the big benefits of that course will be getting your own personal philosophy

about what you do with AI. I think people need that right now. Yep, absolutely. Use, what's that saying, deploy tactically. Yeah, yeah. And like make up your own mind where the lines are because the technology is changing, but you've got to know where your lines are, right? Yep, exactly. All right. But today we're going to be talking about the topic called metrics of success, this is one that has been on the back of my mind for a while. My thoughts about it are complicated. But I think on a productivity show like this one, I think it's something we should address. And it kind of came up in the last episode. We did quarterly planning. And one of the questions we ask herself is, you know, what's working, what's not. It's like, how do you measure success?

And so often it comes back to metrics. does. So what do you mean when you say metrics? Let's just define it here at the beginning for folks. Well, I mean, it's at some margin. It's some yardstick, right? It's a metric is something measurable. And I think when you start doing that, I mean, like I said, my feelings are complicated. The first is I'll say that I'm generally afraid of metrics. I have a fear of them for a bunch of reasons. I don't think they are necessarily good measurements of success. We had Kathy Campbell on here. Didn't she say something like that about metrics not being a measure of success?

I think she said something very wise about that. I don't remember exactly what she said. But that's on my mind. I also think that metrics will often become what you pursue to your detriment. You know, you want to get, you want to hit. revenue at X dollars, and then suddenly you start making all sorts of compromises on the product in order to hit that number. And in the long term, you're screwing yourself, but you're hitting your metrics, you know.

You see this in Wall Street every 90 days, these big companies that juice the numbers with something stupid that is going to in the long run really hurt the company, but they can go to Wall Street and say that we're up 10%. There's a great book on that. I think this is another reason I thought about this topic. like C-Thi Nguyen. Don't know if I'm butchering his name, but, you know, the Vietnamese Smith, N-G-U-Y-E-N.

He's a philosophy instructor. He wrote a book called The Score. I think I picked it on the show a while back as a weekly read. But that's all about that. It's like he looks at all the times where you pick a metric to measure something and suddenly that's all you solve for.

One of his big examples was law school rankings, how a long time ago people used to law schools usually had different themes. Like we're here to teach people how to be public servants. We're here to teach people how to be Wall Street lawyers. And then when they started ranking the law schools, then that's all they cared about. We're here to move up the rankings. Makes sense. What you focus on, number one determines where you ultimately go. And I think the danger of what you're describing there is that you can get so focused on a single metric that you end up chasing that specific thing and then you look back later and you realize that wasn't the thing

that I should have been chasing because there's lots of metrics out there to choose from. I personally have a little bit of a complicated relationship with this because I get the value of the metrics. I mean, when I was an integrator at the digital marketing agency, they were really valuable. And it was valuable not just for the management team. It was also valuable for the individuals and the organization to know this is the most important thing that I should be focused on. That does go a long way in terms of creating alignment across a team of people that are working together towards a common goal. But it is very easy to end up measuring the wrong thing. What's that saying that not everything that counts can be counted and not everything

that can be counted counts. Yeah. And that's the complicated part of it, right? It's not just a clear, well, metrics are bad. Don't do them. No, they're actually quite useful. And, you know, when you're looking at success or failure, metrics can often give you real insight. There's a law for this, Mike. Good Arts law. Have you heard this one? Once a number becomes the target.

I've heard the name before, but I would not have remembered what it was until you put it in the show notes. Yeah. Once a number becomes the target, it stops measuring the thing you cared about. And I think, you know, I think the reason I want to do this show is, I, I, I think we just gave you the episode. It's like, these things are useful, but you've got to be careful around them. Like, and how do you do that? And that's what we want to talk about.

So, you know, the typical metrics, money, I already talked about that one. Customers is another one. Like, in Silicon Valley, it's all about how many eyeballs. Like, that's such a weird number. Like, what if the number's odd, what happened there, right? And then how many units? That's another one. Like, how many units can you?

So I've caught myself in that game. Sometimes I release a field guide. I get in my head, well, I'd really like to sell X number of units. When I should be thinking, I really want to help people that want to try this. Followers is another one for people who do social media, content creators. Like, how many followers do I have? There's a lot of different ones. If you're listening to this, you probably know in your head the list of metrics that people use in your business, whatever it is.

Maybe you're a Girl Scout troop leader, and the number of boxes of thin mints is your metric. right, but they can backfire, especially particular numbers. Like when you say, I'm going to sell 1,000 boxes of thinments and you sell 998, are you a failure? Yeah. I'm curious, how do you feel about, because it occurs to me that these emphasis on specific metrics, it's something that is kind of ingrained in us from a very early age. Yeah. You know, you get your report card.

That is essentially a metric that you are focused. on. It's not the only metric that matters as someone with an 18-year-old who's getting ready to go to college. You know, they're not just looking at your ACT scores or your high school transcripts. They want to know that you're involved in these other extracurriculars and things like that, but we get so focused on this is the thing that matters. But let me say, as the father of a high school teacher and hearing her war stories, in the classroom, a lot of kids only care about what it takes to get the grade, not to learn the material, right?

So in the laboratory of the classroom, I understand you have to do other things in college, but my goal in this class is not to learn art history. My goal in this class is to get an A, and that changes the way they address the topic. Exactly. That's the one that is elevated above the others, I feel, is your GP. If you don't have that, the other ones don't even really matter. But that's the one that's held up on a pedestal. And I was thinking of your daughter, who was the classroom teacher.

And I was kind of curious what you think about that because you probably see both sides of it. If you're a teacher, I think you kind of naturally lean that way. And that's a metric. It's a useful metric. But it's not the only metric that counts. So how do you, how would you navigate that either from a teacher perspective or from a parent perspective, like put yourself in the position of having a kid in that class, you know, how are you guiding them towards what really matters?

Well, my kid, my teacher wants her kids to leave with a love of art history. And she wants them to go to foreign cities and want to go to the museum to see the thing they study. That's her metric, you know. But the kids don't care. Well, some do, but some don't, you know, some just want the grade. But kind of to your point, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole right now. to your point, from birth, it seems like, where you've got metrics thrown at us.

As parents, even when you have little kids, you know, well, shouldn't they be walking by now? That metric of me as a parent is failing because this kid is still crawling, you know. I think it's just everywhere. And it's something we live with, but I feel like I'm at peace with it and I use them, but I don't respect them the way I think society on a whole does. right and that i think uh you kind of hit on it is we're we're always looking for those things because we want to locate where we are in terms of am i succeeding or am i failing yeah i think a large part of that maybe is comparison we want to know that we're at the top or at the bottom yeah you know locate ourselves in the the hierarchy but even if you don't compare yourself to other people i think

it's kind of natural to want to know if you're winning or losing the game i think i think think this also extends to personal stuff. I feel like we often engage personal metrics with our own stuff. Like, you know, when we time track, there's a metric being involved. When you do, you know, your questions, you ask yourself your daily questions, I've been thinking about myself personally because I've been trying to lose weight for the last eight months. And so I get on the scale every day and I write it down on the happy scale. And that is a metric of success. But the interesting thing is the longer I've been doing this, the more I've been become much more interested in percentage muscle versus body fat over the weight. I don't, you know,

I don't care how much I weigh. I want to know that I've got a certain percent of a muscle over body fat. And that's like a different metric, but I've realized the metric I've been using is kind of wrong because as I work, go to the gym and do stuff more, I'm actually gaining weight, but it's in a good way. Do you think that's part of the process? Because you mentioned the daily questions and that was sort of, I went through the same sort of thing when I was developing those. I was trying to journal and do it consistently. And I had these prompts, which were kind of focused on the outcomes. And I get frustrated when I didn't have something good to brag about when I was doing my journaling and I would skip it. Then I would skip it again. And the momentum's gone.

So focusing on the effort instead of the outcomes was a big unlock for me. And that's really just switching the metric. Yeah. Do you think it's part of the process to choose the wrong metric at first, learn that that's not the right one, and then find the one that you should have been paying attention to all along? I feel like a lot of life is a game of darts, Mike. And with metrics, you know, you're lucky to get it on the board with your first shot. And you got to throw a lot of darts before you get to the bullseye. Yep. Got to have those feedback loops. Another piece of this that I want to think about is the escape valve system I've been talking about.

that is another metric that I carry around. And I also like to call them canaries, you know, like the canary in the coal mine story. There are certain things. If I'm doing them, I'm happier and generally doing better with everything. And for me,

that there's really three topics. There's creativity. Like am I working on my trees, my bonsai trees in the garden, am I working in the shop? Am I doing things with my hands? So that's one category. The second is health and my exercise.

eating well, that kind of stuff, meditating. And then the third one is more kind of taking care of my brain and my reading interesting books, thinking, deep thoughts, writing essays to myself. That kind of stuff feeds me. And I find that those are also a metric to a certain degree because when I get to the end of the week, I look to see how many days I checked off those boxes.

And if I have a week where I'm feeling anxious, I'll often go back and see the metric that I didn't do much of any of that. over the course of the week. And that's kind of a reminder to get back at it. Yeah, and that's kind of why I asked at the beginning, how would you define a metric? Because a metric really isn't, you know,

return on ad spend or one of those fancy formulas that you would see in the corporate world. It doesn't have to be that. It could be as simple as I did the thing today and this is important to me. Yeah. But I do think that regardless of the metrics that you use, essentially what they are doing is they are kind of your

mile markers on your success journey. If you have a destination in mind, you've got these points that you can kind of navigate off of. Like you mentioned the creativity using your brain, things like that. You kind of have to go through the process and identify what are the things that I really want to focus on. What are the areas that I want to improve in? And then picking a metric really is just am I moving in the right direction? Yes or no? Yeah, I think they're really useful, but you've got to have a real healthy relationship with them. And you can't, you know, that book, the score is so worth reading if this is something that you're thinking about because it is so easy to get caught up in the metrics. Even when you know you're going into it, you're like,

I'm not going to let this become the thing. It becomes the thing. We're just wired as humans to want to gravitate. It's so much easier, right, when you have just a simple number you need to hit, as opposed to, I want to do quality work. You know, the fact that metrics are usually so measurable is one of the reasons why people like them so much. It's easy to, you know, grades are easy to converse about, you know, the school says our average GPA is 3.2. You know, your aunt Sue says, oh, Johnny got an A in math. And, you know, and that immediately tells the recipient, oh yeah, he's good at math, you know, as opposed to Johnny worked really hard at math

and he's really good at, you know, it just doesn't give you that kind of common denominator. So this stuff is really appealing for big organizations to adopt and even us as individuals for basis of comparison or self-evaluation. But the other thing with metrics that I keep bumping into and the mantra I always say to people in productivity field guide is its effort, not results.

I think the way to really win at life is to stop thinking about the metrics and the results, but think about the process and focus on that. And the more you focus on doing the effort right, the results take care of themselves. And that is what we need to do, which we don't do because we all keep coming back to metrics. So how can someone who keeps telling people effort and out results now make a show saying that metrics have some use? Well, I think that's not at odds. at all, to be honest. It's just not the natural metrics that people gravitate towards.

So it occurs to me as we're talking about this, that there are a couple different types of metrics or numbers that you can look at. And the approach is the same, whether this is personally quantified self, however you want to define it, or corporate working with a team, you've got essentially two types of measurements. You've got lead measures and you've got lag measures. And the lag measures are the ones that happen after the fact. That could be the weight when you step on the scale, or it could be the number of widgets cranked this quarter. Yeah. Or the number of how many iPhones we sold, how many billions of dollars if you're Apple that you made over the last 90 days. How many dump trucks of $1,000 bills do you own now?

Yeah, exactly. But those, in my opinion, have limited. value. So you mentioned effort, not results. That's the key, I think, is you can look at that after the fact and you can say, okay, what we were doing either worked or didn't work, but that's basically about it. That's what lag measures are good for. They're not really going to tell you if you did the right things to get to that point. Those are the lead measures. So if you are talking about, let's use your health and weight loss thing, for example. If the weight when you step on the scale is the lag measure, maybe the number of times that you had a salad or you chose to eat a healthy meal, that's the lead

measure. And you know that those lead measures will lead to the desired state with the lag measure. But in the moment, when you're trying to make the choice, you have to be able to anchor that off of the desired activity. That's the whole point of the lead measure. So when I was talking about the daily questions and the intentions versus the outcomes. That's another way of maybe of thinking about that. It's not quite as clean as that. But we need to disconnect from now that we've had some time and we're able to see the results, did I do it well or not? Because there's too much time that passes in the middle there where you lose motivation and you feel like it's not working and you're ready to give up. So finding a lead measure for the effort that you want to exert to produce the outcome

that you are really after, the result that you're trying to get, I think that's really an important piece to picking a metric that's actually going to work for you. Yeah, I feel like with a metric, you need to have a relationship with it where you internalize what does the number represent, you know, a weight number would represent your overall health, the income number would represent, you know, general financial success. Keep in touch with that because the metric kind of hijacks your brain into thinking, no, this is this is the final thing when it's just a representation of it. It's a data point, you know, but I don't think it's healthy to have metrics driving you. I, you know, to use a corporate analogy, you know, oh, we have to hit the

number more than we have to, you know, make a long lasting business. To me, that's the better goal to pursue. And the number is an indicator. Like if you think you're doing it right, but nobody's buying your product, then you need to start rethinking what you're doing. You know, if you're losing a bunch of weight, but you don't have any muscle mass and you're actually unhealthy doing it, the metrics starts to fail at that point. And I think I'm hitting a dead horse here. But this is a thing that I think we should use, but we should be careful about. This whole show is a big asterisk to every time we talk about evaluation. Yeah, well, I don't think the numbers are necessarily a sign that you're going down the wrong track of it.

You can definitely take them too far. Yeah. But I think the numbers are essential at some level. I'll give you an example maybe of a lead measure for me. Several years ago, my wife and I got away and we kind of reverse engineered what we wanted our relationship to look like, what we wanted our family's relationships to look. look like kind of the end state. If we were to win as parents, what does that look like? Yeah. By the time they're in high school, they feel comfortable talking to us about the difficult things that are happening. And so what are the habits that we can build in order to make that

happen? And we had a whole bunch of things that we listed. But over time, it became clear that there was one thing in particular that really made an impact, that really moved the needle compared to the other ones. And that was the weekly one-on-ones that I would do with my kids, taking a different kid each week to a coffee shop. And we just hang out for an hour, play games. And there were so many conversations that happened on the way there or on the way back that kind of built the platform for that thing to happen. Now, I had this idea of, you know, when they get to be older, I hope that I can say, we did it well. And our kids are, uh, in that place where they feel confident in who they are and they can talk to us about the difficult

things and the difficult choices that they've got to make, have enough time passed now where I think we could say we succeeded at least to a certain degree. And the metric of success in that case was that weekly one-on-one. And it doesn't mean that we hit it or I hit it every single week. there were definitely periods where I just couldn't do it. He had to skip one here, skip one there. But more often than not, I did do it, follow through with it. And that really has made a difference. Now, that's just one metric of success.

And that's the one, I guess as I reflect on this, that's what I chose to focus on at the expense of maybe some other metrics. And that's the thing is you can get a metric in this area, metric in that area. Pretty soon you've got 12 different metrics. And you can't answer the question, what are you optimizing for? But if you are clear on what is actually the most important, I feel like numbers actually can be pretty effective. You know, if I, I didn't track it this way, but I think it could have been useful

if I wanted to, you know, what, what is my, my weekly percentage, you know, of one-on-ones for the quarter or the year? You know, is it 70 percent? Is it 80 percent? Is it 90 percent? That would have been an effective way to track that, assuming that that is the most important thing. But you got to decide what is the most important thing, and you can't have 12 most important things. Yeah. I mean, I think I would say metrics are useful, but they're not a religion. Like if you become baked into them, and you see this in companies all the time, but individuals do the same thing. If you feel like you're only thinking about the metrics, back away, think about the underlying values, the underlying thing you're trying to do, and

respect the metrics, but don't get lost to them. Keep it simple. Don't have too many. Another piece of advice I would give is avoid hard numbers. I think hard numbers are dangerous. Like, I'd rather say I'm going to, you know, make this into a sustainable product as opposed to I'm going to sell one million units. Yeah, I agree with that. The other thing I think I would add to that is a lot of metrics tend to be, I think, leg measures because they are pretty easy to measure. And they almost always end up being external measurements of things that have happened. But there are certainly internal measurements that you can take to. And that could be quantitative or qualitative. So qualitative could be part of your journaling process. How do I feel right now?

And you've got a word where you fill in the blank. I feel stressed. I feel calm. I feel peace. You know, all of those things are fine qualitative metrics, but they're, again, kind of hard to measure that. My version, I guess, is the daily questions where I have some numbers that are assigned to that.

But the internal measurements are the ones that do matter. And you've got to find your peace with the balance between the internal and the external. And this is not just, you know, for you as an individual, I was thinking about this with even something like my YouTube channel. It's easy to measure the views. It's easy to measure the likes. It's easy to measure the comments. Those are external measures on whether a video was successful. And YouTube will tell you in the studio tab, you know, this is one of ten.

This is outperforming your other videos. But there are internal measurements where things like, How much joy did I get in making this video? How easy was it? Was there, you know, sometimes I sit down and I make a video and it just flows. There's no friction there. That's an internal measure of success. Sometimes I go to make the video and it feels like I am just walking through quicksand. I should pay attention to that. Those types of videos, you know, if there's a pattern there, maybe that's not something that I should be doing consistently. So I think that's important to recognize too, is that not not all metrics of success are external and they're not always quantitative.

Well, I think we covered it, gang. We got a feedback show coming up eventually. If you've got thoughts on metrics of success, let us know. We'd love to hear about it. You can also sound off in the forum room at talk.machydmachers.com. We've got our own focused room there. So I love to hear what you think about metrics of success. Am I being too precious, Mike, you think?

I don't know. I feel like your personality-wise, maybe that determines what types of metrics really work for you. I don't think you can pick a specific metric and say this is the one that everybody should be looking at. And if I had to guess, David, I would say that the qualitative metrics probably matter a lot more to you than the quantitative ones do. I tend to be more quantitative. Probably why I'm fascinated with the idea of the quantified self. I don't want to track all of the numbers, but I feel like there are some specific numbers that are worth tracking consistently that can give me a good indication of whether I am going down the right track or whether I am going to crash and burn pretty soon. Yeah, I mean, another piece of that for me is I just don't have that much faith in numbers. I feel like you can make a very complicated system that's supposed to quantify everything and a lot of time it's garbage and garbage out. and I don't have a lot of faith in complicated metrics.

Sure. I think that's completely valid. I do think if you're going to do some sort of quarterly review process like you and I both do, there's got to be some metrics, though, that you're looking at there, right? You've got to have something that gives you the feedback from the loop so that you can make adjustments and try some new things. things. And it doesn't have to be explicit. It doesn't have to be written down. You don't have to have, you know, this is the average for the last 90 days necessarily. If that is helpful to you, go ahead and do it. Build the systems that will generate those numbers for you. But you got to have some sort of data

that you're looking at. It doesn't need to be a spreadsheet. Could be just the number of days that you got in the shop. I know that was one of the things we talked about in the quarterly planning episode was getting more time in the wood shop. Totally valid metric of success. So I think that's if I were to give people some advice from this episode, it would be, as you're thinking about the next quarter, because you do need to have those feedback loops, figure out what are the couple of numbers, a couple metrics of success that are really going to determine whether you're consistently moving in the right direction. You're taking action on the things that are really important to you. And then you have to come up for error in a couple of

months and get some feedback and see how you did. But that's also a great opportunity to adjust and repair and choose some different metrics if you if you want. All right, Mike, you want to talk about shiny new objects? Let's do it. You bought a thing, Mike. I did buy a thing. I think maybe you have this too. I heard a comment when we were doing the relay special where we did the productivity tools draft. Yeah, that was a lot of fun by the way. We haven't mentioned that. If you you're a member, you are in for some fun. That was a really great episode. That was fantastic. I played that. It came out as we were driving back from Mac Stock, and I played it in the car. Rachel and Toby were in the car with me, and Toby was like, that was the most amazing thing I've

ever heard. Oh, that's great. Anytime your kid says that about something you make, then that's a win. Yeah, there was a specific moment where Chris shared a tool. that he was using, and you can hear Stephen Robles go, get out of here. Yeah. It was amazing. But I thought I heard you say that you had picked up this shiny new object I have. And that is the Insta 360 Luna Ultra. Mine has not arrived yet.

I ordered it from Insta 360. So they say they're shipping it any day now, but I haven't got mine yet. Well, I've got mine right here. I went and picked it up at the local. best buy. Yeah. And it's, it's so good.

I love it. It's, it's a dual lens. It's kind of like the DJI Asmon Pocket 3, but it's got the dual lenses and important for us. It's the one that you can buy in the U.S. right now. Yeah.

DJI, the new Pocket 4 and the new Pocket 4P, that's the dual lens one, are not available to purchase in the U.S. I looked at eBay, you know, you get the sellers with the, 99.9% positive reputations. And trust me, it's going to come. I actually saw Doc Rock at Mack Stock and he had gotten one while he was in Japan, brought it home. And then it didn't work. So now he's stuck with it. I don't want, I don't want that to happen. So I bit the bullet. I bought

the Into 360 Luna Ultra and I really, really like it. There's a bunch of crazy features in it. You can program these special shots where it'll, like there's a barrel roll mode where you pointed at the thing and then you hit play and it's kind of just real smoothly turns and it creates this like barrel roll effect. I don't know. It's, I think perfect for what I want to do. I intend to use it for B-roll shooting. I also intend to use it.

I've been part of this Yap challenge and I've been trying to just like talk to the camera informally and publish that even while I was at Microsoft. stack I was able to do it almost every day, but it looks so much better on the Insta 360 Luna Ultra. And the screen detaches so you can hold it and there's a microphone at the top. That I feel like is perfect for the way that I want to use it. You can basically just like set it up on the desk if you want. There's a little mini tripod in the the piece that clamps on the bottom. And then you hold this thing as a like little microphone that sinks back to the the video and the microphone is is pretty good. Jeff C, I'm not sure if you know, know who Jeff C is,

but he is one of the eCAM guys. EICAM did a creator camp the day before Mac Stock proper. And so he had one there and he was showing it to me. And I was like, man, that thing is super cool. I don't have any of the fancy lenses or the filters or stuff like that. But just out of the box, this is a pretty phenomenal tool for a creator like myself. Yeah, or even just someone who wants to shoot family video and not use his phone. It's got Lika glass in it, so they're really good-looking images. And yeah, and you don't have to like go, you know, to the gray market to get one. So I ordered it.

I just, I order it directly from Insta. I think they're just kind of overwhelmed. But mine will get here eventually. So good reporting on that, Mike. I'm looking forward to getting mine. I'm going to use mine for B-roll. And like I, for the labs. A lot of times I'll shoot video like in the shop or in the backyard.

I'll use it for stuff like that. I like to do some Disney vlogging occasionally, and this will be good for that too. So it's just amazing what kind of camera you can just put in your pocket these days. It's just nuts, you know. It is. And my, I mean, I don't have anything recent from DJI to compare it to, but in my limited use of it, the tracking and the gimbal, like how smooth it is, it's vastly improved over the pocket three. I'm sure the newer versions of like the Pocket 4, the Pocket 4P are improved as well.

But it's a big step up if you do have a Osmo Pocket 3. The one thing I don't understand about it yet, I'm looking forward to getting mine is like, is the remote like clip on microphone? Does it have to be the one with the screen or is there like a clip on microphone I can get? So I don't have to, because I really like that about the pocket that you've got a very small microphone. It's easy to attach your clothes. Yeah, you can get a clip on microphone. It syncs with both.

They've, Insta 360 has a, I'm not sure what they even call it. They've got an air and they've got a pro. So they've got like a thinner one, a smaller one, which is the air. And I think that even comes with one of the combos that you can get. And then there's a pro one which has actually an LCD display on the front. So if you were holding it and you were talking and recording video, you could have like the Mac Sparky logo on it if you wanted to. I don't have any of those, but I did order the pro transmitter, and it's on its way. The other thing that's really nice about it is that it syncs with your phone, and then when you are done shooting on the device,

there's an NFC reader right below the screen. You hold your phone next to it. It opens up the Insta 360 app. The files are right there, and then you tap one button, and it downloads it straight onto your phone when you're done. So you don't have to hook it up to your computer transfer files. that way. I've had Insta 360 cameras before and I've always liked the software. So that's another reason. It was easy to go with it. But my actual, so I don't have my yet, my new shiny object is kind of an old shiny object. But I've been talking on the show, you know, kind of my task system

starts on the computer. That's the big bank of things. But the stuff I actually do gets written down. I've been using field notes on that for a while. And I've been a little unhappy with field notes and I've got a pile of Ugman cards getting here and just on a whim I got the ugment cards back out and I really like it you know I went out in the shop I made like a long strip you know where I can put them in I cut some slots in it so I can put it on my desk and I think this is a test still but I think the cards are kind of going to replace the field notes for this kind of stuff because I'm largely at the desk all day and I really like having them right in front of me as I work through the day. And I have one for each day, but I also have some with

dedicated projects. I'm moving a lot of the Max Sparky Labs stuff over to circle. So I've got a card with like five or six things I need to do as part of that process. And it's easy to track them there. And I have the digital systems and I track all this stuff digitally. But to me, ultimately the rubber meets the road when I write it down. And it's kind of nice being on the cards again. I know I'm a little flaky on this. There's a real chance in six months. I'll talk about how great the field notes are again. The advantage of the field notes is you can stick them in your pocket,

but I don't really find I use them much out in the world. And I do carry field notes in my pocket so I can write things down. But the actual tracking of tasks and like filling out pages ahead of time for future days, it doesn't lend itself to the field notes as easily as these cards do. and so I think I'm going to probably stick with the cards. I love the cards. I love everything, Ugmunk.

In fact, if I had my way, I would love to do the personal retreat digital planner that I've got. I'd love to partner with Jeff on an analog version of that. I need to reach out to him and see if he would be willing to print the inserts to go in that, that heirloom journal.

That's my ideal workflow is do the plan. there, write them on the cards, prop them up on my desk. Cards are nice though. They are. And one of the nice things about it is it has three little dots in the top right corner of every card. And I talked earlier about my metrics of health, craft, and mind. Those are three things.

And there's three dots right there. So it makes it really easy. Nice. Do you either check that or not? Or is there like a halfway state? Like, do you half color a dot if you did a little bit, but not as much as you would have liked? You're getting too fancy, Mike. I either do something and I fill it in or I don't do something and I don't fill it in.

Totally fine. I'm just curious because I know, like with the theme system journal, there's the same principle. There's the dots, right? And then Mike, what was, we talked to Mike on this show. He talked about how sometimes he would color in half of it if he made some effort, but not enough. And I just, I'm just curious because that's further proof that there's no single right way to do this stuff. Yep. Yep. You can get creative, lots of different ways to fill in a dot. What do you read these days, right?

I've got a lot of new books, actually. But the one I will call out here is the one that I actually picked up at Maxstock. And that is Apple the first 50 years by David Pogue. He was kind of a VIP for Max Stock. They had an evening with David Poga on the first night. And it was fantastic. So he's, He's given his spiel. He's got his slides. He's talking through some of the stuff from the book. But he's also a Broadway conductor or something. He's a very musical person. So he had this keyboard up on the stage. And every, I don't know, every 15, 20 minutes as he's telling his stories, he will play

on the keyboard and he's got some Weird Al style parody song about something that happened with Apple. And it was fantastic. Were you an Apple fan back when he did, I want an iPhone for the New York Times? Does that ring any bells for you? I don't think so. Okay, you got to, we'll put it in the show notes.

When the iPhone was first released, David Pogue did, I did it my way, but I wanted an iPhone. And he shot it all around. He did play that one. He did play that one. He shot it all around the city of New York. Like he's dancing in the fountains and stuff and singing about how he wants an iPhone.

And it like, it went to the extent. things would go viral back then, that was viral. And yeah, he's really fun and entertaining. Yeah, he is, he's a very energetic guy. He shared a lot of really cool details. One of the things was he shared that the idea for that book actually came from his wife. Yeah. She had a dream in the middle of the night.

He's like, hey, you should write this for your next book. And he kind of like wrote it off. He's like, we missed the 50th anniversary. Great idea, though. And then later on, he comes back to him. He's like, actually, it's not for another year and a half. half, you know, just enough time to write a 600-page book. Yeah.

He was a guest on Mac Power Users 839 right after that book released. And that's a really good extending conversation that folks want to really dig in deep on that. Nice, nice. Yeah, we'll definitely link that in the show notes. There was another thing that he mentioned, which was really cool. I have a, well, one of my kids is really into drama. And one of the plays that he really wants to see is it's coming into town and is going to be at the Performing Arts Center is Hades Town.

Yeah. And so he made this comment about how after, no, I'm blanking on his name, Scott Forstall. Yeah. After he left Apple, nobody heard from him. He tweeted like one time about a Broadway play that he was in charge of, which happened to be Hadesown. Yeah. David Pogue is the only person who has gotten an interview from Scott Forstall after the fact.

And it was because they were working on some musical thing together. And he composed a song. for him or something. So that was pretty, pretty interesting. Yeah. Hades Town, by the way, is really good. I've seen it. Is it? Is it? Are you going to take your sign? Yeah. Yeah. We're going to get tickets. Yeah. He, uh, he did a book signing afterwards. Like the, the thing started at like eight o'clock at night and at 11 o'clock. I was like, I'm piecing out, Toby. You can get the book signed if you want. Yeah. So he got in line with a couple other guys who were part of the conference, but they ended up standing in till midnight. They were the very last ones to get their book signed. And Toby had him sign it

on in the middle of the book, like page 415, basically like where the iPhone was because he's got this timeline, right? The whole time he's doing his presentation. This happened this day. This happened this day. 2007, the year of the iPhone, that's actually when Toby was born. So he like circles the date on the one page where it talks about this is the date that the iPhone was released. And then he drives a big arrow and then has the date. You know, Toby. is born, like keep being awesome or something like that. I'm like, good job, Toby. That's pretty clever. It's a good book, though. I mean, regardless of the story, it's interesting. There's a lot of

cool pictures, a lot of cool stories. I do, I mean, it's a huge book. It's like 600 pages. And that is one that I probably do wish I had a digital copy to carry around with me, because I don't want to carry that big thing around in my backpack and read it or anything like that. But it's a really beautiful book, too. See, I feel the opposite. I feel like that's when you definitely want the physical book for because the art is so good. The art is incredible. So that's when you want on your shelf, you can pull off.

I'm not going to carry it around with me, but I'll sit in my comfy chair and read that all the time. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah. My daughter got a new job. She works for the Disney company in Live Entertainment. Now she's working for Walt Disney Imagineering. And since she got that job, I kind of wanted to understand it better what she's doing because it's a more of kind of creative. piece of it. And there's this book, someone told me called Woman of Walt Disney Imagineering.

And I feel like, well, she's picking up the mantle after them. I want to be able to talk to her about it. So I'm reading the women of Walt Disney Imagineering and it's excellent. It's really good. I think I'd recommend it for anyone because it's just talking about how a male dominated workplace for a long time. These women came in and just turned it upside down and did great things. and I think it would fit in a lot of context, really good. Awesome. So that's my book in addition to the morality of happiness, which is my read for the next year, I think.

I do have a couple of other books that I picked up at the bookstore while we were in Woodstock. Okay. So shout out to read between the lines, L-Y-N-E-S. I love that bookstore. I've been there with you, I think. Yeah. Yeah, it's great.

Every time we're there, I try to pick up a, a book from from that shop in particular. When when Stevea Robles was on the show, he mentioned a book called On BS and they had it there. So I bought that. Okay. And then the other one I got it. I haven't already yet.

Yeah. They had the anniversary edition. Okay. Read between the lines. And then the other one that I got while we were there was Austin Cleon has a new book out called Don't Call It Art. And it's interesting. I just started that one, but he kind of talks about this personal story of how people have come up to him and asked him if he would put together a book on creativity for kids.

And he's like, no, kids are creative. We're the ones who need the help. Yeah. And so that's kind of how he starts the book and how if you don't consider it to be art, then that kind of gives you permission to just make the thing and be creative. and I don't know, it's a very, very Austin-Cleon-style book, and I'm really enjoying that one. I'm a big Austin-Cleon fan. I haven't bought that one yet, but I always buy his as physical media, too, because it's an experience, an Austin-Cleon book. I would love to have Austin Cleon on the Focus Podcast.

Let's do that. If somebody out there knows him, let us know, and we'll try to reach out. But he's got a new book to sell. Maybe we can convince him to come on. Right. All right. Well, gang, that does it. Metrics of success.

Be careful, but don't be afraid. I love that. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us over at really.comfm slash Focus. If you are a supporter of the show, you get the ad-free, extended version of the show. Today, everybody got the ad-free version because we didn't have any sponsors. So if you want to help us out, sign up for Deep Focus and join us. We'd appreciate the support.

on deep focus today, Mike and I are going to share our failure stories. I'm going to talk about some of the worst metrics of success I've ever chosen in my life and how that blew up in my face. It'll be kind of fun. Hope you stick around for that. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.