Focused - 83: Ideas Over Art, with Mike Rohde

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

Author and Designer Mike Rohde joins us to discuss the practice and process of sketchnoting. We talk about choosing the right tools, the benefits and drawbacks of analog vs. digital, and why sketchnoting is for everyone - even if you don't think of yourself an artist.

Welcome to Focused, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. How's it going today, David? Excellent, Mr. Mike Schmitz. How are you today? I'm doing well. I'm very excited. We have a special guest here today. Welcome to the show, Mike Rohde. Hey, guys. How you doing? It's nice to be back with David, and nice to meet you, Mike. Yeah, actually, when I reached out to you, I had forgotten that you had done some work with David.

You did the illustrations for his email field guide. You've also done illustrations for rework, remote, and a bunch of other stuff. And you are basically the sketchnote guy, which is a topic that I am very interested in. So I wanted to have you on the show to talk about the topic. And yeah, really excited to hear what you've got going on. I know you got a notebook, which we'll get into that you're launching. And also important to me anyways, you are a fellow cheesehead. You live in Milwaukee. So we've had a couple of those lately. I do. I do. cheesehead. You live in Milwaukee. So we've had a couple of those lately. I do. I do. Awesome. So I want to start here, Mike, and just kind of ask you how you got started with sketchnoting. Where did this whole idea come from? Well, it started with pain, actually, which many solutions start

with, I suppose. I had gotten to this point in my life where I was taking notes, almost like a court reporter. I had these big notebooks I carried around. I used a pencil because I was preparing for mistakes and the option to fix them. And when I would go and attend meetings or go to conferences or what have you, I felt like I had to write everything down. And then at some point, some magical point in the future, I would go through all my notes and find the gems and the valuable information. But reality set in pretty quickly, and I realized that writing all these notes actually was a big pain for me because I would have to be the one to find the gold nuggets in the forest. So I found that it just was not sustainable.

I was in this weird place. I was really good at taking notes, and I hated it. So that was a sign. place, I was really good at taking notes and I hated it. So that was a sign. And I felt like maybe the way out of this was the way out of many design situations, which is to put constraints on myself. Typically, clients would put constraints on me as a designer. But in this case, I thought, what if I could put some constraints on myself and see what would happen. So the next conference that I was attending down in Chicago, I decided what would happen if I just did 180 degree turn? What if I took a small pocket notebook and a pen? And the two elements of that were it's too small to write everything. So I couldn't do that. And then I didn't have my pencil to fix mistakes. So I had

to really focus on thinking about the things that I would put on the page. So that combination of those two things led to a third thing, which was, well, why couldn't I just analyze the information I'm hearing right in the moment and make decisions about what to capture as I'm doing it rather than having to dig through lots of notes later? It'll be much easier for me to process and I'll actually want to review them in the future. So that's what I did. And my experiment actually worked out pretty well. I found that I enjoyed the experience. I felt like I had plenty of time compared to writing everything down to think about things and decide what to capture and what not to capture. And suddenly had all this free time to actually start drawing and doing lettering, which I love, in my notes.

So it became this thing that felt like I was sketching and I was taking notes at the same time. So the name Sketch Notes was just appropriate. And then from there, I just kept doing it and led to writing books and speaking all over the world and conferences beginning and people all over the place doing this process, this technique. Yeah, I mean, you really started a movement mike because like i i just spoke last year at the aba tech show and they had a person there that was a big butcher port who was sketchnoting our talk and doing it live in the room and then afterwards they had displayed a bunch of those sketchnotes for the different docs i feel like that um you touched a

nerve when you when you stumbled on this i think so too and the interesting thing that i hadn't known at that time was there was actually another movement that had been going probably since the late 70s guy named david david sibbit sort of initiated this thing it's called graphic recording and that's typically when you if you've ever been to a conference where someone's on a big four by eight sheet of foam core or some kind of board or butcher paper or something that's what they're doing and it's a technique that's been around a little bit longer than the work that I did but I didn't know about it it was something I was unaware of so I just followed my nose to what made sense for me. And it turned out that many of the principles that I was using, other than the size, were actually consistent with what they were doing and the things that they had verified. And they have professionals who go and do that on a large scale in the front of a room. Sketch noting simply gave that power to individuals to do that in the back of the room and a little bit more personally. So for the folks listening who haven't fully

grokked sketchnoting yet, kind of explain what you do if you're sitting in a conference or a meeting. How do you sketchnote? That's a great question. On an audio podcast. I've actually done that before, so it is possible. So what I do, sketchnoting is, the way I think about it is, I call it notes plus lots of times. So it's not like you stop writing notes. It's not like you stop doing letters and such. That's still part of it. What you're doing is you're simply adding visuals to those notes

if that's what you feel is most appropriate to capture an idea. So if you have an image that pops in your head or the slide of the presenter is really interesting and you want to capture an idea. So if you have an image that pops in your head or the slide of the presenter is really interesting and you want to capture that information, a map or a chart or something like that, that you would draw that in there. And it's the intention of wanting to include those images in with the writing. The combination of the two, I think, is what the powerful part of it is. There's been some studies that show sort of this analysis of information by hand. The physical doing of it has some benefits over keyboarding.

So that's one aspect. And then retention is a big benefit, too, because you're sort of interacting with the information. But basically, what I teach is very, very simple drawing. One of my mantras, if you run across me, is idea is not art. And what that means is not that I don't like art. It's that many people feel that they're constrained by being great artists. And so if they can't be a great artist, they just don't do anything.

And so my approach is, well, what if we broke down drawing into a simple way for you to approach it? Something more like building with Legos or something. If I gave you five shapes that you could use to construct images, would that help you? And in many cases, that really helps lots of people to think about drawing in a much simpler way. It sort of sets the criteria for what drawing means more to capturing ideas and less about how beautiful the art is. And I think that's really important because so many people maybe stop drawing in grade school or junior high and they haven't drawn in their 40, 50 years old and they still draw like they were a kid in grade school, right?

So, how do they bridge that gap? Well, providing them with a simple structure helps and then emphasis on lettering and drawing simple things. And once you get that momentum going, it's a lot easier to approach drawing. So it's really that combination of drawing and writing together and the strength of each, you know, making the combination much more valuable.

You know, it's interesting because, Mike, you were back on the Mac Power Users in 2013. It was a few years ago. And I was one of those guys who felt like, well, I'm not a good artist, so this would never work for me. And you convinced me to try it during that appearance. And I started this technique, which is similar to sketchnoting in the sense of, as an attorney, often I find myself standing in front of a guy in a black robe, right? And you have oral arguments you're making. And for most of my career, I would write out these notes.

I'd type them or I'd handwrite them. I'd have these detailed notes in front of me. And what I found was the man or the woman in the black robe would ask me a question and I'd look down and just see a bunch of word soup on my page. I have no idea. Those notes were never useful to me. To the extent I would memorize them, they would be helpful. But to actually look at them and get

something useful out of them never worked. And the problem I solved with sketchnoting was I would sketchnote my oral argument notes. I would put little pictures and draw big numbers. And I just used the techniques from Mike's book but i wouldn't be doing it while i was listening to someone i would do it ahead of time and then i would stand up in the courtroom and i'd have this pad of paper in front of me where it looked like i had written cartoons on it or something but it was actually quite useful for me to actually access information off that piece of paper if i needed it and um you know getting to the idea of this show, Focus, that's exactly the kind of thing, kind of trick you want to have up your sleeve. Yeah.

You actually, a sample of your work actually appeared in my second book, The Sketch Note Workbook, and showing and talking about that very process. Yeah. And if you want to see bad art, there you go, baby. Just take a look at my page in Mike's book. I forgot I gave you one. Yeah. So I think that the other thing that I learned, so initially sketchnoting really started as this way to deal with information for myself to solve this problem. What I started to realize was there's lots of ways that sketchnoting could go.

And that was one of those things, right, where it's not necessarily just capturing meetings or conferences, but why couldn't I use these techniques to think, right, to think on a whiteboard, to think on a piece of paper, to prepare notes for my presentation that are not, you know, I'm not looking at my PowerPoint, I'm not reading from a typed, you know, piece of paper with all this information? What if I really focus it down to, like you, these elements that I want to touch on and they're visual so I can glance down at them and that structure helps keep me on track? I think opening it up that way really does help it be applied in many ways. It's not so limited in that sense. Pete Yeah, one of the main ways that I use it, which is probably a little bit strange for a lot of people, but I use it for sermon notes at church because my pastor would be preaching and I had this aha moment one day when I was thinking back like, what did he preach on last Sunday? And I

couldn't remember. I had all of the notes. I had pages of digital notes. I could go back and search for something specific if I wanted to find it later real easily. But day to day, it wasn't helping me. And I wanted to retain more of that information. And I know that's one of the big benefits of sketchnoting is the retention benefits. You share some statistics, I think, in your first book about how you retain more information when you take analog notes and kind of sketchnoting that to another degree. But I was also in the camp where I didn't think I could do it because I didn't consider myself an artist. I hadn't drawn for a long time. And my first sketchnote actually before I read your books, I found out about the topic. And my first sketchnote is two stick figures and then a

bunch of words on the page. You mentioned something which I want to come back to because this really helped me and I think it's really going to help listeners who are maybe thinking about testing this out but they don't know where to start. You mentioned the five different shapes. That is a really important key. Do you want to talk about that a little bit, what those shapes are and kind of how you can use them together like Lego like you mentioned? Yes, exactly. One of the things I realized as I set out to write this book was if I can't convince people they can draw, I'm not going to sell many books, right? So that was a key thing to think about. And I had been thinking about it for a while. The thought was, what if I broke down

drawing into this simple approach, like putting Lego pieces together? And as I thought about it, I realized, well, if I was really pushed to break down basic elements into maybe five, I would pick a square, a circle, a triangle, a line, and a dot. And what I found is, is I started playing with those different elements that I could build pretty much anything that I wanted to visually just using those shapes. Especially if you have a, you know, a generous description of what a circle is. Well, a circle can be an oval or a square can be a rectangle or, you know, those kinds of things. And by combining those, it sort of, it makes it easier to think of this palette of five things that you work with. If I can draw those five things, I'm just looking at

objects and thinking, how can I break that down using those five objects or the image in my head? How can I take those five elements and build something with it? And through many workshops have kind of proven that that system really works. It sort of opens things up and it makes things simpler because I think the challenge with drawing in general is if you're thinking about it more from an art background, you're sort of trying to draw what you see. You're trying to be exact in proportions and you're trying to do perspectives. And those are valuable things if that's your intention. But I think a lot of times maybe that's overkill for just simple idea capture. And by providing this simple palette, it gives you a better entry

point. You're not so, you have so much overhead thinking about all the shading and perspective and proportions and like that starts to get in your way of actually doing something. And by having these five elements, it sort of gets you moving like, well, I've got five elements, how can I put them together to make this work? So that was really the intention there. And that seems to really help lots of people break through that expectation or that barrier. Yeah, I mean, art in this case doesn't matter. I feel like it's the same thing with handwriting

when people are hung up on like saying, well, I'd like to try to do a handwritten journal, but my handwriting's really bad, so I don't want to do it. Who cares? It's for you. It's for nobody else. Just do it.

And I feel the same way with sketchnoting. My sketchnotes are very rudimentary, but in my brain they work, and the process of putting them together connects things in my head that wouldn't otherwise get connected, so I don't care. It's interesting that when I teach this, the people who are non-artists actually seem to accept this idea and run with it much faster than those who are trained as artists. Like there's something having been trained a little bit

or knowing what's possible in some ways becomes this stumbling block a little bit where people who feel like they have no drawing skills or no drawing background, they don't have anything to unlearn in that sense. So it's interesting to me that people who would come in and raise their hand and say, I can't draw, within like half an hour are actually drawing and getting excited about how confident they are and what they can do, which is, again, super rudimentary and stick people and little objects. But they came in the room and they couldn't

draw and they left the room and they could that's that's a pretty shocking amazing thing for many people one of the things i really like about mike's materials are if you get his book and you go through them mike is a good artist but the art in there is not you know it's not super fancy you know i mean when when mike did the illustrations for my email book, he did amazing artwork for that. But the stuff he's using for the sketchnotes is basic. And it's using those building blocks he teaches. And I think that's the way it should be. I mean, for a lot of people, you start to get into stuff like this.

And you go on, you know, what's the first thing you do? You go on Google and you look for bullet journal or whatever. And you see these pages made by these people that look like works of art, every inch of them, you know, where they've, you know, it's like made and it's just completely intimidating and makes you think you could never do this stuff. But it doesn't need to be that way. And I think the way Mike teaches it, I think is really great because it doesn't put that extra burden on you. I think is really great because it doesn't put that extra burden on you.

Yeah. The other thing with that is I was in that place where I was seeing the things that people were creating with sketchnotes. And I'm like, well, I want to try this. Don't consider myself an artist. And you mentioned at the beginning, Mike, how you changed the way you took notes and you went with a pen and a small notebook. I feel like the pen is an important tool choice, which we should unpack. But that's also one of the things that terrified me because I knew if I made a mistake, there was no one going back with a pen. And I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist. So I would draw something and then compare it to the image I had in my mind of these works of art that people had created using sketchnotes. And then I would get discouraged and feel like, oh, this really isn't for me. But once I got that realization that it's really just the building blocks,

and it is ideas, not art, doesn't matter if anybody ever sees this, but me, it's really just for the retention benefits. That's kind of the thing that allowed me the freedom to do that. But do you mind just talking a little bit about the importance of that specific tool? I feel like for me personally, and I'm interested to get your perspective on this, once I got used to using the pen, it kind of forced me to keep with a flow. I couldn't just hit pause and then focus on the one thing. My brain had to, it kind of supported my brain in keeping moving with what the speaker was saying. Is that the intended effect?

It is actually. So I love Pencil. I use it in many applications. You know, like any person using the right tool makes sense. And there's places where Pencil makes sense. I think the problem with Pencil and sketchnoting can be, not always, but it can be that you feel like you have an out, right? If I do it in Pencil, I can erase it. So you've always got this backup plan or this out. And I think in

some ways going with pen sort of moves you to this place of analysis and being okay with putting things on the paper, even if they're imperfect. And I think it goes to a deeper mindset. The deeper mindset is every one of these sketchnotes that you do is an experiment and you're probably going to fail at some of these. I fail when I do sketch notes all the time, but I look at it as a learning opportunity, right? If I look at it as an experiment I can learn from as opposed to some performance that I can pass or fail, that just changes the whole dynamic, right? So if I'm using a pen and I goof something up, I'm going to actually laugh at what I did and turn it into something silly or learn not to do that or how can I change my approach to that when I come to that situation again. All these mistakes are in some ways a gift for you to see like, well, if I could do that again, what would I have done differently there?

And then you sort of tuck that away as the approach that you might take the next time you encounter that and try that. That's your new experiment. When I run into this X situation, I'm going to try this Y solution, and let's see how that works. And you keep on making these experiments until you find a system that works pretty well for you. I think that's the beauty of the pen. It forces you to make decisions. It's either on the paper or it's not on the paper. And that cascades into other decisions that you don't see on the surface, but are actually happening in that decision. So, follow-up question to that then, how do you feel about digital sketchnoting? Because confession time, I moved away from pen and paper. I use good notes and I do have an undo button now, but it seems to work for me. You

sounds like are a big analog fan though. So what kind of are the advantages, disadvantages in your opinion of analog versus digital sketch noting applications? Great question. For many years, I avoided the iPad because I tried it, and the problem was the stylus was never fine enough to really compete with pen and paper. When the iPad Pro came out, I waited for the 9.7 because I just wanted something easier to travel with for me. And now I currently have the 11-inch.

I really like it. And I think, again, it's like any tool. Like the fact that I use often pen for sketchnoting is because of what it challenges me to do. It's not anything I have against the pencil. In the same way with digital tools, using the iPad has definite benefits, but it also has limitations too, right? There's been times where I thought I was going to do sketchnoting and I pulled the old iPad out and oops, I forgot to charge it last night. Now I've got three percent battery left. Right. That could be an issue that you would face if you rely on it. Right. So there's there's always downsides to every tool. You're always looking at tradeoffs.

I would say the benefits are just what you identified with the iPad is you have an undo button and you can make some changes. You can move things around on the page. That's sometimes what I do when I do sketchnotes. So the other challenge with the iPad is actually the same thing as the benefit, right? The fact that you can undo and you can change things actually could become a problem, right? Because you can never be done with something. You're always going to want to futz with it or fiddle with it or make it better. Or in the moment, you might get lost on fixing things instead of actually listening to what you're supposed to be listening to. So that's on the flip side, the challenge with the iPad or any kind of digital tool like that is it's unlimited, right? There's something interesting about using the pen and paper, the finality of

it, right? If you make a mistake, it's not going to go anywhere and you have to deal with it. It's a little bit like doing stand-up comedy, right? You let that joke out and it's either going to work or it's not and you can't take it back. And there's something in a way exciting about that at some point. But, you know, it really depends on what you're going to do with it. I would say if you want to have that flexibility to make changes, which in many cases is important, I think the iPad can be really useful. You can store lots of stuff on there and it's no thicker than a slim notebook, right? So there's lots of benefits there. But on the downside, you have to charge it and, you know, care and feeding.

Another thing to consider is you might really get used to your drawing tool and then the software developer might decide, well, we don't need that feature. We're going to change that feature right underneath you. And suddenly the thing you're used to is changed, right? So now all that skill that you built up using the tool might suddenly change on you without any warning and without your input, right?

So pen and paper has been around for a long time and it's probably going to be pretty similar in the future. So again, the way I approach sketchnoting with either tool is what's my goal with the tool and what do I want to get out of it? And then that's drives me toward which one I choose. But I use both interchangeably and like both analog and digital tools. to help you by giving you an all-in-one SEO tool set that solves that problem. It gives you what

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you want to get a following on or your company needs more traffic to convert into sales go there now that's ahrefs.com a-h-r-e-f-s.com to get that seven dollar trial our thanks to ahrefs for their support of focused and all of relay fm yeah it's interesting mike uh i i'm a pass holder at the southern california disney parks and at california adventure they have this place you can go in and learn how to draw Mickey Mouse or whoever the character of the week is. And the fun thing about it is they give you a big piece of paper and they give you a pencil, but they don't give you an eraser. And it's always interesting when you go in there. People say, well, where's the eraser?

They're like, oh, no, that's okay. Mistakes are fine. Just keep drawing. And they really like that's built into the system. And I always think about that when I go in there and learn how to draw somebody. But the, but for me, because I went through the same thing, Mike is kind of landed on the side of good notes. I'm surprised I didn't as well, because I'm a nerd, and I always have an iPad with me. notes. I'm surprised I didn't as well because I'm a nerd and I always have an iPad with me. But what really got me with the idea of bringing some paper and pen back into my life was just the sheer volume of work I do digitally that I found that I like the experience of using a pen and

paper separately. I just, once in a while, having something that I do in a different medium feels good to me. And then because I'm a nerd, I have workflows to capture all that digitally very quickly. And so I don't, I'm getting the benefit of digital, but I'm using the paper and pen. And for me, it's just simply, even though knowing I don't have an undo button on my pen,

I just like the change in medium. The mode switching, yeah. And I also like the point you made, Mike, about how paper doesn't run out of battery. It's a good point. Right. One of the things I do like about GoodNotes is the ability to have all the different tools. When I was doing doing sketchnote paper pen, I was using a couple different colors. How do you do that? Do you use different colors

or do you use just a single color? Where do you find that balance with the number of pens and notebooks and things that you bring with you? Typically, for a long time, I just did black and white in the beginning. I was just focusing on the content and the structure. So I didn't really add color. Later in my career doing this, I started introducing color

as a new experimental angle. And what I would do is, again, I feel like constraints are a good friend to challenge and experiment with. So what I would do is take one black pen, like a flare pen, and then maybe one other color or two, another color, maybe two colors. And I would limit myself to just those. Sometimes what I would do is focus on the content during whatever the event would be. Like I do sermon sketchnotes as well. And that's where I do a lot of my experimentation because I know the consistent message is going to come. I roughly know the length of it. And I can start gauging some of the details. So I would go in and say, I've got a notebook, I've got a black pen, and I've got a green and a blue, and I can use those. Those are my three elements.

And most of the structure would be done in the black and then I would highlight in the color, but then I would push myself next week and say, well, I've got to use more green this time. And I would start bringing that in. So I think it's good to have some limits. Like if I had 20 colors and I was sort of jumping between, I think it would get in the way of kind of what David was talking about, having a flow, right? Having some kind of a process that you follow and limitations. I know switching over to digital, I have friends who use an app called Procreate, which is really designed for illustration and painting and stuff. And it can be very daunting because there's so many options, but the solutions that my friends have done is they pick like three different nibs that they use and they build a standard template for the page size and they have a standard set of layers. So

when they come into a new project, they sort of have these familiar limitations that they work within. And I think that can be helpful in anything, even beyond sketchnoting, is having, here's the tools that I use, and here's how I use them. And it sort of sets the foundation, and then you can sort of be creative within those bounds. I think that's helpful. Tensional constraints. Comes up again. I like that. And my sketchnoting method honestly is just one pen i don't use any color or anything i just whatever pen i've got i just make a sketchnote and it's fine you know it looks nicer when you add color i know mike is partial to orange every time i see

something online you've done it's got some orange in it yeah but the um uh but you know it doesn't i guess my point is this really doesn't have to be fancy and um and and i want to talk about for a minute you had mentioned some statistics in your sketchnote handbook but just i do think there it's worth giving some air time to the concept of stopping and sorting something you're listening to out in your brain and then figuring a way to stick it out through your pen into a piece of paper in a creative way all the benefits you have when you do something like that in terms of retention and understanding well the most there's more the good news is there's more research coming people are very interested in this space and i i'm sensing more research is being done it's moving into education that's something we can talk about too lots of teachers are super excited

about sketchnoting as an application for students to understand and have retention one of the one of the studies that i cite quite a bit is um you can look it up it's uh mueller and oppenheimer and the test they ran was they pitted uh keyboardists against longhand note takers. So they weren't even doing sketching, really. They were just writing longhand. And they would watch basically a TED Talk and take notes. And then they would test them immediately and see what their retention rate was. It was pretty equal.

But what they found is when they returned and did retesting, I think it was a week later, some period of time later, the ones who did longhand notes actually retained a lot more information. And what they sort of came to was the problem with keyboard note-taking, unless you're very intentional about it, tends to move to verbatim notes. And the problem with verbatim notes is you're not really analyzing, you're just typing what you're hearing. You're just passing through your brain and going through your fingers in some sense, right? Whereas at some point, if you're doing longhand notes, you're just like, I can't keep up with this. I can't write every word they're saying. So I have to start analyzing and making sense of this so I know what to write. So it shifts your mind into a different space. And they found even after running the test and

seeing this and then warning the keyboardist, like don't type verbatim notes, the keyboardist had a real hard time switching out of that mode where the longhand note takers didn't seem to have that issue. So I suspect there's more research coming. I think there's lots of verification that there's retention that's happening. that's happening. Anecdotally, I see it a lot with teachers saying that their students, when they engage with the information with sketchnotes, that the retention levels are higher, the engagement level's higher. It's something they've created, so they have ownership in it. So, there's all these subtle things that are happening behind the scenes that help them feel really one with the information that they are learning in a different way than if they just watched a video or type notes or, you know, in these different ways that are less personal.

Yeah, I have so many questions about that, though. Like, what if the students were on a digital device where they had to outline as opposed to just write verbatim notes? What if they were on something like an iPad with good notes versus a sketchchnote book. I don't want to overgeneralize that. I do think that, you know, you can learn a lot using digital tools, but it is nonetheless very interesting results. Yeah, that study, I had heard about that before I discovered your books, Mike. And that's kind of the thing that got me moving in the direction of sketchnoting because I recognized that the people who were taking analog notes, they couldn't keep up. So what they were doing basically was synthesizing the information and writing down the main idea or the main thought. visual image to that idea or thought, I'm going to remember it further down the road. And I,

when I was in school, I was an expert test taker. I got pretty much straight A's, but I could not remember anything after the test. I knew the information in short-term memory, but then after that, it was basically gone. And I recognized in my adult life that I wanted to retain the things gone. And I recognized in my adult life that I wanted to retain the things that I was learning. And sketchnoting has really helped me with that because I have to go through that process and attach an image to what the person is saying. And I've found that that image will keep coming back in my brain. It'll keep popping up. And I'll remember those things months, even years after I create them because I've had to take it a step further. And then by creating that visual, it's like it gets printed in the notebook of my brain. And it doesn't just disappear after, you know, a week later.

That's pretty crazy, isn't it? It's, there's something, I think there's something physical going on. So I wonder, and again, David, you're good to point out that this is you know one point of data right it'd be interesting to try in all these different ways like is there something different about typing on keys versus using a pen and writing in a book and your whole arm is moving and your body's involved in it like you know what what what's going on there and i think the good news is it seems like there's lots of interest in researching this stuff. So I think maybe in the next 10 years, we'll have lots of stuff to back up or verify or debunk ideas that we have. And that's,

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photo editing, travel, mail clients. You name it, they've got it. And there's a free one-week trial. Just go to Setapp.com now to check out the apps and try it for free. Once again, that's Setapp.com. And let them know you heard about it here on the Focused podcast. Yeah, you mentioned this is getting big in education, but I also know that in education there's a lot of emphasis on the digital devices,

the one-to-one programs where you get an iPad or you get a Chromebook or something. So the schools that are implementing sketchnoting in education, are they doing this analog or are they doing it digital? It still seems like a mix. I think there's some digital stuff. I think the challenge always, even as much as the digital tool makers are trying to make these cheaper, I think you can get into an iPad with a pencil as cheap as like $3.29 or $2.99, something like that. It's still $300 a child where, man, I can buy reams and reams of paper and flare pens for $300 for my kids, right? And they could just burn through that stuff. Another point of reference is I was in Fresno in California a couple of years ago, and there was a science teacher who brought me in to teach her teachers.

teacher who brought me in to teach her her teachers and what they do is something called sketchbooking which i had not actually not heard of before but what they do is they give students a sketchbook like a nice sketchbook of some kind and all through their learning through the semester they're capturing that information and re basically redrawing it as sketch notes in the notebook and as i i think i remember that they uh had open book tests with it. So, whatever you caught in that sketchbook, you could then use in a test. So, it sort of was wise maybe to really invest in your sketchbook and capture information that you thought might be useful because, you know, when test time came, you could open that book and find, if you could find it, it could be valuable. And that teacher, Jennifer, just mentioned how much more engaged her students were and I saw some

of the sketchbooks and they were pretty amazing for these it was I think high school kids the stuff that they were capturing and information the way they were laying out their information is really interesting so I think it's still a mix you know schools often don't have the biggest funding so if they don't have the right tools, it might be easier just to use paper stuff because it's more approachable. And like you said, David, at the Disney experience, you know, if there's no eraser, in the same way, you know, you draw something around, you just crumple up the paper and recycle it and get a new sheet. So it really kind of depends, I think, on the school district and their situation and their mindsets.

It really kind of depends, I think, on the school district and their situation and their mindsets. But also interesting thought. So when you tell me that they have a sketchbook, I'm thinking a book with no lines in it. And what a difference that makes in the way the students would sketch note, as opposed to if you just put lines there, it would just become a copybook. Yes. The books they had, I think, were spiral bound or bound, and the pages were, if I remember right, it's been a little while. It may have been blank on one side and lined on the other. I'm not sure.

But there may have been some structure. That'd be a good question for my friend Jennifer. Yeah. I like the idea of finding new ways for kids to learn and using the science to make it easier. I mean, when we were kids, at least when I was a kid, we were just expected to memorize what they told us and spit it back on an exam. And I think that educators today are so much more farther along than they were back in my day. So I hope that works. And now, Mike, tell us a little bit about your involvement with Sketch.io in education. I know in addition to, you know, this is actually becoming kind of a big thing, right?

It is. And it's not something we expected. So when I wrote the book back in 2012, I released it around 2012, 2013, you know, our target market was user experience and other designers because those were the people that were doing it at that time. You know, user experience designers understand information. They're really into it. So it was a natural fit in that space. And we just hoped that maybe it would step beyond that space.

And it took about four or five years, and it seemed like somehow it got introduced into education and schools. Teachers were doing it. And in my experience, the typical process is a teacher will find this sketchnoting stuff. They get really excited. They'll start doing it in class, see results. They'll tell their principal and the principal will get excited. And then the principal will tell their district and then the district will reach out to me and say, hey, we understand you wrote this book on sketchnoting. Would you be willing to teach a workshop or do a keynote or talk to our teachers about this process? And I'll say, sure, sounds great. And then we'll work something out and

I'll come in and speak to them, whether it's a keynote, which I just did in New York this June, and then workshops to follow. Typically, workshops are the most sought after because, you know, there's application. It's professional development that they can use immediately. So, it's pretty exciting. I think the teachers themselves, in some cases, have students that come to them and want to do sketchnoting and the teachers don't know how to do it themselves. So, in the case of Fresno, there were a few teachers that were there that had allowed their students to use it because they saw it was effective and then simply wanted to do it themselves so they could better understand it and think, well, how can I – if my kids are wanting to do this and it's effective,

how can we integrate this into our curriculum so it's just part of what we do? And then we open it up to all the students. So that's a typical experience that I would have with an education area, district or something reaching out and wanting to work with this. And if you go on Twitter, you just see teachers all over the place that are starting to integrate this into their classes as young as, I think, like fourth grade. Fourth grade kids are starting to do this, maybe even younger.

Wow. So it's kind of amazing. That must make you feel so good when you find out about this stuff. It does. I mean, as I said, I hadn't planned on it, but knowing that there's this whole generation of kids who will go through school thinking it's okay to draw and that I can actually apply it and use it in a way

that makes me remember things and communicate things and understand things better, that's pretty amazing. I have young kids, so it's doubly amazing because they're starting to get interested in it now as well. And I can see how valuable it can be in a personal way. Yes, boy, it's a big trick. And one thing to get a kid to be interested in sketchnote, it's another thing to have your dad be the sketchnote guy and get interested in it. So often, you know, kids will be like, well, no, it's not cool.

That's what dad does. Right. Yeah. Well, that's what my teenage son, he sort of, you know, he likes it, but he doesn't want to admit too much. Exactly. So, you know, so the show is called Focused

and we try to talk about keeping your eye on the ball. And I think one of the challenges for sketchnoting, people that are curious to maybe start doing it, maybe the next time they're sitting in a meeting or at a conference and they want to try to sketchnote, how do you find that balance of focus between, you know, summarizing and sketchnoting when you're listening to and getting so hung up on your drawing and making it clever looking that you stop listening. You understand what I mean? Yeah, exactly.

Well, one of the things that I try to teach people who are new to it, let's say someone who's like, I'm kind of interested in this thing and I want to try it. One of the approaches or the techniques that I try to teach is, maybe you need to approach it more slowly than you think. I think sometimes when I teach the workshops, people will try and do sketchnoting and they'll give up on writing completely. They'll just be drawing images like, no, no, that's really not the point. I still want you to write. So what I often recommend is continue to write what you do. And maybe if you're using paper or

good notes or whatever, instead of using the whole space for writing, maybe limit yourself to two thirds and then leave a third maybe on the right or the left, depending on if you're a lefty or righty. And then allow the information to sort of process as you're taking your notes. And if you see images or there's something on a slide that you find interesting, you've now got a column that's set aside for visualization that you can use and start to put images in that relate to the things that are in the text. And maybe even connect those with arrows or something to the text that it's related to. That's a really good way to start that's not too imposing. You don't feel like you have to do amazing art. You're just simply visualizing in a column and then work from there slowly, try different

layouts and start integrating the images into your text a little bit more. I think it's always good to start slow and see what develops rather than trying to be too aggressive in doing things that you see. So, I think that's sort of what you're identifying with like bullet journaling stuff, right? You see these amazing spreads and, but, you know, someone might have spent three hours making that spread and, you know, you could get a lot of tasks done in those three hours. So, maybe it's not worth it to you to do that kind of detail, right? So I'm always approaching it that way to be practical. I just, I'm a really practical person. You know, when I teach, I teach a concept and I want to, I want people to apply it immediately because that I feel like is where you

start seeing application and integration. And that's just focusing on slowly integrating it in, seeing where it fits, and just following the flow. Kind of like what you did with using those in courtrooms, right? You found something that fits you, and you made it work in a way that made sense to you. And one of the hacks I do with sketchnoting, when I'm sketchnoting a live person, is I may start a diagram, just kind of get the

space for it. I'll draw the initial box or square or whatever, but I'll move on. And then when the presentation is over, I'll go back and make it look pretty, if that makes sense. And I find that that step of going back and finishing the diagrams, while I'm doing that, I'm looking at the words I wrote and thinking about what was said. And it's almost like a way of just like hammering home in my brain, whatever I just heard. It actually, it's a review method really. And I find that really useful. That's a term that I call staking. So like, it's almost like putting a stake in the ground. And that usually that the question for that one comes, what if someone's speaking too fast? So there's too much information and I can't keep up?

Well, my response is, well, use a staking technique where you sort of start the first bits of the comment or the idea. And then you sort of guesstimate how much space you might need to finish it and then jump to the next line and continue with the next idea. And you can keep on doing it. The same kind of an idea, you sort of block out space for it. And then you have to intentionally come back right away and sort of fill it in. Or if you have access to the person who's giving the idea, walk up to them and say, hey, you talked about this idea. I started writing this down. Can you explain more detail? And then you fill in that space. So that's a really great technique, David, that will help you keep up, but also, as you said, is a good reflection technique as well.

How do you typically lay out your sketchnotes? I know there's a lot of different methods people can use, but it's not as simple as your text on a screen, you go from left to right, you go down a line, you repeat. I think because I came from a word space, even though I'm a designer, I like words, I like writing. My default is typically left to right, top to bottom. So like a book and a page. I call that linear format. So you're just going page after page. But often I'll challenge myself. So one of the next ones I might try is called radial. It's a lot like a mind map, which I know David is really into, right? So you have the central idea in the middle of the page. And then you work your way out radially and have information sort of circling that central idea.

It doesn't have to be symmetrical. It can be offset. And that's another way to do it. And then maybe a third one that I like to use is a path layout. So that's an idea where something would start in one location and sort of follow a path of information down to another location on the page. So it really depends on what the content is, or maybe I'll challenge myself, like I'm going to try and do a path sketchnote today, and maybe I'll sort of imagine it in my mind and then start laying the information in as I go.

But I would say the linear format's a good place to start because it's something everybody at least in the West knows, you know, top to bottom, left to right. And then as you go along, you can sort of challenge yourself to these other layouts as you find them interesting. Or maybe one other I can mention is Skyscraper. other I can mention is Skyscraper. And this is the idea if you're in a panel of say three or four people that you could have columns on the page and maybe a little drawing of each person in that column. And as they say things, you just write it in their column. So you've got some built-in structure that you can work with. So as you can see, all these layouts are sort of practical ways to break up the information to make sense to the content that you're trying to capture. ways to break up the information to make sense to the content that you're trying to capture.

Sure. Yeah. Now, you mentioned the different styles fitting the different types of information that you're trying to capture. We've talked about a few different use cases for sketchnotes. You and I use them for sermon notes, take them for note-taking in class. David, you use them for legal uses. What are some other scenarios where you would recommend people consider using sketchnotes? Well, there's a variety of these. I go in a little more detail in the sketchnote workbook, which is the second book, because I felt like there was lots of ways they could be applied. One would be ideation. So if you're on a whiteboard and you're coming up with solutions, you can use these same sketchnoting techniques to capture the things that are going on inside your head instead of what

someone else is saying. So, if you're thinking of ideas, you can start using a whiteboard or sheet of paper to capture those ideas and see what they look like, right? Write notes around them, draw images of what you're thinking. I think a lot of times getting it out on paper like that allows you to see what's in your mind. Often things just sort of fill up in your head and you can't really see them for what they are. I think the other aspect of that would be in team settings where you're doing ideation. Because by putting it on the paper or a whiteboard or whatever the surface is, you get a group of people all looking at the same thing. I think there can be situations where you have this illusion that you agree on things when you talk about them, but when you see it on a board or a page, it becomes a little bit clearer.

It means something a little different. So you can start seeing, oh, we actually aren't agreeing. We disagree about something. And having that visualization will help. Another one that I can think of immediately is creating processes. So in the context of being focused, right, if you have workflows or processes that you're trying to build or improve, you could use these techniques to draw out that process, almost like a flowchart, right, to capture these things one step after another. But maybe you're actually drawing the parts of the process to see them more

visually. And that can be something as a means to an end, right? You might not need that necessarily, but it would help you understand where can I pull something out of the process and drop something else in? Like, I just got a new MacBook and I have to change all my cables to USB-C. Well, what does that look like? Well, let's do a process map and see how the pieces fit together and what I need to buy. So, those are a couple of things. And then the last thing I would say is experiences. Going on travel and food and those kind of things are just fun things you can do. Yeah, I do one similar to your process, a sketchnote with processes for when I'm publishing a field guide or when I'm working on a transaction for a client,

I will sketchnote across a two-page spread. So usually you think about this as a one-page thing you're going to do. But if you've got a notebook that you open wide, it's actually wider than it is tall. And I just draw a line across the center from left to right. And it's essentially a timeline. And then I sketch note the process that way. And sometimes I share it with the client. Sometimes I don't, depending on how bad it looks at the end. But it gives my head just the process of sitting

down and sketch noting out what's going to happen in what order for once again, it's just, you know, I was thinking about, is it the pen and paper? Is it the digital? I think what it is for me, perhaps, is the slowing down that comes with pen and paper. It just forces my brain to linger more as I'm going through the motions of the pen strokes. And I think that helps a little bit. I don't know. Like you, I'm super interested in the science on this. I want to see where it all goes. Like you, I'm super interested in the science on this, and I want to see where it all goes.

But the process of slowing down to write, to draw, does give your brain a little more time to linger on these things. I like the phrase you used, Mike, about seeing what is in your brain. I forget exactly how you put it, but I think that's very much in line with your point, David, of lingering on these things. Like you don't really know where these connections are going to be made or what this picture is going to look like, but your brain kind of does. And so you're giving it a vehicle for that to be expressed. I think that's a great observation. I think it's just another tool that you can express yourself. Sometimes words are just not quite adequate and being able to draw the ideas and have the words together is a big benefit. I think your observation about slowing down, David, is interesting too, because I think it's,

is it Neil Gaiman and Neil Stevenson, I think both have written whole novels longhand, like the first draft longhand, and have found that it actually slowed down their thinking in a way that was really positive to sort of contemplate the story in a way that they didn't quite do when they were keyboarding it, right? They saved keyboarding for a second step. So it would be interesting to kind of dig up what their takeaways were from just writing text. They weren't really necessarily drawing anything either,

but it's the same kind of process in a way. Yeah, I was up at this was i think the museum of science fiction in seattle and they had neil stevenson's cryptonomicon cryptonomicron there which is an excellent book by the way but it was like it was like three and a half feet tall of paper that he just wrote out longhand you know his are very long. That's one of the trademarks. They give you a unique domain, they give you great award-winning templates to choose from, and more. You can use Squarespace for just about any project, whether you want to create an online store with either physical or digital goods, whether you want to create a portfolio of your work, whether you want to create a blog and start publishing your thoughts, or even if you want to start a podcast. start a podcast. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that lets you do any of that with nothing to install, no patches to worry about, and no upgrades needed. You don't have to worry about any of the technical stuff because Squarespace has got it covered. You just have

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and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. You know, one of the things, Mike, that you've done, this is sort of related to sketchbooking, but I think it's super useful and something that focus listeners might be interested is the idea of your logbook.

And you've written about it on Medium, and I've seen some stuff. Could you describe that for us? Yeah, that's something that's been very successful for me for the last four years now. Wow, it's been a little while. I got into bullet journaling. I'm a friend of Ryder Carroll through different ways we've crossed paths, and he encouraged me to try bullet journaling. So I have.

And one of the things that I noticed was I needed something a little more specific around time management. And my solution was, well, what if I added some kind of a symbol or an area in my page to sort of identify that? And to get into the reason why I do that is I don't want to spend all day in Outlook. I try the best I can to get away from Outlook so I can focus on design or whatever it is I'm doing. And so one of my solutions is what if I sat down in the morning and I made a little bar along the left edge of my notebook? So it's like probably a quarter inch wide and it's the vertical length of the left side of the page. And then I'm using a dot grid page. I sort of mark it

off as four dot chunks. So that equals about an hour. So I can break it into 15 minute chunks, I guess. You can see this if you go on the article in Medium. And so basically I represent my workday in this left column. I'll put all the meetings that I'm attending. And then if there's time I want to block out for doing activities, I'll block that out. In the middle of that page, I'll have all my tasks, both for work and maybe things personally that I might have to do, running errands or what have you. And that sort of consumes the left page. And lately what I've been doing, and it's not reflected in the Medium article, is I'm using the right page as a logbook. So what I found was I was doing the plan bar on the left page and the right page, and I would have my tasks in the middle, but I kept running

out of space to write notes in the space that was remaining on those pages. So I simply only do the bar on the left side now. I have my tasks on the left page, and on the right page, I write the log and anything I'm thinking about, meetings I'm attending, whatever it is, I can do sketch notes in that space. It's just a full page for me to capture information. And I find it super valuable. I carry the book everywhere I go for work and all my meetings. I'm constantly writing things down and sometimes the log page will go empty. So I'll flip back to that and use it for capturing ideas if I'm running out of space or I just happen to have some space there. So having this analog tool, like you said, making me slow down and think a little bit has been really valuable, and it gets me a little bit away from the computer all the time.

We're so much on screens, I think it's nice to have a little respite. So an interesting little play I did on this was I did it and so I have it in the morning, the bar that represents. And so gang, if you're listening, what he's done is he's made a bar down the page from top to bottom and then he can easily block off what his appointments are for the day and what his block time intentions are. But what I did is I made a second one at the end of the day, or as the day goes on, showing what actually happens. And it's interesting to see. I don't

do it every day, but it is interesting to see how plans go awry sometimes. Right. So this is a dot grid page you've got here which you mentioned you use in constructing the bar on the left side of this this diagram in the medium post which we'll we'll link to is that your preferred method then is that the dot grid or do you like the plain paper and what kind of are you using and then what's the thought behind it with the sketchnote idea book interesting so i do like the dot grid i like the dot grid because it's enough structure to give me structure but not too much to be in the way so if you compare that to a square a squared notebook you know with crossing lines, it can get kind of noisy, right?

That was my preferred notebook for a long time. And then when the dot grid started to appear, I made the switch. So the beauty is, is that I can use a ruler, I can use a line in my hand on the left edge of the book and actually draw the line along those dots to build my bar. And then you can use the dots too for points on the tasks that

I want to do too. So it gives me enough structure. So if I want to draw and use them, they're there for me, but they're light gray and they sort of set back a little bit. And I use that for my planning. When I do sketchnoting, if I'm going to do intentionally sketchnoting in a notebook, I like to have blank paper. I'll do it in dot grid if I have it, of course, but my preference is to have blank paper, and I like really thick paper that can handle lots of ink. One of the challenges I found, I couldn't ever really find a notebook that had all the elements that I really wanted together in one notebook.

I would find good paper, but maybe I didn't like the cover, or this one I liked the cover, but I didn't like the paper. So, um, through, through connections with, uh, uh, project partner, Mike Shiano, who's a notebook guru, we're teamed up and we're producing a sketchbook designed for sketch noting. So that's that we call that the sketchnote idea book. It looks really cool. I have to admit, I looked at the video before we started recording. There's a couple of reference things in there, which are really nice. I feel like those would be great helps for somebody who's just getting into the idea of sketchnoting. But do you want to explain a little bit about some of the design choices you made with that sketchnote idea book?

Sure, sure. I would be happy to. So first off, I have to say, I really beat up notebooks. I'm always throwing them in bags and tossing them around. And I'm like a notebook's worst nightmare because I just really use them fully. Most notebooks are pretty good, but I've had cases where I was in the middle of a sketchnote session and the binding started coming apart and the pages were coming out. And so, you know, I would admit that I'm pretty tough on a sketchbook. So I'm probably a good testing point for whatever we would build. So that was sort of the driving force behind it was can we build something that's got all the elements and it's tough.

So I would say the heart of the sketchnote idea book really is the paper inside. We found a really great paper. Mike Sciano, my notebook Yoda, basically found this paper and uh we produced several prototypes that we shared with a few people including me to really battle test these things it's like 180 gsm so it's kind of thick uh but it's not too toothy so it's if you're using a pen or especially a fountain pen it's got a real nice smooth feel and it's so thick that most inks will not bleed through or even show through to the backside, which is really important for sketch noting when I would lay heavy ink on a page. Of course, you know, a Sharpie or a Copic marker

that's using alcohol, those things are going to bleed through because alcohol just evaporates right through that. So there are some limitations, of course, but it's got really heavy paper in the center. And then to address the toughness, it's a hardcover notebook that's sewn. It's got a sewn binding. So all the pages are sewn together and then they're wrapped in a polymer cover. So it's sort of like this soft touch polymer, I don't know, fabric, I guess. It's not even fabric. It's material that wraps around the hard cover and it provides a level of protection that's I think better than some of the the other paper type stuff that you might see wrapped on the notebook two of the prototypes that I had one I had for about a year and I battle tested it took it everywhere threw it in my bags and stuff and

when I look at it next to the the brand new prototype it's hard to tell them apart it's kind of amazing that it's held up as well as it has so that's that sort of covers the outside and then as you mentioned there's sketchnoting references how to do typography how to draw with the five elements layouts for sketchnotes in the back and then it's got a pocket and bookmarks so you can sort of keep track of what you're doing. So it's, again, it's more of the focus on making it a balanced book. I'm a real big believer in balanced tools that have a good balance of all the different elements. So I felt like this achieved sort of the balance that I was aiming for in a sketchbook. And we're really happy with how the prototypes have turned out and now we're doing a kickstarter

that launches on september 4th and trying to gather people to sign up to our vip mailing list so they can get access uh one day before everybody else if they sign up and get a chance to back it and make it happen i'm still trying to wrap my head around 180 gsm so that's like um a paperweight it is yes my yes. My favorite paper is the Rhodia paper, which I think is 90. This is double that. It's double that, yeah. Crazy. It's crazy, yeah. And the odd thing is when you feel the paper, it doesn't feel, I mean it feels thick, but it doesn't feel outrageously thick. It's not like index cards per se, but it's

kind of approaching that. I think, um, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's something special. I, it's hard to describe. I know on the website, uh, for the, the idea book, we have, um, a new video we just posted, uh, I think it was earlier this week with a friend, Jim, who's a huge fountain pen fan. And so I brought one of the prototypes and he just drew with 12 different pens and he was pouring ink on and flipped over the page and it's it was like just starting to show through on the back side it's kind of amazing so yeah it is really impressive and and the way you demonstrate it um because you're mike grody of course you you kind of sketch noted on pages with all sorts of different inks and then you took pictures of the backs of the pages so you can see the ghosting and the and the bleed through to the extent there

is any and there's very little um boy that's great and it makes so much sense i mean i feel like you should have a notebook to go along with all these techniques you've taught everybody and a book generated just for sketchnoters that has two ribbons in it. And it's just, I can tell you thought about every little detail. Yeah, we spent about two years really going into Skunk Works and building prototypes, testing them. We didn't just decide last week to produce a notebook. It's something we've definitely been working on for a while to get it right. And we feel like we really hit this one out of the park,

and we hope other people will too. Yeah, well, that's going to be, when this show publishes, it will be already on Kickstarter, so you can go check it out. And there's a website, sketchnoteideabook, all one word, of course,.com. That's a great place to go. I think, folks, if you're at all interested in this, I strongly recommend checking out Mike's sketchnote handbook, which was kind of where it all started. And that's kind of Mike showing you how to sketchnote and giving you some great tools and help to get started. If you want to go to the next level, there's the sketchnote workbook. That's the one where you can see some terrible sketches by a lawyer at the end. I think they're awesome. You get the idea book book at the end and you're good to go.

I mean, this is something I think that can help people. And I'm so happy that you were willing to come on the show today, Mike. Well, thanks for having me. We hope that it's helpful, too. You know, we built it because we wanted to make it happen. But I think often in the particulars, you get the universal as well. So I think that's we feel like that's the case with this. All right.

Well, everybody, Mike Rohde, you can find over at rohdesign.com, R-O-H-D-E-S-I-G-N.com. I love that, you know, the overlapping name. That works, right? You can also find you at sketchnoteideabook.com. And then also, don't you have a different site for just sketchnoting? Yeah, so back in 2009, it's shocking that it's been 10 years, but I started to see that there were lots of sketchnotes floating around, but no one place to really see them.

And so I thought, well, what if I created a site to capture that? Other people's work, not so much my own stuff. So I created sketchnotearmy.com, and that's really a showcase that other people's work not so much my own stuff yeah so i created sketchnotearmy.com and that's really a showcase of other people's work and we have a podcast where we interview many of those people and hear what's you know the story behind the sketchnotes so we've been having a lot of fun with that site for the last 10 years and we intend to keep on going with that are you active on twitter too mike yeah so Yeah, so on Twitter, pretty much any social, if you're going to find me there, it's going to be RhoDesign, R-O-H-T-E-S-I-G-N. Twitter, Instagram, micro.net, or microblog, I think, is the same.

So that's where you'll find me. Well, Mike, thank you so much for beating the drum for sketchnoting for all these years and helping so many people out. And thanks for coming and visiting us today. Thanks, David. Thanks, Mike.