Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► So we're over an hour late starting today on our recording. Would you like to tell everybody,

00:00:07 ◼   ► Gray, why that is?

00:00:08 ◼   ► Gray Miller It was a snow day!

00:00:10 ◼   ► [Ding]

00:00:11 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:00:13 ◼   ► Jay

00:00:23 ◼   ► but it doesn't have to be a lot, right, for it to make a big difference.

00:00:26 ◼   ► But it's very cold here right now and there is some snow.

00:00:28 ◼   ► As always with these things, uh,

00:00:30 ◼   ► if you post on the internet that your city has snow and things are closing down

00:00:35 ◼   ► people from the Northern Arctic wastelands will get in touch and they'll tell you

00:00:41 ◼   ► about how you don't know or understand what snow is, right?

00:00:45 ◼   ► That that your baby, it's like, this is, yeah,

00:00:48 ◼   ► I know that there's more snow in places that are colder. That's,

00:00:51 ◼   ► It's never the question. It's entirely a question of how economically feasible is it to keep

00:00:57 ◼   ► a whole fleet of snowplows at the ready to get your city clear of snow? And the answer

00:01:03 ◼   ► is if you're London, where it didn't even snow last year, you just don't have any plows,

00:01:07 ◼   ► right? Like you have nothing, right? You just don't have anything. And so then when you

00:01:11 ◼   ► do get every two years, one inch of snow, everything shuts down. But most importantly,

00:01:18 ◼   ► I woke up this morning, I saw that there was a lot of snow.

00:01:21 ◼   ► I immediately opened up Carrot Weather and saw that there was going to continue to be

00:01:24 ◼   ► a lot of snow.

00:01:25 ◼   ► And I immediately declared it a grey industry snow day.

00:01:28 ◼   ► I was like, "Nope!"

00:01:31 ◼   ► Year of order, routine establishing in the morning, right out the window it goes.

00:01:36 ◼   ► I just ran into the streets and it was great.

00:01:39 ◼   ► I spent all morning wandering around central London enjoying the snow and it was glorious.

00:01:46 ◼   ► But I did send you a message as soon as I possibly could.

00:01:49 ◼   ► Like as soon as I popped up into Foggart Square, I was like, "Oh!

00:01:52 ◼   ► Oh!

00:01:53 ◼   ► It's not a snow day for relay industries.

00:01:56 ◼   ► Myke's still gonna want to record the podcast."

00:01:58 ◼   ► So I sent you a message to try to give you a heads up that I was going to be almost certainly

00:02:03 ◼   ► late coming back, which I was.

00:02:06 ◼   ► But I liked that you attempted to sweeten this by sending me picture updates every now

00:02:11 ◼   ► and then of the interesting things that you were finding around London.

00:02:15 ◼   ► Like "Look!

00:02:16 ◼   ► Well, I thought you're probably sitting at home in the relay company that is not having

00:02:23 ◼   ► a snow day and having a sad at the office day. So I thought I was going to brighten

00:02:28 ◼   ► your morning with pictures of me frolicking in the snow. I thought you would enjoy that,

00:02:33 ◼   ► Myke.

00:02:34 ◼   ► I did not and have not had a snow day. It's been snowing for a few days. I have not left

00:02:39 ◼   ► the house even though I love snow. There are a few things in the world that I love more

00:02:45 ◼   ► that are naturally occurring than snow because it's so rare for me that like it's a real

00:02:49 ◼   ► treat but oh yeah i think throughout this episode there is going to be a theme and the

00:02:55 ◼   ► theme of this episode is mike mike feels very overwhelmed right now with work so i have

00:03:02 ◼   ► a i have a character flaw in that when i feel very busy if i leave the house it's like i

00:03:11 ◼   ► I have committed a crime. I have to be here and it is the only way that I can feel okay

00:03:21 ◼   ► because if I leave I have neglected the mountain of work that I have to take care of. So I

00:03:29 ◼   ► have not left the house yet. I believe as we're recording this today that when Adina

00:03:38 ◼   ► comes home she's dragging me out of the house she's bought me a scarf even

00:03:43 ◼   ► because she's unhappy with the fact that I have not left the house this week to

00:03:49 ◼   ► play in the snow which would bring me great joy but right now I feel like I'm

00:03:54 ◼   ► not allowed to do that I too had a mountain of work to do and I don't feel

00:04:00 ◼   ► guilty there's no kill there's no kill over there no this is a thing that is is

00:04:05 ◼   ► is very hard to do, but I'm always really glad when I do it, which is

00:04:09 ◼   ► intentional playtime, or intentional goofing off or relaxing time

00:04:15 ◼   ► where instead of what is very easy to do, like, "Oh, I should be working,

00:04:20 ◼   ► but somehow I'm Mario Karting. I don't know how this happened."

00:04:24 ◼   ► And it's like, "I'm not fully enjoying the Mario Kart

00:04:27 ◼   ► because I know that there's something that I should be doing,

00:04:30 ◼   ► and I'm just sort of here procrastinating."

00:04:32 ◼   ► That's the worst because you're not enjoying the activity and you're not getting anything done.

00:04:36 ◼   ► But that's why this morning is like, "Oh, woke up? Boom. I'm the CEO. I'm declaring it's a snow day."

00:04:42 ◼   ► No work can happen on the morning of a snow day. So there's no guilt at all. Nothing is even

00:04:47 ◼   ► possibly going to happen. And I feel like that's the best way to enjoy a thing is to mentally

00:04:54 ◼   ► cordon it off as work can't possibly happen while it's snowing outside. Everyone knows that.

00:05:01 ◼   ► So there's no guilt because I couldn't be answering emails this morning. It just couldn't happen.

00:05:07 ◼   ► What annoys me the most is that I feel like I had gotten better at that. I feel like I had gotten a

00:05:13 ◼   ► lot better at being able to say to myself, "You know what? I'm going to sit down and play Nintendo

00:05:19 ◼   ► for a while and it's going to be great." But I've been going through some transitions business-wise

00:05:26 ◼   ► this year that seemed to have upended everything. I think that my company is at a stage now where

00:05:34 ◼   ► there's just some changes happening, like we're old enough that just different types of things

00:05:39 ◼   ► are going on and it's all good stuff. Like all of this work, this additional work is being generated

00:05:47 ◼   ► because of good things and the stress that I'm going through is because of the additional work,

00:05:51 ◼   ► not that anything bad is happening, right? Like it's that kind of stress. It's an overwhelming

00:05:55 ◼   ► rather than a desperation type stress. So I and I have not yet adjusted to this new

00:06:04 ◼   ► world and right and I'm and I am trying to do some things to help me adjust but right

00:06:10 ◼   ► now I'm not doing a very good job with it.

00:06:13 ◼   ► I'm sorry to hear that Myke. Overwhelmedness is maybe one of the much more harder things

00:06:22 ◼   ► to deal with because it is that cloud, that feeling of "oh there are so many things,

00:06:34 ◼   ► it's very hard to get a handle on" but you know I really think Idina needs to take you

00:06:40 ◼   ► on a snow day.

00:06:41 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah I know, I know it's tricky.

00:06:45 ◼   ► Let me tell you actually, let me tell you about something that I started doing which

00:06:51 ◼   ► which I'm hoping will help with this.

00:06:55 ◼   ► I have started a journal.

00:06:57 ◼   ► Okay, I'm going to need a lot of details on what this means to you.

00:07:02 ◼   ► Yeah, I know.

00:07:04 ◼   ► Because I've basically gone anywhere from dear diary to writing down minute by minute

00:07:10 ◼   ► what I'm doing.

00:07:11 ◼   ► It is an all-encompassing term which these days means more and more and more.

00:07:18 ◼   ► So I have in the past looked at journaling systems. I am a big pen and paper nerd. I've

00:07:25 ◼   ► mentioned this on the show before, but this is a thing that really is one of my big loves

00:07:31 ◼   ► in life is pen and paper. I have an entire podcast dedicated to it. It's called The Pen

00:07:34 ◼   ► Addict and I will put a link in the show notes in case people are interested. We are about

00:07:39 ◼   ► to hit our 300th episode. It is my longest running show that I have ever done. It's weekly,

00:07:48 ◼   ► So, you know, it's a lot of pen and paper news.

00:07:50 ◼   ► So that's the thing that I love very much.

00:07:52 ◼   ► So I've been very aware of journaling systems.

00:07:56 ◼   ► You know, bullet journal is a big one, right?

00:07:59 ◼   ► And I actually know the guy who made it.

00:08:01 ◼   ► His name is Ryder Carroll and he's a great guy.

00:08:04 ◼   ► And we've kind of been going along with his journey

00:08:08 ◼   ► over the time that he created the bullet journal

00:08:10 ◼   ► 'cause we first found out about it before it was nothing.

00:08:13 ◼   ► Right, it was just beginning.

00:08:14 ◼   ► And now it's like a huge, huge deal.

00:08:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, but also, bullet journal, in my mind,

00:08:19 ◼   ► at least from what I know of it,

00:08:21 ◼   ► bullet journal is not a journal at all.

00:08:23 ◼   ► It's a task management system.

00:08:24 ◼   ► - It is, yeah.

00:08:25 ◼   ► - This is why when you say you started a journal,

00:08:27 ◼   ► I feel like I need to know

00:08:29 ◼   ► what it is that you're talking about.

00:08:30 ◼   ► - Exactly, so this is it, right?

00:08:32 ◼   ► Like, this is it.

00:08:33 ◼   ► The term journal means so much now.

00:08:36 ◼   ► But I was saying, like, I have looked into bullet journaling

00:08:38 ◼   ► and I was considering it as a thing,

00:08:40 ◼   ► but it didn't do, for whatever reason,

00:08:43 ◼   ► it wasn't doing what I wanted it to do.

00:08:45 ◼   ► And then a couple of weeks ago, I had a call with my new friend, Mr. David Sparks.

00:08:52 ◼   ► And he was telling me that he had just started journaling himself, but decided to just create

00:08:59 ◼   ► his own system, which focused on things that matter to him.

00:09:03 ◼   ► And I was like, oh, okay, that's probably what I should do.

00:09:08 ◼   ► Like why focus on somebody else's system when I don't need a to-do list on paper.

00:09:15 ◼   ► I already have one of those, right?

00:09:17 ◼   ► So I figured I'm going to focus on what I want to do.

00:09:21 ◼   ► And I've been keeping this journal for just over a week.

00:09:24 ◼   ► And every day I sit down at one point and I write out the headings of the things that

00:09:30 ◼   ► I want to focus on in that day.

00:09:32 ◼   ► And then later on in the evening I'll kind of complete it.

00:09:35 ◼   ► So let me tell you what my system includes.

00:09:40 ◼   ► So I sit down with a double page in a notebook and I write down a bunch of headings.

00:09:45 ◼   ► One of them is priorities, one of them is called one good thing, I have one bad thing,

00:09:51 ◼   ► what did I learn, what am I looking forward to, and then what pens did I use.

00:09:56 ◼   ► I use two pens every day.

00:10:00 ◼   ► Because this is also a way for me to use my pens more, which is nice.

00:10:05 ◼   ► So yeah, so priorities, right?

00:10:07 ◼   ► Okay, yeah, let's run through these one at a time.

00:10:10 ◼   ► Priorities. This is in essence like to-dos, but they are much broader and much more simple.

00:10:20 ◼   ► So like every day I may have 10 tasks say that I want to, my to-do list that I want to complete,

00:10:27 ◼   ► right, in Todoist. But they don't actually all need to be done today, right? Like that's not

00:10:34 ◼   ► how my system works. Sometimes I have to-dos in my project manager, knowing that they won't be

00:10:42 ◼   ► done today but I can do a little bit of work towards them today and then reschedule them.

00:10:46 ◼   ► But my priorities are the things that by the end of the day today I will have 100% wanted to

00:10:53 ◼   ► complete these things. So then when I'm coming to the end of my day and I'm looking at Todoist and

00:10:59 ◼   ► and I'm moving seven tasks to tomorrow.

00:11:03 ◼   ► And I get that feeling of like,

00:11:05 ◼   ► did I actually do anything today?

00:11:07 ◼   ► I can refer to my journal and tick off the things

00:11:11 ◼   ► that I've done and be like, oh, these were the things

00:11:13 ◼   ► that I actually achieved.

00:11:14 ◼   ► I set out to achieve the most important things

00:11:16 ◼   ► that I needed to do today.

00:11:18 ◼   ► So it's like a sub list.

00:11:21 ◼   ► It doesn't bear any kind of control

00:11:24 ◼   ► over my actual to-do list system.

00:11:26 ◼   ► It's more like pie in the sky type stuff, right?

00:11:31 ◼   ► Like these are things that I want to do and they can even be non-work things.

00:11:35 ◼   ► And they are a lot of the time non-work things.

00:11:38 ◼   ► Stuff that I wouldn't actually have in my to-do list.

00:11:41 ◼   ► So like I'm going to write one in right now as we are talking

00:11:44 ◼   ► because I add to my journal throughout the day and it's going to say

00:11:48 ◼   ► "go out in the snow".

00:11:51 ◼   ► That's going to be added to my priorities list for today.

00:11:54 ◼   ► and then later on we'll go out in the snow, but that's never going to find its way into Todoist

00:11:59 ◼   ► because it's not part of my system, right? Yeah, and it also doesn't...

00:12:04 ◼   ► in the structure of using something to manage projects, it doesn't really make sense to make

00:12:11 ◼   ► a project which is called "Myke is exposed to snow because it's good for his mental health"

00:12:17 ◼   ► and then an action which is called "go outside" or like that doesn't make it... it's too heavy

00:12:22 ◼   ► weight, right? It's way too heavy weight.

00:12:24 ◼   ► Well, let me rephrase that. It's not good for the way that I have my system. Some people

00:12:28 ◼   ► may do that, right? But that doesn't work within the way that I think about tasks, right?

00:12:34 ◼   ► But when I'm looking at my priorities for the day, then yeah, maybe that works. So then

00:12:38 ◼   ► I have one good thing and one bad thing. So every day I try and write down one good thing

00:12:44 ◼   ► that happened and one bad thing that happened. And I included the bad thing because I included

00:12:49 ◼   ► the good thing. I didn't want this to just be like an idealistic view of my life because

00:12:56 ◼   ► bad things happen, right? And I didn't want this journal to just be like, "Oh, everything's

00:13:01 ◼   ► so amazing!" Right? Because it's not like that. It's not how life is.

00:13:05 ◼   ► Okay, so already we're getting into a little bit of a different function of this for you,

00:13:11 ◼   ► which is the idea that this is a thing like a traditional diary that you might look back

00:13:19 ◼   ► on as a record of what was going on in your life.

00:13:23 ◼   ► That's why the one bad thing is there because it lets you know what's going on.

00:13:27 ◼   ► I highly doubt that I will even keep this journal when it's finished.

00:13:33 ◼   ► I'm not an archivist or stuff like this.

00:13:36 ◼   ► It's more just as a way for me to reflect on something.

00:13:41 ◼   ► So by writing it down it's like acknowledging a thing happened or a thing didn't happen.

00:13:48 ◼   ► honestly like the one good thing none of this stuff has I don't feel like it ever

00:13:53 ◼   ► has to be completed right if I don't have a bad thing I'm not gonna write it

00:13:59 ◼   ► like I'm not gonna magic something up but the idea for me is more just like a

00:14:06 ◼   ► way to just reflect on things a little bit more just so I can focus on like

00:14:11 ◼   ► what good things did happen today and my idea for this is like moving into the

00:14:17 ◼   ► future, if I feel like I've had a really bad day, why don't I try and think about

00:14:23 ◼   ► if there was a good thing and it might help me feel a little bit better. And the

00:14:28 ◼   ► reason I'm doing this is because of one of the things I learned about myself

00:14:32 ◼   ► through time tracking of understanding I feel like I've been very busy but what

00:14:37 ◼   ► do the numbers say? Sometimes the numbers say no you haven't so then it's

00:14:43 ◼   ► like okay well let me try and think about that why do I feel this way if I

00:14:48 ◼   ► have something that tells me it's not this way so it's like I might feel really

00:14:52 ◼   ► bad today but maybe that's just the last half an hour as opposed to the entire

00:14:59 ◼   ► day so that's kind of what the one good thing one bad thing is is meant to be

00:15:03 ◼   ► for like acknowledging that there is both but also giving me a way to think

00:15:08 ◼   ► about what my day was actually like because I've noticed this about myself

00:15:15 ◼   ► that like I can have a perfectly good day but then things can ruin it like

00:15:21 ◼   ► something happens and then I'm in a bad mood right and I'm very aware of this

00:15:27 ◼   ► and believe that I think I would be overall more happy if I didn't dwell on

00:15:32 ◼   ► on things as much. So this is me trying to curtail that a little bit by having more of

00:15:44 ◼   ► a structure, more of a system around good things that happen. And actually the next

00:15:49 ◼   ► two parts of the journal also enforce this. So one of them is "What did I learn?" And

00:15:56 ◼   ► this serves two functions. One of them is, basically for the entire time that I have

00:16:01 ◼   ► known Adina, if she wants to talk, if we want to have a conversation but we don't have anything

00:16:08 ◼   ► to talk about, like if we're hanging out, we're just chatting, she will say to me, "Tell

00:16:13 ◼   ► me the three things you learned today." And that has always been a strong exercise for

00:16:19 ◼   ► me that I fail at a lot of the time.

00:16:21 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm gonna say even as someone who makes a real effort to try to read and expose himself

00:16:31 ◼   ► two different things. What are the three things you learned today is a tall order?

00:16:37 ◼   ► So it's tricky because I know that there are things but I just don't remember them. Or like

00:16:44 ◼   ► at that moment I can't think back to like the specific things that I went "huh" about today.

00:16:51 ◼   ► Right? There must be more than three every day. So I've always found this an interesting thing

00:16:58 ◼   ► and a thing that I've struggled with, but I thought it was a nice framework to try and

00:17:04 ◼   ► write some stuff down.

00:17:06 ◼   ► Where I try and write down a number of things every day that I have learned.

00:17:10 ◼   ► But this is a very open thing where it can be like facts, something that's changed my

00:17:16 ◼   ► mind or even just a thing about myself or a thing that I found interesting.

00:17:21 ◼   ► It can be literally anything, but it's just three things that have kind of been in my

00:17:26 ◼   ► mind today is kind of how I approach this. So it can be like something pithy, like something

00:17:34 ◼   ► that I just think is kind of weird or funny, or it can literally be like, "Oh, I found

00:17:38 ◼   ► out this thing about the crown jewels today." You know, like, so three things that I consider

00:17:41 ◼   ► like notable pieces of information for one reason or another that I have accumulated

00:17:46 ◼   ► over the day. And it can be three things. It can be six things. Sometimes it's one thing

00:17:52 ◼   ► or two thing. Right? Like it doesn't really matter, but it's more just what did I learn?

00:17:57 ◼   ► And it can be any amount of things, but I try and aim to do three, but most days get like two.

00:18:02 ◼   ► Right, yeah.

00:18:04 ◼   ► And this is again another reflection thing, like me trying to focus on some stuff that's

00:18:12 ◼   ► happened in a day and just trying to note down some notable items. And then the next one is what

00:18:19 ◼   ► I'm looking forward to. So something that's on the horizon that I'm excited about. And

00:18:25 ◼   ► I have a little personal rule of I can't repeat the same thing over two days.

00:18:30 ◼   ► Right, so you can't say like, I'm looking forward to my upcoming wedding. And you can't

00:18:38 ◼   ► use that for the next six months. It's more day to day. So like, I can have

00:18:44 ◼   ► something that I'm really excited about, which is happening on Saturday, and I could

00:18:47 ◼   ► write it on Monday and Thursday for example but it's more just like I can't write what

00:18:52 ◼   ► I wrote yesterday it has to be different today and that's purely because sometimes there'd

00:18:58 ◼   ► be something happening on Saturday and I would write it in every single day and I feel like

00:19:01 ◼   ► that that's that I'm cheating.

00:19:03 ◼   ► Yeah I think that's cheating the idea of what you're trying to go for there.

00:19:09 ◼   ► And then the last section is writing down my pens but you don't need to know any more

00:19:12 ◼   ► about that.

00:19:15 ◼   ► I want to know much more about that.

00:19:16 ◼   ► Okay well one thing is, like the looking forward to, I use two pens, one pen to write the headings

00:19:21 ◼   ► and one pen to write everything else in, like the body of everything, and I don't use the

00:19:26 ◼   ► same two pens in a row either.

00:19:27 ◼   ► I have to use different pens every day.

00:19:29 ◼   ► Right, so this is a mechanism to help you rotate your pens?

00:19:33 ◼   ► Yeah, to enjoy my hobby more.

00:19:35 ◼   ► The image in my head is of a monk typesetting a book, you know where they have the uppercase

00:19:41 ◼   ► and the lowercase of all of the letters and they're working at a big down.

00:19:45 ◼   ► Like this is my image of you writing out the journal, is you have this array of pens neatly

00:19:52 ◼   ► stored in front of you, and so you just select from this big array of pens.

00:19:59 ◼   ► Is that what's actually occurring?

00:20:00 ◼   ► I typically will go to my office and pick two pens from my kind of top pen selection,

00:20:09 ◼   ► which I keep on my desk at all times, and then take those to somewhere else in the house

00:20:13 ◼   ► and write out my journal.

00:20:15 ◼   ► Ah, okay.

00:20:16 ◼   ► Alright, that's nice.

00:20:17 ◼   ► That's nice.

00:20:18 ◼   ► So you move around in the physical space to do it.

00:20:20 ◼   ► Yep.

00:20:21 ◼   ► And then I keep the journal and the body writing pen with me kind of throughout the day and

00:20:28 ◼   ► will add to it where I need to.

00:20:32 ◼   ► So you're a week in.

00:20:33 ◼   ► How do you think it's going?

00:20:35 ◼   ► It's become part of my routine already, which I'm very surprised about.

00:20:41 ◼   ► I have a daily task in Todoist, right, to complete the journal.

00:20:45 ◼   ► But it kind of gets to a point in the day where I feel like, oh, it's journal time.

00:20:50 ◼   ► Like, and it's not about me being reminded.

00:20:53 ◼   ► Like, I just feel like, oh, I need to complete the journal now.

00:20:57 ◼   ► Or one thing that I've been doing is like I get to a point in the day, I'm like, what

00:21:00 ◼   ► shall I do next? And like, oh, I know what I'll do.

00:21:03 ◼   ► I'll work on my journal.

00:21:05 ◼   ► So, you know, it is a.

00:21:09 ◼   ► It is a part busy work exercise, right? So it's like a work-crastination type dealio,

00:21:16 ◼   ► because I'm sitting and I'm kind of doing a thing which isn't real work and it's kind of maybe

00:21:21 ◼   ► putting off real work for a few minutes. But it's also a thing which is helping me think,

00:21:29 ◼   ► which I like. Yeah, I'm gonna disagree with you there. I think that's entirely a category of real

00:21:35 ◼   ► work. In my time tracking system, I have a category that I call "metawork" and that's

00:21:41 ◼   ► what I would classify this kind of thing as. Is it work like editing a podcast? No. But

00:21:48 ◼   ► it's work like sorting out your brain and what you're thinking about and what you're

00:21:53 ◼   ► paying attention to. That is a kind of work. I like this. You seem to be very hesitant

00:22:00 ◼   ► to let this count, Myke.

00:22:03 ◼   ► - So this again, this has been a trend

00:22:08 ◼   ► of my most recent busy time.

00:22:10 ◼   ► I'm trying to really focus on my to-do list as the work

00:22:16 ◼   ► because there's already so much in there.

00:22:21 ◼   ► I don't need to also consider everything else work as well

00:22:26 ◼   ► because then it's just too much.

00:22:28 ◼   ► It's too much work.

00:22:29 ◼   ► Okay, so you don't want it to count as work because you feel like you already have too

00:22:35 ◼   ► much work.

00:22:36 ◼   ► Okay, yeah, then it's not work.

00:22:37 ◼   ► Then it's just a personal project of yours.

00:22:38 ◼   ► This journal is a counterbalance against the overworking, right?

00:22:43 ◼   ► We're just gonna take this activity out of this arbitrary set of labels and oh look,

00:22:47 ◼   ► we lifted it up and we put it down here in this other set of arbitrary labels.

00:22:52 ◼   ► It's different now.

00:22:55 ◼   ► It's a totally different thing.

00:22:59 ◼   ► I'm sorry Myke, it's not work at all. I didn't mean to even suggest that. I take it all back.

00:23:03 ◼   ► I take it all back.

00:23:04 ◼   ► [Laughter]

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00:25:06 ◼   ► A lot of my busyness is self-imposed and I'm very aware of that and I'm trying to

00:25:14 ◼   ► find ways to counterbalance it, to kind of counteract it, to break my thinking a little bit.

00:25:21 ◼   ► Like I am a busy individual. I do have a lot of things going on,

00:25:25 ◼   ► but I know I'm not as busy as my brain tells me I am.

00:25:31 ◼   ► Right and you know that because you do the time tracking.

00:25:35 ◼   ► That's one of the many valuable things about doing the time tracking.

00:25:38 ◼   ► So right now I'm just trying to identify what is making me feel this way.

00:25:44 ◼   ► I mean, because there are days this week where I've been working a lot and my time tracking

00:25:49 ◼   ► reflects it, like abnormal amounts of working hours. And that's fine. I understand that.

00:25:53 ◼   ► I know what's going on. It's all good. But just the overall day-to-day feeling that I've had

00:25:59 ◼   ► for maybe the last two weeks of this complete overwhelmedness, like I need to try and

00:26:04 ◼   ► I need to try and ascertain why I'm feeling this way when a lot of the things that's happening,

00:26:11 ◼   ► not everything, but a lot of the things are on the kind of like the general schedule of things,

00:26:14 ◼   ► the general kind of flow of time. And I have some additional projects and stuff like that,

00:26:18 ◼   ► but logically they shouldn't be making me feel like how I feel right now. So I'm just trying

00:26:29 ◼   ► to work out what is going on and the only thing I have right now is this journal. It's

00:26:38 ◼   ► my only idea so I'm just really focusing on that which is why I wanted to bring it to

00:26:44 ◼   ► discuss today.

00:26:45 ◼   ► You're holding on to this journal real tight because it is the only thing that is keeping

00:26:52 ◼   ► you afloat in the vast ocean of your work that stretches in every direction.

00:26:57 ◼   ► Yep.

00:26:59 ◼   ► Okay.

00:27:01 ◼   ► Good.

00:27:03 ◼   ► Well, I'm going to say

00:27:05 ◼   ► that I think it's a good idea

00:27:07 ◼   ► I'm not going to

00:27:09 ◼   ► poo-poo your journal

00:27:11 ◼   ► and

00:27:13 ◼   ► [sigh]

00:27:15 ◼   ► One of the reasons I will not

00:27:17 ◼   ► poo-poo your journal is because

00:27:19 ◼   ► I have done

00:27:21 ◼   ► something similar to this

00:27:23 ◼   ► and

00:27:25 ◼   ► I always just feel really hesitant to talk about it because there's something so...

00:27:37 ◼   ► There's something so touchy-feely about this that I find myself a little bit repulsed.

00:27:44 ◼   ► But I have totally done this kind of thing and I have definitely found it a helpful exercise at times.

00:27:54 ◼   ► So, yeah, like, I'll pull up what it actually looks like for me, but sort of like, when

00:28:08 ◼   ► would it have been now?

00:28:09 ◼   ► Maybe like a year and a half ago now at this point?

00:28:12 ◼   ► I was sort of going through a bit of a rougher time, like, you know, we touched upon some

00:28:19 ◼   ► of those things, like some of the recurring health issues for my wife and a few other

00:28:23 ◼   ► And it was just like not the best time in the world.

00:28:27 ◼   ► And this was one of the first times I tried this kind of thing because a friend of mine

00:28:33 ◼   ► had recommended it to me and he's like, listen, you're going to feel really stupid doing this,

00:28:38 ◼   ► but you should really try it and it's a good idea.

00:28:40 ◼   ► I was like, okay, fine, I'll give this a shot.

00:28:44 ◼   ► And I did like the, even the way you're laying out your journal, I ended up doing something

00:28:48 ◼   ► that was very similar and I felt so dopey about it because it's like okay in your little journal

00:28:56 ◼   ► here's what you're going to do you're going to write down three things that you're thankful for

00:29:01 ◼   ► as like oh god am I doing am I doing like a gratitude exercise here the answer is yes yes

00:29:06 ◼   ► you are doing a gratitude exercise it's like okay fine so I'll write down like three things that I'm

00:29:12 ◼   ► grateful for and then sort of like you're talking about with the priorities just three

00:29:19 ◼   ► things that I can do that will make the day a good day and then at the end of the day

00:29:26 ◼   ► I would just come back to that list see how things had gone and also just again add like

00:29:34 ◼   ► what were some good things that happened during the day right that's all it was it's like

00:29:38 ◼   ► Like a way of starting something, answering a few questions, setting up the course of

00:29:45 ◼   ► the day in my mind with what are the top things that I want to do as opposed to what is the

00:29:54 ◼   ► big ball of stuff in my task management system, like just pick three things, and then simply

00:29:59 ◼   ► at the end of the day reviewing the situation.

00:30:02 ◼   ► And I did this for the first time when I was on a Greg-cation in an undisclosed location

00:30:10 ◼   ► in Fynn-Oscandia.

00:30:12 ◼   ► And it was stupidly effective.

00:30:16 ◼   ► So effective, I can't believe how effective it was at just changing my mental framing

00:30:23 ◼   ► and also helping just make it really clear about "I only have so much time today, what

00:30:30 ◼   ► are the things that I really need to do?

00:30:32 ◼   ► And so I'm going to try to focus on those things.

00:30:35 ◼   ► So it's not that far off from what you're doing.

00:30:40 ◼   ► I did it for a while.

00:30:43 ◼   ► It is something that I have found nearly impossible to make stick as a part of a regular routine,

00:30:51 ◼   ► even though it's a thing that I in theory would want to do.

00:30:56 ◼   ► I find that I can only really maintain it when I'm in a particular focused or almost

00:31:05 ◼   ► somewhat isolated state of mind.

00:31:07 ◼   ► So it's like I am on a graycation.

00:31:09 ◼   ► I am on like the corporate retreat for one.

00:31:12 ◼   ► And I don't know, there's, I talk about going on these corporate retreats for one thing.

00:31:19 ◼   ► It always, always sounds kind of silly, but it is, they're weirdly mentally draining and

00:31:26 ◼   ► they're very mentally intensive,

00:31:30 ◼   ► and I feel like there's something about having

00:31:33 ◼   ► this little thing running in the background of like,

00:31:37 ◼   ► oh, you're gonna review a little journal

00:31:38 ◼   ► at the end of the day, that is very effective,

00:31:42 ◼   ► but I have just not been able to make it last,

00:31:44 ◼   ► because I almost find like it's too mentally tiring,

00:31:48 ◼   ► even though it doesn't seem like it's a big deal.

00:31:52 ◼   ► But yeah, so I've done that.

00:31:55 ◼   ► I've done that almost every time I go away on a corporate retreat. I've sort of over

00:32:00 ◼   ► the over the time I have modified it to add a couple of more questions or little little

00:32:05 ◼   ► spaces. So it's sort of developed into this thing that I now call a like my bookend journal.

00:32:11 ◼   ► So it's like the day starts and the day ends with looking at just these couple of pieces

00:32:17 ◼   ► a paper. But yeah, I never look back at it. It's not a thing that's any kind of archive

00:32:26 ◼   ► for me. It's just entirely a thing that, like I'm on the trip, I have my iPad and the pencil,

00:32:34 ◼   ► and I just fill it out on some fake paper that I had designed for me, which I mentioned

00:32:40 ◼   ► a while back. And I have a pen.

00:32:43 ◼   ► Why did you do that? I just had people stop asking me for the designs the first time around

00:32:49 ◼   ► because you said you were going to share them and you never did.

00:32:53 ◼   ► I have plans to share them at some point, but I just realized as I was discussing this

00:32:57 ◼   ► what I didn't want you to have in your mind, Myke, was the romantic idea of me with a quill

00:33:04 ◼   ► pen and a piece of paper working on this thing.

00:33:05 ◼   ► Do you really believe that I for one second thought you were doing this on actual pen

00:33:09 ◼   ► and paper?

00:33:11 ◼   ► I don't know what's in your head.

00:33:13 ◼   ► - I knew this was on,

00:33:15 ◼   ► 'cause you spoke about having this paper before

00:33:18 ◼   ► made for you by a mysterious individual

00:33:22 ◼   ► that I assumed that you were doing it there.

00:33:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's where it still is.

00:33:27 ◼   ► - I am happy to hear that you have found

00:33:29 ◼   ► this kind of thing effective too.

00:33:30 ◼   ► It is interesting to me that you seem to speak

00:33:33 ◼   ► really high of it, but can't find a way

00:33:36 ◼   ► to integrate it into your life on a more permanent basis.

00:33:39 ◼   ► That's kind of surprising to me.

00:33:41 ◼   ► it seems like counter to the types of things that you usually do, right?

00:33:45 ◼   ► Find something to be really useful but not like force it.

00:33:49 ◼   ► B: Here is one of the things, this actually kind of rolls up into year of order a little bit,

00:33:55 ◼   ► which is the reason it works when I'm on a great occasion is because I always treat it as

00:34:07 ◼   ► I wake up, I get some coffee and I sit down with this thing,

00:34:11 ◼   ► and I have some blank space. One of the questions I've added over time that I find useful is just a

00:34:15 ◼   ► big blank area that just says "What's on your mind?" and I just sort of write some things down,

00:34:20 ◼   ► just random free form like "What am I thinking about?"

00:34:23 ◼   ► - Oh, that's nice.

00:34:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's surprisingly illuminating to just sit and have a blank piece of paper in front of you

00:34:30 ◼   ► and just wait and see what thoughts surface and just go.

00:34:35 ◼   ► Just write them down and it's almost always just kind of

00:34:39 ◼   ► nonsense but very often it will get to things like

00:34:42 ◼   ► what you're saying here, like I'm feeling overwhelmed

00:34:46 ◼   ► but not about anything in particular.

00:34:48 ◼   ► And it's like, oh that's interesting, why?

00:34:49 ◼   ► Like let's try to figure this out a bit more.

00:34:51 ◼   ► But on the great occasions I treat it as the first activity

00:34:55 ◼   ► in the morning and I'm able to work it into a routine then,

00:35:00 ◼   ► but in my regular working schedule,

00:35:05 ◼   ► so like now when I'm back home, I'm in London,

00:35:08 ◼   ► and like before I was going to my previous office,

00:35:12 ◼   ► and now I am going to the glass cube to create things,

00:35:16 ◼   ► which I think in my mind, I think it's now

00:35:18 ◼   ► because I've decided that's where creation

00:35:20 ◼   ► is going to occur, like it's gone from the glass cube

00:35:22 ◼   ► to the glass forge.

00:35:24 ◼   ► the glass forge in the year of order.

00:35:26 ◼   ► Like I like these, I like all of these things.

00:35:29 ◼   ► But it just doesn't fit in the schedule

00:35:32 ◼   ► because I know on my regular life,

00:35:36 ◼   ► the most important thing, the thing that I try to optimize

00:35:39 ◼   ► for is wake up, take a quick walk,

00:35:43 ◼   ► and then get right to a computer

00:35:46 ◼   ► to work on a script for a video.

00:35:48 ◼   ► Like I've gotta make that transition as smooth as possible.

00:35:51 ◼   ► And doing the journal puts me in a very different kind

00:35:56 ◼   ► of mood, it puts me in a much more pensive big picture mood,

00:36:00 ◼   ► which is not the frame of mind for,

00:36:04 ◼   ► I wanna start revving this engine to get some work done.

00:36:08 ◼   ► And so I've just never quite figured out how to make it work

00:36:12 ◼   ► in a regular routine for me otherwise.

00:36:15 ◼   ► So it has ended up being just largely like a

00:36:20 ◼   ► Gratation kind of thing for me and and that's how I use it

00:36:25 ◼   ► But that's kind of why I was curious like you're a week into it

00:36:28 ◼   ► And I think um I don't think I have ever done it for more than 10 or 14 days in a row

00:36:34 ◼   ► Which is about the longest of the longest Gratations

00:36:36 ◼   ► And then after that it falls apart very quickly when I get back to my regular life

00:36:40 ◼   ► Feel like I'm gonna have better luck than you

00:36:44 ◼   ► because of the secondary purpose that it serves in my life mm-hmm, which is

00:36:50 ◼   ► the act like the action of using my pens because that that brings me joy so like

00:36:57 ◼   ► I I get something out of it which is separate which is like a feeling of

00:37:01 ◼   ► happiness for you for being able to act on a pursuit that I love mm-hmm so like

00:37:08 ◼   ► that's an additional benefit that I get from this then then what then what you

00:37:12 ◼   ► would get but I am I'm happy to hear that it is something that you do as well

00:37:15 ◼   ► just because then I'm not on my own.

00:37:18 ◼   ► (laughter)

00:37:20 ◼   ► I'm a little raw right now.

00:37:23 ◼   ► - No, I totally get it, I totally get it.

00:37:25 ◼   ► And if it hadn't been a friend who I feel like

00:37:28 ◼   ► is not a very airy-fairy person,

00:37:31 ◼   ► suggesting it quite strongly,

00:37:33 ◼   ► I think I never would have tried it in the first place.

00:37:34 ◼   ► Because like, I'm not gonna sit down and write

00:37:37 ◼   ► three things that I'm thankful for.

00:37:38 ◼   ► That's dumb.

00:37:40 ◼   ► But like I said, like comically effective,

00:37:45 ◼   ► comically effective at kind of changing your mental mindset. So yeah, it very much works.

00:37:52 ◼   ► I'm going to have a book recommendation for you, Myke, at this point. I know you don't like books.

00:37:59 ◼   ► You're adding something to the work pile. I know that I'm adding something to the work pile,

00:38:07 ◼   ► but listen, never has a more perfect moment come to recommend something and

00:38:15 ◼   ► We don't even have to commit to it being Cortex Book Club.

00:38:19 ◼   ► I'm just going to mention it on the show.

00:38:21 ◼   ► And if you read it and we want to talk about it, then we can talk about it.

00:38:26 ◼   ► We don't have to do it. There's no obligation here whatsoever, Myke.

00:38:31 ◼   ► I'm only ever going to read this if it can be a work thing, right?

00:38:37 ◼   ► Okay, I'm just going to continue talking.

00:38:40 ◼   ► read books now for work. That's the only reason that I would read any book now is to do it

00:38:48 ◼   ► for work. So, yeah. Is it Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith?

00:38:53 ◼   ► Yes, yes. So you saw this in the show notes document. This has been here for a while and

00:39:00 ◼   ► I've been waiting to bring it up because on my last graycation, a different good friend

00:39:06 ◼   ► recommended this book, which the title of it makes me laugh. It's a book that has a

00:39:13 ◼   ► subtitle which is also very self-help-y about creating behavior that lasts becoming the

00:39:18 ◼   ► person you want to be. Everything about that sort of repels me from the cover of the book.

00:39:23 ◼   ► But...

00:39:24 ◼   ► Oh god, it's a leopard changing its spots.

00:39:27 ◼   ► Yeah, I know, right? Did you get that? It took a while, right, for the visual metaphor

00:39:33 ◼   ► there to work its way in. I know. I was looking at that for a while and I was like, what the

00:39:37 ◼   ► hell is this cover? I don't understand. But yes, the cover literally has a leopard changing

00:39:42 ◼   ► its spots. But I read this on my last graycation, which was also at an undisclosed location

00:39:49 ◼   ► in Fino-Scandia, and I thought it was pretty good. Like as far as business books go, I

00:39:54 ◼   ► think this one was pretty good. And what I specifically wanted to do was let it sit for

00:40:00 ◼   ► a while and see if future me was still thinking about it as a thing to come back to and the

00:40:08 ◼   ► answer to that has now been yes.

00:40:10 ◼   ► Like I've left it alone for a while and I still keep thinking about it which means okay

00:40:14 ◼   ► I want to actually reread it and think if there's anything here to extract for me and

00:40:21 ◼   ► it the most actionable stuff is directly related to things that are very similar to doing a

00:40:27 ◼   ► daily journal.

00:40:29 ◼   ► So if you are trying to do a daily journal, if you're trying to figure out the edges of

00:40:35 ◼   ► what that might be, this is the book to read to see if there's anything in here for you

00:40:41 ◼   ► that might be useful.

00:40:43 ◼   ► And I want to reread it to see if there's a way that I can modify my much more intensive,

00:40:53 ◼   ► pensive bookend journal into something that's more like a daily action plan bookend journal.

00:41:01 ◼   ► So I am going to reread this. I suggest that you might want to listen to it on audiobook.

00:41:09 ◼   ► And if you want to, we could talk about it on a future show, but there's no pressure,

00:41:14 ◼   ► Myke, because I refuse to add any more work to your big work pile.

00:41:19 ◼   ► No, let's do it. Let's do it next time. Let's do it. Okay. All right, cuz it's not that long

00:41:25 ◼   ► It's it's a six hour audiobook, which is about a third of what we usually do

00:41:30 ◼   ► So like I feel like I can knock that out by next time. All right, so next episode

00:41:35 ◼   ► we're gonna do a cortex book club and

00:41:37 ◼   ► Maybe for the first time it will be something of use

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00:43:19 ◼   ► Grey, the drought is over. Oh yeah?

00:43:22 ◼   ► The year-long drought of no new Myke Hurley vehicles.

00:43:28 ◼   ► So sad for the internet. It's come to an end and I have a new show

00:43:31 ◼   ► that I'm very excited about and I want to just tell our listeners about it so they can go and

00:43:37 ◼   ► check it out if they want to. It is called "Playing for Fun" and it's hosted by Tiffany

00:43:43 ◼   ► Arment and myself. It is not the big project that I've been teasing. That is still in the offing.

00:43:51 ◼   ► This is the problem when people know that you're working on some kind of big project.

00:43:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:43:55 ◼   ► Is that they think everything is the big project, right?

00:43:58 ◼   ► Oh, he just tweeted. Was that the big project? No, it was not.

00:44:01 ◼   ► I've been working on this tweet for four years.

00:44:06 ◼   ► I'm still, the big project is still kind of like being slowly chipped at every few days I will have

00:44:14 ◼   ► a thought or like an idea and like I'm just ever so slowly fleshing that out as to see if it's a

00:44:19 ◼   ► thing that I'm going to do. But this is a project that I'm very excited about. Every episode me and

00:44:25 ◼   ► Tiff pick a video game and we just talk about what we love about the video game. Nothing else.

00:44:32 ◼   ► no bad stuff, just the good stuff. It is a fun, happy, positive show about things we love. We

00:44:39 ◼   ► don't talk about industry news. We don't necessarily focus on the biggest games, the biggest games

00:44:43 ◼   ► right now. We just pick a game that we love and we talk about it and we just talk about what we love

00:44:49 ◼   ► about it. And it is a show that is bringing me a lot of happiness because that's all it's about.

00:44:56 ◼   ► it's just about happiness. And I feel like I get to talk about all of the things that I love.

00:45:03 ◼   ► I've built an incredible job for myself in that I just talk about things that I like,

00:45:10 ◼   ► the things that I'm passionate about, the things that I enjoy in life.

00:45:14 ◼   ► But I tend to talk about them from a critical perspective. So with all of the things where

00:45:22 ◼   ► where I'm talking about Apple stuff, for example.

00:45:25 ◼   ► Or even on this show, I like to talk about working.

00:45:28 ◼   ► It's just a passion that I have.

00:45:30 ◼   ► It's a thing that we both share

00:45:32 ◼   ► in just liking to talk about work.

00:45:35 ◼   ► I also talk about bad things,

00:45:37 ◼   ► like feeling overwhelmed, right?

00:45:39 ◼   ► - Right.

00:45:40 ◼   ► - But this show, Playing for Fun,

00:45:43 ◼   ► we only talk about good things,

00:45:44 ◼   ► so it only makes you feel good.

00:45:46 ◼   ► - You're never gonna criticize a video game, Myke?

00:45:49 ◼   ► - Nope.

00:45:50 ◼   ► - Never. - That's not what this show's about.

00:45:51 ◼   ► I have another show about video games where I criticize video games.

00:45:56 ◼   ► This one is just about good things.

00:45:59 ◼   ► So you can find it at relay.fm/playingforfun or any app that you use or any service that

00:46:05 ◼   ► you use, you should be able to find it there.

00:46:07 ◼   ► It has the best artwork and music of any show I have ever been a part of.

00:46:15 ◼   ► It is next level good.

00:46:17 ◼   ► So if anything, just go check out the artwork.

00:46:21 ◼   ► So yeah, it's called Playing for Fun.

00:46:23 ◼   ► Please go and listen to it.

00:46:24 ◼   ► Even if you don't like video games, because you might just enjoy hearing two best friends

00:46:28 ◼   ► talk about something that they enjoy.

00:46:30 ◼   ► Like we have listeners of The Pen Addict that are like this.

00:46:33 ◼   ► People write into us like, "I don't care about pens.

00:46:35 ◼   ► I just like hearing the two of you talk about something that I don't understand."

00:46:39 ◼   ► So yeah, go and check it out.

00:46:40 ◼   ► I just wanted to spend some time promoting it.

00:46:43 ◼   ► Well, if you do like video games, you should also listen to it as well.

00:46:47 ◼   ► Because whenever Tiff has guested on the ATP podcast, and she talks about video games at

00:46:53 ◼   ► the end, I've always thought she should have a podcast where she talks about video games.

00:46:56 ◼   ► She plays a lot of video games.

00:46:58 ◼   ► She's pretty hardcore.

00:47:00 ◼   ► The way she plays games is crazy.

00:47:02 ◼   ► She's so much better at video games than anyone I know.

00:47:06 ◼   ► It's almost embarrassing.

00:47:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:47:09 ◼   ► It's she's she's very hardcore and I've always enjoyed it when she's on ATP talking about

00:47:14 ◼   ► games I thought she's talking about games more so you should go listen to it plus Tiff

00:47:18 ◼   ► has a great podcasting voice she should do more podcasts so I'm glad she's doing another

00:47:22 ◼   ► podcast with you.

00:47:23 ◼   ► All right let's talk about some Year of Order and some so this is part of my year of branching

00:47:29 ◼   ► out by the way both of those things that we've been talking about today I should have framed

00:47:33 ◼   ► it as such but both the journal and the new show that's part of branching out because

00:47:37 ◼   ► These are new things.

00:47:38 ◼   ► These are things that I haven't done before

00:47:40 ◼   ► and I'm branching out by doing those.

00:47:42 ◼   ► So that's actually part of my year of branching out.

00:47:47 ◼   ► - See, this is the nice thing about year themes, Myke,

00:47:50 ◼   ► is they can be inclusive or exclusive

00:47:54 ◼   ► as you desire them to be, right?

00:47:56 ◼   ► I love the year themes.

00:47:58 ◼   ► They should have these fuzzy boundaries.

00:48:00 ◼   ► So much better than goals.

00:48:01 ◼   ► Goals are dumb, themes way better.

00:48:04 ◼   ► And also, okay, so let's be real for a second.

00:48:07 ◼   ► If you set a good theme, literally anything you do can be applied to the theme.

00:48:12 ◼   ► So you always feel like you're progressing.

00:48:14 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:48:16 ◼   ► Right?

00:48:16 ◼   ► Right.

00:48:16 ◼   ► It's great.

00:48:17 ◼   ► I've just made a new show.

00:48:18 ◼   ► I've done this many times, but it's part of my year of branching out because it

00:48:21 ◼   ► wasn't something I did last year.

00:48:22 ◼   ► So I've branched out, but I could also say, oh, it's nothing to do with the theme,

00:48:27 ◼   ► but I'm going to say it is part of the theme because then I feel like I'm

00:48:29 ◼   ► progressing something in my life, which is great news.

00:48:32 ◼   ► No.

00:48:33 ◼   ► It's fantastic to have in the back of your mind.

00:48:35 ◼   ► I went through a box with a bunch of computer cables in it

00:48:38 ◼   ► and got rid of the ones that I don't need.

00:48:40 ◼   ► Guess what?

00:48:41 ◼   ► Year of order.

00:48:42 ◼   ► - Advance the yearly theme.

00:48:43 ◼   ► I have brought order to the box.

00:48:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, this box, more ordered.

00:48:48 ◼   ► - Oh, the cutlery's out of place.

00:48:51 ◼   ► Let me bring year of order to the cutlery drawer.

00:48:53 ◼   ► - Order, order in all things big and small, Myke.

00:48:58 ◼   ► Right, it's great.

00:48:59 ◼   ► It's great.

00:49:00 ◼   ► - I may leave the house today.

00:49:02 ◼   ► It is part of the year of branching out.

00:49:04 ◼   ► I think that's stretching a little bit.

00:49:05 ◼   ► Obviously, I'm bringing order to the drawer.

00:49:07 ◼   ► But yeah, I mean, that's well within the confines.

00:49:10 ◼   ► Yeah, for sure.

00:49:11 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:49:11 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:49:12 ◼   ► I guess going out for your snow day, the snow day is big enough to, I think, to be your branching out.

00:49:16 ◼   ► Yeah, that's good.

00:49:17 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so.

00:49:18 ◼   ► I think so.

00:49:19 ◼   ► Snow isn't normal.

00:49:20 ◼   ► No, it's not normal in London.

00:49:23 ◼   ► So again, themes, big thumbs up, goals, thumbs down.

00:49:27 ◼   ► So what's going on in the year of order?

00:49:29 ◼   ► Okay.

00:49:34 ◼   ► Okay. I'm back with OmniFocus. That's, that's what's going on right now.

00:49:41 ◼   ► I was,

00:49:43 ◼   ► I've actually been talking to your co-founder of relay FM,

00:49:48 ◼   ► Steven Hackett about this on iMessage a bunch,

00:49:50 ◼   ► which is the cycle of task management apps of going through these regular

00:49:57 ◼   ► cycles of one to the other, to the other. It seems like Steven's in,

00:50:01 ◼   ► in the bit of a, he's in a bit of a transition as well.

00:50:04 ◼   ► So we've been talking about it a bit and I knew this was going to happen and

00:50:09 ◼   ► I feel like I have,

00:50:11 ◼   ► I have mentally settled on a metaphor to try to

00:50:15 ◼   ► describe this process.

00:50:17 ◼   ► And I think it's a bit like a forest fire where what

00:50:22 ◼   ► happens in life is you start out with things really simple.

00:50:26 ◼   ► Like I'm always telling people, "Hey, when you're getting started with task managers,

00:50:29 ◼   ► just start with a piece of paper.

00:50:31 ◼   ► You don't even know what you want.

00:50:33 ◼   ► You don't need to get distracted by any of the complexity, and paper is fine.

00:50:37 ◼   ► So just write down things that you want on a piece of paper."

00:50:40 ◼   ► And then eventually you realize, "Oh, you know what?

00:50:41 ◼   ► I don't want to keep rewriting these recurring tasks.

00:50:44 ◼   ► Let me try to find something."

00:50:45 ◼   ► And so you go to a simple task manager, and then you realize there's limitations in these

00:50:50 ◼   ► simple task managers, and you go to something a little bit more complex, and you keep stepping

00:50:53 ◼   ► it up and then you do have something that is very complex and then I think just like

00:50:59 ◼   ► what you're going through now I personally find that at some point I feel this sense

00:51:09 ◼   ► of vague overwhelming that's hard to pin down feeling like oh I have a whole bunch of things

00:51:14 ◼   ► to do and that's when the forest fire comes through and sweeps it all clean right and

00:51:19 ◼   ► you just and then you start over you're like you know what I'm just gonna be here with

00:51:22 ◼   ► with my iPad and my virtual paper and I'm going to write things down like this for a

00:51:25 ◼   ► little while. And I feel like it's a healthy cycle because when the fire sweeps through,

00:51:33 ◼   ► part of what happens is it's a way of discarding a whole bunch of tasks that you were never

00:51:38 ◼   ► going to get to anyway.

00:51:40 ◼   ► I really would love a nicer metaphor than the one you've chosen upon.

00:51:48 ◼   ► What about tides? Isn't that less aggressive? I don't like forest fires here. Can't we call

00:51:55 ◼   ► it like just like the tide comes in and it sweeps everything away from the beach? It's

00:52:00 ◼   ► way nicer.

00:52:01 ◼   ► No, Myke, you with your happy fuzzy life and your happy fuzzy podcasts. No, it's a forest

00:52:07 ◼   ► fire. Because look, I think it's appropriate because it's very easy in your life that I

00:52:13 ◼   ► I feel like the little tasks, they grow up and around,

00:52:16 ◼   ► sort of just like in a forest,

00:52:18 ◼   ► like the forest becomes too dense.

00:52:20 ◼   ► And also, the forest fire, you have to realize,

00:52:24 ◼   ► like the forest fire is healthy for the forest.

00:52:27 ◼   ► Right, we're not talking about like,

00:52:28 ◼   ► oh, some guy in California throws a cigarette

00:52:30 ◼   ► out the window and the whole state burns to the ground.

00:52:34 ◼   ► They're like, oh, this is,

00:52:35 ◼   ► I'm talking about like a forest fire

00:52:36 ◼   ► out somewhere in like Montana or Wyoming, right,

00:52:38 ◼   ► where it's part of the life cycle of the forest.

00:52:40 ◼   ► and it's actually required for seed pods to germinate, this kind of thing.

00:52:44 ◼   ► So I feel like at the beginning of the year I went through the forest fire when I was on the

00:52:51 ◼   ► graycation and I stepped up to using things which I totally loved and definitely highly recommend,

00:52:57 ◼   ► but I knew I was eventually going to go back to something more complicated and then Omni wrote

00:53:02 ◼   ► their blog post about what their plan for the rest of the year is and I do like some of the things in

00:53:07 ◼   ► there and I thought, okay, things is kind of running up against the limitations of things.

00:53:14 ◼   ► And I also do have to say, I really appreciate it.

00:53:17 ◼   ► I wrote the developers one particular question about like, oh, could they change a thing?

00:53:21 ◼   ► And what I really love is unlike most developers who will say, oh, we'll put that on our list

00:53:26 ◼   ► for consideration.

00:53:28 ◼   ► Things wrote back and said, no, we're never going to do that.

00:53:31 ◼   ► I was like, great, I'd rather know.

00:53:33 ◼   ► I'd rather know that you never know.

00:53:34 ◼   ► - Because now you know that there's no point waiting.

00:53:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

00:53:38 ◼   ► And so some of the limitations and things

00:53:41 ◼   ► just became too limiting as I'm back into the regular cycle

00:53:46 ◼   ► of like regular podcasts and regular work

00:53:48 ◼   ► and a whole bunch of other stuff, I need something more.

00:53:50 ◼   ► So anyway, long story short, I'm back with OmniFocus

00:53:54 ◼   ► and so that's what I've been using

00:53:56 ◼   ► for the past couple weeks.

00:53:58 ◼   ► And almost certainly for the next six months

00:54:02 ◼   ► it's what I'm going to be using for a while

00:54:04 ◼   ► and then the forest fire will sweep through and everything will start all over again.

00:54:07 ◼   ► So I've been thinking about this because, you know, alright, so I will tell you right

00:54:11 ◼   ► now I'm playing with things because they just added this new automation system and

00:54:16 ◼   ► it's really interesting and I'm kind of just toying around with it. Like, I think

00:54:21 ◼   ► that ultimately it probably won't make me as comfortable feeling as Todoist does, but

00:54:29 ◼   ► I'm just playing around with it because there's some stuff that it can do which I've wanted

00:54:32 ◼   ► to do with a task manager for a while, but it didn't exist until now, so I just want

00:54:38 ◼   ► to see what that's like. So for example, one big project that I have is this show, and

00:54:45 ◼   ► posting this show just from a point of like when the edit is complete is a two-day process

00:54:51 ◼   ► full of lots of things that need to be taken care of. And we're using something incredible

00:54:59 ◼   ► that our friend Federico Vitici came up with,

00:55:01 ◼   ► which I will link in our show notes.

00:55:02 ◼   ► He created this natural language passing system in workflow

00:55:07 ◼   ► that can hand over a full project into things,

00:55:13 ◼   ► but it has, and I've been adapting and tweaking

00:55:15 ◼   ► with the workflow to the point where I can get

00:55:19 ◼   ► headings in a project, which I've never seen before

00:55:23 ◼   ► in any task manager.

00:55:24 ◼   ► So just like headings, one that says audio,

00:55:27 ◼   ► one that says video, one that says posting.

00:55:30 ◼   ► So it separates out the projects.

00:55:32 ◼   ► I think I mentioned this last time as these non meaningful dividers that things

00:55:36 ◼   ► have.

00:55:37 ◼   ► Which is lovely,

00:55:37 ◼   ► which is absolutely lovely because it can break a project up visually rather

00:55:42 ◼   ► than just this like sea of items that look exactly the same.

00:55:46 ◼   ► Yeah. It's so nice. In OmniFocus,

00:55:50 ◼   ► there's a way that I can kind of trick it,

00:55:52 ◼   ► which is to have these fake sub projects and then have things listed under these

00:55:56 ◼   ► fake subprojects and those aren't real projects in the system.

00:56:00 ◼   ► But I don't like the lack of clarity,

00:56:04 ◼   ► where when I'm looking at the list,

00:56:05 ◼   ► I have to remember, "Oh,

00:56:07 ◼   ► that's not really a subproject,

00:56:09 ◼   ► it's just a thing that I've made so I can

00:56:10 ◼   ► group a bunch of similar things together."

00:56:12 ◼   ► It's one of the very nice things

00:56:15 ◼   ► about things is the visual look of it.

00:56:18 ◼   ► When I first saw the headings,

00:56:19 ◼   ► I thought, "Oh, this is dumb.

00:56:20 ◼   ► I'll never use this."

00:56:22 ◼   ► Turns out, actually one of my favorite things in that app.

00:56:25 ◼   ► the headings is great and it's so visually nice.

00:56:30 ◼   ► So like I've been playing around with this project,

00:56:34 ◼   ► this list of tasks and grouping them out and using

00:56:38 ◼   ► some of the, there's a tool in Workflow called

00:56:42 ◼   ► Magic Variables, which was basically making variables

00:56:47 ◼   ► like a construction set. And it means that someone like

00:56:52 ◼   ► me can use workflow more simply.

00:56:55 ◼   ► So what I've been doing is when I set the task,

00:56:59 ◼   ► when I say I want this project to begin,

00:57:01 ◼   ► what I want is for times to be entered into a to-do

00:57:06 ◼   ► manager that are relative to the time that I started the project.

00:57:09 ◼   ► So I want to be able to start a project and be like,

00:57:13 ◼   ► this thing needs to go off half an hour from the point that I begin.

00:57:16 ◼   ► And no other system that I've been able to use has been able to do

00:57:22 ◼   ► this. So I thought to myself, oh, I can do this in Workflow because I can go into Workflow and I can

00:57:29 ◼   ► say by using their kind of date tools, what is the current time, add 30 minutes to that time,

00:57:35 ◼   ► and then I can drop it into Federico's Workflow as a magic variable. So it can look at the time

00:57:42 ◼   ► that I've selected and been like 30 minutes from now. Right. And I've been able to piece that

00:57:47 ◼   ► together. And so I'm playing around with this. It's just like, what does that look like? So then

00:57:51 ◼   ► I end up with this multiple day project with everything broken out which is all time relative

00:58:01 ◼   ► from this is exactly what I've wanted for this specific project which is posting this

00:58:07 ◼   ► show which is one of the larger projects that I have purely because there are a lot of little

00:58:13 ◼   ► pieces to it that I don't want to get wrong so I have like I don't do this for other shows

00:58:19 ◼   ► because the process is more simple and it's more streamlined and it's easier to repair

00:58:24 ◼   ► if something goes wrong. But with our show it's a little bit more tricky because there's

00:58:28 ◼   ► also like all of the YouTube stuff and you know like if there's something wrong in the

00:58:33 ◼   ► audio it is way harder for me to fix than with my other shows that are just audio right

00:58:40 ◼   ► because I would also have to change the video and like I just so I like to make sure I've

00:58:43 ◼   ► got absolutely everything 100% taken care of before I do anything. So it's a huge list

00:58:48 ◼   ► the tasks and it looks like with this things automation I can create a

00:58:53 ◼   ► templateable project that I can run which will be in a much nicer state than

00:58:58 ◼   ► anything OmniFocus has given me and todoist has given me because I've built

00:59:01 ◼   ► these projects in both of these other apps but I've never been fully happy

00:59:05 ◼   ► about it and it looks like that things can do that and I don't know what this

00:59:10 ◼   ► is gonna mean for me but because I'm still playing around of it. On this point

00:59:15 ◼   ► And the reason I was laughing about all of this is I think I have come up with like a grand unifying theory about to-do apps.

00:59:23 ◼   ► No to-do app will ever be perfect because it is impossible to meet the specific requirements of an undefined user base.

00:59:34 ◼   ► Everyone uses their to-do app slightly differently, even if they follow a system like GTD.

00:59:40 ◼   ► GTD. Everyone has their own preferences. So like it is impossible to create a

00:59:45 ◼   ► perfect to-do app because nobody can ever be satisfied. Because no one is ever

00:59:51 ◼   ► fully satisfied, when a new app comes along there's always the promise of

00:59:56 ◼   ► maybe this is the perfect one and that's why you move to it. And you just keep

01:00:02 ◼   ► doing this in the hopes that over time something will become perfect. But the

01:00:08 ◼   ► funny thing is it never will.

01:00:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, this is why I've always said

01:00:12 ◼   ► like the market for to-do apps is infinite

01:00:14 ◼   ► because everybody thinks about things in different ways.

01:00:17 ◼   ► But there's even more granular problems.

01:00:21 ◼   ► Like one of the things that has been on my mind

01:00:26 ◼   ► in my move back to OmniFocus

01:00:27 ◼   ► when I'm getting the heavyweight stuff set up.

01:00:31 ◼   ► Like I always feel like going to OmniFocus

01:00:33 ◼   ► is bringing in the big guns.

01:00:34 ◼   ► Like we're serious now

01:00:36 ◼   ► and we're heading into a real serious phase of work.

01:00:38 ◼   ► - Yep.

01:00:39 ◼   ► - But there's a, so here's the thing.

01:00:43 ◼   ► Even an individual user who has a clearly defined idea,

01:00:48 ◼   ► so OmniFocus for me has my projects in it,

01:00:53 ◼   ► so things like posting podcasts and videos

01:00:56 ◼   ► and other clearly work-related stuff.

01:00:58 ◼   ► I have a constrained use for it.

01:01:01 ◼   ► I know how to use the system.

01:01:02 ◼   ► Everything is great.

01:01:04 ◼   ► But even then, you don't always want your to-do app

01:01:09 ◼   ► to have the same behaviors at different times.

01:01:13 ◼   ► And so for example, when do I want OmniFocus

01:01:16 ◼   ► to alert me about something?

01:01:19 ◼   ► When it's due ahead of time?

01:01:22 ◼   ► Like, and right then and there,

01:01:24 ◼   ► that immediately throws you into all of these problems

01:01:27 ◼   ► of, well, the app is designed to set alerts

01:01:30 ◼   ► when a thing is due.

01:01:33 ◼   ► So you have to build your whole system around the concept

01:01:35 ◼   ► of okay, if I want alerts, I need the due dates to be

01:01:38 ◼   ► when I expect the alerts to be, right?

01:01:40 ◼   ► And this is just like behavior in a single app.

01:01:43 ◼   ► And to-do managers are always going to run

01:01:47 ◼   ► into that problem of you have to adapt yourself

01:01:52 ◼   ► a little bit to however they think of things.

01:01:55 ◼   ► Like when I was using the Things app,

01:01:58 ◼   ► I was very aware of, okay, I need to build my system

01:02:02 ◼   ► around the way they manage the today and the anytime lists.

01:02:07 ◼   ► And it's like, oh, okay, this is great, this is fine,

01:02:10 ◼   ► I can get this to work,

01:02:11 ◼   ► but you're always gonna run up against a moment

01:02:13 ◼   ► where you feel like, oh, but I want this thing to appear

01:02:16 ◼   ► in the today list in a way that the app

01:02:19 ◼   ► is never going to do it.

01:02:21 ◼   ► So even within a single app or within a single user,

01:02:24 ◼   ► you're going to want inconsistent behaviors

01:02:28 ◼   ► that are impossible to program for.

01:02:30 ◼   ► of like, oh, I do want alerts on deadlines,

01:02:34 ◼   ► but not for these tasks, right?

01:02:36 ◼   ► But I do want them for those tasks,

01:02:38 ◼   ► or I want an alert for these things,

01:02:39 ◼   ► but I don't want to put a deadline on them, right?

01:02:42 ◼   ► So it's just a, it's a fundamentally impossible area.

01:02:47 ◼   ► And this is one of the reasons why for years now

01:02:50 ◼   ► I have actually used multiple to-do apps

01:02:53 ◼   ► because I try to categorize different sorts of activities

01:02:58 ◼   ► that I'm looking for.

01:03:00 ◼   ► And this is why the longest running one now

01:03:04 ◼   ► is To Do For Me, the number two D-O,

01:03:09 ◼   ► where I use that for what I think of as my starting the day

01:03:14 ◼   ► and ending the day in other routines

01:03:17 ◼   ► because I can have that app act the way

01:03:20 ◼   ► that I want these particular kinds of tasks to be.

01:03:24 ◼   ► And that app happens to be really great

01:03:27 ◼   ► at the ability to say, sort of reset a day,

01:03:31 ◼   ► where it's like, oh man, I've totally blown off

01:03:32 ◼   ► all my routine stuff, but I just want to press two buttons

01:03:35 ◼   ► to like reset tomorrow and 20 things just work.

01:03:39 ◼   ► It's like, that's great, that's totally fine.

01:03:40 ◼   ► It works because there's a constrained set

01:03:43 ◼   ► of things in that app, and they're quarantined

01:03:47 ◼   ► from OmniFocus, which is a different kind of thing,

01:03:50 ◼   ► where like, resetting a day is a fundamentally

01:03:52 ◼   ► impossible thing to do.

01:03:54 ◼   ► So even if you're willing, like me,

01:03:57 ◼   ► to go to the mental effort of saying,

01:04:01 ◼   ► I'm going to division certain kinds of tasks

01:04:04 ◼   ► that make sense to put these ones over here

01:04:05 ◼   ► and those ones over there,

01:04:07 ◼   ► you still always run into this problem of,

01:04:10 ◼   ► we kind of want to do managers to read our minds

01:04:13 ◼   ► and show us exactly what we want to see

01:04:16 ◼   ► when we want to see it

01:04:18 ◼   ► in a way that is impossible to programmatically define.

01:04:21 ◼   ► And of course it is also very easy to get enticed by the shiny to give it to give it a try because I feel like like a brand new journal or a physical notebook.

01:04:32 ◼   ► It holds the promise of a better future.

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01:06:23 ◼   ► Gray, let's do some ask cortex questions. I need to lighten this mood a little bit.

01:06:28 ◼   ► I need to go out into the world and pick some questions from our listeners to help

01:06:35 ◼   ► me right now. Does that sound good?

01:06:38 ◼   ► >> If questions from the listeners will help you, Myke, let's do questions from the listeners.

01:06:42 ◼   ► - Grey, it always helps me. And the first one comes from Chad. And Chad says, "If you were

01:06:48 ◼   ► applying for a new job today and had to update your resume, what fonts would you choose?"

01:06:53 ◼   ► - Do you have like a preferred font for stuff? - Well, no. What my brain was just mentally

01:07:06 ◼   ► rolling back there is realizing that the last time I put together a resume, I was doing

01:07:15 ◼   ► it in LaTeX. I don't have any idea how I would reset...

01:07:20 ◼   ► What is that? Is that like a letterpress? What is that?

01:07:24 ◼   ► Okay Myke, anybody who's done a PhD, they will know what LaTeX is.

01:07:28 ◼   ► Oh, look at you! Um, if you'd have done a PhD, then you'd know.

01:07:33 ◼   ► Because obviously you don't know Myke, you didn't do a PhD.

01:07:38 ◼   ► Well, I didn't do a PhD either. Right. Just to, just to be clear here,

01:07:43 ◼   ► I, I, uh,

01:07:45 ◼   ► closest I got to a PhD was dropping out of a master's course in economics.

01:07:50 ◼   ► Sorry, Dr. Gray.

01:07:51 ◼   ► I came across it because when I was a physics student,

01:07:54 ◼   ► the people who were doing the PhDs introduced it to me and they're like, Oh,

01:07:57 ◼   ► Hey, here's this thing that you can use to write papers.

01:08:00 ◼   ► And you actually hit precisely what it is.

01:08:03 ◼   ► It's, if you think of the monk

01:08:06 ◼   ► who is manually typesetting a book,

01:08:08 ◼   ► LaTeX is the computer version of this.

01:08:12 ◼   ► So I would say it's like a,

01:08:16 ◼   ► think of like Markdown.

01:08:17 ◼   ► Make Markdown 10 times more complicated,

01:08:21 ◼   ► but it has a whole bunch of commands

01:08:23 ◼   ► that allow you to produce a thing

01:08:27 ◼   ► that looks like it has been professionally typeset.

01:08:31 ◼   ► Latex is a thing that will produce just beautiful,

01:08:36 ◼   ► beautiful looking documents.

01:08:38 ◼   ► - How is this spelled?

01:08:40 ◼   ► - Capital L, lowercase a, capital T, lowercase e, capital X.

01:08:45 ◼   ► - So why do you say it latex?

01:08:49 ◼   ► - Because I get nervous about how I'm supposed to say it

01:08:51 ◼   ► because in my head, I would always call it latex,

01:08:55 ◼   ► but then people would tell me

01:08:56 ◼   ► that I'm pronouncing it wrong and I think it's supposed to be lay tech and I've heard

01:09:02 ◼   ► people say LA tech. I've heard a million different things, but all I know is if I ever say it

01:09:07 ◼   ► out loud and I say latex, then the people who are actually doing PhDs start scoffing

01:09:13 ◼   ► and they're like, Oh, okay, well you don't really know this thing. But anyway, the reason

01:09:19 ◼   ► I was mentally rolling it back is because I would just use a ton of the defaults in

01:09:24 ◼   ► this markup language so I have no idea what font that would have picked when it was spitting

01:09:29 ◼   ► out my resume.

01:09:30 ◼   ► So I don't know, I don't know, Chad.

01:09:33 ◼   ► I would pick a safe font.

01:09:37 ◼   ► I think that's what I would do.

01:09:39 ◼   ► Something nice and safe.

01:09:41 ◼   ► But presumably in this scenario I would be applying to a school and you just want to

01:09:46 ◼   ► convey safety and boredom in that resume as someone looking to get another physics teaching

01:09:53 ◼   ► So you're gonna be like Ariel Calibri or Times New Roman?

01:09:57 ◼   ► Yeah, Times New Roman, yeah, that's probably which way it would go, yeah.

01:10:01 ◼   ► What about you, Myke?

01:10:02 ◼   ► Uh, Jokerman and Comic Sans, let's really just wrap this one up.

01:10:07 ◼   ► Uh, no, uh, I have two...

01:10:11 ◼   ► typefaces?

01:10:13 ◼   ► That I like? I think that's the right phrase.

01:10:15 ◼   ► Yeah, there you go, right, yeah, trying to figure it out.

01:10:17 ◼   ► That's like me, yeah. How about this, Latex? I don't know.

01:10:20 ◼   ► I'm saying that typeface. I like Gotham and Futura

01:10:24 ◼   ► Mmm, and they're good. They're good the fonts that I like

01:10:29 ◼   ► Futura bold

01:10:32 ◼   ► mm-hmm and

01:10:34 ◼   ► Gotham I think medium I like my favorite so I would try and find something within those typefaces

01:10:40 ◼   ► to use in Futura and Gotham because I like them and

01:10:45 ◼   ► Especially Gotham, it can look just relatively normal looking.

01:10:50 ◼   ► Like Futura in many styles can be like a little bit too much, right?

01:10:54 ◼   ► You kind of look like you're really going for a thing.

01:10:57 ◼   ► But yeah, they're my two favorites.

01:11:00 ◼   ► Although I am very, very partial to a font in Google Docs called Creepster,

01:11:06 ◼   ► which I use quite liberally in our show notes document,

01:11:11 ◼   ► when there's a thing that we have to talk about that you don't want to talk about.

01:11:14 ◼   ► So like business stuff is all written in the creepster font,

01:11:19 ◼   ► which is basically this like bloody dripping thing.

01:11:21 ◼   ► - Scary Halloween font. - Yeah, I love it.

01:11:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, right. - That's my favorite.

01:11:25 ◼   ► - So you'll put that at the top of our shared document

01:11:27 ◼   ► and it will just say Q3 scheduling, right?

01:11:31 ◼   ► Because you know that I don't wanna talk about it at all.

01:11:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's to convey that everyone understands, right?

01:11:38 ◼   ► It's like, this is scary stuff, but we have to do it.

01:11:43 ◼   ► Nathan asked, on the topic of the Year of Order,

01:11:46 ◼   ► I'd love to hear an update on how both of you deal

01:11:49 ◼   ► with email these days,

01:11:51 ◼   ► especially with helping your assistants.

01:11:53 ◼   ► Have either of you tried services like Missive

01:11:56 ◼   ► to let assistants triage your inbox?

01:11:59 ◼   ► - I don't really wanna talk about email because--

01:12:06 ◼   ► - Oh good, because I have another email question

01:12:08 ◼   ► for you next.

01:12:09 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:12:12 ◼   ► I will just say that like you are feeling overwhelmed.

01:12:16 ◼   ► This one of the things that for me triggered the idea of I need a year of order is that

01:12:21 ◼   ► my year of redirection left.

01:12:26 ◼   ► I'll put it this way.

01:12:27 ◼   ► It left all of my communications with the outside world in total chaos, including my

01:12:34 ◼   ► email.

01:12:35 ◼   ► Uh, the number of times I opened my email last year was very, very few.

01:12:41 ◼   ► And so while I have many sub projects that are going on in the year of order, I want

01:12:48 ◼   ► to set up my physical space and then I want to work on my routine and get that really

01:12:53 ◼   ► narrow down.

01:12:55 ◼   ► But one of the things immediately after that is I need to work my way through this terrifyingly

01:13:05 ◼   ► large communications backlog that I have on many fronts across many things.

01:13:11 ◼   ► So I don't really want to talk about email now.

01:13:14 ◼   ► I'm going to have to deal with that at some point later.

01:13:17 ◼   ► A couple of days ago we were talking and you kind of mentioned in passing I haven't looked

01:13:24 ◼   ► at email in months and I just there is like a part of me that's like I can't believe that

01:13:31 ◼   ► that is true.

01:13:33 ◼   ► Like you can't mean that like absolutely right?

01:13:39 ◼   ► Well I mean sometimes websites will send you verification codes through your email and

01:13:43 ◼   ► you need to click on those right and so yeah I've opened email for that sort of thing but

01:13:49 ◼   ► as we have discussed as we have discussed in the past though almost almost everything

01:13:57 ◼   ► that is of any importance to me now either people just know to contact my assistant director

01:14:03 ◼   ► because it will get them vastly faster turnaround than trying to contact me directly or it's things

01:14:11 ◼   ► through Slack. So part of this is a structural problem that I try to limit how much time I spend

01:14:18 ◼   ► on administrative stuff and so Slack and things coming straight from my assistant are much higher

01:14:26 ◼   ► up on the queue of importance and so the hit rate in email has gone way down but

01:14:33 ◼   ► I do really mean it that is I have not I have not looked at email in any

01:14:36 ◼   ► meaningful way in a very very long time I have an enormous backlog of who knows

01:14:43 ◼   ► what in there and it's it is time to it's time to get out the shovel and go

01:14:50 ◼   ► through that at some point in the future but not not today not tomorrow but you

01:14:55 ◼   ► know, later. There are so many things that me and you agree upon when it comes to getting

01:15:00 ◼   ► work done, but our approaches to email are polarizing.

01:15:07 ◼   ► I think about that every time I see an email notification on your watch. I just want to

01:15:12 ◼   ► be clear. I totally know that that works for you, and it clearly does, but it makes me

01:15:18 ◼   ► sort of smile on the inside every time that we're together in person and I see a little

01:15:22 ◼   ► and there's the email notification on your watch.

01:15:24 ◼   ► And it's just like, this is one area

01:15:26 ◼   ► where we live very different lives.

01:15:28 ◼   ► - If I use the application airmail right now,

01:15:32 ◼   ► like to do apps, never fully satisfied

01:15:35 ◼   ► of email applications, but I have it set

01:15:38 ◼   ► with all of the preferences on my iPhone

01:15:40 ◼   ► and even on my iPad, that basically an inbox,

01:15:44 ◼   ► like a list of email, you can kind of see

01:15:47 ◼   ► in like an inbox view, maybe about seven

01:15:50 ◼   ► or eight emails at a time.

01:15:52 ◼   ► kind of like at one time.

01:15:55 ◼   ► If I have to scroll that list, I'm very uncomfortable.

01:15:58 ◼   ► So at a given time, there is typically never more

01:16:03 ◼   ► than eight emails in my inbox.

01:16:05 ◼   ► And they're not being hidden,

01:16:07 ◼   ► like they're being one way or another dealt with.

01:16:11 ◼   ► We have very, very different approaches to email.

01:16:15 ◼   ► It's really very different.

01:16:18 ◼   ► In regards to sharing email with people that I work with,

01:16:21 ◼   ► I would like to try and find a system for this eventually,

01:16:25 ◼   ► because right now it's a lot of forwarding going on,

01:16:28 ◼   ► which is not ideal really.

01:16:31 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

01:16:32 ◼   ► - Right, and it's also with the situation I'm in,

01:16:35 ◼   ► the way that I've got things working for me,

01:16:38 ◼   ► it also wouldn't work for me to share my email inboxes,

01:16:41 ◼   ► and there'd be way too much discussion

01:16:42 ◼   ► about what email needs to be dealt with by who.

01:16:45 ◼   ► I want to be able to find an application or a service

01:16:50 ◼   ► where you can kind of like assign email,

01:16:52 ◼   ► but I haven't been happy with anything

01:16:54 ◼   ► that I've seen so far.

01:16:56 ◼   ► Maybe one day I would like that.

01:16:57 ◼   ► But the triaging of my inbox is currently served

01:17:02 ◼   ► by my Apple Watch, that is my triage.

01:17:05 ◼   ► Assistant is my Apple Watch.

01:17:06 ◼   ► And then Neelesh asked,

01:17:09 ◼   ► "How do you manage your personal business email?

01:17:12 ◼   ► Do you separate them across different applications

01:17:14 ◼   ► or do you keep them all in one app?

01:17:15 ◼   ► Do you use unified inboxes?"

01:17:17 ◼   ► I'm just assuming that like it's all goes in one huge bucket for you and it all is not

01:17:22 ◼   ► dealt with.

01:17:23 ◼   ► Yeah, that's correct.

01:17:24 ◼   ► One gigantic unlooked at pile.

01:17:27 ◼   ► Even when I've been more on top of my email in the past, I've never really found the hassle

01:17:32 ◼   ► of multiple inboxes worth it for me.

01:17:34 ◼   ► Again, that's a side effect of the way I have structured my businesses, but I've just I've

01:17:39 ◼   ► never found the payoff to be worth it.

01:17:41 ◼   ► I have everything all go into one place.

01:17:44 ◼   ► going to find inbox one application personal business email because honestly like email

01:17:50 ◼   ► that is personal is not personal. Really. Like all of the email that I get that would

01:17:57 ◼   ► be deemed going to a personal account. It's still like transactions and things that need

01:18:02 ◼   ► to be checked upon. You know, like it's never really like my buddy sending me an email.

01:18:08 ◼   ► People don't email me like they have other ways to contact me. Right. That like it tends

01:18:13 ◼   ► to be all work no matter what email address it's going to.

01:18:17 ◼   ► This one comes from Raphael.

01:18:19 ◼   ► Grey has commented a couple of times about taking note of every idea that he has so he

01:18:24 ◼   ► can get them off his mind and deal with them later.

01:18:27 ◼   ► How does Grey deal with having ideas in bed right before sleeping?

01:18:30 ◼   ► Does he pick up his phone and take notes or does he just let it go in hopes that he remembers

01:18:35 ◼   ► the idea the next day?

01:18:36 ◼   ► Okay, this is going to be really unhelpful, but I fall asleep very fast.

01:18:44 ◼   ► So I get into bed and then it's morning.

01:18:50 ◼   ► So this is not a problem that I really have to deal with.

01:18:54 ◼   ► You made a disgruntled noise there, Myke.

01:18:56 ◼   ► I'm guessing this is not your situation.

01:18:59 ◼   ► No, it's not.

01:19:03 ◼   ► My situation is I have to just wait until I can't be awake anymore.

01:19:10 ◼   ► And so I do things.

01:19:11 ◼   ► That's why you go to sleep?

01:19:12 ◼   ► Yes, that's why I go to bed at like 2am, because it's like, body can't sleep.

01:19:17 ◼   ► I like sleeping, hate going to sleep.

01:19:19 ◼   ► Once I'm sleeping, it's awesome, don't want to stop it.

01:19:24 ◼   ► But the act of like, going to do it, I hate it.

01:19:29 ◼   ► I hate it.

01:19:30 ◼   ► So like I just would do things until I can't be awake anymore.

01:19:35 ◼   ► There's like this weird thing like in my mind I feel like I'm just kind of just wasting

01:19:38 ◼   ► time like I might as well just be reading Twitter for an hour and wait until like my

01:19:42 ◼   ► eyelids are starting to close.

01:19:45 ◼   ► So bad.

01:19:46 ◼   ► I think everything in my life that would be deemed unhealthy, the way I approach sleep

01:19:52 ◼   ► is the least healthy part.

01:19:54 ◼   ► Like it's really bad.

01:19:56 ◼   ► I can see though that it sounds like you and my wife are using the same sleep strategy

01:20:00 ◼   ► which is only when exhaustion grasps you by the throat

01:20:06 ◼   ► grips you and you cannot escape

01:20:09 ◼   ► or is that like "I'm a little sleepy" I lay down boom almost immediately I'm asleep

01:20:15 ◼   ► I'd hate that I would hate that

01:20:18 ◼   ► well luckily you don't have to suffer from that Myke

01:20:21 ◼   ► yeah or sleep next to you I guess because that would also drive me mad

01:20:25 ◼   ► Yeah, let's not do that.