Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► I feel like a task voyeur.

00:00:02 ◼   ► Oh, yeah? Who are you voying on?

00:00:03 ◼   ► You. Well...

00:00:05 ◼   ► I don't know if I like that, Mike.

00:00:06 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm in the Asana now.

00:00:08 ◼   ► Okay.

00:00:08 ◼   ► Obviously, I'm only seeing the tasks that I should see, which is good.

00:00:12 ◼   ► I wouldn't want to see what's going on everywhere else.

00:00:14 ◼   ► I mean, wouldn't you want to see, though? Aren't you curious, Mike?

00:00:17 ◼   ► I mean, curious, yes, but also I know it would be, like, horrifying.

00:00:22 ◼   ► Kind of like Ark of the Covenant kind of opening feeling, is what I imagine would happen.

00:00:27 ◼   ► But I don't know why it's weird to me, but just seeing how somebody else adds a task

00:00:33 ◼   ► and, like, what they put on that task, it's just a weird thing

00:00:37 ◼   ► because I don't share, like, to-do tasks with anybody.

00:00:40 ◼   ► And so now being in our shared Asana and seeing the way that you, like...

00:00:45 ◼   ► The tasks that you create, which tasks have due dates,

00:00:48 ◼   ► which tasks are assigned to other people,

00:00:50 ◼   ► it's just a fascinating thing to see, and I am also terrified of it.

00:00:55 ◼   ► Like, I don't want to put anything in there.

00:00:57 ◼   ► It's a very intimidating place to be.

00:01:00 ◼   ► I don't mean to intimidate you, Mike.

00:01:01 ◼   ► It's not you, you know?

00:01:03 ◼   ► I've never used Asana, so I don't yet understand how to deal with it, you know?

00:01:09 ◼   ► Okay, well, so let me actually...

00:01:11 ◼   ► This is a good time.

00:01:11 ◼   ► Let me try to shortcut you on a little bit of some of the things

00:01:15 ◼   ► that I have been figuring out about Asana,

00:01:17 ◼   ► having spent basically the last week has been a really intense gray industries kind of re-org,

00:01:27 ◼   ► clean up, doing everything, and, like, getting it all over into Asana,

00:01:33 ◼   ► which is one of those things where, boy, oh, boy, has it made me realize this was way overdue

00:01:39 ◼   ► because the number of projects and the number of areas of responsibility

00:01:44 ◼   ► that I was trying to track in, like, different ways or across people

00:01:49 ◼   ► was just so much that, like, bringing it all into one place has really made me, like,

00:01:54 ◼   ► face the scope and size of, like, all of the things that need to happen.

00:01:59 ◼   ► So it's been a real crash course in the move, but I could not be happier.

00:02:04 ◼   ► But also, I kind of wish I could have convinced me of two years ago, maybe,

00:02:10 ◼   ► to get started on this.

00:02:11 ◼   ► But the best time to plant an Asana is two years ago,

00:02:15 ◼   ► and the second best time is now.

00:02:17 ◼   ► I mean, it's always these things that you've got to go through the fire, you know?

00:02:20 ◼   ► And if you don't, then you're just not going to do it.

00:02:22 ◼   ► Okay, to have a tangent here,

00:02:24 ◼   ► the thing that I'm aware of in, like, the venture capital world

00:02:28 ◼   ► that I think the investors are bringing to the table in many ways is,

00:02:33 ◼   ► oh, they've seen companies go through the transitions as they get bigger,

00:02:38 ◼   ► and so they can act as kind of guides to try to make the changes before they're necessary.

00:02:44 ◼   ► Yes, I have a very good friend who is a VC,

00:02:47 ◼   ► and one of the things that I've learned in the many conversations I've had with him

00:02:51 ◼   ► is it seems like a lot of what a good investor will do,

00:02:54 ◼   ► it's providing you with structure, support,

00:02:58 ◼   ► and paths to follow that a startup needs if they're going to grow into a real thing.

00:03:05 ◼   ► There's a way in which when I'd heard this in the past,

00:03:08 ◼   ► I always thought that was kind of this sort of person overselling themselves,

00:03:11 ◼   ► but I just don't think that that's true anymore now,

00:03:14 ◼   ► having done just, like, the teeny tiny version of having a thing that's gotten bigger

00:03:20 ◼   ► and more complicated over time.

00:03:21 ◼   ► Like, someone else could have shown me five years ago,

00:03:25 ◼   ► like, hey, you should do this now.

00:03:27 ◼   ► This is clearly the way that it's heading,

00:03:29 ◼   ► and this would, like, make a big difference.

00:03:30 ◼   ► So...

00:03:31 ◼   ► It's funny, actually.

00:03:31 ◼   ► I just had something like this come up, like, yesterday.

00:03:33 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:03:34 ◼   ► I was thinking to myself, like, I wanted to let you know how many outstanding invoices

00:03:38 ◼   ► we had to pay over the next couple of months for product stuff.

00:03:41 ◼   ► And I was thinking, I was, like, having to rack my brain of, like,

00:03:44 ◼   ► oh, so which one?

00:03:45 ◼   ► Where is the...

00:03:46 ◼   ► You know, like, really having to think about it, like,

00:03:48 ◼   ► which invoices have we got?

00:03:50 ◼   ► Which products are coming up?

00:03:52 ◼   ► And I realized we need a system to raise purchase orders within our own company

00:03:57 ◼   ► so at any time we can understand how much money is committed to invoices

00:04:02 ◼   ► that have not yet been sent to us, you know, like, we've half paid for something.

00:04:06 ◼   ► I don't know why this has happened to me more with Cortex Brand than Relay.

00:04:10 ◼   ► I think maybe just in the, like, what the businesses do and how they function,

00:04:14 ◼   ► Cortex is more like a regular business,

00:04:18 ◼   ► where Relay is a little bit more irregular, I think.

00:04:22 ◼   ► in the way that it functions.

00:04:23 ◼   ► I think it's the very fact that we have inventory.

00:04:25 ◼   ► Like, actually, as soon as you have said this now,

00:04:27 ◼   ► I think this is the exact same thing for any of these projects, right?

00:04:30 ◼   ► Like, you're going along and everything is fine.

00:04:33 ◼   ► Like, we started with the theme system journal,

00:04:36 ◼   ► and then we, like, add the subtle notebook.

00:04:38 ◼   ► We add, like, one product at a time.

00:04:40 ◼   ► And I'm only just realizing now, of course,

00:04:43 ◼   ► until this moment, we've been basically mentally tracking,

00:04:47 ◼   ► oh, yeah, we've got to pay for the journals.

00:04:50 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, we've got to pay for the sidekick.

00:04:53 ◼   ► Like, we've just been kind of knowing that that's coming.

00:04:56 ◼   ► But there's, like, the multiplication in complexity, right?

00:04:59 ◼   ► Keeping track of three projects is, like,

00:05:01 ◼   ► six times more complicated than keeping track of two.

00:05:05 ◼   ► And, like, that's what happens where you add, like,

00:05:07 ◼   ► one more thing, and suddenly you go,

00:05:09 ◼   ► whoa, this is, like, way over the line of being able to keep track of.

00:05:13 ◼   ► So, yes, let's do that.

00:05:15 ◼   ► So, it's very funny to be in this position where the things that I used to hate dealing with

00:05:21 ◼   ► when I worked in my corporate job, like, raising purchase orders and dealing with invoices,

00:05:25 ◼   ► I now understand why companies do these things.

00:05:29 ◼   ► Because if there is money to be spent on something,

00:05:32 ◼   ► you've got to only spend the amount that can be spent,

00:05:35 ◼   ► and whatever has to be paid later on has to be put aside.

00:05:39 ◼   ► Like, you can't just wing it.

00:05:41 ◼   ► It's very funny to me to kind of just be fumbling my way through

00:05:46 ◼   ► and bouncing into these just very common things.

00:05:49 ◼   ► I am very aware that to many of our listeners, when I say this stuff,

00:05:54 ◼   ► they just are head in hands.

00:05:56 ◼   ► But I actually find it, for myself and for us, kind of adorable,

00:06:01 ◼   ► that we're just kind of like, here we are, like, la-di-da, like, ah, you know,

00:06:06 ◼   ► how's it going, oh, is this going well?

00:06:07 ◼   ► And they're like, oh, we don't know how much money we've got to spend.

00:06:09 ◼   ► You know, I don't know why, but it's like, I like it.

00:06:12 ◼   ► I like having these moments where I realize what I need and work out a way to solve it.

00:06:19 ◼   ► And at the same time, I feel like it means that we're just adding what we need

00:06:22 ◼   ► at the time that we need it, and that works for me.

00:06:24 ◼   ► Because there's some times where I think to myself,

00:06:26 ◼   ► I wish I could put all of my time into trying to grow this business,

00:06:29 ◼   ► but I can't, and I also other times don't want to,

00:06:33 ◼   ► because that would mean giving up everything else that I love to do.

00:06:36 ◼   ► It's the side project, really, in its own little way,

00:06:40 ◼   ► and that means it grows and shapes itself in just, like, a funny way sometimes.

00:06:43 ◼   ► Everything is a trade-off, right?

00:06:45 ◼   ► Like, every hour you spend on one thing is an hour you can't spend on another thing.

00:06:48 ◼   ► But this is the byproduct of, like, the side project has become more successful,

00:06:54 ◼   ► which makes it more complicated.

00:06:56 ◼   ► And that's why we have kind of bumbled into these things as it's gone along.

00:07:01 ◼   ► And then on the reverse side, for me, I think the thing, again,

00:07:05 ◼   ► like, I've been forced to reconceptualize is I was just really determined

00:07:10 ◼   ► to think of myself as a person on my own who happened to work with others.

00:07:17 ◼   ► And it's a similar kind of thing.

00:07:19 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, has the number of people I worked with really changed that much?

00:07:23 ◼   ► Like, it's gone up a little.

00:07:24 ◼   ► But it's like, oh, but the Cortex brand project has become more important

00:07:29 ◼   ► as it's become more successful.

00:07:30 ◼   ► So that has more involvement.

00:07:31 ◼   ► Like, there's more people vaguely over there.

00:07:34 ◼   ► But it's, like, just gone over that threshold where it's like,

00:07:37 ◼   ► I cannot hold on to this conception anymore.

00:07:39 ◼   ► Like, it's hugely important.

00:07:40 ◼   ► And also just very much realizing, like, even on a small team,

00:07:45 ◼   ► as things get more complicated, like, oh, why do big companies do all of this tracking stuff?

00:07:49 ◼   ► Because in big companies, people have to be able to make decisions autonomously

00:07:56 ◼   ► or semi-autonomously, having information at hand to do that.

00:08:00 ◼   ► And when you're, like, a really small team,

00:08:02 ◼   ► it's easy to just keep the communication lines always open.

00:08:05 ◼   ► But as it gets just slightly bigger, it is now better to have, like,

00:08:10 ◼   ► this is where the information is.

00:08:12 ◼   ► And so, like, everyone can know what everybody else is doing

00:08:15 ◼   ► or, like, what's related to what, what's the current stock order,

00:08:18 ◼   ► what's the current bank balance.

00:08:20 ◼   ► Oh, it's better to know the current bank balance,

00:08:22 ◼   ► not by asking Mike what he remembers we have out as orders,

00:08:27 ◼   ► but, like, having an actual system that's keeping track of it.

00:08:29 ◼   ► I think for both of us, like, these things have just, like,

00:08:32 ◼   ► gone over the line a little bit and been like,

00:08:34 ◼   ► oh, okay, got to formalize it more.

00:08:36 ◼   ► And there's a reason that, like, bigger companies formalize these things in this way.

00:08:41 ◼   ► That is part of bringing Cortex brand into, like,

00:08:45 ◼   ► the greater gray incorporated world of, like,

00:08:48 ◼   ► what is going on over here.

00:08:50 ◼   ► So welcome, Mike.

00:08:51 ◼   ► I also think it is very funny because you are talking about, like,

00:08:55 ◼   ► oh, you're seeing what's being added to Cortex.

00:08:57 ◼   ► It's like, ah, we have not yet turned our attention to the Cortex stuff.

00:09:01 ◼   ► This is just, like, incidental things that have happened to pop into

00:09:05 ◼   ► various people's heads to add on to the list.

00:09:07 ◼   ► It's like it has been all the, like, gray industry side of things for now.

00:09:12 ◼   ► I will say, it's been very interesting using Asana.

00:09:15 ◼   ► And I want to try to, like, shortcut you on, I think, when you're using it,

00:09:21 ◼   ► the thing that has been the absolute strangest thing for me to really try to wrap my head around.

00:09:29 ◼   ► And that is, in Asana, the fundamental thing that is different here is it is a database of tasks.

00:09:40 ◼   ► It looks at first like it's every other project manager, where it's like, oh, here's projects.

00:09:45 ◼   ► And then I have tasks inside of those projects.

00:09:48 ◼   ► But that's not really what it's doing at the fundamental level.

00:09:52 ◼   ► Really, it is just these unrelated task entries in a database.

00:09:58 ◼   ► And, like, that is the foundation of what it's doing.

00:10:02 ◼   ► And so everything else, including the project that this task is part of,

00:10:08 ◼   ► is functionally just metadata attached to the task.

00:10:12 ◼   ► And that allows some really interesting things, like the thing that sold me of,

00:10:18 ◼   ► oh, a task can exist inside of more than one project at a time.

00:10:23 ◼   ► Because it's really just metadata that is being added to the,

00:10:28 ◼   ► it's not like a folder that the thing is in.

00:10:31 ◼   ► And that has an enormous number of upsides.

00:10:34 ◼   ► But the one thing that has been totally breaking my brain with Asana,

00:10:39 ◼   ► which has really led to me trying to reconceptualize a lot of the ways I, like,

00:10:44 ◼   ► set things up and think about things,

00:10:46 ◼   ► is it means that there is no order to the tasks.

00:10:50 ◼   ► They're just floating around in that database.

00:10:54 ◼   ► I have never seen a task manager do something in that way,

00:10:58 ◼   ► where there isn't the canonical order of these things.

00:11:02 ◼   ► You can kind of, like, force it to be in order in various ways,

00:11:06 ◼   ► but it's not, like, the starting place.

00:11:09 ◼   ► Like, you're writing a list.

00:11:10 ◼   ► What are you doing when you're writing a list of things on a piece of paper?

00:11:13 ◼   ► You're putting them in order.

00:11:15 ◼   ► It's, like, such a basic concept that I almost feel like I was blind to the very idea

00:11:20 ◼   ► that everything I've been thinking about is a list in order.

00:11:23 ◼   ► And that is not at all what Asana is doing.

00:11:26 ◼   ► And I think that is, like, the biggest mental shift to get around.

00:11:29 ◼   ► It's like, that is not how this works.

00:11:32 ◼   ► It gives some really interesting advantages,

00:11:34 ◼   ► but it is very strange to think about when you're actually setting things up for the first time.

00:11:39 ◼   ► And I guess that's because, as you were saying,

00:11:42 ◼   ► that, like, the tasks, they relate to something else,

00:11:46 ◼   ► not just to them being a list of tasks.

00:11:48 ◼   ► Like, they sit within different projects,

00:11:50 ◼   ► and because they can sit in different orders in different projects

00:11:53 ◼   ► based on what might happen before or after,

00:11:55 ◼   ► that if you just look at all of your tasks, it's not going to make any sense.

00:11:59 ◼   ► You have to kind of, like, is it, like, project first, task second?

00:12:02 ◼   ► The key piece of information is who is it assigned to?

00:12:06 ◼   ► So a task is assigned to a person.

00:12:10 ◼   ► So here's the huge upside.

00:12:12 ◼   ► And this is also the thing that, like, the secondary thing that really sold me

00:12:15 ◼   ► is that when you start using this, you realize,

00:12:17 ◼   ► oh, because the tasks don't have this intrinsic order,

00:12:20 ◼   ► it means that each person can arrange the tasks

00:12:25 ◼   ► and view them and categorize them

00:12:28 ◼   ► in ways that are separate from every other person.

00:12:31 ◼   ► So the primary thing from the user perspective is here are all of the tasks that are assigned to you.

00:12:40 ◼   ► You then can, like, I think their ideal thing here in a sense is there's, like, a little thing at the top,

00:12:46 ◼   ► which is just called my tasks.

00:12:48 ◼   ► You would just go in there and start grinding through all of the things that are available to you

00:12:54 ◼   ► and that are assigned to you right now.

00:12:56 ◼   ► And, again, I think it's so interesting because it's like, oh, of course,

00:13:01 ◼   ► when you're distributing work across a bunch of different people,

00:13:04 ◼   ► the order of those tasks doesn't matter to the individuals at any particular time.

00:13:12 ◼   ► Like, where does this exist in the, like, the broader hierarchy?

00:13:15 ◼   ► It's really only the question of, what can I do right now?

00:13:19 ◼   ► And that's where it'll let you see if you have a task that is blocking someone else

00:13:26 ◼   ► and it will let you see if there's a task that's assigned to you,

00:13:29 ◼   ► but you can't get to it yet because someone else needs to finish it

00:13:33 ◼   ► and so they're blocking you.

00:13:35 ◼   ► But that's kind of about all the order that's really in the thing.

00:13:40 ◼   ► I just keep, like, turning this over in my head

00:13:43 ◼   ► because it's just, like, is not the way that I work.

00:13:45 ◼   ► But I think it is the correct way to do this

00:13:48 ◼   ► when you're working with multiple people.

00:13:51 ◼   ► And so it's very interesting, like, having gone through this with my assistant,

00:13:55 ◼   ► it's like, oh, I can already see the very different ways that we work.

00:13:58 ◼   ► It's like, I want to kind of set up a list,

00:14:02 ◼   ► which is basically I should do these same things in this order every day.

00:14:07 ◼   ► Like, that's how I want to work through stuff.

00:14:09 ◼   ► And Asana will let me do that.

00:14:12 ◼   ► But, like, my assistant's job is very different where it's like, oh, what is she seeing?

00:14:15 ◼   ► She's seeing, hey, a bunch of things were assigned to you overnight.

00:14:19 ◼   ► And then she's able to, like, immediately triage, like, oh, which of these does she want to do today?

00:14:24 ◼   ► Which of these does she want to do tomorrow?

00:14:26 ◼   ► And she's able to move it across, like, a traditional Kanban board,

00:14:30 ◼   ► which I would never use for, like, sorting, like, the incoming, currently working on, pending future tasks.

00:14:37 ◼   ► It's like, oh, of course.

00:14:38 ◼   ► Like, we're each doing very different kind of work.

00:14:41 ◼   ► My work is much more reliable.

00:14:43 ◼   ► Hers is much more sporadic and across, like, a lot of different things.

00:14:46 ◼   ► So she has to have a system that allows her to see things and quickly triage them.

00:14:52 ◼   ► And I want a system that is, like, here are the things that I have pre-set for myself to do, like, in this order that I want to see them in this order.

00:15:03 ◼   ► But, like, other people, if those tasks are blocking them, they don't care what that order is on my own list.

00:15:09 ◼   ► It's just like, okay, they can see that, like, I need to do something that is blocking them.

00:15:13 ◼   ► And that, I think, is just, like, what an advantage.

00:15:17 ◼   ► Because we've discussed many times, like, the problems of these kinds of tools is that they ultimately force everyone to work kind of the same way,

00:15:26 ◼   ► which is where everyone's, like, a little unhappy all the time, which is kind of how I've always felt about Notion.

00:15:34 ◼   ► Like, oh, everybody has to look at this exact same document in this same way.

00:15:38 ◼   ► Because we're, like, literally typing a document that everyone can read.

00:15:42 ◼   ► So Asana just, like, totally blasts through that.

00:15:45 ◼   ► And I think it's great.

00:15:46 ◼   ► What if you are like me, where, like, I like to have, like, due dates and due times on events.

00:15:52 ◼   ► Does that not disrupt this way of working?

00:15:55 ◼   ► Nope. So the due date is just part of the, like, metadata on the task.

00:15:59 ◼   ► Because when you're saying about the task list, you mean, like, the master list.

00:16:03 ◼   ► Like, the big overall list of all of the tasks.

00:16:07 ◼   ► And then everybody else just sees their own.

00:16:10 ◼   ► Like, they get their own little list of stuff that they've got to be dealing with.

00:16:14 ◼   ► Yeah. So even for me, right, like, I'm organizing the whole system, right?

00:16:19 ◼   ► Like, I'm getting, like, the highest level view.

00:16:21 ◼   ► Asana acts as a two-tier tool for me.

00:16:25 ◼   ► So organizing the company, what are the priorities?

00:16:28 ◼   ► What are the high-level goals that we're trying to achieve?

00:16:30 ◼   ► Blah, blah, blah.

00:16:31 ◼   ► And then that actions down into, like, here are the specific projects that we're trying to complete.

00:16:36 ◼   ► Those projects then have tasks.

00:16:39 ◼   ► But the moment that I'm not in, like, thinking about the high-level stuff mode,

00:16:44 ◼   ► I, too, am just going into Asana, looking at a list of the things that are assigned to me.

00:16:49 ◼   ► And that's what I'm working through.

00:16:51 ◼   ► Right.

00:16:52 ◼   ► Now, I am the person who, since I'm going to use Asana for literally everything in my life,

00:16:56 ◼   ► I'm also doing, I'm putting in, like, all of the routine stuff that I was doing from last year

00:17:01 ◼   ► and, like, the stuff that I want to work on this year for my theme.

00:17:03 ◼   ► So I have, like, the absurd little tasks that are also just assigned to me that no one else has to see.

00:17:09 ◼   ► But that's where, like, this is what is really happening.

00:17:12 ◼   ► It's, like, it exists on the assigned-to-you level.

00:17:16 ◼   ► And each individual person gets to organize it however they want.

00:17:20 ◼   ► But if something does have a due date, you will see that as part of, like, the task that you are assigned to.

00:17:26 ◼   ► Or you can see that, like, oh, this task is part of a project that is assigned at a date in the future.

00:17:32 ◼   ► So that information also travels through.

00:17:34 ◼   ► I have to say, hugely impressed.

00:17:36 ◼   ► I will also say the thing that I want to plug on this is anyone who has listened to this show will know

00:17:43 ◼   ► that it's, like, what is the one great thing that I've always complained about with all task managers other than OmniFocus

00:17:50 ◼   ► is they have no concept of this defer date of, like, you can't start the thing until X date.

00:17:58 ◼   ► And Asana falls into that same category.

00:18:02 ◼   ► It has something called a start date, but it doesn't act like the thing that I want it to.

00:18:07 ◼   ► It doesn't have, like, a true defer date.

00:18:09 ◼   ► And I was like, oh, no.

00:18:11 ◼   ► Is this going to be the complete deal breaker that just, like, ruins this whole thing for me?

00:18:17 ◼   ► And the answer is no, because you can also define any new custom metadata that you want to for any task.

00:18:27 ◼   ► And then within Asana, it's, like, nearly Turing complete.

00:18:32 ◼   ► There's, like, a bunch of rules that you can have run on all tasks to, like, treat them however you want

00:18:37 ◼   ► or move them around automatically when different things happen.

00:18:41 ◼   ► And so I have been able to sort of, like, shortcuts for Mac OS.

00:18:46 ◼   ► There's a thing that they just call rules, which is, like, shortcuts for Asana.

00:18:50 ◼   ► And so I've been able to program Asana to basically be custom to me that all tasks that are assigned to me

00:18:59 ◼   ► automatically get created, like, this defer date metadata thing.

00:19:03 ◼   ► And then how my tasks are displayed to me depends on that defer date.

00:19:08 ◼   ► And again, what is amazing is, like, no one else has to even know that this is happening to these tasks.

00:19:15 ◼   ► Like, this is just for me to, like, arrange them the way that I want it.

00:19:18 ◼   ► But anyone else could do the exact same thing.

00:19:21 ◼   ► Like, if they have some picky thing that they want to add to the tasks,

00:19:25 ◼   ► they can just do it on their end, and no one else has to even know that that's part of what's going on with these tasks

00:19:31 ◼   ► or part of what's happening with this system.

00:19:32 ◼   ► So I am hugely, hugely impressed with Asana.

00:19:37 ◼   ► Only thing that I don't like is the iOS app, which is surprisingly limited in a bunch of ways.

00:19:45 ◼   ► But I already have put in a little task for Asana to be, like,

00:19:50 ◼   ► seriously consider hiring an iOS developer to just make a better widget for Asana.

00:19:56 ◼   ► So that might be a thing that comes to pass someday.

00:19:59 ◼   ► I mean, you know, the iOS app, like, you're probably not going to be doing all the big complex stuff on it anyway, right?

00:20:05 ◼   ► Yeah, that's exactly it.

00:20:06 ◼   ► Like, all I would really want is just a better widget and maybe also just a thing on my watch.

00:20:12 ◼   ► Like, I'm not trying to do all the complicated stuff.

00:20:15 ◼   ► And Asana has, like, this API that lots of companies have written stuff against.

00:20:19 ◼   ► So it's already been in the back of my brain of, like, I'm invested in this enough.

00:20:23 ◼   ► This is going to be the tool going forward.

00:20:25 ◼   ► This might actually be the first time for me that it makes sense to try to, like,

00:20:29 ◼   ► get a custom piece of software made to, like, solve a problem that I want with this thing.

00:20:35 ◼   ► But other than that, very impressed, very happy, and you will be too, Mike.

00:20:41 ◼   ► You will be too.

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00:23:08 ◼   ► Back in 2018, Apple introduced something called Screen Time back in iOS 12.

00:23:14 ◼   ► And the idea of this feature is that it would watch what you're doing on your device

00:23:18 ◼   ► and give you statistics about it.

00:23:20 ◼   ► The apps that you're using, the notifications that you get,

00:23:23 ◼   ► that kind of stuff.

00:23:23 ◼   ► This was all a part of a thing that Google and Apple were doing at the time.

00:23:30 ◼   ► I don't remember what they called it,

00:23:32 ◼   ► but it was this idea of like,

00:23:33 ◼   ► hey, we're looking out for you.

00:23:37 ◼   ► We don't want you to overuse your phone.

00:23:40 ◼   ► There was a phrase that they used.

00:23:42 ◼   ► Digital well-being?

00:23:44 ◼   ► Yes, I think, yeah, that's what it was.

00:23:46 ◼   ► Something like that.

00:23:47 ◼   ► It's kind of like how every once in a while there's a year where like three movies on the

00:23:51 ◼   ► same topic get released.

00:23:52 ◼   ► It felt like that.

00:23:53 ◼   ► Like every software company that year had like gotten the word about the good news on digital

00:23:58 ◼   ► well-being.

00:23:59 ◼   ► It was like, we're here to save you dot, dot, dot from us.

00:24:04 ◼   ► Dot, dot, dot.

00:24:05 ◼   ► And also from anyone trying to make laws against us.

00:24:08 ◼   ► So because there was some pressure, there were like pressure groups being set up, like that

00:24:13 ◼   ► kind of thing.

00:24:13 ◼   ► I remember around this time.

00:24:15 ◼   ► And so both at the exact same time, Google and Apple introduced these features of like

00:24:21 ◼   ► looking out for you, suggesting you stop using apps, allowing you to set limits on apps and

00:24:27 ◼   ► all this kind of stuff.

00:24:28 ◼   ► And so then we decided on episode 82, an episode called Screen Crimes, that we would share this

00:24:34 ◼   ► with each other.

00:24:35 ◼   ► So like I would share my screen time data and you would share yours with me.

00:24:38 ◼   ► So you could actually see what our devices were really being used for, no matter what it

00:24:42 ◼   ► was, we said they were being used for.

00:24:44 ◼   ► And I've really wanted to do this again.

00:24:46 ◼   ► And so we're going to share them today.

00:24:48 ◼   ► In preparing for this episode, I realized just how buggy this feature continues to be on

00:24:56 ◼   ► iOS.

00:24:56 ◼   ► So these are the bugs that I have encountered in trying to prepare for this episode.

00:25:01 ◼   ► Screen time turned itself off at some point in the last few weeks.

00:25:04 ◼   ► So I do not have a full seven days data.

00:25:07 ◼   ► I have six days because it just turned itself off.

00:25:09 ◼   ► And I texted you and said, please make sure it's turned on.

00:25:12 ◼   ► Because mine turned off.

00:25:13 ◼   ► In general, it's still giving completely different information on all of my devices, even though

00:25:19 ◼   ► they're all turned on.

00:25:20 ◼   ► So my iPhone, my iPad, and my Mac, when I go to set the setting to show me the data across

00:25:28 ◼   ► all devices, it gives me completely different numbers.

00:25:31 ◼   ► And there is some kind of ghost device that is currently reporting a 24 hour a day usage on

00:25:38 ◼   ► a website.

00:25:38 ◼   ► And I don't know where it's coming from.

00:25:40 ◼   ► So these are my caveats.

00:25:42 ◼   ► I ended up taking my data from my Mac because it gave the best overall picture of what I

00:25:49 ◼   ► was doing.

00:25:49 ◼   ► So I'm going to send you my screenshot now.

00:25:52 ◼   ► You could look at mine first if you like.

00:25:54 ◼   ► And I'll have the link in the show notes if people want to look to.

00:25:57 ◼   ► What Screen Time is doing is three things.

00:26:00 ◼   ► It's like your usage of applications, your notifications that you receive, like how many there are, and

00:26:06 ◼   ► also what they call pickups.

00:26:08 ◼   ► So when you use your device, what is the first thing you open when you use your device?

00:26:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:26:14 ◼   ► Let me just also back up the bugginess of this system, which I just have not thought about

00:26:21 ◼   ► this in absolutely forever.

00:26:23 ◼   ► I think since Apple rolled out the focus modes, I was able to basically not look at this

00:26:28 ◼   ► at all because I was previously trying to use.

00:26:30 ◼   ► OK, I feel like Apple has these three or four interconnected systems that could really use

00:26:37 ◼   ► a revamp.

00:26:38 ◼   ► And it's like it's the screen time, it's downtime, and it's the family sharing settings.

00:26:45 ◼   ► It feels like all three of these are sitting on top of some shared database of like what's

00:26:50 ◼   ► going on that is very buggy.

00:26:52 ◼   ► I think screen time is the database.

00:26:54 ◼   ► So like over the years, they have added features on top.

00:26:57 ◼   ► So app limits, downtime, and focus modes all got added on top of screen time.

00:27:02 ◼   ► And I think now screen time is this database of information, which other things rely on, but

00:27:11 ◼   ► itself needs to be looked at, I think is maybe the best way to put it.

00:27:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:17 ◼   ► I tried to turn it back on from my Mac.

00:27:20 ◼   ► And it was just like the data was garbage.

00:27:22 ◼   ► Like, oh, do you know what I'm doing with my time mic?

00:27:24 ◼   ► I spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week on Finder.

00:27:28 ◼   ► That's what I'm doing, apparently, according to my Mac.

00:27:30 ◼   ► Last week, I spent 133 hours and 11 minutes on Bloomberg.com.

00:27:35 ◼   ► I don't think you did.

00:27:36 ◼   ► No, I did.

00:27:37 ◼   ► I've got to read the reports.

00:27:39 ◼   ► I need to know.

00:27:39 ◼   ► I need to know.

00:27:40 ◼   ► I'm hooked into the terminal.

00:27:42 ◼   ► So yeah, I'm going to be giving you my phone information because that is like the only useful

00:27:47 ◼   ► thing that I was able to get.

00:27:48 ◼   ► So let me send that to you now.

00:27:50 ◼   ► Very fair.

00:27:51 ◼   ► I feel like my phone stuff is pretty accurate looking at just the phone.

00:27:54 ◼   ► But how do you feel about this for all the things?

00:27:59 ◼   ► When I looked at it on my phone, it felt OK-ish.

00:28:02 ◼   ► And then I wanted to try and get a bigger picture, though.

00:28:04 ◼   ► And I ended up finding the data set that made the most sense.

00:28:09 ◼   ► Like when I was looking on my iPhone, it was showing I'd been using Safari for three hours

00:28:14 ◼   ► in the entire week.

00:28:15 ◼   ► And then when I looked on my Mac, it was like eight hours, which feels also inaccurate,

00:28:20 ◼   ► but better.

00:28:21 ◼   ► So that was why I ended up going with this data set.

00:28:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I know.

00:28:24 ◼   ► But I'm just like, I'm finding my brain immediately breaking because it's like, ah, 22 hours of

00:28:31 ◼   ► daily usage.

00:28:32 ◼   ► It's like, I don't even know how to start thinking about this.

00:28:35 ◼   ► Well, that's because of the 133 hours on Bloomberg.

00:28:38 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess so.

00:28:39 ◼   ► But even still, it's breaking my brain.

00:28:41 ◼   ► I mean, the immediate one at the top of my list is the combo, the one-two punch of

00:28:45 ◼   ► YouTube and Bellatro.

00:28:46 ◼   ► What's Bellatro?

00:28:47 ◼   ► Oh, it's a video game.

00:28:51 ◼   ► Oh, you have brought this one up to me.

00:28:53 ◼   ► I think you pitched this to me on episode of Mortex.

00:28:56 ◼   ► I just haven't gotten a chance to actually try it yet.

00:28:57 ◼   ► Right.

00:28:58 ◼   ► This was like wild card poker, but sort of what you were saying.

00:29:02 ◼   ► It's like you get points for better poker hands.

00:29:04 ◼   ► It's like a deck building poker game.

00:29:06 ◼   ► Is that what it was?

00:29:06 ◼   ► Correct.

00:29:07 ◼   ► You're like, you're adapting your deck and you're adapting your hands via these

00:29:10 ◼   ► joker cards, which provide different properties that are way the points are scored.

00:29:14 ◼   ► And it's fantastic.

00:29:15 ◼   ► I love this game so much.

00:29:17 ◼   ► I play it every day.

00:29:18 ◼   ► I play it all the time, as you can see, in any 10 hours last week.

00:29:22 ◼   ► I play Bellatro a lot whenever I'm commuting.

00:29:25 ◼   ► I play it as a way to kind of wind down in the evening.

00:29:29 ◼   ► Like, I play it all the time.

00:29:30 ◼   ► And YouTube is paired with that a lot.

00:29:33 ◼   ► And a lot of that YouTube time, of which there was 15 hours recorded last week, it's podcasts.

00:29:38 ◼   ► So I watch video podcasts.

00:29:41 ◼   ► And typically, I will watch a video podcast in picture-in-picture while I'm playing Bellatro.

00:29:47 ◼   ► It's like a perfect pairing.

00:29:48 ◼   ► I love it.

00:29:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:50 ◼   ► I have also found that YouTube is surprisingly good for podcasts in a strange way.

00:29:56 ◼   ► Like, here's the advantage that YouTube has over, like, a normal podcast player that I've

00:30:03 ◼   ► just become more and more sensitized to is I'm subscribed to, like, a ton of shows in my

00:30:09 ◼   ► overcast because I like to be able to just, like, have a big bank to draw from and delete

00:30:14 ◼   ► everything that just seems boring and try to, like, find the thing that kind of, like, catches

00:30:18 ◼   ► my interest, right?

00:30:19 ◼   ► But the problem that I have with that is I just never really thought about this until I started

00:30:25 ◼   ► listening to more podcasts on YouTube is if I have, like, a topic show and I'm, like, looking

00:30:32 ◼   ► for the interesting topics and I'm, like, deleting the things that seem boring, the problem is I'm

00:30:38 ◼   ► not able to know which of these episodes that seem boring might actually be super interesting

00:30:44 ◼   ► because there's nothing like a view count.

00:30:47 ◼   ► There's no even just, like, the algorithm is trying to bring me something to see that I

00:30:52 ◼   ► might not have thought of otherwise.

00:30:53 ◼   ► And I feel like that, to me, has been a surprising advantage with watching podcasts on YouTube is

00:31:00 ◼   ► like, oh, I might not have watched this, but the view count is really high, so maybe there's

00:31:05 ◼   ► something interesting here.

00:31:06 ◼   ► Or, like, it's bringing me things and the very fact that YouTube brings it to me just

00:31:10 ◼   ► gives it, like, a higher credence of, like, oh, I'll try listening to that even if it doesn't

00:31:14 ◼   ► sound immediately interesting.

00:31:16 ◼   ► Or maybe, like, even just the thing, like, I don't know who this guest is, but YouTube

00:31:21 ◼   ► thinks I might be interested, so, like, I'll give it a try and see if this person is interesting.

00:31:24 ◼   ► And I'm just, like, increasingly aware of how in a traditional podcast player I have access

00:31:30 ◼   ► to none of that information.

00:31:32 ◼   ► It's like, ironically, I'm doing more of a kind of self-reinforcement of listening to

00:31:37 ◼   ► the same kinds of things with an un-algorithmic source like a podcast than the, like, YouTube

00:31:42 ◼   ► algorithmic source.

00:31:43 ◼   ► So this is a long way of saying I'm not surprised to hear that, like, you're listening to a lot

00:31:47 ◼   ► of podcasts on YouTube, because I've also noticed, like, an increase in this behavior

00:31:51 ◼   ► for myself as well.

00:31:52 ◼   ► I find all of those ways you're talking about podcast discovery to be interesting.

00:31:57 ◼   ► What do you mean?

00:31:58 ◼   ► Well, because it's still not at all what I'm doing.

00:32:01 ◼   ► The way in which I am consuming podcasts on YouTube is still very old school in a way.

00:32:06 ◼   ► So it really is just one set of podcasts.

00:32:10 ◼   ► So I'm a big fan of a podcast network called Kind of Funny, and they mostly do gaming stuff

00:32:15 ◼   ► with some pop culture stuff.

00:32:16 ◼   ► And they have a really wonderful studio, and they record in person in a studio.

00:32:21 ◼   ► And so I just prefer to watch the video.

00:32:23 ◼   ► And a lot of the time, I'll have YouTube, like, my phone locked, and I'm listening, just

00:32:29 ◼   ► walking around.

00:32:31 ◼   ► And I might grab my phone if something happens, and I want to see what just happened, you know,

00:32:35 ◼   ► like, maybe some kind of visual gag or whatever.

00:32:36 ◼   ► But I really could just listen to them in Overcast as well, and it would be fine.

00:32:41 ◼   ► But I just prefer having the opportunity to also watch the video.

00:32:44 ◼   ► I do not use it as a recommendation thing.

00:32:47 ◼   ► Like, I want to listen to all of their shows that I like to listen to.

00:32:51 ◼   ► I don't kind of pick and choose that way.

00:32:53 ◼   ► But I know lots of people do.

00:32:55 ◼   ► And I think what you're describing is the reason that YouTube is becoming a bigger and bigger

00:33:00 ◼   ► and bigger part of the podcasting ecosystem.

00:33:03 ◼   ► is because people want to consume podcasts this way.

00:33:06 ◼   ► I think this couples hand in hand with the explosion in interview podcasts over the last

00:33:13 ◼   ► five to 10 years, right?

00:33:15 ◼   ► That, like, interview podcasts do kind of need this as a way to try and service to people

00:33:21 ◼   ► if a show is interesting.

00:33:22 ◼   ► Yeah, they need it more.

00:33:24 ◼   ► And they're well served by the algorithm in a way that, like, other shows are not.

00:33:28 ◼   ► Yeah, it's why even when I'm thinking about it, YouTube is capturing for me a, maybe even

00:33:34 ◼   ► now it's like, oh, the majority of interviews, I'm probably going to listen to them on YouTube.

00:33:39 ◼   ► And, like, I'm less inclined to do interview shows in Overcast.

00:33:43 ◼   ► My favorite kinds of podcasts are the ones that benefit from there being a long-running relationship

00:33:49 ◼   ► between the hosts and a chemistry and a camaraderie.

00:33:52 ◼   ► And I think that algorithms do not help that kind of content to blossom.

00:33:58 ◼   ► No.

00:33:59 ◼   ► From the producer side or from the listener side.

00:34:02 ◼   ► But when the episodes are kind of singular, because they're having a different makeup of

00:34:08 ◼   ► people on them, I think that algorithms do help that.

00:34:11 ◼   ► But that's also just not a kind of content that I like to consume.

00:34:14 ◼   ► I don't listen to really any shows like that.

00:34:17 ◼   ► With one exception, which is a podcast called The Town, which is just an audio podcast.

00:34:22 ◼   ► And it's about kind of like Hollywood news.

00:34:24 ◼   ► And I really like it because the host is so good.

00:34:27 ◼   ► But my favorite episodes are the Monday episodes where he has a fixed guest, like the same person

00:34:33 ◼   ► every Monday.

00:34:33 ◼   ► So, you know, that is why YouTube is so high for me.

00:34:37 ◼   ► I mean, along with all of the other YouTube videos that I watch, like YouTube is my number

00:34:44 ◼   ► one source of entertainment.

00:34:45 ◼   ► Like, yeah, if I want to watch something, if just for me, if I want to watch something, it

00:34:53 ◼   ► will always be YouTube.

00:34:55 ◼   ► Very rarely with my wife, right?

00:34:57 ◼   ► Like if we're going to watch something, it will be a more traditional television show.

00:35:02 ◼   ► But if I'm watching something on my own, it's most likely going to be from YouTube.

00:35:07 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the same thing for me.

00:35:09 ◼   ► Like any solo viewing, it's like YouTube is the first port of call every time for like,

00:35:15 ◼   ► what is it that I'm going to be watching?

00:35:17 ◼   ► Like the only time it's not is when someone I follow on YouTube has posted like members

00:35:23 ◼   ► only content on like a subscription service like Patreon.

00:35:26 ◼   ► Like, but like, I still feel like I'm still just watching YouTube that is like still functionally

00:35:31 ◼   ► the same thing.

00:35:32 ◼   ► But yeah, it's like YouTube is totally the first port of call.

00:35:34 ◼   ► That is the beauty of YouTube as a thing, which is YouTube is where you get the thing

00:35:39 ◼   ► that's just for you.

00:35:40 ◼   ► Like it's the, what is the weird niche you care about that people in your life don't

00:35:46 ◼   ► care about?

00:35:47 ◼   ► It's on YouTube.

00:35:48 ◼   ► Like you'll find it.

00:35:49 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

00:35:49 ◼   ► And that's why I believe it's like such a fantastic like solo viewing experience because you can

00:35:54 ◼   ► just, you can watch someone make knives out of like gummy bears, you know, because that's

00:36:00 ◼   ► what you want to watch.

00:36:01 ◼   ► Someone's doing it.

00:36:02 ◼   ► You can go watch it.

00:36:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:36:04 ◼   ► And that's also why it is the solo viewing because it just gets so tailored to you.

00:36:07 ◼   ► It's like, ah, yes, I want to listen to someone talk about their experience at a theme park

00:36:12 ◼   ► for six hours.

00:36:13 ◼   ► Like, great.

00:36:14 ◼   ► Is that very shareable content?

00:36:16 ◼   ► Normally, no.

00:36:17 ◼   ► No, it's the kind of content that if you were to show someone you're watching it together,

00:36:20 ◼   ► you feel kind of embarrassed.

00:36:21 ◼   ► But like when you're watching it on your own, you're like, yes, where's our seven?

00:36:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:36:26 ◼   ► But this does actually bring like a problem with this entire screen time system, right?

00:36:32 ◼   ► Which is overcast is 20 minutes right down at the bottom.

00:36:35 ◼   ► But that's not accurate, right?

00:36:37 ◼   ► Yeah, that is not accurate.

00:36:39 ◼   ► All it is measuring is what is on your screen.

00:36:42 ◼   ► It's not measuring what is being used.

00:36:45 ◼   ► And I think that is a fundamental problem with a system like this.

00:36:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:36:48 ◼   ► Because like I've never tried to set an app limit on overcast or like an app that you use

00:36:55 ◼   ► in the background.

00:36:56 ◼   ► But my thinking would be that I could put a 10 minute app limit on overcast, but listen

00:37:01 ◼   ► to it in the background for four hours.

00:37:02 ◼   ► So I have just had a flashback to using the system.

00:37:06 ◼   ► And I literally tried to do exactly what you're saying.

00:37:09 ◼   ► Put a timer on all kinds of media consumption, including overcast.

00:37:14 ◼   ► And you are correct.

00:37:15 ◼   ► I ran into this exact problem of like, oh, I only want to listen to overcast for an hour

00:37:20 ◼   ► a day.

00:37:21 ◼   ► Well, guess what?

00:37:21 ◼   ► I'm never going to hit that limit because I'm not actively using the app for an hour

00:37:25 ◼   ► a day.

00:37:26 ◼   ► This episode of Cortex is brought to you by Google Gemini.

00:37:29 ◼   ► I tried Gemini a couple of days ago, the Gemini Live where you can talk to it.

00:37:34 ◼   ► And it really is wild to have a full on conversation with this thing.

00:37:37 ◼   ► I was messing around and asked it to give me some ideas for hosting a party during the

00:37:42 ◼   ► holidays.

00:37:42 ◼   ► And when it started giving results, I could just stop it and say, OK, but what about something

00:37:47 ◼   ► low key for a smaller group?

00:37:48 ◼   ► And then it just adjusts to that and you can keep going until you get an idea that you

00:37:52 ◼   ► want.

00:37:52 ◼   ► I think that's what I would use it for most.

00:37:54 ◼   ► Brainstorming things.

00:37:55 ◼   ► It's so good if you don't know where to start or you hit a wall.

00:37:59 ◼   ► You just go to Gemini.

00:38:00 ◼   ► It helps you get the ball rolling.

00:38:01 ◼   ► But you can use it for all kinds of stuff.

00:38:03 ◼   ► If you want to learn something new, you can have it give you advice.

00:38:06 ◼   ► Ask it to explain Bitcoin in simple terms.

00:38:08 ◼   ► Or you can have it quiz you on microbiology.

00:38:11 ◼   ► Imagine being a student and you've got this personal tutor on hand.

00:38:15 ◼   ► It's hard to explain.

00:38:16 ◼   ► You really have to play around with it, see how it listens to you, responds, adapts to

00:38:20 ◼   ► your style of conversation.

00:38:21 ◼   ► Just try it out.

00:38:23 ◼   ► It's free.

00:38:23 ◼   ► Our thanks to Google Gemini for the support of this show and all of Relay.

00:38:27 ◼   ► There's another place where you can get statistics that are kind of like this.

00:38:30 ◼   ► So in the battery statistics.

00:38:31 ◼   ► So I just went in.

00:38:34 ◼   ► In the last 10 days, I've had 15 hours of overcast usage based on battery statistics.

00:38:40 ◼   ► Oh.

00:38:41 ◼   ► But 20 minutes in screen time and also in the last 10 days, 28 hours of YouTube because

00:38:48 ◼   ► 14 hours is in the background because I'm just listening to it like a podcast.

00:38:52 ◼   ► Right.

00:38:52 ◼   ► And so like if I wanted to set an app limit on myself or this is also using parental controls

00:39:00 ◼   ► on somebody else, I could set them 10 hours a week on YouTube or whatever, but they could

00:39:07 ◼   ► just listen infinitely in the background.

00:39:09 ◼   ► Now, I don't know if that's necessarily what you'd be concerned about, but if you were, this

00:39:16 ◼   ► system doesn't provide that for you.

00:39:19 ◼   ► You know?

00:39:19 ◼   ► I completely forgot that there's this totally parallel system and I'm just going to send

00:39:24 ◼   ► you, I'm going to send you what mine looks like because there's definitely bugs in this

00:39:27 ◼   ► system.

00:39:28 ◼   ► So here's my battery usage from the last week because I was like, oh, this will be interesting

00:39:32 ◼   ► to compare.

00:39:32 ◼   ► And it's like, oh no, this data is all garbage.

00:39:34 ◼   ► But for a different reason, I have this wild bug that I have tried to fix multiple times.

00:39:40 ◼   ► I have contacted the developers for the app Portal, which is this audio player.

00:39:44 ◼   ► And my phone is convinced that I am running this audio player 24 hours a day, every day.

00:39:52 ◼   ► So I have like 222 and 20 minutes of background usage of Portal, which I can absolutely guarantee

00:39:59 ◼   ► is not the case.

00:40:01 ◼   ► So like, why are there multiple incorrect ways of trying to track what you're using on your

00:40:07 ◼   ► phone?

00:40:07 ◼   ► Like this really feels like, you know what?

00:40:09 ◼   ► Apple needs to do what we're doing.

00:40:10 ◼   ► They need to do a reorg of like, how are we tracking what people are doing on their phone?

00:40:15 ◼   ► Because these systems are just wild.

00:40:17 ◼   ► I understand why a battery usage thing would be separate because there are apps that do

00:40:24 ◼   ► just run in the background and they take a sip at your battery, but they do run in the

00:40:29 ◼   ► background.

00:40:29 ◼   ► But then you do run into the situations that we're talking about where there are apps that

00:40:36 ◼   ► are explicitly designed to run in the background that then do not show up in your screen time,

00:40:43 ◼   ► which is essentially a log of your usage.

00:40:45 ◼   ► Maybe what actually needs to happen is there are two different things, but there needs to

00:40:50 ◼   ► be an overall usage set of data.

00:40:54 ◼   ► Like, I understand why you might want to just track something that shows on a screen.

00:40:58 ◼   ► But what about all of the usage of my phone?

00:41:03 ◼   ► Like, I wouldn't personally feel a need to do something with it.

00:41:07 ◼   ► But, you know, if you wanted to consider your digital well-being, maybe that would be I need

00:41:12 ◼   ► to consume less content, right?

00:41:15 ◼   ► Yeah, you need to know how you're actually using it.

00:41:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:41:18 ◼   ► And you can't.

00:41:19 ◼   ► You can't get that data in a reliable way.

00:41:22 ◼   ► I mean, let alone the fact these systems don't work very well.

00:41:26 ◼   ► But even if they did, it still wouldn't be the accurate set of information.

00:41:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:41:30 ◼   ► So I feel like that is from the moment I was looking at this screenshot of your stuff,

00:41:34 ◼   ► like that's the thing that's been in the background of my mind.

00:41:36 ◼   ► It's like, what is this even showing, actually?

00:41:40 ◼   ► And it's showing some strange subset of all of the data when what we would actually want

00:41:46 ◼   ► is usage.

00:41:47 ◼   ► Because, yeah, that was exactly what I was trying to do when I was using downtime.

00:41:50 ◼   ► And I remember it particularly being around media of like, oh, I want to limit media consumption.

00:41:55 ◼   ► But actually, the vast majority of my media consumption is audio, which is completely

00:42:00 ◼   ► untracked by this whole thing.

00:42:01 ◼   ► And meanwhile, every single second that Finder is on the screen on my Mac is like diligently

00:42:07 ◼   ► logged as though I am there, just like staring right at it.

00:42:10 ◼   ► It's just like not giving what we would really want.

00:42:13 ◼   ► But there is still stuff in here, which is interesting.

00:42:17 ◼   ► Like, for example, the fact that last week I spent a cumulative hour in email looking at

00:42:25 ◼   ► the way this is broken up from 30 minutes to the mail app.

00:42:28 ◼   ► And then like another 20 minutes to read all and then another 25 minutes to Spark.

00:42:34 ◼   ► So what is also happening here, because these are different apps and different platforms.

00:42:38 ◼   ► They're trying to work out like the com dot something is like, yes, that doesn't exist on

00:42:44 ◼   ► this platform.

00:42:45 ◼   ► So it's like trying to work out what it is.

00:42:47 ◼   ► But you can kind of work out that between smart email, Spark desktop and mail, there's two

00:42:52 ◼   ► entries for Spark and one entry for mail.

00:42:55 ◼   ► And I think that's great.

00:42:56 ◼   ► And we're going to see it as we go through my notifications and pickup data.

00:43:00 ◼   ► The amount of time I spend in email is just less and less over the years.

00:43:04 ◼   ► And I like seeing that data there and like in an entire week period that I only spent an

00:43:09 ◼   ► hour in email just is so much better than it has been for me at other different parts of

00:43:14 ◼   ► my working life, which I love.

00:43:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:43:16 ◼   ► That is like kind of what I was thinking towards is it still seems to be like the activity data

00:43:22 ◼   ► is like just not very helpful.

00:43:24 ◼   ► No.

00:43:24 ◼   ► But the notifications and the pickups is actually trying to get at something true.

00:43:30 ◼   ► And I feel like it's particularly useful for the phone.

00:43:33 ◼   ► Like the phone is the absolute epicenter of like the usefulness for notifications and pickups.

00:43:38 ◼   ► Like, like I completely forgot that it was even tracking that.

00:43:42 ◼   ► And it's like, oh, yeah, this is a thing that I do want to kind of review every once in a

00:43:47 ◼   ► while.

00:43:47 ◼   ► Oh, you know what?

00:43:48 ◼   ► I should create a repeating Asana task to like do that just to like check this out every

00:43:53 ◼   ► once in a while.

00:43:54 ◼   ► Because, Mike, if you say you want to do something, but you don't actually capture it as an actionable

00:43:59 ◼   ► item that you're going to fit somewhere in your life.

00:44:01 ◼   ► Like, what are you even doing?

00:44:03 ◼   ► It's not even true.

00:44:03 ◼   ► You've not even done it.

00:44:04 ◼   ► Boop.

00:44:05 ◼   ► Assigned to me straight into my tasks.

00:44:07 ◼   ► But, yeah, this is the stuff that is like significantly more interesting.

00:44:11 ◼   ► And I feel like once again, Mike is a very popular boy.

00:44:16 ◼   ► Two thousand notifications from messages.

00:44:20 ◼   ► It's probably like half of that.

00:44:23 ◼   ► Right.

00:44:23 ◼   ► Because it is double counting some stuff.

00:44:25 ◼   ► Like I just looked on my iPhone statistics for last week and on my iPhone, I got 700 notifications

00:44:31 ◼   ► for messages, not 2000.

00:44:32 ◼   ► But it is probably around 1000, I would expect.

00:44:36 ◼   ► But what I do find fascinating about that is I have a bunch of group threads on mute.

00:44:40 ◼   ► So, like, I get so many more messages than this, which that's funny.

00:44:45 ◼   ► But, yeah, I mean, but that doesn't surprise me.

00:44:48 ◼   ► That is how I communicate with people.

00:44:51 ◼   ► I like to send messages.

00:44:52 ◼   ► You know, you're not going to find tons of phone call data in here because that's not what

00:44:56 ◼   ► I'm doing.

00:44:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:44:57 ◼   ► And then kind of like going down.

00:44:59 ◼   ► Abode is my home security system, which is also why, like, the home app is up there because

00:45:03 ◼   ► we get lots of notifications, like doors opening and closing, windows opening and closing,

00:45:08 ◼   ► that kind of stuff.

00:45:08 ◼   ► Okay.

00:45:09 ◼   ► That's what that is.

00:45:09 ◼   ► I didn't realize.

00:45:10 ◼   ► Okay.

00:45:10 ◼   ► Do you and Todoist, they're doing their thing along with clock.

00:45:14 ◼   ► It's like, that's all my alarms.

00:45:16 ◼   ► I have to think about how many alarms I set every day, but you can kind of average it

00:45:20 ◼   ► out.

00:45:20 ◼   ► That's like 10 alarms.

00:45:21 ◼   ► I was just like doing six days worth of data, 63 alarms.

00:45:27 ◼   ► Okay.

00:45:27 ◼   ► It takes 10 alarms to get a mic out of bed.

00:45:31 ◼   ► You know what?

00:45:31 ◼   ► Whatever you got to do, man, to get out of bed.

00:45:33 ◼   ► If it takes 10 alarms, that's what it takes.

00:45:35 ◼   ► Soon it's not going to be alarms.

00:45:36 ◼   ► It's going to be one little person that's going to be getting me out of bed.

00:45:40 ◼   ► I'm not going to need alarms anymore.

00:45:42 ◼   ► We'll see.

00:45:43 ◼   ► WhatsApp, that is one that's creeping up the list.

00:45:47 ◼   ► This is just as a function of meeting new people in London.

00:45:53 ◼   ► People don't use messages here.

00:45:55 ◼   ► They use WhatsApp.

00:45:56 ◼   ► That is how everybody communicates.

00:45:58 ◼   ► It's only becoming more and more prevalent that WhatsApp is moving up and up and up in my

00:46:05 ◼   ► life as a communication system.

00:46:06 ◼   ► I was thinking about this.

00:46:08 ◼   ► I would be very surprised.

00:46:09 ◼   ► I put this down now.

00:46:11 ◼   ► We can check it later on.

00:46:12 ◼   ► I would be very surprised if WhatsApp was not on my home screen when we do State of

00:46:18 ◼   ► the Apps this year.

00:46:19 ◼   ► Oh, interesting.

00:46:20 ◼   ► Okay.

00:46:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:21 ◼   ► And this is a thing of I'm already getting a sense of my home screen is going to look

00:46:26 ◼   ► very different by the time we get there because there's a few apps that are already starting

00:46:30 ◼   ► to vire their way into being very likely to be moving to the home screen.

00:46:34 ◼   ► So I'm going to have to find like two or maybe three apps to remove from my main home screen.

00:46:41 ◼   ► That's the thing.

00:46:41 ◼   ► WhatsApp is going to be one of them.

00:46:43 ◼   ► I think that makes its way in.

00:46:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:44 ◼   ► I was just looking.

00:46:45 ◼   ► So I have I have for years like vehemently refused to use WhatsApp.

00:46:50 ◼   ► I'm like, I just do not want another communication channel like at all costs.

00:46:54 ◼   ► Like I will do anything I can, but I will easily bet that like WhatsApp will be on your home

00:46:59 ◼   ► screen next year because even for me, it didn't cross over into like my top list for notifications,

00:47:05 ◼   ► but the damn did break this year of like, oh, there were suddenly three contacts who all

00:47:12 ◼   ► needed to use WhatsApp.

00:47:13 ◼   ► You probably don't need this top tip, but I'm going to share this top tip because this

00:47:31 ◼   ► was a thing that's frustrated me of WhatsApp forever was that say you have three people that

00:47:36 ◼   ► send you a message, right?

00:47:37 ◼   ► And you have a badge like three on the little badge.

00:47:41 ◼   ► If you opened WhatsApp and looked at one message, it would clear the badge completely.

00:47:45 ◼   ► Yeah, that has happened to me.

00:47:46 ◼   ► What's what's the top tip?

00:47:47 ◼   ► You can change this now.

00:47:48 ◼   ► They have added a setting for years.

00:47:51 ◼   ► They did not have this as something that you could change.

00:47:53 ◼   ► It was just that was how WhatsApp worked.

00:47:55 ◼   ► But now if you go into WhatsApp, you go into settings, you go into notifications.

00:48:01 ◼   ► There is a toggle called clear badge.

00:48:04 ◼   ► Okay.

00:48:04 ◼   ► Turn that off immediately and it will maintain the badge for you.

00:48:09 ◼   ► I want to share this tip of as many people as possible because it has significantly changed

00:48:15 ◼   ► my feelings towards WhatsApp because I sometimes would be like, there is a message in there that

00:48:20 ◼   ► I want to get to.

00:48:21 ◼   ► And I was terrified to open new message notifications because it will clear the number away.

00:48:27 ◼   ► And then I would forget that I had to go and respond to a friend about meeting for lunch

00:48:31 ◼   ► or something.

00:48:32 ◼   ► Thank you so much for that because I have already even with just a few contacts in there,

00:48:36 ◼   ► that's already caused me problems several times precisely because I'm not using it a lot.

00:48:40 ◼   ► So I've accidentally cleared some and then I don't get back to it for weeks because it's

00:48:44 ◼   ► like it doesn't come up that often.

00:48:45 ◼   ► So great.

00:48:46 ◼   ► That is immediately using that.

00:48:50 ◼   ► It's absolutely insane to me that they didn't do it this way and then added the feature

00:48:55 ◼   ► and didn't make that the default.

00:48:56 ◼   ► I don't understand why they think people want to live their life that way.

00:49:01 ◼   ► But apparently the developers of WhatsApp do.

00:49:04 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:49:05 ◼   ► That feels to me like user engagement.

00:49:08 ◼   ► Like that's what they're trying to go for.

00:49:10 ◼   ► Right.

00:49:11 ◼   ► is like someone has a spreadsheet where they want to do something like messages per opening

00:49:16 ◼   ► and they're trying to optimize for it and then like not taking the badge away.

00:49:20 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:49:20 ◼   ► But I just don't know why you would care about that if you made WhatsApp.

00:49:23 ◼   ► Like they're not selling something based on engagement.

00:49:27 ◼   ► Yeah, that's true.

00:49:28 ◼   ► Maybe it's just dumb.

00:49:30 ◼   ► Yeah, it's just a bad decision that they made.

00:49:32 ◼   ► I have Whoop in here, which I know is a thing that people ask about.

00:49:35 ◼   ► I'm wearing a Whoop band.

00:49:37 ◼   ► I don't know what I think about it yet.

00:49:39 ◼   ► This is something that we will talk about later on in the year though, I think.

00:49:42 ◼   ► I was bullying you to give it a try.

00:49:44 ◼   ► So I wasn't sure if you ever really, really did.

00:49:47 ◼   ► So that caught my attention straight away is that you've got the Whoop.

00:49:49 ◼   ► But we'll save that.

00:49:50 ◼   ► I wear it every day.

00:49:51 ◼   ► We'll save that for a future conversation.

00:49:53 ◼   ► Oh, interesting, interesting.

00:49:54 ◼   ► Duolingo, sitting down there.

00:49:57 ◼   ► I don't understand how Duolingo is only on 15 notifications

00:50:00 ◼   ► because I feel like Duolingo is always up in my business.

00:50:02 ◼   ► Yeah, that's their whole deal, isn't it?

00:50:04 ◼   ► Maybe I'm just very good.

00:50:06 ◼   ► I am on a 403-day streak of Romanian.

00:50:09 ◼   ► Very good.

00:50:10 ◼   ► Forte bun, in fact, you could say, Gray.

00:50:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:15 ◼   ► I couldn't help but notice that the New York Times word game thing was on there.

00:50:21 ◼   ► I'm just curious, which game is it for you?

00:50:23 ◼   ► Because I have recently gotten completely addicted to one of the games

00:50:27 ◼   ► and I just wanted to know if it's the same one.

00:50:29 ◼   ► Which one is it?

00:50:30 ◼   ► So I wouldn't say I'm addicted, but me and Idina tend to play together the mini crosswords.

00:50:35 ◼   ► Oh, the mini crosswords.

00:50:37 ◼   ► Okay.

00:50:37 ◼   ► So I got my mom a subscription to the New York Times games a couple of years ago

00:50:42 ◼   ► because she was playing Wordle.

00:50:44 ◼   ► And this was just one of those things where, you know, you pay attention to like,

00:50:49 ◼   ► especially with parents.

00:50:50 ◼   ► I want my mom to stay as sharp as she possibly can, right?

00:50:53 ◼   ► And she does.

00:50:54 ◼   ► She's a very intelligent woman.

00:50:56 ◼   ► I want that to remain that way.

00:50:58 ◼   ► And when I got a hint that she was really into Word games, you know,

00:51:02 ◼   ► I'm like, all right, great.

00:51:03 ◼   ► And so I bought her a subscription and she plays all of them.

00:51:06 ◼   ► I think Spelling Bee is her favorite.

00:51:09 ◼   ► Every time I play Spelling Bee, this is without fail, I fall asleep.

00:51:15 ◼   ► The game sends me to sleep, so I can't play Spelling Bee anymore.

00:51:20 ◼   ► But we signed up for Connections.

00:51:22 ◼   ► Like I was playing Connections and signed up for that,

00:51:24 ◼   ► but then found that the mini crossword is my favorite.

00:51:27 ◼   ► Okay.

00:51:28 ◼   ► So I was just shocked that I signed up for this

00:51:31 ◼   ► because I just hate Word games.

00:51:34 ◼   ► It's like I have always felt like I should be the kind of person

00:51:37 ◼   ► who does crossword puzzles, and I just, I cannot do them,

00:51:40 ◼   ► partly because my spelling is just absolutely atrocious.

00:51:44 ◼   ► There's just like something about Word games I cannot do,

00:51:48 ◼   ► have never enjoyed any of them.

00:51:50 ◼   ► But the one that did get me, which I love, is the Connections.

00:51:55 ◼   ► So if you haven't played, right, they give you like this four-by-four grid

00:52:00 ◼   ► where there's one word written on like each of these squares.

00:52:03 ◼   ► And what you have to do is find four words that belong in one category four times.

00:52:10 ◼   ► So at the end you will end up with like, ah, you've correctly put together the four words into the four categories.

00:52:16 ◼   ► And it's a game like I will really, really push it up.

00:52:20 ◼   ► You have to play it a few times to kind of get what the game is after.

00:52:24 ◼   ► But what I really like is I feel like it gives the satisfaction that people are getting out of crosswords,

00:52:31 ◼   ► which is something like, oh, that was a really interesting question that led to this word in an unexpected way.

00:52:37 ◼   ► Like it feels like that's the satisfaction that people get.

00:52:40 ◼   ► But I don't have to spell or come up with the word.

00:52:44 ◼   ► The words are there.

00:52:45 ◼   ► And it can just be very satisfying sometimes to go like, oh, that's a way that these four words are connected,

00:52:51 ◼   ► which I never would have thought about.

00:52:53 ◼   ► So like, yeah, I took a little while.

00:52:55 ◼   ► But boy, do I just I really like it.

00:52:58 ◼   ► And I don't know if it's true, but I honestly feel like it kind of makes me better at writing

00:53:04 ◼   ► because it's just getting me to think of words in different ways than I would normally do.

00:53:09 ◼   ► Because that's the whole key to the game is like, ah, yeah, there's the obvious thing this word is,

00:53:14 ◼   ► but there's some secondary or tertiary meaning that also lines up with the secondary or tertiary meaning of three of these other words.

00:53:22 ◼   ► So a plus word game, the only word game I have ever enjoyed.

00:53:27 ◼   ► If you've never played the mini crosswords, I do recommend them.

00:53:29 ◼   ► Like it's just enough crossword.

00:53:31 ◼   ► Mike, I have one question.

00:53:33 ◼   ► Am I required to spell words?

00:53:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:53:36 ◼   ► Okay, it's out.

00:53:38 ◼   ► Okay.

00:53:38 ◼   ► You don't like doing that?

00:53:40 ◼   ► I am incapable of spelling words.

00:53:41 ◼   ► So no, it's not even a choice.

00:53:44 ◼   ► I just literally can't.

00:53:45 ◼   ► I understand.

00:53:46 ◼   ► I mean, we all have our strengths.

00:53:47 ◼   ► Like if there was any number, like all the number games.

00:53:50 ◼   ► No, it's not happening.

00:53:50 ◼   ► I just can't numbers.

00:53:52 ◼   ► I can't deal with, you know, like Sudoku was on there.

00:53:54 ◼   ► It's like, no, you're okay.

00:53:55 ◼   ► I don't know if you're going to bother.

00:53:57 ◼   ► Don't even.

00:53:57 ◼   ► But I like connections too.

00:54:00 ◼   ► Strands is fun.

00:54:01 ◼   ► If you've never played strands.

00:54:02 ◼   ► Do I have to spell?

00:54:03 ◼   ► Well, it's the spelling in reverse, right?

00:54:05 ◼   ► Why would you even?

00:54:06 ◼   ► It's the spelling in reverse.

00:54:07 ◼   ► Do you ever play word searches?

00:54:09 ◼   ► The word searches, is that also like a kryptonite kind of thing?

00:54:11 ◼   ► Mike, you know what you have to know how to do in order to search for words?

00:54:15 ◼   ► Spell them.

00:54:16 ◼   ► You have to know how to spell them.

00:54:17 ◼   ► But connections, you have to read them, which means you need to know how to spell them.

00:54:20 ◼   ► Look, Mike, I can read, right?

00:54:22 ◼   ► Yeah, so you can read by looking at a word search, right?

00:54:25 ◼   ► No, it's like, it's all different, right?

00:54:27 ◼   ► Because I'm like, I'm basically trying to spell the word one adjacent letter at a time.

00:54:31 ◼   ► The word search is somehow the worst version of all of this.

00:54:34 ◼   ► It's awful.

00:54:35 ◼   ► Okay, let's take a look at your pickup data.

00:54:38 ◼   ► Not surprisingly, messages at the top there, given all of the messages that you get.

00:54:42 ◼   ► Good old Instagram, still holding strong in the top three.

00:54:45 ◼   ► Love Instagram.

00:54:46 ◼   ► Oh, and what is the, I want to do some kind of like the WhatsApp pickups per messages sent ratio, very high.

00:54:54 ◼   ► So yeah, WhatsApp is totally climbing the rank of priority for you there.

00:54:57 ◼   ► Oh, you're on Blue Sky Social.

00:54:59 ◼   ► So you're over on the Blue Butterfly.

00:55:02 ◼   ► I don't know any of the lingo for Blue Sky Social.

00:55:05 ◼   ► Blue Sky is my current favorite text social network.

00:55:09 ◼   ► But if we jump back over to app usage, you'll see 56 minutes, an entire six days.

00:55:19 ◼   ► Right, so not a ton.

00:55:20 ◼   ► No, I mean, they all have their app limits of 15 minutes a day.

00:55:23 ◼   ► And you can see in that data that I'm not going over it.

00:55:26 ◼   ► So I'm still really happy about that.

00:55:28 ◼   ► Like three hours in the week for text-based social media, I think is amazing.

00:55:35 ◼   ► Especially for someone who works in the tech reporting industry.

00:55:39 ◼   ► Yeah, that is absolutely amazing.

00:55:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:55:41 ◼   ► That is fantastic to be holding the line on that one.

00:55:43 ◼   ► That's really good.

00:55:43 ◼   ► But I do feel that this is where some of the data is just not helping me out.

00:55:47 ◼   ► Because I know I'm spending a ton of time in RSS and Reader is down there at like 20 minutes.

00:55:54 ◼   ► And it's like, that's not right.

00:55:55 ◼   ► Like, there's right down at the bottom.

00:55:57 ◼   ► But I just know that what I am doing is spending a lot of time going through RSS.

00:56:02 ◼   ► That's my way of getting news.

00:56:03 ◼   ► I do not rely on text-based social media to get news for my work anymore.

00:56:10 ◼   ► Which is what I was doing years and years and years ago.

00:56:13 ◼   ► So I'm much happier about this mix of the way this stuff works for me now.

00:56:18 ◼   ► But yeah, of the ones that I am using, I find Blue Sky to be currently the most enjoyable.

00:56:25 ◼   ► But this stuff, it goes up and down over time.

00:56:27 ◼   ► It's also the newest one, you know.

00:56:30 ◼   ► I didn't want to do many comparisons, but I do want to make a comparison.

00:56:33 ◼   ► So back when we did this the first time, back in 2018, I spent seven hours a week on Twitter.

00:56:39 ◼   ► Oh, wow.

00:56:41 ◼   ► I didn't realize it was that bad.

00:56:43 ◼   ► Spending a full workday on Twitter.

00:56:45 ◼   ► Oof.

00:56:46 ◼   ► Right?

00:56:46 ◼   ► So like, I think that is a pretty great difference of like a thing that I've worked on over time.

00:56:53 ◼   ► Where now, it's like, it's half of that with three services.

00:56:56 ◼   ► Yeah, that's way better.

00:56:58 ◼   ► That's good.

00:56:59 ◼   ► And that's the kind of stuff that these systems should be helping you work towards.

00:57:02 ◼   ► So yeah, that's really good.

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00:59:09 ◼   ► Okay, let me take a look at yours here.

00:59:12 ◼   ► I think the first thing that I'm immediately drawn to is the name of your device's three emoji, tick, fun, star.

00:59:19 ◼   ► What are you asking about?

00:59:20 ◼   ► What does that mean?

00:59:21 ◼   ► I'm just like, what is this code?

00:59:23 ◼   ► So I've settled on like three emoji scheme for basically all of my devices.

00:59:29 ◼   ► Okay.

00:59:30 ◼   ► Like, okay.

00:59:30 ◼   ► Again, this is another one of these things.

00:59:32 ◼   ► I have always had a real, I'm realizing now I'm about to say this right after the part where I'm like, I can't play word games.

00:59:38 ◼   ► But I was about to say, I've always had a real war on words.

00:59:42 ◼   ► It's like, it's why I've never liked the words below the app icons, which we can finally get rid of.

00:59:47 ◼   ► It's even why like, oh, in my to-do system, I use a lot of emoji to represent tasks.

00:59:53 ◼   ► Like in my time tracking, it's the same thing.

00:59:55 ◼   ► And so I recently redid all of my devices to be like, I don't need to have the names of these things.

01:00:02 ◼   ► I can just use like three little icons to represent what they are.

01:00:06 ◼   ► The checkmark is still a little bit of a legacy thing because I was actually just doing a physical cleanup of all of my devices and re-going through each one of them.

01:00:16 ◼   ► And so as I was doing it, I was just like doing the green checkmark to be like, okay, I've gone through this device.

01:00:20 ◼   ► I've changed the settings.

01:00:21 ◼   ► I've updated the name.

01:00:22 ◼   ► So that's eventually going to go.

01:00:25 ◼   ► But otherwise, it's just like, oh, it's a little iPhone.

01:00:28 ◼   ► And then it's the star icon because this is the like newest iPhone.

01:00:32 ◼   ► I still have last year's model like around.

01:00:35 ◼   ► So I gave that one like a brown rock, right?

01:00:37 ◼   ► It's like, oh, this is the old one, right?

01:00:39 ◼   ► And then this is the new one.

01:00:40 ◼   ► And so all of my devices now, I have some like little emoji code for like, which device is this?

01:00:46 ◼   ► And then some little emoji just to represent where does this live or what is the device's primary purpose?

01:00:52 ◼   ► And I've done that with like the different headphones because I have the different AirPods.

01:00:57 ◼   ► And again, maybe it's because I read words out loud in my head.

01:01:01 ◼   ► I've always just felt like reading words is kind of slower and less clear.

01:01:05 ◼   ► So I've been really happy with this, even going through things like the Bluetooth connection and just switching headphones.

01:01:11 ◼   ► Like I find it visually much easier to parse.

01:01:13 ◼   ► Like, oh, I want to connect to this headphone, which is represented by these emoji, rather than like reading the words.

01:01:20 ◼   ► Like, this is the AirPods Pro 4 with noise cancellation.

01:01:26 ◼   ► And this is the AirPods Pro 2, but the new one, not the old one that you thought you lost and had to replace or whatever.

01:01:33 ◼   ► So that's why I have that weird device name.

01:01:35 ◼   ► But I like this as a system.

01:01:37 ◼   ► I am not recommending this as a system to anyone.

01:01:40 ◼   ► I was immediately drawn to one thing in your list.

01:01:43 ◼   ► 50 minutes on Sonicare.

01:01:45 ◼   ► Oh.

01:01:46 ◼   ► Do you have an app for your toothbrush?

01:01:49 ◼   ► Okay, so this is brand new as of that week.

01:01:52 ◼   ► The newest Sonicare toothbrush has an app which I cannot believe they are convincing me to use.

01:02:01 ◼   ► You do have an electric toothbrush?

01:02:02 ◼   ► I have a Philips Sonicare.

01:02:04 ◼   ► Okay, so you have a Sonicare.

01:02:05 ◼   ► So you know how it does like the little boop-boop, right?

01:02:07 ◼   ► And it's like, so you're brushing your teeth and then it goes like boop-boop and you're supposed to move on to the next zone.

01:02:11 ◼   ► Yeah, okay.

01:02:12 ◼   ► I wasn't sure if you meant the boop-boop for the zone or the boop-boop for too hard.

01:02:16 ◼   ► Well, yeah, there's also boop-boop for too hard.

01:02:18 ◼   ► I feel like that's not quite a boop-boop.

01:02:19 ◼   ► That's more like an ah sound, right?

01:02:21 ◼   ► It's like the toothbrush is freaking out in your mouth because you're pressing it too hard.

01:02:24 ◼   ► My one lights, there's a little light that shines on the bottom to kind of also grab my attention.

01:02:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:02:29 ◼   ► So like I sort of vaguely knew that there were like, oh, the boop-boop means you're supposed to move to a different zone.

01:02:34 ◼   ► And I've used like Sonicare's Philips toothbrushes for years and I just made up my own zones.

01:02:41 ◼   ► Yes, I have this.

01:02:42 ◼   ► It's like, all right, I start here, then I move to here, then I go to here.

01:02:45 ◼   ► Like I have my own little process based on, I don't know, the intervals that it's giving me, I guess.

01:02:50 ◼   ► Like I was like, ah, this one, I'll do the inside of my teeth.

01:02:53 ◼   ► Like I was just doing my own thing.

01:02:54 ◼   ► Like whatever, Sonicare, I have no idea.

01:02:56 ◼   ► But I recently got their like new top-of-the-line Sonicare toothbrush because I need to replace my old one.

01:03:02 ◼   ► And the like instructions was really pushing the app and I thought, okay, let me just like give this a try just out of pure curiosity.

01:03:10 ◼   ► And so I was like, okay, number one, now I know what the zones are supposed to be.

01:03:15 ◼   ► But the thing that I actually thought was like worth trying for a while is that if you're brushing the teeth with the app,

01:03:23 ◼   ► it's actually able to keep track of how long and how hard are you really pressing in each of the zones that it wants.

01:03:31 ◼   ► It's like it can tell which way the toothbrush is angled.

01:03:33 ◼   ► And if you're going along with the zones, it then knows like are you doing the front or the back of the teeth?

01:03:38 ◼   ► And interestingly, like it's keeping track basically of is there some area that you're always giving like slightly short attention to?

01:03:47 ◼   ► And then every once in a while it does like, hey, you should do a makeup session.

01:03:51 ◼   ► And it will tell you like just spend 30 seconds right here.

01:03:55 ◼   ► It's like I just I think that's interesting.

01:03:57 ◼   ► This is funny.

01:03:58 ◼   ► I explicitly have avoided the one that comes with the app because I'm just like I don't want an app for my toothbrush.

01:04:06 ◼   ► Like I just don't.

01:04:07 ◼   ► I really don't want that.

01:04:08 ◼   ► So like I agree.

01:04:10 ◼   ► I'm not sure that I'm going to keep doing this going forward.

01:04:15 ◼   ► But I thought, you know what, I am going to give this a try and just like see it for a little while.

01:04:19 ◼   ► I think the biggest problem, though, is just realizing how when I'm brushing my teeth, I want to be on my phone doing literally anything else than looking at the tooth brushing app is like fundamentally the conflict of like what do I want to be doing?

01:04:35 ◼   ► It's like, oh, I want to be going through my like morning routine checklist or like I want to be listening to a podcast.

01:04:42 ◼   ► Like I want to be doing something else.

01:04:44 ◼   ► It made me kind of realize how much brushing my teeth was totally on autopilot of like I never really want to think about this task at all.

01:04:52 ◼   ► So I've given this a little bit of a try, but I'm not 100 percent sure that this will be like forever going forward in the future.

01:04:58 ◼   ► But as far as tooth brushing apps go, I think it's about as good as it could be.

01:05:04 ◼   ► So what we do know is that you spend 50 minutes a week brushing your teeth.

01:05:09 ◼   ► Two minutes, twice a day, times seven.

01:05:12 ◼   ► Oh, I guess actually I guess that's not that far off.

01:05:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:05:14 ◼   ► So do you have to have the app open while you're brushing?

01:05:18 ◼   ► That is the killer.

01:05:18 ◼   ► That's what I mean by I want to be doing something else.

01:05:21 ◼   ► I see what you mean.

01:05:22 ◼   ► Yeah, no, I don't want to do that.

01:05:23 ◼   ► I don't want to live my life that way.

01:05:25 ◼   ► OK, Sonicare, if you're listening, what I really want you to do is the way YouTube could let you play like a little video on screen while you're doing something else.

01:05:34 ◼   ► That's what I want this app to functionally do.

01:05:36 ◼   ► Like show a little video on screen of what you want me to do so I can also be doing something else.

01:05:42 ◼   ► Because I do feel like that tooth brushing app, it's really blocking every other app on my phone while I'm brushing my teeth.

01:05:49 ◼   ► So don't love that.

01:05:51 ◼   ► I love that Asana is your most used app of the last week.

01:05:55 ◼   ► I mean, it really ties up what you were talking about earlier on.

01:05:58 ◼   ► I think that's amazing.

01:05:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:05:59 ◼   ► So ideally, this shouldn't be the case, right?

01:06:03 ◼   ► This is like setup week.

01:06:04 ◼   ► This is where I was really realizing like trying to get the iPhone app to work the way I want to display in widgets like the things that I want in the particular order.

01:06:14 ◼   ► It's functionally not really possible without just like a lot of work, which again, I may be able to automate through rules, but probably not.

01:06:24 ◼   ► But ideally, your task manager should not be the top thing on your phone.

01:06:29 ◼   ► It should maybe be like top one or two for pickups, but it shouldn't be like this many hours.

01:06:35 ◼   ► But this is entirely the like, oh, I had my computer open and I'm making changes and I'm keeping the phone open and seeing like, oh, how does that update in the app?

01:06:42 ◼   ► Because they're just like weirdly different.

01:06:44 ◼   ► How does this look in the widget?

01:06:45 ◼   ► So that's why that's there.

01:06:47 ◼   ► But that's not the way it should be like permanently going forward.

01:06:50 ◼   ► Something I cannot understand is how I have 117 pickups of messages and you have 115.

01:06:57 ◼   ► Now, that just doesn't feel like that can't be possible.

01:07:00 ◼   ► It should be the case for both of us, because I get the impression you just don't use messages for days.

01:07:07 ◼   ► And so I don't know what you're doing over there.

01:07:09 ◼   ► It's either way under counting yours or way over counting mine in some way.

01:07:15 ◼   ► I don't know, because that doesn't make any sense.

01:07:17 ◼   ► I mean, because, again, we now have like the actual numerical measurement here that I am like one quarter as popular as you.

01:07:23 ◼   ► So I should not be picking up messages as frequently as you.

01:07:26 ◼   ► No, no, no, no.

01:07:27 ◼   ► Remember, as I said, that is over counting for multiple devices.

01:07:31 ◼   ► No, it's under counting because you have all those group threads that you're also muting, right?

01:07:35 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, that's true.

01:07:36 ◼   ► I'm at least one quarter as popular as you.

01:07:40 ◼   ► So I don't understand that number either.

01:07:43 ◼   ► Just looking on my iPhone for last week.

01:07:45 ◼   ► 637 messages, 114 pickups.

01:07:49 ◼   ► You are at 657 messages, 115 pickups.

01:07:54 ◼   ► Did I accidentally screenshot your phone for my pickups?

01:07:57 ◼   ► I don't understand.

01:07:59 ◼   ► How is this possible?

01:07:59 ◼   ► Even though I don't understand at all how they could be so close, like the fact that you're using messages apparently as much as me.

01:08:05 ◼   ► I don't know who you're texting.

01:08:06 ◼   ► It ain't me.

01:08:07 ◼   ► But there's also something funny about that of like that 650 number to about 110 pickups.

01:08:14 ◼   ► Like there's like a correlation there that must be like just a standard number for pickup to notification ratio that occurs between people.

01:08:23 ◼   ► I guess so.

01:08:24 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:08:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:08:25 ◼   ► There's something statistically significant about that one, I guess, considering the fact that we use messages, I think, very differently.

01:08:33 ◼   ► But yet notification to pickup ratios is something.

01:08:36 ◼   ► That's very weird.

01:08:36 ◼   ► That is very, very, very weird.

01:08:38 ◼   ► Yeah, the only thing I can think of that might, it still seems like it's an overcounting, but I functionally don't use messages anywhere other than my phone.

01:08:47 ◼   ► Like I've turned it off on my computer and iPad.

01:08:49 ◼   ► So like I'm just never, ever interacting with it anywhere other than the phone, which might be like falsely pushing a bunch of activity here that you have distributed across more things.

01:08:59 ◼   ► That's true.

01:09:00 ◼   ► It still feels very wrong.

01:09:01 ◼   ► And I wasn't even thinking about it.

01:09:02 ◼   ► Like looking at the screen time, like four hours of messages also seems very wrong, but I don't know.

01:09:08 ◼   ► Whatever.

01:09:08 ◼   ► What was my time in messages?

01:09:11 ◼   ► Three hours, 13 minutes.

01:09:13 ◼   ► You're just like texting up a storm these days.

01:09:16 ◼   ► That's what I'm recognizing.

01:09:17 ◼   ► I think I screenshotted your phone.

01:09:19 ◼   ► I think that's what happened.

01:09:20 ◼   ► Well, no, the reason I know it's your phone is because Slack EMM is still in there.

01:09:25 ◼   ► I can't believe you're still using that.

01:09:27 ◼   ► Why would I ever change that?

01:09:29 ◼   ► One, I'm just very surprised that it still exists.

01:09:30 ◼   ► So this is the enterprise version of Slack that you can sign in to any Slack account with, right?

01:09:37 ◼   ► Like you're just right signed into a regular Slack.

01:09:39 ◼   ► It's not an enterprise Slack.

01:09:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:09:40 ◼   ► So you end up with two Slacks that you can control individually.

01:09:44 ◼   ► It's incredible.

01:09:45 ◼   ► I can't believe that that is still a thing that exists.

01:09:48 ◼   ► You know what?

01:09:49 ◼   ► I am realizing, though, I should probably change that.

01:09:52 ◼   ► So I originally did this to have like my Gray Industries Slack separate from the notifications for the Cortex Slack.

01:10:00 ◼   ► But I realized like I don't think actually now the settings are different anymore.

01:10:06 ◼   ► Like I think both of them are just doing the same thing that go into notification center.

01:10:10 ◼   ► So I should probably just have it in one because it is annoying enough times that I'm opening Slack and then I want to go to the other one.

01:10:18 ◼   ► So I should probably change that.

01:10:19 ◼   ► And also, I think since we first spoke about this, Slack has put in more native notification management than they would have had then.

01:10:28 ◼   ► Yes.

01:10:28 ◼   ► You know, I was like, yeah, what else has changed?

01:10:30 ◼   ► That is the other thing.

01:10:31 ◼   ► They've gotten way better at the ability to do that.

01:10:34 ◼   ► Okay, I'm deleting Slack EMM off my phone right now.

01:10:38 ◼   ► Well, don't forget to sign into the other Slack account, though.

01:10:40 ◼   ► And done.

01:10:41 ◼   ► That is the end of the task.

01:10:43 ◼   ► Absolutely nothing else to do.

01:10:45 ◼   ► Great.

01:10:46 ◼   ► It's just that was the last time we ever heard from him.

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01:12:26 ◼   ► So, tick-tock, Mike.

01:12:32 ◼   ► How goes the paternity clock?

01:12:34 ◼   ► It's ticking.

01:12:35 ◼   ► Oh, boy, is it ticking.

01:12:36 ◼   ► So, this is my last episode that people will hear before my paternity begins.

01:12:42 ◼   ► Me and you are actually pre-recording an episode.

01:12:45 ◼   ► Which, by the way, is going to be a book club.

01:12:47 ◼   ► I might as well say that now.

01:12:49 ◼   ► We're going to do How to Win Friends and Influence People.

01:12:52 ◼   ► So, that is going to be the next episode of Cortex,

01:12:55 ◼   ► which will be out sometime in March whenever I can find the time to post it.

01:13:01 ◼   ► Yeah, give it a read.

01:13:02 ◼   ► Probably the most famous self-help book, maybe?

01:13:05 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:13:06 ◼   ► It's got to be up there in the top.

01:13:08 ◼   ► More than Seven Habits?

01:13:10 ◼   ► I think more people would have name recognition for How to Win Friends and Influence People than Seven Habits.

01:13:16 ◼   ► Seven Habits might be better for the business people,

01:13:18 ◼   ► but I feel like general populace, How to Win Friends and Influence People,

01:13:22 ◼   ► it's got to be more name recognition.

01:13:23 ◼   ► I'm very aware of the title of the book,

01:13:25 ◼   ► and I'm very aware of the book having existed.

01:13:27 ◼   ► I think of all of the books that we are reading,

01:13:31 ◼   ► it is the one that I, even knowing the title is what I do,

01:13:34 ◼   ► I have no idea what this book is actually about.

01:13:37 ◼   ► Oh, interesting.

01:13:37 ◼   ► Okay.

01:13:38 ◼   ► Like, I can make a guess based on the title.

01:13:41 ◼   ► What would that guess be, Mike?

01:13:43 ◼   ► What do you think the book is about?

01:13:44 ◼   ► I don't really know how that translates to a book, in a way.

01:13:48 ◼   ► Right?

01:13:48 ◼   ► Like, because the title would suggest to me is it is about kind of manipulating people, I think.

01:13:53 ◼   ► But like, I don't know if that's what the book's going to be about.

01:13:56 ◼   ► So I'm intrigued to find out.

01:13:57 ◼   ► So that's going to be our next episode.

01:13:59 ◼   ► Wow.

01:13:59 ◼   ► So cynical, Mike.

01:14:00 ◼   ► That is actually the final podcast I will record before my paternity leave.

01:14:06 ◼   ► Oh, I'm last in line with that one.

01:14:08 ◼   ► I didn't realize.

01:14:09 ◼   ► Okay, so nothing else afterward.

01:14:10 ◼   ► Did you really expect that you wouldn't be playing realistically?

01:14:14 ◼   ► I mean, I guess that does seem kind of inevitable.

01:14:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:14:17 ◼   ► I'm sorry.

01:14:18 ◼   ► I apologize.

01:14:19 ◼   ► I'm just happy that we do have a plan to pre-record something, you know?

01:14:23 ◼   ► So my paternity leave, in the way in which it will be, is planned to be about an eight-week span.

01:14:33 ◼   ► Okay.

01:14:33 ◼   ► So this will be two weeks where I don't really want to hear from anyone.

01:14:40 ◼   ► And that is kind of like from when the baby is born, not the first two weeks of my paternity leave.

01:14:45 ◼   ► Because my expectation will be I will probably have about a week of paternity leave where the baby isn't here.

01:14:53 ◼   ► And that's just kind of like the final preparation time and also the true danger window.

01:14:59 ◼   ► Oh, I see.

01:15:00 ◼   ► Right.

01:15:00 ◼   ► Okay.

01:15:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:15:01 ◼   ► You know, different people do it in different ways.

01:15:03 ◼   ► But because I'm affording myself such a long period of time, I am going to give myself a little bit of time beforehand.

01:15:08 ◼   ► And, you know, I'm going to do a full deep clean of the house.

01:15:13 ◼   ► You're clearing the way for babies.

01:15:14 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:15:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:15:16 ◼   ► And, like, we're doing stuff like that now.

01:15:18 ◼   ► But this will be the, all right, the final, final things before I'm going to take care of them in those few days.

01:15:25 ◼   ► And then I will have, I'm expecting probably four weeks that I'm calling, like, with contact.

01:15:31 ◼   ► And then maybe a week or two of kind of, like, staging back in.

01:15:38 ◼   ► Now, the biggest thing, though, for this whole period of time is I won't be recording podcasts.

01:15:45 ◼   ► That is the, I mean, as we know from my time tracking, my biggest time allocated is to the preparation, recording, and editing of podcasts.

01:15:54 ◼   ► So this will give me most of my time back.

01:15:56 ◼   ► It's also the thing that takes me out of the house the most, which I don't want to be doing during this time.

01:16:03 ◼   ► So that is the thing.

01:16:05 ◼   ► And then I will be keeping in touch with various endeavors.

01:16:09 ◼   ► There will be the occasional meeting that I'll still be attending, like, during the kind of, like, four weeks with contact and the week or two of staging back in.

01:16:19 ◼   ► The staging back in will probably include recording some podcasts, but not all of them.

01:16:23 ◼   ► But that is a very nebulous thing.

01:16:26 ◼   ► This is a thing that a bunch of friends recommended I do.

01:16:28 ◼   ► But really, it's like, will this occur at week six or will this occur actually at week eight?

01:16:34 ◼   ► And maybe, you know, some stuff doesn't start again until, like, week nine.

01:16:38 ◼   ► I don't know yet.

01:16:39 ◼   ► Wait, was your original plan just to go straight back into all of it and not phase it in?

01:16:44 ◼   ► Of course. You know me.

01:16:45 ◼   ► Oh, my God.

01:16:46 ◼   ► You know me.

01:16:46 ◼   ► I was like, bang, let's go.

01:16:48 ◼   ► Like, because that's just how my brain works.

01:16:50 ◼   ► It didn't even cross my mind that you could do that.

01:16:53 ◼   ► Oh, boy.

01:16:53 ◼   ► Incorrect, Mike.

01:16:55 ◼   ► I'm glad you have been correctly advised on this to stage it back in.

01:16:59 ◼   ► Am I going to be last out first back in?

01:17:01 ◼   ► Is that the way it's going to work for Cortex?

01:17:03 ◼   ► You might be first back in, yeah.

01:17:06 ◼   ► I'm not sure yet, though, because I really don't know.

01:17:09 ◼   ► I don't know what the end part of this looks like.

01:17:11 ◼   ► I mean, but this is, like, emblematic of this entire process for me.

01:17:16 ◼   ► Being self-employed, I'm just working this out on my own, right?

01:17:20 ◼   ► Like, why eight weeks?

01:17:21 ◼   ► Because that felt like a good number.

01:17:24 ◼   ► It was also my opening gambit, and everybody agreed, which I couldn't believe and I was so

01:17:28 ◼   ► happy about.

01:17:29 ◼   ► Like, I was just like, well, six would be nice.

01:17:32 ◼   ► I guess I'll start with eight.

01:17:33 ◼   ► And, like, it was like a negotiation.

01:17:35 ◼   ► But all of my colleagues were like, yeah, of course, take as much time as you want.

01:17:38 ◼   ► I was like, oh, great.

01:17:39 ◼   ► I'll take eight weeks then.

01:17:40 ◼   ► I didn't know what I should do, but I knew what I wanted.

01:17:44 ◼   ► And what I wanted was as much time as seemed realistic.

01:17:48 ◼   ► This is a very important thing for me to be able to spend as much time as I can in the beginning

01:17:57 ◼   ► of building my family.

01:17:59 ◼   ► And there was also this thing in my mind, which was, if I can't take a really long time,

01:18:05 ◼   ► kind of what was the point of doing all of this?

01:18:08 ◼   ► Yes.

01:18:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:18:09 ◼   ► Why build your own career for a decade if you then can't take an opportunity like this, you know?

01:18:16 ◼   ► And there was a part of me that was like, you deserve this.

01:18:20 ◼   ► Like, you have gotten yourself to a point where you can do this, so you should do this.

01:18:24 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:18:26 ◼   ► 100%.

01:18:26 ◼   ► I feel like we talked about this in the very early days of Cortex, but that the danger of

01:18:32 ◼   ► being a self-employed person, which does happen to most self-employed people, is that you end

01:18:37 ◼   ► up just building this kind of cage for yourself that in many ways can be much worse than the

01:18:43 ◼   ► job that you left if you were trying to do it for freedom reasons.

01:18:47 ◼   ► is like, oh boy, you can be the person that everything hinges on and now you can never

01:18:53 ◼   ► take breaks.

01:18:53 ◼   ► And like, you have to be so careful in constructing your career to be able to do that.

01:18:59 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, if you are able to do that, Mike, it's like, yeah, 100%.

01:19:03 ◼   ► That is because you have made that possible.

01:19:06 ◼   ► And I consider myself to be incredibly lucky that I am surrounded by the most supportive

01:19:18 ◼   ► co-workers and that everyone is just making it work.

01:19:22 ◼   ► I am also doing my best to just trust everybody that it will all be done, which is not my natural

01:19:32 ◼   ► way of feeling.

01:19:33 ◼   ► No, it is not.

01:19:35 ◼   ► We all have pride in the work that we do.

01:19:37 ◼   ► And part of the pride that I have is that everything is done as well as it can be on time.

01:19:43 ◼   ► And I feel like for projects to work that way, everybody kind of has to agree on that.

01:19:49 ◼   ► Like I'm part of my role in a lot of the shows that I have and a lot of the projects that I

01:19:55 ◼   ► have is the person who makes sure that this is done, make sure that that is done and gets

01:20:01 ◼   ► it complete.

01:20:02 ◼   ► And it's not the case of all of my projects, because Steven is more that person than me.

01:20:07 ◼   ► So like on Connected, he does all of that.

01:20:09 ◼   ► But on my other shows, I tend to be like the driving force, the producing force.

01:20:16 ◼   ► And so for that time period, I'm kind of like handing everything over to my co-hosts and I

01:20:23 ◼   ► trust that they will get it done because I know it's important to them too.

01:20:27 ◼   ► So typically, say I'm away and something is happening, I will kind of be checking in on

01:20:33 ◼   ► it, you know, or like keeping my eye on it.

01:20:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:20:36 ◼   ► But I am choosing for this time period.

01:20:38 ◼   ► I know everyone can handle this and I am going to turn my attention to the thing that is more

01:20:43 ◼   ► important to me during this time.

01:20:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:20:45 ◼   ► But that's not easy when you've been the de facto project manager for most of the podcasts

01:20:50 ◼   ► that you're working on.

01:20:51 ◼   ► I'm going to be really interested to kind of like debrief of everyone of like how this

01:20:55 ◼   ► time was for them.

01:20:56 ◼   ► Like I was talking to Jason the other day and he was like, it was very sweet.

01:21:01 ◼   ► He said to me, I'm going to miss you.

01:21:02 ◼   ► He said something along the lines of, I think I'm going to realize how much, like in doing

01:21:07 ◼   ► everything, kind of realizing like what we both bring to the table, which I thought was very

01:21:12 ◼   ► funny.

01:21:12 ◼   ► I mean, I do want to ask, cause the thing that caught my attention straight away is

01:21:16 ◼   ► you said here, like the first two weeks, this is a very strong statement for Mike, no contact.

01:21:22 ◼   ► I was just like, what are the boundaries of that?

01:21:24 ◼   ► What do you really mean?

01:21:25 ◼   ► Like no, no contact with anyone?

01:21:27 ◼   ► Like, like what does that mean to you?

01:21:29 ◼   ► Cause that's a very strong statement.

01:21:31 ◼   ► For those two weeks, I don't want to hear from anybody that I work with unless it is an

01:21:36 ◼   ► absolutely critical emergency.

01:21:38 ◼   ► Okay.

01:21:40 ◼   ► Like there are other people that can answer questions.

01:21:43 ◼   ► If they can't, then you can get to me.

01:21:46 ◼   ► Okay.

01:21:47 ◼   ► And I feel like it's important to be that strong because then it makes people question if something

01:21:52 ◼   ► truly is an emergency.

01:21:53 ◼   ► I kind of want people to just work out on their own because it's unlikely you're going to hear

01:21:59 ◼   ► from me anyway.

01:22:00 ◼   ► You know, like even if you've got something you want to say to me that time period, I just,

01:22:04 ◼   ► there is only one thing that I want to be focusing on and I want to put all of my energy

01:22:10 ◼   ► energy into that.

01:22:11 ◼   ► And I don't want to be thinking about work.

01:22:14 ◼   ► I would suggest if you haven't thought of this already, that this is a good time to have

01:22:19 ◼   ► your assistant act as the firewall.

01:22:21 ◼   ► Yes.

01:22:21 ◼   ► We're doing something like that.

01:22:23 ◼   ► Great.

01:22:23 ◼   ► Right.

01:22:23 ◼   ► Cause it's like, ah, if she's the first point of contact, I think it helps just put a little

01:22:28 ◼   ► bit more resistance to people just messaging you.

01:22:31 ◼   ► Yes.

01:22:31 ◼   ► So let me explain how this is going to work.

01:22:33 ◼   ► So for relay, it's not needed because there is an infrastructure that already exists and

01:22:40 ◼   ► everybody knows.

01:22:41 ◼   ► Like no one's going to need me, right?

01:22:43 ◼   ► Like they know they can go to Steven.

01:22:45 ◼   ► They know they can go to Carrie.

01:22:47 ◼   ► They know they can go to Kathy.

01:22:48 ◼   ► And realistically, most of the time people would go to one of those three before me anyway,

01:22:53 ◼   ► for most things.

01:22:54 ◼   ► So like for relay, it's not so much of a thing for Cortex brand, that is the way it's going

01:23:00 ◼   ► to work that everyone's going to go to my assistant.

01:23:02 ◼   ► And also something that is going to be happening, which when it was originally pitched to me was

01:23:08 ◼   ► a horrifying idea, but I really came around to it quite quickly is my assistant is going

01:23:12 ◼   ► to be managing my email from my paternity leave.

01:23:15 ◼   ► Great.

01:23:16 ◼   ► So she will have my email logins and we'll be looking at it a few times a day, triaging

01:23:23 ◼   ► it and she will then, if like something appears to be urgent, come reach out to me.

01:23:28 ◼   ► But by and large, it will be triaged.

01:23:31 ◼   ► She will put in Slack things that maybe I want to know if I want to just go and have a look,

01:23:36 ◼   ► right?

01:23:37 ◼   ► Like rather than open the email.

01:23:38 ◼   ► But then whenever I do get to my email, there will be just the stuff that is important for

01:23:44 ◼   ► me to see, even if it's not necessarily urgent, but is important.

01:23:47 ◼   ► So that is like a big part of it.

01:23:50 ◼   ► But realistically, everyone in Cortex Brown will know they can go to her and she will

01:23:56 ◼   ► get to me if it's needed or just collect things up.

01:23:59 ◼   ► And with relay, the structure is already well in place.

01:24:03 ◼   ► And realistically, these days, people, they don't need me for this kind of stuff.

01:24:09 ◼   ► Like everyone's pretty self-sufficient anyway.

01:24:11 ◼   ► And typically if something urgent is needed, it's very rarely me that has the answers anyway.

01:24:16 ◼   ► It's like if it's technical, Stephen is doing it.

01:24:20 ◼   ► If it's ads, Kerry is doing it.

01:24:23 ◼   ► And those are the two most urgent categories.

01:24:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:24:25 ◼   ► But then like that's when I said the urgent things then are like something quite bad is

01:24:31 ◼   ► happening, you know?

01:24:32 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

01:24:32 ◼   ► And these things can happen.

01:24:34 ◼   ► They do happen.

01:24:35 ◼   ► And I will just hope that they don't happen while I'm on my paternity leave.

01:24:39 ◼   ► It was funny that there was something similar.

01:24:42 ◼   ► So Stephen took a sabbatical earlier this year.

01:24:46 ◼   ► In part because I was going to be taking a break and so it felt good to be able to give

01:24:51 ◼   ► him some time too after the podcast of Thumbury really put a lot into it last year.

01:24:57 ◼   ► And I think within three or four days, our entire website broke.

01:25:01 ◼   ► It is the whole thing.

01:25:03 ◼   ► Oh, no.

01:25:03 ◼   ► The whole thing.

01:25:05 ◼   ► It was just 100% unresponsive.

01:25:07 ◼   ► And I know a few things to do.

01:25:11 ◼   ► Poor Stephen.

01:25:12 ◼   ► Poor Stephen.

01:25:13 ◼   ► That's terrible.

01:25:14 ◼   ► And I went in and like I was like rebooting things and like, you know, I was trying my

01:25:20 ◼   ► best and I reached out to him and luckily he didn't even know what needed to be done in

01:25:25 ◼   ► that scenario.

01:25:26 ◼   ► And so then we got our developer involved and it was like a, it was just a random chance

01:25:32 ◼   ► that like an update had failed on the server kind of thing.

01:25:34 ◼   ► But it was like, I felt so bad.

01:25:36 ◼   ► Like I tried so hard to fix it and I couldn't fix it.

01:25:39 ◼   ► But like there are things like that that could happen, but in the reverse, I don't know what

01:25:43 ◼   ► they would be, but like some kind of big business issue, which, you know, is a decision that

01:25:48 ◼   ► Stephen would probably not make on his own and would at least want me to know about it.

01:25:51 ◼   ► But I consider that unlikely.

01:25:53 ◼   ► And I also know that he knows how important this is to me and it's important to him that

01:25:58 ◼   ► I can take this time.

01:25:59 ◼   ► So it would have to be huge to kind of cross my path.

01:26:01 ◼   ► But we'll see.

01:26:02 ◼   ► I mean, for the majority of the time that I will be away, I'm going to be checking in

01:26:07 ◼   ► with people and answering questions.

01:26:09 ◼   ► It would just be on like a weird schedule, you know, like people could send me stuff and

01:26:12 ◼   ► I'll get back to them when I can.

01:26:13 ◼   ► Cortex brand is probably where the majority of my work will go during my paternity leave

01:26:20 ◼   ► just because it needs more decisions right now because it's new.

01:26:25 ◼   ► And it's likely we're going to be launching our pocket notebooks during my paternity leave,

01:26:30 ◼   ► which is a decision that I made that I want to do it during that time period, because if

01:26:37 ◼   ► this is going to be the year of products, we have to actually launch the products.

01:26:41 ◼   ► And so that is going to be happening during the time, but obviously towards the end.

01:26:47 ◼   ► I feel like I would strong push to defer that to the fees back in two weeks period.

01:26:52 ◼   ► That's probably just when it's going to end up being like just based on shipping and stuff

01:26:56 ◼   ► like that.

01:26:57 ◼   ► Like it's going to be in April for sure.

01:27:00 ◼   ► Then it's just kind of like when is everything ready?

01:27:03 ◼   ► But luckily, it's good in a way because with the way that things are timing up, it means there

01:27:09 ◼   ► is work for everyone to do while I'm away.

01:27:12 ◼   ► You know, images to be taken, copy to be written, like stuff that everyone can just be getting

01:27:16 ◼   ► on with, which is all of the things around a new product launch.

01:27:19 ◼   ► And that I can then start reviewing as I'm kind of about a bit more, you know, like things

01:27:26 ◼   ► that are a bit more asynchronous and we can kind of take our time with it.

01:27:29 ◼   ► Like we're not on a time crunch.

01:27:30 ◼   ► All of the pieces can be put into place for when I return, you know, because everybody that

01:27:36 ◼   ► works with us, they're working on hours, right?

01:27:40 ◼   ► So like they're billing us for their time.

01:27:43 ◼   ► And something that I was nervous about in like, you know, months and months ago was I

01:27:49 ◼   ► didn't want my paternity leave to result in nobody being able to bill any hours.

01:27:54 ◼   ► Right.

01:27:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:55 ◼   ► You don't want to be the blocker for absolutely everybody.

01:27:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:58 ◼   ► And so I'm really happy that we have this like project of getting all of the collateral

01:28:04 ◼   ► together for a new product for happening while I'm gone, because everyone will be having things

01:28:10 ◼   ► that they can get on with without me needing to be there.

01:28:13 ◼   ► And that, you know, then eventually everybody presents what they've got and then I can do

01:28:19 ◼   ► the approvals and the approval stuff or like the feedback stuff that doesn't take too much

01:28:23 ◼   ► time.

01:28:23 ◼   ► The time has actually been getting to this point, you know, putting brace together and like getting

01:28:29 ◼   ► all the products together.

01:28:30 ◼   ► And I can set it out to all of our creative people that we work with and they can go ahead

01:28:33 ◼   ► and put something together for us.

01:28:35 ◼   ► So like, I think that's, I'm happy that I've gotten this project to this point before the

01:28:41 ◼   ► leave begins.

01:28:42 ◼   ► You just reminded me and I am assigning it to you right now, a template in the Cortex brand

01:28:49 ◼   ► Asana for product launching.

01:28:51 ◼   ► So while you're doing this, I'm just going to put that in there for you to just like throw

01:28:58 ◼   ► in the rough steps as we're doing it this way, this new way the first time and like we'll

01:29:03 ◼   ► organize it later, but this is just like a place to start capturing like what do you

01:29:07 ◼   ► want to have happen in what order and when.

01:29:09 ◼   ► So yeah, there you go.

01:29:12 ◼   ► There's something assigned to you right now in Asana while you were thinking about it.

01:29:16 ◼   ► But yeah, might as well do this for the pockets.

01:29:19 ◼   ► It's like our little product launch.

01:29:21 ◼   ► It feels like it's the perfect one to start with.

01:29:24 ◼   ► And yeah, if you're going to do it for the phasing back in time, we need to get on this.

01:29:28 ◼   ► Love it.

01:29:29 ◼   ► So aside from the thing that I have just assigned you though, how do you feel about clearing

01:29:37 ◼   ► your calendar like this?

01:29:39 ◼   ► I mean, this has got to be like the biggest no work intentionally time you've had like since

01:29:48 ◼   ► the start of relay since the start of working.

01:29:51 ◼   ► I mean, I don't even know.

01:29:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:29:52 ◼   ► It's got to be like your absolute biggest break.

01:29:55 ◼   ► How are you feeling about it?

01:29:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:29:56 ◼   ► The biggest break I had before this was my honeymoon, which was two weeks.

01:30:01 ◼   ► After that, I then like, you know, every year will take like a week or two that will be

01:30:06 ◼   ► completely away from work and I'll take a couple breaks and stuff.

01:30:09 ◼   ► So one, I would say I'm really looking forward to having the opportunity to detach from work

01:30:15 ◼   ► and the news cycle for the period of time that I'm going to have.

01:30:18 ◼   ► I think it's going to be a good refresh for me for when I come back.

01:30:22 ◼   ► What I'm looking forward to is like the way I'm going to get news about the topics I care

01:30:27 ◼   ► about is by listening to the podcasts that I'm not on.

01:30:30 ◼   ► I think it'll be fun.

01:30:32 ◼   ► So I'm not going to read like RSS during my paternity, but I will listen to Upgrade.

01:30:37 ◼   ► I will listen to Connected, right?

01:30:39 ◼   ► Like I'll listen to The Pen Addict and we'll hear what is happening that way, which I'm looking

01:30:43 ◼   ► for.

01:30:44 ◼   ► I'm actually really looking forward to that.

01:30:45 ◼   ► It will be fun.

01:30:46 ◼   ► That's a funny thought.

01:30:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:47 ◼   ► You get to experience the show as a real listener does.

01:30:50 ◼   ► Which I always get when I'm on vacation.

01:30:52 ◼   ► But even when I'm on vacation, I'm still kind of like keeping up a little more.

01:30:55 ◼   ► But this time it's like gone.

01:30:56 ◼   ► It's not the same.

01:30:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:58 ◼   ► You're still doing more.

01:30:59 ◼   ► The biggest fear that I have or like the biggest concern I have for my work during this

01:31:07 ◼   ► time is like more of like an imposter syndrome-y thing.

01:31:11 ◼   ► It's going to be a long time on my weekly shows where I'm not there.

01:31:16 ◼   ► And it's like, will people prefer it?

01:31:19 ◼   ► That's what I get in my head.

01:31:22 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know if you could hear the sound of me rolling my eyes at the words imposter

01:31:26 ◼   ► syndrome.

01:31:27 ◼   ► I just have no patience for this concept.

01:31:29 ◼   ► What's your real fear here is replacement syndrome, right?

01:31:32 ◼   ► That's what your fear is.

01:31:33 ◼   ► But like people are like, oh, I much prefer it without Mike or I much prefer the show with

01:31:38 ◼   ► this guest or that guest.

01:31:39 ◼   ► And this comes from the fact that like sometimes when I'm away, people say these things and

01:31:43 ◼   ► I get it, right?

01:31:44 ◼   ► Like there are maybe certain pairings that you prefer.

01:31:47 ◼   ► I don't think everybody has to like me.

01:31:49 ◼   ► Like I'm not unrealistic, right?

01:31:52 ◼   ► In the way that I think about the content that I make because I'm also a consumer of content

01:31:57 ◼   ► too.

01:31:57 ◼   ► And I have preferences about the pairings or the people that are as part of projects that

01:32:02 ◼   ► I like and don't like.

01:32:03 ◼   ► You know, I get that.

01:32:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:05 ◼   ► It's just like a weird thing.

01:32:06 ◼   ► It's like a long time.

01:32:07 ◼   ► And I know that that's going to be in there or maybe I won't care.

01:32:11 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:32:12 ◼   ► But it is something that I am nervous about a little bit because it's like a weird thing

01:32:16 ◼   ► to do to take such a long time away from these creative projects.

01:32:20 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I think you do have the different problem of you will actually be subbed in.

01:32:27 ◼   ► So for rolling my eyes at imposter syndrome, it's like I do get it.

01:32:31 ◼   ► And of course, given the way that the internet is, everyone will tell you their opinion on

01:32:35 ◼   ► everything.

01:32:35 ◼   ► And like with an audience size large enough, you will hear every version of everything,

01:32:40 ◼   ► which means like, yep, you're sure going to hear from the people who are like, I like

01:32:43 ◼   ► the new guy better.

01:32:44 ◼   ► That's just going to happen.

01:32:45 ◼   ► But it is the sheer way that these things go.

01:32:48 ◼   ► I know I'm going to have so many people because I'm already having it tell me how they're

01:32:52 ◼   ► going to miss me, but they're so excited.

01:32:54 ◼   ► And when I come back, people are going to be like, oh, I'm so happy you're back.

01:32:57 ◼   ► But there'll be like three people who will email me and be like, stay away forever.

01:33:03 ◼   ► And they're the only ones I'm going to think about.

01:33:05 ◼   ► But like, I know this.

01:33:06 ◼   ► But the thing is, I've been on the internet for too long that I know that it will bug me

01:33:11 ◼   ► for a day or two.

01:33:12 ◼   ► But I've just like hardened over time.

01:33:15 ◼   ► I'm kind of just like, hey, so what?

01:33:19 ◼   ► That is the ultimate thing that I get to with those where there is this kind of thing of

01:33:23 ◼   ► like someone was here to me.

01:33:23 ◼   ► Oh, I wish such and such person was here instead of you.

01:33:26 ◼   ► And I'm kind of like, well, unfortunately, you have me to listen to.

01:33:29 ◼   ► So that's your punishment, I guess.

01:33:30 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:33:31 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:33:32 ◼   ► I mean, my feeling is a little bit more direct, Mike.

01:33:34 ◼   ► It's like, they're your shows.

01:33:36 ◼   ► Those people can suck it.

01:33:37 ◼   ► That's just the end of it.

01:33:38 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:33:39 ◼   ► But like outside of that, it's like business disasters.

01:33:41 ◼   ► But I don't really worry about that.

01:33:43 ◼   ► But the thing, the more realistic thing from a business perspective is like, what are the

01:33:47 ◼   ► little things that get missed?

01:33:48 ◼   ► And how long does it take to realize?

01:33:50 ◼   ► But they're also going to be handled like it will just be handled.

01:33:54 ◼   ► And I know it will be.

01:33:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:33:55 ◼   ► And again, definitely, if they're little things that get missed, they're little things.

01:33:59 ◼   ► They're not business disasters.

01:34:01 ◼   ► So I feel like it's definitionally fine for this period of time.

01:34:04 ◼   ► So, yeah.

01:34:06 ◼   ► I feel like you have nothing to worry about, Mike.

01:34:08 ◼   ► I'm very confident in your paternity leave.

01:34:10 ◼   ► What could go wrong?

01:34:11 ◼   ► I know it's going to be fine.

01:34:13 ◼   ► I genuinely know it's going to be fine.

01:34:15 ◼   ► But also, it doesn't matter because I have something that I care more about.

01:34:19 ◼   ► Right?

01:34:21 ◼   ► Like, ultimately, the reason for all of this is for this time period and for the next little

01:34:27 ◼   ► while and then for the rest of my life, there's something more important than me.

01:34:31 ◼   ► And I don't know how that's going to feel yet, but, like, I'm more aware of it than before.

01:34:38 ◼   ► You know?

01:34:39 ◼   ► Like, I'm more aware of this feeling that my life is about to change, and I'll see what

01:34:46 ◼   ► it feels like on the other end of it.

01:34:48 ◼   ► And I'm curious to know who that man will be because it's not the one that's here right

01:34:53 ◼   ► now.

01:34:53 ◼   ► And I feel very confident of the fact that I am about to undergo the single biggest change

01:35:00 ◼   ► of my entire life.

01:35:01 ◼   ► And nothing will ever come close to this after.

01:35:04 ◼   ► And so, we'll see.

01:35:07 ◼   ► What could go wrong?

01:35:08 ◼   ► Cortexans, this is the end of the show, but it doesn't have to be.

01:35:12 ◼   ► There is more.

01:35:13 ◼   ► Just go to getmoretext.com and you can sign up now.

01:35:16 ◼   ► You'll get longer, ad-free versions of the show.

01:35:19 ◼   ► In more text this time, I talk a little bit about themes for parenthood and more about how

01:35:25 ◼   ► ready I feel for this next step in my life.

01:35:28 ◼   ► Go to getmoretext.com and you can sign up now, support the show, and get longer, ad-free

01:35:33 ◼   ► episodes.