Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► Happy new year. Happy new year. We had lots of suggestions written in by

00:00:04 ◼   ► Cortexians for suggestions to your theme name, although I'm not really sure why. I feel like it was perfect already. The year of small improvements. I don't know why we would need a suggestion. But I would like to start with the most common, also most nerdy suggestion that we got from listeners, which was the year of Snow Leopard. Oh, yeah, I love that. That's fantastic. S tier name suggestion. Year of Snow Leopard. I really like that.

00:00:34 ◼   ► So I feel like year of small improvements bracket Snow Leopard is fine. And for people that are unaware, which should be I expect the majority of listeners, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which was a version of Mac OS in 2009 following Mac OS X Leopard because it used to be named after cats. Yeah. The idea of Snow Leopard was this was the no new features release.

00:01:03 ◼   ► It's a quality of life improvement.

00:01:04 ◼   ► Yeah. However, it wasn't though. And like, that's the thing about Snow Leopard. It's like the dark secret of Snow Leopard is Snow Leopard actually included huge foundational changes to Mac OS X, but they just didn't really promote them to customers.

00:01:18 ◼   ► I think the thing about Snow Leopard, which has got to be the most famous, like, I think if you ask most people to name one, that they're going to name Snow Leopard, but it's partly because I do think there's this thing where they did say no new features. But it was really more like, what did the nerds really want and like, create in their mind the like the idea of Snow Leopard is greater than what Snow Leopard actually was.

00:01:43 ◼   ► The legend.

00:01:44 ◼   ► Yes, the legend.

00:01:46 ◼   ► There were no like, customer features.

00:01:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:01:49 ◼   ► But it included a thing called Grand Central Dispatch, which I'm not going to bother getting into today.

00:01:55 ◼   ► Yeah, but was not a small addition to the operating system.

00:01:57 ◼   ► Absolutely massively important.

00:01:59 ◼   ► Yeah, as the name Grand Central Dispatch might imply.

00:02:03 ◼   ► Such a good name.

00:02:04 ◼   ► It was really no new customer facing features is really what it was. But everyone likes to remember it as, oh, that's the year where they didn't do anything and they just fix stuff.

00:02:12 ◼   ► If you're curious, at least to understand, Grand Central Dispatch is basically the underlying technology that would allow for multiple processor cores and for tasks to be handed between them.

00:02:22 ◼   ► It's a very oversimplified version of that.

00:02:24 ◼   ► But like, if you know anything about the way that computing is done today, you understand how fundamentally important that is.

00:02:30 ◼   ► And that was what Snow Leopard included.

00:02:32 ◼   ► So like, there is a funny thing of like, you can only really call this the year of Snow Leopard.

00:02:37 ◼   ► If I think of like, you know, say about a duck swimming of like, above the water is elegant, but underneath is everything's happening, you know, that's kind of what it would have to be, which I don't.

00:02:47 ◼   ► I mean, you can correct me if I'm wrong.

00:02:49 ◼   ► This does not feel like a Snow Leopard year for you.

00:02:51 ◼   ► So Mike, I've got what it should be in the brackets, right?

00:02:54 ◼   ► All right.

00:02:54 ◼   ► It's year of small improvements, brackets, the legend of Snow Leopard.

00:03:00 ◼   ► Oh, yes.

00:03:01 ◼   ► That's the name.

00:03:02 ◼   ► Forget everything you know about themes.

00:03:05 ◼   ► All right.

00:03:05 ◼   ► This is how they are now.

00:03:07 ◼   ► Forget the years of work we've established.

00:03:09 ◼   ► If it hasn't got an absolutely epic subtitle, what is the point?

00:03:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:03:15 ◼   ► Does that resonate with you, dear listener?

00:03:17 ◼   ► Some more serious recommendations is the year of optimizing, the year of refresh, the year of user experience.

00:03:24 ◼   ► I kind of like that.

00:03:25 ◼   ► But I actually think the year of small improvements really did the job.

00:03:28 ◼   ► The year of quality of life, that was not good, right?

00:03:31 ◼   ► Like that one is just like, clunky.

00:03:33 ◼   ► Year of quality of life was the first thing that had entered my brain.

00:03:38 ◼   ► And then I think you can kind of hear it in that episode.

00:03:41 ◼   ► I try to explain it as like, it's like a year of small improvements.

00:03:44 ◼   ► It was like, no, dude, that's obviously the better name.

00:03:47 ◼   ► Like you should just go with that.

00:03:49 ◼   ► At this point, I'm completely fine with year of small improvements and I really love it as brackets, the legend of Snow Leopard.

00:03:56 ◼   ► Like I could see the movie poster in my head for this year's theme.

00:04:00 ◼   ► Absolutely love it.

00:04:02 ◼   ► And so here's the thing that I want to try to establish as not a regular, but maybe like a quasi-regular thing for this year.

00:04:12 ◼   ► Which is one of the problems I had last year was I kept feeling like, oh man, year of work, like it's this huge thing.

00:04:22 ◼   ► And I kept building up a monumental pile of notes of like, oh, these are all the things that I want to talk about for the end of the year, for year of work.

00:04:30 ◼   ► It's such a big deal.

00:04:32 ◼   ► That it was just like way too much.

00:04:34 ◼   ► And so frequently you and I do have this thing where we sort of don't want to talk about the theme in like the second half of the year, because then that can naturally lead into discussions about like, what were the problems or like, what's the next thing?

00:04:47 ◼   ► So I want to try to just occasionally have like a small improvement report on the show as just like, hey, as I'm going along, here's an example of like a little small improvement that I made.

00:05:00 ◼   ► And the first one I want to start out with is just to me, iconic.

00:05:04 ◼   ► This to me is like the perfect example of the kind of thing that I am aiming for.

00:05:08 ◼   ► And I know it's always one of Mike's favorite things, a change to my recording setup.

00:05:14 ◼   ► One, why would you do it?

00:05:15 ◼   ► And two, why'd you tell me?

00:05:16 ◼   ► You know, like I don't want to know.

00:05:18 ◼   ► I'm happier to not know.

00:05:20 ◼   ► Okay.

00:05:20 ◼   ► But so look, here is perfect example of the kind of thing that I want to keep my mind open to over the course of the year, right?

00:05:30 ◼   ► Look out for what are small annoyances that your brain has just been kind of pushing to the side because it feels like it's below some sort of threshold to even bother dealing with.

00:05:42 ◼   ► And the one that I've changed, what I'm so happy with has to do with just the wire that runs from my headphone into the computer.

00:05:52 ◼   ► In just the most minor of annoyances, the wire is running as one might expect.

00:05:58 ◼   ► It just goes from my headphone across my desk and then back to the laptop, which was on the other side of the desk.

00:06:05 ◼   ► I thought, you know what?

00:06:07 ◼   ► I hate this.

00:06:07 ◼   ► I hate this so much.

00:06:08 ◼   ► Like I'll hit it with my hand sometimes or it's just like mildly in the way or it's like slightly constricts my motion because you're just aware like, oh, I don't want to pull this wire.

00:06:15 ◼   ► So I just decided to be like, how am I going to solve this?

00:06:18 ◼   ► And so all I've done is I rearranged my desk.

00:06:24 ◼   ► Basically, I'm running the wire now behind my desk, under the desk, and I bought a little magnetic attachment.

00:06:33 ◼   ► So that what I have now is that like right underneath my keyboard in the center of my desk is where the wire ends with a little magnetic attachment.

00:06:42 ◼   ► So I can pull it out, plug it into my headphones when we're recording the show, and then I can just put it back and it magnetically connects back under my desk.

00:06:50 ◼   ► And now the wire runs in between my hands up to my headphones and is never in the way when I'm recording.

00:06:56 ◼   ► And it's like such a small thing, but it's like, ah, love it.

00:07:02 ◼   ► This is better. This has less friction.

00:07:04 ◼   ► This is just more pleasant.

00:07:06 ◼   ► Most wire connectors I've never really liked, but I thought, you know, what would be a nice version of this?

00:07:10 ◼   ► There must be little magnetic ones that you can do.

00:07:12 ◼   ► It's like, oh, perfect. This is great.

00:07:13 ◼   ► So that's the kind of thing where I'm like, ah, this is what I'm looking for.

00:07:18 ◼   ► Find these little annoyances, make these small improvements in your life.

00:07:22 ◼   ► Think about all the things that you frequently interact with and see how you can make them better.

00:07:26 ◼   ► I would say as far as a change to your recording setup can go, you just changing the way your headphones connect, that doesn't bother me.

00:07:34 ◼   ► Or that's a you problem, you know, like that only affects you and it doesn't affect me.

00:07:38 ◼   ► I mean, that was like pulling on a small thread and it ended with me taking everything out of my office and completely redoing my entire office setup as well to try to make it better.

00:07:54 ◼   ► So that's how it started recording on different computers and completely different setups and everything is different as well.

00:07:59 ◼   ► But that's how it began small improvement.

00:08:02 ◼   ► I feel like if this was a different show, maybe if this was a show that you didn't have a hand in the editing of, this year of small improvements segment would be introed with the sound of a snow leopard roaring.

00:08:15 ◼   ► You know, that's what I would do.

00:08:18 ◼   ► But I don't think you would allow that.

00:08:21 ◼   ► In the essence of a little theme update, I have a little theme update for you.

00:08:25 ◼   ► Last time on the show, so for more text subscribers, which is a longer ad free version of the show, we discussed the yearly theme for Cortex brand this year, which is going to be the year of basics.

00:08:37 ◼   ► So we kind of decided on that segment.

00:08:40 ◼   ► And so far this year, I've done a pretty good job of aligning my year, the year of people and the Cortex brand theme, the year of basics on a project of building the groundwork and putting the pieces in place to create an email newsletter system for Cortex brand.

00:08:57 ◼   ► So again, email newsletter plus like email marketing program, I guess would be the two things together.

00:09:03 ◼   ► And so far it has been like a four person team effort to find a system that works for us and then also start building the templates for email design, working on copy and like the email flows for people.

00:09:19 ◼   ► So it's been a pretty big project so far, but the speed at which it has occurred is because of all of the people involved in it.

00:09:28 ◼   ► Like if it was me or just like one person doing it on their own, it wouldn't look as good or be as effective or would have gotten like the work wouldn't have started so quickly.

00:09:37 ◼   ► So I'm hoping before the end of January, we'll have started sending stuff.

00:09:43 ◼   ► So, yeah, I'm pretty excited about it.

00:09:45 ◼   ► And it's been a nice thing to see these two themes coming together already that my kind of focus on working with people has enabled for us to start laying the groundwork for something which is kind of so basic for a company like ours, but something we just have not put any focus on until now.

00:10:01 ◼   ► Yeah, that's why I like I was in that segment.

00:10:04 ◼   ► I was a bit dubious at first about your basics as the theme, but you completely sold me on it.

00:10:09 ◼   ► And yes, the get our house in order with regards to the email list really is the most basic of basic starting point for a business that sells stuff on the Internet.

00:10:20 ◼   ► Like you said, people were horrified when we would discuss this and be like, so how's your email list?

00:10:25 ◼   ► Like email list? We don't have one.

00:10:27 ◼   ► Like what are you doing?

00:10:29 ◼   ► Most of our friends, Tom and Dan, because we do a show together about like product stuff and businesses and they were mentioning their email list again.

00:10:37 ◼   ► And I think Tom said it is the backbone of a business like ours.

00:10:42 ◼   ► And I'm sitting there like, oh, God.

00:10:44 ◼   ► Oh, really? Oh, is it?

00:10:46 ◼   ► But at least we started and they're very, very proud.

00:10:48 ◼   ► As Confucius said, the best time to plant an email list is a thousand years ago.

00:10:55 ◼   ► And the second best time is now.

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00:13:29 ◼   ► OK, Mike, I cannot wait any longer.

00:13:32 ◼   ► I need to know how was school today?

00:13:35 ◼   ► Well, school ended a little while ago.

00:13:38 ◼   ► OK.

00:13:38 ◼   ► And before Christmas, but school was very good.

00:13:41 ◼   ► Today, I got my certificate e-mail.

00:13:43 ◼   ► Which was a funny it was very funny to get my hey, you completed your course certificate the day that we were going to talk about it.

00:13:51 ◼   ► Oh, it's graduation day, basically.

00:13:52 ◼   ► Yeah, I graduated today considering the course was completed like four weeks ago.

00:13:56 ◼   ► That is kind of funny that they chose today, but they did choose today.

00:13:59 ◼   ► So, yeah, I graduated from my short course on product design.

00:14:03 ◼   ► I don't even know what was the basic structure of what it was that you were doing.

00:14:09 ◼   ► It was a week long course, right?

00:14:10 ◼   ► Like full days, half days.

00:14:12 ◼   ► Five days, 10 to four.

00:14:14 ◼   ► Five days, 10 to four.

00:14:16 ◼   ► Single instructor?

00:14:17 ◼   ► Single instructor, a group of five students.

00:14:20 ◼   ► Oh, OK.

00:14:20 ◼   ► Very good student to teacher ratio.

00:14:23 ◼   ► Yeah, that was actually really helpful.

00:14:24 ◼   ► It was, yeah, in person at University of the Arts London College.

00:14:31 ◼   ► They have like a variety of short courses that they do.

00:14:36 ◼   ► And my experience of feeling like I was going back to school started immediately.

00:14:41 ◼   ► So you arrive at the college and you go to like the enrollment desk and they're like,

00:14:47 ◼   ► all right, go into the main hall and there are pieces of paper on the wall with all of

00:14:53 ◼   ► the names of the short courses you need to line up at the name of your course.

00:14:58 ◼   ► So you go into this big hall and there's all these people just like standing around in

00:15:03 ◼   ► loosely formed lines.

00:15:04 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:15:05 ◼   ► And like I get into a line and I'm like, I don't know if I'm in the right line because

00:15:09 ◼   ► like I can see my course on the wall, but there's like 20 people in front of me and

00:15:14 ◼   ► they all look like they're in different lines.

00:15:16 ◼   ► The quintessential first day of school experience.

00:15:20 ◼   ► I feel a little lost.

00:15:22 ◼   ► Yes.

00:15:22 ◼   ► And I'm also being physically sorted with a large number of people as I'm being processed

00:15:28 ◼   ► by the education system.

00:15:29 ◼   ► And immediately for me, taken back to my school experience, I'm too nervous to ask.

00:15:33 ◼   ► Yeah, you don't want to ask.

00:15:34 ◼   ► You don't want to embarrass yourself because then all the cool kids will laugh at you.

00:15:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:15:37 ◼   ► Yep. So I would just be waiting to be sorted.

00:15:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:15:40 ◼   ► And so, yeah, I was in the right line and we were taken to the class.

00:15:44 ◼   ► And so the structure was, you know, we had like five days.

00:15:47 ◼   ► It's not like a ton of time.

00:15:48 ◼   ► And essentially it was we're going to kind of dip our toes into what a bigger course

00:15:56 ◼   ► around product design could look like.

00:15:58 ◼   ► Right.

00:16:00 ◼   ► That's kind of what you're doing here.

00:16:01 ◼   ► And of the people that were there, there was me.

00:16:03 ◼   ► There were two people that worked for like businesses who were sending their employees

00:16:07 ◼   ► on these.

00:16:07 ◼   ► Right. So it's like employee training.

00:16:09 ◼   ► Training or like expanded learning kind of thing.

00:16:11 ◼   ► Like, you know, one was it was like considered training for this person.

00:16:15 ◼   ► The other, it was like it seemed like that company allowed people to just pick

00:16:18 ◼   ► something.

00:16:19 ◼   ► It's very tech company-y.

00:16:21 ◼   ► You know, you can do whatever you want with your 20 percent time.

00:16:24 ◼   ► Yeah, it's totally up to you.

00:16:25 ◼   ► And we'll pay for it.

00:16:25 ◼   ► We just want to make you more rounded.

00:16:27 ◼   ► And then the other two people were in between degrees.

00:16:33 ◼   ► So they'd been studying and they wanted to do something now in design.

00:16:38 ◼   ► And so they were like doing taster sessions, basically of different courses.

00:16:42 ◼   ► And it felt like really that's what this is for.

00:16:45 ◼   ► Like a survey experience.

00:16:46 ◼   ► Yeah. That like somebody can go around, pay a relatively small amount of money compared

00:16:51 ◼   ► to what a course would be and get an idea as to whether they might want to enroll in

00:16:56 ◼   ► like a full three year course at the university.

00:17:00 ◼   ► OK.

00:17:01 ◼   ► Our instructor, what he does now is instructing, but he had a history in

00:17:06 ◼   ► furniture design.

00:17:07 ◼   ► And day one was mostly like, let's talk about what design is.

00:17:15 ◼   ► So like different forms of industrial design and product design, different

00:17:21 ◼   ► thinking.

00:17:22 ◼   ► And also the instructor was kind of sharing some of his influences and like the people

00:17:26 ◼   ► that he draws interest from as like a way to kind of like set up.

00:17:31 ◼   ► And on that day, actually, we started doing like technical drawing.

00:17:36 ◼   ► Did you have a triangle in your hand and a grid piece of paper in front of you?

00:17:41 ◼   ► His thing was not to try and be too precise of it.

00:17:43 ◼   ► Like get a grid paper, draw between these two points and try and draw something.

00:17:48 ◼   ► We're drawing a chair that day just for practice sake, like in that kind of like

00:17:53 ◼   ► isometric style.

00:17:54 ◼   ► Right. Like how can you imagine this?

00:17:56 ◼   ► And that was like that first day was to try and get us used to the idea of imagining an

00:18:02 ◼   ► object in 3D.

00:18:03 ◼   ► Right. So like you can imagine what a chair looks like, but how would that chair look

00:18:07 ◼   ► like from the top?

00:18:09 ◼   ► How would it look like from the bottom?

00:18:10 ◼   ► And we were kind of like playing around with that because it would inform us for the

00:18:15 ◼   ► next day's work.

00:18:16 ◼   ► So, yeah, then we went on to like coming up with the concept of a product, imagining

00:18:21 ◼   ► what it could look like, trying to draw it out in a technical style.

00:18:24 ◼   ► Then we were doing storyboarding, which was in essence like show how this product could

00:18:30 ◼   ► be used. Like what is the story of this item?

00:18:33 ◼   ► Why does it exist?

00:18:34 ◼   ► We're kind of like playing around with that and drawing some of these out.

00:18:37 ◼   ► And then we did a lot of these kinds of things whilst also having mini lectures around

00:18:44 ◼   ► like the types of ways that products are made, how something can be made would inform

00:18:50 ◼   ► your design of it.

00:18:51 ◼   ► And then the last two days was kind of bringing everything together to create a light.

00:18:57 ◼   ► It was like create a product that emits light in some way.

00:19:00 ◼   ► You can make a lamp or whatever.

00:19:02 ◼   ► And you had to come up with an idea, come up with a new reason for existing and be able

00:19:08 ◼   ► to explain that, do some technical drawing and then make a model.

00:19:11 ◼   ► And we made a model out of card.

00:19:13 ◼   ► Mine was a little light, a little working light that looked like an egg timer.

00:19:19 ◼   ► And you would turn the timer and it would start glowing red at the top to try and indicate

00:19:25 ◼   ► to people that you're working.

00:19:26 ◼   ► But of course, gray is also a time tracker because that's the only way I could imagine.

00:19:30 ◼   ► The lens through which you view all products.

00:19:33 ◼   ► Yes.

00:19:33 ◼   ► It tracks your time for you.

00:19:35 ◼   ► And so that was just like a little thing.

00:19:37 ◼   ► And we built it and I wanted to build something that had like in my mind some kind of

00:19:40 ◼   ► element of tactility and like a little egg timer, like the form of an egg timer was kind

00:19:45 ◼   ► of cute.

00:19:45 ◼   ► So that was like overall what it was focused on.

00:19:49 ◼   ► But the main things that I took away from it was around kind of space and distraction

00:19:57 ◼   ► when trying to imagine designing products.

00:20:02 ◼   ► What do you mean?

00:20:03 ◼   ► So I had no cell coverage in the classroom.

00:20:08 ◼   ► My phone couldn't connect to 5G.

00:20:11 ◼   ► And so on day one, I kind of was like, OK, so I can't connect.

00:20:17 ◼   ► Then on day two, I know that people were on the Wi-Fi, but I was like, I'm not going to

00:20:23 ◼   ► connect to the Wi-Fi.

00:20:24 ◼   ► And so I could only be online at lunch and then at the end of the day, which meant that,

00:20:33 ◼   ► you know, I would surface for air two times a day and my phone would be like blowing up.

00:20:39 ◼   ► But I really valued this in allowing me to have like space to think and like distraction

00:20:49 ◼   ► taken away so I could really get involved in what I was doing, because like a lot of

00:20:59 ◼   ► the time, the things that we were doing had a lot of like concept work involved in it.

00:21:07 ◼   ► We had to come up with concepts and like sketch them out and like, how would this work?

00:21:11 ◼   ► How would this not work?

00:21:12 ◼   ► And you're kind of it's a lot of iteration and being able to be distraction free in that

00:21:20 ◼   ► work was very beneficial, I think.

00:21:23 ◼   ► And so I think it has informed for me that I need to try and replicate this where

00:21:32 ◼   ► possible, which is complicated.

00:21:36 ◼   ► And I'm not sure I know what the answer to that is right now, but it's something I'm

00:21:41 ◼   ► working on.

00:21:41 ◼   ► The first thing that I've taken away is I am trying now to focus on Thursdays are free

00:21:52 ◼   ► for cortex.

00:21:53 ◼   ► So we record on Thursdays.

00:21:56 ◼   ► Right.

00:21:56 ◼   ► Which is one help.

00:21:58 ◼   ► So like typically in the past, I've tried to keep Thursdays more free in case we need

00:22:03 ◼   ► to move the recording date.

00:22:04 ◼   ► So I don't want to like smash up too much stuff into trying to record the show.

00:22:08 ◼   ► But now what I'm going to try and do is on the Thursdays, we're not recording to try

00:22:14 ◼   ► and leave those for like bigger cortex brand projects.

00:22:17 ◼   ► Right.

00:22:18 ◼   ► OK.

00:22:18 ◼   ► Like if I'm noodling on an idea for something, you know, if I find time during the

00:22:24 ◼   ► week, I can like poke at it if I have the time.

00:22:26 ◼   ► But otherwise I would know that I would be able to try and spend a bunch of time on it

00:22:30 ◼   ► the next Thursday, whatever it would be.

00:22:33 ◼   ► That's like one part of it.

00:22:34 ◼   ► And then I'm going to try and see if this works and maybe adapt it a little further in

00:22:38 ◼   ► the idea of giving myself time to experiment and to play around and take in

00:22:46 ◼   ► information, take in inspiration, like that kind of stuff and give myself more space in

00:22:52 ◼   ► my work to do that.

00:22:54 ◼   ► But also to have dedicated physical space to do this work.

00:23:01 ◼   ► So I'm looking at making a bunch of changes to Mega Studio.

00:23:05 ◼   ► One of them will be I'm going to get like a table that that's just where all the design

00:23:10 ◼   ► stuff goes.

00:23:11 ◼   ► Oh, right.

00:23:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:23:12 ◼   ► Because you don't really have a clear table right now.

00:23:15 ◼   ► I'm just trying to think about the office.

00:23:17 ◼   ► You've got what I think was like your keyboard table, even though I know that's not

00:23:20 ◼   ► exactly right, but it feels like you've got that one table that always has keyboard stuff

00:23:24 ◼   ► on it.

00:23:24 ◼   ► Then you have your recording set up.

00:23:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:23:25 ◼   ► But neither of those have like a big...

00:23:27 ◼   ► There's not a big space.

00:23:28 ◼   ► It's not an empty space.

00:23:29 ◼   ► Like the table that you're thinking of is my keyboard table.

00:23:32 ◼   ► It is a very large desk that's kind of split in half.

00:23:35 ◼   ► And one half is my PC, which has my streaming stuff and then also my keyboard hobby

00:23:39 ◼   ► projects.

00:23:40 ◼   ► The other half is where I actually sit all day when I'm not recording.

00:23:43 ◼   ► But they of course, there's always a fancy keyboard on it.

00:23:46 ◼   ► So maybe it can all blend in to one.

00:23:48 ◼   ► But that's my main desk.

00:23:49 ◼   ► And it is at the moment where I would try and push stuff away and have space.

00:23:54 ◼   ► But that's not really what I want.

00:23:57 ◼   ► And so this would be a desk which would be like, you know, covered in the relevant

00:24:01 ◼   ► things that I would need.

00:24:03 ◼   ► I'm like prototyping and like workshopping a different paper layout for the Sidekick

00:24:08 ◼   ► Notepad, like to do another version of it.

00:24:10 ◼   ► Like, so it's not just the dot grid.

00:24:12 ◼   ► It's just some other stuff.

00:24:13 ◼   ► And when I've done things like this before, I've kind of just like sketched them out a

00:24:20 ◼   ► little bit.

00:24:21 ◼   ► But this time I was like cutting out pieces of paper and moving them around and

00:24:27 ◼   ► trying to come up with a layout that way.

00:24:28 ◼   ► And that felt a little bit more tactile in a way that I enjoyed.

00:24:31 ◼   ► And that was something I took away from this course was the like kind of cutting stuff

00:24:37 ◼   ► out, moving it around, like having a kind of tactility in it felt more exciting and

00:24:43 ◼   ► engaging for me than trying to just draw boxes on a piece of paper.

00:24:48 ◼   ► I feel like I'm having the realization of the images that you sent me of the design

00:24:53 ◼   ► changes that you were thinking about.

00:24:55 ◼   ► It was made out of these little modular pieces.

00:24:58 ◼   ► And I'm just realizing that's not something that I've seen you do before.

00:25:02 ◼   ► But I also think it just made so much sense.

00:25:05 ◼   ► Not that I really thought about it, but if I had to think about it, I would have said

00:25:07 ◼   ► like, oh, this must be Mike just in the early stages.

00:25:10 ◼   ► And then the stuff that he's shown me before is the later stages where he's just

00:25:13 ◼   ► drawing it out on paper.

00:25:14 ◼   ► But no, that does intuitively make way more sense as a good early stage thing is let me

00:25:20 ◼   ► cut out physically the pieces that I might want to assemble something out of because

00:25:25 ◼   ► moving things around tangibly, especially for the Cortex products, really matters.

00:25:31 ◼   ► It's interesting.

00:25:32 ◼   ► It was just something that I didn't really know that I liked until I was doing some of

00:25:37 ◼   ► the prototyping stuff in the last couple of days where cutting things out of card and

00:25:41 ◼   ► like moving them around and trying out different layouts and stuff.

00:25:45 ◼   ► It was just like really interesting to me.

00:25:47 ◼   ► So I brought that in too.

00:25:48 ◼   ► So I can imagine having this like kind of the way I think about it is like time and

00:25:54 ◼   ► space are the things that I need.

00:25:56 ◼   ► And so trying to create and find that I think will be better overall for my aspirations

00:26:05 ◼   ► and things that I want to do in product design.

00:26:09 ◼   ► Yeah, we may talk about this later, but I think as Cortex brand becomes a bigger and

00:26:13 ◼   ► bigger thing, I hadn't really thought about it before.

00:26:16 ◼   ► But yeah, it does make sense that you would really need a separate physical design space

00:26:22 ◼   ► so that it's not like, oh, I'm just incidentally doing this design work on this table full

00:26:26 ◼   ► of keyboards and other things.

00:26:28 ◼   ► It's like, no, no, this is like a dedicated space.

00:26:30 ◼   ► It feels like I'm not respecting the work.

00:26:32 ◼   ► I'm just trying to always just squeeze it in.

00:26:35 ◼   ► Squeeze it in.

00:26:35 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:26:36 ◼   ► That's exactly what it feels like.

00:26:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:26:37 ◼   ► Both in my day and in the physical space, it feels like I'm not valuing it.

00:26:44 ◼   ► And so I want to be able to give it a little bit more room to breathe in.

00:26:49 ◼   ► I mean, also it seems half unintentional and half intentional with the no cell phone service

00:26:54 ◼   ► and then deciding not to join the Wi-Fi.

00:26:56 ◼   ► I was very aware of it and I was kind of thinking of it in terms of your year of people

00:27:00 ◼   ► because we had this conversation in the last episode about how you train people how to

00:27:06 ◼   ► respond to you based on how quickly you get back to them.

00:27:09 ◼   ► And I think there was some part of me which kind of forgot that you were in school, but I

00:27:14 ◼   ► was very aware.

00:27:15 ◼   ► Like I would send you a message and it's like, wait, it's been two minutes.

00:27:19 ◼   ► Mike hasn't gotten back to me.

00:27:21 ◼   ► Like, this is unacceptable.

00:27:22 ◼   ► It's like, I knew you were at school, but I think there was some part of my brain which

00:27:26 ◼   ► defaulted to thinking like, oh, Mike's running his year of people on me, right?

00:27:31 ◼   ► Like he's trying to train me that I don't always get an immediate response.

00:27:35 ◼   ► But actually, no, you were just busy with design work.

00:27:37 ◼   ► Hang on a minute.

00:27:38 ◼   ► I count in this too?

00:27:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I was doing the thing everybody does.

00:27:41 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:27:42 ◼   ► Mike's not going to get back to other people as fast, but surely he still means me is going

00:27:48 ◼   ► to get instant replies.

00:27:50 ◼   ► To me, I don't think that it would be truly realistic to be like, all right, turning off

00:27:56 ◼   ► the Wi-Fi.

00:27:57 ◼   ► Like that doesn't make sense to me.

00:27:58 ◼   ► I don't think I don't think that would ultimately make me happy on a longer period.

00:28:02 ◼   ► But the biggest question that I am left with having done this experience is do I want

00:28:09 ◼   ► more?

00:28:10 ◼   ► Because what I'll say is overall, I loved doing this.

00:28:15 ◼   ► Really?

00:28:16 ◼   ► OK.

00:28:16 ◼   ► Yes, I loved being immersed in an environment where everyone is just talking about design.

00:28:25 ◼   ► Like I loved so much just being immersed in this world where all anybody is talking about

00:28:34 ◼   ► is like, what is the intention of the object?

00:28:37 ◼   ► All that matters right now is you're trying to understand what the thing that you want

00:28:44 ◼   ► to make would say to the user.

00:28:46 ◼   ► Like, does it have a point?

00:28:48 ◼   ► Does it have a reason for existing at these kinds of questions?

00:28:51 ◼   ► I just loved being in an environment where everyone was totally on board with asking

00:28:56 ◼   ► that and nobody was like, what are you talking about?

00:28:59 ◼   ► Like, you know, in that environment, like the most important thing.

00:29:04 ◼   ► But realistically, they don't seem to be that way on a grand stage.

00:29:10 ◼   ► But I am of the opinion that these things are really important, but you're not always

00:29:16 ◼   ► within company who agrees with you.

00:29:18 ◼   ► Right?

00:29:19 ◼   ► OK.

00:29:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:21 ◼   ► This is kind of the dynamic of someone from outside of this sphere would say something

00:29:27 ◼   ► like, oh, you guys are overthinking this.

00:29:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:30 ◼   ► And the correct thing here is like, oh, no, but the designer should think about this quite

00:29:37 ◼   ► a lot, actually, and this conversation will seem like overthinking to an outsider.

00:29:45 ◼   ► Almost perversely, the more successful the design is, the design should seem really

00:29:52 ◼   ► intuitive for whatever it is or it should be like obvious.

00:29:54 ◼   ► Oh, this thing just works.

00:29:55 ◼   ► Like what I was thinking is in school, school at its best provides a kind of structured

00:30:04 ◼   ► camaraderie and maybe that's what this was is like.

00:30:07 ◼   ► It's selected for people who really care about this thing on this course.

00:30:12 ◼   ► And so then when you are with them, you can feel like, ah, we all have the same kind of

00:30:17 ◼   ► purpose, which is in designing and critiquing design of objects in a way that we don't

00:30:23 ◼   ► have to worry about if we were having this discussion at a random dinner party, like how

00:30:28 ◼   ► entertained are the other people or do other people think this is boring kind of thing?

00:30:32 ◼   ► It's funny that you said, I never really thought of it that way, but like I have like

00:30:35 ◼   ► multiple shows that I do, which that is it, right?

00:30:39 ◼   ► Like the idea of you're with people and you just want to talk about objects and like how

00:30:43 ◼   ► much you care about them and what they do or not do.

00:30:46 ◼   ► Like I love that kind of thing.

00:30:47 ◼   ► But being in that environment for that week, like I left it and I just want more.

00:30:53 ◼   ► And so like when I left it, I'm like, all right, I think I want to go to university.

00:30:58 ◼   ► Like that's how I left the course of like, I want to do a course like I want to go and do

00:31:04 ◼   ► a three year course on product design for the sake of learning.

00:31:09 ◼   ► Like I don't care about a degree.

00:31:12 ◼   ► Like I care about learning, I want to learn more about this.

00:31:19 ◼   ► I want to be in this environment, learning from other people, having the experience of

00:31:26 ◼   ► taking in a body of work and broadening my thinking, what I feel like I could achieve,

00:31:35 ◼   ► what I could be capable of.

00:31:37 ◼   ► But the problem is the amount of change that would need to occur in my life to do this

00:31:43 ◼   ► would be massive.

00:31:45 ◼   ► So if I really genuinely want to do this, I have to be way more sure of it than I am

00:31:51 ◼   ► currently.

00:31:52 ◼   ► And so the easiest way to achieve it is to do more short courses.

00:31:57 ◼   ► And that's something that like I want to do this year.

00:32:00 ◼   ► I just need to find courses that I'm interested in.

00:32:03 ◼   ► University of the Arts have more, but some of them are on Zoom and I don't want that.

00:32:10 ◼   ► No, no, it's a disaster.

00:32:11 ◼   ► Because that's not what I want, because the Zoom courses are like way longer and it's like

00:32:17 ◼   ► an hour a week or something and you do it for like 12 weeks.

00:32:20 ◼   ► That's not what I'm looking for.

00:32:22 ◼   ► Because that feels like you do that in the sense of getting the like thing at the end of

00:32:27 ◼   ► it, like I've completed this course and that's not what I care about.

00:32:30 ◼   ► What I want is what I was talking about, being in an environment which is like focused

00:32:35 ◼   ► around that one thing.

00:32:37 ◼   ► That's what people care about for the week that they're there is what is their lamp going

00:32:42 ◼   ► to look like at the end of this week?

00:32:44 ◼   ► You know, like that's kind of what I care about.

00:32:47 ◼   ► But like, I just don't know if I am ready to commit to that.

00:32:50 ◼   ► And so what I have my eyes out for right now is what are the other ways in my life that I

00:32:58 ◼   ► can get this experience, this expertise from people?

00:33:05 ◼   ► I don't have an answer for this.

00:33:07 ◼   ► All I know is I have a desire for more learning.

00:33:11 ◼   ► Yeah, the problem there is like how contingent is this on people?

00:33:16 ◼   ► And given that this is year of people, I'm imagining quite high.

00:33:19 ◼   ► And that's also why I was saying like school at its best provides this kind of camaraderie

00:33:24 ◼   ► that can be difficult to replicate.

00:33:26 ◼   ► The thing that I was just wondering is I was wondering if this school or other schools

00:33:32 ◼   ► in the UK do something like what I had in university, which were summer sessions and

00:33:37 ◼   ► intercessions, which are just like compressed classes where they take a whole semester's

00:33:41 ◼   ► worth of thing and they squeeze it down to three weeks instead.

00:33:46 ◼   ► And it's not like a survey class.

00:33:49 ◼   ► It really would be.

00:33:50 ◼   ► This is the actual class.

00:33:52 ◼   ► We're just doing a kind of pseudo term in between the regular terms for weirdos, for

00:33:58 ◼   ► example, who are trying to do two degrees simultaneously.

00:34:01 ◼   ► Well, that is like so when the short course that I was on, the school was closed, like

00:34:06 ◼   ► they put them on.

00:34:07 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:34:08 ◼   ► The school is otherwise closed.

00:34:10 ◼   ► So like for me, it was during the Christmas break.

00:34:12 ◼   ► Right.

00:34:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:34:13 ◼   ► But I've yet to find in my admittedly somewhat limited search chain because I've just been

00:34:19 ◼   ► looking at like London schools right now.

00:34:21 ◼   ► Anything more than what I've done?

00:34:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I would take a look around and see if you can find something like you might need to

00:34:29 ◼   ► find a place that has something that's more like a campus.

00:34:31 ◼   ► But I would just be surprised if you couldn't find these like summer session or intersession

00:34:36 ◼   ► kind of things.

00:34:37 ◼   ► And my experience was always like those are the maximum like bang per hour by far of any

00:34:44 ◼   ► kind of thing that you're going to do.

00:34:45 ◼   ► Even just for the fact that like what you were doing, where you're going in every day for

00:34:50 ◼   ► five hours, the amount of fat that that trims from just the time of like, oh, we're booting

00:34:56 ◼   ► up.

00:34:56 ◼   ► What did we do last week?

00:34:58 ◼   ► What are we going to do?

00:34:58 ◼   ► Like all of that kind of nonsense is just naturally removed when you're there every day

00:35:04 ◼   ► for a big block of time.

00:35:05 ◼   ► So like going to sort of a regular design school, I think is not really practical in your

00:35:12 ◼   ► foreseeable life in the near future.

00:35:15 ◼   ► But I could see that you could arrange something to be able to take like three weeks to do a

00:35:22 ◼   ► compressed course.

00:35:22 ◼   ► Like that might be possible as a next step if you can find the right thing.

00:35:25 ◼   ► Oh, I believe that would be possible.

00:35:27 ◼   ► Like it would be a busier time.

00:35:28 ◼   ► Like during that week, I didn't record any shows, right?

00:35:31 ◼   ► But if I'm doing a three week course, I'm going to have to lose some stuff.

00:35:35 ◼   ► I'm not going to be able to do nothing.

00:35:37 ◼   ► I think I wouldn't be comfortable with that.

00:35:39 ◼   ► I would have to work a reduced schedule.

00:35:42 ◼   ► I've just yet to find another course that I think would be interesting for me.

00:35:49 ◼   ► On a broad scale, what do you feel like you want to get out of these courses or what do

00:35:56 ◼   ► you think that they do for you that makes them worth the investment of time?

00:35:59 ◼   ► I think that and I know I felt this way from this one and I would hope I would continue

00:36:04 ◼   ► to feel that way.

00:36:05 ◼   ► It makes things that seem impossible feel more possible.

00:36:11 ◼   ► Like what do you feel that you can do now that you couldn't do before the course?

00:36:14 ◼   ► It's like technique.

00:36:15 ◼   ► OK.

00:36:16 ◼   ► Helping me kind of open up my brain a little bit.

00:36:20 ◼   ► I know from one week, I know I have not gained enough skill in which I feel like I

00:36:26 ◼   ► could make something out of wood, say, or design something out of metal.

00:36:33 ◼   ► But it started to show me how I could build the skill needed.

00:36:40 ◼   ► Right.

00:36:41 ◼   ► So I feel like it took down a wall to make something that felt completely insurmountable,

00:36:48 ◼   ► more surmountable.

00:36:49 ◼   ► Like I believe that I could learn the skills to be able to take something from my brain

00:36:55 ◼   ► and be able to better explain it to someone, which is kind of what the whole point of this

00:37:01 ◼   ► was for me, right, just to better give me the confidence to be able to sit in a room

00:37:06 ◼   ► with people and explain what I'm looking for.

00:37:08 ◼   ► And I feel like I got that out of this.

00:37:10 ◼   ► And I feel like it's shown me that if I was to take more of this, like if I was to do

00:37:15 ◼   ► longer or more of this kind of stuff, it would further unlock or remove barriers that

00:37:24 ◼   ► I'm putting up in my mind of stopping me from being able to do what I'm looking to

00:37:28 ◼   ► achieve.

00:37:29 ◼   ► Right.

00:37:29 ◼   ► Like it takes down some barriers and it makes me feel like these things are more in

00:37:33 ◼   ► reach.

00:37:33 ◼   ► Not to discourage you in the slightest, but like you said right there is the thing, like

00:37:38 ◼   ► it's a barrier in your own mind maybe because you didn't go to paper design school to

00:37:45 ◼   ► design the first notebooks.

00:37:47 ◼   ► No.

00:37:47 ◼   ► Is it the fact that, oh, you don't know how to design anything in wood or communicate

00:37:51 ◼   ► with wood manufacturers because we don't have a wood based product that is in the

00:37:56 ◼   ► forefront of our mind of like, oh, that's a thing that we need to make.

00:37:58 ◼   ► I understand where you're coming from.

00:37:59 ◼   ► I think that there is some truth to what you're saying, but I do feel that there is

00:38:03 ◼   ► like a level of knowledge, expertise, inspiration and genuinely technical skills

00:38:10 ◼   ► that would be needed to go further that I can more easily pick up if I was taught

00:38:16 ◼   ► them.

00:38:16 ◼   ► Okay.

00:38:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:38:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:38:18 ◼   ► Like at a certain point to be able to express what I'm looking for, I need to have a

00:38:23 ◼   ► little bit of 3D modeling experience.

00:38:25 ◼   ► Like it would go a long way to helping me be able to prototype something to be able

00:38:34 ◼   ► to model it in 3D.

00:38:35 ◼   ► At some point I believe that that is going to be important, but I don't know what for.

00:38:39 ◼   ► Okay.

00:38:40 ◼   ► But there is genuinely just like a confidence building that comes from stuff

00:38:44 ◼   ► like this, which I think for me would be very important.

00:38:48 ◼   ► Because I know I left it feeling real good.

00:38:51 ◼   ► Like I left this course feeling like, you know what?

00:38:56 ◼   ► I can't do this.

00:38:57 ◼   ► And it's like that is maybe something I've not truly felt until then.

00:39:04 ◼   ► Like being in that environment and talking to people about the stuff that we make and

00:39:11 ◼   ► working on new ideas and having those ideas praised by peers.

00:39:16 ◼   ► And it was like, oh, okay.

00:39:17 ◼   ► Like I feel like I have something like I can build this.

00:39:22 ◼   ► I can grow from here.

00:39:24 ◼   ► Like it was very valuable.

00:39:26 ◼   ► And I feel like that kind of environment is important as well as learning the things

00:39:31 ◼   ► that I might want to learn from these experiences.

00:39:35 ◼   ► So.

00:39:35 ◼   ► I have one final question though.

00:39:36 ◼   ► Okay.

00:39:37 ◼   ► Did they know who you are?

00:39:39 ◼   ► Did they know who's in this class?

00:39:42 ◼   ► Did they know that it's the Mike Hurley?

00:39:44 ◼   ► Nobody gave the impression that they had heard of me.

00:39:47 ◼   ► Okay.

00:39:48 ◼   ► But just naturally throughout the course of the week, the mood in the room changed.

00:39:54 ◼   ► Okay.

00:39:55 ◼   ► There is an element of like, what do you do?

00:39:58 ◼   ► Yeah, well, of course.

00:40:00 ◼   ► Of course.

00:40:00 ◼   ► I was not going to bring it up.

00:40:02 ◼   ► Right.

00:40:02 ◼   ► Yeah, of course.

00:40:03 ◼   ► Of course.

00:40:03 ◼   ► But I was just answering questions honestly.

00:40:07 ◼   ► Like when people say, why are you here?

00:40:09 ◼   ► It's like, well, I started a business making paper products and I want to get more

00:40:16 ◼   ► expertise and more knowledge to help me further make more stuff and feel more

00:40:20 ◼   ► confident.

00:40:20 ◼   ► Then that would later turn into like, well, what are you making?

00:40:23 ◼   ► I'd be like, well, I'm using one of them right now.

00:40:26 ◼   ► Like I had a sidekick taking my notes on, you know, people were talking about that.

00:40:30 ◼   ► They were interested in it.

00:40:31 ◼   ► And then, you know, you'd be like working away.

00:40:34 ◼   ► And you know, I'd said that I was podcasting and people would ask me like, what are

00:40:37 ◼   ► your podcasts about?

00:40:38 ◼   ► Like I'd explained that.

00:40:39 ◼   ► And then the next day as we go on, like someone would say to me, like, how many

00:40:44 ◼   ► listeners do you have?

00:40:45 ◼   ► Or like, how many of those notepads have you sold?

00:40:48 ◼   ► Like, and so like, I was not offering this information.

00:40:54 ◼   ► This is why I was, I was wanting to know, because the problem is if you open this

00:40:56 ◼   ► door, the tiniest amount, if you made the decision of I'm not willing to go in here

00:41:02 ◼   ► and be extremely obfuscatious about what it is that I actually do, that door is

00:41:07 ◼   ► going to fly open the moment the first questions start getting asked.

00:41:11 ◼   ► So that's what I was curious about.

00:41:12 ◼   ► But it was like, you know, there was somebody who worked for an airline and

00:41:17 ◼   ► they worked in design at this airline, like physical design inside of the planes.

00:41:20 ◼   ► I would not stop asking them questions.

00:41:23 ◼   ► I just thought this person's job was fascinating.

00:41:25 ◼   ► And so like, I was asking him questions constantly throughout the week because he

00:41:31 ◼   ► was a super nice guy and he was very forthcoming and like seemed really like

00:41:34 ◼   ► passionate about his work.

00:41:36 ◼   ► And I just found that super interesting.

00:41:38 ◼   ► So I think that there was an element of that from a couple of people in the class.

00:41:41 ◼   ► It was just one of those things where it was just, who is this person?

00:41:45 ◼   ► Then things start to be revealed that it's like, oh, I actually, we've sold lots of

00:41:51 ◼   ► these and like people really liked them.

00:41:52 ◼   ► And like the questions just kept going.

00:41:55 ◼   ► But it was really interesting.

00:41:56 ◼   ► Like people had like really cool questions for me and stuff like that.

00:41:59 ◼   ► But yeah, it was one of those things that from Monday to Friday, different vibes.

00:42:05 ◼   ► The vibes were different.

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00:44:35 ◼   ► Real AFM.

00:44:36 ◼   ► In our State of the Apps episodes over the last couple of years, a lot of time has

00:44:41 ◼   ► been spent talking about Slack and like trying to make Slack better for us.

00:44:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:44:47 ◼   ► I saw an article on The Verge about a new feature in Slack called Catch Up.

00:44:55 ◼   ► Even just mentioning Slack and talking about making it better, I mean like PTSD,

00:45:00 ◼   ► going back to that conversation about the Slack redesign and this whole palace of

00:45:05 ◼   ► pain for these team communication apps.

00:45:08 ◼   ► That's just so horrible to deal with.

00:45:10 ◼   ► And so when you say like, Oh, they have a new feature.

00:45:13 ◼   ► I just do not greet this with a positive emotional experience.

00:45:17 ◼   ► Like, Oh, I can't wait to see what they've unveiled.

00:45:19 ◼   ► It's a physical tightening in my chest of, Oh no, how is this going to get worse for

00:45:24 ◼   ► me?

00:45:25 ◼   ► I want you to bear with me for a minute here.

00:45:27 ◼   ► Right.

00:45:28 ◼   ► Because like there is an initial reaction, which I think you had.

00:45:31 ◼   ► And I think there is also a secondary reaction.

00:45:33 ◼   ► Oh boy.

00:45:34 ◼   ► The best way to do this is just to read to you the beginning of this article from

00:45:38 ◼   ► friend of the show, David Pierce, who says, "Slack is adding a new feature to its

00:45:43 ◼   ► mobile app meant to help you triage all of your unread stuff a little faster.

00:45:48 ◼   ► It's called Catch Up.

00:45:50 ◼   ► And the only way I can describe it is Tinder for enterprise messaging."

00:45:54 ◼   ► Ah, just please wait.

00:45:56 ◼   ► "When you tap on Catch Up at the top of the app's home screen, it will show you one

00:46:01 ◼   ► channel or DM at a time.

00:46:03 ◼   ► Swipe left to mark it red, right to leave it unread."

00:46:07 ◼   ► So I feel like maybe you're going on a similar journey to me right now.

00:46:15 ◼   ► But my initial reaction was, why are you doing this to me?

00:46:21 ◼   ► But then I started thinking about my Slack style.

00:46:24 ◼   ► And like typically, you know, I'm at Open Slack and I have like two DMs and three

00:46:30 ◼   ► channels that have got unread messages in.

00:46:32 ◼   ► And the way that I find that, because I'm in some Slacks with lots of channels, it's

00:46:36 ◼   ► just it's like that little thing that's like there's unread messages down there.

00:46:39 ◼   ► And you have to scroll, scroll, scroll.

00:46:41 ◼   ► Oh, there it is.

00:46:42 ◼   ► And you hit it.

00:46:43 ◼   ► Now, what this would do is would allow me to every time I open Slack, just very

00:46:50 ◼   ► quickly see everything that has got unread content within it.

00:46:54 ◼   ► And then I can either read it and be like, OK, whatever.

00:46:59 ◼   ► Or I can keep it unread to deal with later on.

00:47:03 ◼   ► I actually think the idea behind this feature, which I have not used yet, because

00:47:08 ◼   ► as Slack do do these things, which is weird, it is rolling out to free Slacks first.

00:47:13 ◼   ► Oh, great. Paid Slacks later.

00:47:15 ◼   ► I can see myself using this feature.

00:47:18 ◼   ► And what they've said is this is going to be on the phone.

00:47:22 ◼   ► This is a phone feature.

00:47:23 ◼   ► Right.

00:47:24 ◼   ► I think because they said like what they have noticed is that people use the Slack

00:47:30 ◼   ► phone app as like a triage.

00:47:31 ◼   ► You know, they wake up in the morning or it's later in the day and they just want to

00:47:35 ◼   ► very quickly see what's going on and deal with it later on.

00:47:37 ◼   ► Again, what I want, which they don't seem to have done and I don't think they'll ever

00:47:43 ◼   ► do, I want this feature.

00:47:44 ◼   ► But for every Slack, like collapse all the Slacks, right, and give me this for one view

00:47:50 ◼   ► every Slack that I'm in.

00:47:51 ◼   ► So I haven't got to keep like swipe tap, swipe tap.

00:47:54 ◼   ► So this is a thing where like at first I'm like, oh, God, why?

00:48:00 ◼   ► And then the more I think about it, I'm like, this might make my life a little easier.

00:48:05 ◼   ► I'm deeply unconvinced by this.

00:48:08 ◼   ► I don't like this.

00:48:09 ◼   ► OK.

00:48:09 ◼   ► I have a specific dislike and a broad dislike.

00:48:12 ◼   ► My broad dislike is we've discussed the TikTok-ification of everything on the show

00:48:18 ◼   ► before that this is like a kind of natural attractor for a lot of apps to go in the

00:48:25 ◼   ► direction of being more like TikTok.

00:48:27 ◼   ► And I think that there are several natural attractors like that for user interfaces,

00:48:34 ◼   ► which are mostly bad.

00:48:35 ◼   ► And I don't think we've ever discussed it, but I have in my head the same idea of like

00:48:41 ◼   ► the Tinder-ification of things.

00:48:43 ◼   ► So it's really horrifying because like I don't use any app that is Tinder-like, but I

00:48:47 ◼   ► can still see this is a user behavior or user experience that spreads.

00:48:54 ◼   ► It's like an ICE9.

00:48:55 ◼   ► Like once it's introduced, you cannot get rid of it and it just continues to spread.

00:48:59 ◼   ► So it's, I have a real visceral reaction to, oh, what if we put some Tinder in our Slack?

00:49:06 ◼   ► It's like, oh, it's like the reason that this user interaction spreads

00:49:11 ◼   ► is not because it's great.

00:49:13 ◼   ► It's because it's like hooking into something in people's brains, which is not quite the same.

00:49:19 ◼   ► So I just like on a very broad level, I don't like it in the same way that if Slack was

00:49:26 ◼   ► introducing some feature that they had borrowed from TikTok, be like on average, I think

00:49:30 ◼   ► that's going to be bad.

00:49:32 ◼   ► It's not going to be good.

00:49:34 ◼   ► Even if on Slack's end, they're like, oh, look at whatever metric we care about.

00:49:39 ◼   ► It's gone up.

00:49:39 ◼   ► Like, yeah, you can get the metric to go up and things to still be bad.

00:49:44 ◼   ► I think my thing on it is like, I could see it being interesting and I can see myself using it.

00:49:49 ◼   ► But what it highlights to me is a continued proof that there's problems that they are unable to fix.

00:49:57 ◼   ► That like, this is just another user interface to try and deal with the problem that is the ever-growing Slack.

00:50:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:09 ◼   ► Which is like a systemic fundamental issue that they can't deal with probably, right?

00:50:15 ◼   ► Like it's too late now, but is so funny to consider when you think about it was created as the idea of like,

00:50:23 ◼   ► we're going to replace email because email is too unmanageable and they've just created a second unmanageable system.

00:50:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I know.

00:50:30 ◼   ► But that's again, that's why all of the like corporate communication apps, like they all exist in this palace of pain

00:50:37 ◼   ► where they just recreate the very problems that they're trying to solve because multiple people working together

00:50:44 ◼   ► and trying to communicate, there are just some unsolvable problems here that you cannot ever really properly deal with them.

00:50:51 ◼   ► You can only seem to have pseudo-solved them by moving to a new thing that is smaller.

00:51:00 ◼   ► And so while it is smaller, you feel like, oh, what a relief, like this is great, but it will just grow.

00:51:06 ◼   ► And then it reintroduces those problems.

00:51:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:08 ◼   ► My second issue with this, again, it depends on like some of the exact details, but I also, I feel like for me personally,

00:51:15 ◼   ► this actually encourages the worst behavior for me admin wise.

00:51:23 ◼   ► I just think that it's a very bad pattern.

00:51:26 ◼   ► I do this with email.

00:51:27 ◼   ► I do this with lots of things with notifications.

00:51:30 ◼   ► I do this with iMessage too much where you like see some things, don't respond to a bunch of things and mark things unread.

00:51:38 ◼   ► Okay.

00:51:38 ◼   ► Like I think that's just a bad user pattern.

00:51:42 ◼   ► I think it's bad for your brain because it's like, oh, now I've just made myself aware of a bunch of stuff that I'm not actually dealing with.

00:51:52 ◼   ► And I provided this kind of pseudo relief of having gotten rid of some things that I'm not going to respond to.

00:52:00 ◼   ► But I think this is encouraging a bad user behavior.

00:52:04 ◼   ► It feels like progress, but isn't really.

00:52:07 ◼   ► I agree with you, but the problem is people are doing this.

00:52:10 ◼   ► And so, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I get it.

00:52:12 ◼   ► So it's like if people are doing it and now the genie is 100% out of the bottle on this, how can we at least make it easier for people to do the thing they're already doing?

00:52:22 ◼   ► No, I disagree.

00:52:23 ◼   ► Slack should be having their whole design be around like when you open up Slack, it shouldn't let you see anything.

00:52:28 ◼   ► There should be a message on screen and it should say, do you have 20 minutes to actually deal with Slack and try to respond to some of these messages?

00:52:35 ◼   ► And if you say no, then it just quits the app and says, come back later when you do.

00:52:40 ◼   ► Like that's what the user interface should be.

00:52:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:52:42 ◼   ► Like this kind of like, oh, I'm going to quick check.

00:52:44 ◼   ► This is exactly what I mean by TikTok-trification or in this case, Tinder-ification.

00:52:49 ◼   ► I guarantee they're like interaction metrics will go up, but I don't think that's the same thing as making Slack actually better.

00:52:59 ◼   ► Like I think this will increase engagement with Slack, but that is not the same thing as people getting useful work done in Slack or people feeling better about having used the app or actually like getting things out of their side of the court and turning projects around.

00:53:17 ◼   ► So that's my specific complaint here.

00:53:20 ◼   ► That comes down from the broader thing of like, why do certain user interface elements get adopted and spread is because they seem to be doing good things, but they are actually doing bad things.

00:53:33 ◼   ► And so I have not gone on the journey with you.

00:53:36 ◼   ► I don't like this at all.

00:53:37 ◼   ► I hate it.

00:53:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:53:38 ◼   ► There was something as like, so funny too.

00:53:41 ◼   ► Like Tinder is just triage for humans, which is like such a weird, when you think about it that way.

00:53:48 ◼   ► Such a strange thought, right?

00:53:49 ◼   ► You're just triaging people.

00:53:52 ◼   ► Don't use Tinder.

00:53:53 ◼   ► Well, I'm not going to say that, you know.

00:53:55 ◼   ► Pro tip, get married 10 years ago.

00:53:58 ◼   ► The best time to plan to marriage is 10 years ago.

00:54:01 ◼   ► The second best time is now.

00:54:02 ◼   ► You know what time it is, Mike?

00:54:06 ◼   ► It's time to review your time.

00:54:09 ◼   ► It's the January Mike time tracking review.

00:54:12 ◼   ► Indeed.

00:54:13 ◼   ► So I was thinking about this on Unconnected.

00:54:16 ◼   ► A few times a year we do roasts.

00:54:18 ◼   ► We like roast each other.

00:54:19 ◼   ► Like maybe it'll be like a home screen or desktop background or whatever.

00:54:24 ◼   ► We do like little roasts of each other.

00:54:25 ◼   ► And I feel like this is like roast Mike's time.

00:54:29 ◼   ► And that's what you get to do.

00:54:31 ◼   ► We're giving you the ability to roast me.

00:54:33 ◼   ► I think that's too harsh.

00:54:35 ◼   ► It gives you the opportunity to do it if you want to.

00:54:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:54:39 ◼   ► You know?

00:54:39 ◼   ► Because a roast can also be helpful.

00:54:42 ◼   ► Yeah, but that's no fun.

00:54:43 ◼   ► That's no one shows up to a roast because they're like, oh, I can't wait to see this

00:54:46 ◼   ► person complimented, right?

00:54:48 ◼   ► That's not what a roast is for.

00:54:49 ◼   ► No.

00:54:50 ◼   ► So I've created a graphic, which is from Timery showing my year over year time

00:54:57 ◼   ► tracking from 23 to 22.

00:55:00 ◼   ► I guess I could maybe start with some top line stuff and then maybe you could pick

00:55:05 ◼   ► into some things that you'd be interested in hearing me explain.

00:55:08 ◼   ► Well, I'll say straight away, right?

00:55:09 ◼   ► So we've done this multiple years.

00:55:11 ◼   ► Yep.

00:55:12 ◼   ► This is also why like I refuse to think of this as a roast because some years you

00:55:17 ◼   ► show me your numbers and it's a real example of the inside versus outside

00:55:23 ◼   ► experience where for you, it seems like there is something that is so obviously

00:55:27 ◼   ► different from the two years that to me from the outside, it's a bit like, what's

00:55:31 ◼   ► the major difference here between these two things?

00:55:33 ◼   ► Like it's not always obvious, like what has caught your attention.

00:55:36 ◼   ► But this has to be one of the most obvious differences I've ever seen

00:55:41 ◼   ► between two different years from 2022 to 2023.

00:55:45 ◼   ► The two massive changes are weekend and podcast editing.

00:55:51 ◼   ► Like that's just big obvious changes in what your year was like.

00:55:54 ◼   ► I have some huge changes to introduce you to later on in the discussion, but I will

00:55:59 ◼   ► agree with you.

00:55:59 ◼   ► So if you guess top line stuff, there is a pretty large increase in hours tracked

00:56:06 ◼   ► year over year.

00:56:06 ◼   ► Oh, wow.

00:56:07 ◼   ► I didn't even notice that.

00:56:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:56:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:56:09 ◼   ► But the biggest contributor to that is weekend.

00:56:12 ◼   ► So something I have started doing starting last year and I have something in it for

00:56:17 ◼   ► my 24 tracking as well is bringing something related to my yearly theme into

00:56:23 ◼   ► my time tracking to be able to give me more data that I am achieving or not my

00:56:28 ◼   ► theme.

00:56:28 ◼   ► And I brought weekend in.

00:56:31 ◼   ► Now what I didn't do here was just track my weekends, right?

00:56:36 ◼   ► Like it's Saturday morning.

00:56:37 ◼   ► Start that tracker.

00:56:39 ◼   ► That's not what it was.

00:56:41 ◼   ► That's the rare case where you could pre fill out the time tracker for the year at

00:56:47 ◼   ► the start of the year.

00:56:48 ◼   ► You could just put in all the weekend entries.

00:56:49 ◼   ► Look at this increase.

00:56:51 ◼   ► I was tracking things that I was purposely doing with the mindset of the year of the

00:56:58 ◼   ► weekend.

00:56:58 ◼   ► Okay.

00:56:59 ◼   ► It was the spirit of the weekend you were tracking.

00:57:00 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:57:01 ◼   ► So let's say it was spending time with friends that I had purposefully made a point of

00:57:10 ◼   ► doing, which came from the idea of you should be doing this, right?

00:57:14 ◼   ► That like there was something in my theme, which I was then bringing into the world.

00:57:19 ◼   ► And so like this could also be like if I worked on Saturday and I took time off on

00:57:25 ◼   ► Tuesday, I would track that time because that was a purposeful change that I was

00:57:30 ◼   ► looking to make because of the year of the weekend where previously I would have

00:57:35 ◼   ► worked the Saturday and then just not taken any time off for it.

00:57:37 ◼   ► So like I wasn't crediting myself for what I had done.

00:57:40 ◼   ► And this is also like, oh, you know, like I'm going to spend some time at home today

00:57:45 ◼   ► rather than going to the studio.

00:57:47 ◼   ► I can track that as the year of the weekend.

00:57:49 ◼   ► That's a thing that I really wanted to do.

00:57:51 ◼   ► And so like this is things that I was making a conscious decision that I would not

00:57:56 ◼   ► have done otherwise.

00:57:57 ◼   ► They got tracked as weekend time.

00:57:59 ◼   ► And so there's about three hundred hours there, which kind of equates for the bulk of

00:58:04 ◼   ► the increase year over year.

00:58:06 ◼   ► So I feel pretty good about that.

00:58:08 ◼   ► And you'll see at the bottom air traffic control.

00:58:11 ◼   ► Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah.

00:58:12 ◼   ► Project air traffic control.

00:58:13 ◼   ► So that was when I started this project.

00:58:15 ◼   ► And like so now for twenty twenty four, my year of people kind of thing that I'm

00:58:20 ◼   ► tracking is these air traffic control meetings.

00:58:24 ◼   ► I mean, me and my assistant are getting my week in order each week.

00:58:27 ◼   ► So that will be a thing that will continue to tick up in my twenty twenty four.

00:58:31 ◼   ► I'm more add in here, but I'm continuing to track activities that were from like the year

00:58:37 ◼   ► of the weekend. I'm trying to keep that mentality going.

00:58:40 ◼   ► And so I continue to track things like that, although I expect the hours to drop as these

00:58:46 ◼   ► things just become more integrated into my life.

00:58:48 ◼   ► But when I am doing something very specific for that reason, it's going to go into the

00:58:53 ◼   ► weekend timer.

00:58:54 ◼   ► OK, so you're keeping the weekend timer going forward.

00:58:57 ◼   ► Yeah, because I was going to ask, like, oh, you're going to have a like a year of people

00:59:00 ◼   ► timer, but it feels like there's actually quite a lot of overlap between that and the

00:59:03 ◼   ► weekend. Like it's there's some similar ideas there.

00:59:05 ◼   ► And also it's stitched into so much other stuff.

00:59:09 ◼   ► Oh, OK.

00:59:10 ◼   ► So it'd be too hard to track that.

00:59:12 ◼   ► But, you know, should I be running a Cortex brand admin timer or should I be running a

00:59:17 ◼   ► people like it's too complicated.

00:59:19 ◼   ► It gets into the classic question that people like, do you run multiple timers?

00:59:23 ◼   ► Like how do you deal it with when you're running two things at one time?

00:59:25 ◼   ► And the answer is don't don't ever do that.

00:59:27 ◼   ► Yeah, just choose.

00:59:28 ◼   ► OK, that that makes sense.

00:59:30 ◼   ► This data is one of the reasons that I track my time, because what I like about time

00:59:36 ◼   ► tracking is accountability and information.

00:59:39 ◼   ► So like when I am working by turning on a timer, I am indicating to myself that I am

00:59:46 ◼   ► working and if the timer is running, I should be doing what I say I'm supposed to be

00:59:51 ◼   ► doing. And if I notice that I've stopped, then I'll turn off my timer.

00:59:55 ◼   ► You know, like it's very normal.

00:59:56 ◼   ► You're working on something and you get distracted.

00:59:59 ◼   ► And then there will come a point where I realize that and I'm like, right, timer goes

01:00:02 ◼   ► off and I'm kind of indicating to myself that it's OK to do this other thing that I now

01:00:09 ◼   ► want to do instead. Or I will take that as a moment to be like, whoa, hang on a minute.

01:00:13 ◼   ► You're supposed to be working. Go back to the thing you're supposed to be doing.

01:00:15 ◼   ► So that like accountability is very helpful for me.

01:00:18 ◼   ► But I also love the information.

01:00:20 ◼   ► I love looking at this year over year stuff and seeing like, did I get out of the year

01:00:26 ◼   ► what I set? Like it's these things are very linked for me with themes.

01:00:30 ◼   ► Like, can I look at my year's data and be like, oh, I can see these changes that I have

01:00:37 ◼   ► actually made. I can see that these were changes that happened in my life that either I

01:00:41 ◼   ► made or things happened to me.

01:00:43 ◼   ► And it gives me an idea of being able to look at a very top level to be like, did I have

01:00:49 ◼   ► the year that I wanted and why could that be?

01:00:51 ◼   ► So it's like good information to have to like reinforce if the changes that I'm making are

01:00:57 ◼   ► reflected in the hours that I'm spending.

01:00:59 ◼   ► And I like that kind of stuff.

01:01:01 ◼   ► So this has become these like year over year comparisons has become one of the main

01:01:05 ◼   ► reasons that I continue to do time tracking.

01:01:08 ◼   ► It totally makes sense as a tool of intentionality in that way.

01:01:12 ◼   ► And especially because you are more diligent and less sloppy about the time tracking than

01:01:17 ◼   ► I am with this kind of stuff.

01:01:18 ◼   ► So you have meaningful year over year data to compare.

01:01:22 ◼   ► And like there's a way in which if I could magic it into existence, I would love to also

01:01:27 ◼   ► be able to do like the year over year comparisons.

01:01:30 ◼   ► I'm just like I'm not quite as diligent with it as you are, but I use it in the same way as

01:01:35 ◼   ► like this intentionality tool.

01:01:37 ◼   ► So, yeah, it's really useful in that way to like, like you said, notice when you have

01:01:44 ◼   ► diverted from what your intention was.

01:01:48 ◼   ► That's like the great, oh, it sounds so dumb, but that ability to go, oh, I have to stop

01:01:53 ◼   ► this reading timer because I'm actually just checking my email on my phone.

01:01:59 ◼   ► I'm busy tendering on Slack right now.

01:02:01 ◼   ► I'm not actually reading this book.

01:02:02 ◼   ► Right. Like I have to stop this reading timer.

01:02:04 ◼   ► And then like it's surprisingly useful in the little day to day moments of life of

01:02:10 ◼   ► noticing what it is that you're actually doing.

01:02:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:02:14 ◼   ► All right. So what's going on with all that podcast editing time, Mike?

01:02:16 ◼   ► Where has it disappeared to?

01:02:18 ◼   ► Well, this is one of the things where like this year there's a good decrease, right, from

01:02:22 ◼   ► two hundred nineteen hours to one hundred and forty three hours.

01:02:26 ◼   ► So that's dropping upgrade, I think was this is where I saw a full year of that because

01:02:31 ◼   ► it was something I stopped like half way through twenty twenty two.

01:02:34 ◼   ► Right.

01:02:35 ◼   ► Right. I'm really keen to see what twenty twenty four looks like because the majority of

01:02:41 ◼   ► what's left here is Cortex.

01:02:43 ◼   ► So I expect I'll probably lose over a hundred hours year over year.

01:02:48 ◼   ► OK, so you think the majority of this is purely Cortex editing.

01:02:51 ◼   ► Interesting.

01:02:51 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. I mean, I only edit Cortex and the pen addict and the pen addict takes ten

01:02:56 ◼   ► minutes once a week.

01:02:58 ◼   ► So the majority of that is Cortex, but I don't expect it to disappear.

01:03:02 ◼   ► Right. Because I still call editing what I'm doing with like the assembly of the show and

01:03:07 ◼   ► the posting of the show and all that kind of stuff.

01:03:09 ◼   ► So, yeah, that makes sense.

01:03:10 ◼   ► It's still going to be in there, but it's going to be a big chunk taken out of it for

01:03:14 ◼   ► sure. And, you know, there is also a decrease in it year over year because there's also

01:03:19 ◼   ► just like a decrease year over year.

01:03:21 ◼   ► And obviously the amount of episodes I produced from twenty twenty to twenty twenty three.

01:03:25 ◼   ► Exactly sure why that is that you can see my podcast recording hours are down.

01:03:29 ◼   ► I guess I did make some changes.

01:03:31 ◼   ► So I took some shows that changed their scheduling rather than like weekly or whatever

01:03:36 ◼   ► went to monthly, like stuff like that, which I'm always kind of tweaking those kinds of

01:03:40 ◼   ► things. And so that's why like podcast recording and show prep both went down because

01:03:46 ◼   ► they will go down or up together.

01:03:48 ◼   ► Where now podcast editing over the last two years has been divorced from that because

01:03:53 ◼   ► I've made much larger changes to what I'm editing.

01:03:57 ◼   ► So that's kind of become uncoupled from the recording and prep numbers where previously

01:04:04 ◼   ► the three of those went completely hand in hand.

01:04:07 ◼   ► But that day it was going to be weird over the last two years.

01:04:10 ◼   ► And so really it will be from twenty twenty four onwards that those will be locked

01:04:15 ◼   ► together again because I'm not expecting to make any changes to editing or whatever.

01:04:19 ◼   ► That makes sense. I think the biggest change is Cossacks brand.

01:04:23 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. I'm just looking through the rest of this and I'm just noticing more and

01:04:28 ◼   ► more like, oh, there's actually quite a number of changes here that didn't jump out to

01:04:31 ◼   ► me as obviously is those first two.

01:04:33 ◼   ► So tell me about what's going on with Cortex brand in twenty twenty one.

01:04:37 ◼   ► Everything to Cortex brand was all just in one timer.

01:04:41 ◼   ► And then at the end of twenty twenty two, I kind of split it out and created Cortex

01:04:46 ◼   ► brand product design as well as Cortex brand admin.

01:04:49 ◼   ► And I tracked about one hundred and five hours of time, one hundred five hours of work

01:04:55 ◼   ► in twenty twenty two.

01:04:56 ◼   ► Then in twenty twenty three, I also introduced Cortex brand marketing.

01:05:02 ◼   ► And now between admin design and marketing, I tracked about three hundred hours of work

01:05:08 ◼   ► in twenty twenty three compared to the one hundred in twenty twenty two.

01:05:13 ◼   ► Big difference. Yeah, there's no surprise, but that is a huge difference.

01:05:18 ◼   ► That's a lot of hours to add.

01:05:20 ◼   ► So that is, I think, the biggest meaningful change that I see in my just like pure work

01:05:25 ◼   ► hours this year. It's why even though some stuff has reduced in like the podcasting

01:05:31 ◼   ► stuff, my overall hours have stayed relatively the same of work.

01:05:36 ◼   ► Right. Because if you take the weekend hours out of that, the work hours have remained

01:05:41 ◼   ► the same, if not increased, because I have added about two hundred hours of work this

01:05:46 ◼   ► year on top of the things that I was doing before.

01:05:49 ◼   ► But this is all by design.

01:05:51 ◼   ► It's not an accident and I'm happy about it.

01:05:53 ◼   ► I don't look at that and I'm like, oh, it's too much.

01:05:55 ◼   ► This is exactly what I wanted.

01:05:57 ◼   ► And I feel like the results of it have borne out and I'm happy with the effort.

01:06:02 ◼   ► I was kind of wondering for myself, I was thinking, oh, should I break out Cortex brand

01:06:06 ◼   ► versus Cortex podcast stuff?

01:06:08 ◼   ► Oh, one hundred percent you should.

01:06:10 ◼   ► Yes. Yeah.

01:06:11 ◼   ► I'm not convinced for me it matters as much.

01:06:14 ◼   ► So I know people do this differently.

01:06:16 ◼   ► So like my co-founder, Relay Steven, he tracks very differently to me and he finds my

01:06:22 ◼   ► way of tracking to be very strange.

01:06:24 ◼   ► So like what does he do?

01:06:25 ◼   ► So I track podcast recording and then what you don't see in this number is I have a tag

01:06:29 ◼   ► for each show. So I can also see how much time I spent per show by doing a different

01:06:34 ◼   ► report where Steven will track for Mac power users.

01:06:38 ◼   ► He just tracks everything.

01:06:39 ◼   ► So if he's prepping, if he's recording, if he's editing, it's all just Mac power users.

01:06:44 ◼   ► That to me seems wrong.

01:06:46 ◼   ► I track by task and then have a tag if there is a property related to that task and he

01:06:54 ◼   ► finds mine to be strange.

01:06:55 ◼   ► So it's just like a very personal thing where like I want to know more about how much I'm

01:06:59 ◼   ► recording is like the top line and how much I'm spending per show.

01:07:03 ◼   ► Like for me, I don't really feel like I need that as the most important statistic.

01:07:08 ◼   ► I like to know more about like the type of work that I'm doing, not what it's for.

01:07:12 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe. I feel like this is a byproduct of the number of shows that you do.

01:07:16 ◼   ► Yeah, probably.

01:07:17 ◼   ► Even just for me thinking like I just have a timer called Cortex.

01:07:22 ◼   ► Am I doing anything Cortex related that goes from we're talking right now to I'm

01:07:29 ◼   ► updating spreadsheets for the business?

01:07:31 ◼   ► It's all just the Cortex timer.

01:07:32 ◼   ► To me, that doesn't make any sense, right?

01:07:34 ◼   ► Like for me, prepping for an episode of Cortex could not be more different to working

01:07:41 ◼   ► on the email newsletter, right?

01:07:42 ◼   ► Like those things, like I just couldn't imagine tracking them as the same work.

01:07:47 ◼   ► But this is why I thought about it for a moment and then I talked myself out of it

01:07:52 ◼   ► because the information to me is really much more like how much of my life does

01:07:59 ◼   ► Cortex take up?

01:08:00 ◼   ► It's all one connected blob for me, whereas you have shared tasks that are similar

01:08:08 ◼   ► across multiple things.

01:08:09 ◼   ► But even for you, though, like the idea that you track everything related to the

01:08:12 ◼   ► podcast has been one thing.

01:08:13 ◼   ► While it's not my style, I understand why somebody does it.

01:08:16 ◼   ► But then to be like when I'm working on my spreadsheets, it's effectively the

01:08:22 ◼   ► same bucket as when I'm sitting here recording with you.

01:08:24 ◼   ► Like that to me just feels wrong.

01:08:26 ◼   ► I find that to be really odd.

01:08:27 ◼   ► I can understand why.

01:08:29 ◼   ► I think it's partly because the real division in my life for work is what I

01:08:33 ◼   ► think of as the core work, which is usually like heavy like research and writing work.

01:08:37 ◼   ► And then I have like two layers of lighter work, which is on top of that.

01:08:42 ◼   ► So it's like video editing, podcast preparation, podcast recording, like

01:08:47 ◼   ► working on spreadsheets.

01:08:48 ◼   ► It's all like medium level work.

01:08:50 ◼   ► And then the light level work is tinder-ing on Slack, I guess.

01:08:53 ◼   ► Like, oh, like that's, that's my light level work.

01:08:55 ◼   ► And so like, I'm doing a level of categorization that's like meta on that

01:09:01 ◼   ► level of like, I care about the relationship of these three things.

01:09:05 ◼   ► And for me, something like writing and research is just so fundamentally

01:09:12 ◼   ► different from everything else that I do work-wise.

01:09:15 ◼   ► I really care about the ratio of this to everything else.

01:09:20 ◼   ► So I think it's a lot easier for me to compress the everything else into much

01:09:24 ◼   ► broader buckets of like, I just want a cortex bucket.

01:09:27 ◼   ► I just want a video editing bucket and I don't really need things

01:09:33 ◼   ► that are much granular than that.

01:09:34 ◼   ► But I could see, depending on how this year goes at the end of it, maybe

01:09:39 ◼   ► deciding like, oh, I do need to break out Cortex brand from the Cortex podcast.

01:09:44 ◼   ► But I think for the moment, I'm still okay not doing that.

01:09:47 ◼   ► But yeah, it's interesting to see how other people do it.

01:09:50 ◼   ► And there is a funny thing where to me, like I find looking at your system,

01:09:53 ◼   ► it's almost absurdly broken down and also absurdly broad, like podcast

01:10:01 ◼   ► recording with 400 hours is almost, it's like a hilarious number.

01:10:04 ◼   ► But again, that's just a function of this report.

01:10:06 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, of course, of course.

01:10:08 ◼   ► Like I can make a report that tells me the stuff that I would need to know there.

01:10:14 ◼   ► And like, I make those reports for when they're important to me.

01:10:16 ◼   ► But the majority of time, I don't need that information.

01:10:21 ◼   ► But like, I can give it to you right here.

01:10:24 ◼   ► Here we go.

01:10:25 ◼   ► All right.

01:10:26 ◼   ► So just for the sake of comparing now, I've pulled the 2022 and 2023 podcast

01:10:31 ◼   ► recording numbers based on show.

01:10:34 ◼   ► See, we can also see upgrade very consistent, like 119 hours.

01:10:40 ◼   ► I feel like this is almost an indecent level of information

01:10:43 ◼   ► about how my expense is time.

01:10:45 ◼   ► I mean, but this part is very findable, right?

01:10:48 ◼   ► Because like you can see the runtime of shows.

01:10:50 ◼   ► Oh, I know, I know.

01:10:51 ◼   ► But there's just something funny about it.

01:10:53 ◼   ► It's like, oh, we've almost drilled down to a level where I'm slightly uncomfortable.

01:10:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:10:58 ◼   ► Look at all that upgrade time.

01:11:00 ◼   ► Connected went from 110 to 90 hours.

01:11:05 ◼   ► I think I took more episodes off this year.

01:11:06 ◼   ► Yeah, I was going to say, you didn't change the number of episodes, but

01:11:09 ◼   ► you just were on fewer episodes.

01:11:11 ◼   ► Yes.

01:11:12 ◼   ► The pen addict, similar, Cortex was more, which I expected because we did more

01:11:16 ◼   ► episodes, not by a lot more, which is interesting, but yeah, it's actually funny

01:11:20 ◼   ► that Cortex number is bigger, but it's not as much bigger as I would have expected.

01:11:25 ◼   ► Cortex has a weird outlying though, is I am tracking from the

01:11:29 ◼   ► moment we start talking.

01:11:30 ◼   ► Okay.

01:11:31 ◼   ► That makes sense.

01:11:32 ◼   ► Right.

01:11:32 ◼   ► So like that one is wobbly of like maybe in 2022, we were just way more chatty.

01:11:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:11:39 ◼   ► Even though we recorded more episodes in 2023.

01:11:41 ◼   ► I guess, I don't know if I should even say this, right?

01:11:46 ◼   ► Cause I don't want to make you self-conscious.

01:11:48 ◼   ► One of the things that I track of a timer, which is called social

01:11:55 ◼   ► colon audio visual, right?

01:11:58 ◼   ► So am I talking to someone basically like on a phone call or on a video chat?

01:12:03 ◼   ► And the reason I keep track of a couple of little social timers, because I'm just

01:12:08 ◼   ► like really bad at it and I feel like I shouldn't let this number get under like

01:12:12 ◼   ► 1% of my total time, so I just want to keep an eye on like, have I just spoken

01:12:17 ◼   ► socially to someone and when we start our calls for Cortex, sometimes I'm like,

01:12:23 ◼   ► Ooh, if we're actually just chatting, I can flip on that social timer.

01:12:27 ◼   ► That is the main way we maintain our friendship.

01:12:30 ◼   ► Yeah, it is.

01:12:31 ◼   ► But I'm also, I'm totally juicing those social AV numbers.

01:12:35 ◼   ► Like that's 100% what I'm doing.

01:12:37 ◼   ► No, you're not juicing, it's accurate.

01:12:38 ◼   ► Like most of the conversation, like me and Grey will talk for multiple

01:12:42 ◼   ► hours outside of the recording.

01:12:44 ◼   ► The vast majority, we're just like shooting the breeze.

01:12:47 ◼   ► Like we're not, you know, we're just like hanging out.

01:12:49 ◼   ► So I think that it's perfectly acceptable.

01:12:52 ◼   ► I still acknowledge like, I'm kind of juicing these numbers mainly because

01:12:56 ◼   ► what I really want to do is encourage me to have more of this time, which means

01:13:01 ◼   ► like, Oh, I should try to call and talk to someone, right?

01:13:04 ◼   ► And I'm cheating it because it's like, ah, we were going to do the

01:13:07 ◼   ► call for recording anyway.

01:13:08 ◼   ► That's true.

01:13:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:13:09 ◼   ► Don't use me to make your chart go up.

01:13:12 ◼   ► Right.

01:13:13 ◼   ► But that's exactly what I'm using you for.

01:13:14 ◼   ► It's like, Oh, I've got these great AV numbers now.

01:13:17 ◼   ► Amazing.

01:13:18 ◼   ► So yeah, this is the information I can draw if I want to.

01:13:21 ◼   ► But for me, this granularity is good to have, but I only really use it at one

01:13:27 ◼   ► time, which is we generate like a spreadsheet every year, which looks at

01:13:33 ◼   ► the hours I spent per show, the revenue I made per show, working out my hourly

01:13:38 ◼   ► rate that I make from each, you know, just, it's like a good piece of information

01:13:43 ◼   ► to look at it's one of those charts though, where it can sometimes help

01:13:47 ◼   ► inform stuff, but you also have to like take things with a real grain of salt too.

01:13:52 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

01:13:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:13:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:13:53 ◼   ► Because it would say otherwise like, Oh, all I should record is

01:13:56 ◼   ► ungenius because the show is like 10 minutes long and we have like an

01:14:01 ◼   ► ad on each episode and Steven does all the prep work, but it doesn't work like that.

01:14:06 ◼   ► Like in theory, yes, if we just did ungenius, we'd be raking it in.

01:14:10 ◼   ► And also if the episodes were two hours long rather than 10 minutes long.

01:14:13 ◼   ► But I know that realistically, that's not how that works.

01:14:16 ◼   ► Right.

01:14:16 ◼   ► So that's, we have a lot of this stuff.

01:14:18 ◼   ► You still have to apply, it's the same with the time tracking,

01:14:21 ◼   ► just the raw time tracking.

01:14:22 ◼   ► It's just to apply what you know about your work to overlap.

01:14:26 ◼   ► This is just a data point.

01:14:27 ◼   ► It's not a Bible.

01:14:29 ◼   ► I'm always trying to convey this idea, which I think is really hard for people.

01:14:33 ◼   ► Especially if you're listening to us and you are not inclined this way, right?

01:14:37 ◼   ► Where you're not like, I'm going to time track all the time, right?

01:14:39 ◼   ► It just seems like it's very strange behavior.

01:14:41 ◼   ► It's very easy to over assume the importance put on these things.

01:14:46 ◼   ► And I think that the kind of people who are naturally inclined to be tracking all

01:14:53 ◼   ► of this kind of stuff or making spreadsheets, if you're inclined that way,

01:14:57 ◼   ► your tendency will be to put too much emphasis on this data.

01:15:00 ◼   ► So like, I'm always trying to express this idea that you have to both take the data

01:15:07 ◼   ► seriously and not seriously at all.

01:15:11 ◼   ► And the closest I've ever come, or the way it sort of feels in my head is it's a bit

01:15:16 ◼   ► like you're the king and you have this advisor and the advisor is really smart,

01:15:23 ◼   ► but he's literally never left the library.

01:15:26 ◼   ► And so like you as the king have actually traveled around your kingdom and like,

01:15:31 ◼   ► you know, a bunch of things out in the world that are difficult to quantify.

01:15:34 ◼   ► And so like, it's important to listen to your advisor who is the spreadsheet in

01:15:40 ◼   ► this metaphor or the time tracking in this metaphor or the like your hourly rate in

01:15:44 ◼   ► this metaphor, but it's also extremely important to always remember that guy

01:15:50 ◼   ► never leaves the library.

01:15:51 ◼   ► He doesn't know anything about the actual real world.

01:15:55 ◼   ► And so you can totally blow off his very strong advice all the time because there's

01:16:01 ◼   ► a huge amount of context that's just missing.

01:16:03 ◼   ► But I think it's really hard to have the balance between those two things to both

01:16:09 ◼   ► be the person who's pedantic enough to keep all of these records like the

01:16:14 ◼   ► librarian advisor, but is also like out in the world in the way that like the

01:16:21 ◼   ► person running the empire has to be.

01:16:22 ◼   ► Well, yeah, that's my time tracking over the year.

01:16:25 ◼   ► I feel like everything else is within kind of the margins that I would expect,

01:16:29 ◼   ► like without too much change to them.

01:16:32 ◼   ► There's maybe some things that are a few hours here or there.

01:16:34 ◼   ► I guess what actually one that I did want to point out was how sponsors

01:16:38 ◼   ► dropped from 32 hours to six.

01:16:40 ◼   ► Yeah, that was the other big one that I noticed there.

01:16:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:16:43 ◼   ► Which is just confirming the thing that we've been working on for years for

01:16:47 ◼   ► me to reduce that from my plate.

01:16:49 ◼   ► I think the other thing that's just funny from a data perspective is year

01:16:54 ◼   ► over year, how many things that you track are within plus or minus five hours each

01:17:01 ◼   ► year, right?

01:17:01 ◼   ► It's like you've tracked 1500 or 1800 hours, but you still have five, six, seven

01:17:08 ◼   ► things that are like within five hours.

01:17:11 ◼   ► The one that particularly catches my attention here is you've got mega studio

01:17:15 ◼   ► and it's like five hours, 50 minutes, one year, five hours, 21 minutes the next

01:17:20 ◼   ► year, like how is it so close?

01:17:22 ◼   ► Workflows, one hour, 41 minutes, one hour, 12 minutes.

01:17:27 ◼   ► But the other one that really catches my attention is like podcastathon is within

01:17:33 ◼   ► Yeah, that's weird.

01:17:33 ◼   ► one hour, like both years.

01:17:37 ◼   ► It's 69 and 68 hours.

01:17:40 ◼   ► The thing that's strange to me is the event itself increased by 50% in runtime.

01:17:46 ◼   ► Like looking at this, it feels to me like there's some kind of mathematical

01:17:53 ◼   ► or universal law in action here that I don't know about.

01:17:57 ◼   ► Like how is it that you can track whatever it is, 20 different categories

01:18:02 ◼   ► and a surprising number of them are within just a few percent of where they

01:18:09 ◼   ► were last year, even though the number of hours being tracked is huge.

01:18:13 ◼   ► It just, it feels like there's some phenomenon I don't know about that

01:18:16 ◼   ► has a name that explains this.

01:18:17 ◼   ► If anyone knows what that is, please tell us in feedback.

01:18:20 ◼   ► Creature of habit syndrome or something like that.

01:18:23 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:18:24 ◼   ► I was hoping for something more exotic, but you're probably right.

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01:20:11 ◼   ► All right, before we wrap up today, I have a little bit of Cortex brand follow up.

01:20:15 ◼   ► We need to revisit a bet that we made.

01:20:17 ◼   ► So in episode 145 in August of last year, we spoke about the fact that we had just

01:20:25 ◼   ► decided to make a really big bet with ordering Sidekick Notepad stock.

01:20:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:20:31 ◼   ► To the point where we would have more stock than we've ever had in any product

01:20:36 ◼   ► ever before, far past what we were comfortable ordering, way more investment

01:20:42 ◼   ► than we were comfortable making.

01:20:44 ◼   ► But we were doing that because you were working on a video that you were going to

01:20:49 ◼   ► put up for the end of the year.

01:20:51 ◼   ► And we wanted to be prepared for the like worst case scenario that we would go out

01:20:58 ◼   ► of stock after the promo video went up, which had happened both times you'd done

01:21:02 ◼   ► this with the journal.

01:21:03 ◼   ► Well, the video went up.

01:21:05 ◼   ► Before you say another word, can I just say, like, even just hearing you describe

01:21:13 ◼   ► this situation, again, I have a physical tightening in my chest thinking about

01:21:19 ◼   ► this.

01:21:19 ◼   ► Well, okay, so obviously we're on the other side of this bet and we know how it went.

01:21:24 ◼   ► Sometimes we've talked about how there are kind of stresses in self-employment that

01:21:30 ◼   ► are just fundamentally different from being employed.

01:21:34 ◼   ► And I think this bet and working on the promotion of this product are one of the

01:21:41 ◼   ► times that I have felt that most keenly in a different way when you're just on your

01:21:47 ◼   ► own and you are like making important financial decisions about things and the

01:21:54 ◼   ► pressure is on and there's like, there's nobody else here.

01:21:58 ◼   ► Like it's just you being self-employed doing a thing.

01:22:02 ◼   ► I just really felt it from the moment we put in that order until the time that I was

01:22:09 ◼   ► finally able to press publish on that video.

01:22:12 ◼   ► That was just a like grinding stress of self-employment time from my perspective.

01:22:19 ◼   ► This is a unique kind of unpleasantness that is just different from the numerous

01:22:29 ◼   ► kinds of unpleasantness I also experienced being employed.

01:22:33 ◼   ► Like they're just different, like they're different kinds of things.

01:22:36 ◼   ► What made it different?

01:22:36 ◼   ► I guess the difference that I'm trying to express is the lack of structure around

01:22:42 ◼   ► you.

01:22:42 ◼   ► I think that's really what it is.

01:22:45 ◼   ► Like the maximum stress of being employed is the stress of being

01:22:49 ◼   ► ejected from that structure.

01:22:51 ◼   ► That's when I had my worst time as a teacher, right?

01:22:54 ◼   ► The underlying stress there was they're going to fire me.

01:22:58 ◼   ► It's the stress of expulsion, but you have to go to like really the next level of,

01:23:07 ◼   ► "Oh, if I make a bad decision or if I do a bad job, it's like catastrophic for the

01:23:14 ◼   ► organization in which I exist."

01:23:15 ◼   ► Like that's just like a very different kind of thing.

01:23:19 ◼   ► And so that's the flip side of the like the self-employment stress is you can make

01:23:25 ◼   ► decisions or you can do things that are just very bad for the organization in which

01:23:30 ◼   ► you exist because the organization is basically just you.

01:23:33 ◼   ► And so that's why like I just really felt it.

01:23:38 ◼   ► Like I swear from the moment that you said like, "Okay, we placed the order."

01:23:41 ◼   ► It's like, "Ah, here comes the stress."

01:23:44 ◼   ► This isn't going to change anything, but I felt exactly the same.

01:23:48 ◼   ► I remember the exact moment when we were sitting around your kitchen table and we

01:23:54 ◼   ► made the decision, my life changed at that moment and it remained that way until early

01:24:00 ◼   ► December.

01:24:00 ◼   ► So for like August to December, I had a low level anxiety the entire time.

01:24:09 ◼   ► The day did not go by where I was freaking out about the decision that we had made.

01:24:15 ◼   ► I'll also say between us, I also acknowledge that you in many ways were in the worst

01:24:22 ◼   ► position because at least I knew on a day to day basis like, "What am I up to?"

01:24:27 ◼   ► You were basically existing in the dark of like, "I wonder what Gray's done today."

01:24:32 ◼   ► Right?

01:24:32 ◼   ► Where at least Gray knows what he's done today.

01:24:34 ◼   ► Right?

01:24:35 ◼   ► Where you were much more in the dark.

01:24:36 ◼   ► Well, okay.

01:24:37 ◼   ► So yes, I was, but this was on your shoulders.

01:24:41 ◼   ► That's what you had that was different to me.

01:24:43 ◼   ► The result of this was the quality of the product you produced.

01:24:47 ◼   ► Right?

01:24:48 ◼   ► If you did a bad job making this video, that is on you.

01:24:53 ◼   ► It's not on me.

01:24:55 ◼   ► Right?

01:24:55 ◼   ► Because like that is your contribution there.

01:24:58 ◼   ► It was like you had to make a good product, but if you messed it up or if like you

01:25:04 ◼   ► didn't put the effort in and it resulted in poor sales, that is a thing where we'd

01:25:10 ◼   ► have to look at forever and be like, "Oh yeah, because that was because the video

01:25:14 ◼   ► wasn't good enough."

01:25:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:25:16 ◼   ► Right?

01:25:16 ◼   ► So like that is what you had that was different to me.

01:25:20 ◼   ► Where like I tried to be as helpful as possible during the process, but I don't

01:25:25 ◼   ► have what you have.

01:25:26 ◼   ► Like I don't have the skills that you have.

01:25:28 ◼   ► I don't have the ability to write something the way that you do.

01:25:32 ◼   ► And so ultimately the quality of the end product was on you.

01:25:38 ◼   ► And so like that puts the stress on you, which I'm sure you felt.

01:25:40 ◼   ► But I'm saying like, you say it's bad for me because I didn't have control.

01:25:45 ◼   ► Well, I acknowledge it's bad for you because it was on your shoulders.

01:25:48 ◼   ► Right.

01:25:49 ◼   ► Because I did have control.

01:25:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:25:50 ◼   ► It's the two sides of the same coin, but it's just a thing that I was really aware

01:25:55 ◼   ► of.

01:25:55 ◼   ► Like, ah, this is like the real stress of self-employment.

01:25:59 ◼   ► There's like this low level thing that, I mean, ultimately is there all the time when

01:26:06 ◼   ► you're self-employed.

01:26:07 ◼   ► It's always in the background like a little, but this is one of the times where it

01:26:11 ◼   ► really felt like it just got ramped up.

01:26:13 ◼   ► Well, the difference is, is because it's a thing that we don't deal in, in that there

01:26:18 ◼   ► was a large capital expenditure to make this bet, where usually the types of things

01:26:23 ◼   ► that we do don't have that.

01:26:26 ◼   ► Like you can either succeed or fail and that will make an impact on the other end.

01:26:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:26:31 ◼   ► But it's not, that failure would not then end up in, well, we have too much stock and

01:26:38 ◼   ► we're going to pay the price for that.

01:26:39 ◼   ► And we've got to, by any means necessary, sell it.

01:26:43 ◼   ► And like that kind of desperation, I'm sure sucks.

01:26:48 ◼   ► And actually we have been in a version of that in the past, but not to the level that

01:26:53 ◼   ► would have been financially.

01:26:55 ◼   ► And also like, what does that say about the product, right?

01:27:01 ◼   ► Like that we would produce a video that hundreds of thousands of people would see

01:27:04 ◼   ► and they didn't want it.

01:27:06 ◼   ► That was also like one of the things that I think I was having a hard time expressing

01:27:09 ◼   ► when I was talking to you sometimes is like the Sidekicks and Interesting product.

01:27:15 ◼   ► I found it a tricky video because in my discussions with people in person, it

01:27:23 ◼   ► really did have like quite a bifurcated response where some people just go like,

01:27:28 ◼   ► I don't know why I would ever use that.

01:27:30 ◼   ► And some people go, Oh my God, I want that right now.

01:27:33 ◼   ► Like I know exactly where that fits in my life.

01:27:36 ◼   ► So those people in some sense are like, they're pre-set, but I was thinking of

01:27:40 ◼   ► someone like my dad, I was actually thinking a bunch about with this, where

01:27:46 ◼   ► when I first showed him the Sidekick notepad, he was skeptical of it, which I

01:27:51 ◼   ► found very surprising because like when I think of my dad, when I was a kid and

01:27:56 ◼   ► going to his office, he was one of those guys who had one of those giant calendars

01:28:00 ◼   ► on his desk, like was working on top of the paper calendar.

01:28:03 ◼   ► So it was like, Dad, it's like that, but smaller.

01:28:06 ◼   ► Like I know this is a thing that you would like.

01:28:09 ◼   ► And he eventually turned around on it and decided like, Oh no, I

01:28:12 ◼   ► do really do like it, it's useful.

01:28:14 ◼   ► It's like, yes, obviously that's for you.

01:28:15 ◼   ► And so I was just thinking a lot about like the marginal person, like how do

01:28:20 ◼   ► you try to demonstrate quickly to the marginal person that there's something

01:28:23 ◼   ► that's interesting here to them where they don't know that they would like it.

01:28:27 ◼   ► But yeah, so it's just like it had this property of people respond immediately

01:28:33 ◼   ► that they know that they want it, immediately that they don't.

01:28:35 ◼   ► And then there's a group of people who don't know that they

01:28:37 ◼   ► do really want this thing.

01:28:38 ◼   ► And it just made the messaging much trickier as opposed to the theme

01:28:44 ◼   ► system journal where it's more like, I can tell you a story about what this thing is for.

01:28:48 ◼   ► Like that's just obviously how you go about it.

01:28:50 ◼   ► I agree with you, but I still, my kind of thinking of why I believe this

01:28:55 ◼   ► product would be successful and I thought the video could be and would be

01:28:58 ◼   ► successful is while you have the hurdle of like this product is made in a

01:29:03 ◼   ► particular way and it has a particular use idea and it's a premium price product.

01:29:08 ◼   ► And so like you've got those three things, but I believe it is easier to

01:29:13 ◼   ► see yourself as a user of this product in the journal because for the theme

01:29:17 ◼   ► system journal, if you don't know about yearly themes, like you haven't

01:29:21 ◼   ► really had that much exposure to it.

01:29:23 ◼   ► In the course of a 10 minute video, you have to accept to life

01:29:30 ◼   ► change, then go to checkout.

01:29:32 ◼   ► Like that is quite a jump, I think.

01:29:35 ◼   ► No, I completely agree.

01:29:36 ◼   ► We've talked about this before with this as a product is it's more like a

01:29:39 ◼   ► look at it and understand it product.

01:29:41 ◼   ► Yep.

01:29:41 ◼   ► Perversely, that narrative of I need to convince you of a life change in 10

01:29:46 ◼   ► minutes provides more structure for what is the story of this video going to be.

01:29:53 ◼   ► Whereas the Sidekick, which is a much more direct product, has less of a

01:30:00 ◼   ► predestined structure for what should a promotional video for this look like,

01:30:05 ◼   ► which is why it's harder.

01:30:07 ◼   ► So there's like, there's this weird inverse, right?

01:30:09 ◼   ► Like Sidekick in many ways is an easier sell, but a harder video.

01:30:15 ◼   ► And the theme system journal is kind of a harder sell, but an easier video

01:30:19 ◼   ► in terms of the production, because there's a, there's like a necessary

01:30:23 ◼   ► story here, but that also just didn't help at all with the like, what am I

01:30:28 ◼   ► going to do?

01:30:29 ◼   ► And I definitely had many days where I was just like sitting in a room and

01:30:34 ◼   ► thinking, I'm like, am I going to do this?

01:30:36 ◼   ► And you do this like horrible writer thing where you like write out a bunch

01:30:39 ◼   ► of stuff and then you go, it's all terrible.

01:30:41 ◼   ► And you digitally scrunch it up and throw it away.

01:30:43 ◼   ► Throw your typewriter at the wall.

01:30:44 ◼   ► I'm useless.

01:30:46 ◼   ► I can't do this.

01:30:48 ◼   ► When you have done that for a long period of time, you are left in the

01:30:53 ◼   ► position where even when you go to press the publish button, it's like, I

01:30:58 ◼   ► don't understand this anymore.

01:30:59 ◼   ► Like I don't even know how to perceive this thing that I have made.

01:31:02 ◼   ► I'm just going to ship it out there and see how it does.

01:31:06 ◼   ► And I think it come to the end of it.

01:31:08 ◼   ► I was in somewhat of a similar boat to you in that I really liked the video.

01:31:13 ◼   ► I thought it was very good.

01:31:15 ◼   ► I was very happy with how it told the story of the product, but I still wasn't

01:31:20 ◼   ► sure.

01:31:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:31:22 ◼   ► Where with the journal videos, for all of the reasons that you mentioned.

01:31:27 ◼   ► You see, as I'm saying that, I feel like I don't agree with myself.

01:31:31 ◼   ► I was going to say I felt more sure.

01:31:32 ◼   ► But the thing is, it also didn't matter the same.

01:31:36 ◼   ► So I think I don't know if I can say that to be true.

01:31:39 ◼   ► Like where we were when we had the journals to sell, it just wasn't the

01:31:44 ◼   ► same. The price for having the stock wasn't the same.

01:31:46 ◼   ► There wasn't so much feeling like it was on the line.

01:31:49 ◼   ► And so I don't think I was really thinking in that mindset of like, oh, this

01:31:54 ◼   ► is going to do the job, you know, because it wasn't so important.

01:31:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:31:58 ◼   ► We weren't dealing with the problem of the physical volume and costs of

01:32:04 ◼   ► thousands of them.

01:32:05 ◼   ► Like that wasn't the issue.

01:32:07 ◼   ► Like we said, this is a very large bet that was really pushing the edges of

01:32:16 ◼   ► our comfort when we made it.

01:32:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:18 ◼   ► I think both of us had a little bit of a like, well, we're going to sled down

01:32:22 ◼   ► this hill together kind of feeling when we made the final decision.

01:32:25 ◼   ► The psychic notepad costs to us over twice the cost price of the journal.

01:32:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:33 ◼   ► To produce.

01:32:34 ◼   ► So we would have had to have ordered like three times more journals than we've

01:32:40 ◼   ► ever ordered to be close to what this came to.

01:32:43 ◼   ► And like then I would be worried the same way.

01:32:48 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:48 ◼   ► It's a very different experience.

01:32:51 ◼   ► And plus we just, it's from different worlds.

01:32:53 ◼   ► Right.

01:32:53 ◼   ► When we made the journal promo videos, it was like a time when we couldn't keep

01:32:58 ◼   ► the theme system journal in stock at all.

01:33:00 ◼   ► And it was like a very different time for us because we were really struggling

01:33:04 ◼   ► with catching that eel back then.

01:33:05 ◼   ► Like just could not work out how to manufacture it at the scale that we needed

01:33:11 ◼   ► to.

01:33:11 ◼   ► And it was, it all felt very weird and very different.

01:33:14 ◼   ► But all of this is to say the bet really, really paid off.

01:33:19 ◼   ► So we had an amount that we were supposed to keep in stock for like a long period

01:33:23 ◼   ► of time.

01:33:24 ◼   ► And then we ordered the extra for the bump for the video.

01:33:28 ◼   ► We sold through all of the extra.

01:33:30 ◼   ► We kept selling through and as we appear right now, we're going to go out of stock

01:33:36 ◼   ► within the next six weeks, most likely of the Sidekick notepad, which again, we're

01:33:41 ◼   ► back to that process again.

01:33:43 ◼   ► We're getting more made, but there's been some delays.

01:33:45 ◼   ► So we're going to have an out of stock period.

01:33:47 ◼   ► That is just, I think what it's like to do this.

01:33:51 ◼   ► Coming to terms with this more, there is no such thing as perfection with stock

01:34:00 ◼   ► management.

01:34:01 ◼   ► And what I've been doing over the last few months is I've been paying attention to

01:34:05 ◼   ► brands that I follow more and how they deal with this kind of stuff.

01:34:10 ◼   ► And I'm just learning more and more that like companies going out of stock on an

01:34:15 ◼   ► item is actually very normal.

01:34:17 ◼   ► And I need to kind of just get over myself a little bit with this and like do the

01:34:24 ◼   ► best we can, but understand that things happen that you can't prepare for.

01:34:30 ◼   ► And I feel happy with what we did because I believe we did the absolute maximum we

01:34:37 ◼   ► could do.

01:34:37 ◼   ► We did it, right?

01:34:40 ◼   ► We couldn't have bought anymore.

01:34:41 ◼   ► No, no.

01:34:42 ◼   ► In the way that we want to structure our company.

01:34:43 ◼   ► Obviously, we could have borrowed money to do it, but I'm not doing that.

01:34:46 ◼   ► Oh my God.

01:34:47 ◼   ► No, no.

01:34:47 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:34:48 ◼   ► That is the other way we could have done this.

01:34:50 ◼   ► We could have got a credit line and done it that way.

01:34:52 ◼   ► But I'm not comfortable.

01:34:53 ◼   ► I'm not going to do that.

01:34:54 ◼   ► No, I'm not going to do that because I want to be able to sleep at night and it was

01:34:58 ◼   ► already hard enough.

01:34:59 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:34:59 ◼   ► If it was like Mr.

01:35:00 ◼   ► Bank Man is going to be tapping his watch on January 1st, it'd be like, no.

01:35:05 ◼   ► It was bad enough to be responsible to each other, right?

01:35:08 ◼   ► That it's mine and your money ultimately, rather than it also being somebody else's

01:35:13 ◼   ► money.

01:35:14 ◼   ► Like I'm not willing to play in that space right now.

01:35:16 ◼   ► That is not a thing that I want to do.

01:35:18 ◼   ► But, you know, similarly, the thing that we're going to do that we've not done

01:35:22 ◼   ► before is we're going to take pre-orders when we go out of stock.

01:35:26 ◼   ► And like that's not a thing that I've wanted to do before.

01:35:29 ◼   ► But again, it's like grow up.

01:35:32 ◼   ► It's part of logistics.

01:35:35 ◼   ► It's part of stock management.

01:35:37 ◼   ► We can make it work.

01:35:39 ◼   ► And so we're going to do that.

01:35:40 ◼   ► But like that is the result of all of this thing.

01:35:42 ◼   ► I don't know how you feel, but to me, these past six weeks feels like the

01:35:49 ◼   ► biggest success that we've seen as a company.

01:35:53 ◼   ► I mean, as the one running the spreadsheets, it's crazy.

01:35:56 ◼   ► Like Sidekick has more than doubled the business and its existence this year.

01:36:02 ◼   ► Like it's been really quite shocking.

01:36:05 ◼   ► And you said a thing about accepting that we're going to run out of stock.

01:36:10 ◼   ► There's definitely this part of me, which is like, no, like I will not accept this.

01:36:14 ◼   ► With God as my witness, I will never run out of stock again.

01:36:17 ◼   ► But yeah, like this is, um, I've got some bad news for you, but it's going to happen.

01:36:24 ◼   ► Like, okay.

01:36:24 ◼   ► So one of the things that I told myself to try to keep myself sane during the

01:36:28 ◼   ► production of the actual video was, okay, we have this huge number of stock.

01:36:32 ◼   ► But listen, listen, Gray.

01:36:34 ◼   ► Really, we're only trying to sell half this number because we also want to

01:36:40 ◼   ► have the stock for all of next year.

01:36:43 ◼   ► So there's not so much pressure.

01:36:46 ◼   ► And so when it went up and we sold through half the number, I'm like,

01:36:50 ◼   ► Oh, thank God.

01:36:51 ◼   ► Right.

01:36:51 ◼   ► Like what a relief.

01:36:53 ◼   ► Thank goodness.

01:36:53 ◼   ► But then the sales have not dropped as much as I was expecting.

01:36:59 ◼   ► And there's this weird thing where like, I'm looking at all of my estimates for

01:37:04 ◼   ► when are we going to run out of stock?

01:37:05 ◼   ► And the date very quickly went from like, Oh, we'll run out just before Christmas

01:37:11 ◼   ► next year to, well, we'll run out before Halloween.

01:37:14 ◼   ► We'll run out before school starts.

01:37:16 ◼   ► We're definitely going to run out before the 4th of July.

01:37:19 ◼   ► Right.

01:37:19 ◼   ► Like now it's like Valentine's day.

01:37:22 ◼   ► You're not going to make it to Valentine's day, buddy.

01:37:24 ◼   ► And it's like, Oh no.

01:37:25 ◼   ► It's such a funny thing because.

01:37:28 ◼   ► Updating the numbers.

01:37:29 ◼   ► I have this weird feeling like sales, please slow down.

01:37:34 ◼   ► Right.

01:37:35 ◼   ► But like, obviously as a business person, that's not really what I want at all, but

01:37:40 ◼   ► it's just funny how your brain can like play these tricks on you where it's like,

01:37:44 ◼   ► wild success has very rapidly turned into like, no, I'm not going to run out of

01:37:49 ◼   ► inventory, but we're totally going to run out of inventory.

01:37:52 ◼   ► And on top of that, we've had to put in orders for all of the other products

01:37:56 ◼   ► because like, there's just been so many sales over the holidays and we did run

01:38:01 ◼   ► out of pens and it's like, okay, all of this is just like a by-product of it going

01:38:05 ◼   ► extremely well, but it's just very funny that now it's like kind of my

01:38:09 ◼   ► responsibility to not run out of stock.

01:38:12 ◼   ► I'm like, please slow down sales.

01:38:15 ◼   ► It's not going to happen.

01:38:16 ◼   ► We're running out, but like we're learning now again.

01:38:18 ◼   ► Right.

01:38:19 ◼   ► Like I think one of the things that we're taking away from this is, okay, so maybe

01:38:25 ◼   ► this year we will focus more on more frequent smaller orders.

01:38:32 ◼   ► It hasn't really worked out, but that is kind of what I built this spreadsheet to

01:38:37 ◼   ► try to do is like be looking at more frequent smaller orders, but we might need

01:38:42 ◼   ► to turn that up and say like, no, even more frequent smaller orders.

01:38:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:38:46 ◼   ► But there is a, there are things to consider and all of that.

01:38:50 ◼   ► It's like smaller means more expensive.

01:38:51 ◼   ► Yes.

01:38:52 ◼   ► So like you've got to find a balance, but this is just the thing that we will spend

01:38:57 ◼   ► the rest of the year going through.

01:38:59 ◼   ► Cause one of the things about this video and that as an answer, we are still

01:39:02 ◼   ► waiting to find, and I don't know when we're going to get it now is, you know,

01:39:07 ◼   ► we were selling whatever, you know, a small handful of units of the journal every

01:39:11 ◼   ► day when it was just people who listened to this podcast that knew about it.

01:39:15 ◼   ► And that would increase by orders of magnitude.

01:39:19 ◼   ► Each time you'd release a video, there would be like a noticeable change.

01:39:23 ◼   ► And you know, we're now like three or four times more than what that was.

01:39:26 ◼   ► So we got like a somewhat reliable daily sales rate, which was increased by the

01:39:32 ◼   ► video and the existence of the video keeps the sales coming in and there's also

01:39:37 ◼   ► more products in the world.

01:39:38 ◼   ► So people see them and it's like, it just kind of perpetuates from there.

01:39:41 ◼   ► I want to know what that's going to be for the Sidekick notepad.

01:39:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:39:45 ◼   ► But we don't know because as you say, the sales are, I think still much higher

01:39:50 ◼   ► than that number on a daily basis, but we don't know what that number is going to

01:39:54 ◼   ► be.

01:39:54 ◼   ► And it's going to take longer to find that out because of the existence of us

01:39:58 ◼   ► going out of stock.

01:39:59 ◼   ► Like it's going to be way into the year.

01:40:02 ◼   ► If this year at all, before we actually get that number, cause we just, there's

01:40:08 ◼   ► too many variables at play to try and understand what that's going to be.

01:40:11 ◼   ► So it's going to be a longer tail thing going into the future.

01:40:15 ◼   ► So, yeah, that's what kind of kills the data person in me.

01:40:18 ◼   ► It's like, Oh, I want continuous data, right?

01:40:21 ◼   ► And I was like, Oh, the moment we switched to pre-sales, like this is a functionally

01:40:24 ◼   ► different kind of data set.

01:40:25 ◼   ► And like the streak will be broken of having all of these like days in a row

01:40:29 ◼   ► where we can try to estimate what are we actually looking at here.

01:40:33 ◼   ► So all of this to say the bet paid off our instinct was right.

01:40:38 ◼   ► And I feel very good about it.

01:40:42 ◼   ► Like I feel very vindicated that this is another product that is successful that

01:40:50 ◼   ► people are interested in.

01:40:52 ◼   ► And we're getting very good feedback about like that was what the Sidekick

01:40:56 ◼   ► Notepad was supposed to be.

01:40:58 ◼   ► We have the theme system journal, we have the Sidekick Notepad, and then we

01:41:02 ◼   ► have other products.

01:41:03 ◼   ► Like that was what I wanted.

01:41:05 ◼   ► What I also like about the Sidekick Notepad is it I'm starting to think of it

01:41:10 ◼   ► as like a platform now where we've done so much work in the construction of it

01:41:15 ◼   ► that we can create other layouts.

01:41:18 ◼   ► And it's also really easy from a manufacturing perspective to bundle those

01:41:22 ◼   ► together.

01:41:23 ◼   ► And so like I feel like great.

01:41:25 ◼   ► We have proven the point and now we can further expand this and the existence of

01:41:31 ◼   ► the video and the result of the video, the response to the video and what that

01:41:35 ◼   ► has meant from sales has like borne that out to be like great.

01:41:39 ◼   ► We have another one of these like it's another pillar of the company.

01:41:42 ◼   ► We can continue from here.

01:41:43 ◼   ► You have every right to feel vindicated.

01:41:46 ◼   ► I feel mostly just relieved.

01:41:48 ◼   ► I don't think vindication and relief are that far away from each other on the

01:41:52 ◼   ► emotional scale.

01:41:53 ◼   ► *Laughs*