164: Screen Crimes: The Ghost Device

I feel like a task voyeur. Oh, yeah? Who are you voyeing on? You. Well... I don't know if I like that, Mike. Yeah, I'm in the Asana now. Okay. Obviously, I'm only seeing the tasks that I should see, which is good. I wouldn't want to... see what's going on everywhere else i mean wouldn't you want to see though aren't you curious mike i mean curious yes but also i know it would be like horrifying kind of like arc of the covenant kind of opening

feeling is what i imagine would happen but i don't know what why it's weird to me but just seeing how somebody else adds a task and like what they put on that task it's just a weird thing because i don't share like to do tasks with anybody. And so now being in our shared asana and seeing the way that you like, the tasks that you create, which tasks have due dates.

which tasks are assigned to other people. It's just a fascinating thing to see, and I am also terrified of it. Like, I don't want to put anything in there. It's a very intimidating place to be. I don't mean to intimidate you, Mike. It's not you, you know, I've never used Asana, so I don't yet understand.

how to deal with it you know okay well so let me actually this is a good time let me try to shortcut you on a little bit of some of the things that i have been figuring out about asana having spent basically the last week has been a really intense gray industries kind of reorg clean up doing everything and like getting it all over into asana which is one of those things where

boy oh boy has it made me realize this was way overdue because the number of projects and the number of areas of responsibility that i was trying to track in like different ways or across people was just so much that like bringing it all into one place has really made me like face the scope and size of like all of the things that need to happen. So it's been a real crash course in the move but I could not be happier.

but also i kind of wish i could have convinced me of two years ago maybe to get started on this but the best time to plant an asana is two years ago and the second best time is now i mean it's always these things that you've got to go through the fire you know and if you don't then you're just not going to do it okay to have a tangent here the thing that i'm aware of in like the venture capital world that

I think the investors are bringing to the table in many ways is, oh, they've seen companies go through the transitions as they get bigger. And so they can act as kind of.

guides to try to make the changes before they're necessary yes i have a very good friend who is a vc and one of the things that i've learned in the many conversations i've had with him is it seems like a lot of what a good investor will do it's providing you with structure support and paths to follow that a startup needs if they're gonna grow into a real thing there's a way in which when i've heard this in the past i always thought that was kind of

this sort of person overselling themselves but i just don't think that that's true anymore now having done just like the teeny tiny version of having a thing that's gotten bigger and more complicated over time like someone else could have shown me five years ago like hey you should do this now this is clearly the way that it's heading and this would like make a big difference so it's funny actually i just had something like this come up like yesterday

I was thinking to myself, I wanted to let you know how many outstanding invoices we had to pay over the next couple of months for product stuff. And I was thinking, I was having to rack my brain of like, oh, so which one? Where is it? Really having to think about it.

which invoices have we got, which products are coming up. And I realized we need a system to raise purchase orders within our own company. So at any time we can understand how much money is committed to... invoices that have not yet been sent to us you know like we've half paid for something i don't know why this has happened to me more with cortex brand than relay i think maybe just in the like what the businesses do and how they function cortex is more

More like a regular business where Relay is a little bit more irregular, I think, in the way that it functions. I think it's the very fact that we have inventory. Actually, as soon as you have said this now, I think this is the exact same.

thing for any of these projects right like you're going along and everything is fine like uh we started with the theme system journal and then we like add the subtle notebook we add like one product at a time and i'm only just realizing now of course until this moment we've been basically mentally tracking oh yeah we've got to pay for the journals oh yeah we've got to pay for the sidekick like we've just been

kind of knowing that that's coming but there's like the multiplication in complexity right keeping track of three projects is like six times more complicated than keeping track of two and like that's what happens where you add like one more thing and suddenly you go whoa this is like way over the line of being able to keep track of so yes uh let's do that so it's very funny to be in this position where the things that I used to hate

dealing with when i worked in my corporate job like raising purchase orders and dealing with invoices i now understand why companies do these things because if there is money to be spent on something you've got to only spend the amount they can be spent and whatever has to be paid later on has to be put aside like you can't just wing it

It's very funny to me to kind of just be fumbling my way through and bouncing into these just very common things. I am very aware that to many of our listeners, when I say this stuff, they just are head... hands but I actually find it for myself and for us kind of adorable that we're just kind of like

here we are, like, how's it going? Oh, is this going well? And they're like, oh, we don't know how much money we've got to spend. I don't know why, but it's like, I like it. I like having these moments where I...

realize what I need and work out a way to solve it. And at the same time, I feel like it means that we're just adding what we need at the time that we need it. And that works for me. Because there's some times where I think to myself, I wished I could put all of my time into trying to grow this business. But... I can't. And I also other times don't want to, because that would mean giving up everything else that I love to do. It's the side project.

really, in its own little way. And that means it grows and shapes itself in just like a funny way sometimes. Everything is a trade-off, right? Like every hour you spend on one thing is an hour you can't spend on another thing.

this is the byproduct of like the side project has become more successful which makes it more complicated and that's why we have kind of bumbled into these things as as it's gone along and then on the reverse side for me i think the thing again like i've been forced to reconceptualize is i was just really determined to think of myself as a person

on my own who happened to work with others and it's a similar kind of thing like oh has the number of people i worked with really changed that much like it's gone up a little but it's like oh but the cortex brand project has become more important as it's become more successful so that has more involvement like there's more people vaguely over there but it's like just gone over that threshold where it's like i cannot hold on to this conception anymore like it's hugely important and

also just very much realizing like even on a small team as things get more complicated like oh why do big companies do all of this tracking stuff because in big companies people have to be able to make decisions autonomously or semi-autonomously having information at hand to do that and when you're like a really small team it's easy to just keep the communication lines always open but as it gets just slightly bigger it is now better to have like this is where the information is

And so like everyone can know what everybody else is doing or like what's related to what, what's the current stock order, what's the current bank balance. Oh, it's better to know the current bank balance, not by... asking mike what he remembers we have out his orders but like having an actual system that's keeping track of it i think for both of us like these things have just like gone over the line a little bit and be like oh okay gotta formalize it more and uh there's

reason that like bigger companies formalize these things in this way that is part of bringing cortex brand into like the greater gray incorporated world of like what is going on over here uh so welcome mike i also think it is very funny because you are talking about like oh you're seeing what's being added to cortex

like ah we have not yet turned our attention to the cortex stuff this is just like incidental things that have happened to pop into uh various people's heads to add on to the list it's like it has been all the like gray industry side of things for now i will say it's been very interesting using asana and i want to try to like shortcut you on i think When you're using it, the thing that has been the absolute strangest thing for me to really try to wrap my head around, and that is, in Asana...

The fundamental thing that is different here is it is a database of tasks. it looks at first like it's every other project manager where it's like oh here's projects and then i have tasks inside of those projects but that's not really what it's doing at the fundamental level really it is just these unrelated task entries in a database and like that is the foundation of what it's doing and so

Everything else, including the project that this task is part of, is functionally just metadata attached to the task. And that allows some really interesting things, like the thing that sold me of, oh.

a task can exist inside of more than one project at a time because it's really just metadata that is being added to the it's not like a folder that the thing is in and that has an enormous number of upsides but the one thing that has been totally breaking my brain with asana which has really led to me trying to reconceptualize a lot of the ways i like set things up and think about things is it means that there is no order to the tasks they're just

floating around in that database. I have never seen a task manager do something in that way where there isn't the canonical order of these things. You can kind of like force it to be in order in various ways but it's not like the starting place like you're writing a list what are you doing when you're writing a list of things on a piece of paper you're putting them in order it's like such a

basic concept that i almost feel like i was blind to the very idea that everything i've been thinking about is a list in order and that is not at all what asana is doing and i think that is like the biggest mental shift to get around it's like That is not how this works. It gives some really interesting advantages, but it is very strange to think about when you're actually setting things up for the first time. And I guess that's because, as you were saying, that like the tasks...

they relate to something else, not just to them being a list of tasks. They sit within different projects because they can sit in different orders in different projects based on what might happen before or after. Exactly. all of your tasks it's not going to make any sense you have to kind of like is it like project first task second the key piece of information is who is it assigned to so a task is assigned to a person

So here's the huge upside. And this is also the thing that like the secondary thing that really sold me is that when you start using this, you realize, oh, because the tasks don't have this intrinsic order, it means that each person. can arrange the tasks and view them and categorize them in ways that are separate from every other person so

The primary thing from the user perspective is here are all of the tasks that are assigned to you. You then can like I think the their ideal thing here in a sense is.

there's like a little thing at the top which is just called my tasks you would just go in there and start grinding through all of the things that are available to you and that are assigned to you right now and again like i think it's so interesting because it's like oh of course when you're distributing work across a bunch of different people the order of those tasks doesn't matter

to the individuals at any particular time like where does this exist in the like the broader hierarchy it's really only the question of what can i do right now and that's where it'll let you see if you have a task that is blocking someone else and it will let you see if there's a task that's assigned to you but you can't get to it yet because someone else needs to finish it and so they're blocking you but that's

kind of about all the order that's really in the thing i just keep like turning this over in my head because it's just like is not the way that i work but i think it is the correct way to do this when you're working with multiple people and so it's very interesting like having gone through this with my assistant it's like oh i can already see the very different ways that we work it's like

i want to kind of set up a list which is basically i should do these same things in this order every day like that's how i want to work through stuff and asana will let me do that but like my assistant's job is very different where it's like oh what is she seeing she's seeing hey a bunch of things were assigned to you overnight and then she's able to like immediately triage like oh which of these does she want to do today which of these does she want to do tomorrow and she's able to move it

across like a traditional Kanban board, which I would never use for like sorting like the incoming, currently working on pending future tasks. It's like, oh, of course, like we're each doing very different kind of work. My work is much more reliable. Hers is much more sporadic and across like a lot of different things. So she has to have a system that allows her to.

see things and quickly triage them and i want a system that is like here are the things that i have preset for myself to do like in this order that i want to see them in this order but like other people if those tasks are blocking them they don't care what that order is on my own list it's just like okay they can see that like i need to do something that is blocking them And that I think is just like what an advantage because we've discussed many times like the problems of these kinds of tools.

is that they ultimately force everyone to work kind of the same way which is where everyone's like a little unhappy all the time which is kind of how i've always felt about notion like oh everybody has to look at this exact same document in this same way because we're like literally typing a document that everyone can read so asana just like totally blast through that and i think it's great what if you are like me well like i like to have like due dates and

times on events. Does that not... disrupt this way of working no so the due date is just part of the like metadata on the task because when you're saying about the task list you mean like the master list like the big overall list of all of the tasks And then everybody else just sees their own, like they get their own little list of stuff that they've got to be dealing with.

yeah so even for me right like i'm organizing the whole system right like i'm getting like the highest level view asana acts as a two-tier tool for me so organizing the company what are the priorities what are the high level goals that we're trying to achieve blah blah blah and then that actions down into like

Here are the specific projects that we're trying to complete. Those projects then have tasks. But the moment that I'm not in like... thinking about the high level stuff mode i too am just going into asana looking at a list of the things that are assigned to me and that's what i'm working through right now

I am the person who, since I'm going to use Asana for literally everything in my life, I'm also doing, I'm putting in like all of the routine stuff that I was doing from last year and like the stuff that I want to work on this year for my theme. So I have like the absurd little tasks that are also just Asana.

to me that no one else has to see but that's where like this is what is really happening it's like it exists on the assigned to you level and each individual person gets to organize it however they want but if something does have a due date you will see that as part of like the task that you are assigned to or you can see that like oh this task is

part of a project that is assigned at a date in the future so that information also travels through i have to say hugely impressed i will also say the thing that i want to plug on this is anyone who has listened to this show We'll know. That is like... What is the one great thing that I've always complained about with all task managers other than OmniFocus is they have no concept of this defer date of like, you can't start the thing until.

x date and asana falls into that same category it has something called a start date but it doesn't act like the thing that i want it too it doesn't have like a true defer date and i was like oh no is this going to be the complete deal breaker that just like ruins this whole thing for me and the answer is no because you can also define any new custom metadata that you want to for any task and then within asana it's like

nearly turing complete there's like a bunch of rules that you can have run on all tasks to like treat them however you want or move them around automatically when different things happen and so i have been able to sort of like shortcuts for mac os there's a thing that they just call rules which is like shortcuts for asana and so i've been able to program asana to basically be custom to me that

All tasks that are assigned to me automatically get created like this defer date metadata thing. And then how my tasks are displayed to me. depends on that defer date and again what is amazing is like no one else has to even know that this is happening to these tasks like this is just for me to like arrange them the way that i want it but anyone else could do the exact

same thing like if they have some picky thing that they want to add to the tasks they can just do it on their end and no one else has to even know that that's part of what's going on with these tasks or part of what's happening with this system so I am hugely, hugely impressed with Asana. Only thing that I don't like is the iOS app, which is surprisingly limited in a bunch of ways. But I already have put in a little task for Asana to be like, seriously consider.

hiring an iOS developer to just make a better widget for Asana. So that might be a thing that comes to pass someday. I mean, you know. The iOS app, you're probably not going to be doing all the big complex stuff on it anyway, right? Yeah, that's exactly it. All I would really want is just a better widget and maybe also just a thing on my watch. I'm not trying to do all the complicated stuff.

asana has like this api that lots of companies have written stuff against so it's already been in the back of my brain like i'm invested in this enough this is good to be the tool going forward this might actually be the first time for me that it makes sense to try to like get a custom piece of software made to like solve a problem that i want uh with this thing but other than that very impressed very happy and you will be too mike you will be too

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10% of your first purchase and show your support for the show. Our thanks to Squarespace for the continued support of this show and all of Relay. Back in 2018, Apple introduced something called Screen Time. Back in iOS 12.

And the idea of this feature is that it would watch what you're doing on your device and give you statistics about it. The apps that you're using, the notifications that you get, that kind of stuff. This was all a part of like a thing that... google and apple were doing at the time i don't remember what they called it but it was this idea of like hey we're looking out for you like you know we don't want you to overuse your phone like there was a phrase that they used

Digital well-being? Yes, I think, yeah, that's what it was. Something like that. It's kind of like how every once in a while there's a year where like three movies on the same topic get released. It felt like that, like every software company that year had like gotten the word.

about the good news on digital well-being and was like we're here to save you dot dot dot from us dot dot dot and also from anyone trying to make laws against us so because there was some pressure there were like pressure groups being set up like that kind of thing i remember around this time and so both at the exact same time google and apple introduced these features of like

looking out for you, suggesting you stop using apps, allowing you to set limits on apps and all this kind of stuff. And so then we decided... on episode 82 an episode called screen crimes that we would share this with each other so like i would share my screen time data and you would share yours with me so you could actually see what our devices

were really being used for, no matter what it was we said they were being used for. And I've really wanted to do this again. And so we're going to share them today. In preparing for this episode, I realized just how buggy... this feature continues to be on iOS. So these are the bugs that I have encountered in trying to prepare for this episode. Screen time turned itself off at some point in the last few weeks. So I do not have a full seven days data. I have six days.

because it just turned itself off. And I text you and said, please make sure it's turned on because mine turned off. In general, it's still giving completely different information on all of my devices, even though they're all turned on. So my iPhone, my iPad, and my Mac, when I go to set the setting to show me the data across all devices, gives me completely different numbers.

and there is some kind of ghost device that is currently reporting a 24-hour-a-day usage on a website, and I don't know where it's coming from. So these are my caveats. I ended up taking my data from my Mac because it gave the best overall picture of what I was doing. So I'm going to send you my screenshot now. You could look at mine first if you like.

And I'll have the link in the show notes if people want to look to. What Screen Time is doing is three things. It's like your usage of applications, your notifications that you receive, like how many there are, and also what they call pickups.

you use your device, what is the first thing you open when you use your device? Yeah, let me just also back up the... bugginess of this system which i just have not thought about this in absolutely forever yeah i think since apple rolled out the focus modes i was able to basically not look at this at all because i was previously trying to use Okay. I feel like Apple has these.

three or four interconnected systems that could really use a revamp and it's like it's the screen time it's downtime and it's the family sharing settings it feels like all three of these are sitting on top of some shared database of like what's going on that is very buggy i think screen time is the database so like over the years they have added features on top so app limits downtime and focus modes all got added on top of screen time

And I think now screen time is this database of information which other things rely on, but itself needs to be... looked at i think is maybe the best way to to put it yeah i tried to turn it back on from my mac and it was like the data was garbage like oh uh do you know what i'm doing with my time mic i spend 24 hours a day seven days a week on finder that's what i'm doing apparently according to my mac last week i spent 133 hours and 11 minutes on bloomberg.com

I don't think you did. No, I did. I've got to read the reports. I need to know. I need to know. I'm hooked into the terminal. So, yeah, I'm going to be giving you my phone information because that is like the only useful thing that I was able to get. So let me send that.

now. Very fair. I feel like my phone stuff is pretty accurate looking at just the phone but how do you feel about this for well all the things when i looked at it on my phone it felt okay ish and then when i was i wanted to try and get a bigger picture though and

I ended up finding the data set that made the most sense. Like when I was looking on my iPhone, it was showing I'd been using Safari for three hours in the entire week. And then when I looked on my Mac, it was like... eight hours which feels also inaccurate but better so that was why i ended up going with this data set yeah i know but i'm just like i'm finding my brain immediately breaking because it's like ah 22 hours of daily

usage is like i don't even know how to start thinking about this well that's because of the 133 hours on bloomberg Yeah, I guess so. But even still, it's breaking my brain. I mean, the immediate one at the top of my list is the combo, the one-two punch of YouTube and Bellatro. What's Bellatro? Oh, Gary.

oh it's a video game oh you you have brought this one up to me you i think you pitched this to me on episode of more text i just haven't gotten a chance to actually try it yet right this was like wild card poker but sort of what you were saying it's like you get points for better poker

like a deck building poker game is that what it was correct you're like you're adapting your deck and you're adapting your hands via these joker cards which provide different properties that weigh the points are scored and is fantastic it's i love this game so much i play it every day I play it all the time, as you can see, in any 10 hours last week. I play Bellatro a lot whenever I'm commuting. I play it as a way to kind of wind down in the evening.

Like, I play it all the time. And YouTube is paired with that a lot. And a lot of that YouTube time, of which there was 15 hours recorded last week, it's podcasts. So I watch video podcasts and typically I will watch a video podcast in picture in picture while I'm playing Bellatro. It's like a perfect pairing. I love it. Yeah. I have also found that YouTube is surprisingly good for podcasts in a strange way. Like...

Here's the advantage that YouTube has over like a normal podcast player that I've just become more and more sensitized to is I'm subscribed to like a ton of shows in my overcast.

because i like to be able to just like have a big bank to draw from and delete everything that just seems boring and try to like find the thing that kind of like catches my interest right but the problem that i have with that is i just never really thought about this until i started listening to more podcasts on youtube is if i have like a topic show and i'm like looking for the interesting topics and i'm like deleting the things that seem boring Problem is...

I'm not able to know which of these episodes that seem boring might actually be super interesting because there's nothing like a view count. There's no even just like the algorithm is trying to bring me something to see that I might not have.

thought of otherwise and i feel like that to me has been a surprising advantage with watching podcasts on youtube is like oh i might not have watched this but the view count is really high so maybe there's something interesting here or like it's bringing me things and the very fact that youtube brings it to me just

gives it like a higher credence of like oh i'll try listening to that even if it doesn't sound immediately interesting or maybe like even just the thing like i don't know who this guest is but youtube thinks i might be interested so like i'll give it a try and see if this person is interesting and i'm just

like increasingly aware of how in a traditional podcast player i have access to none of that information it's like ironically i'm doing more of a kind of self-reinforcement of listening to the same kinds of things with an unalgorithm source like a podcast than the like youtube algorithmic source so this is a long way of saying i'm not surprised to hear that like you're listening to a lot of podcasts on youtube because i've also noticed like an increase in this behavior for myself as well i find

all of those ways you're talking about podcast discovery to be interesting. What do you mean? Well, because it's still not at all what I'm doing. The way in which I am consuming podcasts on YouTube is still very old school in a way. So it really is just... one set of podcasts so i'm a big fan of podcast network called kind of funny and they mostly do gaming stuff with some pop culture stuff and they have a really wonderful studio

and they record in person in a studio. And so I just prefer to watch the video. And a lot of the time I'll have YouTube, like my phone locked and I'm listening just... Yep. Walking around and I might grab my phone if something happens and I want to see what just happened, you know, like some kind of visual gag or whatever. But I really could just listen to them in Overcast as well and it would be fine. But I just prefer having the opportunity to also watch the video.

I do not use it as a recommendation thing. Like I want to listen to all of their shows that I like to listen to. I don't kind of pick and choose that way, but I know lots of people do. And I think what you're describing is the reason that YouTube is becoming a bigger and bigger and bigger part of the podcasting ecosystem is because people want to consume podcasts this way. I think...

This couples hand in hand with the explosion in interview podcasts over the last five to ten years, right? That like interview podcasts do kind of need this as a way to... try and service to people if a show is interesting yeah they need it more and they're well served by the algorithm in a way that like other shows are not but yeah it's why even when i'm thinking about it youtube is capturing for me a

maybe even now it's like oh the majority of interviews i'm probably going to listen to them on youtube and like i'm less inclined to do interview shows in overcast My favorite kinds of podcasts are the ones that benefit from there being a long-running relationship between the hosts and a chemistry and a camaraderie. And I think that algorithms do not help that kind of content to blossom.

No. From the producer side or from the listener side. But when the episodes are kind of singular because they're having a different makeup of people on them, I think that algorithms do help that. But that's also just not a kind of content.

that i like to consume i don't listen to really any shows like that with one exception which is a podcast called the town which is just an audio podcast and it's about kind of like hollywood news and i really like it because the host is so good but of my favorite episodes are the monday episodes where he has a fixed guest like the same person every monday so you know that is why youtube is so high for me i mean along with all of the other

youtube videos that i watch like youtube is my number one source of entertainment like yeah if i want to watch something if just for me if i want to watch something it will always be youtube

Very rarely with my wife, right? Like if we're going to watch something, it will be a more traditional television show. But if I'm... watching something on my own it's most likely going to be from youtube yeah that's the same thing for me like any solo viewing it's like youtube is the first port of call every time for like uh what what is it that i'm gonna be watching like the only time

it's not is when someone i follow on youtube has posted like members only content on like a subscription service like patreon like but like i still feel like that i'm still just watching youtube that is like still functionally the same thing But yeah, it's like YouTube is totally the first portal call. That is the beauty of YouTube as a thing, which is YouTube is where you get the thing that's just for you. Like it's the, what is the weird niche you care about?

people in your life don't care about it's on youtube like you'll find oh yeah and that's why i believe it's like such a fantastic like solo viewing experience because you can just you can watch someone make knives out of like gummy bears You know, because that's what you want to watch. Someone's doing it.

You can go watch it. Yeah. And that's also why it is the solo viewing because it just gets so tailored to you. It's like, ah, yes, I want to listen to someone talk about their experience at a theme park for six hours. Like, great. Is that very shareable content? Normally, no. No, it's the kind of content that if you were to show someone you're watching it together, you feel kind of embarrassed.

But like when you're watching it on your own, you're like, yes, where's our seven? Yeah. But this does actually bring like a problem with this entire screen time system, right? Which is overcast is 20 minutes right down at the bottom. But that's not accurate. That is not accurate. All it is measuring is what is on your screen. It's not measuring what is being used. And I think that is a fundamental problem with a system like this. Because... I've never tried to set an app limit on Overcast.

or like an app that you use in the background. But my thinking would be that I could put a 10-minute app limit on Overcast, but listen to it in the background for four hours. So I have just had a flashback to using this system, and I literally tried to do exactly what I did.

what you're saying. Put a timer on... all kinds of media consumption including overcast and you are correct i ran into this exact problem of like oh i only want to listen to overcast for an hour a day well guess what i'm never going to hit that limit because i'm not actively using the app for an hour a day this episode of cortex is brought to you by google gemini i tried gemini a couple of days ago the gemini live where you can talk to it

And it really is wild to have a full on conversation with this thing. I was messing around and asked it to give me some ideas for hosting a party during the holidays. And when it started giving results, I could just stop it and say, OK. But what about something low-key for a smaller group? And then it just adjusts to that, and you can keep going until you get an idea that you want. I think that's what I would use it for most.

brainstorming things. It's so good if you don't know where to start or you hit a wall. You just go to Gemini. It helps you get the ball rolling. but you can use it for all kinds of stuff. If you want to learn something new, you can have it give you advice, ask it to explain Bitcoin in simple terms, or you can have it quiz you on microbiology. Imagine being a student and you've got this personal tutor on hand.

You really have to play around with it, see how it listens to you, responds, adapts to your style of conversation. Just try it out. It's free. Our thanks to Google Gemini for the support of this show and all of Relay. There's another place where you can get statistics that are kind of like this. So in the battery statistics.

So I just went in. In the last 10 days, I've had 15 hours of overcast usage based on battery statistics. Oh. But 20 minutes in screen time. And also in the last 10 days, 28 hours of YouTube. Because 14 hours is in the background because I'm just listening to it like a podcast. Right. And so like if I wanted to set an app limit on myself or this is also using parental controls on somebody else.

I could set them 10 hours a week on YouTube or whatever, but they could just listen infinitely in the background. Now, I don't know if that's necessarily what you'd be concerned about, but if you were... This system doesn't provide that for you, you know? I completely forgot that...

there's this totally parallel system. And I'm just going to send you, I'm going to send you what mine looks like. Cause there's definitely bugs in this system. So here's my battery usage from the last week. Cause I was like, Oh, this will be interesting to compare. And it's like, Oh no, this data is all garbage. But for.

different reason i have this wild bug that i have tried to fix multiple times i have contacted the developers for the app portal which is this audio player and my phone is convinced that i am running this audio player 24 hours So I have like 222 and 20 minutes of background usage of Portal, which I can absolutely guarantee is not the case.

Why are there multiple incorrect ways of trying to track what you're using on your phone? Like this really feels like, you know what? Apple needs to do what we're doing. They need to do a reorg of like, how are we tracking what people are doing on their phone? Because these systems are.

just wild i understand why a battery usage thing would be separate because there are apps that do just run in the background and they take a sip at your battery but they do run in the background but then you do run into the situations that we're talking about where there are apps that are explicitly designed to run in the background.

that then do not show up in your screen time, which is essentially a log of your usage. Maybe what actually needs to happen is there are two different things, but there needs to be an overall usage set of data. I understand why you might want to just track something that shows on a screen. But what about all of the usage of my phone?

I wouldn't personally feel a need to do something with it. But if you wanted to consider your digital well-being, maybe that would be a need to consume less content. Right. Yeah. You need to know how you are actually using it. Yeah. And you can't you can't get that data in a reliable way. I mean, let alone the fact these systems don't work very well. But even if they did, it still wouldn't be the accurate.

set of information yeah so i feel like that is from the moment i was looking at this screenshot of your stuff like that's the thing that's been in the background of my mind it's like what is this even showing actually and it's showing some strange

subset of all of the data when what we would actually want is usage because yeah that was exactly what i was trying to do when i was using downtime and i remember it particularly being around media like i want to limit media consumption but actually the vast majority of my

consumption is audio which is completely untracked by this whole thing and meanwhile every single second that finder is on the screen on my mac is like diligently logged as though i am there just like staring right at it yeah it's just like not

giving what we would really want but but there is still stuff in here which is interesting like for example the fact that last week i spent a cumulative hour in email looking at the way this is broken up from 30 minutes to the mail app and then like another 20 minutes to read all and then another 25 minutes to Spark. So what is also happening here, because these are different apps and different platforms.

they're trying to work out like the com dot something is like yes that doesn't exist on this platform so it's like trying to work out what it is but you can kind of work out that between smart email spark desktop and mail there's two entries

for Spark and one entry for Mail. And I think that's great. And we're going to see it as we go through my notifications and pickup data. The amount of time I spend in email is just less and less over the years. And I like seeing that data there in an entire week period.

that I only spent an hour in email just is so much better than it has been for me at other different parts of my working life, which I love. Yeah, that is like kind of what I was... thinking towards is it still seems to be like the activity data is like just not very helpful no but the notifications and the pickups is actually trying to get at something true and i feel like it's particularly useful for the

phone like the phone is the absolute epicenter of like the usefulness for notifications and pickups like like i completely forgot that it was even tracking that and it's like oh yeah this is a thing that i do want to kind of review every once in a while oh you know what i should create a repeating asana test like do that just to like check this out every once in a while because mike if you say you want to do something but you don't actually capture it as an actionable item

that you're going to fit somewhere in your life like what are you even doing it's not even true you've not even done it boop assigned to me straight into my tasks but uh yeah this is the stuff that is like significantly more interesting and i feel like once again Mike is a very popular boy. 2000 notifications from messages. It's probably like half of that.

because it is double counting some stuff. I just looked on my iPhone statistics for last week, and on my iPhone I got 700 notifications for messages, not 2,000. But it is probably around 1,000, I would expect. But what I do find fascinating about that is I have a bunch of group threads on mute. So like I get so many more messages than this, which that's funny. But yeah, I mean, but that doesn't surprise me.

That is how I communicate with people. I like to send messages. You know, you're not going to find tons of phone call data in here because that's not what I'm doing. Yeah. And then kind of like going down, Abode is my home security system, which is also why I like the home app is up.

there because we get lots of notifications like doors opening and closing windows opening and closing that kind of stuff okay that's what that is i didn't realize okay do you and todoist they're doing their thing along with clock it's like that's all my alarms uh to think about how many the alarms are set every day but you can kind of average it out that's like 10 alarms i was just like doing six days worth of data 63 alarms okay uh

It takes 10 alarms to get a mic out of bed. You know what? Whatever you got to do, man, to get out of bed. If it takes 10 alarms, that's what it takes. Soon it's not going to be alarms. It's going to be... One little person that's going to be getting me out of bed. I'm not going to need alarms anymore. We'll see. WhatsApp, that is one that's creeping up the list. This is just as a function of...

meeting new people in London. People don't use messages here. They use WhatsApp. That is how everybody communicates. It's only becoming more and more prevalent that WhatsApp is moving up and up and up in my life as a community. communication system like i was thinking about this i would be very surprised i put this down now we can check it later on i would be very surprised if whatsapp was not on my home screen when we do state of the apps this year

Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. And this is a thing of I'm already getting a sense of my home screen is going to look very different. By the time we get there, because there's like a few apps that are already starting to vie their way into being very likely to be moving to the home screen. So I'm going to have to find like two or maybe three apps to remove from my main home screen.

that's the thing whatsapp is going to be one of them i think that makes its way in yeah i was just looking so i have i have for years like vehemently refused to use whatsapp i'm like i just do not want another communication channel like at all costs like i will do anything i can but i will easily bet that like whatsapp will be on your home screen next year because even for me it didn't cross over into like my top list for notifications but the damn did break this year of like oh there were such

suddenly three contacts like who all needed to use WhatsApp and I was like I can't fight this anymore like I have to give in and so I was like great now I too have WhatsApp it's like I finally lost this battle that I somehow thought I could be like the only person to survive from but uh you probably don't need this top tip but i'm going to share this top tip because this was a thing that's frustrated me with whatsapp forever was that say you have three people that send you a message right

And you have a badge, like three, on the little badge thing. If you opened WhatsApp and looked at one message, it would clear the badge completely. Yeah, that has happened to me. What's the top tip? You can change this now. They have added a setting. For years, they did not have this. as something you could change. It was just that was how WhatsApp worked. But now if you go into WhatsApp, you go into settings.

You go into notifications. There is a toggle called clear badge. Okay. You turn that off and it will maintain the badge for you. I want to share this tip of as many people as possible because it has... significantly changed my feelings towards WhatsApp because I sometimes would be like, there is a message in there that I want to get to. And I was terrified to...

open new message notifications because it will clear the number away. And then I would forget that I had to go and respond to a friend about meeting for lunch or something. Thank you so much for that because I have already, even with just a few contacts in there, that's already caused me problems.

Several times, precisely because I'm not using it a lot. So I've accidentally cleared some and then I don't get back to it for weeks because it's like it doesn't come up that often. So great. That is immediately using that. Absolutely insane to me.

that they didn't do it this way and then added the feature and didn't make that the default. I don't understand why they think people want to live their life that way, but... apparently the developers of whatsapp do i don't know that feels to me like user engagement like that's what they're trying to go for right is like someone has a spreadsheet where they want to do something like

messages per opening and they're trying to optimize for it and then like not taking the badge away. I don't know. But I just don't know why you would care about that if you made WhatsApp. Like they're not selling something. based on engagement. Yeah, that's true. Maybe it's just a bad decision that they made. I have Whoop in here, which I know is a thing that people ask about. I'm wearing a Whoop band. I don't know what I think about it yet.

This is something that we will talk about later on in the year, though, I think. I was bullying you to give it a try. I wasn't sure if you ever really, really did. So that caught my attention straight away is that you've got the whoop. But we'll save that. We'll save that for a future conversation. Oh, interesting, interesting. Duolingo.

Sitting down there. I don't understand how Duolingo is only on 15 notifications because I feel like Duolingo is always up in my business. Yeah, that's their whole deal, isn't it? Maybe I'm just very good. I am on a 403-day streak of Romanian. Very good. Forte bun, in fact, you could say, Gray. Yeah.

I couldn't help but notice that the New York Times Word game thing was on there. I'm just curious, which game is it for you? Because I have recently gotten completely addicted to one of the games, and I just wanted to know if it's the same one. Which one is it? I wouldn't say I'm addicted, but me and Idina tend to play together the mini crosswords. Oh, the mini crosswords. Okay. So I got my mom a subscription to the New York Times games a couple of years ago because she was playing Wordle.

This was just one of those things where, you know, you pay attention to like, especially with parents. I want my mom to stay as sharp as she possibly can. Right? And she does. She's a very intelligent woman, and I want that to remain that way. And when I got a hint that she was really into word games, I'm like, all right, great. And so I bought her a subscription, and she plays all of them. I think spelling...

Bee is her favorite. Every time I play Spelling Bee, this is without fail, I fall asleep. The game sends me to sleep, so I can't play Spelling Bee anymore. But we signed up for Connections. I was playing Connections and signed up for that, but then found that the mini crossword is my favorite. Okay. I was just shocked that I signed up for this because I just hate.

word games it's like i have always felt like i should be the kind of person who does crossword puzzles and i just i cannot do them partly because my spelling is just absolutely atrocious and there's just like something about word games i cannot do have never enjoyed any of them but the one that did get me which i love is the connections so if you haven't played right they give you like this four by four grid where there's one word written on like each of these squares and

What you have to do is find four words that belong in one category four times. So at the end, you will end up with like, ah, you've correctly put together the four words into the four categories. And it's a game like I will.

really really push it of you have to play it a few times to kind of get what the game is after but what i really like is i feel like it gives the satisfaction that people are getting out of crosswords which is something like oh that was a really interesting question that led to this word in an unexpected way like it feels like that's the satisfaction that people get but

i don't have to spell or come up with the word the words are there and it can just be very satisfying sometimes to go like oh that's a way that these four words are connected which i never would have thought about so like yeah i took a little while, but boy, do I just, I really like it.

I don't know if it's true, but I honestly feel like it kind of makes me better at writing because it's just getting me to think of words in different ways than I would normally do. Because that's the whole key to the game is like, ah, yeah, there's the obvious. thing this word is but there's some secondary or tertiary meaning that also lines up with the secondary or tertiary meaning of three of these other words so a plus word game the only word game i have ever enjoyed

If you've never played the mini crosswords, I do recommend them. Like, it's just enough crossword. Mike, I have one question. Am I required to spell words? Yeah. Okay, it's out. Okay. You don't like doing that? I am incapable of spelling words, so no. It's not even a choice. I just literally can't. I understand. I mean, we all have our strengths. Like if there was any number, like all the number games? No, it's not happening.

I just can't, numbers I can't deal with. You know, like Sudoku was on there. It's like, no, you're okay. I'm not even going to bother. Don't even. But I like connections too. Strands is fun. If you've never played strands? Do I have to spell? Well, it's the spelling in reverse, right? Why would you even? Spelling in reverse? Do you ever play word searches? The word searches, is that also like a kryptonite kind of thing? Mike, you know what you have to know how to do in order to search for words?

spell them. You have to know how to spell them. But connections, you have to read them, which means you need to know how to spell them. Look, Mike. I can read, right? Yeah, but you can read by looking at a word search, right? No, it's all different, right? Because I'm basically trying to spell the word one adjacent letter at a time. The word search is somehow the worst version of all of this. It's awful.

Okay. Okay, let's take a look at your pickup data. Not surprisingly, messages at the top there, given all of the messages that you get. Good old Instagram still holding strong in the top three. Love Instagram. Oh, and what is the, I want to do some kind of like the WhatsApp. pickups per messages sent ratio very high so yeah whatsapp is totally climbing the rank of uh priority for you there yep oh you're on blue sky social so you're over on the

Blue butterfly. I don't know any of the lingo for blue sky social. Blue sky is my current favorite text social network. But if we jump back over to app usage. Oh. You'll see. 56 minutes an entire six days right so not a ton no i mean they all have their app limits of 15 minutes a day and you can see in that data that i'm not going over it so i'm still really happy about that like Three hours in the week.

For text-based social media, I think is amazing. Especially for someone who works in the tech reporting industry. Yeah, that is absolutely amazing. That is fantastic to be holding the line on that one. That's really good. But I do feel that this is where some of the data is just not helping me.

out because like i know i'm spending a ton of time in rss and like reader is down there at like 20 minutes and it's like that's not right like there's right down at the bottom but like i just know that what i am doing is spending a lot of time going through rss as my way of getting news. I do not rely on text-based social media to get news for my work anymore, which is what I was doing years and years and years ago.

So I'm much happier about this mix of the way this stuff works for me now. But yeah, of the ones that I am using, I find Blue Sky to be currently the most... enjoyable but this stuff it goes up and down over time it's also the newest one you know i didn't want to do many comparisons but i do want to make a comparison so back when we did this the first time back in 2018 i spent seven hours

week on twitter oh wow i didn't realize it was that bad yeah spending a full work day on twitter yeah right so like i think that is a pretty great difference of like a thing that i've worked on over time where now it's like it's half of that with three services Yeah, that's way better. That's good. And that's the kind of stuff that these systems should be helping you work towards. So, yeah, that's really good.

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What are you asking about? What does that mean? I'm just like, what is this code? So I've settled on like three emoji scheme for basically all of my devices. Okay. Like, okay. Again, this is another one of these things. I have always had a...

I'm realizing now I'm about to say this right after the part where I'm like, I can't play word games. But I was about to say, I've always had a real war on words. It's like, it's why I've never liked the words below the app icons, which we can finally get rid of. it's even why like oh in my to-do system i use a lot of emoji to represent tasks like in my time tracking it's the same thing and so

I recently redid all of my devices to be like, I don't need to have the names of these things. I can just use like three little icons to represent what they are. The checkmark is still a little bit of a legacy thing because I was actually just...

Doing a physical cleanup of all of my devices and re going through each one of them. And so as I was doing it, I was just like doing the green checkmark to be like, okay, I've gone through this device. I've changed the settings. I've updated the name. So that's eventually going to.

go but otherwise it's just like oh it's a little iPhone and then it's the star icon because this is the like newest iPhone I still have last year's model like around so I gave that one like a brown rock right it's like ah this is the old one right and then this is the new one so all of my devices now i have some like little emoji code for like uh which device is this and then some little emoji just to represent where does this live or what is the device's primary purpose and

I've done that with like the different headphones because I have the different AirPods and.

again maybe it's because i read words out loud in my head i've always just felt like reading words is kind of slower and less clear so i've been really happy with this even going through things like the bluetooth connection and just switching headphones like i find it visually much easier to parse like oh i want to connect to this headphone which is represented by these emoji rather than like reading the words like uh this is the airpods pro 4 with noise cancellation and this is the

AirPods Pro 2, but the new one, not the old one that you thought you lost and had to replace or whatever. So that's why I have that weird device name. But I like this as a system. I am not recommending this as a system to anyone. I was immediately drawn to one thing in your list. 50 minutes on Sonicare. Oh! Do you have an app for your toothbrush? Okay, so this is brand new as of that week. The newest Sonicare toothbrush.

has an app which I cannot believe they are convincing me to use. You do have an electric toothbrush? I have a Philips Sonicare. Okay, so you have a Sonicare. So you know how it does like the little boop-boop, right? And it's like, so you're brushing your teeth and then it goes like boop-boop and you're supposed to...

to move on to the next zone yeah okay i wasn't sure if you meant the boop boop for the zone or the boop boop for too hard uh well yeah there's also boop boop for too hard i feel like that's not quite a boop boop that's more like an ah sound right it's like the toothbrush is freaking out in your mouth because you're pressing it too hard one lights there's a little light that shines on the bottom to kind of also grab my attention yeah so

Like I sort of vaguely knew that there were like, oh, the boop boop means you're supposed to move to a different zone. And I've used like Sonicare's Philips toothbrushes for years. And I just made up my own zones. Yes, I have this. I start here, then I move.

to here as then i go to here like i have my own little process based on i don't know the intervals that he's giving me i guess like i was like ah this one i'll do the inside of my teeth like i was just doing my own thing like whatever sonicare i have no idea but i recently got their like new top of the line sonicare toothbrush because i need to replace my old one and

the like instructions was really pushing the app and i thought okay let me just like give this a try just out of pure curiosity and so i was like okay number one now i know what the zones are supposed to be but the thing that i actually thought was like worth trying for a while is that if you're brushing the teeth with the app

it's actually able to keep track of how long and how hard are you really pressing in each of the zones that it wants it's like it can tell which way the toothbrush is angled and if you're going along with the zones it then knows like are you doing the front or the back of the teeth

And interestingly, like... it's keeping track basically of is there some area that you're always giving like slightly short attention to and then every once in a while it does like hey you should do a makeup session and it will tell you like just spend 30 seconds right here I think that's interesting. This is funny. I explicitly have avoided the one that comes with the app. Because I'm just like, I don't want an app for my toothbrush. I just don't. I really don't want that.

i agree i'm not sure that i'm going to keep doing this going forward but i thought you know what i am gonna give this a try and just like see it for a little while i think the biggest problem though is just realizing how when i'm brushing my teeth i want to be on my phone doing literally anything else than looking at the

toothbrushing app is like fundamentally the conflict of like uh what do i want to be doing it's like oh i want to be going through my like morning routine checklist or like i want to be listening to a podcast like i want to be doing something else It made me kind of realize how much brushing my teeth was totally on autopilot. I never really want to think about this task at all. So I've given this a little bit of a try, but I'm not 100% sure that this will be forever going forward in the future.

As far as tooth brushing apps go, I think it's about as good as it could be. So what we do know is that you spend 50 minutes. a week brushing your teeth. Two minutes, twice a day, times seven. Oh, I guess, actually, I guess that's not that far off. Yeah. So do you have to have the app?

open while you're brushing that is the killer that's what i mean by i want to be doing something else i see what you mean yeah no i don't want to do that i don't want to live my life that way okay sonicare if you're listening what i really want you to do is

the way youtube could let you play like a little video on screen while you're doing something else that's what i want this app to functionally do like show a little video on screen of what you want me to do so i can also be doing something else because I do feel like that toothbrushing app, it's really blocking every other app on my phone while I'm brushing my teeth. So don't love that.

I love that Asana is your most used app of the last week. I mean, it really ties up what you were talking about earlier on. I think that's amazing. Yeah. So ideally, this shouldn't be the case, right? This is like setup week. Yeah. i was really realizing like trying to get the iphone app to work the way i want to display in widgets like the things that i want in the particular order it's functionally not really possible without just like a lot of work which

Again, I may be able to automate through rules, but probably not. But ideally, your task manager should not be the top thing on your phone. top one or two for pickups but it shouldn't be like this many hours but this is entirely the like oh i had my computer open and i'm making changes and i'm keeping the phone open and seeing like oh how does that update in the app because they're just like weirdly different how does this look in the

So that's why that's there. But that's not the way it should be like permanently going forward. Something I cannot understand. is how I have 117 pickups and messages and you have 115. Now that just doesn't feel like... That can't be possible. It should be the case for both of us because...

I get the impression you just don't use messages for days. And so I don't know what you're doing over there. It's either way under counting yours or way over counting mine in some way. I don't know. Because that doesn't make any sense. I mean, because again, we know. have like the actual

numerical measurement here that I am like one quarter as popular as you. So I should not be picking up messages as frequently as you. No, no, no, no. Remember, as I said, that is over counting for multiple devices. No, it's under counting because you have all this group. threads that you're also muting right so i'm at least one quarter as popular as you so i like this i don't understand that number either just looking on my iphone for last week 637 messages

114 pickups. You are at 657 messages, 115 pickups. Did I accidentally screenshot your phone for my pickups? I don't understand. How is this possible? Even though I don't understand at all how they could be. so close like the fact that you're using messages apparently as much as me I don't know who you're texting it ain't me but there's also something funny about that of like that 650 number to about 110 pickups like there's like a correlation there that must be like

just a standard number for pickup to notification ratio that occurs between people? I guess so. I don't know. Yeah. There's something statistically significant about that one, I guess, considering the fact that...

We use messages, I think, very differently, but yet notification to pick up ratios, that's very weird. That is very, very, very weird. Yeah, the only thing I can think of that might... it still seems like it's an over counting but i functionally don't use messages anywhere other than my phone like i've turned it off on my computer and ipad so like i'm just

never ever interacting with it anywhere other than the phone which might be like falsely pushing a bunch of activity here that you have distributed across more things that's true it still feels very wrong and i wasn't even thinking about it like looking at the screen time like four hours of messages also seems very wrong but i don't know whatever what was my time in messages three hours 13 minutes you're just like texting up a storm these days that's what i'm recognizing

I think I screenshotted your phone. I think that's what happened. Well, no, the reason I know it's your phone is because Slack EMM is still in there. I can't believe you're still using that. Why would I ever change that? One, I'm just very surprised that it still exists. So this is the... version of slack that you can sign in to any slack account with right like you're just right signed into a regular slack it's not an enterprise slack yeah

So you end up with two slacks that you can control individually. It's incredible. I can't believe that that is still a thing that exists.

you know what i am realizing though i should probably change that so i originally did this to have like my gray industry slack separate from the notifications for the cortex slack but i realized like i don't think actually now the settings are different anymore like i think both of them are just doing the same thing that go into notification center so i should probably just have it in one because

It is annoying enough times that I'm opening Slack and then I want to go to the other one, so I should probably change that. And also, I think since we first spoke about this, Slack has put in more native notification management than they would have had then.

Yes. You know, I was like, yeah, what else has changed? That is the other thing. They've gotten way better at the ability to do that. Okay. I'm deleting Slack EMM off my phone right now. Well, don't forget to sign into the other Slack account. Done. That is the end.

the task absolutely nothing else to do great it's just that was the last time we ever heard from him this episode of cortex is brought to you by sock dog Have you ever woken up at night with a tight pain in your neck or yet another day of a persistent cold and immediately turned to the internet for advice?

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that people will hear before my paternity begins. Me and you are actually pre-recording an episode, which, by the way, is going to be a book club. I might as well say that now. We're going to do How to Win Friends and Influence People. So that is going to be the next episode of Cortex, which will be out sometime in March whenever I find the time to post it. Yeah. Give it a read. Probably the most.

famous self-help book maybe i don't know uh it's like it's got to be up there in like the top more than seven habits I think more people would have name recognition for How to Win Friends and Influence People than Seven Habits. Seven Habits might be better for the business people, but I feel like general populace, How to Win Friends and Influence People has got to be more name recognition. I'm very aware of the topic. I think of all of the books that we are reading, it is the one that I...

Even knowing the title is what I do. I have no idea what this book is actually about. Oh, interesting. Okay. Like, I can make a guess based on the title. What would that guess be, Mike? What do you think the book is about? I don't really know how that translates to a book.

in a way right like because the title would suggest to me is it is about kind of manipulating people i think but like i don't know if that's what the books are going to be about so i'm intrigued to find out so that's going to be our next episode wow so cynical mike that is actually The final podcast I will record before my paternity leave.

Oh, I'm last in line with that one. I didn't realize. Okay, so nothing else afterward. Did you really expect that you wouldn't be playing realistically? I mean, I guess that does seem kind of inevitable. Yeah, I'm sorry. I apologize. just happy that we do have a plan to pre-record something you know so my paternity leave in the way in which it will be is planned to be about an eight week span Okay. So this will be two weeks where I don't really want to hear from anyone.

And that is kind of like from when the baby is born, not the first two weeks of my paternity leave. Because my expectation will be I will probably have about a week of paternity leave where the baby isn't here. And that's just kind of like the...

final preparation time and also the true danger window oh i see right okay yeah you know different people do it in different ways but because i'm affording myself such a long period of time i am going to give myself a little bit of time beforehand you know i I'm going to do a full deep clean of the house. You're clearing the way for babies. Exactly. Yeah. And like we're doing stuff like that now, but this will be the, all right, the final, final things before I'm going to take care of them.

a few days and then I will have I'm expecting probably four weeks that I'm calling like with contact and then maybe a week or two of kind of like staging back in Now, the biggest thing, though, for this whole period of time is I won't be recording podcasts. That is the, I mean, as we know from my time tracking, my biggest time.

allocated is to the preparation, recording, and editing of podcasts. So this would give me most of my time back. It's also the thing that takes me out of the house the most. which I don't want to be doing during this time. So that is the thing. And then I will be keeping in touch with various endeavors. There'll be the occasional meeting that I'll still be attending during the four weeks.

We have contact in the week or two of staging back in. The staging back in will probably include recording some podcasts, but not all of them. But that is a very nebulous thing. This is a thing that a bunch of friends recommended I do. But really, it's like a... occur week six or will this recur actually at week eight and maybe you know some stuff doesn't start again until like week nine or i don't know yet wait was your original plan just to go straight back into all of it and not

know me you know crazy i was like bang let's go like because that's just how my brain works it didn't even cross my mind that you could do that oh boy uh incorrect mike i'm glad you have been correctly advised on this to stage it back in

Am I going to be last out first back in? Is that the way it's going to work for Cortex? You might be first back in, yeah. I'm not sure yet, though, because I really don't know what the end part of this looks like. But this is like... emblematic of this entire process for me being self-employed i'm just working this out on my own right like why eight weeks because that felt like a good

It was also my opening gambit and everybody agreed, which I couldn't believe and I was so happy about. I was just like, well, six would be nice. I guess I'll start with eight. It was like a negotiation, but all of my colleagues were like, yeah, of course, take as much time as you want. oh great, I'll take eight weeks then. I didn't know what I should do, but I knew what I wanted. And what I wanted was as much time as seemed realistic.

This is a very important thing for me to be able to spend as much time as I can in the beginning of building my family. There was also this thing in my mind, which was if I can't take a really long time, kind of what was the point of doing all of this? Yes. Why build your own career for a decade if you then can't? take an opportunity like this, you know? And there was a part of me that was like, you deserve this.

You have gotten yourself to a point where you can do this, so you should do this. Oh yeah, 100%. I feel like we talked about this in the very early days of Cortex, but that...

The danger of being a self-employed person, which does happen to most self-employed people, is that you end up just building this kind of cage for yourself that in many ways can be much worse than the job that you left if you were trying to... do it for like freedom reasons is like oh boy you can be the person that everything hinges on and now you can never take breaks and like you have to be so careful in constructing your career to be able to do that and it's like yeah

If you are able to do that, Mike, it's like 100%. That is because you have made that possible. And this is the time to take advantage of it if there ever is time. Yep. And I consider myself to be incredibly lucky that I am surrounded by the most supportive co-workers and that everyone is just making it work. I am also doing my best. To just trust everybody that it will all be done, which is not my natural way of feeling. No, it is not. You know, we all have pride in the work that we do.

Part of the pride that I have is that everything is done as well as it can be on time. And I feel like for projects to work that way. Everybody kind of has to agree on that. Like part of my role in a lot of the shows that I have and a lot of the projects that I have is the person who.

make sure that this is done, make sure that that is done and gets it complete. And it's not the case of all of my projects because Steven is more that person than me. So like on Connected, he does all of that. But on my other shows, I tend to be... like the driving force the producing force and so for that time period I'm kind of like handing everything over to my co-hosts and

I trust that they will get it done because I know it's important to them too. But typically, say I'm away and something is happening, I will kind of be checking in on it, you know? Or like keeping my eye on it. Yeah. But I am choosing for this time period. I know everyone can handle this.

And I am going to turn my attention to the thing that is more important to major in this time. Yeah, but that's not easy when you've been the de facto project manager for most of the podcasts that you're working on. I'm going to be really interested to debrief with everyone of how this time was for them. I was talking to Jason the other day, and he was very sweet. He said to me, I'm going to miss you. He said something along the lines of, I think I'm going to realize how much.

Like in doing everything, kind of realizing like what we both bring to the table, which I thought was very funny. I mean, I do want to ask because the thing that caught my attention straight away is you said here like the first two weeks. This is a very strong statement for Mike. No contact. It's just like, what are the boundaries of that? What do you really mean? Like, no, no contact with anyone. Like, what does that mean to you? Because that's a very strong statement. For those two weeks.

I don't want to hear from anybody that I work with unless it is an absolutely critical emergency. Okay. There are other people that can answer questions. If they can't... then you can get to me. And I feel like it's important to be that strong because then it makes people question if something truly is an emergency.

I kind of want people to just work out on their own because it's unlikely you're going to hear from me anyway. Even if you've got something you want to say to me, that time period, there is only one thing that I want to be focusing on. I want to put all of my energy into that.

And I don't want to be thinking about work. I would suggest, if you haven't thought of this already, that this is a good time to have your assistant act as the firewall. Yes, we're doing something like that. Great, right? Because it's like, ah, if she's the first point of contact. I think it helps just put a little bit more resistance to people just messaging you. Yes. So let me explain how this is going to work. So for relay, it's not needed because there is an infrastructure.

that already exists and everybody knows. Like, no one's going to need me, right? Like, they know they can go to Stephen, they know they can go to Carrie, they know they can go to Kathy, and realistically, most of the time, people would... go to one of those three before me anyway for most things so like for relay it's not so much of a thing for cortex brand that is the way it's going to work that everyone's going to go to my assistant and also something that is going to be happening which

When it was originally pitched to me, it was a horrifying idea, but I really came around to it quite quickly, is my assistant is going to be managing my email for my paternity leave. Great. So she will have my email logins. And we'll be looking at it a few times a day, triaging it. And she will then, if like something appears to be urgent, come reach out to me. But by and large, it will be triaged.

She will put in Slack things that maybe I want to know if I want to just go and have a look, right? Like rather than open the email. But then whenever I do get to my email, there will be just the stuff that is important for me to see. even if it's not necessarily urgent, but is important. So that is like a big part of it. But realistically, everyone in Cortex Brown will know they can go to her and she will get to me if it's needed or just collect things up.

And with relay, the structure is already well in place. And that realistically, these days, people, they don't need me. for this kind of stuff. Everyone's pretty self-sufficient anyway. And typically, if something urgent is needed, it's very rarely me that has the answers anyway. It's like, if it's technical, Stephen is doing it.

If it's ads, Carrie is doing it. And those are the two most urgent categories, yeah. But then, like, that's when I said the urgent things then are, like, something quite bad is happening, you know? Mm-hmm. And these things can happen. They do happen. And I will just hope that they don't happen while I'm on my paternity leave. It was funny. There was something similar. So Stephen took a sabbatical earlier this year.

In part because I was going to be taking a break and so it felt good to be able to give him some time too after the podcast of Thunbury really put a lot into it last year. And I think within three or four days, our entire website broke. Oh, no. The whole thing. It was just 100% unresponsive. And I know...

A few things to do. Poor Stephen. Poor Stephen. That's terrible. And I went in and I was like... rebooting things and like you know i was trying my best and i reached out to him and luckily he didn't even know what needed to be done in that scenario and so then we got our developer involved and it was like a

it was just a random chance that like an update had failed on the server kind of thing but it was like i felt so bad like i tried so hard to fix it and i couldn't fix it but like there are things like that that could happen but in the reverse i don't know what they would be but like some kind of big business issue which you know is a decision that Stephen would probably not make on his own and would at least want me to know about it but I consider that unlikely and I also know that he knows

how important this is to me and it's important to him that I can take this time so it would have to be huge to kind of cross my path. But we'll see. I mean, for the majority of the time that I'll be away... I'm going to be checking in with people and answering questions. It would just be on like a weird schedule, you know, like people could send me stuff and I'll get back to them when I can. Cortex brand is probably where the majority of my work will go during.

my paternity leave just because it needs more decisions right now because it's new. And it's likely we're going to be launching our pocket notebooks during my paternity leave, which is a decision that I'm... made that I want to do it during that time period, because if this is going to be the year of products, we have to actually launch the products. And so that is going to be happening during the time.

but obviously towards the end. I feel like I would strong push to defer that to the phase back in two weeks period. That's probably just when it's going to end up being, like just based on shipping and stuff like that.

like it's going to be in april for sure then it's just kind of like when is everything ready but luckily it's good in a way because with the way that things are timing up It means there is work for everyone to do while I'm away, you know, images to be taken, copy to be written, like stuff that everyone can just be getting on with, which is all of the things around a new product launch and that I can then start reviewing.

as I'm kind of about a bit more, you know, like things that are a bit more asynchronous and we can kind of take our time with it. Like we're not on a time crunch. All of the pieces can be put into place for when I return. Because everybody that works with us, they're working on hours, right? So they're billing us for their time. And something that I was nervous about months and months ago was...

I didn't want my paternity leave to result in nobody being able to bill any hours. Right. Yeah. You don't want to be the blocker for absolutely everybody. Yeah. No. And so I'm really happy that we have this like project. of getting all of the collateral together for a new product for happening while I'm gone, because everyone will be having things that they can get on with without me needing to be there. And then eventually...

Everybody presents what they've got. And then I can do the approvals. And the approval stuff or like the feedback stuff, that doesn't take too much time. the time has actually been getting to this point, you know, putting brace together and like getting all the products together. And I can set it out to all of our creative people that we work in and they can go ahead and put something together for us. So like, I think that's.

I'm happy that I've gotten this project to this point before the leave begins. You just reminded me and I am assigning it to you right now.

a template in the cortex brand asana for product launching so while you're doing this just gonna put that in there for you to just like throw in the rough steps as we're doing it this way new way the first time and like we'll organize it later but this is just like a place to start capturing like what do you want to have happen in what order and when so uh yeah there you go there's something assigned to you right now in asana while you were

about it but uh yeah might as well do this for the pocket since like our little product launch it feels like it's the perfect one to start with and uh yeah if you're gonna do it for the phasing back in time we need to get on this love it So aside from the thing that I have just assigned you, though, how do you feel about clearing your calendar like this? I mean, this has got to be like the biggest.

no work intentionally time you've had like since the start of relay since the start of working maybe i don't even know yeah It's got to be like your absolute biggest break. How are you feeling about it? Yeah, the biggest break I had before this was my honeymoon, which was two weeks. After that, every year it will take a week or two that will be completely away from work, and I'll take a couple breaks and stuff.

So one, I would say I'm really looking forward to having the opportunity to detach from work and the news cycle for the period of time that I'm going to have. I think it's going to be a good refresh for me for when I come back. What I'm looking forward to is like the way I'm going to get news.

about the topics I care about is by listening to the podcasts that I'm not on. I think it would be fun. So I'm not going to read like RSS during my paternity, but I will listen to Upgrade. I will listen to Connected, right? Like I'll listen to the pen addict. hear what is happening that way which i'm looking for i'm actually really looking forward to that it'll be fun that's a funny thought yeah you get to experience the show

As a real listener does. Which I always get when I'm on vacation. But even when I'm on vacation, I'm still kind of like keeping up a little more. But this time it's like gone. It's not the same. Yeah, you're still doing more. The biggest fear that I have. Or like the biggest concern I have for my work during this time is like more of like an imposter syndrome-y thing.

It's going to be a long time on my weekly shows where I'm not there. And it's like, will people prefer it? That's what I gave in my head.

I mean, I don't know if you could hear the sound of me rolling my eyes at the words imposter syndrome. I have no patience for this concept. What your real fear here is replacement syndrome, right? That's what your fear is. Yeah, like people were like, oh, I much prefer it without my... I much prefer the show with this guest or that guest and this comes from the fact that like sometimes when I'm away people say these things and I get it right like

There are maybe certain pairings that you prefer. I don't think everybody has to like me. Like I'm not unrealistic, right? In the way that I think about the content that I make because I'm also a... consumer of content too and i have preferences about the pairings or the people that are as part of projects that i like and don't like you know i get that yeah it's just like a weird thing it's like a long time and i know that that's going to be in there

Or maybe I won't care. I don't know. But it is something that I am nervous about a little bit because it's like a weird thing to do to take such a long time away from these creative projects. Yeah. I mean, I think you do have... the different problem of you will actually be

subbed in so i for rolling my eyes at imposter syndrome it's like i do get it and of course given the way that the internet is everyone will tell you their opinion on everything and like with an audience size large enough you will hear every version of everything

which means like, yep, you're sure going to hear from the people who are like, I like the new guy better. That's just going to happen. It is the sheer way that these things go. I know I'm going to have so many people, because I'm already having it, tell me how they're going to miss me, but they're so excited.

And when I come back, people are going to be like, oh, I'm so happy you're back. But there'll be like three people who will email me and be like, stay away forever. And they're the only ones I'm going to think about. But like, I know this. But the thing is, I've been on the internet. for too long that i know that it will bug me for a day or two but i've just like hardened over time i'm kind of just like hey so what

That is the ultimate thing that I get to with those where there is this kind of thing of like someone was here to me. Oh, I wish such and such person was here instead of you. And I'm kind of like, well, unfortunately, you have me to listen to. So that's your punishment, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, my feeling is a little bit.

more direct mic it's like uh they're your shows those people can suck it that's just the end of it i don't know but like outside of that it's like business disasters but i don't really worry about that the thing the more realistic thing from a business perspective is like what are the little things get missed and how long does it take to realize but they're also going to be handled like it will just be handled and I know it will be

yeah and again definitionally if they're little things that get missed they're little things they're not business disasters so i feel like it's definitionally fine for this period of time so yeah I feel like you have nothing to worry about, Mike. I'm very confident in your paternity leave. What could go wrong? I know it's going to be fine. I genuinely know it's going to be fine. But also, it doesn't matter because I have something that I care more about.

Ultimately, the reason for all of this is for this time period and for the next little while and then for the rest of my life, there's something more important to me. And I don't know how that's going to feel yet. But like, I'm more aware of it than before. You know? Like, I'm more aware of this feeling that my life is about to change. And I'll see what... it feels like on the other end of it. And I'm curious to know who that man will be. Because it's not the one that's here right now. And...

I feel very confident of the fact that I am about to undergo the single biggest change of my entire life and nothing will ever come close to this after. And so we'll see what could go wrong. Cortexans, this is the end of the show, but it doesn't have to be. There is more. Just go to getmortex.com and you can sign up now. You'll get longer ad-free versions of the show. In More Text this time, I talk a little bit about...

themes for parenthood, and more about how ready I feel for this next step in my life. Go to getmoretext.com and you can sign up now, support the show, and get longer ad-free episodes.