In this episode Rich and Paul discuss productivity tips and tricks. Their best bet is deadlines. They go into productivity softwares as tools of empowerment. They inform you on what the tools offer and how to make the most out of them.

Do you wanna know one of my best qualities?

Jesus.

Yeah.

Okay.

Tell me your best quality

when something really consequential is at stake.

I don't

don't wanna work with anyone else.

I become uncollaborative.

Boy, is that true?

That's fantastic.

It's really Graham, I'm on like your 10 of work.

Here's what's tricky as, as your business partner in, in so many things, uh, when

you become obsessive and you want to get something done, you're very valuable.

Oh,

I think that was a compliment.

It's, it's worked out great for me, but there's a part

of me that's just like, could you just talk about it for a minute?

No, no.

We're gonna have that meeting and everyone's gonna have to wrap.

yeah.

So I go through spells, where I look for like tools.

I don't call 'em power tools.

I call 'em tools of empowerment,

right?

You ever heard of Alfred?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What's that do?

It's like a little, you hit space and it

It's a, it's a, for, for the Windows Vista users out

there, it's a Mac app that turbo charges like shortcuts and stuff.

You do, you do like option space and then everything is wired to Alfred.

Like you could,

Yeah.

So you can like open up your mail editor and you can bring up a URL directly and

Bring up url, pre-fill a form and upload an

Always the fantasy.

I mean that's the fantasy with, with AI right now is that we're gonna,

everything is now your personal

Yes, exactly.

And I always, uh, bail.

Mm-hmm.

I try 'em, I feel good about it for a bit, and then I always bail and

I go back to yelling at someone else.

Do you remember the, of course you do.

Do you remember the phase when everybody was like, we're gonna create the most

minimalist writing editor imaginable.

That was,

IA writer.

I think it was

year period on the internet where everyone tried

to make the blankest screen.

Yes, yes.

There were a bunch.

I remember there was one where it would like, as you were writing the clouds

would kind of open up a little, you'd

see Oh yeah, yeah.

outline of a tree.

Yes.

You know what, I'll tell you my, my thing on this, I have a bit on

this, which is cuz it comes up.

I used to be a guy who I like a good minimalist writing environment.

I spent enormous amount of time not writing, creating one.

And uh, I really did realize at one point I just had to kind of, I had to

deal with, deal with it and accept, uh, there's one technology that will help you.

Get a piece of writing done.

What's that?

A deadline.

Oh.

And, and it's a pencil and a piece of paper is not radically

different than a really great word.

It's, it's somebody waiting and saying, you know, when the, um, I

still do my column for Wired, and I'm, I'm more on time than I used to be.

But, uh, every now and then I'll get, it's like, Hey, the managing

editor just used the phrase.

Contingency plan.

So how's that going?

And I'm like, I'm gonna stage my career where I'm like, oh, managing editors

are always saying contingency plan.

Gimme an hour.

You know?

And um,

it's funny because, you know, that's the promise of a lot of

these sort of this flourish of AI ideas of how it's gonna solve this or that.

We've talked about it in other podcasts.

It's kind of hilarious how everyone's like that thing that

was burdening you is no more.

And it turns out that every time someone promises that, it's,

the output is always shittier.

It is.

It's not just I watch somebody like try to, you know, figure out to how to do a

really complicated scheduling algorithm and they're just programming after.

They're just

program.

Yeah,

the, they're not a programmer.

So what is nice about these interfaces is that, um, I was doing

some programming over the weekend.

I'm doing, I'm doing a weird project, which is my father was an

experimental writer, and he left.

He said, could you put my manuscripts online after I died?

So he passed away.

It's God bless my

so, 10, 10 manuscripts.

it's two stacks of just loose paper that he threw into a box.

box.

Oh, so it's all

No, there, there's that.

And then there's the Google Drive, which is 20,000 separate files.

Each one of them is a poem, uh, or a short story or a novel, you never know.

And, um, uh, and about, uh, about half are duplicates.

Right.

So, so I'm, I'm, I had to do a lot of scripting to d duplicate and

sort of hash and so on and so forth.

And there's a point where I'm trying to put stuff in the database and I

didn't have my single apostrophes.

Right.

Yeah.

And it's just a half hour of my life.

I'm never getting back for that.

And I, I do feel that, like, where AI is gonna be amazing is it's, you're

gonna, you're gonna ask it a question and it's, you're not gonna be able to

skip that whole extra apostrophe thing.

Yeah.

You'll see it, you'll be like, what's going on here?

Like, I, I feel that it's smart that way.

Yeah,

around little annoying hurdles is good,

but it turns out that solving problems as a

human being is fricking hard.

We just had a business structure meeting in the other room there.

I couldn't ask a bot to do that.

Like, that's not it.

It's complicated.

Yeah.

And, and, and, um, you know how I view it, we were supposed to talk

about something else, but we don't give a

Oh, we're gonna get there.

We're gonna get there.

Hold on.

Okay.

Um, do you know how I view the whole AI flurry right now?

How it's like the c you ever see Goodfellas.

Yeah, about 20,000 times.

Right.

You know, the final scene where he is like all coked up and the

helicopter won't stop chasing him and he is trying to make the meatballs.

don't even like to think about that scene.

It's so stressful.

It, to me, the AI flurry is sort of the, like the,

that final scene of work from home.

oh, you're right,

like, wait, you think you got your time back?

You think you got work-life balance?

You think you could spend time with your kids?

Wait, it gets better.

It gets better.

Hold on,

are hovering.

You're trying to make the be

Hold on.

You thought you had to make a grocery shopping list?

No, you don't have to do that.

You have to do anything cuz the cocaine, AI will take care of it.

just coming in.

It is, it is the, the sort of culmination of like, how can

we actually gain absolute freedom?

And here's the farce in all

of Mm.

Hmm.

We are terrible with free time.

Oh, humans,

It's, well, what do we do?

We end up going

World War

who DevOps is a product of free time.

there's a lie.

I, it's, um, oh God.

Well, idle hands make the devil's work.

That kind of like, there is a truth to that, which is if you're not busy, we know

a lot because of where we are in life.

We, we know a lot of people who've done really well and, uh, they,

they have too much free time.

They talk to you about the craziest

Yeah.

You wanna know an observation about the wealthy?

Yeah.

They buy stuff for their stuff.

So they get a boat and then they spend all their time thinking

about the chandelier on the boat.

Yeah.

the leather, the leather trim of the

listen.

The way capitalism works, it's all, it is what it is.

Okay, there you go.

But the trade off on that is when you spend all your time thinking about the

chandelier on the boat, you are never ever gonna be able to connect with a

normal human being ever again on earth.

You also won't enjoy the boat.

That's

no, no.

Cuz you're, all you're gonna do is look, you're gonna look at that

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's, you know, it's the Reno project that takes four years.

Mm-hmm.

And it's like, wait, that's like minus four years of my life

of not being in the kitchen.

Oh.

Wealthy, wealthy people tend to communicate through

furniture like they no longer.

Yeah.

It's,

bring it all the way back around and set this up for you cuz we

got a really cool, um, bag, mail, bail

bag.

Oh, right.

Okay.

So thank you.

Yes.

hold on.

Let me just say, let me just say,

back to Alfred.

Yeah.

Well let's, let me just say productivity is good.

It feels good.

You feel useful.

I fixed an outlet this weekend in my bathroom.

I like turned off the power to it.

My wife thought I would die in the bathroom from electric shock,

a little hopeful.

She's like, this is almost over.

unwired the old one, wired the new one, wrapped it in tape.

And when I plugged in my like, Rechargeable toothbrush.

I felt like a hero.

Mm-hmm.

I felt so good about

myself?

What's better than that?

The feeling, productivity.

The checkbox.

The X going into the box.

Yeah.

One of the greatest feelings in the

It's a great feeling.

And so all of this stuff, you're depriving yourself of something if you think

you're gonna automate away everything.

And so we got this really interesting, first off I thought it was you

so this is, this is from Joshua.

Go.

And, uh, I've been a longtime listener to your podcasts.

Do you have any advice?

Or consulting towards getting better at emax.

That's my text editor, Paul.

I keep hearing people rave about org mode, but I can't seem to get the hang of it.

I do like the EMAX overall, but I'm a two to three trying to get closer to

a seven plus skill level out of 10.

Thanks so much.

Keep up the good work, Josh.

Thank you Josh, first of all,

thank you.

So let's talk about this for a minute.

Let me give a minute or two of real advice and then let's go Meta.

Okay, well I don't know if people will understand

I'm gonna explain the whole thing.

Okay.

Okay.

So there are many kinds of ways to edit documents and one of them is a

text editor that runs on your computer.

Okay.

Notepad, no pad.

Microsoft note.

Exactly.

So emax is like a super notepad that came out of super nerd world, like

literally out of m i t in the seventies.

Okay.

And just the name is weird.

Is it only on Mac?

No, it's editor macros.

It's even like before the Macintosh, right?

We're just, we're way

called E M A C S?

Yes.

And it's, it's legendary as like the super editor.

It has a programming language built in.

It can do anything.

Okay.

And it's.

It's not attractive in the way the modern software is, but it's very, very

powerful and it can like, you know, for a while, like Slack was out and you could

do slack from inside, inside of emax.

You can tweet from inside of emax.

You can read, you can read mail, search mail.

You can do anything.

Anything you do at words.

Okay.

Is this free?

It's all open source.

It's completely free.

Is

Is it in, do you download it for your Windows computer?

can download it for any computer.

Okay.

Okay.

So it is like, it is a, and I've been using it for 25 years at this point.

It's a go-to text editor for building complicated piles of code.

worth noting, by the way, this is, you're not gonna see cool icons here.

This is a hands-on keyboard power tool.

Nori rich likes to look over my shoulder when I'm

using and just laugh at me.

And he goes, what the hell is that?

Yeah, it's, it's ridiculous, but it's very powerful and people love it.

It has incredibly loyal.

Talk about the community for a minute.

love it.

Well, look, it's one of the flagships of the open source movement and it has,

you know, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of regular users and it's

free, and it's been around forever.

So it's very powerful.

It has all these special modes for different kinds of programming.

So like, If you program it and the C language has a really good mode for

that, and if Python and so on, so it's,

so is it an ide?

It can be.

It's a little bit of everything.

It's sort of older.

It predates all those sort of tools.

You're a writer.

Do you write in

it?

That's the thing.

There's this mode that came out more than a decade ago called

org mode for organization.

It's kind of an outliner, like you put an asterisk in front of a of a

line and then gives you a headline.

Okay, and you put two asterisks in and it gives you a subhead.

Okay, so it's like markdown.

yes, but then you can add to-dos and then you can add,

uh, days and times to the to-dos as

headlines.

Okay.

now it can create your agenda for you and it can export

that to your Google Calendar.

Okay?

And if you, if you like all that and you've structured your whole world in that

way, in one big text file where you bounce around and keep all your notes and ideas

and thoughts, you can then hit a certain, um, set of command keys and you can

export that to a Word document or a, um, a pdf, uh, or an eub and take it with you.

And so, It is a personal organization, slightly.

It's a little bit of a spreadsheet, a little bit of an outliner, and

it can make any, you can make any kind of document out of it.

Yep.

Okay.

if you're somebody like me and occasionally I, I used to

use it at, I, I'm mostly writing relatively short things, but when

I was at Postlight, we'd have these sort of big documents that would need

to get produced from time to time.

I would start there and I would do my outline, I'd write it, and

then it's very easy to move the chunks around, so on and so forth.

So, to Josh's, Question.

I would say that, and, and back to the, the point that we made earlier, right?

It's all about the utility.

There's a million videos to watch and there's a, but you need that goal.

For me, the goal was I wanted something, I was writing things and what was

beautiful about a to-do list in embedded in your document manager, Is, you could

say this section needs to be written.

Yeah.

And now I had a, the ability to write things and check them off

and export them and make them look pretty and send them to people.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

That goal, like not just organizing my, organizing your life.

mm-hmm.

Is a false goal that I think everybody has.

Oh, the, the to-do

out.

Mm-hmm.

organize your life.

tell you what, I've given up on it.

You know what actually works?

Recurring things that you do every day.

Emptying the dishwasher.

I check that off my head.

Yes.

As long as I empty the dishwasher every day, a lot of other stuff happens.

So like the idea that I'm gonna organize it all in a checklist.

Nah.

But the idea that like, Hey, I know I have to finish that manuscript, and

that's made out of lot of subtasks.

What I love about work mode, what I think is really interesting is it

blurs the boundary between the thing you need to do and the thing itself.

Hmm.

And

So write the essay.

Is it to-do?

And you write the essay in the same tool as the to-do

you check it and it says done.

Interesting.

And it's all flat text.

It's, so you see, you see elements of this show up in, you know,

GitHub checklists and in, in notion and, and things like that.

Do you use this every day?

I used to.

I'm not writing as much anymore.

Okay.

And so, and so what's

publish articles, when you write articles for publishing,

do you write 'em in, in emax?

I outline, sometimes I do note-taking.

For the most part, I've pitched in Slack to my editor, and then I just pop in and

write two pages in Google Docs because I'm writing, when you're writing six

paragraphs, if I'm writing anything longer, I'm gonna be back in this.

I see.

And if I'm doing any sort of granular, like as we're talking more about

the marketing for our product and we're doing stuff like that, I'll

do the first draft of the checklist of like, what needs to get done.

Mm-hmm.

I'll do that in this tool.

Let me restate what I'm hearing for, uh, as, and, and

frame it as advice, um, for Joshua.

Yep.

Um,

two things.

One, The, I think that one of the mistakes people, one of the mistakes

people make because software touches our lives in so many ways, is that

they think if you, if I just get the right software, I'll be happier.

Mm-hmm.

That's got nothing to do

Well, and to be fair, all software is marketed that way.

Here it is, it's happiness in a jar.

You put it on your screen and you, it's just gonna be amazing for

Now, um, that's a trap and doesn't really work.

What, but there are other ways to feel happier.

Back to what we were saying earlier.

When you feel a sense of control and you feel, um, a, a flow that

comes out of even a shallow level of expertise, you are happier like.

The power in your hands of knowing your way around a platform or a system

or a piece of software is really power, really, really great, really

powerful and, and makes you feel good.

Put aside how many boxes you got to check.

Mm-hmm.

kind of not the point.

The trend of software, and this is, you know, not a bad thing, is that

they wanted to make it more and more accessible to the whole world.

But I think it's, there's a double edge to that, which is, People feeling

like experts and feeling good about their skills around it has kind of

been shunned aside for, Hey, not only are we gonna make it better for you,

but we're gonna finish your sentences.

pictures.

You know, there's a, there's a really, a thing just popped in my head that I

think we could explore here for a sec, which is, there's a really big difference

between configuration and customization.

So configuration is where you spend an enormous amount of your time.

EMAX is, is dangerous that way cuz you can configure it all day long

and just adapt it, adapt it, and anticipate your needs and so on.

There's actually.

One.

The one piece of advice I would give Josh is, if you're not using

it yet, go download Doom emax, which is a version where everything's

already configured for you.

Then there's customization, and that is like, not necessarily setting

things, but sort of like, here's the policies and approaches that

I use to get good results, right?

I, this is, I've set my environment up.

It's a few little things.

I used to spend an unbelievable amount of time in conf configuring everything.

It was, it's a hobby.

It's a hobby.

right?

I'll get it.

I'm gonna solve it.

I'm gonna figure out what you want instead is, and this is the

irony with productivity software.

Figure out one thing you wanted to do for you.

Yeah, do as much of what it asks you to do to achieve that goal.

Do that one thing, and then decide if you want to learn more.

See the thing about org mode when he says he's a two to three and you'd like

to be a seven, two to three is a really great place to be because it means

you haven't given your whole life to some freaking piece of software yet.

Means you're just kind of figuring it out as you go.

Yeah.

Seven should happen organically.

Exactly.

And, and this was the second point you just made, my second

point that I was gonna make.

So this is a twofer, two, two pieces of advice for the price of one, um,

which is this promise of like, I mean, what you hear in Joshua's note

is like, I'm not good at this yet,

Yeah.

No, Josh, you're great.

You're

you're great, like

You can never be bad at productivity software.

You can never be bad.

software's fault if you're not great at it.

at it.

And, and frankly, you could apply this to a lot of different.

Aspects of life, like I learned flask and some of the flask libraries like sequel,

Okay, you got it.

Gotta gotta like, you just lost everybody.

Yeah.

Python has this really lightweight framework called Flask that lets

you build apps really quickly.

Python's a programming language, and I, I go, I went back and forth from

wanting to be really good at it.

And just wanting to get my thing done smartly and efficiently.

And, and there were moments where I felt like such a loser because I was

like, wait, I shouldn't, I cash these pages, they're never gonna change.

And then I thought to myself, this is for you and like three

friends, rich, what you're building.

But I couldn't help it because I sought out the full knowledge picture.

let me articulate the goal for you.

The goal is to learn when it is not purely for work.

Okay.

So there's work, and work is somebody is, we're back to deadlines.

Somebody's looking at you and saying, I need it.

and it needs to be

So you better learn.

Learn all the skills and tools you can that allow you to meet those goals.

But then there's things you're doing like flask on the weekends, I'm

learning a lot about sound synthesis.

Watch the video and learn just enough to be creative and solve one little problem.

That's, see, that's, you're more mature than

me.

Well, no, I.

I went all the way down the path and then I realized like I need one goal

to understand sound synthesis, and I decided to simulate a trombone.

Okay.

And I'm, I got a pretty good trombone going.

your poor wife.

Uh, it's, I got headphones on.

It's,

Um, no, and then I'm like learning, I'm reading about tube

resonances on the internet, right?

Like, this is good for me.

And I, I feel that like, that, that is, unless if there's work that's

work, make it part of your job.

And if it's not, you should be learning just enough that you

have a more creative toolkit.

And just fully acknowledge and accept that you're not gonna be among the best.

It's okay.

You're

great, right?

You're doing great.

And, and, and it's fun to learn.

It's fun to grow skills.

But there's comes a point where like, I'm learning stuff

just to somehow get accepted

mm-hmm.

And

Overflow than, than I am really to become

more productive and feel more

that's a very dangerous question.

The, am I a real blank?

Is the, is the bane of the technology

Yes.

And productivity tools actually kind of go at you, right, at the God,

because it's essentially saying, are you a good enough person?

Yes, that's right.

That's right.

Do you love your children?

God.

And I've seen, I've seen engineers be like, you know, there's, there's just no

language that's better than JavaScript.

And you know, unless they program JavaScript, I don't wanna work with them.

And

right.

Yeah.

you lost your mind?

exactly.

Exactly.

Um, so I, I think this was a, this was a useful, uh, uh, Zian Ford,

for us to decide.

it's true.

I hope, uh, people can take something away from this.

Um, uh, Check boxes are good.

All the power tools around them.

Be careful.

Yeah.

Look for stuff to make things a little more useful.

I think we should use another one.

I have a list of things that, that have made me five times faster on my computer

that we should just give tips and

tricks.

that we can share with people and then tweet them out

All right.

Give us, give us one more.

I'll give you one.

This one is killer, man.

I use it probably 50 times a day.

I have a key combination that turns my mouse into a cursor, uh, a plus cursor.

I drag it on a region of the screen, it screen grabs it, and

then puts it in my clipboard in one

time.

Oh yeah.

This is wild.

Because the Mac, you take that screenshot and now it like puts a little preview

down the bottom and then you got,

tells you, do you want to annotate it?

Do you want to save it?

I want is the screenshot to paste into this

I need it in my clipboard and, and it's, it is an

What tool did you use to do this?

There's a wonderful macro, super simple macro tool.

You can use Automator,

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

There's a super simple macro tool for Mac that's free.

I didn't even hit the pay trip wire on it.

It's called Keysmith

Keysmith,

Yeah.

There's another Keysmith combination.

Um, Command V means paste, right?

Mm-hmm.

In Mac or control V means paste,

Command V and Mac.

Yep.

Um, I have option V that does paste and match style.

Oh

Oh yeah.

It's important,

uh, because you know, a lot of angry emails get written in

different places and then get pasted in and it's in different gray colors.

have sent so many emails that look like ransom notes.

It's so disappointing.

So pace and match style.

Like I often, I wanna do it more than just paste and there's others

and we should maybe have you just st This has been like a five pack of

No, no, but you know what, what, what we're getting to and

this is how we can close this out.

Getting better at the thing is fine.

That's a good goal.

But just like identifying the small things and fixing them one at a time.

Absolutely.

That's the way forward.

Yeah.

Um, we should have that podcast.

I think let's just give people cool little snack size tips.

The hell with this podcast.

Let's go have that podcast.

what is this podcast sponsored by?

Do we have a sponsor yet?

God.

We do.

And, and we're very, very, very, very, very close to bringing

people in to use this tool.

Our.

Wait, what?

Yeah.

Isn't someone paying us for ads, Paul?

Oh, yes.

I'm sorry.

Yes.

We're sponsored by a board, a company that, uh, rich and

I co-founded, but whatever.

Uh, a board.

What, what does a board do?

A board.com is gonna let you take.

In the entire internet and organize your passions in one place.

And it's beautiful and it's gonna be launched very soon.

A few weeks from now.

God, it is good.

Sign up for the beta.

All right, well that's it.

Check us out z ford.com.

Check us out on Twitter at z Ford.

Send an email to Hello at z ford.

Josh, thank you for your email.

Uh, let's get back to work.

have a lovely

this product.

Yes.