792: Where Automation Meets Intention, with Kim Caloca-Madden
01:12:48 Share

Hello and welcome to MacPower Users. My name is Stephen Hackett. I'm joined, as always, by my friend and your friend, Mr. David Sparks. I am your friend, Stephen. It's true. I will always be your friend. Hello. How's that? It's a nice way to start the show. Yeah. A little virtual hug. Well, you know, you and I, we have these little talks offline, you know, and I always feel good afterwards. You're such a nice guy doing good stuff. That's nice of you to say. Yeah.

And I always like talking to you about your truck because it makes you so happy. That's true. It does do that. Yeah. I'm turning into that guy. I am so into my car, I just can't even get over it. I just spent a bunch of time wiring in a subwoofer. So, sounds sick. Mary came out of the garage and I had like all the interior panels off and like wiring loom everywhere. She's like, you know what you're doing? I was like, like 80%. She's like, okay. She's like went back inside. Yeah.

Then like your hair's like on edge, standing up straight. Yeah. Yeah. You know, everybody knows that I'm a jazz nerd, but what kind of music do you like, Stephen? What kind of music do I like? It's pretty broad. I mean, I like a lot of like rock. I like some folk music or like, you know, not country, but it's kind of like, you know, acoustic music. I think like Mumford and Sons, 20 years, 15 years ago. Oh, Mumford and Sons, I love that.

Yeah, my daughter and I went to a Mumford & Sons concert. Oh, that's awesome. You know, Ava Brothers, lots of good stuff. What are we doing? Have you ever listened to Passenger? You should try Passenger. Yeah, I want to put him on the list. All right. Well, hey, you know what? We have somebody here. Welcome to the Mac Power users for the very first time, Kim Koloka-Madden. Thanks, guys.

I love Mumford and Sons. I got to go see them up in Monterey at a really cool festival tour they did years ago. We saw them in LA and we had kind of the cheap seats. It was really on the side and up high.

And you could see Mumford would go behind the stage and be drinking while he was taking breaks. And then he'd come back out. And it was very funny watching him. And he was just getting, as the night went on, he just got more into it. But yeah, I mean, you could call that country music, but it's, I don't know. It's good. It's good music. Country music is like distinctly like its own thing. You know, it's like acoustic. I don't know. Like the Avent brothers aren't country, but I love them. You know, just...

whatever that is. I really like, like kind of the old timey country music. My dad was a huge Johnny Cash fan growing up listening to Johnny Cash, that stuff, that stuff's good. Okay. Enough talking about music. We got some housekeeping here. The first is a mea culpa. Last week, I proudly said I would have a poll up for a survey and I built the survey and

And then I did not put it in the show notes. So I did the hard work and didn't do the easy work. We did get it updated later in the week. So you may have already caught it, but if you want to fill out that survey, go do it. We've got a link in the show notes this week for sure. It's one question. How often do you use iCloud.com? Often, sometimes you're never, I'm very curious to see how this turns out. So if you have a moment, go do it. And I apologize for not getting those last week.

The other thing I'd like to do in housekeeping today is I'd like to make a pitch for my newsletter, Stephen. I've been really working on improving the Mac Sparky newsletter. It goes out every Saturday. Sometimes it's a little productivity, hippie stuff. Sometimes it's just Apple nerdiness, but...

Either way, it's fun and I've been doing it. And if you haven't subscribed, I'd ask that you at least go check it out. We've got a link in the notes where you can go sign up. You can read a couple of the old ones and decide then if it's worth your time. But I'd love to have you sign up for my newsletter.

And today on More Power Users, Kim's going to talk about artificial intelligence inside Asana. AI is a frequent topic on the show, but we don't talk about Asana much, so I thought that would be fun to dig in deep. And More Power Users is the ad for Extend version of the show. You can check that out at relay.fm. All right, Kim, you have not been on the show before. Tell the audience a little bit about yourself.

Yeah, so I have been on Automators, but I have not been on Mac Power Users. So this feels really cool to be here. So thanks for having me. I have an online business that I started...

Oh, let's see, about 10 years ago now, I had a little one and I was splitting from his dad and I needed to be able to make some money. I didn't want to go out and get a regular job. So I was Googling, you know, what are some ways that I can make money from home? And with my experience, I found my way into virtual assisting.

which turned into, as I grew in my business, online business management. And now I do a lot of marketing, consulting, automation, consulting, project management, that kind of thing for clients who have online businesses, memberships, coaches, that sort of thing.

Yeah, I can tell you just getting to know Kim that she sucks the marrow out of that Mac. She gets so much great stuff done in it. And I thought, you know, because we do have a lot of small business owners and people who are entrepreneurs listening to the show. And some of the workflows you've got and ideas I think are just excellent because there is a lot of things we can get done faster if we just spend a little bit of time using this technology and some of the tools available to us. And

And that's what I like about you, Kim, is you've gone through and kind of figured out what works and what doesn't. And you help folks get their act together that way. But you also can help some of the Mac Power Users audience today. Yeah. Let's start out with your gear. We always got to hear from a Mac Power Users guest, you know, what are you driving?

Well, here at my desk, I have an M1 Max, Max Studio, and a studio display. And man, that studio display was a tough price tag to swallow, but I really love it. Yeah, it is. Yeah. And I was on chat with the Apple support person. I was kind of like, do I really need this much machine? And he was kind of like, no, you don't. But

You know, it's probably overkill for you. And I'm like, no, you know what? I do. You switched reversals with the salesperson there. Oh, I did. Well, and the thing is, you know, if you've ever been trying to plan to get your 14-year-old out the door to a dentist appointment and trying to finish a task at your computer and then you have to reboot in that moment, like,

Like I picture like, you know, Leslie Nielsen from airplane, like trying to like land the plane, like you're shaking and sweating and it's like, come on, I'm just trying to finish the thing. So this computer restarts so fast. Like it's, it literally is less than a minute from the time I reboot to being back in business. So it's worth it. I just got an email from a listener. Cause we had talked about this recently about, you know, do you upgrade or not? And like,

an Intel to Apple Silicon listener. So he's like, I can't believe how fast he went, you know, from an Intel machine to an M4. And he's like, it's a different world. And I'm like, yeah, we keep saying that on the show. We keep saying that for all you folks out there that are still driving an Intel Mac, you, I'm a little jealous because you're going to get that moment of

of massive jump. You don't get the same level of jump between generations of Apple Silicon, but when you go from Intel to Apple Silicon, it is like life changing in terms of everything with the computer. Yeah.

And I had an Intel MacBook right when I bought this. And I actually, because I got this and I got so spoiled on it, I was like, I have to get an M1 MacBook because I can't do the Intel Mac anymore now that I have this studio machine. So I kind of try to keep work-life separate in that I work in a shed out in the back. So I have my she-shed. And that's where my big computer is. I have three monitors here. It's like mission control here.

Unfortunately, sometimes I need to be able to take the laptop and either work in bed after the kids are asleep or take it to a dentist appointment or that kind of thing. So I do also have a MacBook M1 Pro. You said three monitors. So you've got the studio display and then what else are you using? Oh, they're just a couple old HP monitors on either side. Yeah.

What is your strategy for that, for having multiple monitors? Like, do you have like certain types of work that only go on certain screens? Sort of. I actually, I think it would make a lot of people lose their minds, but I keep my messages open on the left side of one monitor and my tasks from Asana open on that monitor also. And then I have Slack and my email opened on the right. So I kind of always have a visual on all of my notifications and

Because I just have so many different clients doing different things, plus my kids and my husband and everything else that I need to be able to see if something comes in on one of those. And I kind of focus the work on the middle. Yeah, I'm glad you said that because I'm so precious, right? Whenever this comes up on the show, I'm like, I never keep email open. I never keep messages open.

Steven and all my other friends know like when you message me, it's still maybe hours. I recently updated my home screen, so I don't even see notifications on badges anymore. Yeah. And, um, and like, that's really great that I can say that, but there's a lot of people who make their living dealing with clients like you and you can't do that. You can't just like ignore messages for eight hours. And, um,

And I'm kind of glad you said that because now I can say, yeah, there's people like him, but I still am going to be precious. Right. Yeah. My kid doesn't like it if I ignore him for a few hours either. If he's at school wanting to get picked up earlier, he forgot something. Yeah. My family hates that too. Whenever we do the emergency things, you're like, who do we call in case of emergency? They're all like, call mom. Dad doesn't check his phone. Yeah. Yeah.

Kim, I would imagine you do a fair number of video calls with your clients. I know the studio display kind of took some heat when it first came out for the webcam not being very good. And I'm sitting in front of one and quite frankly, still, it's not great. Years later after updates, are you using the built-in webcam or are you a third-party webcam kind of person?

I am using the built-in one for my purposes. We get on Zoom to talk about what we're doing and launch plans and things like that. I'm not doing appearances or anything like that. So if I were, I probably would use a third party. But since we're just chatting on Zoom and it's all very casual, I just use that.

And you mentioned your MacBook as well. So you are a two Mac person. What is your philosophy going into that? Are you trying to keep these machines as close to being the same? Is the notebook a subset of the desktop? How do you go about that? Well, I used to try. And the main thing is I...

Pretty much everything I do is web-based. So I have a series of Chrome profiles on my computer and I have to use Chrome because there's one particular piece of software I use that literally only works on Chrome. And if you guys are listening, just know that I think that's lame. But so I have a series of Chrome profiles, one for business, one for personal, and then one for like each client or different projects that I do.

So it's kind of, it kind of doesn't matter if things are on this computer or that computer, as long as the Chrome profiles are there that I use to access. And then that history and the plugins and everything I use sync up together. And also like I use, you know, a lot of cloud storage. When I download things to this computer, I basically sync

stick it in a folder that is going to auto delete after, after a day. So it's like a Hazel folder that's managed that just says delete after today, because I know once I download it, I'm uploading it into a cloud somewhere, whether it's Amazon S3 or Dropbox or Google drive. Yeah. I do something similar. I call it the burn bag, but I'm not as brave as you. Mine's like two months before I delete something, but it does, it is kind of nice kind of cleaning up after yourself with one of those folders. Steven, do you do anything like that?

Uh, a little bit. Um, but not as much as, as y'all, I don't think. Yeah. I'm such a nerd. I can't help it. I do it. I even do it with the, the show recordings, right? Because it really adds up these, these big files we make every week. And if you're not careful, you fill up your drive with them. So, you know, a couple of months after the show's published, it's done. It'll go through and clean up after me. Yeah. Yeah.

What's your biggest friction point having two computers? I really don't think there is one. My hardest thing is that I'm spoiled on the three monitors. And with my business, I could literally live and work from anywhere. Like if I wanted to pack up and go live in Thailand for a month, ostensibly I could, but I can't do the laptop lifestyle thing. Like I'm just so used to having my monitors and my mouse and my keyboard that I feel really slowed down when I'm working on my laptop.

When I use my laptop at night, sometimes I have to remote access this computer because there's something I downloaded or started on this computer or it is faster and it's hardwired to internet. So I'll just hop on. I use jump desktop, which I got from set up, but they don't carry it anymore. And I'll remote access this computer and do something from it. I think like the friction of having two computers is way lower. Just like the friction of having one computer is way lower. Everything is just easier now. Yeah.

Have you guys seen these monitors now? They're very popular on Amazon. They're like flat screens, but like very small that you hang off your laptop. Oh, I've been eyeing those. I'm so skeptical though. Like I want one to try it, but I'm really skeptical of it. So I haven't.

Taking the plunge. Yeah, I think because some people in Max Barkey Labs use them like people who travel like you can put it in your bag. But I mean, I'm not sure how great they are. But hey, if you just need to like have a reference screen when you're in a hotel room.

you can do it. Yeah. Yeah. Or you could buy a $3,500 vision pro. Big gap there. I think between Amazon screen and vision pro. I'm covering all your options here. That's all. You almost had me convinced on the vision pro back when you were first talking about it. And I, I got realistic with that price tag and said, no, thanks. Yeah.

What about the iPhone or iPad? Are you doing a lot of work kind of on the go with those devices? I don't do, I try not to do a lot of work on my phone. I try to just keep it for checking notifications and make sure nobody's hair is on fire in the morning.

And I'm still using a 13 Pro. I'm just one of those people where I don't rush to upgrade my phone in part because once I upgrade, then everybody else wants to upgrade and it gets more expensive. So once the whole house is getting new phones, like they're like, oh, you got a new phone. That's not fair. Yeah.

And then I have an 11 inch iPad Pro that I do use sometimes for work for like signing documents and just kind of some different things. But mostly I found that it's a really good creative outlet because I can just, you know, I really like to use Procreate and Notability and GoodNotes and I just draw and handwrite stuff on there. Like I keep a bullet journal in.

filling out like mood trackers and that kind of thing that I just find really satisfying to do on the iPad. And I don't feel as guilty about having a bunch of extra notebooks, empty notebooks sitting around my house. It's all in the iPad. So I can't see all of the empty pages. What's your software of choice for bullet journaling on the iPad? GoodNotes. Yeah. I love GoodNotes.

You know that feature GoodNotes has where you can write big on the bottom screen and then it writes small at the top of the screen? Yes, that's what I use all the time. I love that. And I don't know why all these e-ink readers, none of them do that. It seems like something everybody should copy. But I think GoodNotes might be the only app that does that. Yeah. And you've got an Apple Watch, right? Yep, I have a Series 8 Apple Watch. I also have an iPad that's plugged in on my desk that I run Pushcut on.

And just have a shortcut screen always open. And yeah, I have a Series 8 Apple Watch. I use it to track my sleep too. You know, I'm neurotic. I have all of my notifications off on my phone. Like nobody's going to get my attention on my phone unless they have sort of special access to me. Like they get through my focus modes or in my watch notifications are really kind of synced with that. So like I get text message notifications and yeah,

I think activity notifications for my friends for the activity sharing, because we like to do the respond thing. Like, you know, if you've got your steps in or you got your move goal, we'll send each other the little emoji things, but that's about it. But yeah, I track everything. I track my water, my sleep, you know, quick timers and things like that on the watch. It's really a utility for me. This episode of Mac power users is brought to you by one password. Go to one password.com slash MPU to learn more.

We all have a lot of complicated things we need to store passwords, secure notes, passport information, software licenses, and one password is what David and I both use to manage all of these things. One of my favorite things about one password is they are always making improvements.

Just recently, they added locations. This means you can tag a login to a location. When you're nearby, it surfaces in 1Password. So say that you have a secure note with the security code to the office building, or maybe you have your login to your doctor's office, and you want to see those when you're in those locations. Well, it is really easy to do. But if you're running 1Password for business, and for some reason you don't want this, then

you can set that as a policy as well. We do use 1Password for business at Relay. We share it with like four or five people now, and it's great because I can manage who has access to what. But I also use 1Password at home with my spouse. We have private and then a shared vault, and it's really great just to be able to update something in one place.

OnePassword supports everything you would imagine, a wide range of browsers, Face ID, Touch ID. It's integrated with autofill passwords on iOS and iPadOS, which is awesome. And just this morning, I was saving a new login and I set up a two-factor authentication. I did it all from the Safari extension. It was awesome. I didn't even have to switch apps.

So head on over to 1password.com slash MPU to learn more and to sign up for a free 30-day trial. And when you do, you'll get 20% off. Once again, that's 1password.com slash MPU. Our thanks to 1Password for their support of the show.

Kim, one of the things I like about you is the way you creatively use automation. Let's talk a little bit about that. First, how did you get into automation and share some ways that you're using it with your clients and just to make life easier? Well, yeah, when I started my business, like I said, my oldest, who's 14 now, was four or three, actually, when I first got started. And I really found that

That's when I first discovered Zapier. And when I found that I could automate certain things, not only could I make sure that they got done right if I got my attention split by being pulled aside for something that my little one needed, I also found that I could sort of make the most of my time. So I wasn't spending a lot of time doing really boring tasks that are repetitive. Like I could sort of program the machine to do it for me so that I wouldn't

be spending more time on my computer at my desk and not with my kid, if that makes sense. Yeah, totally. And cloud-based automation tools, I don't think we cover enough on the show. I mean, the shortcuts, keyboard maestro, you know, the usual suspects come up all the time, but you know, there is this growing like group of cloud-based automation services out there that

And at the same time, we're increasingly getting cloud-based productivity apps, you know, cloud-based calendars, cloud-based task managers. And, you know, these things are a natural fit. Like if you want to use some of these tools like Notion, which Steven and I use, you know, these tools can really help improve things.

Yeah, and I love with the cloud-based stuff, you know, you were talking about the friction between the two computers. That's part of the thing with having the cloud-based stuff. It doesn't, I don't have to have friction when I'm using two computers or even if I want to look something up on my phone. It's all there in the cloud. So as long as I can get into the app where the thing is, Asana has a great search. Notion's got great search features. So I can look through there and find what I need.

you know, if I need to send an SOP to a team member really quick, like here's how to do this thing that I need you to do, then I can go in and find that. I think a place I'd like to start with this is like, I'm aware of three big players here. If this, then that make and Zapier, there may be other players that I'm not even aware of, but like if somebody out there is curious about this, how do they even know which platform to start on? What advice would you give?

I found when I was first getting started that Zapier was the easiest for me to learn and get into. I've heard that some people feel like Make is easier. But for me, Zapier was sort of like my way in. And, you know, I just started to play with it. It's like there's something I needed to do. Okay, I'm going to try to build it, see if I can figure it out. Yeah, so Zapier was the easiest for me to learn. I started doing things in there. I also used If This Then That for...

If this and that is good, if you're trying to do one thing, like if you just want when a calendar event hits your calendar to do something else, then if this and that is great. But if you want to do something more complicated, like if you want it to once the calendar event is created, then create a Google Doc and also create an Asana task to remind you to do something with it. If you're going to have like more than one step like that, you would want to use something like Zapier or Make.

And what I found as I've started to learn how to use Make is that it's a lot better when you're running a lot of volume. It's just more cost effective. And you can set up one scenario that can have all of these different branches based on the kind of information that's coming in to decide what it's going to do next. And then it can go off and do, you know, sort of an almost infinite number of steps on each of those branches.

And Zapier, if you're doing stuff like that where you're getting into, you know, turn left here if this information says that and turn right here, then that gets a little bit harder to manage within Zapier. There's also the angle that not all of these services work with all the other services. Like we use Zapier at Relay because it does some stuff with FreshBooks that basically no one else does. It's like, well, if we want this automation done,

then we have to use Zapier, which is not a problem for me. I really like Zapier, but that's another layer here of how complicated does automation need to be

Things like how often do they need to run? You know, if this and that, it may be free, but then if you want it to run on a certain timeframe, maybe you've got to pay what services they work with. Like there's a lot of factors here when kind of picking a system and what I've kind of over the years have built up, like, well, I've got some stuff running here and I got like one thing running over here because they support it. And that can kind of get messy if you don't pay attention to it. Oh yeah, for sure. And I've started now,

pretty religiously. And I wish I had started this years ago. So if you're listening and you're just getting started, do this. Every time I create an automation, I go through and I make myself a little loom or screencast recording that describes every step of what the automation does. And then I have, like, I plug that into ChatGPT to transcribe it. Like, I actually have an automation that does this. So I upload the audio recording and

to the automation, it transcribes it, and then it writes out a step-by-step of what's happening within the automation. And then I put the link to that scenario or that zap, whatever it is, so that if I need to go in and fix something, I have my notes of exactly what the automation is designed to do, what's happening at each step. And I could just sort of riff that in an audio and record it right as I make it. And if I had been doing that as long as I'd been in business

There'd be so many things about my life that would be easier right now, but I'm going and doing it now. So better late than never. Yeah. Best time to plant a tree. Yeah. I think though that that's actually a very useful tip because a lot of people think about loom for like internal customer support or team building on my team. I use loom anytime there's something new that I'm handing off to JF. I make a video and shade. This is how I do it. And this is when I do it.

And then we've got in Notion this rich list of loom links of like anytime he needs to do something he hasn't done in a while, he can click a button and watch my video on it. But you're using it for your own, like I'm not doing it for someone else, I'm doing it for me kind of thing. That is equally useful.

Yeah, it's definitely both. Like I keep a directory, you know, there's certain things that are just for me, certain things that are for my team, and then certain things that I want the clients to have, especially if they're, you know, a project based client, and I'm not going to be continuing to work with them on an ongoing basis where they can't just text me and say, Hey, Kim, fix this.

I make sure that they have what they need. I'm like, okay, you know, we're building you an automation. That doesn't mean that it's always going to work. And if something changes about how Zapier handles an API call, then you might have to go in and update it. So I just want them to be able to do that without feeling too lost and overwhelmed.

Yeah. You know, I, cause loom is a yearly subscription and I make a living making screencasts. I have very good tools and the ability to, to make very good high quality screencasts and I could easily like build them and host them on Dropbox or whatever and,

But every year that Loom subscription comes up and I pay it without thinking twice. If you work with other humans, the friction that it removes is so easy because you just literally hit a button, you record it, you send a link, and then they've got it. And now they've added a lot of AI tools. So it does a good transcription. They're keeping up with kind of what's required. If you work with other humans out there, I would recommend looking at Loom.

Okay, so we got off a little sidetrack there, but you're building new automations and you're looming and transcribing for your own notes. But give us some examples of what people can do with this stuff these days.

Oh, let's see. So one thing that I do is I have clients who write blog posts. And so I take the blog post that they've written and I run that through an automation that analyzes the blog post and it gives me the SEO settings. So it basically, you know, does like keyword research, gives me the topics and categories that I should mark on it, you know, gives a little social information, all that so that my team can then just

load that for me. It used to be that I would have to sort of go check their work on that stuff. And now they just get that all passed to them through the Asana task. Once I get a blog post, that automation runs that does all of that SEO and keyword research. Another thing that I use it for is, so like I have one client who does a lot of Facebook lives where she does, she teaches on different kinds of relational topics.

And so we get these questions that are submitted through Airtable and we keep track of how many questions we get during each live and what kinds of questions. And it used to be somebody's job to go through the questions and read them manually and sort of categorize them into what the topics, the questions were around so that we can know what kind of content people want more of. Well, I created an automation that once those questions enter the Airtable, then my little chat GPT

module, goes through, reads the question, looks at the list of topics that we have that questions are usually about, and picks three and assigns them and populates that into the Airtable.

So my friend who was doing that manually was really grateful when I created that. I think she had gotten about a year's worth behind on questions because it was such a tedious task to do. Yeah, I mean, that's the kind of thing AI is so good at. But I think for a lot of people listening, they're going to be like, well, wait a second. How is ChatGPT reading AI?

an Airtable. I mean, they don't have ChatGPT on Airtable. And this is where you're using these cloud-based automation tools. So get into the weeds a little bit about how specifically you pull that off.

You know, give some people some ideas. Yeah, sure. So once the question gets submitted in Airtable, that's the trigger. So basically, whether you're using Zapier or Make, you can say, watch this Airtable, this base, this, you can even tell it which of you to watch. So in Airtable, if you have a view that's new questions. So let's say I make a view in Airtable that has, if there's a question submitted, but there aren't categories submitted.

So once a question hits that view, then my automation will grab the question from that field. You know, I go into the next step and I say, okay, you have a question here. Look at that text and then chat GPT. Here's a prompt. Here's the text that you're looking at. Identify what categories this question is around. And then there's a next step that says, okay, now go back to Airtable, find that same record that triggered the automation,

And go in and enter those three categories that you identified when you ran this previous module. It's like a three-step automation, you could say. First step, you know, watch the trigger is watch the air table. The automation piece is chat GPT. You know, you tell it what you want it to do. And you give it the text from that previous step. And then update the record. So trigger, step, step.

That's powerful, you know, when you think about it. Yeah. And I think that is kind of the way this is all going. Notion has a similar built-in AI, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't interact with tables the way you're pulling off with Airtable here. And that's probably just a question of time. Yeah. The other thing I like automation for, you know, a lot of people give automation...

If you hear people talk about automation, you think about machines and you think about people doing things cold and calculated and for profit so they can crank out more of something, right? I don't like to use automation that way. The way I see automation is it's a way for me to put more care into something. So I like automations too. If I'm sending an automated message to somebody, I really like for the person to feel like it has that human touch to it. So I put a lot of care into creating those.

And then it's also a matter of making sure that there's not human error so that if I'm busy, because like, let's say, you know, like I had last week, a friend in the hospital, then I can still make sure that the thing that needs to be done is being done with as much excellence as I can put into it. So my example for this is,

I have different clients who have Zoom calls for their programs, whether they're teaching a live course or they have a membership program. There's always a Zoom meeting that needs to be created, right? Or a Zoom webinar link or anything like that. So I have different automations for these types of Zoom meetings that I plug in once with all of the correct settings, like it needs to record in the cloud and it needs to be on this account and it needs to be this view and this

This is the, it needs to have a password or it needs to have a waiting room, whatever the settings are so that,

I can create that Zoom meeting from a trigger. So like I say, okay, this person is having, Christine's having a be the queen call. I need to create a Zoom meeting that's for that call and add it to a Google calendar. And that way, if I am running out the door to take my kid to an appointment and I'm creating that Zoom meeting, then I'm not forgetting to do step two of adding it to the calendar. I'm not forgetting to set the record settings, all of that stuff. It just makes it so that the thing gets done right every time.

And are you triggering, which service are you using to trigger that? Oh man, I have so many different ways that I trigger things. And just lately, I've actually been using Asana. Asana actually has built-in automation when you get one of the higher tiered accounts. So you can actually automate creating a Zoom meeting from an Asana task getting created. But I mean, you can do it in any of the services. You can do it in Make, you can do it in Zapier. And it really just depends on what you want to trigger it.

So sometimes it's from a calendar event. So I have a Zapier that if I create a calendar event on this particular calendar, then it creates a Zoom meeting and it goes back to that same calendar event, similar to the Airtable questions, and it adds the Zoom link to that calendar. So yeah, there's a lot of different ways that you can do it, different ways that you can trigger it. It just really depends on what's, it's like anything, it's what's going to work best for you, what's going to work best for your client and your situation. It's all very customizable.

One of the things you had mentioned in passing is that you want the communications to be thoughtful and you're using automation for that. Could you explain further what you meant by that? One of my favorite examples of this is that I have a client who takes coaching applications and her one-on-one coaching is a little bit expensive. I mean, it's not crazy, but it is a lot of money for some people. And she has a lot of free offerings, a lot of low-cost offerings that

But on the application for the coaching questionnaire, she wants to know before they get on a discovery call and then maybe feel embarrassed or awkward that they can't afford it. She wants to know like, hey, can you afford this much? So she asks a question about the different prices that they can afford. You know, if you if coaching was this much money, would you realistically be able to do it? And what I did with that was I took those questions and.

And I made it decide, you know, different things based on which thank you page they would get, whether it was, no, I can't afford this or maybe I could afford this or yes, I can afford it. Right. So there was one thank you page that was a very discreet like, OK, we'll get back to you soon if they said they couldn't afford it. And I had it wait like I didn't have it go away.

Like on the hour I had it wait like 37 minutes or something like that and send it like during weekday. So it wouldn't be like at 11 a.m. Send this email that says, we're sorry, you can't afford it. You know, it was like it was just a very like I put that kind of intention into it, like wait this many minutes. So it's not like on a set time. So it feels very personal. Yeah.

I put a lot of care into how the email was written to say, hey, it's okay. Like there's all these other ways that we can help you. It doesn't look like coaching is going to be a good fit for you. But just really making that communication soft and making it just doing everything I could to have it not feel like they were just getting a, you know, slide across the desk rejection of their coaching application. And then what platform are you doing that in?

Um, that was, uh, oh man, that was one I created years ago and it was in a form builder called Wufoo. Yeah, I remember Wufoo. Oh yeah, me too. Yeah. And, um, using Infusionsoft or which is now known as Keep, that's the main email service that my clients use. And there's a lot of automation that's built into that as well. So my automation is multi-layered and, and complex. Yeah.

This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by Ecamm. Go to ecamm.com slash MPU for a powerful live streaming platform for the Mac. Get one month for free. Ecamm Live is the leading video production and live streaming studio built for the Mac. But it doesn't stop there because Ecamm is great at simplifying your workflow too.

You can do it all with the Ecamm app. Get started quickly and have everything on hand to create whatever you need with video. What I like most about Ecamm is the way it democratizes professional-looking production. People demand good-looking video this day, and with Ecamm, anybody, no matter what your training or background, can deliver that. It's great for streaming, recording, podcasting, and presenting.

If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need high quality video. With Ecamm, you can screen share, use multiple cameras and even direct the show in real time with their live camera switcher. Plus, you can add logos, titles, lower thirds and graphics. And you can drop in video clips, bring on interview guests and use a green screen. And so much more. Ecamm Live truly does it all.

Ecamm's members are entrepreneurs, marketing professionals, podcasters, educators, musicians, church leaders, bloggers, and content creators of all sorts.

If you're on the pro level plan, you can enjoy Ecamm for Zoom. Automatically send Ecamm Live's audio and video output into a Zoom meeting, Zoom webinar, or Zoom event, and up to eight Zoom participants as camera sources in your broadcast or recording. Plus, you can automatically create individual participant audio and video recordings and add Zoom chat messages to your broadcast or recording as text overlays.

To get one month free today, just go to ecamm.com slash MPU. That's E-C-A-M-M dot com slash MPU and use the code MPU. That's a whole month for free of Ecamm Live at ecamm.com slash MPU with that code MPU. Go there now and check it out. And our thanks to Ecamm for their support of the Mac Power users and all of Relay.

Kim, you mentioned Asana a couple of times in there, and that is not a software that I have a ton of experience with. And for members, we're going to get into a conversation about what they're doing with some built-in AI tools and stuff. But can you give us sort of a broad overview of what Asana is and how it can be useful to somebody like you? I mean, maybe this is an incorrect assumption, but when I think about Asana, I think about

like companies and teams and, you know, strategy meetings. But you're just like an individual doing cool stuff. So how does that fit in? Yeah, so Asana is amazing. I have tried just about every task management

tool out there. I mean, I went down the rabbit hole with OmniFocus. I bought Tim Stringer's courses. I was trying to learn that thing. And Asana is just what I kept coming back to. And for one, I just want to encourage anyone who's an individual just wanting to dabble in it. They have a, you can do so, so much with their free plan, not automation and stuff like that, but you can really do a lot with their free plan. And I

I mean, it's project management. It's task management. It's got task descriptions in there. So like I can write SOPs and just embed them in the description. I think I heard your last guest talking about note plan and how he really liked that you could include all of these notes about his tasks in there. And Asana lets you do that. Like you can have a task that has

that has a full lengthy description. You know, you can add comments on it. You can link and cross-reference to different tasks. So like the stuff that I hear you talking about David doing with Obsidian, you can do in Asana. So like I can, if I'm in an Asana task, I can say, you know, at, and I can either tag a team member or another task or a project. And I can just cross-reference all of those things. So you can really, I've got like a whole second brain in my Asana basically, um,

And I have all of my tasks in there. I have templates that I've set up for the different kinds of things that we do on an ongoing basis for clients. And those are preset with my different team members. And we all know our roles and what we do with those tasks. And they all get created and assigned on an automated recurring basis. One of the things I struggle with Asana is drawing the lines between Asana and Notion. Because they're both web services. They're both kind of for teams, but...

Where do you see the lines between those two? Well, to me, everything in Asana is a task. And sometimes if it's not a task that I'm actually going to take action on and I'm just kind of keeping it for reference, I'll just keep off an assignee and a due date. I'll just have a project that's a reference project. But every single item in here could ostensibly be a task. And I feel like

I don't know, Notion was for me, it was a big learning curve, similar to how I said it was harder for me to learn Make at first. I had a really hard time learning Notion and learning how the different pieces connected together.

But in Asana, I felt like it was just, you know, you have this blank slate list in front of you. You just type in, you know, like I'm seeing here, confirm blog post received, right? That's one of my tasks that I do every week to make sure that I have the blog post. And in the description, I have a link that goes to the blog post folder. Like it's like, okay, here's the place where I need to look to see if the blog post has been filled in there yet.

Let's see, I'm looking and you can have subtasks. So like I have this task here that's like update this promotion campaign, right, for my client. And then it's got a little set of subtasks. So it's like use the time zones Google sheet to generate the list, update the merge fields, update the dates, publish the campaign, add contacts to sequence. So I can see have I done everything that needs to be done in order for this task to be fully complete?

So it's just a really powerful tool. They have, you know, especially once you get onto the higher paid plans, you can build dashboards that like report on how many tasks or you can add custom fields like to track time or how much you're spending on something. Like if you wanted to put budgets in there, there's just so much you can do with it. And like I said, the automation is huge because I can say, you know, if a task falls into this particular section, then here's what I want you to do. And I can set,

basically automation built into Asana. I can even push it over into a Zapier or make scenario from there. So I can run automation in Asana that triggers automation somewhere else. If like, if I can't do everything that I need to do right within Asana. Now, are you, you know, Steven made a point earlier. I mean, I always equate Asana with teams, but are you using it solely? Cause I guess you're on a bunch of teams because of your client work.

Yeah. So I have my own Asana workspace where my clients with smaller teams, like I just have, you know, the person I work with on that team, I've invited her into my Asana and I have my two team members in here. I have a graphic designer in here so I can assign her things. And then recently one of my bigger clients who has, you know, she's got like 10 or so people on her team.

I've gotten her to set up her own Asana. I'm like, okay, I've been doing a lot for you in mine, but I got her to move from, we were using teamwork for many years, over into Asana. And just, it's kind of what's lit me up more about Asana is all the things that I've been doing for her and seeing her.

I mean, I've just really learned so much in the past few months how much more robust it is, even though I've been using it for years. I've learned different tricks and things that I can do with it just in getting her set up with it. Earlier, you were talking about how I use Obsidian for like a project, you know, centered task or project page, you know, with all my notes for it. Is Asana also a project manager? Yeah.

I mean, I'm madly signing up here so I can just look at it while we talk. But it seems to me like in my head, it's more about task assignment and tracking than project management. But maybe I'm wrong on that. Oh, no, it's very robust for project management. In fact, you know, if you assign a task, you can create a task in here, but it'll just be only for you personally if it's not in a project. The only way that it becomes something that you can work with somebody else on is if you put it into a project.

So I have projects. I mean, I use it for my husband and my kid too. Like we have a home project. So like there's things in here for like yard cleanup projects and things like that. And my personal, let's see, I'm looking at my team projects. So like I kind of have a project for each client for their ongoing stuff.

I've also created sales pipelines in here. So one client, we did a launch recently and it was similar where we had applications and the salesperson would book calls. So I had an automation that ran. So when they filled out the application, it created a task in the pipeline project that was the person's name and it had their application in the description and

And so and then they would just go into a different stage. So when they applied, they would be in like the first section that was just applied. And then if they booked a call with the salesperson, she would move them down into the, you know, booked a call or warm lead kind of thing. And then from there, if they, you know, whether if they purchased it automatically moved them into the buyer section because of automations.

So you can do so, so much with it. I will tell you the Kanban view is really nice. And to me, that's like increasingly important to have a Kanban view. And they did a really nice job with that. I'm always a little leery of these, you know, one app to do it all kind of things. It feels to me so often there's just a bunch of tiny sandpaper compromises at each level.

Yeah, I don't feel like Asana is trying to do that. I feel like they're trying to be a place where you can keep track of what you need to get done. And then I'm pushing the limits with putting things like SOPs and

you know, my AI brain that we'll talk about later, I'm pushing the limits of what it's actually meant to do and what they're trying to advertise that they do. Nice. Well, I like that. That's why you're on the Mac power users. Yeah. If someone is out there on more traditional Mac project management, task management software, what's the pitch for Asana that you would give?

Well, for me, it's the fact that I can collaborate. Like I've tried to use other, you know, reminders and OmniFocus and all of those things, but those are only visible to me. And what I love about Asana, like, let's say, you know, I have all of my tasks in here. And if I'm busy, my team member can go in there and she can look at what I have to do and see if there's something that she can help me with.

Or I can, you know, if somebody else passes me a task in here and I don't have time to do it, I can pass it on to my team member and say, hey, can you help me with this? So it really gives a good central place where we know where everybody can see what everybody else is needing to do and we can all work together on it. How does Asana manage on mobile devices? You mentioned you don't like doing a lot of work on your iPhone and iPad. Looking at this interface, it's a lot of stuff going on.

No, the Asana mobile app. You know what? I'm so glad you brought this up because the guy who created Apollo, I would love to talk to that guy about creating a better app for Asana because I just don't think they're ever going to do it for the mobile app. It's very, very basic. There's no shortcut support. You could basically just add a task. You can't even select a project in the mobile app.

And I just feel like if he and I put our heads together, like I loved Apollo. I still refuse to download the Reddit app because I'm so mad about what happened to Apollo. But yeah, the mobile app don't let's let's just pretend that doesn't exist. I use it on my computer. I don't use it on my phone.

Yeah, that's always rough, right? How did these companies miss that? When you're like a web-based app, it seems to me like your mobile solution should be right at the top of the list. Yeah. And they force you into the mobile app too. You can't even open it on a browser on your phone, which is sometimes a good workaround if they don't have a good mobile app, but they really, they really force you into the app. You can't even open a link if you don't have the app on your phone.

So I mean, I can see my inbox, I can see some of my tasks, but the ability for how I capture is really not strong. And I've actually created some shortcuts for myself that push into Zapier webhooks to create the Asana tasks the way that I want them. But that's really convoluted and people shouldn't have to do that just to have a good capture for Asana. Yeah.

So, Stephen, are you sold? Do you want to just move out of Notion and put everything into Asana now? I'm not sold. Not sold. No, no, no.

I'm also personally extremely allergic to shared tasks. Like, you know what you have to do. I don't have to do it. But it is just always interesting to hear people using these tools and, you know, getting real work done with them. I think sometimes people look at these at these project management or shared task systems and and get a little overwhelmed. But it sounds like you've really been able to make it work. Yeah, I live and die by it.

Yeah. And I think it really depends on the type of work. Like looking back in my old job, when I had a paralegal and a secretary, I like,

This could have been very useful, you know, but what you've said, that's piqued my curiosity. I'm going to play with Asana after this. And, and gang, we have a forum, like there's a forum post for each episode. And if you're a big Asana power user sound off, let's hear what you're doing. But I, I'd never heard of it as like an individual system. I'd always thought of it. Like you got to have three or four people to even want to deal with this, but I, I want to just be familiar with it. So I'm going to play with it a little bit after, after we record today.

Cool. You know, another thing you were talking to us about is this is food and health tracking. And that's something increasingly on our mind here at the Sparks house. And it sounds like you've got some interesting apps you're using. What are you doing?

Yeah, so because of you, you talked about food noms and I started using it sort of on and off. I tried a few different times, but in July of last year, I really cracked down on it. I had a little health thing that I was like, OK, I'm going to do this now for sure. And I just started focusing on trying to hit food.

More so than cutting calories, just trying to hit fiber and protein goals. And so I've lost about 40 pounds since then. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. It's been really fun. And, you know, I've got my husband using it too. We're doing it together. So it's really cool. And I also have been using Happy Scale because, you know, when you're trying to lose weight and the number on the scale doesn't necessarily go down as much as you would want it to every time you step on it.

Happy Scale is a cool app that really helps you to view trends over time instead of just seeing like, okay, I'm down or I'm up, right? So it really helps contextualize and they've done a really good job with this app of helping you see what the trends are. They help you like to predict sort of where you'll be based on your current rate of weight loss. So it's a really fun app. And then I also track things like, I track my steps,

Because I work from home, I don't have, I don't go a lot of places. I don't have a lot of opportunities. In fact, sometimes the only way I get 5,000 steps is if I pop my treadmill under my standing desk. Like my desk is, I can sit or I can raise it up to stand and I have a treadmill that I roll under here. It's like, okay, I need to get some steps in. So I use an app for that. And I use my watch for tracking sleep with auto sleep.

As a parent, I'm sure you guys are familiar with the idea that you just sort of feel tired all the time, at least if you have young kids. And I feel like with my sleep tracking and with tracking water and tracking stress, all the different things I track with my watch, that I can say, okay, I'm

I feel extra tired. Is there a good reason for it? Like, oh yeah, I've only been, you know, my sleep debt is up to like 20% versus, okay, my sleep debt's at 10%. Maybe I just need to drink some more water, that kind of thing. So it really helps me to just have something to keep a pulse on and to know sort of how to best water the plant that is me.

You know, I like the way you say that. And it also, you know, Steve and I, we've been talking about this, this rumor about Apple putting in AI, like health advisor. And this is just like why I think it's a good idea if, you know, with the big if that they could do it right, because it does have a lot of data on you and, and pointing out to people that they're not getting enough sleep is could be really helpful.

Yeah. And the one app, Stress Watch, that I've recently discovered, it takes a look at your heart rate variability. And so what that does is it will just send me a notification and it'll say, oh, and you would think that if your heart rate is high, that means that your stress is high, but it's actually when your heart rate is low that it says that your stress is high.

So I just kind of noticed that it's like a really not obnoxious notification because I don't let a lot of notifications through on my devices. But the stress watch one just kind of says, oh, hey, your heart rate is low. You might be feeling stressed or your heart rate is normal. You're probably feeling good. And I can kind of see that. I'm like, oh, yeah. Okay. And it just helps me to have that little bit of awareness.

Of my stress. And if it's saying that I have high stress, I can kind of like take a moment. Okay. You know what? I can just breathe. It's okay. Thankfully, none of what I'm doing is life or death for the most part. It's just, it's just work. It's just like so often all you have to do is stop and breathe. You know what I mean? That's it. Yeah.

Oh man. And I have those breathe reminders off. I, I, I used to get those on the watch and I, I found those so useless. Yeah. I've got those off, but it is so interesting to me that the, I mean, we're 10 years into the Apple watch and,

like how it really has become a health and fitness device for most people more than anything else. Like I still have times like, you know what? I really just, and I'm like you, I have very few notifications come to my watch, but when I think about taking it off, what leaves it on my wrist is no, actually I really want those, uh, those health and fitness features, right? I want it to let me know if something is out of line. I want to be able to see how many steps I've taken. And, and,

I really think that's become true for a lot of people over the last several years. The thing that makes me want to take it off the most is the watch faces. Cause I just feel like Apple just can't, can't get enough good watch faces on it. And like, man, I could buy a fancy watch with a face that I really love, but then I might have a heart attack and not know it. It's like, so like, yeah, they got me. I'm in with the Apple watch, but, uh,

But yeah, it is the health stuff. I'd love to go back to, this would be a good job for ChatGPT, go back and take the original Apple Watch announcement and give me the number of minutes they spent talking about health compared to the whole thing, right? Because, you know, we're not drawing pictures of sushi on our watches anymore, but we are using all the health stuff.

Does that, like the thing you're describing to me is like you took on kind of like a health initiative for your life. You tracking your food, you're tracking your weight and you're like, you've, you went in intentionally found apps that to do health tracking. You've been doing it now since last July. So you've been doing it for a while. It's stuck with you. Do you have any advice for folks out there who are thinking, yeah, I'd like to do what's Kim with Kim's doing, but how do I get started?

Yeah, I think for me, it was a, I've tried so many different times to really get all of that dialed in with varying degrees of success. I mean, I feel like it was whatever I did last July is what really made it the change between, you know, when they say it's a lifestyle change. And I think it's, it's a lot of persistence. It's a lot of being willing to try different things. You know, I had, I had tried a bunch of different things and I feel like

This time what worked was I found that I really focused on A, like I said, that protein and B, fiber, because just being a nerd about health and learning about how important that is and how few people actually get that. And then really thinking about, like I follow a lot of, I use TikTok a lot. I know that, David, I don't think you're a big fan of TikTok, but I love TikTok. I have learned so much. I found so many good recipes online.

So many good creators who come up with these recipes for things that it's like, oh, this is so easy and it's actually really good. So I feel like what's actually worked for me with the food is that I actually eat things that they taste really good. They're good substitutes for things that I would like to have that were higher calorie and less nutritious before. And they're easy.

So that's what's really helped for me is like, I actually look forward to the food that I'm eating. And I feel like that's maybe that's kind of the key is just whatever you're going to do, whether you're going to focus on protein or you're going to focus on calories, anything like that, just to have food that you like. It's just so important to have that enjoyment. And if you're feeling like, okay, I'm going to eat this.

you know, this iceberg lettuce with a little bit of low fat dressing and you're going to feel sad about it, you're not going to be successful. Yeah. We, we've been dealing with that in our house too. And, and you're right. You have to find things you like, but just to set the record straight on TikTok, I don't dislike TikTok. I just dislike the unintentional use of TikTok. I think TikTok,

These social media services are fine if you can put it in a box and just say, okay, I'm going to spend 15 minutes watching TikTok videos of puppies. That would be, to me, a perfectly good use of your day. But don't do it in the middle of working. It needs to be something you actually go out and do. Yeah, yeah. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by NetSuite.

Nobody knows for sure what the future holds for business. If you ask nine different experts, you're going to get 10 different answers. Some say rates will rise or fall. Others might say inflation is going up or coming down.

The only way business owners can know for sure is if someone invents a crystal ball. Well, until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one fluid platform.

With one unified business management suite, there's one source of truth, giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. And when you're closing your books in days and not weeks, you're spending less time looking backward and more time on what's next.

Having a single source of truth is huge. I own a business and when our data is scattered across various systems, it can be hard to get the full picture. And with NetSuite, you have all those tools in one place. So whether your company's earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities.

Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash MPU. That guide is free to you at NetSuite, N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E, netsuite.com slash M-P-U. One of the thoughts you had that I thought was worth sharing with the audience is this idea of reflection and using your technology. Share with us what you did on New Year's Eve.

Yeah, so I have this New Year's Eve tradition that we've been doing for a few years now where I take my iPad and my Apple Pencil and I AirPlay my iPad to the TV. So I have my GoodNotes. I actually have a notebook in GoodNotes that's just New Year's Eve.

And so I put a page that just has the year and me and my husband and my oldest, because my little one is six. He's not a part of this ritual yet. He's asleep by the time we get to this point. But we go through some questions. So we ask, what did you learn? What did you practice? What do you want to do better next year? And we kind of talk about goals, but

We're all very perfectionist and neurodivergent, and sometimes a goal, something that you really want to do, like a New Year's resolution or something, can just create a feeling of like, oh, I'm not going to be able to do it. So this is more of like a reflective, like talking about just generally celebrating and hopes and aspirations. Yeah.

And I also, when we're doing that, like I'll take photos that I've gotten throughout the year from my phone and kind of pick like the best photos and make a little collage. And we can, as a family, look and remember that, you know, we went to Disneyland and we went to, you know, we went to the pumpkin patch or this is your Halloween costumes. So it's just a really fun, it's turned out to be a really fun and sweet little ritual that we do every year.

And, you know, you're using your iPad and your Apple TV to share it. I like that. Yeah. Kim, we always like to end up a show with some favorite apps and services from our guests. You know, what are some of the apps and services you're using that bring you joy or delight or make your life easier? What are some of your favorites?

Yeah, so I've gotten a good deal into Notion once I finally got my head around it and being able to capture SOPs in there. And I like that I can embed videos in there that go along with the notes. So I can write out the instructions. I can have the video embedded right there. I use Airtable a lot with my clients for, I mean, you guys have talked about Airtable a lot. So I think listeners pretty much know what it is.

So another automation tool that's coming onto the scene that I guess they've been around for a while, but I've just heard about it is called N8N. And it's similar. It's kind of a cross between, I think, Zapier and Make, but it's also a little bit more codey, I guess you would say, than visual. And, you know, you could do the same kind of thing where you can have a trigger and

You can have, you know, if something happens in this app, then do this next step. You can have it branch off and do different things. But they also have a built-in AI agent, and you can actually host your own. So I'm currently paying their service, and I'm just using their hosted version. But you can download from a GitHub and host your own automation service.

instance. So I'm really looking forward to doing that. That's something that I'm just taking on learning right now. So if you guys have me back on in the future, maybe I'll have more to say about it. But that's something new I've discovered and I'm kind of trying to get my head around.

Yeah, I mean, this is kind of the future of artificial intelligence, the agents. So it's not enough that you go to a text box and it does answers your question or sorts data for you. But this actually goes out and works in other applications. And this one has been on my radar, too. I haven't dug in on it yet, but it's on my list of things to explore because I feel like this is a real good kind of like early start.

early test into this idea of artificial intelligence agents. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

One that I've built with it so far is using Telegram because you can create a Telegram bot and then you can send it a message. So what I'm trying to do is like I can record a voice memo to Telegram and then I send that into my N8N and it will transcribe the Telegram if it's a voice memo or if the Telegram has a link, then it will do something else. So I'm kind of like I'm basically making.

a telegram bot that will talk to my AI agent automation. So that's, that's what I'm working on right now. And then what's the deliverable out of that? I mean, what is it doing at the end of the chain for you? I haven't decided yet. It's probably going to create a sauna tasks. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean that, that is kind of the future of this stuff and I'm very curious about it. So yeah. Thanks for sharing that one. Yeah. I use set up.

I love Setapp and being able to just go in there and find different tools to do different jobs. One of my favorites that I found through there, besides Jump Desktop, is Downy. So if I have a URL of a video that the client doesn't remember the login for the channel that had it, then I can just pop that link at the Downy and download the video. That makes things really convenient. Yeah, Downy is awesome. And one of my favorite things about it is

You can also have it like do things with the file. So one thing I do often is because so many podcasts are actually just long YouTube videos like, oh, I want to listen to this interview, but I want an overcast so I can listen to it in the truck or on a walk or whatever. And I'll download it from YouTube and Downy, but use the preset to save only the audio and

I'm perfectly capable of stripping audio out of a video, but the app can also just do it for me. And it's just like, and there's a little triangle, like in the dropdown of the job and say, Hey, I want, I want this sort of preset done here. And, um, it's, it is a fantastic tool. Oh man. I didn't even realize you could do that. Thank you. I'm going to have to play with that.

learn something new. Awesome. There you go. Next on your list is Moom. Yes. With my three monitors, it took me many different tools and attempts to get the right tool to put things just where I want them. I was finding that whenever I restart my computer, things were all over the place and the windows are kind of all opening in the middle studio display. And with Moom, I've got it just meticulously how I want it. I pop

my moon into Alfred and say, set up my preferred workspace and it does it for me. And I love it. Yeah. There's a special workflow in Alfred to trigger a moon and it's, it's, it's, it's golden. I, you know, I, I really tried to use the new Apple window management cause I think it's actually really good. And if people don't want to spend money, the window management Apple has now starting with Sequoia is, is very good.

But Moom is just that much better. I can't give up my Moom. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that was such a friction point because if I did have to restart my computer and with my old iMac when it took too long to restart and then I would have to rearrange my Windows after that, that was always making me stressed out. I bet. Yeah. Yeah.

And I actually, I know we talked about Loom earlier. I was kind of using that as shorthand. It's like, you know, if the kid says they need Kleenex. I use ScreenPal, which used to be called Screencast-O-Matic. And I love it. Like, it's a lot cheaper than Loom.

And I can just, I can edit videos in it on my desktop. Like I just, I don't know why I just, I love this app. Well, now I'm going to have to check it out. Yeah. Yeah. It's a fun little screen, screen recording app.

The problem for me at Loom is I'm so deep into it now. I'm not sure I could move off if I wanted to. I've got all my videos in there. Right. Yeah. Nice, though. ScreenPal. Does ScreenPal offer what some of these other services do where they will host the video or images as well? Is that part of what they offer? Yes. Yes. And I have so many videos hosted on there. And I think, yeah, price-wise, it really beats the pants off of Loom.

I use a combination of ChatGPT and Claude. It kind of depends on what I need to do. ChatGPT, I find, is a lot more generous before it'll tell you you're out of time for the day or you have to cool it if you're asking me for too many things. Claude, I find, is really good for writing. So...

I do use it for sometimes I have a client who releases a podcast every week and we write an email based on that episode of the podcast. And I have fine tuned a Claude prompt that takes the transcript from the episode and writes an email that pretty well sounds like her, pretty well feels like it's written by a person. And it scares me that I'm able to do that with an AI. Yeah.

I wish Claude would adopt the concept of GPTs, like chat GPT as individual, like you can create a special one to do a special job. I find with Claude, the way you trigger that is you have to like do a text expander snippet or something to kind of retrain it every time you run it.

And that's one thing I'd like. But yeah, I agree with you. Claude is kind of the one that I think people miss. I mean, Google Gemini is very popular. Google product, of course, ChatGPD was first there. But there is something to Claude, at least the current iteration, that the others don't seem to have. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, Kim, you are a very busy lady with all the stuff you're doing. And thank you for taking some time out of your schedule to share these tips with the Mac Power Users audience. Hopefully we've inspired a few folks to pick up Make or some of the other cool automation tricks that you're doing here. If people want to learn more about you, where do they go? I am at kimkaloka.com and on Instagram at kimkalokaltd.

All right. And we are the Mac Power Users. You can find us at relay.fm slash MPU. If you want to join more power users, which is the ad for extended version of the show, we're going to be talking to Kim today about AI and Asana. Go check it out at relay.fm slash MPU. We'd love to have you join. Helps keeps the lights on around here. And in that regard, thank you to our sponsors as well this week, 1Password, Ecamm, and NetSuite. And we'll see you next time.