So Mike, it's been a while. It's been quite a long while since the last show. We recorded early and now we're recording late. And you had just announced your big news on the last episode. I felt quite relieved for you because it was finally in the public. So how has that experience been? The secret's out. There's a baby on the way. Yes, it feels wonderful. I mean, I will go back to what you mentioned before. So we recorded the yearly themes episode.

two months ago now. That seems longer than it really could have possibly been. We recorded before I went on vacation. And so that was really difficult for me because I had finally spoken it

On a podcast. Oh, I didn't even realize this part for you. Right, right. Okay. You got like the podcast recording emotional release, but then had to sit on it. I didn't even think about that. I'm sorry. That's very funny. And it was killing me. It made it so tough. I was so desperate to get the episode out. There are many times, and I think a lot of people that ever produce anything that is like...

to be enjoyed by others. If you're working on something for a long time or you've had something in your mind for a long time, when you put it out to the world, the response is never going to be as good as you imagine it could be, right? I think I've spoken about this on the show in the past. There are these things where we've had it with episodes of the show where I've worked really, really hard on them for weeks and then I know they're great episodes and you go like, here you go world and no one says anything because they're just getting into it on their own time.

and or they just go that was good and then they just carry on with their lives right you don't hear the response from everyone or even a tiny percentage well this was one of those situations where I could not have had it go any better oh good the outpouring of support

And love was amazing. I kept crying for two days. I recorded with Casey on the day that the episode came out and that I kind of like posted about it. I actually recorded with him on that day. Oh, no. The two Max Feelings boys recorded together. Brilliant. I mean, I cried three times in one episode. It was great. I was just so pleased to be able to finally share this news. And it's been so great.

Now, like in the time since, I just feel so free that I can just talk freely about this thing that is like all I'm thinking about, where it was like that for the prior six or seven months, but I couldn't talk about it. And so that just feels good. I've had so many great pieces of advice from people and I...

We'll follow up on some of these as time goes on, like things that could be of interest. I will actually talk about one of them next. I had a question that came in that I wanted to answer specifically while we were talking about baby stuff. The best piece of advice that I got, and I got a bunch of times, is...

It's people just telling me, you will work it out. Like when it comes to like how my schedule is going to work and how I'm going to fit this new thing into my life that I will want to be all of my time and like how will I balance everything? And everybody just says, you'll just work it out. Like everybody works it out. You will work it out. It's going to be fine. And that piece of advice just keeps coming up anyway, like in all manner of things. Like how do you feed a baby? It's like, you'll work it out.

Like you just will work it out. Yeah, cool. I'm very, very, very pleased and I'm very thankful for listeners of this show and how supportive and wonderful everyone's been. It's been a very good time. I mean, and we're not far away from the next moment. Yeah.

Really not very far at all now. Yeah, can I say that your countdown calendar is under 30 days to launch? Is that something I can say publicly? There were a couple of things that I meant to mention in the last episode that I don't think I mentioned. And they're not important, but they're just things I think are funny, like to close loops on things. So one of the widgets that I had been hiding on my home screen was a Widgetsmith countdown to the baby's due date. Mm-hmm.

that has now ticked under 30 days, which is when you see that number with a two in front of it, terrifying. And at some point very soon, it's going to be a one and then it's going to be a single digit. Maybe, who knows, right? We might not even have to wait to single digit. You'd need,

Babies come when they want to come. Yeah, I think the terrifying thing about this is actually that, right, I was like, you know, doing inventory, right? You have variants, right? The further out you are, the variance matters less of what is the baby's plan. But as this number gets smaller, suddenly whatever variance for arrival date the baby is going to introduce becomes every day a significantly larger percentage of the uncertainty of what's happening. Yeah, so you're definitely within the, like,

baby could change this date by 25% at any moment. So yeah, that makes it additionally kind of stressful. And there was in the State of the Apps episode, I referenced that I had an Apple Book widget on my home screen.

And this was for a baby book that I've been reading that I want to recommend to expectant fathers. If now or whenever someone might hear this in the future or can remember, oh, Mike said about a book and they can go find it. It's called How to Be a Dad by Dr. Oscar Duke.

It's probably more helpful if you're British for this book, but I think some of it will apply no matter what. It's just like looking at how these things work in the British health system. But it's a very, very easy to read book, and I've actually been reading it not

Not listening to it. Like, actually reading, reading it. Oh, wow. Reading, reading it. I know. Very rare for me. But it's a very readable book. Like, it's very easy to read. You know, he actually writes it kind of in a... What you can tell is his tone and his style. And it's very easygoing. So...

Those are like two long term pieces of follow up that no one really cares about. But I wanted to give them anyway, just for the time capsule of the show. You're trying to get them out of your brain, right? You're trying to close those loops. Yeah. Because I keep seeing things like they pop up, right? And I'm like, oh, I never said that. Like, not important at all. But to me, so important, these little pieces of information that I've been holding on to. And so now everybody gets to know them.

I actually have a baby book recommendation for you for a book that I haven't read, but I've just heard the author talk about. This is going to sound like a strange recommendation, but the book title is called Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. It's by Brian Kaplan. Now, the reason I would recommend this, so I've heard him talk. Brian Kaplan is a very interesting economist. I think he thinks about things in this quite decisive way. And

Every time I've heard him talk about the book, it sounds significantly less like the book is really trying to convince you to have more kids. The actual argument of the book, hey, there's a lot of ways that parents make their lives needlessly difficult in raising kids. And he's tried to like hammer home the point of like,

Sort of like you were saying, if you'll work it out is something that seems to resonate with you. I'm imagining some of this advice might also be a similar kind of thing of like, hey, you don't need to worry about this as much as you do. His core point is like, oh, most parents...

probably don't have more kids because they're like way, way, way overcomplicating each kid. And you can actually do this like more simply and with less stress. So I haven't read the book myself, but I've heard him talk about it and I've heard him talk about other things. And I feel like, oh, he's a real interesting thinker. It might be one to add on to your pile.

I had a question that came in via cortexfeedback.com. It's from Peter. And Peter said, I was wondering how you're planning on time tracking baby time. Have you thought about this at all? Is there anything that you're thinking of? So when this question came in, I had not thought about it at all. And this question coming in made me start thinking about it. And...

We're going to talk about time tracking a little bit later on in today's episode. But I was thinking about like how, you know, for me, one of the things I love about time tracking is how it also relates to my theme. And that in the last few years, I've been creating a time tracking category that is focused around my theme. Like I was tracking weekend, for example, in the year of the week. Right, right. It's a specific thing to do.

And so I wasn't initially planning on tracking baby time, but I think I'm going to. And when I started thinking about that,

I started thinking about what are ways in which this could actually be part of a better system for me. And so I'm actually going to couple this with a baby focus mode, which I thought would be pretty cool as a way to try and help me with a couple of different things. Okay, all right, all right. So I've created a focus mode, and activating this focus mode will start a timer-y timer

for family, which is a category I've had for a couple of years now. And I want to try and like do this for at least a year because I want to see how kind of my year of fatherhood impacts my year over year comparison when we get to this next year.

I tend to track for specific activities that I do. Like it's like a thing that I'm doing specifically rather than huge blocks of time. But I want to stay open to it this year just so I can kind of get an idea. Because for me, the focus mode is like it's like an intentional thing. Like I'm spending time with the baby or like I'm doing baby related things.

Because part of it is it will activate baby home screens, which have totally different apps and widgets on them. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. I'm sure there's like a billion baby apps that you need in this kind of mode. Yes, that's the kind of thing that I'm thinking about. So while I wasn't necessarily thinking about time tracking baby time...

I am thinking more about having my device set up in a specific way. So now I'm like, well, when I actually enable that focus mode, why not just also set a timer at the same time and just see how it goes? So your timer, though, is you're setting a family timer, right? Which is the pre-existing category. Okay. So I have a thought. Yeah. Your baby is a person. And...

At least in my own system, I feel like when you're time tracking, there's some small number of people who are at the top tier priority in your life where it makes sense for them to have their own category of timer.

And sometimes it can make sense to have like separate categories of timer like for that person. Are you spending time with them or are you just like spending quality time or whatever? So when you talk about time tracking the baby and you talk about your fatherhood, I just want to like plant this idea maybe a little bit that there's two separate things here. Your baby is a person and maybe there's a way where it makes sense like there's a top level timer for interacting with your baby.

But like when you talk about year of fatherhood, right, there's also going to be some kind of admin side or like things that you are doing, which are new fatherhood responsibilities that aren't actually interacting with the child. Right.

I don't know if it really makes sense, but it's just kind of funny to me to imagine a baby not having a top level timer. Everyone's time tracking is squirrely and specific to them. Yeah, I'm going to think about that because like my family timer right now is mostly an administrative timer. Oh, yeah. Remember, I don't track time the way that you do. Like my time tracking is always very like proactive.

Okay. You know, like I don't track time with my wife. Like that's not a thing that I do. Right, right, right. So my kind of like family timer is appointments. I've been setting it when we've been building nursery furniture, stuff like that.

So that has kind of felt like it had that administrative role. So maybe it's better for me to have an actual baby timer that would be for this one. And so it would be a separate thing. I know that that's what you do. I think it kind of threw me because what you mentioned, there's the focus mode. I'm imagining like, ah, you're going into room. There is baby, right? Like swipe down on control center, baby focus begin. Like, and now you're interacting with baby. That is the plan, right? Because I will have apps and widgets that are needed to,

For baby. Right. But I guess that sounds very different then from all of the other ways that you do use timers, right? Correct. If you're talking about like, ah, you're doing a project timer. You are describing the thing that I do, which is like person starts talking to you. Like start the person's timer if they're worthy of a top level timer, right? It's like you're kind of doing that with the baby and then...

Anyway, I don't know. You think about it, but I feel like you are implicitly moving in my direction of like, you're starting the timer when you're looking at the baby. Like, baby interaction begin. Click, click. I think this is the only place where I could imagine tracking in that way. Once you go full track, you never go back.

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Go now to memberful.com slash cortex to get started with Memberful. That is memberful.com slash cortex. Our thanks to Memberful for their support of this show. First episode of the year tradition. How's your theme going so far? So this year for me, it's like, ah, you know, I had this kind of thought, Mike. I was like, you know what? What if instead of jumping straight into the theme, what if you jumped into the opposite of the theme? Yeah.

An anti-theme, as it were. What do you think about that idea, Mike? Now, I will say, Year of Fatherhood, probably very bad theme to try to jump into the opposite of for the first month of the year. The opposite would be that I would just be a real pain to my own mum. Oh, I guess that would be the opposite of it? Yeah, no, that's no good at all. Yes, I would need to become a real problem child for my parents, which would be...

weird that's the way to start the year also very strange to do at this time in your life yes so i'm not recommending this for you just to be clear uh this is me once again doing a strange thing with the theme as i like mulling it over but so i had this experience right of this past year how did i get to my theme being like ah it's going to be like run the routine and it's it's the routine it's because i was doing all this traveling last year and i was just like really nailed down like

This thing with like, I've got my lists and I've got my systems and the part of this that I want to continue to expand on after doing a bunch of simplification is I want to focus on like this daily routine thing. This is really what I want to do. And so after we recorded that episode, I was thinking about it a bunch and I was just thinking about how to make some tweaks and how to make some changes and how to focus on all of this. And then I kind of realized something. I was like, oh, you know what? It's the holiday time now.

This is actually a really good time to make space. And so what I decided to do was intentionally not follow a routine, like intentionally pull back for a little while. And what I was kind of thinking of was...

It's sort of like cleaning a room or trying to tidy up a room, right? You go into your room and you're like, I'm going to clean this room. You can do that. But if you are really trying to like, ah, how should this room be? If you're trying to do that part of it, you want to take everything out of the room first. And then how is this going to be organized? How are you going to do stuff? And so I felt like in one way or another for a director,

Very long time in my life. Like I don't even know exactly how long I've had like daily checklists in one form or another I've been doing crazy total time tracking in one form or another and I thought I Think if I really want to do this, right? I'm actually going to take this like holiday time and intentionally say you know what I

I am not going to do any of this and kind of give myself a bit of mental space to rethink the whole thing. It's like a kind of taking everything out of the room and thinking about it again from the start. And so it popped into my head like, oh, this is a kind of anti-theme. It's like doing the opposite. But I feel like this was a really good thing to do. And it actually was very interesting.

strange at first because I am so used to like, again, people does like everything I'm doing. It's like, I start a little timer of like, okay, what am I doing right now? This is the thing that I'm doing. And I have the lists and all of the rest of that. And so I did kind of let things go on purpose to think about it. And so at this point in time, it's like, ah, I haven't time tracked anything for five weeks or so.

And it's just been very interesting to make a certain kind of space in my life to try to re-evaluate from scratch what do I think I want this to be. Just from your initial description, it feels like it would work specifically for the theme that you have created for yourself, which is routines, where the idea of if I...

have no routines, it might help me build new routines. I'm not sure how well it would work even for other themes that you have had. Right? So if we say like the year of less, well, you shouldn't add more, right? Before doing that one. Because like, you know, I think about the way that I set my themes always and the way that you have set your themes a lot of the time is your theme is a response to a way in which the previous year has gone.

Exactly. And so you've already kind of anti-themed it a bit because you're wanting to change. But in this particular thing that you're creating, which is like, it's time to, you know, like get more routine in place and like really like

work out what the best routines are for me. What are the best checklists that I can have? Some of the best ways to do those things is to start with a fresh, clean slate. Like let's forget everything we know and start over. And so I can see it working for this one. I don't know how well it would work even for some of the other things that you've done.

before. Yeah, that's a good point. I think on average you should probably not anti-theme. You're like, year of happiness, do not start with month of sadness, right? That seems like a terrible idea. It's actually, I'm trying to think, it didn't occur to me until this very moment, but I'm trying to think of like off the top of my head other examples of things that it might be good to anti-theme and perhaps the list is quite smaller than I was originally thinking, but...

As a result of this, I came to a pretty big decision in the way that I'm actually going to be running these things and like a really big change. And I genuinely think I could not have done it without...

Like stopping everything, taking some time off from like running all of the checklists and using all of those tools and just like kind of being more like a normal person. It's like, oh, well, what was I doing? It's like I was just like always a big fan of paper, just like writing stuff down on paper really helps you think things through. And it really did give me some space along with the holidays. And I think I came to a realization which I

I just don't think I would have otherwise. And so my view is this is like, what happened when I was traveling? I was in an extended period of time where it's like, I'm just on my own. And it's like, ah, great. So it's like, that's very easy to be using all of my normal tools and to be doing all that kind of stuff.

But over the past many years of like doing this job and being in business, it's like, you know what's happened over this time? Stuff has just gotten more complicated. There's more projects. I'm working with more people. Like even what happened last year with Cortex Brand. It's like, oh, we've got Cortex Brand. What did Cortex Brand do? It was a year of people. Like there's more people. There's more things going on. And I have...

Didn't quite realize that I was...

very, very resistant to truly taking on board the idea of like, hey, buddy, you started doing all of this work just as a single person who didn't work with anybody. But that's not the case now. It hasn't been the case for many years. You actually need to readjust like what you're doing to recognize the fact like you work with a ton of people, a ton of people from my perspective being like, I have to interact with some people.

And so what I ended up doing is I was talking with my admin team and I was talking with my chief of staff and was going through and thinking things through. And what I've decided to do, it's been a big process, but in the past couple weeks I've been moving everything over to...

one task manager to rule them all, which is going to be Asana. Whoa, what? No, come on. What? No, what? So here's the thing. It's like, what I realized had happened is like, I basically got OmniFocus as perfect as it could be for a one person team at exactly the point in time where then I realized like, this is not really my life anymore. I work with too many people. I'm losing track of like, what is everybody up to? I have to make this decision.

And my chief of staff happens to be like incredibly good with Asana from previous experience. She was showing me a couple of things and I was completely sold on Asana.

This is the thing that I need to do going forward. And so I am building back up all of my routines and like, how am I going to be keeping track of everything through a tool where I'm just acknowledging the fact that I cannot work in a tool where it is just me doing

going forward if I'm continuing to have the number and size and complexity of projects that I'm working on. So that's what I'm doing. It's like goodbye OmniFocus. Hello Asana. That's what's happened over this month. I could not have predicted this plot twist. Is it a plot twist? I think so. I think it's a plot twist in your life. Are you actually going to use it though? Like are you going to be checking your tasks in Asana? So here's my pitch.

for what is the thing that's unique here and what kind of problem is this solving. So there's a feature in Asana that was the main thing that really sold it to me, which is you can put tasks in Asana. The tasks can be essentially infinitely nested. So you can have just like this is a subtask of this and this is a subtask of that. But the key thing is tasks can live in multiple projects simultaneously.

What that allows is that if you have a project and multiple people are working on that project, it doesn't need to be the case that all of the people who are assigned tasks can see the higher levels of what that project is. You can have it be like this task is connected to multiple projects.

And also it exists as a subtask of other things, but you don't have to necessarily share like, ah, here's the whole project with the whole team.

And those two things have really, really changed the way that I think about what am I doing here? Because the answer to your question is yes. I can have my dumb, I brushed my teeth, I combed my hair like checklist items, I took a shower, check, check, check, check, check. I can put all of that routine stuff in there. And I can simultaneously have all of these little like

daily routine tasks be connected to higher level planning projects for me. Like, what is this really trying to serve? Like, this is trying to serve health. This is trying to serve routine. Like, those can be higher level projects. And I can have, like, these subtasks that are assigned to me that nobody else can see them. I can see the whole thing, so I'm not, like, cluttering up other people's systems. But also if those higher level projects have things that

people I work with need to be able to do, they can be connected to that. I can see the whole scope of the project from like the smallest details of what I need to be working on to the highest level of things. And it's all one unit from my perspective, but it doesn't have to be from the people that I'm working with. Like, what do they see? And so once I saw like, this is the thing you can do, I really felt like,

oh, this is an answer to a problem that has been a minor frustration for years, but is really clearly what the thing is that I need to do now. I've had multiple checklists and like lots of times in OmniFocus, I have a thing which is like, go look over here at that other thing. Like go look over there at that other thing. It's like, no, I want one task manager to rule them all. And I think Asana is the tool that

more than anything I've ever seen gets it the closest. Plus, extra bonus feature, what I think is the genius thing is we've talked for years about these kind of collaboration tools. Like, what's always the problem, right? Everybody kind of has to agree on the way a thing looks. Oh, here's this Notion document. We kind of have to, like, agree on the structure of the Notion document.

Oh, we have to agree on like the way these things are formatted. But the sauna, its structure is very task based. Like you are assigned the task. It allows everybody to actually arrange the things. Like how do they want to see the tasks? And it doesn't force everyone to have a like shared structure to the system. You can even do things like the lists can have like different colors and different names for each of the users. Like you don't have to have everyone agrees on like this.

this is the way that it looks. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. I can do all of my crazy stuff for my personal routine and the way I want to run things personally. But that doesn't mean that my animator has to be OK with the way that I have set up all the lists, because it's like, no, the tasks that he's getting can be on his dashboard the way that he wants to see them. And I've already done this with the admin team of like, oh, OK, great. We've done some initial things.

put some tasks in, assign them. I can see them the way that I want to. They can see them the way that they want to. And we don't have to have this minor frustration of like, ah, but that's not the way I would want to do it. It's like, no, no, no. Task assigned, and then they can see it the way they want to. MARK MANDEL: That's pretty nice.

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her work within gray industries and stuff that i need to do but this was a really big change of uh like hey talk me through how this works really understanding like the advantages of the system and it's one of those times where the moment i saw it i really did feel like oh any system when i'm planning things if i can't share that subtask

with the person who actually needs to work on it from the place where planning occurs. Like, I just realized, oh, this system is instantly dead to me. Like, this is now a required feature, because I feel like this is solving a bunch of the problems of, like, where are projects? Like, what is the state of things? It's allowing the planning phase and the high-level phase to exist all the way down to the granular level action phase.

And that's always been my frustration with having tools like Notion plus whatever is it's like, oh, we do like company planning in Notion. And there's here's all these documents about like, blah, blah, blah. Here's what the company should do. And here's the goals. And I always feel like those documents become dead very fast because somewhere else you're actually doing the like, here's the real work.

And every day that the real work happens where you're not also going back to those higher level documents, those documents just become more disconnected from reality. And it's hard to have like a good cadence of reviewing those documents. But the Asana stuff, I was just able to see like, oh, yeah.

This allows me much better to connect the high level to the low level and also assign out those tasks. This is like sold. I was sold so hard. What am I building up here? It's like I've got this database of like both the highest level tasks and

and the most mundane routine level tasks and I just like could not be happier because it's all actionable from this one spot. I feel like I don't fully understand Asano if I'm being totally honest. Like I'm even looking at their website and like I can't fully get my head around it. Yeah, I had this same problem too. Like I needed a tour of like

convince me on this because it just didn't look that different from like 10,000 things that are kind of like this. If you're using one of these tools already, you probably go there and you're like, yeah, okay. So for me with Notion, right? I don't use tasks in Notion at all. It's all about documents.

Yeah, I was looking at Notion as like maybe there's a way to solve this here with tasks. And it's like, yeah, I can't do this kind of thing. But it feels like Asana is mostly focused on tasks, not documents. That's correct. Here's the way to think about it. Notion is documents first, tasks second. Asana is tasks first, tasks second.

document second. Okay. So that makes sense why when I did a little bit of Googling while you were talking, there are many integrations to bring the two together. Like to bridge them so you can have your Asana tasks in your Notion database. Yeah. So like it makes sense why lots of people would want to connect these two. Yeah.

My plan going forward, and we're already working on this, is my company Notion should be as much as possible. We're turning this into actionable items in Asana because otherwise, if you're not taking action, what is this? What are we doing here with this document? Is this action or is this not action? If it's not action, then it isn't anything. It's just a bunch of words. In Notion, what can you do? You can share documents with a person.

But you have to share them at the document level, right? So it's like, you can share this page with another person in Notion. But Asana is kind of like, imagine you could have a document in Notion, but you could just select one paragraph and share that single paragraph with some other person. And they only see that? That is functionally what Asana is allowing to do. They only see that one paragraph. But these paragraphs are tasks. But the paragraphs are tasks.

But what I mean then is like, ah, you can have the whole plan visible at the highest levels. So you can always be aware of like, what are we trying to achieve all the way down to how does that translate into an actual action? Right. And see every part in between all the sub processes. But then you can pick...

any one of those lines and like that line is just shared with some other person and they don't have to know the structure of the whole thing that it exists in so if i was to use this for this show right there could be 60 tasks in the list that i see because i'm overseeing it but you would get five tasks

That's correct. Our editor will get five tasks. That's right. Ad sales will get five tasks. And that's all they need to worry about. Not dependent on things coming before, or maybe that's when they only see the tasks and things that happened before. But I would see them all, see them all being worked on and pick off the things that I need to from my list, which I can see is mine to do.

That's correct, yeah. But it's not like you wouldn't see all of my tasks. You would just see the ones that I give you. That's exactly right. Like I'm just seeing the things that you have assigned to me and/or given me access to. There's also a really nice little bonus if you make like a project template to say like, "Okay, every time we do a Cortex write, it's basically the same thing." You can also mark out this task is being blocked until the other task is finished.

So this is just like an interesting concept to me. Like all task managers have dependencies. It's like this depends on this. But I think the framing is very different when you have a database where someone can quickly see like I've been assigned these three tasks and here are the people who are blocked until I have finished this task.

Yeah, and also I would imagine from the other way. So like you have some work that you want to do or you have a job you know you need to do but your task is being blocked by somebody else. Exactly. This is a corporate way of doing it because then you will go bug that person to get their work done. Yeah. Right? And this is the kind of thing where like...

I know to listeners, sometimes this can sound silly, but it really does matter. And I've even thought about it with this show of like, what is part of this problem that I feel like I'm trying to solve here? I'm trying to solve like all of the task managers I have used have been entirely like, what am I doing focused? But the moment I'm interacting with other people, including you, including Cortex brand, including my own company, very often, like I'm the person who's blocking others and

because I'm like the center person for a lot of this, but it's not immediately obvious to me if that's the case. And it's especially not immediately obvious to me unless I go and like check communication channels, right? Oh, am I going to go look in Slack to see if I am the person who's like blocking the Cortex episode from going up? Ah,

Am I blocking the review of the animation? It's like, I have to go to this like talky talky Slack channel where everybody's talking and then parse sentences out to be like, ah, is the person done? What do they want from me? It just, can I just check? Is this you trying to convince me to sign up for Asana now as well? Is that what's happening here? You're going in my Asana. If it's not at the Asana, it doesn't exist.

But the thing that I'm trying to collapse down into is automatic notifications that like you're the person blocking a thing without having to go somewhere else and like discover that piece of information because there's a chat in Slack that seems like it's a small difference, but I actually think it's a huge difference. I think that makes a real world of difference.

for like, how do things get done? How do you flip stuff around? Because you can, people can stay in a sort of work mode without having to switch out into like, check in things to see like, did the emails come in about whatever? It's like, no, no, no. If it's an actionable task, it will be checked off by the other person. And then like, you can immediately see like, ah, now I'm the person blocking this. It's funny because I think one of the ways that you're positioning this conversation is like,

Listener, you don't know what I'm talking about here. This sounds so weird to you. I think you're actually approaching that in the wrong way. I think the majority of our listeners, this is how they work because they're working inside of modern corporations. And the difference is me and you have not done that for 10 years.

And in that time period, what's changed for us is we have gone from essentially individuals working with other individuals to building teams of our own.

And now we are at the teams of our own stage. We now need to start adopting team platforms, which we've been looking more at. And this is just another one of them. You're essentially, you need project management. I mean, we both need project management. It's something I am very aware of with Cortex brand. I think is maybe the sticking point in the year of people is just that I feel like the

There is more people management that is needed, and I'm not sure that I'm doing a very good job of communicating to everyone what's needed and when. And one of the reasons I'm not doing a very good job at it is because I have to do it, and it's maybe not a thing I want to do. I maybe want to be doing something else rather than saying to someone, hey, that project, you've got to get that done by Friday. That needs to be done by Friday because otherwise this can't happen and this can't happen. And

I don't really like doing that. I don't really like being on people's case like that. But at the same time, it then means that the thing that I needed isn't done and I get frustrated because it wasn't done. And the only reason it wasn't done is because I didn't know. If I communicated to somebody what the deadline was for this project, then they would have been able to make it work or they could have communicated to me that it couldn't have been done. But nobody knows this because it's not being shared. But this is just how modern corporations work.

But we don't run modern corporations, but we're not too far away from it now. It's just a small team inside of a bigger business is kind of what it would feel like, I suppose. Yeah, I think that that's a good way to...

think about it is it's like a small corporate team. I do just feel like this is also a byproduct of everyone is remote, right? I think everyone is remote really increases the demand for this kind of thing. Yeah, but that's just like modern corporate teams. But that's exactly it, yeah. Cortex brand was actually a large reason why this was on the back of my mind.

Because we had a conversation about kind of doing like the high level like restructuring of like who's in charge of what for Cortex brand. This is a conversation that we had. And it kept really like gnawing at the back of my mind of like, ooh, I like this restructuring that we're kind of thinking of. But how does this realistically cash out into actions, right? This is again is what I feel like is this problem often with...

Like, you have your planning documents and then separately, like, a bunch of people are doing things. But, like, these have to be intrinsically connected. Otherwise, the planning document just doesn't work. And, again, if it's just you, it's fine. But at this point, what it's you...

and me and like people working for Cortex brand and people working for me. There's just too much. And all of this came up, like even within my own team where, because I had stuff in my personal task manager, it's like, oh, I ended up accidentally blocking a bunch of stuff from my team because like they didn't realize like, ah, he's doing this kind of stuff. It's like, this just can't happen anymore where like there's too many projects going on. And so, yeah, it's been,

Very, very interesting. I feel like a poor Mike in some ways where I think like you have been trying to nudge me a little bit sometimes towards these tools. It's like I had to do it in the most gray way of like, I'm going to go wander off, you know, into this cave and just think for 30 days and come back and then be like, hey, Mike, do you know what?

Did you know it's a good idea to use a shared task manager when you have lots of tasks to share? Well, you can lead a horse to water, right? So I don't care how you get there. I just want the tasks done. I mean, this is a very funny way to find out that I need to learn a new tool. This is a very interesting way that I have found out this piece of paper.

information but i guess asana is in my future is what i am now aware of here's the thing mike asana is in your future precisely because i care about you mike and i care about cortex brand and you know what if you care about something and it's not in your to-do manager it doesn't exist and you don't really care so hop in buddy we're going to asana town

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So we mentioned time tracking a little bit today, and I do want to go through something we always go through in January, is we compare my year of time tracking, like year over year, and see how things have changed. Mm-hmm.

But I thought it might be a good time to do a refresher on why we time track. The last time we spoke about this was five years ago. In an episode that I remain proud of, which is our Productivity 101 episode. Yeah, I really liked that episode. I didn't realize we talked about the time tracking there. We did a little bit of all of it.

It was like task management, time tracking. It was basically our what can we do for people in lockdown episode. Like, let's tell you how to get some work done. The good old days. I don't know why I said that. That was the most crazy thing in the world. You know what it was? It's because I remember it's like, ah, that first year of lockdown, I was like, this is great. I have heard this more and more in the last...

12 months or so that there is like a feeling amongst people of how simple that time was and like how we could like really everybody people got a lot of work done now I am not someone who looks back fondly on lockdown because if you will remember I had

in february of 2020 decided i didn't want to work at home anymore and signed a lease on a studio that's right and was then stuck back at home for like nearly a year and a half so i do not look back on that time with any fondness no year one locked out uh i do look back with fondness year two locked down then i was like okay i've had enough of this so time tracking why do you time track

For me, this is again the difference between the two of us, is for me, time tracking is much more about a tool of intentionality. That is my main focus, is I like to press the button because I always feel like

This is me deciding like I am doing this thing right now. I am doing admin work. I am writing on the script. I am talking to a friend. Right. Like I'm doing any of these things like I like to do that to just be like I am deciding because I feel like.

It helps keep me focused because what I don't want to have to do is feel like, oh, I didn't do that thing. So that's the primary thing that time tracking has always served for me. And it is the reason why I've always done the thing of like, if I'm time tracking at all, I am time tracking everything.

everything because I'm using it to help with the decision point between activities. Am I stopping this? And am I doing that? I have to really think about it for a second because I'm also going to press a button that says like, yes, I'm doing that thing. So,

For me, it's always been less about the looking at the data over time in the way that it is for you. For me, it's much more of an in-the-moment kind of thing. Like, I do look at the data, but I'm much more interested in it as a tool of intentionality. That's always been my primary focus for time tracking. Are you still time tracking all the time? So, yes. I mean, again, we've just gone through how I haven't been doing it for the last, like, month or so, which is just...

has been very interesting. I'm glad to have taken the time off in some sense to give my brain some space to think about it. I am going to come back to time tracking, but I don't actually know what that form is going to be. If I had to guess, I'm probably going to go back to time tracking everything.

It might actually depend on what Asana integrations there are for time tracking. Who knows? Who knows? Someone's made them somewhere, I'm sure. So, yes. Up until a month ago, time tracking everything, then stopped completely because there's only two modes, do all of it or do none of it. And so I assume that I will eventually find my way back to doing all of it because I really do find it a useful tool of intentionality and...

while I was happy to have space to kind of be freer in the anti-theme time, it is noticeable that like, ah, but I am less intentional. So that's what I'm going to go back to for that. It's funny to me that you mention intentionality because I only track when I am actively doing something. And for me, that is intentionality because I,

I don't track the time, which is unintentional. Like, I'm just hanging around. I don't track that time. I don't find that particularly useful. And I like the accountability that a running timer gives me. That if I have started something, I'm working on that thing or I am doing the related thing.

And as soon as I'm done or if I'm taking an extended break, I stop it. And that means that I'm free of the work until I sit back down again. You're free, right? Yeah. I don't do the all the time time tracking. That doesn't work for me. There is enough time in my life where I would just be filling it with what would essentially be the same thing, which is like, hey, I'm not working right now. And that's just not really my thing.

I get why you do it. And it makes sense, right? That like there are different types of non-working time. But for me, really, time tracking is a system that I use to track my work, not my life. Yeah, just a quick little asterisk on there. The thing that I do look at, right, is...

Because what do I always feel is this dangerous time is the kind of like indecisive time for me. And the reason that I track is because I do have a specific timer that I always call the loading timer of like thing is done, but I haven't decided what I'm going to do next. Like I very reflexively like can start that timer just instantly. It's like I'm kind of like on a break and just thinking for a minute about what am I going to do next. And I use that timer also for things just like

Any activity that's like between two other activities. It's like, oh, it's like it's the shower or I'm getting ready in the morning or I'm shutting down at night. Like I'm using that one. But the primary reason for that is I do keep an eye on that one because I always feel like this time should be relatively short.

And it's just like, I always want to have an idea of like, how much time did I spend today in between things and just keeping an eye on like, ah, that wasn't too long. But it's like, I think it's sort of the same thing of like, that is the closest I come to like the accountability is like keeping an eye on that sort of thing. But yeah.

That doesn't work unless you have really built the reflex to do that without thinking about it. Otherwise, it is a giant pain, and I don't recommend that most people do that. Yeah, and my asterisk is...

I have over time added in some non-work stuff and it tends to be related to themes or bigger things that I'm tracking in my life, like adding in a weekend timer, for example, for tracking what I consider a weekend activity. But they are still for me like it's a focus thing that's happening that I am intentionally doing. And if time is not tracked, then it is unintentional time, sleep, rest, whatever it might be.

How much data do you put into your system? When you start a timer, how much metadata is there in that timer? So I've ended up doing essentially no metadata for my timers. I want to just have most important, broadest, high-level categories.

For me, in the thing that I'm doing, I just don't find it useful to have a lot of the metadata. It's like, if I'm looking at this, what do I really want to know? I want to know how much time did I spend writing today? I don't really care about like tracking each individual project and like how much time did that project take up versus the other one. It's like, no, no, no. I just want to hit like an hour's number for writing in a day.

It's the same thing like with Cortex. I still don't have a distinction between like Cortex the podcast and Cortex brand for my timers. I just have a top level like I'm doing Cortex stuff. Like just run the timer. That's so broad. Right.

That's so broad. That one is probably the broadest of all. It is just very funny. It's like, Cortex, am I preparing for the show? Am I recording the show? Am I doing a spreadsheet for the Cortex brand? All of this is just Cortex. That's all that timer is. So I think that probably is a byproduct of just doing the time tracking all the time, that if it was...

Also very metadata heavy. Now it's just like way too much to keep track of. So I have a socializing timer and it's just like, am I socializing with anyone? Boop, like start the timer. Like subdivisions of what that means, not interested. So that's what I do. Very, very broad, very, very high level.

Yeah, so I'm similar. So basically all of my timers are what is deemed are projects in the system that I have. And I only ever start project timers, except for the podcast related timers that I have. They have tags for the names of the shows that I do.

So that's the only thing. I don't type descriptions in. I know lots of people do this. They might have a writing timer and they would type a description of what are they writing. Maybe it's chapter four of this book or whatever. I don't do that because there's too much friction for me. I want to press one button by and large to stop my timer and then one button to stop it again. Or I type the first letter of the name of the timer into Timery and then tap the thing, which I would say I'm using Timery.

For a backend system, Timery uses what's called Toggle. You can use Toggle if you want to. We never liked their apps. I don't like their app. It's a good web interface, but that's the kind of the system that I use. And then I use an app called Timery that logs in to my Toggle account. Timery is an app we spoke about a bunch on the show. It's one of my favorite iPhone apps of all time. Timery has been out of active development for the last year, but the developer is back to work on the app again. So,

If the next update hasn't come out by the time this episode's out, it's coming soon. I'm using it. The developer is back on it. I use it on my iPhone, on my Mac, on my iPad. I use it on my Apple Watch, everywhere. I love Timery. It's so simple and it does such a good job and it does everything that I need. What app do you use now or will you be using when you return? I also have a big thumbs up for Timery. I really like Timery. I switched to Timelines, which I also really like

The reason that I did that is I needed it to have offline functionality, but that was a byproduct of some like other things that I was doing at the time and some ways that I'm working. And so this is another one of these like create space kind of moments where it's like, oh,

The reason I needed offline ability to start timers is not the case anymore. And so whenever it is that I go back to time tracking, like I'm just going to start fresh and reassess. But I really like timelines. I feel like they had some just very good, simple visualization tools. Like I could just put as I had like,

a little pie chart widget for like what does my day look like on my Mac and then a little thing that's just like a bar chart of like how many hours did I spend doing X today. I just really liked having that stuff up there and it was a big advantage to have it offline but I think they're both good tools like I really like Timery when I used it and I really like Timelines. Both of those are good but I don't know yet what I'm going to be using going forward. I think at this point for me

Time tracking kind of serves two purposes, which is one is the intentional thought of like, hey, I'm working right now or there is no time of running. Should I get back to work? Like I like that there is someone checking on me, right? Like it's the app, you know, like I do like that because for a lot of my day, there is nobody that is telling me to work and it can be helpful to have that.

that there is work to be done and that I should think about it. But over time, it has become incredibly important for me with thinking about my yearly theme and how I want to spend my time. Like the raw data that it provides me, I can't argue with numbers. Like,

I could try and give reasons for why things may have gone the way that they have gone, but there's nothing I can do about it. They are the numbers as they are. And I have made so many decisions for my yearly themes based on looking at my time tracking data and or the data can be used as a way to help me answer a question of a feeling. You know, like I feel overworked.

And then I can look at my time tracking and I can see the numbers. And that is so helpful, even down to daily levels. I remember when I started time tracking, one of the really great things for me was sometimes I would finish a work day and be like, man, I'm exhausted today. And I didn't know why. Like I was like, I feel really tired. And I'd look and I'd be like, oh, I've tracked 11 hours of work today. That will do it. That's the reason. But like over a span of a day, you can kind of get lost on it.

where especially with the way that I track where I may be out of the house for the same amount of time each day but one day I might track five hours and one day I might track nine hours because it's just the way that the day has gone yeah we've been doing this for so long it's kind of easy to forget but my

pitch is always to people like if you haven't time tracked you need to try it in whatever form for like two weeks and you will be very surprised everyone is very surprised when they actually start to track their time because your brain just cannot keep good track of what is really occurring and

And like that thing that you've said right now, like I have definitely had that experience, which it sounds so dumb of like you get to the end of the day and you go, why am I so tired? And then you look at your time tracker and you go, oh, because today was a wildly productive day or even the reverse of like,

Oh, you get to the end of the day and you feel like, ah, I feel like overwhelmed and kind of stressed so that your time tracker is like, yeah, bro, because you didn't get anything real done. That's why. It is just surprising to do that kind of thing. And humans just are just so bad at doing an objective evaluation of how their day went. I just feel like.

For everyone, it's a great tool, but especially if you are self-employed in any context, like you have to do this, even if you don't do it regularly, like you have to do this sometimes to kind of calibrate yourself about what is really happening in your life. But I will add to that and say, but you've got to be honest with yourself. Like if you work a corporate job, an office job, or you're self-employed, maybe you have some kind of creative job,

If you are working a non-manual work, there is a period of your day, many periods of your day, where you're not actually working. You're maybe taking a little break or you're maybe surfing the internet. Maybe you're watching a YouTube video or you're pretending to work, but you're listening to this show right now. You can't track that. You can't just walk into the office, start your work timer, and then at 5 p.m. end your work timer. That's not going to give you what you're looking for.

I mean, and I know this because every year, whenever I share the data that I'm going to share, people are like, oh, you work four hours a day. And it's like, well, that's four hours of my eight hours where I am really fully engaged on a thing, which is very different to I'm at the studio.

And so you've got to be honest with yourself. When are you actually truly putting the work in? That's what you should be tracking. And that's when you'll get the information that you're looking for. Because if you want it, you have to be honest. You also have to be consistent. Yeah.

The starting time tracking is horrible. It's a terrible time and everyone hates it. It's very annoying when you start it, yeah. But you've got to force yourself into it and you'll get the habits. And one of the reasons that I like apps like Timery, but any app that will give you widgets or things you can put on your home screen will remind you to press the buttons and start the timers. But...

You've got to be honest with yourself, but also I recommend don't try and overtrack whatever that might be for you. Maybe you want to do the way that I do and you just track when you're actively working, or maybe you could have the kind of system that Gray does, but it's always a timer running, but don't fill it with metadata. Like be kind of easy on yourself, especially when you're beginning.

Yeah, it's very tempting to be like, I'm going to track all these things. Like, no, you're going to track cortex. That's what you're going to do. Does it have anything to do with anything with cortex? Great, that's what you're going to track. But I can't emphasize the honesty point enough. And I mentioned this before, but like one of the reasons I like having the always running tracker is because I have my dreaded unintentionality tracker. And this is about being honest with myself. It's like if I sit down to write, it's very easy to kind of like,

bounce off of that. It's like sitting in front of the computer. It's like I'm sort of thinking about it, but I'm actually like not really getting anything done. It's like, ah, when I catch that that has happened, I have to stop the writing timer and then change the category to like this black color of unintentionality. It's like, no, you weren't really writing during that time. You were just like doing the kind of you're in front of the computer. Nothing is really happening. Like

If you are not willing to be honest about yourself with that stuff, like you're not going to get something out of time tracking. And for me personally, like that is very motivating to know, like I am going to be honest with myself. And if like I sat down to do a bunch of admin work and actually I didn't,

the moment I really catch myself going like, oh, I haven't done anything for 20 minutes, it's like that timer is stopped and that 20 minutes is going into the black category of death. Like you didn't do anything here. That's another one of those things of like,

I'm not specifically looking at all of the numbers, but I do want to see like my pie chart of the year has the least amount of black on it that it possibly can. And yeah, anyone who's working in knowledge work, if you haven't done the time tracking, Mike said four hours and having spoken to a lot of people in a lot of different areas in mental and creative work,

I would say almost every single one of them zooms in on this. You have four real good hours of high quality mental work in you. And you just have to be aware of that. It's like you can do other things, but this seems like a real limit. And if you're a creative and have never time tracked and never really thought

come up to face that as a limit it can be quite surprising at first i feel like i spent all day on a thing it's like did you did you really uh i bet you didn't if even like the most successful and productive people i know also mention like four hours as being a kind of theoretical cap a lot of times for how much super high quality work can they actually do in a day this

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Then when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash cortex. You'll save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain. That is squarespace.com slash cortex when you sign up and you'll get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the show. A thanks to Squarespace for their continued support of this show and all of Relay. All right, I've got the mic time tracking in front of me here. So we've got 2023 and 2024. Yeah.

Oh, boy. Lots of time. Interesting. Less time tracked this year than last year by 200 hours or so? The immediate thing where I'm like, no, f***.

way you know when i see that is this my initial feeling always of like there's absolutely no way in hell i've done less work but i can't argue with the hours so i obviously have worked less this year which is wonderful okay you'll see it across the board there is way less work in this year than there are other years however one of the big differences is weekend but we'll get to that the

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. Is the actual difference just coming out of weekend? It seems like it is. It seems like that's most of the difference here. Well, there's an extra hundred hours of family time this year. So there are a couple of, you know, it's less. It's not maybe as less as it looks, but it is still less. Okay, the very first thing that I think about here is I look at in 2023, your top item is the same as 2024, podcast recording.

393 hours of podcast recording in 2023 and you've got 386 hours of podcasting in 2024. Isn't it incredible how close that is? I think this happens every year where it is shocking how close some of these numbers are over the course of an entire year. So, I mean, again, now that everybody knows that it's like Mike has a baby on the way.

I feel like I have been vaguely hearing from you for years about cutting down podcast recording time. And I'm going to just say 10 hours less might as well be no hours less between 2023 and 2024. Do you have any thoughts on that? Not really. I don't expect it to massively change much in 2025 either. I've cut a couple of shows, but they're short. Realistically...

It's too hard. It is essentially my job. And I could cut more shows. I just can't bring myself to do it yet. I think I was just surprised because I knew that you cut some shows, but it just hasn't turned up at all in the actual podcast recording numbers. So I think this year I was expecting to see a big drop in these. But I guess it makes sense given what did you change and what have you done recently?

I mean, I wonder what your minimum viable podcasting recording number is. Maybe it's not that far off from like 380 hours, right? Like, it might not be that far different. I mean...

Minimum viable hours is like half that. I feel like you're using some very scary definition of minimum viable if you were going to cut it in half. No. How many shows would I actually have to do to make an outsized amount of my revenue? Actually, how many shows are you still doing now that you've done the cut? What's the total number of shows?

Isn't it terrible that I just don't know the answer to that question? Mike, is it unbelievable to me that you just sighed when I asked the question? Because I don't know. How many shows do you do? Okay, well, why don't you start counting on your fingers? Tell me, how many shows do you currently do? Let's say six. No, no, I don't want to hear, let's say six. What's the number? There's like...

one show that there might be like two episodes in the entire year for okay in the past year or let's say going forward in 2025 how many podcasts will have at least one episode published that's the question i'm trying to ask you how many shows do you do seven

I mean technically if you go to my people page and relay there's eight but there's one of them that I know there won't be an episode of it okay all right okay so it's it's seven seven is the number of shows okay oh my goodness exhausting merely to think about okay how do you feel about that look like realistically I could do two or three but I don't want to

And so I'm not going to even think about making that decision because I don't need to. I don't want to do it. I don't think I need to do it. So it's not something that I'm going to do. But if I had to, I could start making some horrible choices that would be horrible to me. But if I had no choice and had to start cutting stuff for some reason...

There are more things that can go. Okay. The only reason I'm just asking about the top line thing here is because I don't know if you are aware, but you're going to have a big category of time next year, right? Which is like not accounted for on this year's time tracker. It's like, hey, Mike, time only comes from somewhere. So it's like this is the cruelest way to say it, but I think it is a real like you have to think this way. Otherwise, you're not properly thinking.

Baby, how many hours do you wish to give to baby? Whatever that number is, you don't have that number of hours that you didn't use this year just laying around. Well, no, that's not necessarily true, right? Okay. Because if I had in here time with wife, that number would change, right? Okay, all right. Yeah, that's true. But if I track like you did, then I would be in a real problem. Okay.

but there is there is a lot of time that is not track time and most of my baby time will be in that time okay well i hope for your sake that is true uh we will find out we will see in 2026 well the 2025 numbers are going to be weird

They're not going to be real. They're going to be fake numbers. Are you juicing the numbers in 2025? What are you doing? Like 20% of my podcast recording time will be gone because I'm taking time away. So straight away, you are, as I suggested, literally taking time from one of these categories. Correct. But it is a temporary thing, right? That took two minutes for me to feel like, aha, I was correct. You can't take credit for my paternity leave now.

I'm just simply remarking on the other thing that I was speculating about that you were like, no, no, no, that's not true. It's like, ah, here we are minutes later. Based on that though, if we're going to use that line of thinking, it means when I have a baby, I can't work anymore, which is not accurate.

This is a luxury, like a choice that I'm making of taking an extended parental leave, which means I won't record podcasts. Okay, so then in 2027, we'll find out the real numbers. We will see then. Okay, so the thing that is also surprising is your show prep really jumped up, right? You got like 150 hours last year, and then it's like 210 hours this year. How more show prep if there are less shows? I think I just...

If I can ever take time from something to put it into something else, I always want to put more time into show prep. Okay. Because it increases the quality of the shows. It does, yeah. And so one of the big changes is podcast editing. Podcast editing has gone from 140 hours to 70 hours. Ooh, that's really good. Okay. So I can take some of that time and put it back into preparing for shows. Okay.

If I know I don't have to stay late to edit, I can come in early to prep. Oh, actually, wait. So it's podcast editing. So you saved like 25. So you saved like, let's ballpark it, like 75 hours on podcast editing. Okay. Actually, you're still net positive there. Yeah. Yes. And also like for me getting rid of

Basically, the last podcast that I edit, and I'll talk about why there's still 74 hours in a second, but getting rid of my last big editing project wasn't so much because I wanted the time. I wanted the inconvenience to go away.

That was the bigger problem. My editing was always happening at times when I didn't want to be doing it. It was either late or on the weekend. It's like, I don't want to do this. And so that was the removal of that. And so now I have time back, which is great. And then I've been able to spend that time

Yeah. On other things, right? Because like my podcast recording hours were less, but my prep was higher. And it's like, that is the perfect balance for me. I mean, I am always a big proponent of the fewer things you have to think about the better. And so, yes, even if you have tasks that are,

not necessarily hugely time consuming or they're straightforward or whatever, simply eliminating them is much more of a benefit than people think. And I can definitely tell that, at least with this show, which is the one that we talk about all the time, is you...

You are clearly in a much less stressful place since you gave up the editing of this show. And it's like, it's made a huge difference to you doing this. And it's like, great, great, great. The more you can do that with more things, it's not even about the edit. It's just about like, it's something else off your plate. You don't have to think about it. It doesn't have to go in your queue as like work that needs to be cleared. And I think that's,

You get the hours back, but there's some kind of like every time you eliminate something, you get the hours back. Plus you get some kind of 5% bonus in terms of mental clarity is kind of like what happens every time you can eliminate stuff. But there's still 74 hours of editing tracked. Yeah. So what is remaining here? So for me, podcast editing is...

encompasses anything which is happening to a podcast after it was recorded. I used to have a different tracker called podcast posting, which encapsulates some of this, but I kind of shrunk that down over time as I was doing a little less of that. And the majority of my podcast editing time is still this show. And it is... Once we get the show back from our editor and you've taken your part, it comes to me. I am then...

still doing things. I'm preparing the show. I'm listening back to the show, which is the biggest time, I think, in this. And just various things of getting the show ready, preparing the video version, lots of little things like that. There are tasks in that bucket that could still be given to somebody else, but

for the time being, I'm fine with it. Especially the thing that takes the biggest chunk of time, which is listening to the final exploited episode. I do that while I'm doing other things. Like, I am tracking podcast editing time while I'm commuting home because I'm listening to our show. So like, it's not the intense work, but I do still count it as work. So I track it. Outside of that, the only show that I edit at all is The Pen Addict.

Because it takes 15 minutes a week. And so I'm fine with that. And then it's any of the shows that I post. And I still do post a couple of shows. They come back from the editor and then I kind of put them together, upload them and post them. Okay. So this is partly a definitional change. You're using a broader category for podcast editing than you were in 2023. Is that correct? No. In 23, that did include all of that stuff too. So that like 70 hours difference is...

the last remaining cortex editing going away because that wasn't a full year i think i only did like three quarters of the year of editing of cortex and then for the last quarter that was when we gave it away i actually kind of like that as a definition of anything you're doing to the show after it's been recorded but before it's published like i actually think that's quite mentally clarifying of like ah that's all podcast editing and you're just including anything related to the show including the

Okay, that makes more sense than that it's still 75 hours. Especially because a lot of the time, like for a lot of shows, the editing went into posting and it was just like, it's just silly to change the timer. So I just condensed it. All right, so do you want to talk about the big drop in weekend then? Yeah. It sounded like you had something to say about that. So we've gone from 315 hours of weekend to 110 hours of weekend. Yeah, this to me is just like the settling of a theme into...

Your life. So when I was tracking year of the weekend, which was the 23 theme, it was very much kind of focused in a couple of areas, which was intentional weekend time on the weekend, right? Like I am not working, but it's not just I'm not working. I am like purposely doing a thing that is like, I want to do this on the weekend. And it's a thing I want to do. And I can only do it because it's Saturday or Sunday. And so I'm going to do it. Or when I would give myself time

an activity in the week because I was doing something on the weekend. You know? So like, if I'm working on Saturday, on Tuesday, I'm going to go play golf or something like that. Now in 2024, and then also this is remaining in 2025, the only things I'm counting are that latter half, which is kind of now in two things. It's either I was working on the weekend, so I'm giving myself some time off, or I'm just going to give myself a day off.

and that now becomes weekend and so that's why i've had that drop but i'm still tracking weekend things for that same thing like i just had it this week where like actually i knew i was going to be working late a couple of nights at the end of the week and so on monday i gave myself a half day and i tracked it as year of weekend okay all right yeah that makes sense and that is just the now it's become part of my way of working which is i give myself time off

when I know that there is extra work that's going to be happening as opposed to what I would do before, which was work and then also do the extra work. It's essentially, I could call this weekend could just be work-life balance because that's kind of what it is now. It's the balancing of the work life when I might need or want that. Right. Would it be fair to say that it's intentional time off? Like that's essentially what this category is tracking? Yes. Okay. Which wasn't necessarily what it was tracking in 23. It was that plus...

hey, it's Saturday and I'm going to treat this Saturday like Saturday. It was like a mindset thing too. Yeah, when it is your theme, it makes sense that you were intentionally doing it more and you're thinking about it more and you have more stuff that's just related to it. And so now it's just getting rolled into the regular thing. I am happy to see though that you're still tracking it as the intentional time. That's what I was trying to get at there. It's like, what does this matter? And I just think that's really good to...

that as a thing to keep an eye on. Yeah. You know, I'm not quite doing the same thing, but my own version of this has always been, I've got two trackers, which one is, which is called free, which is just like totally free time that I'm giving myself in a way to not think about the time tracking and just do whatever. And also a like novelty timer, which is like, I'm just doing something that is different from something that I've done before. I'm in a place that's different from somewhere that I've done before. And I feel like those are,

the closest of my equivalent to something like Weekend and I think I'm glad to see that since you are so work focused with your tracker that you're also still keeping this around as like ah the theme lives on in my taking intentional time off so I'm very happy about that

The thing in my time tracking this year that I'm most miffed about, like I don't understand and I'm also frustrated with, is that all of my Cortex brand numbers are down year over year and it just doesn't feel like that that was the case. So I don't know why it's happened, but I can't argue with the numbers. So I think it's interesting.

I actually feel like this is kind of a byproduct of some of the stuff that I was getting at with Asana. I think some of that is a result of me not flipping tasks back to you fast enough. I think some of that is that. Although, also looking at this, there is one there which I've really got my eye on.

part of our reorg, it's like, oh, Mike, I actually do have a place where you can get some hours from, and it is that Cortex brand marketing timer. It's like, oh, look at that. Those are hours that I think Mike should be getting back in 2025, because I think that's getting folded under, or at least a good portion of whatever you're tracking there should get folded under some of the stuff that I want to be taking a look at with Cortex brand going forward. I'm not exactly sure what you're using that timer for, but...

there may be a place where you're getting those hours back. It's marketing and branding. Ah, so you've got two things under that category. It's kind of like what is the world seeing of the brand? That's what comes under marketing. Okay. All right. Interesting. Okay. So maybe not as many hours to get out of that, but I should take some of those hours from you going forward. I want my nut. And then the last couple of things that I wanted to mention at least, and this is anything else that you have. It was funny to me that the podcast with Tom was about the same thing.

considering I didn't attend any of the meetings. Most of the planning meetings I didn't do this year, Stephen took them over because of live events, which obviously shot right up there to 52 hours tracked, where it did not exist in the previous year at all. Oh, I thought that was just a rename of streaming. Okay, but live events is a separate thing. All right. Live events was purely Relay 10, the Relay 10 live show that we did. So it just didn't exist in the previous year. And...

I figured that I would have less time in Podcastathon, but essentially the in-person time in Memphis this year was significantly more complex. And so that was essentially three full days at St. Jude was what went into that.

along with the other little bits and bobs that I did. That makes sense. And then we have air traffic control. Air traffic control. One to 20 hours. And that was just weekly meetings with my assistant where we go through what I'm doing in the week and go through projects that she helps me with and stuff like that. That's kind of where all that goes into. Yeah, I was happy to see that one jump up. I feel like whenever you've mentioned it, it just sounds like that's working really well for you to just

get like everyone's caught up like you're getting an overview of what you're up to it's funny I think in my head I had already imagined that you were doing that for longer it's like ah but of course not now if it's like you have like under two hours in 2023 so I'm very happy to see that it's basically 20 hours in 2024 so that's great

Otherwise, I feel like it's looking good. I get just always surprised of the ones that are like nearly identical, especially even as the numbers get smaller. It's like invoicing eight hours. How on earth could it be so exactly the same? I just don't understand. Yeah. Always interesting to see. But yeah, looks like a good 2024 and we'll see what it looks like in 2025. Cool.

Well,

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