Trusting the Meat Computer

Inger and Jason convene for the long awaited mailbag episode! (but first there's a bit of old-person whinging about health and other stuff).  Inger explains how she and Narelle wrote a 36000 word book in a single weekend with Claude.

The mail bag is full to overflowing! There's gold in there - which prompts a very wide ranging conversation about Bujo, task managers, screen capture software,  politics and - well, the usual stuff. The speak pipes failed after the first one... (which is also a bit quiet for reasons Inger can't work out), so we'll have to bring you these next time. Enjoy!

Stuff we mentioned:

Rich Aademic / Poor Academic book
A blog post explaining what Rich Academic / Poor Academic is about
Narelle Lemon's Explore and Create Co website
Alternative to (software information site)
So. Many. Feelings sticker book for bujo
Kaitlin Salzke Omnifocus plug ins
Omnivore book marking app
Kindle highlights plug in for obsidian
Obsidian web clipper
Taskade
Quit by Annie Duke
Co-intelligence by ethan mollick
First rule of mastery - stop worrying what other pe

We've changed our email address!! You can email us on <pod@ontheregteam.com>
Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.
Visit our (pretty terrible) website: www.ontheregteam.com

Jason is having a break from the Socials, but you can still find Inger as @thesiswhisperer pretty much everywhere (and she will friend anyone on LinkedIn). You can read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com.

It costs us about $1000 a year to produce this podcast. If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site

Transcript

 You're driving the bus. Oh god damn. And I've like, I've thrown you under the bus further into the I episode in your show notes.

I about how terrible you are at driving the bus. I know, right. It's okay. No judgment. All right.  Did you just grab the wheel? I think you did. I did. Yeah.  Welcome to On The Wreck. I'm Dr. Jason Downes from La Trobe University, and I'm here with my good friend, Professor Inga Mewburn from the Australian National University.

But she's better known as the thesis whisperer on the internet. And we're here for another episode of On the Reg, where we talk about work, but you know, not in a boring way. We're all about practical, implementable productivity hacks to help you lead a more balanced life. We'd also like to make it clear that even though we work at a couple of awesome universities, that this podcast is not connected to either of them, nor are we representing them.

On the Reg is our own endeavor. In fact,  it's so much of our own endeavor that we. Dedicate our Sunday mornings to doing this sort of stuff. Like in terms of We sure do. This is what's called a hobby, Jason. 

It's funny how we've like, how we kind of move around a little bit, depending on what we've got going on in the weekend. But you know, it's like, it's getting earlier and earlier, so It is, it's very early.  Anyway, how have you been since we last caught up? Look, I've been good. I feel like I've been running around without taking a breath, but that's just, I suppose, life as usual really, isn't it?

We've got the builders in, Jason.  Right. Big time. Yes. Um, when we renovated this house before we moved in eight years ago,  I don't know if you've ever done a renovation of an old house, but I've done several. This is like my fourth, maybe.  Anyway, it takes a long time and it's very, if you don't want to actually knock the building down, it takes a long time.

And by the time you get to the interior, you're fucking dumb. Okay. Right. Like, so first of all, I had to stop the front of the house falling off.  So we pumped like 25, 000 worth of concrete underneath the front of the house to stop it falling off. Right. And then, yeah. And then we like took all the asbestos out. 

Right? Right. Yeah. Good idea. Good idea. Important shit. We replaced all the windows with double glazing, cause you know, we're like that. We pumped in like insulation. We changed all the carpets. We changed the drapes. And I got to the cupboards, Jason. Oh, and a kitchen that was big. Two bathrooms. And I was like, by the time I got to the closets, I was like, you know what?

Fuck it. These closets are from the 1960s. I don't care. They're closets. They'll work.  And then. Functional. Yeah, I got one crappy one put in a room that didn't have any closets and I have regretted this decision every day for the last eight years, but I've said to myself, wait until you've paid it off, pay it down, pay down that mortgage.

Anyway, I gritted my teeth. Finally, I felt we're in a position to do it. And in the meantime, the cost of closets have tripled.  Maybe quadrupled, which is just excellent. Closet inflation. Closet inflation. And so we had the people in, we had the plans, and like, I had this on my list, Jason, last year. So I've got my long term list, one of my lists,  so I got the people in, we got the prices done, we got, anyway, over 40, 000, Jason.  Holy cow! That's Yes, and not only that, what you learn when you do closets is that it's like moving house without moving house.  Right. There's a lot of shit inside your closets, right? And stuff you just push in there.

Think I'll think about that later. Having to think about that now.  You're faced with, faced with eight years. It's kind of like, is it like an architectural dig? Uh,  archeological. Yes, yes, it is exactly like that. Especially for, um, Mr. Thesis Whisperer, dear husband, um, who is a very, very, very tidy person. And he has a lot, a lot, a lot of stuff in a lot, a lot, a lot of labeled plastic tubs, and he's going through it.

He still had floppy disks.  And floppy disk readers and all sorts of like things that look like they went on the NASA space mission.  And so he had to go through all of that. So long story short, that's why I'm sitting in his room because my room's got sheets all over it now  as they take things out because I've decided that room's no longer a bedroom.

It's my room now and I'm putting in masses of bookshelves. So anyway, that's what's been happening mostly that, and, you know, 

I've been on the Zempi, a Zempic, now for nine months. I just wanted to give a brief health report back because we're old people. Um, I got my bloods done.  They are the best set of bloods I've had in, well, I don't know. I can't even remember. My liver's fine.  Great.  Uh, my kidneys say I'm dehydrated, so I'm trying to drink some more water

But, but other than that, like even my, I went off all my meds, my high blood pressure meds, my cholesterol meds, and um, my cholesterol actually dropped.  Wow. Off the meds. Wow. This is like  a miracle drug. I read a lot of, Oh, Sempic's bad. It's, I mean, I'm sure it has side effects for some people and I'm sure it doesn't work for some people, but I feel blessed.

Hashtag blessed. Yeah.  Thank you, Sempi. So I've, I'm down to my last three doses to start feeling a bit twitchy. I'm maybe three kilos off what my doctor said was the top of my weight range. So hopefully he'll re prescribe for me.  Yeah. My blood sugar problem is gone.  Anyway, it's all good. So all of that is good.

Last thing, I'm just looking at the time, how am I going? Last thing Norella and I wrote a book on the weekend.  I, I, I know, right? Like 36, 000 words or something. On a weekend. We started, we got there Friday night, we had a few drinks, we made some dal, we chatted, we went to sleep, we got up, we had a coffee, charged the car, because I drove the Polestar, very nice car, and decided what the book was going to be about, and went back and fired up Claude. 

And buy gum.  See, listeners who don't know  you personally, Inga, other than maybe through the pod or,  or through your, um, through your blog, teaching activities in your blog, and people who don't know Narelle,  Um, who is wonderful. So Narelle's over in Western Australia now, um, Professor Narelle. Narelle Lemon.

Yep. Yes. Um. Explore and Create Co is her blog if you want to look her up. I'll put a link. Yep. I think that's a great idea. Um, both of you are wonderful people and you're both incredibly productive and focused individuals. But I can imagine there'd be a lot of chatting going on between you two as well.

No. Right. There wasn't a lot. Was it all head down and bum up? Oh man, head down, bum up. I've, I love Narelle. Narelle and I are like sisters of another mother. There's like something in our neuro, slightly neuro spiciness that is just like, we lock into each other and we can sit in a room for hours without talking and occasionally go, huh, Claude did this.

And you're like, really? How about we try this? And then silence for another hour. Wow. They're both very focused individuals.  I mean, we've spent a lot of time having lunch together and stuff  shut up and right in company with other people back in the day, but we've never seen a time like that together. It was delightful.

We had the nicest day. Okay. But here's the thing. Claude got tired.  So,  you know, I, I did prime it with a lot of text, like I gave it the whole of Tame your PhD. I gave it a lot of Narelle's writing and I said, come up with a cocktail of our voices and show me what that looks like. So I did a bit of tests and it's like, yep, you sound like a blend of both of us.

Like basically it said I was humorous and practical  and Narelle was inspirational. I think it liked Narelle more, I'm just saying, I think Narelle was its favorite child. Um, but, but it made this quite convincing tonal blend of both of that. Like it sort of sounds like me, Narelle kind of blended over the top of each other anyway.

And then I just started to ask it to write stuff and it got better and better and better. And you keep it in a single chat, right? You don't change chats.  And it got better and better and better at a kind of one shot answer. And then it started to get sort of excitable and over its skis and started to do like, just weird, like kind of angerisms.

I'll admit I was the one that made it go a bit, like it was my bit of the voice that was a little bit weird. When it gets, when it gets weird, it gets quite weird. And yeah. And so then it would be like. Now you've got six left, five left, four left. I'm like, what's going on here? Three left. I'm like, can't be serious.

And then it's like, nope, you can't come back till 4pm.  I was like, what? And when I clicked on the link, it's like, basically the compute's too high now. You'll req, this is too sophisticated a chat. You've got too much going on cause it remains the whole, um, you just basically you compute's too high we're timing you out.

And then I came back in four hours later and it was. Fine again, but it, it sort of got slower and slower and eventually I had to restart and retrain and all that sort of stuff. But even with all of that, it still made my writing. I calculated it because you know, we calculate these things, Jason. We keep, we keep track of these sorts of things.

I was already quite fast, just like, not going to lie. Like I'm quite a quick writer. Um, four times faster.  Wow. Yeah.  Yeah. Wow. It's the dream. It's the dream. Yeah. It's the dream. I did a lot of editing though, and I did write a blog post about it. I'll link it if you haven't read it already. Lots and lots of people have, because lots and lots of people bought the book.

We just decided, Hey, we're just going to release this first version as a PDF and see what people think of it. You know, maybe they've got suggestions for us or whatever. So we planted a feedback survey inside the book. There's a code. You have to read the book to get the code. So we know you've read it. And so we just released it as a PDF on Ko Fi and on our website. So we both released it. It doesn't matter who you buy it from, Narelle or me. What we've decided to do is just add up all the profits that we made and whatever the difference is, and we split the difference, basically someone has to buy the other person's dinner, cause we're not talking about a lot of money.

However,  In a week since it's been released, I've sold, pure profit, Jason, 652  worth.  Wow. And that was 5. 37 a book, which is the price of an almond latte that I drank. When, when Claude booted me out, we went out for a coffee.  They're expensive in South Australia. It was a nice almond latte and it's 5. 37. So that's the price of the book.

It's the price of an almond latte. So yeah, so that's remarkably specific pricing too. Yeah.  Yes, I know. Well, then I can see it in my records. I know who's bought that book because there's 3. I get confused, yeah. 5. 37. Yeah. So that's, um, that's pretty amazing. And I just would like to compare it briefly to the profit that I'd made.

I just got royalty reports from my last book with Routledge,  Be Visible or Vanish, which took months, months, months to write. With Simon. Yeah. With Simon Clues, and the profit on that book,  610. Wow.  And that's like. Wow.  That's a two year project.  Ask me again. Why did I just agree to two new books with publishers?

Ask me again.  I think these might be the last two. Really, honestly. Wow. When you're not writing like, Something that needs peer review. We're talking about how to shit, right? Yeah, yeah. So maybe you should Well, people like it. It's useful. Maybe you should like to tell our listeners what the book was about.

Uh, the book is called Rich Academic, Poor Academic, which is an obvious rich riff on the really bad. 90s book called Rich Dad Poor Dad. Have you read it? No.  Oh my God, Jason. I would have thought you would have read this book.  No. I've only. I fully didn't even bother saying, you know, this. I thought, oh no, Jason, I'll be able to pick up the other end of the rope.

Surely you've read. This is like airport book, the, uh, airport book. Yeah. No, I, um. It's still there in airports. Yeah. No, I, uh, I've heard about it and I feel as though I've heard enough about it.  You have heard enough about it. You don't need to read it. It's  infallible.  So basically there's this guy and his dad's a public servant, a real do gooder, you know, maybe he's a teacher.

I think, I can't remember. And how he, you know, works hard all his life and basically, Oh, he's okay. He's got the house and a family that loves him and a car and he's comfortable, but he's not rich.  Um, and he contrasts that, and I believe it's totally made up, don't quote me on this, but I believe the whole thing's totally made up, that there was no rich dad but he compares it with this apocryphal dad that lives next door that is entrepreneurial and kind of breaks all the rules and da, da, da, well, it doesn't break all the rules, but just kind of bends them, you know, like, and and he's sort of like, be more like rich dad.

And, but one thing I did get out of that book was the idea of passive income. So that idea that money drops in your bank account while you sleep.  And in fact, you know, rich debt, rich academic, poor academic, that's a classic example of it, like 600 bucks landed in my bank account this week while I slept.

But, you know, it's a weird, I think people oversell. How much money you can make out of things like subscriptions and stuff, like it's not a living, it pays, it'll pay for, you know, maybe doing a  cover design or something for a real release of this book, should we decide to put it in print rather than just a PDF.

So it's got four sections. It's the creative department, the HR department, the finance department, and the, I can't remember the other one. The marketing department. And so we treat you like a little mini corporation. Did you manage to have a read of any of it? Um, I read, uh, what did I read?

I read the contents pages and I read the. Notes at the end of the book, and I haven't read actually any of the content yet.  Um, even though I did promise, even though I did promise, I would, and that I would give you, I would give you feedback. Um, You've had nice feedback. People have written to us already.

I'm surprised they've finished reading it, but people have said it's very readable. Thank you, Claude. Because it's 200 odd pages, right? Yeah. Well, I did sort of bind it in an A5, so it's not as long as it probably looks. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So when I printed it to PDF, I put it to an A5 rather than an A4, because it's easier to read on the screen.

Yeah, and that was one of the things that confused me because I saw the page count and I knew what your word count was and I was like, that doesn't compute in my head. And then I just figured that I just didn't know how many words go on a page or that my maths was screwed up. So I'm pleased to hear that it's at A5 and not at A4. 

Yeah, it's little, it's little. It's like a Bujo size. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. Anyway, so that was good. That was an interesting experiment. In two weeks, Jason, I will be with you. I'll be in your hood.  We're going to meet at the Docklands library, which you promised to come in the tinny and take you for a ride in the tinny.

And listeners, I promised to make a YouTube video should that event happen. Weather permitting.  Yeah. Weather permitting. Definitely. A couple of weeks. It should still be nice weather. It will just be cold.  Maybe. I don't want cold. I'm fine with cold. I'm fine. But yeah, but windy,  no,  no, no, no, it's not the, the Timmy, it's no, it's no, uh, a blow decks, right?

Like there's no real salon that you can retire to.  It's not a super yacht. 

Anyway, I'm trying to convince you to write a book with me in two days there at the library. I reckon you can do it. I've got an idea.  It's not an idea we've discussed. Excellent. It's coming out of my own bag, actually, you know, so I love it. I love it. I love a good challenge, right? Yeah. Yeah.  But how about you?

I've like crapped on about myself for 25 minutes now. This is like the longest ever Inga download, maybe. Yeah, I mean, all, all interesting stuff. I'm, I'm thrilled that the bloods have come back, um, the way they Thank you. Yes. Come back. That's really good, right? Yes. Well, health first, you know? Um,  yeah. Yeah.

Well, yeah. Speaking of that,  speaking of the health things, I have, I went and got some new glasses because I was finding it a little bit difficult to read. And I was like, ooh, eyes are  playing properly anyway. They went and they did this test. They did this eye pressure test thing, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I go to the same optometrist all the time. Partly because, uh, the optometrist is also one of the guys that rolls at jiu jitsu.  So I'm kind of, yeah, so it's like, Oh, yeah, he's got business. I'll go and support his business. You're already used to him putting you in a headlock. Yeah. That's it, right? 

Um, turns out I've got potentially early stage glaucoma. That's really scary. I know, right? And the, and the reason they picked it up, of course, is because I've got this longitudinal data about, you know, keeping an eye on my brain over the years. So they see the change. Yeah. And they can see the change.

And so I'm sitting in there with optometrists and they're going, like, see, you know, this is what it used to look like, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then they're showing all the little, all the little graphs and all the, and I'm like, Oh, God.  So, um, so yes. So I'll be off to an ophthalmologist to get that confirmed or.

Something, you know, get that looked at and then maybe laser eye surgery.  Cause apparently that's how they, that's how they deal with this stuff. Early detection though, Jase, like early detection, right? Amazing. Cause otherwise that actually can make you go blind. That's right. And that, you know, that's, I like my, I like my vision.

Yeah. Looking at things. I mean, with all this AI speech stuff. Yeah. I, yeah, you are used to it. Like, yeah, it is your preferred mode to actually be able to see things.  To be able to write things. Sure. Like, yeah. And, uh, and I absolutely, I get it. People low or no vision have other ways to be able to do all that sort of stuff, but.

And I'm sure you'd learn, but you know, since you don't have to, maybe a better thing. I don't want to, Yeah. Yeah. Too old to learn that. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's kind of like, other than that, I'm the most boring person in the whole entire universe over the last few weeks. So, but yeah, that's, um, there was some sort of big news and, you know, kind of, I walked out of there and I was like, right.

Hmm. Yeah. Like it, it made me think, you know, stop and think for a couple of days, right?  Like. Yeah. It's like, I'm getting older now. Things are starting to really break. Yeah, no, it's not just kind of like gentle decay anymore. We're going straight into hardcore kind of, you know. I know, right? People pointing lasers at my eyes and stuff like that.

Like in, in the context of a James Bond movie, I could probably deal. Right.  In the context of you just getting old, Jason. Anyway, some other, some other good news on the BJJ front. I got my first stripe on my blue belt. Okay, so you need to explain to me Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Blue Belt, Stripes. I'm down with the Belts because you and Mark Zuckerberg are now the same level, so you could take him in a fight, potentially.

Potentially. He is younger than me though, right? Yeah, well, that's true. That is true. Not that much younger though, Jase. Like you know,  he's over 40, he's like, you know, once you get over 40, I'm just saying we could take him. It's all a health thing after that.  Well, a decade so there's, you know, there's this calculation that you can do, right?

Right. So you might be, you might be a purple or a brown belt, which is kind of getting up there a little bit. And you might be rolling against a blue belt, someone lower than you. But if they're 10 years younger,  every bit as good as you are.  Oh, damn. Because they're fitter, stronger, you know, those sorts of things.

So Zach would take you in a fight is what you're saying. Yeah, I'm thinking.  So what does the stripe mean? What's a stripe mean? Hurts to admit that.  It's alright, he'd take you in a fight financially, he'd take you in a fight, you know. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. But I reckon you could do over Elon Musk. I would back you in a fight with Elon Musk because we're of an age.

Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Sometimes it's just about tenacity. He might be on the Zempi. I'm sure he's on the Zempi or something because, you know,  he looks like he's on the Zempi. But other than that, I don't think the man does a lot of working out. No. No. Spent a lot of time in. Spends a lot of time, well, walking around yelling at people.

I understand. Yeah, yeah, I suppose it's one.  Let's stop talking about him. Stripes. What is the Stripe? Stripes. So, it's kind of like a mini belt, if you like. So, as you progress through, because it takes a long time to earn up a belt. So, it took me five years to earn it. On my white belt now, but in  the middle of all of that, we weren't training because of COVID and all the rest of it.

So, right. So, um, cause you weren't allowed to actually be with people for any of that. Thanks very much, Victoria. So we, uh, so that took, that took an extraordinarily long period of time. And then as you work your way through. A belt,  as you progress, they give you these little stripes. So, and the way we do it at our dojo is they electrical tape, like white electrical tape.

So yeah, yeah. So on the end of your belt, they just, yeah, very much. They put this kind of white electrical tape. And so it was ceremonial than that, but okay.  I think, I think some dojos, you know, it's quite the gold plating or something like a little traditional, all sorts of stuff, but yeah, where we're doing it, it's like,  it's out the way,  you know, you get four, four stripes and then, um, What would be your fifth stripe is when they promote you to the next color belt, right?

So I'm off the bottom of the blue belt at the moment. So anyway, this is progress. I feel good, right? Yeah, because like the white belt's all about just kind of  understanding the game. It's like, you're not actually any good at that point, but at Bluebelt, you can, at Bluebelt, you can start to do things to people. 

And so,  so, so moving from, moving up a stripe on the Bluebelt, I'm like, this is pretty good. So that's, um, I'm not actually shit at this, if you know what I mean.  Jason Downes, slightly less than shit.  Yeah, welcome, you're on the path.  Um, and the other thing is, um, as we kind of move into winter, of course, all the summer sports have finished.

So, number one son has taken up sailing over the last 12 months. Yes. Yeah. In little, in little, Little boats and he's been, you know, been 12 months or so he's come a long way. Uh, and he's teamed up with, uh, an older lad Ben, if you're listening, hello. Uh, and they seem to be getting along pretty well and doing okay in the water in their races.

So, you know, first season sailing together, sort of came middle of the pack at the end of the season. So, which is pretty good, right? Yeah. Yeah. I've realized I'm that dad. Oh, are you? Yeah, I'm the, I'm the equivalent of standing on the sidelines, yelling at the ref, right? 

That stuff's hard, right? Like, you know, how do you get to support people? You know, uh, I've had to learn not to ask where they come in the race. It's more like, you know, did you have fun? You know,  anyway, um, for context a couple of, uh, number one, sons, uh, Friends also sail out of the same sailing club.

Yeah. Oh, and they're in the same age bracket. And they are three times state champions.  So comparing, you're not comparing. No, no, no. So what I'm hearing. No, no, no. So what I'm saying is, I think that like number one son's doing well, like, and these are all great kids. They're genuinely good kids. Um, they all hang out together.

They're, they're all good friends and it's nice to watch them do that and kind of they get together and they talk sailing business and all that. That's nice.  It's really good. They're the kind of friendships that keep you going, aren't they, in life, those mutual interest friendships. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like ours Jason.

We get together and we talk about work. It's not sad at all. On a Sunday morning. Um, this doesn't happen by magic, right? So a lot of effort goes into these sorts of things and, uh, because I've been spending more time down the sailing club, I'm not a member there, but I'm spending more time down there. You know, kind of dropping them off, picking them up and doing all that sort of stuff.

I just wanted to give a shout out to Alex, who is the sailing development coordinator and also friend of the pod. Hello Alex.  Hello, Alex just for being awesome and for supporting the genius, um, they're doing a wonderful job down there. And it just goes to show that if you support people in Gumbooburn,  they thrive.

They do thrive. You know, I can't help comparing you being that dad and thinking I was that mom when it came to school. Like whenever there was a test, it wasn't like, Hey, how was your day? Did you feel good about it? It was like, what'd you get? How'd you go? And I still do it. I did it the other day in the exam and it went fine.

And I'm like, like, fine, fine. Or like, not, Oh, fine. And he's like, fine.  I'm like, I don't know. So I refused to pay for high school. He went to public school. And, but I am paying for uni, that was the deal, but now I'm paying. I'm like, I'm like a shareholder now. I'm terrible.  I'm up in his grill in a way I never really, well, no, that's a lie.

I was up in his grill during high school as well. You know,  parenting  stuff, man, you think it gets easier, but it doesn't, it gets.  I don't have any, anything to go back to days of shitty nappies sometimes. Although,  at 22, he's now off his P's, you know, earning his own cash, pretty much doesn't need me in his life, really.

Yeah. But he still talks to me, like he sat down and talked to me for a whole 10 minutes last night, you know? Oh, nice. It felt nice. 

You don't need much to, you don't have to water the pot plant very much for another six weeks. 

All right. I'm moving. I'm moving. It's on. Um, I'm going to do them because we promised a mailbag episode. Oh my God. And an epic one. It's going to be. Okay, um, because people have been writing to us and because you're such a terrible bus driver last time, Yeah, I'll own it. Yeah.  We haven't been able to get to the mailbag in recent episodes.

So today we're going to rectify that and we're going to give our mailbag, We're going to rectify the hell out of that.  The love it deserves, this mail. Yes, yes. We love mail, so please keep sending it through. Inga seems to delight in spreading my super secret email address out there. So if you have it, remember it's our little secret  people.

When I reply to the emails, I now just like CC Jason in, but I always say,  you have the code now. That's a secret gift you get. It's a gift you get if you email us, I'm easy to find. I'm just an internet flirt. I'm out there everywhere. Just go to me, you'll find me, you'll find me, so easy. Start off our first one here.

We've got, um, a speak pipe from Kimberly on managing up. Hello. Thank you guys so much for the podcast.  And I started all the way back from the very beginning episode and I'm working my way.

I'm really enjoying  all of the things I'm hearing. I feel like I'm sitting around with some friends for coffee. Um, It gets better. I mean, you've brought up a couple of times this idea of managing up, um, and managing down, obviously managing down, managing people that you supervise, but managing up, I'd like to hear more about how you do that, or if you have specific resources on learning to do that.

Well, I would really appreciate hearing, um, anything you have.  to share about that. Um, and thanks so much for being such a delightful part of my commute to and from work. Unfortunately, it's a very short commute each way. Um, but I really appreciate you being part of my day.  That's so nice. Thank you, Kimberly.

That just,  that always makes those kind of speak pipes always make me smile. Manage on the topic of managing up, Jason, I have some notes, but Um, we also have a letter from Ricky do you want to read that out first? Cause I think it's kind of related and then we can talk about both of them together a little bit.

Maybe. Sure. Sure. Hi. Hi, Inga and Jason. My name is Nicky and I'm an archeologist based in the UK. I'm a big fan of the podcast, stemming back to the beginning of 2023. And I have now trawled a good few of the earlier pods too. Look, people, you don't need to go back to the,  it's like, it's We feel embarrassed, but I mean, it's lovely, everyone says nice things when they go back and then you go, yeah, it sounded a bit, and they're like, yeah, it's a bit terrible, wasn't it?

They put up with it, which is nice, because they know it gets better. Nikki continues to write. I'm also a big fan of the thesis whisperer blog for more than a decade, which I discovered during my PhD. I'm also an unashamed,  I'm also, sorry, that's an amazing link for time to, Ricky, Nikki, Nikki. Oh, that's terrible.

Terrible. Thank you, Nikki. Yes. Yeah. Thank you, Nicky. Thank you for reading that long. That's amazing. 10 years. I appreciate you.  Yeah.  That's a lot of words, too. Yeah, it is. Like, how many words have you written? Well, last time I looked on the blog, there were about 800, 000 words around that. Dang, that's a lot.

Yeah. I mean, not all of them authored by me, but a large amount. Yeah, yeah, yeah. words.  Nikki continues. I'm also an unashamed productivity nerd, um, which stemmed from a need to survive my PhD part time from 2010 to 2017, while working full time and that's not a choice, she's afraid.  Since discovering the pod, I've been super impressed with the techniques you guys have championed and the technology you've mentioned.

I've been building my second brain in Obsidian for a while now. But currently it's full of tips for brewing beer and training plans for rain. So let's try through these two things like we've worked against one another. So really a second brain for my hobbies, if nothing else. I've also managed to wrangle Chatty G to help with some of the communication activities, so writing tweets, et cetera, that I've been producing as part of my job, and there's more of that to come. 

I'm getting in touch due to a recent change in my career trajectory and productivity journey. About 18 months ago, I transitioned from being an academic, from an academic career after five to six years of doing postdoc positions here in the UK in the field of archaeology, which is her discipline, and I now manage training and communications for a digital repository based in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York.

It's been a great pace and it really utilizes the diverse range of skills that I've picked up in academia.  It's also been a great opportunity to take the role that was created and to expand these sections of the organization that were previously managed by one of my hugely talented, but massively overworked colleagues. 

I'm proud of what I've been able to achieve in such a short time, but it hasn't been without its challenges. Moving from deep work on a small number of projects, which is how Nikki worked when she was involved with their research, to juggling a lot of different priorities has been a challenge and some of the productivity hacks and the podcasts have been hugely useful in this change of role.

So getting things done seems to work really well for what she does. So that's, that's awesome.  That being said, although I'm a manager and I essentially manage these two departments by myself with a staff of zero. Well, one, if you include me. Nikki, she's been able to streamline activities a great amount, but I'm getting to the point of realizing that no amount of efficient working is going to allow me to continue at the pace I've been going over the last year.

The issue is, I think I just don't want to oversee the activities that we did before, but expand the activities of these parts of the organization and work towards leading the way in its environment.  Part of realizing my time limitation is, I think, managing my expectations, which can be hard. Oh, yeah. 

Also, I think part of it is just being able to share the load with other team members. As such, and apologies for the long winded introduction, um, I was wondering how you both would go about justifying expanding your teams to your employers. I suppose I'm specifically thinking about, How to show that the extra help was needed to justify this type of expense.

Do I document my time? I'd start there. Just try to justify the expenditure as financial plus or show that the other potentials are, sorry, as a financial plus or show that others potential, an increase to the team may present. I think what she's, I think  what my potential of other people might, you know, she's talking about the opportunity.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. So thank you for that Nikki. And I thought I put those two together because Nikki's dilemma there is a classic example of managing up Kimberley, right? So like managing up is trying to influence or persuade your boss to do something right. Right.

Either something that they haven't thought of doing,  or something they don't want to do, or something they can't be bothered doing. We're all human. Bosses are human. And as a boss myself, I get managed up all the time. My team have full permission to manage up to me, and they do. Thanks to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, um, And there's also just sort of more run of mill of bosses who's just simply forgotten something and need reminding and sometimes reminding repeatedly, which does feel like nagging. And this is where something like OmniFocus I think is really helpful. My boss sort of waves a hand at my machine when I go into meetings and goes, what's in your listy thing there? 

And then I say, well, the things under you are this thing, this thing, and this thing, she says, ah, no, remind me of that thing in June, remind me of this other thing in July. You can probably take that thing off. Right. So we've got into this quite, you know, after five years, she realizes I will come back with things and she, I can be her off, you know, manage her brains off. 

Cognitive load off her. She does really appreciate that. So I think if you can, one of the ways to manage up a boss is be very useful to them. And that's one simple way you can do that. If you've got a thing like OmniFocus. And you can perform that role for them, then you're building cultural capital with them.

You're building trust, you're building gratitude,  you're building a certain level of guilt,  right?  So, so when you ask them, Then you, a friend of mine was always fond of saying you have to earn the right to ask a favor. And I know this sounds like it's not a favor and it doesn't, isn't really a favor.

Like Nikki's particular dilemma, like I would like to do something good for the organization is actually a favor for the organization, not you, but in the context of everyday work, it does actually get framed as a favor that you're asking. So you've got to earn the right to ask a favor and that you earn that with trust and with dependability and with, well, some bosses are big on loyalty.

Lots of bosses are big, I've learned this to my cost over time, but you know, loyalty is important. I think the hardest stuff, I'll just go through my notes here then, Jason, and you can like chip in, I don't know. Yeah. I'm listening as you go. I'm taking mental notes. Okay. Good. Good. Yeah. I think the harder We'll come back to the loyalty one.

I think, yeah, exactly. It's a two way street people. That's all I'm saying. Um, the hardest stuff about managing up, I think is where, where a manager gets really dug in and they don't want to, or I think worse, they think they can't. Um, because the organization will always want to do what organizations do.

They're huge impersonal clusters of, you know, people and things and that, but they have their own sort of momentum and often they will make it like certain procedures and processes make it. Look like you can't do things that you can. I'm going to give an example of this, which is one I learned from long personal experience.

So this is where I talk about how,  how I came to be employed at ANU. So,  uh, I went to visit the students. Invited me strategically to visit and through that, the DVC research, who's the, like, there's the like vice principal of the school basically. Mm-Hmm. of research at the university became aware of me, Googled me, rang me up and said, Hey, that's interesting what you're doing.

Do you wanna come and have lunch? So I went and had a two hour lunch and Mm-Hmm. . The lunch was the interview you have before you have an interview. Yeah. Then they wrote a job ad they put it on the internet for three days. Supposedly in a competitive process. And then I had an interview, but I had, this is where the competitive process really did kick in.

There were like five people interviewing me. It was pretty horrendous. I think I've talked about it before. I don't really remember much of it. It was quite stressful. Apparently I did okay. That's the one where I said  that I worked in a record store where they used to call the cops all the time when they asked me that I didn't have management experience.

Yeah. Um, And I said, if the cops come, I'm your woman. And I think I won that one. Anyway,  um,  because of the slightly unconventional way in which I was hired, right,  I won't they put me on a particular type of contract that needed renewal. Now it was a five year contract and after two years I realized I couldn't apply for any research funding because the term of my employment wasn't So, you know, wasn't long enough.

So I went in and said, well, if you want to keep me, I want to apply for grants and I can't. And they said, okay, we'll just, we'll just do an extension. What landed on my desk was an eight year contract. Right. Slightly unconventional. I think someone at HR actually made a mistake. I didn't question it. I just signed it.

Yeah. That's it. Done. Yeah. I'm like in eight years, either I'll be so entrenched here. I'll be out of here. Like either way. I don't care. Like eight years. I'll think about it then. Anyway, time flies Jason. And before I knew it, I was decked down to three years left on my eight year contract. Right. And I was back in the same situation again.

I was like, this is bullshit. We need to like decide this is a committed relationship or not. Right. Yeah. So when steaming into the new DBC, you know, the previous one who'd hired me had left and the new one was there,  um, and said to him, so, Hey, okay. Hey, it's been great. Thanks for everything. I really enjoyed working here.

One of the reasons that I haven't taken the many other jobs I've been offered because I had been offered many jobs, you know, like we're not offered, offered, but I had a lot of job flirts. Like I had a lot of calls from recruiters. I'd had.  I'd had a few job interviews, I'd, you know, shopped around because as far as I was concerned, A and U hadn't made it a marriage.

I was still on the market.  And I said to him look, my son's now out of school. I don't need to stay in Canberra. And basically the next person who calls me with a good offer, because they will, I was being a bit sort of over east of the wall, but whatever,  I was a bit mad I'll be gone. So like the way that you can stop this happening is you can offer me a permanent appointment.

He said, well, I can't do that  because of the way that you were hired. I said, well, actually you can. And here's why. There was a little, little loophole in there, which I'd become aware of because I'd had this job interview, right? I've actually been interviewed and gone through a competitive process through that, that was enough for HR.

And he went, Oh, right. And so  the next day I got an email, I clicked yes, and that was it. Yeah, yeah. I was permanent. And that, so that was between 2013 and 2019. Okay. The point of this story is  that the other way to make a boss to manage up is to make them feel pain. Right. Got it. Yep.  And so he immediately thought, Ooh, how am I going to replace Inga?

Ooh, you know, this is a lot of hassle. Oh, she's not actually quitting, but she's putting me on notice. Oh, she's made me aware I can do something about it. Even though he was under the impression he couldn't, I'd done all the work to make sure that he could do it. And then he was like, Oh, okay, well, it's really easy.

I'll just press a button. I'll do it.  So that's another example of managing up, like causing management pains. Sometimes it's the only way you get what you want from them, but you've got to be really careful when you do that. And again, I don't think you can do that without doing that first piece, which is building the cultural capital that enables you to,  you know, to go,  you know,  Um, sometimes just being a good girl and doing everything that they want all the time doesn't work.

And sometimes you have to be a little bit rebellious, but you've got to be really choose your moments. It's hard. Like, so you get a spidey sense for it, I suppose. Coming back to Ricky, like the way that you could manage this situation is I think you've got the right idea, gather the data, do the positive case, show them the, the, opportunity cost and so on, because I don't think you're in a position there to say, to use pain as your strategy.

Anyway, so Jason, your thoughts, I haven't given you any space there. So I, just because I know that we've got quite a few letters to go through, I'll try and keep this one as short as I can. You have to go in with the data. Absolutely. I think that's the, that's the first  position. So you need to be able to go in and sort of say, this is where this time is being spent.

There is only so much of it. This is how it's being spent. And these are the results that you're getting from that time spent at the moment. If we add  to that, if we add further resources to that, this is what we can achieve. But it's going to be one of those cases of you need to go in with a really clear idea about what's happening at the moment to be able to give the boss the opportunity to say, well, actually stop doing that. 

Yeah. Right. Yeah, very much. You can't just kind of go in and go.  I want to do this thing because this is the best thing in the entire world. You have to give them the opportunity to have their input into it as well.  And, and they might, they might surprise you about with, you know, what, we don't actually value that thing over there as much as what you think we do.

And you should stop doing that now. And then you can go and you can do some other things as well. Yeah. That's really smart advice.  Really?  The one thing I do there is go, what would you like me to stop doing? Yeah. Like, you'd like me to do this new thing. What would, what of all these things do you want me to stop  doing?

Because you can't get any more, Captain.  Yeah. Yeah. And being able to show your timing data. Is timing's a piece of software that both Ingo and I use to keep track of what we do on our computers. So you can allocate blocks of time to projects that you work on. So you can get an accurate reflection of how much time you're actually spending on a particular thing. 

Really useful for, uh, Particularly if you have to do something, if you have to write a report every year,  knowing how long it takes to report, to write one of those reports, although AI  now might change that a bit. Yeah. But knowing that it takes you 14 report  allows you to budget your time allocation the following year to make sure that you've got enough time to be able to do that.

For example because your boss doesn't actually know what you do  most of the time,  because they're busy doing their work.  They're busy doing their boss things, whatever it is that they're doing. And they probably don't have as close an eye on you as what you think. And a lot of it would be around impressions. 

So they will have an impression of what you are doing.  And then, and that impression can be, and I've had experience of this vastly wrong.  Right. Because if you're because he,  how do I,  I, um, try and keep a calm demeanor. Right. Yeah. At work always, it doesn't matter what's going on, zombie apocalypse, check, earthquake, check.

Right. It's just like, yeah, I'm just over here doing my thing. Right. Um, I'm not that by the way, the risk around that sometimes is that, you know, like, what's he doing? Right. Yeah.  So you need, you will need that data to be able to go in and have that argument and sort of say, this is, this is the facts here.

This is what this looks like right now, so that they can have a better understanding about what your needs are as a result of that, um, that conversation. And it's not you just saying, Hey, we're really busy. And we're like, We're doing all this stuff. They've got something that they can look at and they can go, okay, all right,  I can see what you're saying here and I can make a decision around that because it's the role of the boss to make decisions,  um, often, right.

And when you're, when you're managing up, even though, you know what you need to do and. And it's a really good idea, sometimes you're not in the position to be able to do that. And it's their job to be able to make the decision. So managing up is providing all of that information. It's providing all of that work to the boss so that they're in a position where they can do their boss stuff. 

Yeah. And I think the other thing I would add to that, it's all very deeply wise, Jason. The other thing I would add to that then is, you know, be prepared to just let it go. Like, um, if you don't get what you want, You know, just bank it, go, well, okay, why didn't I succeed that time? Try and see it from their point of view, you know, what, what other pressures have they got on them and why are they making that decision?

You may not agree with it. I, there's been many, many, many times I don't agree with decisions from management, but I'm actually getting way, way better at just going, okay. This is what they want to pay for. I don't make,  it's taken me a lot of therapy, Jason, like a lot.  Therapists did say, you know, you don't like to sit in the back of the bus and you know that I don't.

Yes. Yeah, I do. Yeah. Yeah, that's, yeah. Because sometimes people, people are human and sometimes they make what appear to be really dumb decisions. Like really dumb decisions. And sometimes they are, to be fair. Sometimes they are stupid decisions. Like sometimes. Not always though. Sometimes there's just, you know, there's information that you're not privy to that they are privy to.

Exactly. And there's priorities that you're not privy to that they are privy to. I mean, I can count on my one hand though, in 25 years in academia, where I think I've seen genuinely stupid  decisions.  Most of the time, they're not. And I, like, I say this absolutely truthfully, current management doesn't make stupid decisions.

And that's why we get along really well. So I've realized I had very low tolerance for stupid decisions, very low. And I, yeah, again, something I've talked with my therapist about quite a bit, but I think there's a whole episode to be had here on the concept of invisible work. Because I think what you said about your boss not knowing what you're doing, I think that's And how to make it visible to them without overwhelming them or looking like you always need help.

That's part of the managing up business as well. So look, Kimberley, we've started to answer your question. There's probably heaps more to say. Nikki, hopefully we have provided you some leads, but I think you're on the right track. Measure, measure, measure. Try that first.  Start there. Yeah. Start there. And the, the,  often the hardest thing to do, like measuring time is, is relatively easy.

You know, timing will do that for you and put it out in, you know, really easy to read graphs and section it out and do all that sort of stuff, which is really, really good. It's about measuring your impact. Yes. And, and you can do that with, I find money being the most important thing. The thing that really focuses the mind.

So with the bootcamp, for instance, I got an increase, a massive increase in funding to bootcamp by just proving doing a side by side comparison of people who'd been treated with bootcamp with comparison cases of people who hadn't like a medical research model. I did this over four years. So sometimes you have to be really patient to collect the data that's really going to convince, but I did eventually convince them that I'd save them 1.

7 million.  Yeah. For an investment of around 20, 000. And they were like, Oh, this is a no brainer. Yep. And then they said, can you do 10 a year? And I was the dog who caught the car, Jason, at that point, I'm like, I just want to, I just want a funding to do four and now you want 10?  Yes. Okay.  I need more people on my team.

And that, they gave me that, so, you know,  um,  right. A letter from Fiona about Obsidian. So do you want to read out the letter from Fiona? Yep. Yep. She's,  she uses the subject. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That's a nice subject. We like it. We like it.

Hi Inga and Jason. There is not many, any times that I feel my young adult children listen to me. Oh, I relate. I'm just gonna have a moment. I just read this, I'm like, I see you, I feel you, Fiona.  However, thanks to both of you, when my eldest got a summer research internship between engineering and science semesters, she listened to her, she listened to my advice, like to Fiona's.

Exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark, I get it. Yeah.  Fiona is a final year PhD student, and when asked how to keep track of all the literature for a review she needed to write, I showed her Zotero, Obsidian, and Research Rabbit. Well, within a day, she had a newly installed Obsidian on storage, importing from Zotero.

There's icons, colors, links everywhere, all the bells and whistles.  I know you can go down that rabbit hole. I know, but I'm actually just really impressed with Fiona's oldest child because like that shit is hard, Jason. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And within a day she did it. I'm just saying the resilience of youth. 

Yeah. The brains of you, like Mark Zuckerberg's muscle are better than ours, go on. Yes.  Um, her supervisor was so impressed with the work that she had produced that she now has an ongoing small EFT position so she can ditch, yeah that is, so she can ditch the, uh, hospitality work. Wow. She even has a two week overseas data collection trip to Italy coming up, and that's paid by the university.

Wow. Needless to say, yeah, needless to say, Fiona said that if she needed her, she could be her research assistant. No direct thanks, but it is awesome to see her flourishing.  And she has agreed to give me a copy of her Obsidian template.  That's amazing and so amazing. And Fiona gave me the Zotero template and I've implemented it in my system.

So thank you to Fiona's adult child. I now have emojis,  amazing things. And via Fiona's email, I also helped Coralie, friend of the pod, Coralie in Newcastle, solve some of her annoying obsidian problems and I love it. I love it. I love everything about that whole email exchange of us old ladies, um,  you leveraging the young person's brain to solve our obsidian problems that, you know, this is the thing with obsidian, it is, um,  a commitment would commitment be the word I'm looking for.

Yeah, we did talk about that. You know, it isn't, it isn't super easy. I, I, let's not over,  I don't know how hard it is though, either at the same time. Like it's, it's really easy to get into and to start writing words, right? Absolutely. It's only when you want to do these fancy bells and whistles that it becomes problematic.

But thank you, Fiona. And thank you for your patience going back and forth emailing me and Coralie and actually my little Obsidian mailing list. We all thank you. It just reminded me, I got an email yesterday. Today, actually which I'm going to read out to you, Jason. I haven't put it in the thing because it's also obsidian related and the subject is obsidian equals procrastination in disguise. 

And this is from Nicole. Who's a PhD student hiring Ingrid Jason. So I started a PhD at the start of March, leaping from a successful career in mid level government health management to an utterly confronting life as a student. Yep. We witness you where all of a sudden my, all my previously held beliefs in my own self worth are questionable.

I'm sorry. Academia does that to you. It does it to everyone. It's pretty shit. Anyway, that aside, I have my big girl pants on. I've discovered your podcast about three weeks ago and I've been totally diverted by, for any other works. Since then, such as the joy of student life. I'm told I decided to look at obsidian because I'm a new student.

It would be great to set up something that worked well at this point in my journey, right? Well, three weeks later, I'm still head deep in trying to figure it out and get my Kindle scribe to sync to my obsidian vault, and I have this whole process. I have to say this whole process is out of frustration, but it compels me to keep working on it.

But to the detriment of my student work, I'm not writing to you in the expectation you'll wave your magic wand. No, to the contrary, I'm writing to say thanks, though I'm sure it sounds more like a vent or should I say a vent thanks. I like that, Ben, thanks. I am at the point where a sensible decision would be to give this one more weekend and call the whole thing off or use a pen and paper.

How do I maintain my sanity while keeping Obsidian in its place? Warmest love for the podcast and the joy it brings to my new life. We're, we're there with you, Nicole. Actually this is like, Anytime you're sort of bringing a new device in sync with Obsidian, it's got, there's just going to be issues.

But the good thing about it is once you've set it up, you never think about it. It just does its thing. And there is just a little bit of setup pain. So Kindle sync Nicole sent me all the things that is going wrong, and I'm just going to send it to the Brains Trust mailing list and see if they can sort it out, because so far there's nothing they can't sort out, Jason.

I put you on it against your will. I just, I, I didn't seek consent. I just put you on it.  And you would have seen already a little bit of the nerdery go backwards and forwards on that. It's pretty ad hoc.  But there's, there's about 12 people on there. And I would say about a half of them.  I'm like absolute guns and the other half of us are like, what? 

But we learn in community and we all get better. And when a new person comes on, sometimes it's helpful to explain to that person, you know, something you've learned. It consolidates the learning, but. Just needless to be said, the good thing about Obsidian, yeah, I don't want to overplay the difficulty of it because it is easy to use it in easy mode.

The more complicated you make it, the more it will complicate your life for sure. But it doesn't mean you won't get value out of just doing the basics. And when we wrote the Rich Academic, Poor Academic book the workflow for that was Claude, Straight to Obsidian, heaps of editing. I did five, six, seven times as much editing as I did actual Claude work.

Um, so it is a real collaboration book, but then Jason, I just dragged the file out of the file structure, dropped it on marked two. Thank you for that.  It did a beautiful job of transferring it into all sorts of other formats. You just set it up and it just goes. And I've just been using that so much.

It's so simple. You just drag and drop it on there and suddenly you've got a word file that just opens up and it's, it really does clean things up as well. So, um, yeah. So I think even if you're just using it on basic mode there's a lot of advantages in it. Just having all your stuff there.  Yeah. Yeah.

Everyone's PhD journey is different and, uh, unique, and I get that. One of the things that I heard, I think I heard in that letter  was, uh, maybe a little bit of guilt about how much time she's spending doing this sort of stuff versus, you know, Doing the student y stuff, you know, like being the student  and you're in a far better position, Inga, than me to comment around that sort of stuff.

But I, I want to talk about in a  second,  in the second third of mine I, I painted our house.  Like,  do you know what I mean? Like, just sometimes, like, that's what you need to do is, you know, I'm not putting words on a piece of paper or doing anything like that but I'm doing something and it was still working towards, I was still working towards my PhD because I was kind of  painting, house painting is one of those things where you.

You know, it's busy enough and, and you have to pay enough attention to what you're doing, so you don't do a shit job, but it's,  but it's also meditative. And so you can continue to think and process the stuff that's going on in the back of your brain. You just give it its own little place to work away.

That's what I found anyway. Yeah. And so when I came back to it, like I had things that were much more well formed in terms of my ideas and I was able to then continue on. So at the time I was a little bit worried about the amount of time I was spending painting various rooms in our house, but but  you know, it all comes together at the end, I think is.

And so don't,  You will have times when you can't be super productive or you don't imagine  you can't act in ways that you imagine a really super productive PhD student must act in. Yeah. Um,  cause it's just not like that. There's, there's just, you know, for every person it's a unique, it's a unique, um, experience.

And so  don't beat yourself up over some of that sort of stuff. You've spent some time and Inga's advice is absolutely perfect. Is absolutely right. Like this thing will pay off for you in the future. Um, you're right at the start of your PhD. So now's the time to do that kind of investment. It will make, you'll get that time back in the future.

So, yeah. My friend, my friend, Will Grant calls what you're talking about with painting the house. My friend, Will Grant. Talks about that being the meat computer.  He goes, Oh, you know, you just got to trust the meat computer. Or he goes, the meat computer just doesn't, like it, it isn't on your same timescale or the meat computer doesn't work in a linear fashion.

And Will justifies this for not taking notes, because he said, if it's really important, it'll stick in the meat computer. And I, I mean, I can't be that laissez faire, but I've got to say it does work for him. He's,  uh, and I don't know if he's made computers just more exceptionally tuned than mine, and maybe I keep track of too much.

And maybe by doing that, he kind of automatically excludes things that, you know, maybe aren't so relevant or don't really need to be followed up. Or  I would also add that he's a white man and maybe gets away with a little bit more of that than maybe I would in my female body. I don't know. Like I, it's hard to say, but I think, I think his point is sometimes you just got to give.

So ideas time to brew and the good thing about the kind of creative procrastination around something like Obsidian is at least you're doing something useful, right? And as long as you're still doing your reading, you know, and this is something you nut around with it's not the only thing you're doing.

You're not completely captured by it. I can understand that obsession. Like if you just go, okay, I'm going to give this two hours and then I'm going to go and do something else. You might actually find that you crack the obsidian problem because you've given the meat computer a little bit of time to go, Oh, maybe it's the path that I did for that template file is wrong.

That's happened to me the other day. I'm like, Oh, maybe I just. Gave it the wrong path name and that's all that it was, but it took me going away from it to actually realize that's what was going on. So I still think it's worth the effort and investment. And I did say, I did say to Nicole, you know, did you read the blog post?

Cause after our last pod, I did write that blog post. I did the coffee vault. I put it in GitHub. Did you see my GitHub?  I'm very impressed. Yeah, well, I did get a little tiny bit of help from Mr. Thesis Whisperer to set up my GitHub and then, yeah, it did take him like an hour and a half to set up my GitHub, thank you, Luke.

Um, but it looked great. It looked great. And, um, and it's a really good way to share file structures. So I'll do GitHub things again, I think. Um, I really enjoyed that. All right. I am got to move us on cause we are still, we're going to get through this mailbag though, unfortunately without the rest of the spade pot, sorry.

Um, we've got, um, a letter here from Charlotte now we wrote, we read a bit of Charlotte's other letter out another time, but Charlotte did come back with two things, um, that she mentioned. She said one last thing and I'll leave you both in peace. Well, two things. Do you want to read this that yeah, so in context, the previous conversation was around email.

Um, it was around, you know, what, which email clients you use and how do, how do you talk in email and all that sort of stuff.  So Charlotte says, she's got two things. Yesterday, our school started the new year with a staff wellbeing session, including half an hour on learning tricks in Outlook. Wow. There was a huge company, I know, right? 

Like pound for pound, right? Yeah. If you're going to spend your whole entire life in email, which academics tend to do,  right? Spend the half an hour and learn how to do the damn thing properly. I think that is excellent management. And like, anyway, go, go ahead. Yeah.  Charlotte says that there was a huge complaint about the point of all this.

And I was like, no, this is the best thing. Am I the only one geeking out on email folders and stuff? You are not Charlotte. You're not. And all the listeners of the pod are nodding along, going, why don't my managers put on a half an hour Outlook tricks? I know, right? Har out. Yeah. They don't know what they got.

They could hide their ineptitude by saying that the environment has changed and Copilot is a thing now. Oh, they could do some, they could go, you know what, email's evolved. We've got Copilot. Yes. So we can do some training on this new thing and kind of gloss over the fact that they never trained people how to use the basic tools.

Right.  Just saying. Yeah, that's good. That's very good. Yeah, yeah. Good suggestion. Yeah. Then the other thing this morning when I was catching up with an older pod, Extreme Ownership and your discussion on elbow patches versus entrepreneurs for people who need to remember Inga went on at length about the different types of  academics that exist.

I need to tell you that this was the most validating half hour ever. It totally made sense of why I'm here at a small university doing the stuff I do, which makes a lot of elbow patches, frown and worry. Yes. So those of you who haven't,  keep doing what you do best. Yeah, yeah, keep it up. Yeah. So to those who haven't listened to that episode, it is a good one.

I think, is that the one where you did your Navy SEALS romance, um, review? I'm not sure.  Yes. I think that. Is it? We  both did a review. Yeah. Anyway. We talked about, um, I talked about Extreme Ownership and then I sent you a copy and made you read it. Oh, that's right. I don't know. I gave you my review. You did Navy SEALS.

I did Extreme. We should do something like that again.  I have more romances, but anyway, elbow patches are the kind of conventional academic signifiers of success, you know, papers and stuff and entrepreneurs are like, make the things do the things. I think the thing that's really been fun about rich academic, poor academic, to circle that back for just a moment is people writing to Narelle and I this week and saying, actually, You, rich academic, poor academic is about side hustles, right?

Like how you make money on the side of your conventional academic job and how you do that with IP issues and all that sort of stuff, which I didn't explain very well in the intro, actually. I just sort of got stuck into  talking about, anyway so, we had one person write to us to say, actually, the advice that you give is advice that I've used to keep my academic.

Department going, I realized that what you're describing as a side hustle is actually how we make enough money on the side through contract work, through, um, running workshops to actually employ people in our research unit to keep us going. So it's like a side hustle inside the university, which is really interesting to hear, and that's an example of sort of entrepreneurship.

You know, what can you sell? And then bring money into the university and use that to hire staff, hire yourself, hire those kinds of things. So we might add a chapter to Rich Academic, Poor Academic saying, Oh, okay, well, these are techniques to earn money on the side of your academic job. But what about if you actually use these internally?

I think that would be a really good addition to Rich Academic, Poor Academic version two. Anyway, stay tuned.  That'll bump up against the  Massively bureaucratic.  Exactly. And I have plenty of experience with that. Processes of, you know, that sort of stuff. Um, the other thing, I don't know whether or not you've mentioned it in your book, because I haven't read the actual book bit of it.

But did you talk about, A lot of universities will have conflict of interest and outside work policies.  Yes. So you do need to be careful about those things. Yes. Yeah. And in fact, that's a bit where Claude was really helpful in the writing of the book, because I gave it academic ANU's policy and I gave it some talking points I wanted to talk about.

And it came in. And it matched into the policy and sort of, it, it, it helped me write a much better section on that of things to be careful about and how to sort of understand what you can earn on the side when you should take annual leave, where you should look at what your university will allow you to do.

Um. Yeah. With your time and also the importance of communicating with your manager about that and stuff. So yeah, there's a whole section. I think it's in the finance department where we talk about IP, conflict of interest, copyright. And there's obviously heaps more to say about that. And it's a bit Australian specific because that's what we know.

But we're just honest about that and say, well, you'll need to look for the equivalent document at your university. There will be one. Yeah. Like often it's just knowing that such a document exists.  Yeah, and I imagine that the environment, um, for our American listeners would be vastly different over there because of the way in which their system is structured.

It seems to me that university professors in the States have a lot more free reign to go and do consulting, outside work consulting. Yeah, well they're only paid six months of the year.  Yeah. In the  business disciplines anyway, the ones that I'm familiar with. Yeah. So they get good pay, so they could live on it, just paid six months of the year, but they, a lot of people on tenure, at least, that's why tenure is so sought after, is that six of the other months of the year, you could sit around and do your research, or, you could You could go and do other things and people do. 

Right. We would have included a speak pipe about from Ben about traveling tips, but we can't, because thank you for nothing Riverside right now. I don't know what's happening. Um, but we will bring you that next time. But Ben did write to us. He did. I don't know if it's Ben. It's two, it could be two different Ben.

So do you want to read out this other email from Ben? I'll read out the other Ben, um, this is from Ben and Ben says, hi, Inga and Jason found your email. Excellent. Thank you. Yes. Good work. Yes. A question for you. I'm an early career researcher who works entirely remotely. Next year is shaping up to be the first year I have a manageable teaching load.

That is only six units. That sounds like a lot.  I know, right?  ? I'm not sure I'd call that manageable, but Okay. Yeah.  Yeah.  Um, so I wanna get my shit together and actually make some progress on my PhD. Mm. All the best. No, hang on. What are the Must have, yeah, yeah. What are the must have apps, tools, and pieces of equipment that you would recommend to help me keep my head above water?

Bear in mind, I'm a PC user and have some terrible experience with Max, so, he won't go there again. So our, we are a mat shop here on the rig. Sorry, not sorry. Yeah, but I, we did get into some of this sort of stuff, so we might be able to help you. Inga, you wrote back and recommended Bujo and then Ben came back and said,  I've been attempting Bujo for a few years now, I've really struggled to stick with it.

Which do you tackle first, the task manager or the Bujo? Thanks again. Yes. And then I went right. You went right in.  It's been ages since I've actually talked about my tech stack and how, and how we kind of put all that sort of stuff together.  Um, but the first thing to note is that there's a website called  alternative2.

net. So I'll put it in the show notes.  Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes, but if, whenever you, if you've got a piece of software and you want to find out what are the alternatives for it, you go to alternative two. net and that will list all of the similar kinds of software with crowdsourced recommendations and ratings and those sorts of things. 

So for example, we talk about OmniFocus a lot, so OmniFocus is task management software. It's for the Mac only. But if you go to alternative. net. Um, it will pop up things like Asana and other ones as well. And you can do a,  you can do a bit of a comparison. You can find something that's going to work for you.

So with that, I'm going to talk about the ones that we use. These are all Mac based, but there are probably alternatives that will work as well.  The first one is text expander. We wrote a whole book on this, right? We did. Yep. Still sells to this day. Passive income. My favorite type of income. Yep. Excellent.

Um, we wrote a whole book on this nifty piece of software and how it can save you hours a week in academic work. Um, we'll put a link in the show notes again. If you haven't already got a copy, it's not very expensive, um, 3. 99 and we go, it's a look book. Lots of examples of. How you can deploy this piece of software just to save you a bunch of time, um, during your academic week text expander works on PC as well.

So, straight up, just load that shit up, right? Like just use that one.  Um, you'll need something to write in. Both Inger and I are loving Obsidian right now for a tool that allows us to capture our thoughts, notes, ideas, anything really. Amazing and free, but for your actual PhD, and we, we touched on this just in our latest episode just now,  um, I recommend Scrivener.

Mm, I've heard of Scrivener. Mm, I know, I know. So, um, But it's still great. As a PhD, if I was doing a PhD, I would for sure write it in Scrivener. Yep. Yeah. Yep. Do you want to quickly say what Scrivener is or? Scrivener is this piece of software. It's a word processing package that's actually elegant and really nice to write in.

Designed by a person who was writing their PhD.  Um, it's really, really powerful. One of the things that I love about it is it allows you to set little word targets. So some days, right, like 500 words is all you're going to get out of me. So that's what my target is and just keep pushing forward. It's a really, really nice, elegant piece of software and it doesn't choke when it gets, when the work gets big.

I love it. No. So Word will just, it'll just balk when you get to a certain size and your PhD will exceed that limit. So write PDFs in Scrivener when you were writing your PhD? Because I only discovered it after my PhD, so I've only seen other people use it. But did you still have a separate maintenance or did you put all the PDFs inside Scrivener as well in the reference folder?

No, I didn't keep them. Okay. I kept them out. I even though they had started to wind down or stopped supporting papers,  um, I continued to use papers and kept everything in there. And so, uh, I don't know what I'd recommend now to manage references in Skuvinov. I mean, I've only used it. it to write books and I've just handled the referencing manually. 

Um, because in a book you can, well, in the type of books I write, at least you can, other books you wouldn't be able to. So I've just always put the PDFs in the reference folder and then you can split screen, write and look at the PDF at the same time. So it keeps all the references for that particular project bound to the writing.

It's all like, it's like, imagine a Manila folder that's got the PDFs in it and your draft. And, and a little sticky note on the front telling you what's everything that's in there. That's kind of how Scrivener works that, um, you can write in chunks and you can move things around really easily. You can see different parts of your document together and compare them.

So yeah, I'm a huge fan as well, but I don't know what, you the reference manager. I have heard people use Zotero with it. So, I don't know. So it's all, it's all in the, it's the way I'm going back in time. It's been ages since I've used it, but the way in which you, you have to hook up your codes, your Zotero codes will need to hook into the text.

It's because it all marries together when you do the export. Right. When you export out of Scrivener, the software package to a word. Format, you know, how you can export to different formats, like eBooks and markdown and all that sort of stuff.  That's the other thing is before. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the, that's the process where it all kind of brings it all together then is in that export thing.

So  be a little bit of work that you might need to do to make sure that those codes are  correctly formatted. And like I say, I was using papers at the time, so, but Scrivener absolutely would be,  I would write in that. However, having said that, I've noticed that in the Obsidian chat that there was a few,  um, references to long form plugins for Obsidian, um, which I've not explored yet.

So to your point about, can you write long form in Obsidian? Maybe you can, but I've not, I've not looked at those plugins yet. Well, I haven't had to, but I'm just saying like in a PhD, you really need to keep track of all your references. It's like critically important. Whereas in the sort of work I do, it's like a little, I'm a little more loosey goosey.

I've got to admit, cause I don't.  I'm not writing really reference heavy text, um, but yeah, uh, definitely explore that. Yeah. So, sorry. So there's, there's two sort of main writing options. We recommend Obsidian and Scrivener and I would recommend you have a look at both. Yeah. I talked a little bit about the bullet journal.

I use a Moleskine A5 dotted notebook to structure up my Bujo. I know Inga  goes out and buys the cheap. Cheat versions, not cheap, cheat versions that are pre structured. But anyway, I think both of us would recommend StickInstance. Nozkin just released a bullet journal, Jason. And I just bought one.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've got two other bullet, it'll be my third from now to bullet journal. Cause  people delightfully, when I go and give talks now as a sort of speaker gift I get, well, I get given my preferred. Bullet journal. I have a couple sitting in the shop. It's so nice. They're all plastic wraps.

And they're like, the little gifts of love that keep giving. I just on that. Stickers.  Yes.  Important. Hashtag important. So, so important. I was like, I roll my eyes every time Inga talks about stickers.

Cause I'd like, I, I just can't. Anyway,  Inga showed me  something. I can't remember. It was like a, a.  Company called Pip Sticks, which are a bunch of stickers. It's like a book of stickers, right? Yeah, I bought it. This one's called So Many Planner Stickers. I like how it's so dot, many, dot, planner, dot, stickers. 

That looks great. It's very good. It's got all sorts of stuff in here. Um, we'll put a link in the show notes for that one. Hey, yeah. So there's that one. And then there's this other one.  Oh my God. So. many. feelings.  stickers. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like 2, 700 stickers in there. They're not like they repeat and stuff.

So there's not 2, Yeah, well you have repeated feelings and feelpinions. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. You know, everything from, you know, So, so excited as a feeling to like a little sticker of someone doing yoga, who's feeling chilled out to do a little sticker that just says nope.  I like that. That would compliment my period stickers where I have angry uterus stickers.

Yes. Yes. So, um, I'm sorry. I'm here to say I'm a, I've come around. I'm like, Oh my God, you're sticker man, I'm stickering all sorts of stuff in there. And I've also got, uh, you sent me this some years ago, Inga. Yes. I knew you'd eventually get to where I am with the stickers and the boojo. I knew it would happen.

I had faith. And it's like  a little puppy one, right? And the one that gets used a lot is the puppy poo. It's like, because sometimes you're just like,  yeah, that requires. Boo  sticker, that one.  Um,  so, both of us Stickers. Boo jars and stickers. Boojos and stickers. One day we're going to write our Boojo for academic book.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was the other one on my list of us to do the book when we meet for two days in the library when you pull up the tinny. Yeah. Yeah. Number four, if you have to do remote teaching, this one, I'm born from deep experience because I was doing  a reasonable amount of teaching around the world and I found screencasting to be an excellent support for my teaching.

So a little bit of setup involved here, but. Buy the best piece of screen casting software that you can actually afford. So the piece that so the bit that I use was some software called ScreenFlow  and it was pretty sophisticated. It was expensive. Every year the subscription would come around and it was like,  Goddammit, that hurts.

Yeah. Um, but learn to use it and use it effectively. And it's because it's especially good for building up libraries. So what I used to do was build, I would do a screencast of say a concept. Right. Right. Like really, really, really super short. Right. And it was super short. Devoid of any context around it.

So it was just the concept. Right. And so then I could take that little concept screencast thing and I could drop it into all sorts of other stuff. So what is the screencast? 

How is it different? So  are you like, are you talking about pre recording things like you would with Camtasia or you're like, you're doing a screen recording, you're doing a voiceover, you're doing something like that. So ScreenFlow you would, ScreenFlow you would use instead of Camtasia. Camtasia is what I've got.

It's a bit clunky. Yeah. So.  Yeah. So ScreenFlow is kind of professional level screencast  recording software. So you can split out audio from your, uh, split out your audio from your visual, like it records on multiple channels and then you can, and it's got a full editing suite that sits underneath it as well.

So drag and drop editing, kind of like GarageBand, but for. Yeah. But for for screencasts, it also comes with a massive library of transitions, titles, all that sort of stuff. So you can look really, really professional with kind of a minimum amount of pain, if you know what I mean. Wow. I mean, you've been holding out on me with this one.

Cause that's the sort of thing I. I, I use them during live workshops. Like I don't, I just sort of have, you know, drawings when I've done diagramming and stuff for writing. I have a little, like a really bad YouTube video of me drawing spider diagram and stuff, but I'd love something more sophisticated.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Much more sophisticated and you, and so if you're going to, for example, for you, with your workshops and you're, if you had, let's say you had a library of 50 little.  Screencast grabs that were professionally put together when it comes to, and someone asked you to do a workshop on a particular thing.

Yeah. You don't have to,  you could just drag and drop from your overall library of these things. Oh, I'm gonna talk about this one. I'm gonna talk about this one. Just drag and drop 'em into Yeah, yeah. No, I'm here for it. I hear that. And then you export as, um, whatever you want into whatever format that you want.

Amazing. So either upload directly to YouTube or.  Export it as a high high definition movie file,  and then you can manipulate from there. You can spend hours making that kind of content, by the way. It's one of the things I hear people complain about when they start teaching that, ah, what suddenly I'm a media producer?

I'm like, kind of, yeah. Yeah, you are. Yeah. So the, the key here is and I learned this from a friend who was a builder before he became a DVC academic. Oh yeah. And he said, he said to me, buy the most expensive tools that you can afford. Yeah. Oh, I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Get some ScreenFlow or ScreenFlow or use some kind of the best screen editing, screen capture and editing software that you can, and then go into that practice,  being extremely mindful of the kind of stuff that you want to capture needs to be evergreen.

I learn the hard way. Mm-Hmm. Um, when I first started doing these things, um, I would. Record a concept and then I would put this really contemporary example with it to illustrate that particular concept.

And then 12 months time when I had to re teach this stuff again, that example was well and truly out of date. And so I'd have to re record it. That's painful and you don't want to do that, right? Yeah. So record your concept separately to your examples. You know what, Jason, we could write a bloody excellent book about teaching. 

Like we could, you know, Like I've got so many book ideas now, now that I know that we can write one in a weekend, changes the game, right? It completely changes the game. I think there's certainly a book to be written. I know there's a lot written about teaching technology and a lot of my friends have studied in this area and stuff, but it's all very theoretical. 

Whereas like, what you just, the knowledge you just dropped down, like, holy shit, taking notes in my about. How I might use this in my practice, but that, that, that just, that whole bit that you did there, gold, that's all I'm saying.  Yeah. So  in the context of a technology stack, I think, you know, it's, yeah, you'd need something like that in your kit. 

And you probably don't even know you need it. You just go, Oh, I can't seem to like, there's this big empty gap of things I'd sort of like to do, but you don't realize there's a tool actually that does all those things and we'll fill that gap for you. Reasonably accessible.  Um,  I found that the tools that, um, RMIT deployed at the time  were not sophisticated enough. 

Cause, you know, academics are notoriously cheap. They don't, they won't invest in this stuff. But I found that actually, I found that actually, if you do invest in it, it makes a big difference, right? The quality of The tools that they give you by default out of the pack, like, if you think about the tools they give you to write with Word, I mean, come on, like, a lot of people will be like, what do you mean in Word is the only one?

I'm like, there are so many. Yeah. And in this era of like cross platform functionality where things are built to transfer between things, it's not like the old days where you had to go, Oh, it's either WordStar or Word. Or Lotus Notes, you know, they've still got their enterprise thinking and they're just by the like, really most,  anyway, I could get on and rant about that.

We don't have time. Uh, so the next part of your response was about task managers, I think. Yeah, we use, both of us use OmniFocus. Inga and I both use OmniFocus. It is It's amazingly powerful and we can do all sorts of stuff with it. And what I like about OmniFocus 4, the, the most recent version that they've released is that it's now almost like a universal app across your iOS devices and your Macs.

So it, um, whereas before they were kind of, they were two separate things, they did different things, but now they seem to work pretty well together and it's much more intuitive. So you can really. And I, I subscribed to their pro version again because it allows you to do things that I'm not, you wouldn't be able to do with just the basic version.

And that's really around customization of your perspectives. What that means is that you can, you can tell OmniFocus to show, Your task database in whatever way your brain can pretty much think up in the pro version. So if you want to set up a perspective that says, show me all the tasks that I completed from a time period that stretches from three weeks ago to five weeks ago, and you can build a custom perspective and it will just do that.

You know, I don't know how to do that. So, um, one of the things I'm going to put on a list for our library days is for you to show me that. It's coming circling back to Nikki's problem. You know, sometimes putting a number on invisible work.  It's really useful. So if you've got a perspective in OmniFocus that says, I've done tasks around X, you know, type of thing.

Um, for instance, I, I was getting cranky at the end of last year about the time cost of a particular thing that we were organizing. And I went back and counted the number of emails that I'd exchanged with someone about tables being missing. And it was 70, 70 emails.  So by, so getting a handle on some of that, that explains invisible work.

Sometimes you just need one example. Like this is killing me, this project. And it was just 70 emails from it. Like I, you know, but in OmniFocus, if you could say, okay, this many tasks related to my service work or this, you know, can you do it with keywords and things like that?  They've got tags.  I think I need to get better at this because I think that's a bit of my data picture that I'm missing when I'm reporting back problems.

Yep. Yeah. The other thing around OmniFocus is that there's a really vibrant. community around that as well. And so  they've now you can get plugins for community led plugins for OmniFocus and one of my favorite  people for this. So the community writes  all of these plugins so that you can extend OmniFocus in weird and wonderful ways.

And I'll put I'll put the website address into the show notes, but one of my favorite authors is an Australian woman Kaitlin,  I can't think of her last name. It's like Salsky or something. I'll put the, I'll put it in there and she's got a whole library of plugins for OmniFocus. Really?

Yeah. And also it's a really useful things like you can, with her plugins, you can, you can have dependencies between tasks. Ooh. So I'm kind of like, yeah, right. Like do this and then do, yeah, yeah, I know, right. It's like, oh, okay.  Caitlin's wonderful. And yeah, I'll, I'll put her stuff in there. But what I found was you can automate to a certain extent with these plugins.

You can automate OmniFocus. So I used to build my kind of setup. Routine into OmniFocus every year. So I'd press a button and then it would automatically, because I'd written it in such a way that it, it worked on a, if this is the first teaching date, then  date minus X days do this task. So in, you know, in the lead up towards teaching I used to think of teaching as go live date.

And then it's D plus one. For the day after you go live date, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I would set up my whole semester, everything from building my LMS right through to the actual teaching, send this, send this announcement on this particular date sort of thing. And I'd have all the texts for the announcement.

Pretty much written either in text expander. So it'd be send this announcement dot whatever the text expander expansion was, or I'd have the text in the notes field of OmniFocus and just copy paste. I'm getting so lost in the weeds of this explanation, but I'm in absolute awe. And I'm, I just really think we need to.

actually document some of this stuff. And by the way, I would pay you to come and teach me that stuff.  And I'm sure a lot of other people would. I think you underestimate Jason, how like your experience, I think we've talked about this, this on the pod many times, but the, the sheer number of. students used to have in the sheer number of continents you used to be doing with the sheer complexity of the number of tutors that you had reporting to you, just forced you into being like this stupid, like Ripley, Ripley in Aliens 2, you know, in a exo suit,  like that's you in teaching.

I think most people do it sort of artisanal, and I would even count myself as this kind of approach as much as I try and avoid it. It's artisanal, make it, you know, Again, each semester sort of almost start from scratch. Like  there's a kind of perfectionistic urge in me that I sort of go back and I, like, you know, I wait, I, I think in, in summary, I, I waste a lot of time by not modulizing things like you were talking about your screen flowing before, not kind of thinking about your teaching as a system, but when you've got a technology stack, I think what you can do is it enables you to start thinking things systematically rather than.

As individual little crafted pieces that you do, it's very hard for me to describe exactly what I mean by that. But,  you know, it's, it's, I, I would take out all of the repeatable pieces. So, If I know that I'm going to have to teach this thing again, then there's like build a system for it. Right. So take out all of the heavy lifting of having to think about what the underlying pieces are.

Yeah. You're just good at that. That's all I'm saying. You  focus your time on the actual fun bit, which is the creativity in your teaching. Yeah. Yeah, we focus, we recommend that make sure that whichever task management system that you use that it passes the information from your task.  A calendaring system that works well.

So, for example, I use Fantastical,  um, as my calendar because if I drag, if I create a task, let's say it's 52 minutes long in OmniFocus, I say it's gonna be 52 minutes and I drag that task out of OmniFocus and drag a drop it onto my calendaring fantastical calendar. It will create an appointment in there that's 52 minutes long.

It just respects the, the data inside of OmniFocus. It respects that. And then we'll automatically create something that's 52 minutes long. I'm just adding that to my list of things you need to help me with, because I just cannot get Fantastic Girl to talk to Outlook  properly.  And I'm sure there's something I'm just doing wrong.

And see the way you're going, Oh, means that you know how to do it. So that will be happening.  In our list of things. Yes. Okay. Fantastical is really great. It's just that I can't, if I can't get it to work with Outlook, I can't use it. And so I'm constantly frustrated. I still pay for it, for  my private life. 

Why, why this is really important is because your tasks make up your day. Yes. And if you start dragging tasks across into your calendar, you're quickly going to see how much time you've got available to you. Which is the huge, it's a massive move that many, many, many people don't make. Again, Jason Yeah. Is actually just putting the time in your diary.

Yeah. And when you start to actually realistically account for it and put it in there suddenly like, fuck, I don't have much time left, actually. Yeah. I need to. Yeah. Or you have to make some choices about what you draw. Exactly. Exactly. And so pick a calendaring app that will respect those, those data fields from your, your task management app.

Mm-Hmm. Um. And then the last one I, I said, this is not so much a tool as a, as an important principle. Schedule time to do something that is good for you that you like doing and ensure that you do it. So for me, it's Jiu Jitsu. I go to class, whether I have a deadline or not, I recognize that the university will happily accept all the time and effort that I'm prepared to feed it.

So you need to recognize that as well and make sure that you have time away from your PhD and the teaching.  This is incredibly important to avoid burnout. I can't.  We've talked about burnout,  we actually had a, an episode on overwhelming burnout. That where we talked about that, because at RMIT, I had an episode where I was just completely overwhelmed and had pretty much a brain lock for a day where I just couldn't find my way out of it.

So if you're interested in what that looks like go back to that particular episode, but you do not want to experience overwhelming burnout if you can avoid it. And I know it's tempting to just think, work harder, muscle up, but you really need something away from your PhD and away from the work, away from the teaching if you're going to maintain over the long haul, if you're going to maintain some health and some mental health. 

So, make sure that you find And if you're anything like us You're going to have to have an episode of burnout before you really take that seriously. Yeah. Unfortunately. I think you have to actually experience it. Lots of people do before they're like, Oh, this is what you're talking about. Yeah, that's right.

It's not great.  It's not great. It's not great. And it the problem with burnout, if you're conscientious and you work hard all the time, and you think that working hard is really, really valuable and  problem with burnout is that you can't work.  Yep. And so it's this kind of like, it attacks you on multiple levels, right? 

It's like, you can't physically, like, you can't do it because like your health suffers incredibly for it, but also mentally it puts you in this really challenging position where you just can't do it. Yeah. And like, that's just, that's nasty. You know, lots of therapy there. Yeah. Finally, email. We, we've talked about email a bit but my recommendation here is spend time with the various email packages.

I know Ingo uses Outlook because there's, there's a piece of, there's a thing in Outlook she really values and she doesn't want to get rid of. It's something to do with meetings. Instantly create a meeting.  Yeah, something like that. Um, I don't use Outlook because I don't, I don't like Outlook. So  find the email  program that's going to work for you.

Most, most email clients will have a. Like a free subscription period, maybe two weeks or a month or something like that. Go deep, go granular, really figure it out. Right. And then buy the one that's going to work best for you and then stick with it. Yeah. I bought fast mail for my personal mail and actually use the app on my phone.

It's really good.  Yeah. So there's a lot out there. Bend it to your will. Bend it to your will. Absolutely. I'm going to, because I'm a crappy bus driver, you've got the overall time. I can't see it, but I'm guessing it's really high. Yeah. Absolutely.  We are two minutes and two, we're two hours and two minutes and 42 seconds.

Holy moly. Yeah. There's 20 minutes of like, it didn't work in the middle. Oh, that's true. That's true. Okay. Let's carry on. We would have put here a speak pipe from Jen about her new internet boyfriend, Claude, who is also my new internet boyfriend, Claude AI from Opus. But you know, speak pipes not working.

So next time, um, we got a letter from Tim about Obsidian and Zotero. We're, we're kind of, I tried to package them together, but it kind of ended up separated out my apologies. But. Tim just said, I read your blog on Obsidian and noted you're looking for Readwise Zotero integration. I use Obsidian Zotero and the Kindle community plugin to extract Kindle notes.

And I extract Zotero notes into Obsidian using another plugin called Zotero integration, which I also use. But I think it was Tim who also put us onto Omnivore. Which I've now replaced Readwise completely. So Readwise is out of my life. Don't play the subscription anymore. Really pleased. So the Kindle plug in that goes into Obsidian, the community plug in, Is fine.

It works well. And Omnivore as my web clipper now, works great too. So I've replaced Pocket and Readwise with Omnivore. Oh, I need to get back to Tim because I'm having trouble syncing my mobile version of Omnivore and my desktop version of Omnivore with Obsidian because it requires an API key. To do all that, and for the life of me, I can't get it to work.

Maybe I can help you with this because I manage that pretty easily.  Oh, okay. I'm good with the old API key, that's from doing online commerce stuff. We can do swapsie doodle. So you teach me perspectives in OmniFocus and I'll teach you API keys in Omnivore,  put on the list. He, thank you, Tim, so much.

He also put me onto JavaScript bookmark Clipper by the Obsidian CEO, which might be an alternative to Omnivore for those who prefers it. And there's a blog post there that I'm going to put in the show notes as well on the topic of Obsidian, friend of the pod, Janet Davey. Hello, Janet. Um, thank you for writing to us again.

Sorry. We like last time we were so long in reading your email out, but this time we're not. Um, there is a rather long email, but. You go for it, Jason. Janet writes, Hi Ingrid and Jason. Thoroughly enjoyed your latest episode, Obsidian, of On the Reg and the ongoing discussion about how you, you are using large language models and AI tools.

I find your discussions far more useful for understanding the potentials of my own use cases than looking at the long list of AI prompts. Yeah, they are good too. Yeah. Never apologize for the two hour episodes. That's lucky.  , because this one's gonna be like maybe over. There's a bit of, there's a lot of snippy, there's a lot of snippy.

The tangents are great and it's an excuse a while away, two hours at the gym. Good for you, Janice. Um, I, yeah, I know, right? Yeah. I must say I was shocked about Inga not knowing about the Z Tarot connector. Many people were, Luke laughed so much when we listen.  , , have you got it working now? 

I recently migrated my whole reference library from EndNote to Zotero and I have no regrets. It's amazing watching the Zotero connector automatically grab a reference and its PDF from a web page and rename the PDF according to the convention I set it and move the PDF to the folder I specified all in one click.

Oh yeah, one click. Yes. I'm still Deel's 99. 9 percent certain you're aware of another amazing feature in Zotero, but just in case she goes on to share. Yes. So look, this is really important listeners. It doesn't always mean that we do know it. So we do like to share. Yes.  If the PDF linked to a reference in Zotero has highlights in it.

So, She reads and highlights in Readwise and then downloads the now highlighted PDF as part of her workflow. You can right click on the linked PDF in Zotero and pick Add Note from Annotations. This creates a note with all of the highlights and notes you made while reading. And the in text citation is there, complete with page number for every highlight.

Can I just say that's what Zotero integration does in Obsidian, essentially. Yep. Yep. Yep.  If you click on any highlight, it opens the PDF and navigates to the spot where that bit of text is. Yeah, which is pretty cool. Yeah. I tried that. I didn't know that. So thank you, Janet.  Papers. Remember papers? Yeah. And how good papers are.

Used to do that. Used to do that too. And that was missing from our Zotero life. And now it's back. Yes.  Thank you, Janet. The notes can then be synced two ways with Obsidian or other Markdown compatible PKM software. She uses craft, Janet uses craft docs. 

Using the better notes, plugins, Markdown export. Then you can edit in Obsidian and clicking on a highlight in Obsidian or wherever still opens the PDF and takes you back to that exact spot on the paper. See, that's not what my Zotero integration does, which is. That would be bloody handy. Yeah. I know, right?

This feels like next level. It does feel like next level. Janet, one day we're going to have to meet up in a library in Docklands and tell us all this stuff. Yeah. We can, we can go toodling around in the tinny. We could. This solves a problem I was having of loving Readwise, but not loving the page numbers when associated with the highlights I was taking.

And I really wanted to find a highlight in the original doc. Yeah. Like you think Readwise, I would think that was the important thing to be able to do is one of the reasons I wanted to get rid of it.  Yeah, yeah, with all of your discussion on custom GPTs in the previous episode I felt like I was missing out a little but then you brought up Claude and that reassured me that there's still a lot of out there, there's still a lot out there of  Besides just chatty and every day, right?

Like just there's just new things happen every day. Mm hmm at the moment Janet writes that she's using GPT 4 inside TaskAid. Now, I've not heard of TaskAid before. Did you look it up? I've got some things to say. Okay. Yeah. What Janet finds awesome about this is that she can create multiple AI agents, e.

g. an academic critic, a proofreader, a translator, an interviewer, a research assistant. Great idea. And it. Each one has its own role, description, knowledge uploaded files, et cetera, and frequently used commands. This means that a lot of the context background setting part of guiding chatty before providing the task is already preloaded and you're good to go every time. 

I know, right? Like if you were having a proof, like the  academic critique, you just use that particular AI agent and it already knows what it has to do. That's right. And if you try it and say you're critiquing from the point of view of someone who doesn't agree with, and then just insert  that doesn't agree with, it's, it's bloody brilliant.

Don't ask it to do something and pretend it's a climate change denier. It's too good at that, by the way. It's right. 

Um,  You can even have more than one persona, which she really likes. Um, now it's not in these show notes, but she, um, but Jenna included a couple of screenshots of, of what she does. And she sort of, she goes on to say I feel you get a lot of feedback on this episode from people wanting to keep the conversation going.

So please keep it up.  One of her. Thank you for writing to us, Janet. Yes. Thank you, Janet. Yeah. You, you, Janet, you're like, we'd like to meet you one day, Janet. I'm just saying, we'll just bring our computers over and say, could you fix this thing for us? Thank you. So on, on Janet's recommendation, I went and bought the pro version of test.

Yeah, just to go and kick its tires because I, I thought that this would be really, really useful. I'm looking it up now. Yeah, go on. I can see that you need,  Janet would be able to ease my way into this a lot more, a lot faster than what the Tascade documentation does. I've, I've found  what you need is trust applied and I, I feel like Janet is our, is our, is  Yeah.

Like Janet is our person on this one. Yeah. It's pretty good. It's got a whole bunch of already built in prompts. Um, and so you can get it to do a whole lots of stuff. I really liked this idea of that inbuilt personas for the AI agents, um, as well. I think that's really, really good. Um,  it's I.  I, I put a, like a personal project in there and I've been kicking the tires with that, it can do things like  take a bunch of tasks and then,  uh, reformat them as like a mind map or reformat them in lots of other different ways. 

Really, really, really good. Really, really useful. One of the things that Janet. Included in her original email was screenshot where she has  one of her AI agents will translate from Chinese to English. Amazing. So, yeah, like really, like, the world we're living in Jason, I mean, I thought when we started this pod, like we have a couple of years in it, maybe run out of things to talk about, except to be you and I just talking about the tinny or something, but like we, I really feel like we're not only on the cusp, I think we've fallen over into really, really different ways of working.

That to me are personally quite exciting,  but I still just don't like it being on the web  and my data being visible to tech bros and stuff. I am more and more leaning into the idea of please build it into my Apple ecosystem  and have a captive pet. I'd give it a name. We'd have a great relationship.  Yeah,  me and me and my computer already have that kind of relationship and we'd just be, you know, bringing it all together if, if the AI was built in, in clever ways.

And it's all about trust, really, isn't it? Because I trust Apple to do that.  Maybe misplaced trust. I don't know, but I trust them.  It'll be interesting to see what happens, how this space shakes out, right? Yeah. Because there's a lot of competition at the moment. Yeah, so much. Almost too much. It's all kind of, it's a lot of noise. 

Yeah, so where it will, I think, where this will shake out  is will be in the user data.  So, all of the large language models have all pretty much, as far as I understand, have pretty much utilized all of the  available Data to train, pre training data, you know, like the publicly available stuff.

And so now if they're going to get better, if once everybody uses all of that freely available data to pre train their models, they all become similar. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then it becomes a case of how do you.  Yeah.  So it will be. Tuning. Meta or Google. Yeah. Or something like that. Yeah. It uses their private user data.

Yeah.  To train their large language models. Yeah. I don't love it. That's going to be the thing that will separate out the people, will separate out the AIs in this space. But also I think the integration into, into the devices like that,  you know, rather than into the products, it's in the device. I don't know.

I don't know where it's going. Yeah.  Yeah. And so.  That's when you have to start thinking about that industry in discrete chunks. So which part of the industry you're really interested in, because the hardware, that integration hardware piece is a completely different business model to the provision of large language model.

for the business models, Jason, I thought last year, my little side hustle, you know, I go around and I teach for, you know, workshops and days at other unis to get paid a hefty day, right? Actually. It's hefty because I want to. I usually use it for, to discourage people, but it doesn't seem to be discouraging them.

Maybe I need to put it up a bit more. Um, lately everyone's saying yes to it. And I'm like, Oh, too much. Um,  so  yeah, I thought that my little sideline in teaching people how to use chatty would last, I don't know, three months, but it seems to be pretty solid. So I think people still have a lot of trouble with this.

technology, like getting their heads around and then, and what you're saying about more and more and more products in the market just makes it more and more and more confusing and difficult, I think. So I think I'll have a little sideline in that,  you know, sort of narrow down on the task, but I'm just conscious of the time.

I've got one more letter. I reckon we can do it, Jason. I believe in us.  Okay. All right. Here we go. Last one. Yeah. Um, so thank you Janet.  Hopefully awesome. Yeah, we'll get to catch up.  Hi Inga and Jason. I'm a fairly new listener to On The Reg, so from mid  2023. This is an anonymous letter, by the way, requested anonymity.

Yep. Anonymity. But it's become one of my favorite podcasts. Thank you for all the time and effort that you put into it. I really enjoyed the book section, especially the romance and navy seal novel reviews.  More of those, please. If you haven't read the Dirk Pitt books by Clive Kessler, they're great.

And they both have romance and action. I've read all of them. I've read all of them. Have you? Yeah. You've read them.  He wrote Raise the Titanic, which is one of my, I don't know. I think I must've read that when I was about 16 or something and made a lifelong impression of it.  Oh God. Okay. I started listening to the pod while finishing my honours and this year I'm embarking on a PhD.

Oh, congrats. Congratulations.  Naturally, I've been working my way through the On The Reg Back catalog,  um, and the Thesis Whisperer blog,  where you're info'd the link on the page why you need a PhD notebook. Doesn't seem to be working. Oh, a little bit of work there, I left that in there because this, I think I've told before that I've got rot. 

In the blog? It's everywhere.  And thank you people, and please continue to point them out. Some of them I can fix. That one I can't. So this is why I'm working slowly on getting into a new content management system of some kind. Yeah. But no one professional seems to be able to tell me why it's not, why it's got rot, but it's got rot.

So if you encounter that, soz. It's like coming into a house with  like mold in it or something. I don't know. I can't like, I've got to rebuild, but the rebuilding task is so huge. I just keep putting it off. Anyway.  Yeah. AI can help. This anonymous writer says that they've read a few of your PhD papers.

Dbooks, Inga, and all have been fantastic and super helpful, and I would agree, I think your books are wonderful. Thank you. I'm inspired by all of this. I've set myself up with Zotero and Obsidian, however, I'm already overwhelmed by the amount of reading I'll have to do. Yeah, that's the PhD way. Yeah, welcome.

Hmm. Have either of you ever used software to listen to academic papers?  If yes, I'd be interested to know if you've found it an effective, useful way to process the content. Quick answer to that is yes and no.  Yes, I have. No, it isn't. Not for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I couldn't. It just doesn't.  Yeah. Like audiobooks and driving.

Same sort of problem. But  to try and get my, To try and compete on an even keel with Inga and the rate at which she reads I tried to listen to audiobooks while I was on my hour long commute to and from work  and unable to do that. Unable to actually listen to the book, retain the information and, um, and then talk about it sensibly later.

So,  yeah. Everyone's different, right? Yeah. Like I need some down. Some brains can do it. Yeah. Some brains are really good at it. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So just like, you need to test it out for you, really. But I haven't found anything that works for me, nothing.  I'm also currently working, so my PhD supervisor were, had extremely low vision.

Oh yeah. And so she used, she used a lot of assistive technology to be able to help her. She was able to do it. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you can train your brain. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm also currently working in a professional role at a university and I'm seeing a lot of the issues you and your listeners have described, primarily the overworked and under resourced academic.

Yep. And many current PhD students I talk to aren't very enthusiastic about working in academia when they finish because of this. Sensible.  Yeah, given on the reg was created to address some of the problems that crop up while working in the university sector. Can you give us some, can you give us all some hope?

Those are the reasons why you both stay in this area.  What are the best things about working for a university? Apologies if you've addressed these questions before, I'm not fully up to date with all of the episodes yet. Also Inga,  has there been an update on your romance novel? I've made no progress, I've made zero, but you know,  I am, I am thinking about how Claude might be able to help me with this.

Yeah. As well. So one of the things I enjoy about Claude AI is you can have a conversation with it.  Yeah. And sometimes I just get in there when I'm not feeling very creative about something and I just have a conversation with it and  it helps. I don't know. A few, a few autistic PhD students have recently approached me saying I, speaking of processing time, leaving aside the hope question, which I'm not sure we have time to get into, to be frank.

Yeah. Absolutely. But we'll take it under advisement, shall we?  Um, yeah, I've got I've got some things that I could say. I'll just quickly say then about this audio processing thing is that speech to text tools are out there. There's lots of them. I use Descript for instance and I do listen to audio books, but I don't, I just don't expect to actually take things in properly.

I write, I use them actually to screen whether I want to buy a book. And then I. Then I buy the book and read it if I really want to get the information out of it. But I have been talking to a few autistic ADHD students now, because I'm so upfront and out talking about that, that people write to me. And I've, a few of them I've made the suggestion to sort of get into Claude and use that as a You know, speak, if you need to speak to someone and no one's prepared to listen to you enough, you can speak into something like Descript or Obsidian or whatever, and then send the transcript to Claude and then have a conversation with Claude based on that.

And so I'm waiting for reports back from some of those neurodivergent students to see if they found that helpful. So I think these, these technologies might be useful in all sorts of different ways, but yes, Hope, why do you stay in university? Jason  . Uh, why?  Um, yeah, I, well, it's a bad way to ask us this, isn't it loaded, loaded question.

Uh, the way in which I think about universities is I think about them as mission-based organizations. Yes. Right. So I'm,  I'm not here for the,  I'm not here for the organization. I'm here for the mission. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah.  So, so different universities will approach that mission in different ways.

And so what you try and do is you try and find a way to line yourself up with the university that matches your particular sense of values as best you possibly can in order to prosecute the mission. And for me, the mission I've found, I came late to education. I, my  Schooling education was not spectacular.

My undergraduates, uh, education was not spectacular either. It was like, huh, like it was, I was educated at, if you know what I mean, rather than educated with. But it wasn't until I got to do my master's degree and  I was then in charge of my own particular direction that I suddenly got it, I suddenly understood the power of education and what it can do. 

And because of what it did for me, it turbo charged my careers did a whole lot of really awesome stuff. And then later with the PhD as well, when you're kind of really working on the edge of that new knowledge frontier how incredibly amazing that is as an experience and what that can do  in terms of in terms of.

You know, just benefits that it brings to individuals and to, you know, larger society and those sorts of things. I, so I, I hundred percent, I'm like, I'm on board with that. I'm on board with the mission of education. And universities are a good way to be able to forward that mission. I believe everybody should, um, if they want to have a, a university education, should be given the best opportunity that they can.

Remove as many barriers as we possibly can to allow that to occur. Hmm.  So that things can move forward. I mean, that's why I get up in the morning and work at universities, um, is because of that mission. If you think about  universities, if you think about the organization of a university, like the business bit of a university, that's usually pretty shit, right?

Like bureaucracy, politics,  all sorts of stuff going on there. It's insane. Some. In some cases, the worst kind of environments to work in in some ways. And so those organizational elements are things that I think  maybe people  make the mistake of thinking that the, the mission of the university and the way in which it goes about doing its stuff are somehow tied together, they're not.

Like if I was to come to ANU, for example, and come and work inside ANU, there'd be some things that have. reasonably familiar to me,  you know, the way in which ANU goes about doing its education, its, its mission is different to the way in which La Trobe goes about doing it.  And they are both different to RMIT and Melbourne University and, you know, all the others as well. 

So finding that university, finding that mission is what,  that's what keeps me in the sector. I agree totally.  And in fact, you've absolutely nailed it, mission based organizations and universities aren't the only ones,  right?  All sorts of those organizations everywhere. And some of them are corporate and some of them are not, but ones that have strong missions that you align with, I think it's the key.

I would, I would say I've really always been mission based in this pod work and the blog work, which is, you know, I call a hobby. I guess it's a hobby. It is a hobby. I don't make any money from it. I enjoy it. I would make, you know,  enough to cover it. But I would say, so my mission and I wrote it down years ago was that I just, I believe the world's in trouble and I believe that PhD students are not.

hold the keys to solving some of those problems and too many of them spend too long doing their PhD and my job is to help them get out. And that doesn't have to be just my university. I've always seen my mission really broadly. And so for me, the university that I'm working at is kind of irrelevant. And so that's where probably you and I differ a little, and that's because you do, you've always been focused more in undergraduate education, whereas the PhD is much more, it's much more of a worldwide phenomenon.

And so  part of the reason that I sort of don't care what university I work at to do that work is because I have all these outside things that I do. And that keeps, ironically, has kept me in the, kept me in academia much longer than maybe otherwise would be. The things I do outside of my own university are much more fulfilling.

In lots of ways and much more the heart work than the work that I do every day, which is a lot of very glorified events, management and committee sitting in, it does boil down to that, but, you know, but it keeps, it keeps roofs over my head and Volvo's potentially in my garage. Right. Um, So, but I, I think that you still can have a sense of mission and purpose, and that's the key thing.

I like that, all being said, ANU has been the best place for me to work because they also want graduated researchers more so than other universities I've worked at. Right. So they want to get researchers in, they want to graduate them. And, and so they support me to do that work better than other universities have.

And so that, that's why, so, you know, so in a way there is mission alignment, but there wouldn't have to be, I can make my own fun at any university. And I would highly recommend to think about how you can do that because we don't always have choices. You, you live in Melbourne, it's a big city. There's,  Six or eight universities you can work at.

I live in a small city. There's about two. And some people can't move because of families and or they don't have universities that have the discipline or whatever. So maybe you need to find that broader sense of purpose to keep you stuck in or look for another mission driven organization. I think that's a really, I don't think we could answer it any better than that.

That's the end of our mail bag, except for the speak pipes that I couldn't play, which will be in the next one. Hopefully. In the next one. Yeah. Yes.  Um, given that we the sun has just hit my screen, so I can't actually see it, but  we've been doing this long enough this Sunday morning. It's the longest episode ever, potentially. 

The sun has come around, swung around, around the horizon. We are  two hours, 28 minutes, 25 seconds. There's probably 20 minutes of mucking around with technical problems though, I hope. Yeah, so we'll be, we'll be about, we'll be about 22 hours, I guess. I will just say on terms of books that I'm reading, if people are looking for books I'm reading three books at once at the moment, Quit by Annie Duke.

This is on the back of what you said in the last podcast. Great book. And because you talked about it in the last podcast, I just bought it. It's bloody good. So if you're looking for something to read, Quit is Good, go back to the previous episode, Inga talks all about why it's good. Annie Duke.  Annie Duke.

Yep. Co Intelligence by Ethan Mollick, because Inga texted me and said it was great. So I bought it on the spot. It's really great.  It is really great.  We can talk about that next episode, maybe.  Yep. Yep. And I'm reading a book called The First Rule of Mastery, Stop Worrying About What People Think of You, by Michael Gervais, who's a PhD.

He's also a world class psychologist performance psychologist, one of those kind of American books, but he goes deep into the fear of other people's opinions and why that can often hold you back. So lots of yeah. Lots of experiments that they undertook to be able to figure out this sort of stuff.

Lots of models in there. Yeah. That might have to be a thing I buy after this. This  book, The First Rule of Mastery, Stop Worrying About What People Think of You,  is probably my most highlighted book in my entire library. Wow. That's a big book.  Yeah. And I've got, and I read, I tend to read with a pencil in my hand.

Yeah. And so this one's, it's full of,  I'm finding, I use little codes, like I'll underline something and I'll put a C next to it, um, if it's for a concept. Um, that I'm interested in or I'll put a Q next to it. If it's a quote that I'm interested in, Oh, yeah, that's handy. I don't do that.  Oh, and then you, you, you create your own index at the front of the board.

Oh God, yeah,  no, that's really sensible. Okay. We could have another podcast about that. Yeah.  And then you, then you just go, Oh no, there was a quote in there and it's like, Oh yeah, it's page edition. You're talking about a paper book at this point though, which I very rarely, very rarely read. Yeah. Yeah. Hard copy.

Hard copy. Yeah. True. But yes,  those are the three things that I've got on my, um, on my thing at the moment. They're great.  Yeah. Yeah. Well, well worth it. So if you've got to the end of this and you're looking for something. Good. We're not doing two minute tips because I don't have one. Do you have one?

Nope. And we're going to just move straight on to our route. You're just going to have to skip it. You've got plenty in there. I don't know. It's too much probably.  We do love reviews though, right? So here we are at the end. Yes. And we would love it if you could leave a review on Apple podcast. We read every one and we use them to actively shape our show.

I went back late last night, Inga, to Apple podcast to see if there was, and the last review we've got was from Apple podcast. October last year. Yeah. Come on, people scroll down.  So it's, it's a, it's a, uh, it's a call out to our wonderful On The Red fan. If you could leave a review, that would be awesome. We would love it.

Definitely. We promise we'll raid it out. If you want to join us with a question, a great way to do that is to record it via our SpeakPipe page and Inga promises she'll figure out what's going on in Riverside. It'll be SpeakPipe all the way next time. All the way down. Yeah. We'd love to hear from you from, uh, SpeakPipe.

Or you can write to, you can email and, um,  I'm easy to find. Probably  reply with my super secret email address attached to it as well. We can be found on Blue Sky, but I think it was more of a Threads, Threads person. I love Threads, yeah. It's sad. I think it's pretty much every, Everywhere as at thesis whisperer on blue sky, I'm at Dr.

JD on mastodon, we've got Inga as thesis whisperer on Oz. social and I'm at Jason Downs on RaveNation. club and on threads, Inga is at thesis whisperer and I refuse to join her on threads. That's fine. It's really fine.  Um, so that's us for another, another episode of On The Rec. Episode number 64. Oh my gosh.

And I feel like we're just getting started. I do feel like we're just getting started. I will see you in a couple of weeks though and promise a YouTube video of us in the tinny, weather permitting.  Weather permitting. Yep. All right. See you, Jay. See ya. Okay. Bye.