EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,010 words- 0:00 – 15:00
Windows computers just don't…
- CWChris Williamson
Windows computers just don't work.
- JOJonny
I have what I think is the best list of life hacks I've ever had. It is a waterproof notepad for the shower.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- YUYusef
(laughs)
- JOJonny
(laughs)
- YUYusef
Someone we know was doing lateral raises with, um, the metal dumbbells, and between reps he just dinked his between the dumbbells.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- YUYusef
And that was game over. He just, like, stopped the workout, went home.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) (whoosh) It is another life hacks episode: tools, tactics, and techniques for a productive and efficient life. We'll be going through some of the life hacks that we've found over the last few months, telling you what we think of them, and then the other two people are going to tear them to pieces. If you like the sound of them, they will be linked in the show notes below, either on Amazon or a website or even just a sentence. So Johnny, I've got a present for you here. I'm not sure if you can see that.
- YUYusef
A potato.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, nice.
- YUYusef
Oh, yes.
- CWChris Williamson
It's, this is a very-
- YUYusef
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
I mean, it's, it's burning my fingers. I'm having to sort of... So if, Johnny, if you can just, uh.
- JOJonny
What I, what we all need is a potato prop.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Well, you've got one.
- JOJonny
And then Dean can make it happen.
- CWChris Williamson
Look like a real potato, yeah. But this is a real potato.
- JOJonny
So-
- CWChris Williamson
You're up first, Johnny. What have you got for us on this episode?
- JOJonny
It looks room temperature, but I'm happy to catch it. So I have what I think is the best list of life hacks I've ever had in the history of life hacks.
- CWChris Williamson
Big shout.
- JOJonny
Are we ready-
- CWChris Williamson
Big shout.
- JOJonny
... for life hack number one? I think I've already told Yousaf this, but it is a waterproof notepad for the shower.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JOJonny
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Oh.
- JOJonny
So I (laughs) , I have the most ideas and thoughts that ever occur to me all day happen in the shower. And what I do is, like, try and leave my phone within sort of, kind of touching distance, so that-
- 15:00 – 30:00
Got dining, got dining…
- JOJonny
But do you mean-
- CWChris Williamson
Got dining, got dining chairs though.
- JOJonny
(laughs) I do have dining chairs.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JOJonny
I've never thought about that, you know? But that, that literally would fix the problem. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Well, did you not see this over summer when the first lockdown happened, there was t- tons and tons of videos of like lads in the garden, I, with like some unfortunate garden trestle chair. It's just a, you know, like a c- classic plastic barbecue chair-
- JOJonny
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... and they've got themselves plus like quite a bit of weight, and you can see the legs are just going like this.
- YUYusef
Oh, horrible.
- JOJonny
I, I think like falling with a barbell in your hands while you're falling, it just, it's awful, isn't it? The thought of it is, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
So much can go wrong.
- JOJonny
Yeah. I've seen people put barbells on wheelie bins, like two wheelie bins and then the wheelie bin lids cave in, and stuff like that. Um-
- YUYusef
I think we've, we've probably had every possible, um, variation of barbell injury from like dropping it on your toe to like clipping your chin when you're doing an overhead press. That is awful. Have you ever done that?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- YUYusef
Or you bite your tongue off.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's bad.
- JOJonny
But I thought of, I thought of you, Chris, with th- with these 'cause didn't you, wasn't the source of your back injury a dumbbell clean?
- CWChris Williamson
It was, yeah. Correct. Fuck me.
- JOJonny
So I think, yeah, I, I don't know-
- CWChris Williamson
That's three years, three years ago that, well remembered.
- JOJonny
I don't know why I remember that but I, I, it's something that I always, whenever I'm like moving something into place I always think like, "Be careful."
- CWChris Williamson
'Cause Chris, Chris hurt himself before.
- JOJonny
So, yeah. So like whenever you're doing a dumbbell overhead press, if you're doing like four sets, that's four, maybe more... So I'm, I'm actually doing like density style circuits with these, with dumbbells at the moment, so it's multiple sets of low reps. That's like 10 or 15 cleans-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JOJonny
... that I would have to do, and I'm terrible at them.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- YUYusef
So it, there's a recurring theme there. Like I remember a few years ago, I've got a really crisp memory of me lying on the floor like in tears, and Chris came with a care package of malt loaf and a smoothie and it, it was, and like Voltarol, it was really, really heartwarming.
- CWChris Williamson
Voltarol.
- YUYusef
Uh, Voltarol. And, uh, that was because at I think at like 6:00 in the morning I had the 50 kilo dumbbells, trying to get them into place for a, uh, seated ben-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- 30:00 – 45:00
It's a really important…
- CWChris Williamson
on me, and I'm just able to be like, "This is really, really nice. Like, this makes me quite happy." The, the sky's clear, I can see birds, there was a dog on the other side of the street, I enjoyed the dog. Like, just finding joy today and not presuming that it's a thing that you get to do in the future once you've got today out of the way.
- YUYusef
It's a really important point, especially for people that listen to this podcast. I think we're gonna, we're all gonna be more on the spectrum of deferring enjoyment and investing in ourselves long term. And it's quite easy to lose sight of the fact that you're still living your life right now-
- JOJonny
Mm-hmm.
- YUYusef
... and so finding some kind of inherent enjoyment from things that you do day to day is really important.
- CWChris Williamson
I think you're quite good with that, Johnny. Obviously, that was one of the big reasons that you bought a dog, right? Was to kind of take you out of that neurotic sort of self-involved, business-involved mind and, "I'm gonna kind of focus on an- another being and kind of just be present with it."
- JOJonny
Yeah. Well, it's, it's like, there's just certain aspects of having a dog that you just cannot avoid. Like, it needs to be taken for a walk. There's no, like, it's not negotiable really. So, yeah, and it is like the automating laughing and happiness, definitely. Daily thing. It's brilliant. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Johnny, what you got?
- JOJonny
It's me. Right. So, my, uh, this hack is related to reading speed, but I should preface this with I am now, big moment, drum roll, reading again. (laughs) And the reason that I'm reading again, which is kind of a life hack within the life hack, is something that Yousef really kind of flipped the switch in my brain and explained to me, which is the power of, um, things like Evernote, Craft, all these bits of software. I've never really had a use for them. I've never really understood, like, I just take notes and then don't refer to the notes and it's just pointless. But hearing Yousef explain this like second brain idea and how if, if you, as you read a book or as you listen to a podcast or you're learning something that you think like, "Yeah, I'll need this in the future," then using that app as your searchable database for information. So I've now, when I'm writing notes about books and when I'm writing notes about like Q&A calls I'm listening to or calls we're on, I'm writing it as though like, "When I need this in the future, what will I, what do I think I'll search for? What do I think I'll type in to find it?" So like, this morning, Yousef asked me a question. I, I was like, I'm sure I've typed literally the- a- a keyword in and suddenly three or four notes that I've made on that thing get brought up and I'm like, "Oh yeah, I remember." That's already in my brain. I just can't recall it. So I have to use something else. So, that means that I've kind of, all right, it makes sense to read now. I kind of understand why I'm reading again. Um, and a tip related to that, that I got from Mark Manson, which you two may have already come across, when you're reading you tend to have like the, the inner voice that's reading aloud. So you're like reading in your head and that limits your reading speed quite a lot. And if you just stop that, so if you just- so like when you're watching a film with subtitles, you don't read the words in your head as the film's happening. You just look at it and you've read it. And you can do that with a book if you just decide to do that with a book. So you just look at the words and you're like, "I've read the page," and lo and behold, it's, it's there. So just, I suppose two, two in one. I've, I've kind of jumped the queue a little bit, but one of them is using something like Evernote if you have it as whenever I learn something, I'm gonna put it in here so that I can search for this topic in the future and what would that look like, that note. And then secondly, if you are then gonna read from that or read as a result of that, just stop reading the words in your head and you read way quicker.
- YUYusef
Nice. So use something like Evernote, but not Evernote.
- JOJonny
But not Evernote.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) That's fucking shit.
- JOJonny
Well, so I- Yousef recommended Craft to me, so that's what I've started using.
- CWChris Williamson
It seems at the moment like Roam is, is really sort of picking up speed, but I've never touched Roam. I've seen Notion and a couple of other things. What advice have you got for stopping the inner voice in your head whilst reading, other than just saying "Stop"?
- JOJonny
(sighs) I don't know. I think like what I, what I think of is if this, uh, exactly the example I gave, like if this were a film and I was reading subtitles, I would just look at the words. Like when you, when you read things in normal life when you're not trying to read them, you still read the words. Like you've still, you can still understand the sentence written down. Like when you look at a sign, you don't go, "Turn left at the next exit." It's just, you look at it and you understand it, and you scan it quickly.
- YUYusef
There's a tip from Tony Buzan about stopping this, which is you give your audiophonic loop in your head something to do. So you either think of a, a tune that doesn't have words or you repeat something to yourself. This is an exercise. This isn't something you do for all of your reading for the rest of your life.
- JOJonny
(laughs)
- YUYusef
But it's just to be able to learn that you can, as Johnny said, you can detach the audiophonic loop from reading and you don't have to be like, "The cat sat on the mat."
- JOJonny
(laughs) That's awesome. That's a good tip.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I like that.
- JOJonny
It feels weird because it, it feels like you're not reading initially. But if you kind of test yourself on the recall of, "What have I just read?" it's amazing how like it took you seconds to read the page when it previously would have taken a minute. But you've still taken it all in.
- CWChris Williamson
The problem I have with note taking whilst reading is that I don't sink into the content anywhere near as deeply.
- JOJonny
Mm-mm.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, and this is why for me reading on Kindle and then using progressive summarization highlighting makes a lot more sense because-
- JOJonny
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... you can just go through, highlight as you go and then single batch process the entire book once you're done, uh, go back through and make the, the, the key takeaways. Plus if you're using Readwise, which is actually, I'll, I'll just explain that one as my next one after this, um, but if you're using Readwise then they'll deliver them to you on a daily basis.
- JOJonny
So I s- I suppose the, the tip is more like if you... So I see, like I was explaining this to Yousef and Yousef's like way further down the rabbit hole with me than this stuff. (laughs) This is, I'm just learning. But I see OmniFocus as like my RAM on a computer. So like if something is said to me, all I need to do...... is make sure it goes from there and into... And I know, I know that that system will take care of it. And then the other thing, so Evernote, or Craft, or Roam, or whatever, is like your hard drive. So I don't need it now, I may never need it, but if I have a findable version of it in the future, when I want to learn, when I'm like, "I want to get more into meditation. What are some best, what are the best resources about meditation?" I'll just type meditation into my hard drive. And I'm, "Oh, yeah, I read a book six months ago about, that re- referenced something tiny that now I can make use of." So that... It doesn't really matter how you make the notes, I suppose, as long as it's findable whenever you want that thing in the future.
- YUYusef
That is a great analogy. As long as you have a, that... As you start to build more and more notes, 'cause I think I've got 5,000 or so at this point, that's where you start to need a, a decent tagging structure more and more. (clears throat) And the benefit of tags as well as notebooks, is notebooks are the hierarchical structure that's, you know, organized and you've, you've created it deliberately. But tags allow things to straddle across multiple notebooks, because they are themes that are shared but don't necessarily fit into a single notebook. And over time, you start to build this emergent structure, and eventually cross-links between notes that previously didn't happen. And that's why the benefit of, that's why Roam has become so popular, because it allows ideas to have sex with each other.
- CWChris Williamson
Or, you can downgrade back from new Evernote to Evernote Legacy and just get rid of all of your notes and you don't have this problem at all.
- YUYusef
Exactly, yeah. You just flash fade.
- JOJonny
It's like the Men in Black flash pen, isn't it? But, but (whale call)
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Mm. …
- JOJonny
recommend two websites that I can look at, you can fire that text off and suddenly 10 projects are moving forward every day in little ways, and there's not really any resistance to it. And before you know it, they've all been done. So basically the, the, the hack is if you've got anything on your to-do list that you are considering doing today that is a huge thing, instead of that, break it down into 10 things, into 10 steps.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JOJonny
So if you were explaining to somebody else how you're going to do this action, what do those 10 steps look like? And the, only the first one should be on your to-do list, if that makes sense. Mm. And that's, that's... For anyone who's read Getting Things Done, that is just how David Allen explained it 30 years ago, whenever the book was read. (laughs) It's only just- (laughs) We've just come across it now, yeah, exactly. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. It's, um... I think one of the main reasons people procrastinate is that they don't know what to do next.
- JOJonny
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
So a lot of the time I'll speak to the boys that are in the office about a- an assignment that they're struggling to do and they're like, "Oh, mate, like, I was in the library all day yesterday and I'm, I'm here, I was in the office today and, you know, there's... I've got this big assignment coming in." You go, "Okay, have you made the document on which you're going to write the assignment?"
- JOJonny
(laughs) Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
"Oh, well, no, I haven't. I, I, I've been..." Right, okay. And it's like... So a, a big part of that, and I, I think me and Yusuf probably suffer with this a little bit more than you, Johnny, is to know that time dedicated to planning and reviewing is more important than time dedicated to the task. Like, if you spend time before you do a thing constructing how you're going to do the thing, it makes everything so much easier. And if you don't do it-
- JOJonny
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
... the- it's basically a different challenge. It's a totally different challenge to try and, um, manifest, what do I need to do and then how am I going to do it? As opposed to batching, okay, first I'm gonna do this, then I'm gonna do that, then I'm gonna ring the person, then I'm gonna get the paperwork, then I'm gonna go blah, blah. And just doing that. And after that, it's literally just a case of some, some past version of you, yeah, step after step after step.
- JOJonny
The next step from that is... Sorry, sir.
- YUYusef
Oh, no, just similar to the Chris Sparks thing (clears throat) that... Is it an ounce of planning is worth a pound of execution? Something like that. Um, I definitely, yeah, I definitely do struggle with, if I haven't done that, roll into the morning like a PS1 RPG character-
- JOJonny
(laughs)
- YUYusef
... that walks into the wall and then carries on walking-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- YUYusef
... and slowly rotates on that axis and keeps, keeps walking.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah, it's, um-
- JOJonny
So link, link... Sorry.
- CWChris Williamson
It, it's just that we presume if I can get started on this task now, I'll make progress on this task now. Planning's taking time away from me doing the thing. You're like, "Yeah, but it's, it's deciding to drive to a place without knowing where the place is or the route you're going to take." It's just getting in the car and putting your foot down. Like, o- o- okay, I mean, before that I should probably get the map out, have a look at the route, realize where I need to go, and then I can do it.
- JOJonny
The, the hidden benefit of all of this, that you don't necessarily realize until you've broken things down in that way, is that when you have, like... when you're on a walk and you think, "Oh, I'll call someone," right, or like, "I'll, I've got a bit of spare time, I'll, I'll call someone," and you've got 20 projects in your life broken down into next steps and five of them have things in them with the tag phone call. You can make five phone calls in the 15 minutes that previous you were like, "At some point, you need to make this phone call." Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, and, like, fi- all those things will be moved forward. So it's kind of facilitating the... when you have, you know, you're, you're sat waiting or you're on your phone or you're browsing Amazon and you think, "Oh, yeah, I wonder if there's anything that I've kind of forgotten," and you can s- you can filter through all of the little tiny subsections in your life that when I'm...... putting the art on the wall that I'm going to buy, I'm gonna need picture hooks, and I'm gonna need... so, done. So, it's just a way of, like, reducing resistance, I suppose. Planning and then making things easier on yourself in the future. And who doesn't want that?
- CWChris Williamson
Everyone.
- JOJonny
Easy, easy things are nice, aren't they?
- CWChris Williamson
They're lovely. Seth?
- YUYusef
So, on the, the journal theme, there's an app called Day One which, I can't remember if I've mentioned it on a previous Life Hacks, but it is beautiful. And it's very much designed for journaling and diaries and stuff, so i- it bridges that gap which Johnny was talking about the RAM, which is working memory of your brain, stuff that needs doing and needs to be in the system, but isn't gonna be stored long-term. It's not gonna be archived. And actually if it was in your external brain, it would clog things up. Um, and then you've got the archive, which is the stuff that you want to refer to in the future. But you might have the stuff in the kind of in-between bay, which is reflective stuff that doesn't have an immediate next action but is a way to kind of take all these thoughts and neuroses and patterns and things and just put them into boxes and clarify your own thoughts and, um, manage your, your emotions. And that's the whole purpose of a diary or a journal. And I think I, I definitely see the value in, in Chris' approach of, like, having a handwritten journal that gives you prompts and questions. But if you're the kind of person that hates handwriting, and you want a free-form thing, then Day One is very good. The other benefit of it is that it's... because it's designed like a diary, it allows you to... it, it tracks a lot of data but it's all held on your device, um, in terms of location, photos that you took that day. It's designed to really create like a tapestry of your life, so you can look back on it and it's, it's just quite a cool, um, way to be like, "Ah, yeah, this is like a, a memoir."
- CWChris Williamson
I use Day One for more sort of significant emotional life events. Um, it's also, like, password protected, which is kinda good, so people can't just stumble upon... well, I mean, to be fair, like, my journal's not where the worst stuff on my phone is.
- JOJonny
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
But (laughs) my, my camera roll's got some fairly awful stuff on it as well.
- YUYusef
(laughs)
- JOJonny
(laughs)
- YUYusef
So, that, that's a, that's another one. When you, like, when you're trying to show someone like, "Oh, here's the, um, the new wall that I've had painted," and you have to, like, scroll through the... and people are like, "Uh, uh, uh, that's, like-"
- 1:00:00 – 1:13:37
You have just described…
- JOJonny
ones, some quick ones. Um, quite a lot of people I know, myself included, are very consistent with, like, a multivitamin and vitamin D, but quite inconsistent with creatine. I don't know whether you, either of you two have this problem?
- CWChris Williamson
You have just described me, my friend.
- JOJonny
(laughs)
- YUYusef
(laughs)
- JOJonny
So, I have had this problem in my life for ages, for, like, as long as I can remember, and it's actually credit to MyProtein who fixed this, so they sent us a- a box of stuff, uh, to review, like, pre-Christmas. And in that box was a tub of creatine tablets, creatine monohydrate tablets, that, like, I'd always looked over 'cause I thought, "Well, you know, what benefit's that?" But now I just take five creatine tablets when I take my multivitamin and I always take my creatine. So, there you go.
- YUYusef
That's great.
- CWChris Williamson
That's- that's a good way to put it in, because the only time that you have creatine if you're not having it in tablet form is if you also have a shake, and-
- JOJonny
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
... you don't always have a shake every day.
- JOJonny
Exactly.... so I like, I very rarely miss vitamin D 'cause it's, like, in the morning with breakfast, like multivitamin, vitamin D. And then creatine's like, "Oh, later I'll mix some kind of, like, squash and water and I'll have it then," and I always forget. Or, like, mostly forget.
- YUYusef
Yeah, there's, there's more steps involved in creatine.
- JOJonny
Mm-hmm.
- YUYusef
I think off the back of that, I have been more consistent with creatine recently. But that's because, one, I use CreaPure rather than creatine monohydrate, which is the same, but it's just more purified. It doesn't give me the same nausea that normal creatine does. Um, which is, again, it j- like, the whole James Clear thing, like, if it's unpleasant to do, if it makes you feel nauseous-
- JOJonny
You don't want to do it.
- YUYusef
... then you're like, yeah, you're like, "Oh, well, I'll have it after my meal, not before." And, um, (clears throat) and also mixing it in hot water. So if I have a morning cup of tea, I'll have it before or after the tea.
- JOJonny
I just can't, I just c- the, uh, the thought of putting, like, creatine in my morning coffee just feels...
- YUYusef
I wouldn't put it in your morning coffee.
- JOJonny
'Cause it does have a taste... Oh, what-
- YUYusef
Um, just have it before or after with a little bit of hot water. Not boiling.
- JOJonny
So all those-
- YUYusef
But it's easy to faff though.
- JOJonny
Yeah. Th- the only downside with the tablets are they are quite big. So if you, like, if you're not great with taking tablets in general. Um, but I've actually found it's a nice, quite a nice thing to, to train yourself. So at initially I had to do one tablet at a time, now I'm just all five in at once. So I've trained myself-
- YUYusef
That's why when I, wh- when, when Johnny was at mine and I ordered a, a big bag of carrots and he helped me put them away in the fridge... so that I could train that as well. Um, anyway, my next life hack (laughs) is Blob Opera. So this is a digital one, and it's, I mean, it's very, very highbrow. Um, Google have made a series of AI projects, and Blob Opera is an AI, um, opera thing. There's five blobs and they've all got faces, and each one is, like, tenor and soprano and bass and whatever. And depending on how you move the mouse or your finger or if you're d- doing it on your phone, they do different harmonies and different, um... And you can actually produce some really beautiful blob operas. So if you're listening, search for Blob Opera on Google, have a play around, and say goodbye to your evening 'cause you'll be on it for a while.
- JOJonny
So it's to make music? You specif- you produce the music?
- YUYusef
Yeah, and you can record them, send them to friends.
- CWChris Williamson
Can you see popular ones that other people have done?
- YUYusef
I think you can. I don't know how d- there must be a library of them somewhere.
- JOJonny
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
I've seen the videos. It's, they're quite sort of cute characters and they all go like...
- YUYusef
Yeah, exactly. (laughs)
Episode duration: 1:15:13
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