Speaker 1: Can everybody see me? Just wait, I'm going to share
Speaker 1: my screen. Wait, hang on a second, Okay have I
Speaker 1: Now we've all sat in these dry zoom presentations that
Speaker 1: are slow, boring and engaging and often just plain painful.
Speaker 1: We think to ourselves, how much longer is this going
Speaker 1: to go? For? And don't forget to smile and look
Speaker 1: like you're listening. But does it actually have to be
Speaker 1: this way? Co founder and CEO of Phil Libbin thinks
Speaker 1: definitely not. He's designed a tool that will have your
Speaker 1: colleagues entertained and even laughing during presentations by providing you
Speaker 1: with lots of fun tools and gadgets to utilize so
Speaker 1: to stop your workmates from tuning out. And this isn't
Speaker 1: the first time Phil has looked to make life better
Speaker 1: and easier with technology, because before m M. Phil and
Speaker 1: his team created the life changing note taking app ever
Speaker 1: note which I have been using every single day, many
Speaker 1: times a day, for the better part of a decade.
Speaker 1: So when it comes to building a business, which Phil
Speaker 1: has plenty of experience doing, why are the numbers three
Speaker 1: and ten critical? And why is it better to be
Speaker 1: positive during a meeting instead of trying to appear to
Speaker 1: be smart, and how can working from a museum help
Speaker 1: you solve complex problems? And why is it important to
Speaker 1: differentiate between difficult versus unpleasant decisions. My name is doctor
Speaker 1: Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of
Speaker 1: behavioral science consultancy Inventium, And this is how I work
Speaker 1: a show about how to help you do your best work.
Speaker 2: So I've seen you.
Speaker 1: Fiel's latest technology product, spelled mmmmm for about six months,
Speaker 1: solves one of my biggest frustrations with traditional meeting software,
Speaker 1: which is that the slides when you're making a presentation
Speaker 1: are really big, and the human presenting becomes the size
Speaker 1: of a postage stamp. So with m you can superimpose
Speaker 1: your slides in the background and put yourself in the
Speaker 1: foreground at any size that you want to be, which
Speaker 1: is great for actually making a connection with the people
Speaker 1: that you're speaking to. So I wanted to know from Phil,
Speaker 1: who's obviously thought a lot about this, what is the
Speaker 1: ideal way to use slides in a meeting or a presentation.
Speaker 3: Well, I think companies who make presentation software, you know,
Speaker 3: who are in the business of making slides, they very
Speaker 3: naturally act as if the slide is the most important thing.
Speaker 3: And so like this whole like PowerPoint culture of slides
Speaker 3: kind of comes from that. And it isn't like you're
Speaker 3: you're much more important than the slides. That the presenter,
Speaker 3: the person doing the talking, is much more important. So
Speaker 3: the slides are really there as background material, which is
Speaker 3: why we literally put them in the background instead of
Speaker 3: you know, right next to you or in front of
Speaker 3: you in most setups, because the focus really should be
Speaker 3: on you and your face, on on how you're communicating,
Speaker 3: and having the slides be you know, a visual reinforcement
Speaker 3: of it. We're trying to change the cognitive style of
Speaker 3: presentations because they think that the cognitive style of PowerPoint
Speaker 3: is is quite weak. It's the style of you know,
Speaker 3: of pitching of bullet points of things like that. They're
Speaker 3: these sort of lazy crutches that don't lead to very
Speaker 3: effect presentations. And I think on video they're just terrible.
Speaker 3: Like they think PowerPoint is barely you know, effective in
Speaker 3: real life. On video, it's it's pretty much unbearable. Luckily,
Speaker 3: there's plenty of examples of really effective video communications and slides.
Speaker 3: You just have to go to TV. You have to
Speaker 3: go to you know, comedy shows, Saturday Night Live, the
Speaker 3: Daily Show, that kind of stuff. So we just tried
Speaker 3: to recapture that kind of spirit where it's a person
Speaker 3: talking or multiple people talking, and the slides are meant
Speaker 3: to kind of be the punchline, the visual reinforcement from
Speaker 3: time to time. I love that.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's in a way, it's kind of it's
Speaker 1: such an obvious thing to do to put the person
Speaker 1: in front of the slides. And certainly one of my
Speaker 1: pet hates in terms of how like Zoom works is
Speaker 1: that the presenter is the size of a postage stamp
Speaker 1: and the slides are enormous. And for me that was
Speaker 1: a game changer when I started using MHM and suddenly
Speaker 1: the focus is on the human.
Speaker 2: So I'm curious for you when you're creating a slide deck,
Speaker 2: when you're trying to put forward an idea or a presentation,
Speaker 2: what are some of the rules that you're thinking about
Speaker 2: when you're designing slides.
Speaker 3: In the beginning, I think I just started. I was
Speaker 3: just using my keynote slides, you know, Keynote or power slides.
Speaker 3: I was importing him in there. You can drag him
Speaker 3: into MHM and doing that, and some people still do that.
Speaker 3: I pretty much stopped doing that almost immediately because they
Speaker 3: realized that actually I wanted the constraint of authoring the
Speaker 3: slides in MM because they're much much briefer than much shorter.
Speaker 3: So usually it's just a couple of words or a
Speaker 3: gift or a picture or maybe one chart. There's no
Speaker 3: point in having, you know, multiple sentences, multiple points, multiple
Speaker 3: equations on a single slide. But when you have something
Speaker 3: like PowerPoint, it really breeds this style of trying to
Speaker 3: just load it up with stuff, which makes I think
Speaker 3: the presentations really, you know, really untenable, really unwatchable. And
Speaker 3: it's almost as if like your slides are meant to
Speaker 3: be viewed, like your deck is meant to be something
Speaker 3: to be viewed without you, but that never works, Like
Speaker 3: you should never send your slides ahead or behind or
Speaker 3: something like your slides are not a document, it's not
Speaker 3: a novel. It's not meant to it's not meant to
Speaker 3: exist without you presenting it. You should make a video
Speaker 3: with you presenting the slides together. But if you look
Speaker 3: at it that way, then like, well, how complex and
Speaker 3: intricate to the slides have to be? Well not very
Speaker 3: at all. So I just try to keep it as
Speaker 3: simple as possible. So you know, yes about rules like
Speaker 3: keep thing simple. So the first the first rule of
Speaker 3: simplicity is simple as hard. And the second rule of
Speaker 3: simplicity is there's obviously only one rule of simplicity. You
Speaker 3: clearly haven't understood the first rule.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that. I wanted to know, like, what
Speaker 1: are the features that you're using in M and maybe
Speaker 1: if we take a step back from that, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess I've kind of described how I use but
Speaker 1: how do you describe and what it is?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's a video communication tool. It's really meant
Speaker 3: to give you, you know, video superpowers. I think most people
Speaker 3: start by using it by when they're presenting in on
Speaker 3: Zoom or Google Hangout or Google Meet or Microsoft Teams
Speaker 3: or WebEx or something like that. That's the most common
Speaker 3: use case right now is people just using it to
Speaker 3: present to make their presentation a lot more more interesting,
Speaker 3: more more more expressive, more dynamic. What I and I
Speaker 3: still do that all the time. But what we're doing
Speaker 3: now in our company is actually shifting almost all of
Speaker 3: our communication to a syncre us. So we've gone from
Speaker 3: talking to each other live when we're doing status updates,
Speaker 3: to're just sending recordings around. So we have you know,
Speaker 3: TV where people are just sending recordings of them doing
Speaker 3: presentations and updating each other. And we save the synchronous
Speaker 3: communication for for what you and I are doing right now,
Speaker 3: for actually having a conversation where we you know, we
Speaker 3: take turns talking, not for one person lecturing and the
Speaker 3: other person listening. So more and more it's about it's
Speaker 3: about shifting from synchronous asynchronous communication and kind of smoothly
Speaker 3: going back and forth between those two.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 1: I want to know what features your planning on building
Speaker 1: in and what you're most excited about.
Speaker 3: Well, we are. I mean, I'm I'm easily excitable. I'm
Speaker 3: excited about lots lots of stuff. We've got a really
Speaker 3: ambitious roadmap. We announced a lot of the stuff this summer.
Speaker 3: We had this content series called Summer, which is on
Speaker 3: our website. If you go to oom that app and
Speaker 3: click on the events section, you can see a bunch
Speaker 3: of our demos and keynotes and all of that stuff
Speaker 3: that we announced and demo and preview that's all coming out.
Speaker 3: There's a bunch of stuff around what I kind of
Speaker 3: think of as the djaification of the world, where like
Speaker 3: you can kind of be a DJ and smoothly mixed
Speaker 3: between synchronous and asynchronous parts of your of your video,
Speaker 3: so you can started meeting live and then switch to
Speaker 3: something prerecorded and then switch back to live and do that,
Speaker 3: do that kind of smoothly and effortlessly. We're launching versions
Speaker 3: on an iOS, on Windows, We're launching a new version
Speaker 3: for the Mac. We've got, you know, lots of lots
Speaker 3: of product updates coming out. But yeah, just watch watch
Speaker 3: the watch the keynotes from from the summer to get
Speaker 3: a sense of all the stuff that's coming, you know,
Speaker 3: between now and a month or two from now. Now.
Speaker 1: I imagine because of the timing of when you started
Speaker 1: m HM and you've been building lots of features along
Speaker 1: the way that you would have had to rely heavily
Speaker 1: on virtual collaborations.
Speaker 2: So I'm wondering, what's been your approach to doing that.
Speaker 3: Well, Well, I don't know if we've done it well,
Speaker 3: but we've done it. You know, it's actually been great.
Speaker 3: I think when we started in May. We launched May
Speaker 3: twenty seventh of twenty twenty, so we started a couple
Speaker 3: of months after we all went into lockdown, and it
Speaker 3: really started as a joke, like we were just you know,
Speaker 3: we were so bored all the all of the video
Speaker 3: calls are so tedious, and we were just goofing around.
Speaker 3: We're just trying to find something to make us laugh
Speaker 3: while working on other projects. But it kind of snowballed
Speaker 3: from there, and so mm hmm. It was completely created
Speaker 3: in a distributed way. You know, we're up to close
Speaker 3: to one hundred people now working and the vast majority
Speaker 3: of them I've never met each other in person, you know,
Speaker 3: it all hired them during the pandemic. Fully globally, they're
Speaker 3: spread out all over the world and it's great. I
Speaker 3: think the main thing is we don't think of ourselves
Speaker 3: as remote. No one is remote, because remote implies a
Speaker 3: certain disadvantage, Like you're remote, but other people are somewhere,
Speaker 3: you know, together. We're not remote. We're distributed. We're distributed
Speaker 3: by design, kind of like you know, the Internet is
Speaker 3: a distributed system. It's a distributed network, not because the
Speaker 3: people who created the Internet didn't know how to make
Speaker 3: a centralized network, but because like being distributed is kind
Speaker 3: of its whole point. That's the superpower of the Internet,
Speaker 3: and it makes certain things a little bit harder. You know,
Speaker 3: a few things would be easier if the Internet had
Speaker 3: one big central server, but obviously, like noone thinks that
Speaker 3: that's a viable thing, because it has to be distributed
Speaker 3: by design. On so we are we have designed our
Speaker 3: company to be distributed, not because we had to, not
Speaker 3: because like we don't know how to be in an office,
Speaker 3: but because of the massive advantages it gives us. And
Speaker 3: when you think about it like that, we're rather than
Speaker 3: focusing on the on the few things that are harder
Speaker 3: when you're a distributed team, you really focus on the
Speaker 3: many things that are better and that are easier. It
Speaker 3: makes everything, makes everything more fun, it makes everything more productive.
Speaker 1: And so aside from the obvious advantage that you can
Speaker 1: find talent anywhere on the planet, what have been some
Speaker 1: of the other really advantages around being distributed.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, the talent piece is like, let's not
Speaker 3: dismiss that too quickly. I mean, that's that's just that's
Speaker 3: worth it, right, Like, you know, you've talked to CEOs before,
Speaker 3: all right, And I'm sure whenever you talk to a CEO,
Speaker 3: literally one hundred percent of the time. If you ask, hey,
Speaker 3: what's the hardest thing about this company? I guarantee you've
Speaker 3: only ever gotten one answer, because you know, when we
Speaker 3: go to CEO school, they teach us if anyone ever asks, like,
Speaker 3: what's the hardest thing about your companies, only one answer
Speaker 3: we're legally llo to give. We have to say, Oh,
Speaker 3: it's the people, it's the talent, it's hiring and getting
Speaker 3: the best people. Like that's literally the only thing that
Speaker 3: any CEO's ever said in response to that question. And
Speaker 3: it's true for the most part. And so here we
Speaker 3: are we as you know CEOs we say in the past,
Speaker 3: you know, fifty years winding about how the hardest thing
Speaker 3: is people, and the universe has just given us this
Speaker 3: greatest gift, the superpower where every single job in my
Speaker 3: companies is now global. Is now I can hire people
Speaker 3: from everywhere in the world, and then they can stay
Speaker 3: where they are, they could do the job the top
Speaker 3: of my talent. A funnel has just expanded by thousands
Speaker 3: of times. And I'm going to give that up, like,
Speaker 3: of course not, I'm never going to give that up.
Speaker 3: So yeah, the fact that it's a fully, fully globally
Speaker 3: distributed workforce is amazing, But that's just the type of
Speaker 3: the iceberg. Another big, you know benefit is, you know,
Speaker 3: no one wastes any time commuting, Like one hundred percent
Speaker 3: of the people who work at our companies don't spend
Speaker 3: any time commuting. Imagine if, like somehow, magically, that had
Speaker 3: always been the case in our company, like somehow, you know,
Speaker 3: like alternate Earth, you know, Harry Potter style, like people
Speaker 3: who just teleport to work to the office. No one
Speaker 3: ever commuted, And all of a sudden, like I come
Speaker 3: into the office the next day and I say, hey, everyone, Like,
Speaker 3: everyone gather around. I've got a CEO idea. I'm going
Speaker 3: to need each of you to spend to waste two
Speaker 3: hours a day sitting in traffic. Yes, it's not very
Speaker 3: productive and you can't work, and yes you're not spending
Speaker 3: the time with your friends and family, and yes you
Speaker 3: can go like to a good restaurant or listen to music,
Speaker 3: and yes it's very unhealthy and very stressful, and oh
Speaker 3: my god, it's terrible for the environment. But two hours
Speaker 3: a day every single person wastes sitting in traffic go right,
Speaker 3: Like the board would be like, see yo has gone crazy.
Speaker 3: You would fire me immediately. But you know, that's kind
Speaker 3: of what we're asking people to do if we want
Speaker 3: them to quote unquote go back to the office. And
Speaker 3: then you know the fact that that one hundred percent
Speaker 3: of our employees can choose where they want to live.
Speaker 3: They can they can live in a nice house if
Speaker 3: that's what they want. They can send their kids to
Speaker 3: a good school. They can live in a city, they
Speaker 3: can live in a small town. If someone's always wanted
Speaker 3: to live on the beach and surf, they can do
Speaker 3: that today and still have their job. And then, like
Speaker 3: for the first time ever, every single person who works
Speaker 3: in our companies, who works in a distributed company, can
Speaker 3: choose where they live to have their best life independently
Speaker 3: from where they work to have their best job. I
Speaker 3: mean that that's amazing. We're never giving that up. And
Speaker 3: there's like, there's like twenty other superpowers that are kind
Speaker 3: of like of this level of caliber, and when you
Speaker 3: think about them, you're like, well, yeah, I'm not I'm
Speaker 3: never giving these up. So sure it's worth solving some
Speaker 3: problems to keep these, but I'm definitely keeping them.
Speaker 1: And so when it comes to collaborating with people that
Speaker 1: you've potentially never met face to face, like is there
Speaker 1: is there are almost like a template or a system
Speaker 1: that you use, Like when do you know when to
Speaker 1: be asynchronous versus synchronous?
Speaker 2: For example?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm constantly surprised by how tall or not tall
Speaker 3: people are when I first meet them in person. I
Speaker 3: realize that I never get that right, Like my mental
Speaker 3: image is always off. When I like know someone for
Speaker 3: a few months, you know, but only online that I
Speaker 3: see him in person for the first time, I always like, wow, yeah,
Speaker 3: I was wrong about that. Yeah, I have you know,
Speaker 3: for synchronous and asynchronous is a really important thing that
Speaker 3: we're trying to get better at. I have a test
Speaker 3: for this. I call it the facehle test. It goes
Speaker 3: like this. When there's a bunch of people and they're
Speaker 3: having a conversation and one person is moving their face
Speaker 3: hole a lot, like for minutes at a time, and
Speaker 3: no one else is moving theirs. Then something's gone wrong
Speaker 3: that that's not a conversation, that's a lecture and it
Speaker 3: shouldn't be happening synchronously. If I am doing all the
Speaker 3: talking and other people are listening, they shouldn't be doing
Speaker 3: this in real time. I should have recorded it they
Speaker 3: can watch it when they want to watch. They can
Speaker 3: watch it at you know, one point seven x speed.
Speaker 3: They can jump around, they don't have to take notes.
Speaker 3: Like it's just any kind of information transfer where it's
Speaker 3: primarily one person speaking for multiple minutes shouldn't be synchronous.
Speaker 3: Should be it should be asynchronous. Synchronous communication should be
Speaker 3: what we're doing here, which we're having a conversation. You know,
Speaker 3: I move my face hole for a few minutes and
Speaker 3: then you go and it's like back and forth, and
Speaker 3: then okay, then that should be synchronous. But so much
Speaker 3: of what we used to do at work was we
Speaker 3: were having synchronous communications in a way where it really
Speaker 3: was just knowledge transfer as one person at a time,
Speaker 3: and we just don't do that anymore. And it's amazing.
Speaker 1: That does sound amazing now, I know that you like, well,
Speaker 1: while a lot of people that work in a distributed fashion,
Speaker 1: they do work from home a lot of the time,
Speaker 1: but I've heard that you maybe work from home perhaps
Speaker 1: thirty percent of the time. So I want to know
Speaker 1: where else are you're working from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this is a This is another big
Speaker 3: kind of misunderstanding. People think that distributed work means working
Speaker 3: from home. It doesn't. It meant working from home when
Speaker 3: we were all forced to do it, you know, with
Speaker 3: no preparation because of COVID. You know, we've had to
Speaker 3: work out of our apartments and homes with screaming children
Speaker 3: in an environment that wasn't set up for it. But
Speaker 3: distributed work means you can you can figure out where
Speaker 3: your environments are and you can pick you can pick
Speaker 3: the work environment to best accomplish whatever you're trying to accomplish.
Speaker 3: So I've got I've got a few different places, so
Speaker 3: I work from home some of the time. You know,
Speaker 3: about a third of the time. I have a nice,
Speaker 3: like av setup. So if I'm like, like, for example,
Speaker 3: now I want to be on a good microphone, I've
Speaker 3: got a good setup at home, so I'll do that
Speaker 3: for my home studio. But sometimes I work from a museum.
Speaker 3: There's two amazing museums within walking distance of media that
Speaker 3: at a ten minute walk. I live in Bentonville, Arkansas,
Speaker 3: and there's a museum called Crystal Bridges, which is just breathtaking.
Speaker 3: It It's like my fear museum I've ever been to.
Speaker 3: And you know, I can walk there in ten minutes.
Speaker 3: And I can walk around the grounds outside and inside,
Speaker 3: and it's amazing. Like whenever I need to puzzle puzzle
Speaker 3: through something, I go and I do it in the museum.
Speaker 3: Sometimes I go to the library and sit down there
Speaker 3: if I just want a breathtaking view with a lot
Speaker 3: of art. Sometimes I pace around. Sometimes when I have
Speaker 3: co workers over, we go for a walk together, and
Speaker 3: it's an amazing environment for being creative, much better than
Speaker 3: like sitting in a conference room. And sometimes I work
Speaker 3: from There's a club that I joined, which was a
Speaker 3: really nice pool and a gym, and so I'll go
Speaker 3: work at the club, and if I feel like being
Speaker 3: around other people who aren't my employees, just other you know,
Speaker 3: professional adults, sometimes that's useful. And then I can do
Speaker 3: like a couple of zoom calls in the club and
Speaker 3: then go go swim a few laps in the pool,
Speaker 3: and then, you know, a half hour later, be back
Speaker 3: on a zoom call because there's nice showers and things there.
Speaker 3: And it turns out that like swimming laps in a
Speaker 3: nice pool is like the exact opposite of being in
Speaker 3: a zoom call, Like every sensation is the opposite of
Speaker 3: it is like the ultimate recharge, and I would never
Speaker 3: do this before. I could never before, like go for
Speaker 3: a swim in the middle of the day, because what
Speaker 3: I'd have to like drive to the gym and like
Speaker 3: they just wouldn't happen. But now I can work from there.
Speaker 3: So this idea of like being able to choose where
Speaker 3: I want to be that I think is best for
Speaker 3: a commish whatever I want to accomplish over a few
Speaker 3: hours is kind of amazing. I'm never giving that up.
Speaker 3: And all of this is walking distance, so it's not
Speaker 3: so much walk work from home. It's really it's really
Speaker 3: walked to work, Like I just walk around everywhere for
Speaker 3: these places, and one hundred percent of my current lifestyle
Speaker 3: is accessible to everyone in our companies. Like it's not
Speaker 3: because I have more money. It would have been the
Speaker 3: case if I had if I had this lifestyle in
Speaker 3: San Francisco. But you know, when I used to live
Speaker 3: in San Francisco, my quality of living was much lower
Speaker 3: than it is now. But to the extent that it
Speaker 3: was okay, it was because I was spending a lot
Speaker 3: of money. But now, like I think all of our
Speaker 3: employees can literally afford to live in the house that
Speaker 3: I'm currently living in and can afford to like be
Speaker 3: a member of this club and go to the same
Speaker 3: museums because it's all, you know, either free or inexpensive,
Speaker 3: because most of the world is when you're not forced
Speaker 3: to congregate in the same exact place as everybody else.
Speaker 1: I love the idea of walking around amuseum when you're
Speaker 1: trying to puzzle through something. And something that always fascinates
Speaker 1: me about found the CEOs is that I always imagine
Speaker 1: this person who's a maker at heart that has had
Speaker 1: to find a way to also be a manager in
Speaker 1: terms of thinking about their diary or their calendar. And
Speaker 1: I'd love to know for you, how do you think
Speaker 1: about segmenting your calendar between maker versus manager activities that
Speaker 1: you're doing.
Speaker 3: So one thing I've done is I have canceled almost
Speaker 3: all of our like I said, synchronous update meetings, which
Speaker 3: frees up many, many hours a day for me. So
Speaker 3: I used to when I used to look at my calendar,
Speaker 3: what was I spending time on while I was I
Speaker 3: was having fourteen fifteen synchronous meetings a day, and you know,
Speaker 3: fully half of those were just like one on ones,
Speaker 3: you know, catch up meetings, standing meetings with various people.
Speaker 3: Get rid of one hundred percent of those. Now, when
Speaker 3: I need to exchange information, we exchange recordings asynchronously. That
Speaker 3: lets me lets everyone watch them anytime. I don't have
Speaker 3: to do it at a particular time, and much faster
Speaker 3: because turns out everyone sounds better and it's actually more
Speaker 3: fun to watch at like one point five to two
Speaker 3: point zero speed rather than one x like literally, it's
Speaker 3: just it's just true. So why would you Why would
Speaker 3: I want to watch someone updating me at the same
Speaker 3: time they're speaking. Imagine if like when you're reading, imagine
Speaker 3: you're reading something, then you were forced to read at
Speaker 3: the same speed that the person who wrote it wrote.
Speaker 3: That don't make any sense. So we said I got
Speaker 3: rid of most of my synchronous stuff. That freed up
Speaker 3: probably two hours a day when I need to have
Speaker 3: a synchronous conversation, I of course, you know, jump on
Speaker 3: a call, we have a synchronous conversation, but by then
Speaker 3: we're all in the same page that we're really having
Speaker 3: a live discussion, so it's much better and much briefer.
Speaker 3: And then I don't waste any time commuting, So that's
Speaker 3: another like two hours a day, So you know, just
Speaker 3: pure calendar time. I've got four or five hours extra
Speaker 3: free time every single day than I used to be four,
Speaker 3: which is kind of amazing. And I use that to
Speaker 3: you know, to be to be productive.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's amazing when you describe it like that. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about ever note because I feel
Speaker 1: really privileged to be talking to one of the people.
Speaker 2: That actually created it.
Speaker 1: And I'm sitting here in front of my iMac and
Speaker 1: the only software applications that I've got open are Chrome
Speaker 1: because that's how I'm using Zancaster to record this interview.
Speaker 2: I've got Scrivener opened.
Speaker 1: Because I'm on a deadline for a manuscript that's due
Speaker 1: in under four weeks and.
Speaker 3: I've strong strong choice scriven or strong choice.
Speaker 1: Oh it's good, it's good. I just can't work out
Speaker 1: how to do the bloody reference list anyway, my problem
Speaker 1: not yours. And ever note is the other thing that's open.
Speaker 1: And I've used Evernote for years and years and years.
Speaker 1: I can't remember a life where I didn't use ever note.
Speaker 1: And I want to know, Phil, how are you using Evernote?
Speaker 1: What can you teach me about? How can I use
Speaker 1: Evernote better?
Speaker 3: So yeah, I use it. I mean, he's it every day. Obviously,
Speaker 3: it's great. I have become I think as I've gotten older,
Speaker 3: I've become more selective about what kinds of things I
Speaker 3: put in there. So I used to put absolutely everything
Speaker 3: in there because I like it gave me this feeling
Speaker 3: of security that I wasn't forgetting anything. And then I
Speaker 3: think as I've gotten older, I've like gotten to appreciate
Speaker 3: the feeling of security that I get from being okay
Speaker 3: and about forgetting things. Like so I just know there's
Speaker 3: likes of stuff I'm just not going to retain. I'm
Speaker 3: like that, that's cool. You know, I'll learn it again.
Speaker 3: I'll be happy. So I'm more intentional now, like I
Speaker 3: put things in every note that I tend to like
Speaker 3: have a higher confidence level that I'm going to need again,
Speaker 3: that I'm going to want to you know, that I'm
Speaker 3: going to want to use. Whereas it used to be,
Speaker 3: you know, probably like I would probably look at two
Speaker 3: percent of the things that I wound up putting in Evernoe,
Speaker 3: and now I probably look at fifty to eighty percent
Speaker 3: of the things that I wound up putting in there.
Speaker 3: So that's but that's that's more about like my lifestyle,
Speaker 3: like I just like care less about remembering you know,
Speaker 3: every single scrap of information and more about using it
Speaker 3: for or for organizing my thoughts, for organizing projects. And yeah,
Speaker 3: I use it all the time, you know when when
Speaker 3: when I was and I haven't been that ever note
Speaker 3: for six seven years, so I can't take credit for
Speaker 3: for most of the new stuff. One of the things
Speaker 3: that we found when I was still there, which really
Speaker 3: explained a lot to me when we realized this from
Speaker 3: our research, was people who used Evernote for something that
Speaker 3: they loved, that they cared passionately about were much much,
Speaker 3: much much like more valuable power users than people who
Speaker 3: used it for things that they don't quite care about,
Speaker 3: like people who were like using every note at work
Speaker 3: because like their company like forced them to use it
Speaker 3: or something they didn't really care about the stuff they
Speaker 3: were putting in there. As totally makes sense in hindsight,
Speaker 3: but those were kind of you know, lacksadaisical users, whereas
Speaker 3: people who were using it for their like life's work,
Speaker 3: for the things that are most important to them were
Speaker 3: like really power users were really in love with it.
Speaker 3: And you know, we figured we had lots of data
Speaker 3: to kind of back this up. But the thing that
Speaker 3: made it really clear to me is I was talking
Speaker 3: to a pretty good friend of mine, you know, I've
Speaker 3: known for many years already I'd ever note, and he
Speaker 3: said one to me one day a you know, like
Speaker 3: i'd been using every note for like three or four
Speaker 3: years now, because you know, you started it. And I figured, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'll tried it out. And I used it a bunch
Speaker 3: and use it at work. And I remember, like I
Speaker 3: was never that into it, Like it was fine, but
Speaker 3: it was never like that into it. And then I
Speaker 3: like decided that I was going to write a book,
Speaker 3: and I started using it to like collect ideas for
Speaker 3: the book. And then I like understood how amazing it
Speaker 3: was because I was finally using it for like the
Speaker 3: most important thing in the world, tree and I couldn't
Speaker 3: I couldn't put it down. And I thought it was
Speaker 3: like a really beautiful thing. But like make a product
Speaker 3: that if you use it for something you really care about,
Speaker 3: it's amazing. And may we've been trying to recapture some
Speaker 3: of that and.
Speaker 1: Hello, we will be back with Phil shortly where he'll
Speaker 1: be talking about the rule of three and ten for
Speaker 1: business and how this was life changing. And we'll also
Speaker 1: hear from Phil about the difference between difficult versus unpleasant
Speaker 1: decisions and why it's critical that you make that distinction. Now,
Speaker 1: if you are after more content, you might want to
Speaker 1: follow me on the socials, where I produced quite a
Speaker 1: lot of content. The two best places to follow me
Speaker 1: are on LinkedIn. Just search for my name Amantha INMBA.
Speaker 1: I think I'm the only one on there, and also
Speaker 1: on Instagram, which I'm starting to post a lot more
Speaker 1: content too, and you can find me on Insta at Amantha.
Speaker 1: I something I have never really used religiously in ever,
Speaker 1: note firstly having different notebooks, like everything sits in my inbox,
Speaker 1: and I haven't relied too heavily on tags, and like,
Speaker 1: am I missing something really major?
Speaker 2: There? Should I be changing how I use Evernote?
Speaker 3: Well, you know I'm similar, So I have notebooks, but
Speaker 3: you know, I probably have like fifty notebooks, but realistically
Speaker 3: I only use like four or five regular basis and
Speaker 3: I barely ever use tag. I mostly just search for things,
Speaker 3: and it worked great for me because usually, like I
Speaker 3: can just type in a few letters and I can
Speaker 3: find whatever I'm looking for. I'm gonna find, you know,
Speaker 3: I'll get it down to like ten and then when
Speaker 3: there's like ten notes, I just like the last mile
Speaker 3: of the search, I just see the one I want, right,
Speaker 3: so I can just like click on this. I don't
Speaker 3: have to get it like exactly right. So I don't
Speaker 3: use most of that stuff either, but there's a lot
Speaker 3: of people who religiously use it. What we found is
Speaker 3: that there's a group of people who I think are
Speaker 3: like organizational fetishists, Like they enjoy they derive pleasure from
Speaker 3: the act of organizing something. They like putting labels on
Speaker 3: things and putting things into little cupboards and stacking things
Speaker 3: up cleanly. There's people like this, I get it. That's cool.
Speaker 3: They're into the organization for the sake of the organization.
Speaker 3: They enjoy it. And that's probably I don't know, five
Speaker 3: percent of the population. And they and these people have
Speaker 3: like all sorts of you know, cultish things. There's like
Speaker 3: getting things done people, and there's all sort of like
Speaker 3: different warring camps about how to properly organized things and
Speaker 3: what taxonomies they want. And I'm not like that. I
Speaker 3: don't enjoy the act of organizing. I just want to
Speaker 3: have the benefits of it without actually doing the work.
Speaker 3: It's not actually clear to me that like, well organized
Speaker 3: people are inherently more productive than disorganized people. I am
Speaker 3: fundamentally disorganized them in normal life, but I'm pretty productive.
Speaker 3: But that's I guess one of the reasons why we
Speaker 3: were so interested in ever note is like I wanted
Speaker 3: to have the benefit of having this organizational fetish without
Speaker 3: actually liking organizing things. So yeah, I just throw everything
Speaker 3: in there and it, you know, and it kind of
Speaker 3: works out. But there's a there's a very hardcore user
Speaker 3: base that loves, you know, nest the tags and multiple
Speaker 3: notebooks and flags of different colors, and we were constantly
Speaker 3: getting bombarded with requests for additional taxonomies, additional ways of
Speaker 3: organizing for people who are into the organizing.
Speaker 1: Now, given you describe yourself as being more on the
Speaker 1: disorganized side of things, how do you organize your task
Speaker 1: list and just what your priorities are on a daily, weekly,
Speaker 1: monthly basis, So.
Speaker 3: You know, I've never actually succeeded in keeping a to
Speaker 3: do list, a task list. I don't have one, like
Speaker 3: I've obviously tried all of them. We have them. A
Speaker 3: ever note, I just don't use one. I was actually
Speaker 3: going to start at one point, I was going to
Speaker 3: start a company. Most of my company ideas are jokes.
Speaker 3: So if someone actually wants to build this, by all means,
Speaker 3: please build it. I'll be a customer. I wanted to
Speaker 3: start a task manager to do you know list that
Speaker 3: was called too done or two did, And the way
Speaker 3: it would work is there'd be no input. So I
Speaker 3: would start this program, this app, and it would figure
Speaker 3: out what I did just by looking at like my
Speaker 3: calendar where I've been, and it would like it would
Speaker 3: automatically put items that I'd already done and check them off.
Speaker 3: So I would look at it and it would say,
Speaker 3: like watch Netflix for two hours, done, went swimming, check done,
Speaker 3: and that was it. I would just look at it.
Speaker 3: The only way. The only thing you can do is
Speaker 3: look at it, and I would just tell you if
Speaker 3: you already did, and then you can be like, yep,
Speaker 3: that's what I did, and you like feel a sense
Speaker 3: of accomplishment as if you would like planned it but
Speaker 3: it didn't really happen. But I don't do that ahead
Speaker 3: of time. I generally I live off my calendar, so
Speaker 3: I do have a pretty well organized calendar. But that's
Speaker 3: because I have Leah with my assistant, who does an
Speaker 3: amazing job and keeping keeping the calendar organized. That's like
Speaker 3: my single source of truth. I wake up in the morning,
Speaker 3: I look at my calendar. I do what my calendar
Speaker 3: tells me to do. I don't question it.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And but in terms of like the kinds of topics
Speaker 3: and things I'm working on, look, if they're not important
Speaker 3: enough for me to remember, they're probably not really important
Speaker 3: enough to do.
Speaker 1: That's such an interesting way of thinking about things. Now,
Speaker 1: I've heard you talk about the rule of three and
Speaker 1: ten and how life changing that was for you. Can
Speaker 1: you tell me a bit more about the rule of
Speaker 1: three and ten?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So this is something that one of my one
Speaker 3: of my friends and really want my best mentors is
Speaker 3: a guy named the Mickey Harrisia mccattuaney son mcatony son
Speaker 3: is the founder and CEO of Rakuten, which is you know,
Speaker 3: started in Japan, but now it's a big global internet company.
Speaker 3: And he was, you know, the first employee and now
Speaker 3: it's I don't know, thirty hundred thousand employees and he's
Speaker 3: still the CEOs. He's one of the most amazing people
Speaker 3: that actually is like the best CEO from one person
Speaker 3: to tens of thousands of people. And he came up
Speaker 3: with this rule of three and ten, which basically says
Speaker 3: that every time something important triples, everything breaks. So every
Speaker 3: time in your company something important triples, everything breaks. So
Speaker 3: the idea is like, let's say, you know, you start
Speaker 3: a company and it's just you. You're the only person there.
Speaker 3: Kind of figure out how to work, and then you
Speaker 3: like hire one more person and things are okay, and
Speaker 3: then you hire a third person and now it's tripled
Speaker 3: and everything's broken. So now you got to like reconfigure everything.
Speaker 3: So you figure all that stuff out and then four
Speaker 3: or five, six is all fine. But then you hire
Speaker 3: the tenth person, everything breaks again. So it's three and
Speaker 3: ten ten because it's just easier than keeping multiplying by three.
Speaker 3: Nothing magic about ten because you'd be nine, I guess,
Speaker 3: but three and ten is easier to remember. And then,
Speaker 3: you know, you figure it out for ten people, and
Speaker 3: then it breaks again to thirty, and then it breaks
Speaker 3: it one hundred, and then it breaks it three hundred,
Speaker 3: and by it I mean like everything like how you communicate,
Speaker 3: how you pay people, how you keep your calendar, what
Speaker 3: kind of office set up you have if you have
Speaker 3: an office like it all like every time you triple
Speaker 3: something important and tripling. The easiest thing is tripling headcount,
Speaker 3: tripling in place, but it could also been tripling the
Speaker 3: number of customers, tripling the amount of revenue, like you know,
Speaker 3: tripling the number of products that you have. Every substantive
Speaker 3: tripling puts extreme strain on all of your systems, and
Speaker 3: it's worth looking at them and anticipating it. And a
Speaker 3: lot of startups go through multiple triplings without noticing it.
Speaker 3: So like right now at at about we're getting close
Speaker 3: to one hundred people, about one hundred people probably by
Speaker 3: attend this podcast, there is will be a little over
Speaker 3: one hundred people. But you know, but we still have
Speaker 3: certain systems. You're only a year old, so we probably
Speaker 3: have some systems that we put in place when we
Speaker 3: were three people, and so we've missed now several triplings
Speaker 3: because we missed like three to ten, ten to thirty,
Speaker 3: thirty tow one hundred. So those things are like way
Speaker 3: out of date and they need to be refreshed. So
Speaker 3: a lot of startups get into trouble when they kind
Speaker 3: of blow through a few triplings and then things start
Speaker 3: to creak and things start to break. The flip side
Speaker 3: of that is a lot of big companies waste a
Speaker 3: lot of time trying to be quote unquote innovative when
Speaker 3: they really don't have to. Like, you know, if you're
Speaker 3: a ten thousand person company, like you're good until you
Speaker 3: hit thirty thousand people. You don't need to like figure
Speaker 3: out too much stuff. But you know, it's hard. Then
Speaker 3: that may take a decade, but it's hard to like
Speaker 3: sit around for a decade without changing things. So big
Speaker 3: companies tend to chase innovation and change a little bit
Speaker 3: too much, and small companies tend to forget about it
Speaker 3: and break things. So I just try to be mindful
Speaker 3: of that.
Speaker 1: Now, the people that as a manager, why is it
Speaker 1: important to learn the difference between difficult and unpleasant decisions?
Speaker 3: Ah? Yeah, I think that's a good That's that's that's
Speaker 3: like that's probably one of my favorite kind of things
Speaker 3: that I've that I've that I've learned that I've figured
Speaker 3: out about myself. I found that whenever I think, oh man,
Speaker 3: that's a really hard decision, Like that's a hard decision.
Speaker 3: Whenever that happens, whenever I feel like something is a
Speaker 3: hard decision, I like a little red flag goes off,
Speaker 3: and I ask myself, is it hard like it's difficult
Speaker 3: to know what the right answer is? Or is it
Speaker 3: hard like it's unpleasant? And usually the vast majority of
Speaker 3: time when I forced myself, I think through that, I'm like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: I know what the right answer is. It is just unpleasant.
Speaker 3: So probably ninety percent of the decisions that I perceive
Speaker 3: as quote unquote hard, they're not actually difficult to know
Speaker 3: what the right answer is. I know what the right
Speaker 3: answer is. They're just unpleasant, they're scary. There's something about
Speaker 3: them that that that's bad. And once I kind of
Speaker 3: identify which one it is, then then things become clear.
Speaker 3: Not easy, but clear. Obviously, if a decision is unpleasant,
Speaker 3: you should still do the right thing, regardless of whether
Speaker 3: it's pleasant or unpleasant. You just have to deal with
Speaker 3: the unpleasantness. But I think what I used to do
Speaker 3: is really conflate those two things, and I think a
Speaker 3: lot of people conflate that. I think a lot of
Speaker 3: people conflate difficult decisions with unpleasant decisions, and they pretend
Speaker 3: that it's hard to know what the right answer is
Speaker 3: when really it's just an unpleasant answer. Uh. And yeah,
Speaker 3: that's that's like a that's probably my favorite, like management
Speaker 3: hack or life hack. It's just like something's a hard
Speaker 3: decision hard how.
Speaker 1: And when you have an unpleasant decision to action, how
Speaker 1: do you approach that conversation?
Speaker 3: Uh? I mean it's very situation right. It depends on
Speaker 3: what's what's unpleasant about it and how, and but ultimately
Speaker 3: you just you have to do the right thing, and
Speaker 3: you have to do the right thing. Like I very
Speaker 3: much dislike words like fearless. I think for a while
Speaker 3: it seems to it seems to be receding, it seems
Speaker 3: to be in remission. But for a while, like a
Speaker 3: few years ago, everyone was like something something fearless, something something.
Speaker 3: It was like it was way overused word. And I
Speaker 3: think fearless is really like people fearless people are just
Speaker 3: genuinely stupid. They really don't have any fear. Then they're
Speaker 3: clearly too dumb to understand what the danger is. I
Speaker 3: never try to be fearless. Being brave is about experiencing fear.
Speaker 3: Like if you're not afraid, you're not brave, you're just dumb.
Speaker 3: So you have to you know, you experience the fear
Speaker 3: and the trepidation, and you allow yourself to experience and
Speaker 3: you just do the thing that you have to do anyway,
Speaker 3: because that's the right thing to do. It's not easy,
Speaker 3: but it's simple.
Speaker 1: Now, on the topic of management hacks, and I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if this falls under that category, but I've heard
Speaker 1: that you always try to be the positive voice in
Speaker 1: a conversation.
Speaker 2: Can you tell me a bit about that.
Speaker 3: It's not so much that I try to be the
Speaker 3: positive voice. It's that there's a strong negativity bias in people.
Speaker 3: Kind of cognitively, I have it. Almost everyone has it,
Speaker 3: where basically it's easier to seem smart if you're being negative.
Speaker 3: And this is especially true in social situations. So you know,
Speaker 3: if you've got a bunch of people sitting around and
Speaker 3: you you ask someone's opinion, they're kind of trying to
Speaker 3: seem smart and thoughtful in front of everyone else, and
Speaker 3: it's much easier to do that by pointing out the weakness,
Speaker 3: by pointing out the problems, by pointing out the risks.
Speaker 3: It's just just how our brains are wired. And then
Speaker 3: you know, the next person has to like top the
Speaker 3: first person and being like negative and afraid and so on.
Speaker 3: So typically like decisions are overwhelmingly weighed towards towards negative,
Speaker 3: towards the safest option, the least bad option, not the
Speaker 3: most good option. And this is you know, there's evolutionary
Speaker 3: biology for this. There's like very basic brain science about this.
Speaker 3: You know, it used to be thought that the amigdala
Speaker 3: the portion of your brain. This is wrong and overly simplified,
Speaker 3: but still useful. There's a portion of your brain that's
Speaker 3: basically in charge of fight or flight responses. That's very
Speaker 3: old in evolutionary terms, that exists in almost all animals.
Speaker 3: And then there's like a much more recent human part
Speaker 3: of the brain that deals with you know, opportunity and
Speaker 3: like happiness and love and strategy, and that's that's in
Speaker 3: evolutionary terms, that's brand new and very very weak compared
Speaker 3: to the power of the of the dark side, of
Speaker 3: the fear and the negative and the risk a version.
Speaker 3: And so when you're making a decision, it's useful to
Speaker 3: understand is this the type of decision where it's important
Speaker 3: to pick the least bad option, or is this the
Speaker 3: type of decision where it's important to pick the most
Speaker 3: good option understanding that least bad and most good are
Speaker 3: often the same. They are often the same the same thing.
Speaker 3: Like something could be the most good if it works,
Speaker 3: but also the most dangerous or the most bad if
Speaker 3: if it doesn't work. So you just gotta know, like
Speaker 3: are you going for least bad or are you going
Speaker 3: for most good? And you know, if you're one hundred
Speaker 3: thousand years ago, you know, one of our our caveman ancestors,
Speaker 3: and you're standing in the middle of a you know,
Speaker 3: a grassy plane and you think you're saw a tiger
Speaker 3: hiding in the grass. That's like the part of your
Speaker 3: brain that's like meant you know, to do that, and
Speaker 3: you're thinking, like, well, should I go into that grass?
Speaker 3: Maybe there's a tiger there? Then yeah, maybe this is
Speaker 3: a type of decisions where you should take the le
Speaker 3: bad outcome, which is like, you know, do everything possible
Speaker 3: to avoid being eaten by a tiger. But if you're
Speaker 3: like running a startup and you're not about to get
Speaker 3: eaten by a tiger, and you're trying to decide about
Speaker 3: a particular you know, what to name your product or
Speaker 3: whether or not to put in a feature, then like
Speaker 3: maybe the downside is pretty limited because like, I can
Speaker 3: be eaten by a tiger regardless of how you decide,
Speaker 3: So you may as well make the decision based on
Speaker 3: what's most good. And you can't do that if you
Speaker 3: allow any any focus on the negatives and the downsides,
Speaker 3: because then then the lizard brain, the amigdal of portion
Speaker 3: of your brain, is going to kick in and you're
Speaker 3: gonna you're gonna buias towards risk version. So when we're
Speaker 3: making decisions where it's important to get the most good,
Speaker 3: not not the least bad, I basically try to discourage
Speaker 3: anyone from saying anything negative, not out of some polyannish
Speaker 3: sense of like I only want to hear good things,
Speaker 3: but because I don't want people's brains shut off. So
Speaker 3: often I'll say, like, okay, I only want to hear
Speaker 3: what can go right. I only want to hear the
Speaker 3: good stuff intentionally as an exercise, as a meditation, because
Speaker 3: I don't want anyone to like start that cycle of
Speaker 3: being like, oh what if we screw it up, maybe
Speaker 3: we get eaten by a tiger, Which doesn't mean we
Speaker 3: don't look at the risks, of course you do. We
Speaker 3: just we just try to separate those two things out
Speaker 3: and look at them, look at them separately. But in
Speaker 3: startup life there's many, many, many, many, many many decisions
Speaker 3: where it's more important to be the most good, not
Speaker 3: the least bad.
Speaker 1: Now, Phil, for people that want to connect with you
Speaker 1: and try out the wonderful things that you are putting
Speaker 1: out into this earth, what is the best way for
Speaker 1: people to do that?
Speaker 3: Well, you can send me an email, but I do
Speaker 3: have one hundred and you know of messages good, lack
Speaker 3: any response, tough, but yeah, you know Twitter, I'm at
Speaker 3: P libbin, p L I B I N or that
Speaker 3: app or al turtles dot com. Really any any of
Speaker 3: those are ways to get in touch. And I am
Speaker 3: happy to happy to chat anytime.
Speaker 1: Amazing, Phil, It's just made such a privilege chatting to you.
Speaker 1: Your products have just made my life so much better.
Speaker 1: So thank you for the work that you've done.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you so much. It's extremely kind of you
Speaker 3: and really fun to chat.
Speaker 2: Hello there.
Speaker 1: I hope you liked my chat with Phil. And if
Speaker 1: you know someone that you think would find it really useful,
Speaker 1: why not share this episode with them? And if you
Speaker 1: are not a subscriber or follower of how I work
Speaker 1: in the app that you are listening to this from,
Speaker 1: you might want to hit subscribe or follow because next
Speaker 1: week I'm so excited to have one of my favorite authors,
Speaker 1: Sally Hepworth, on the show. Sally is a New York
Speaker 1: Times best selling author and she thinks so deeply about
Speaker 1: how she approaches her work, and one of the things
Speaker 1: that we will be delving into is how Sally is
Speaker 1: very intentional with setting boundaries in her life. How I
Speaker 1: Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead
Speaker 1: Set Studios. The producer for this episode was Jenna Coat,
Speaker 1: and thank you to Martin Nimba, who is the audio
Speaker 1: mix for every episode and makes all of this sound
Speaker 1: much better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.