“I finished the race across the finish line, and I went from this, like, euphoric, yay, I accomplished this incredible goal to, like, instant depression of now what do I do? Because, normally, you achieve that goal and you're like, well, I guess I'll sign up for another race, but I couldn't. I had physical therapy, if not surgery, ahead of me and turned out fine, but I had to, basically relearn how to run after taking a long period off. And, I embrace the James Clear, identity-based approach with that, you know, I'm a runner. What does a runner do? They run. Doesn't matter how far. Doesn't matter how fast. They just run. And once I just ran, you know, I learned to love the process, and I feel like that's important with business and creativity too is, like, you can't be so focused on once I get to this point, that's when things are gonna click, and then it's gonna be fun. If you have that mindset, you're gonna burn out.” - Mike Schmitz
Joe Casabona: Perhaps the most important thing I learned over and over again, running a business is that it's never about the tool. It's about the solution to a particular problem. So while I recruited Mike Schmitz to talk about Obsidian, a “note-taking” app, I've been curious about over the last few years. What we actually talked about was much, much deeper. I tasked Mike with convincing me to use Obsidian, but we got into a deep conversation about Personal Knowledge Management or PKM, and how it's much more about defining your approach, being intentional and making time for the important things in your life. See, all of these things create balance and space for you to do your best work as a solopreneur.
Now, we also get some actionable advice. Mike shares his 5 C's of his Creativity Flywheel for capturing ideas and creating valuable output, which is fantastic. If you are feeling overwhelmed by information and struggling to turn your ideas into reality, this episode will give you a framework and the mindset to tame the chaos. You'll get practical tips and inspiration for upgrading your PKM system and your productivity.
Look for these top takeaways:
- Obsidian is powerful, but it requires intentional use to get value from it. Simply dumping notes in it is not enough. You need a system.
- Having a philosophy, vision, and values will guide what projects and information you focus on. Along with having a good system, you can start with the end in mind and work backward from there. A theme that's gonna keep coming up in the next few episodes.
- Use apps intentionally by “hiring them for specific jobs”. Don't try to do everything in one app. Pick the best tool for each job.
This is a show notes-rich episode, so you can find the show notes in your podcast player or over at [streamlined.fm/422]. That's [streamlined.fm/422].
In accelerated, the members-only version of the show, we talk about journaling, taking time to think reflection and personal retreats. This conversation was everything I hoped it would be and more. I'm a real admirer of Mike's work, and I'm really glad that we got to chat with him today. I know you'll love this episode. And so without further ado, let's get to the intro and then the interview.
Intro: Welcome to the Streamlined Solopreneur, a show for busy solopreneurs to help you improve your systems and processes so you can build a business while spending your time the way you want. I know you're busy, so let's get started.
Joe Casabona: All right. I am here with Mike Schmitz. Mike's an independent creator, who uses Obsidian to run his life and business. I'm really excited to have him on the show. Mike, how are you?
Mike Schmitz: Doing great. Thanks for having me.
Joe Casabona: I'm a big fan, which I'm sure Mike could probably tell in the preshow or in the green room, I guess, we'll call it, because I was like, gushing about his work in Relay.fm in general. And so, I'm psyched to talk to you.
This is basically, I'd I scheduled this interview because even though I just talked to, Rashelle Isip about, like, why tools aren't the thing, which I suspect you're also going to tell us, I suspect you're also going to tell us, I almost wanna be convinced to use Obsidian. I'm… I've been Obsidian curious for a very long time now. So, let's dive right into it and just tell us, what is Obsidian?
Mike Schmitz: Well, first of all, challenge accepted. Obsidian essentially is a note-taking app, although it really is a lot more than that, and I think the best way to describe it is a tool for thought, which means that it has to be used in intentional ways in order for you to get the most out of it.
So one of the mistakes I see people make with Obsidian is they take everything they've ever collected in Evernote, Bear, Ulysses, and the other 10 note-taking apps that they've tried, dump it all into Obsidian, and assume that Obsidian is gonna make the connections for them, and they're just gonna get all these insights. The heavens are gonna open, and they're gonna have all these ideas that they never had before. That's not how it works. But there is a note that connected note-taking that is available in Obsidian and also other apps, but those connected notes where you can have a Wiki style link between one note and another, that's not an actual Wiki style link. It's a bidirectional link. It goes both ways.
If you use those intentionally, you can create this web between the notes and ideas that you put into your note taking system, and then you can kinda surf those connections, and you can get insights when you have all of those different ideas or notes laid out side by side. I kinda like to think of it as like a workbench. So you put all these things out on your workbench, and then as you look at them, you can see how, oh, this thing actually connects to this thing over there. I never realized that before. And that doesn't instantly turn the light bulb on.
And now you've got a 10,000, you know, word post that you're gonna write about it, but it plants a seed. And then if you continually give your mind the time and space it needs to kinda unravel these things and you're curious about these things instead of trying to, like, ring every ounce of value you can out of every note that you take, over time, I found that you can build these flywheels for creativity specifically that basically you never have to worry about what am I gonna write about, what am I gonna talk about, what am I gonna do a YouTube video on. Because it's it's all there. You just have to work the system.
Joe Casabona: I like that a lot. And this was something like the bidirectional kind of “Wiki-style links” was something I was first introduced to in craft. And then I, like, sortof abandoned craft. I don't really remember why at this point. I just remember that there was, like, there was friction. And so, I think it's really, like, kind of wise to say, like, yes, you can take notes in Obsidian. But it's really is more than that. And I, and again, I wanna reiterate the intentionality.
As you were talking, I was reminded of, I'm also very cognizant that you probably get a lot of analogies like this, but, my brother works at Disney World, and I go to Disney World a lot. And people are like, how do I, like, maximize my time? And I'm like, you can't just walk in to Magic Kingdom and wander around. Like, you gotta know, like, set your fast passes, get lunch before 11:30, know where you wanna be. Because if you just, like, walk and go, oh, that looks nice, then, like, you're not gonna maximize your time. You're gonna do a few rides and then be like, what did I spend all this money for?
Mike Schmitz: Yeah. So there's a couple different systems, I think that are important to implement if you wanna make more out of your notes and ideas, kinda what you're you're hitting at. You have to have a plan for the notes that you're taking.
I shared a bunch of stuff with you in the preshow. One of the models I talked about was what I call the PKM stack. And recognizing how these pieces fit together I think, is important because Personal Knowledge Management is really, like, the systems that you have for managing the information that is a part of your personal and professional worlds. So there, I really am not a fan of, like, the work life balance. It's just your life. You have to balance it, especially with a bunch of people working from home, solopreneurs, specifically, like, when are you, dad? When are you…
Joe Casabona: Right.
Mike Schmitz: Business guy? It's hard. You gotta be able to flow back and forth between those things.
So with the PKM stack, you've got the information at the lowest level, which is the stuff that if we're not intentional, like, the algorithms will just throw in our face, and all you do is react to that stuff. There's a lot of things that can appear important, but they're really just urgent, and they have this false importance attached to them, and that leads to what I call the default life where you're simply reacting to that. That determines the quality and the quantity of the ideas that you have and, ultimately, even the actions that you do, the projects that you engage with.
But when you start at the top with, like, a philosophy, a vision, and values and use that as the baseline, you can almost use it as, like, a filter for everything else. When you've got your vision and values, you choose the projects that are in alignment with your ideal future, the direction you wanna go, and then your brain is already kind of primed to think about those things, and that creates different ideas. And then it even, actually you can use it to curate the amount the information that you you pay attention to. The ideas level of that stack. And I don't care if you can share that visual in the show notes if you want.
Joe Casabona: Awesome.
Mike Schmitz: Maybe that's helpful for people. But there's really, like, the big idea there is not completely original to me. It's just you start with the end in mind. Right? You work backward from where you want to end up, and then that kinda orders everything else. But that ideas level in there, that's the thing that feels like a black box to people is when I have an idea, when I'm creative, it's just I've caught lightning in a bottle, and I've always kinda, I've always kinda bristled at that. And, actually, for a long time, I said, I guess I'm just not creative because I would see what other people would make.
Joe Casabona: Mhmm.
Mike Schmitz: And it looked like it was an instant download. And they got the whole plan, and then they just expressed it. But wasn't till I read Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon where I realized that when you're creating something, you're really just connecting dots in ways that haven't been connected before.
So, I started focusing on the dots I was collecting, reading, reading books and taking notes and believing that as I did that, it was gonna increase the quality of the output. Well, that's what I found out, and I've been noodling on that for the last several years. And, just in, like, the last 8 to 10 months, it's kinda clicked for me with this concept of what I call a Creativity Flywheel. And I'll share yet another visual in the chat for you here, but this is kinda what I think how my brain works anyways in terms of the creative process, and we could talk about how note-taking and apps like Obsidian really fit into this. Because the first part of this is the capture phase. And feel free to interrupt me if I'm going too fast here, but, the capture phase is the one everybody knows about from GTD.
If you have an idea, you better capture it because you may not ever have it again. Well, that's great, except then you've got a whole bunch of ideas you've captured, and most of them are junk, but you don't know which ones are junk. So you move all that junk over into your note-taking app, Right? Which is why the second step for me is curate. I capture things all the time, but then I interject space between that capture phase and the things that actually end up in Obsidian for me. And 90% of those staff I capture, I discard. And I trust that if that’s really important,ti’s gonna comeback to me. But some of those staffs I can just tell. It kinda resonates. There's something there. You know? Then I'll put it into Obsidian, and I'll develop it further.
So the 3rd step is cultivate, and this is where you quit trying to push something forward. You're curious with your ideas, but you're not putting pressure on them. This has to turn into something. It's kinda like a greenhouse. You know,you plant the seeds in the greenhouse, you provide the ideal conditions, but you can't force the plant to grow. You can't force it to produce the fruit. You've gotta be patient. You gotta see what wevelops there. And then once you kinda see what these things are, then you can figure out how do they fit in line with everything else that I've collected,.Kind of, kinda like the syntopical reading idea from Mortimer Adler's, How to Read a Book where you read a book on habits. You're not reading just that book on habits. You're taking that information that James Clear talks about and you're lining it up against all the other information and advice that people have talked about in terms of habits, and you're deciding for yourself, what if this is true, useful, am I gonna actually implement?
And then the last piece, which, I will advocate till my dying day that people really need to focus on this piece, which is the creative piece. So I call it the 5 C's of Creativity:
1. Capture
2. Curate
3. Cultivate
4. Connect
4. Create
But that creative phase, you know, that happens only after you've gone through all the other stuff, and that is basically just an output. It doesn't mean it has to be a blog post. It doesn't have to be a YouTube video. It doesn't have to be a podcast. It could be as simple as, you know, I'm trying to make sense of whatever topic, and I found that the minute that I force myself to open up a new note in Obsidian and create what I call an opinion note or a map of content is another name for it, and you just, like there's that saying, thoughts just entangle themselves, your lips and pencil tips, while also clicky keyboards for me, like, the minute that I start typing out what do I think about this stuff, that's when it's, oh, I get it now, and that's when it's useful and I can plug it into whatever else I happen to be making.
Joe Casabona: Wow. There's a lot to unpack here. I love a lot of it. Right? You said, I just, I was just looking through all your screenshots again. Capture to curate. I love this. This really resonates with me right now because I just got, as we record this, I just got back from CEX, where B.J. Novak gave, kind of the closing interview. Anne Hanley interviewed him. And someone asked him about ideation, and he pulls a notebook out of his jacket pocket. He says, I always have one of these on me, and I'm always observing and asking why. Now it wasn't a, I tried to spy. It wasn't a field note. I always have a field notes notebook on me. And, but the important thing he said here was ideation is different from execution. Right? You write everything down, and then you just set time aside later to figure out what you're gonna execute on.
And so the capture to curate here is really important. Right? The capture is like there are no bad ideas in brainstorming. Right? It's just you're, I wrote down I was watching my mail carrier. I had a rare opportunity. My wife took the kids to a play date with her friend, and I had a rare opportunity to smoke a cigar in the morning with my coffee, and this is my favorite thing to do. And I'm watching my mail carrier, and it was a a different mail carrier than my weekday carrier. And I was like, I wonder how mail carriers, like, figure out their process, like, she parked somewhere different than my normal mail carrier and my other mail carrier, like, does packages. And, I wrote that down, and I'm like, maybe this is something. Maybe it doesn't matter. But it was an interesting thought I had.
Mike Schmitz: Yeah. So the capture versus curate, like, that intentional friction can be applied a lot of other places, but it's really important. And, really, it's at the heart of you know, I mentioned habits earlier, but, like, behavior change.
So James Clear talks about this. BJ Fogg talks about this in Tiny Habits a lot. That's actually, I think the majority of where that came from for me. But it's essentially you want something to become easier, you lower the friction. You want something to become harder, you raise the friction. Those are levers that you can pull, and most people don't think about where they should be increasing friction in their systems. But I can tell you if you don't increase friction from the capture phase, there's too much information out there in the world. Most of the time, you don't have the time and space to sit there with a cigar and wonder where the post person parked their vehicle
Joe Casabona: Yeah.
Mike Schmitz: Because you're constantly reacting to whatever information is being thrown at you. You don't even have time to think. So I put that in there because I've made the mistake of dumping everything into my note-taking app.
And I kinda feel like Evernote has gotten this reputation as the roach motel, but it's really probably not Evernote's fault. It was just really easy to save stuff with the WebClipper, and people dump stuff in there without ever thinking about it again. You could always go back and search for it and find it, but surprise, surprise, having all that stuff in your archives doesn't actually have any real practical value going forward.
That's really what I'm after with my note-taking system is not something where I can go search for something later and find it if I need it. And there is, you know, places where cold storage like that is important. I do use Devonthink, and that's where, like, the PDFs that I may need to reference at some point are gonna live.
But the things that are in Obsidian, I want those to be the best of the best. And, I use curate intentionally because the picture I get is like a curator in a museum, and you think about, like, the Natural History Museum in New York or something, like, a big museum, they, it's almost more important what's not in the collection than what is.
Joe Casabona: Yeah.
Mike Schmitz: They have, like, all these archives underground with all the stuff that didn't make the cut. So that when you're walking through the museum, your experience is high quality. You know, that's kinda what I'm optimizing for with the stuff that's in Obsidian is as I'm walking and connecting between these different notes, the stuff that's in there is the stuff that is gonna benefit from having those intentional connections, and the lower quality stuff that can just stay in the archives. But I can't trust myself to discern that when I have the idea.
I found that whenever I have an idea, it seems like the greatest idea the world has ever seen the moment that I have it. Oh my gosh. This is gonna change everything. And then by the next morning, it's, well, actually, that wasn't anything.
Joe Casabona: That wasn't great. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And this is helping me work through a little bit of friction because I started using WhisperMemo for iOS. I think it's really great. It is the, you know, a part of me thought, like, why should I use this when, like, Apple has its own dictation on the phone? But Whisper memo, I was talking and my son was “dutifully” mowing the lawn. He's almost 4. And I was just thinking about that, how, like, we're getting you know, we buy all of these toys, and most of them go unused, but the ones that are used are used until they're falling apart, and it's almost like making different bets.
But a motorcycle drove by as I was talking, And I look in the Whisper memo note and it like, it captioned my thoughts perfectly. And then it said motorcycle roaring. And I'm like, what? So I'm like, well, this is clear, but, like, Apple would be like, it would probably garble my speech. Right? But I just thought that was really impressive. But I love using it, and part of me is like, yeah. But all my notes are in Bear notes, and so I feel like Whisper memo is a good capture mechanism, and then I can spend time curating.
Now, I do wanna ask you, in the capture phase, do you, how do you capture? Right? Because for me, I was always, like, I need one way to capture, but lately, I've decided, like, it's whatever if I have a notebook on me and I get, you know, an idea in the middle of a talk or a presentation or something. Like, I'm not gonna start dictating my thoughts to my phone. And I'm even like, I'm not even really likely to pick up my phone and start typing either. Like, it feels better to write it down in a notebook. So, like, what does your capture look like?
Mike Schmitz: Well, I have multiple capture methods. The primary one in terms of ideas is drafts because the place that I get ideas most often is when I'm out for a run. And I'll use it on my Apple Watch. I'll use the Siri dictation, and I'll capture the idea. And I'll always use a format like idea, colon, and then the idea.
Joe Casabona: Okay.
Mike Schmitz: So when I go through my drafts inbox about once a week, I see what the ideas are, but based on that idea, colon, prefix, and then I can decide if I want to do something with that. However, I also am a huge fountain pen nerd. And I have a fancy notebook with paper that I, I buy from from France. It's a Clairefontaine Triomphe, I believe, is the, a 5 size paper that I buy, and then I punch it so I can put it into my Ugmonk Heirloom journal. Sorry, Jeff. The paper in the heirloom journal is not fountain pen friendly enough for me. So…
Joe Casabona: Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because I also have the Ugmonk Heirloom journal. And, I felt the I have a William Hanna notebook, and I buy, like, planner paper for that. But the heirloom is really nice for justlike, Simple note-taking. Yeah.
Mike Schmitz: Yeah. So the heirloom journal is the place where I will time block my day the night before usually on the left-hand side. I'll jot down a couple of tasks that I'm gonn, get done on the right-hand side. And then below that on the right-hand side is basically anywhere where I've got notes. If I'm in a podcast like this, I'm on a different location today, but if I'm at my office, I've got note cards that, again, are the, by the same company, the Clairefontaine. I forget the name of the specific note cards, but they were very fountain pen friendly note cards. And I'll put that next to my desk, and I'll jot down notes as I'm going. Sometimes it's just, I wanna jot down the time codes so I can put the chapters in later because I don't wanna bang on my clicky keyboard while I'm talking on my microphone and have it pick up on the audio track.
Sometimes if, like, for focus, for example, we've got a guest. They'll say something, and then David will jump in and respond, and I'll make sure that I, you know, I wanna go back and I wanna touch on something that the host said. So, I'll put it in, you know, quotation marks so that I have a marker essentially when I get back to it. Anything that I have at my disposal, I will use to capture things, but, usually, it's a fountain pen and some sort of paper or drafts on either my phone or the Apple Watch.
Joe Casabona: I can't talk when I run. It's just, like it's a very difficult thing for me. So I've tried like, logging ideas, and I'm like
Mike Schmitz: it's just…
Joe Casabona: but you, it feels like you're more built for running than I am. I'm definitely a center-of-gravity sports kinda guy.
Mike Schmitz: Well, I don't know. I mean, I do run quite a bit, and I just did a couple of half-marathons on back-to-back weekends, actually.
Joe Casabona: Wow.
Mike Schmitz: But I'm definitely not, like, top half. You know? There are people who ran the half marathon twice as fast as I did. So, I'm not really worried about the speed. I'm not you know, I come back and my kids like, did you win? I'm like, nope. Not once. The goal was to finish, and I did that.
Joe Casabona: Yeah.
Mike Schmitz: Yeah. But one of the things that I learned from doing the races because they'll have, like you know, half of a marathon is 13 miles. They'll have these, like, water stations every so often, and I force myself every time I see one whether by the time you realize that you're thirsty in a half marathon, it's too late. Like you're dehydrated. So, you drink a lot before you start, and then as you go, you stop at every single one. And when I stop, you know, some people will grab it and try to drink while they're running and just keep going. I always, like, stop, walk, drink the water, even throw away the cup, and then I'll, like, catch up to those people again.
Joe Casabona: Nice.
Mike Schmitz: So, I have, I've kinda got into this rhythm where, you know, it's not you're always going all the time. And if you stop and walk for 10 seconds while you're capturing an idea, you know, that's completely fine. Are, you know, is it gonna affect your time? Maybe. But like I said, it's not about the time. It's not even really about the distance for me except when I'm doing the races occasionally. It's the process.
Joe Casabona: Mhmm.
Mike Schmitz: When I ran my first half marathon, I actually overtrained, and my patella tendon slipped off my kneecap on the side of my leg. But I've been training for a year and a half, so I'm like, I'm doing the race anyways. And I finished the race across the finish line, and I went from this, like, euphoric, yay, I accomplished this incredible goal to, like, instant depression of now what do I do? Because normally, you achieve that goal and you're like, well, I guess I'll sign up for another race, but I couldn't. I had physical therapy, if not surgery, ahead of me and turned out fine, but I had to, basically relearn how to run after taking a long period off. And, I embrace the James Clear, identity-based approach with that. You know, I'm a runner. What does a runner do? They run. Doesn't matter how far. Doesn't matter how fast. They just run. And once I just ran, you know, I learned to love the process, and I feel like that's important with business and creativity too is, like, the journey you can't be so focused on once I get to this point, that's when things are gonna click, and then it's gonna be fun. If you have that mindset, you're gonna burn out.
So it's more important to find a rhythm that allows the outcome to happen organically, where, like, the score almost takes care of itself. Not that you don't pay attention to the score, but there's like, the lead and the lag measures. You know, we talked about the preshow. I've got some critical numbers that I'm paying attention to for my business, but I'm not making my decisions, you know, solely off of what trends do I see in those graphs. That's the result of things that I did 6 months ago. So, recognizing that and just learning to love the day to day.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. Gosh. That's such, that's a really great way to look at things, because it can turn into a limiting belief. Right? Like, if I get there, then it'll be good. But then, like, when you get there, if it's not good, you're like, oh, well, I just have to do this one extra thing. And like you said, you burn out. Right? Where it's like, celebrate the victories, say I'm a runner. Right? I've part, I'd say I participated in a few half marathons because what I did doesn't qualify as running. But, I did the 13.1 miles, and I didn't get swept up by the balloon ladies, which is if you've run a half marathon in Disney World or Disneyland, you'll know what they are. So I kept a more than 16-minute pace is what that is. And so, you know, I think it goes back to, like, focusing on your accomplishments, I think.
We've gotten really deep into the philosophy here, and I wanna continue that because you have, again, a whole framework around it. But, I do want to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors.
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Hey. Real quick before we get back into the episode, I want to tell you about my free newsletter, Podcast Workflows. If you are wondering how I can successfully run this show, plus two other shows, plus run a business, plus run three children, Podcast Workflows is for you. You will get weekly emails with a behind-the-scenes look at how I produce this show, experiments I am trying with other podcasts, and general advice to start, grow, and monetize your podcast. You'll also have the opportunity to become a member and get ad-free extended episodes of this show as well as bonus content. You can do all of that over at [podcastworkflows.com/join]. That's [podcastworkflows.com/join]. Sign up for FREE, today.
Joe Casabona: And we're back. So I'm gonna be honest with the listeners here. For Act 2, if you list, if you've been listening for a while, you'll know that the sponsor break comes right before Act 2. And for Act 2, I have, can't I just use Apple Notes or Evernote? And that feels that the vibe doesn't fit that right now.
We've gone deeper than that, I think. And so what I really wanna come back to is, as a quick recap, Mike, you've shared your, 5 c’s. Did you call it the Creation 5c Creation Flywheel?
Mike Schmitz: Yeah. It's the 5C's of Creativity or really the Creativity Flywheel because a flywheel, there's a whole, you know, picture that goes along with that Nathan Barry talked about at crafting commerce where it becomes easier and it produces more, which I think is an important idea there.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. And so it's to recap, it's capture, curate, cultivate, connect, create. And then along with that and, again, I'll share these in the show notes, which you'll be able to find over at [streamlined.fm/422], is you have your PKM stack, right, where Obsidian is personal tasks, notes, ideas, journal, and reflection.
We're gonna talk about journaling and reflection in the pro show in the… I'm sorry, Streamline solopreneur accelerated. I'm still getting used to saying that one, which you can join over at [streamlined.fm/422]. So, you'll get this episode ad-free extended as well as every episode ad-free extended.
But, and then you have a few other apps here. Right? You mentioned drafts for quick capture. You mentioned, oh my gosh, for archive. I'm completely blanking on it right now even
Mike Schmitz: Devon think.
Joe Casabona: Devon think. Yes. Yep. I can't help but notice that for the email you have is this, an actual app icon or is this just like generic? Oh, this is an actual, what app is that?
Mike Schmitz: Yeah. That's MailmMate.
Joe Casabona: MailMate? Okay.
Mike Schmitz: MailMate is not the email app I would recommend to anybody unless I really knew them, because it is ugly, but it is plain text. It's a plain text email app, and it forces you to write in markdown. So it very much feels like, an extension of a lot of the apps and tools that I use, primarily Obsidian. And by being intentionally ugly, I'm not, I wanna get in there and get out as quickly as possible.
Joe Casabona: I like that.
Mike Schmitz: I don't spend a lot of time in my email app.
Joe Casabona: I deleted Spark off of my phone for the same reason. So I am left with just the default mail app, which I hate. And so I'm just, like, in there quickly and then out.
On my desktop, I use MimeStream because that's nice. It's nice.
Mike Schmitz: That is a good app. Yep.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. So you have your PKM stack. This is what I'm getting at. We just got sidetracked by an app I was very curious about. But there are a lot of apps here. Right? And so I feel like saying, well, can't I just use this one app really discounts what we're trying to achieve here. I think the important thing, and you mentioned this in the pre show or the, the green room, I guess, whatever, is not a lot of conviction in calling it that before we started reporting. You mentioned, this sort of jobs to be done, which is something I talked to a few guests in the past about, including Kronda Adair, and Georgiana Laudi, like, what did I hire this app to do? So can you talk about that a little bit? Because I think it's really easy to get overwhelmed by tools, and I see you're using 1, 2, 3, maybe 4 apps that people would consider note apps. But you've assigned different jobs to them.
Mike Schmitz: Yeah. So your listeners are probably familiar with the jobs to be done theory, but, my inspiration from it is probably the same as your other guest, which was Hayden Christensen who has this YouTube video where he talked about how his firm was hired by McDonald's to sell more milkshakes. And, the question they were asking people was what was the job you hired that milkshake to do? And the TLDR here is that what they found, that the job that people were hiring the milkshake to do is different than the the job that they thought they were that they were hiring it to do.
So instead of trying to, like, make it more chocolaty or something like that, they got a smaller straw, so it took longer to drink on their way to work, and they weren't hungry when they got there, which when I heard that, I was like, that's interesting because, with anybody who makes anything, whether it be physical products, knowledge products like I do, you use services for a business, you have to know what problem you are solving for your customers.
And it's so easy to fall into the trap of this is what I think I can do and the value that I bring. But until you talk to people, you don't really know what exactly, what benefit really you are actually contributing to them. And then I started thinking about how I've done that same thing with all of these different apps that I have tried over the years because we tend to put these apps into specific categories. Right? We talked about email apps. We talked about note apps. ‘
One of the things that drives me nuts recently is when people describe PKM or, like, Obsidian or Craft or Roam Research or whatever as a PKM app. I'm like, No. PKM is not an app category. PKM is a system. Right? So that's what this PKM stack idea, where this PKM stack idea comes from is when I'm doing the work when I'm being productive or creative, and I would argue that those are actually linked, there is a specific flow of information. There's a system that's being followed. There's an input, there's a process, and then there's an output.
Now, going back to, like, work the system by Sam Carpenter, which I read a long time ago, like, most systems work fine most of the time. So if you don't like the output that you're getting, then you gotta figure out what tweaks you wanna make to the system itself.
And then I realized that in terms of the apps that I was using to do the work, I found that when people were talking about a new email app or new note taking app, I would feel this urge to just go try it. Like, maybe there's this hidden feature that I don't know about, which when I see it is gonna revolutionize all my workflows, and that's not the case. What really revolutionized my workflows was when I realized that a lot of the apps that I use, I use a small fraction of all of the features that they have, and that's okay. I just lean into the specific things that I use in that app, and then I figure out, you know, what other apps and services are gonna complement those.
So there's another concept kinda related to this where I think it's Occam's razor where everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Okay? So I think the tendency maybe, can be, well, I'll get an app like Obsidian, and I'll make it do everything. And I've fallen into that trap too where it's like, I'll download Obsidian as a note-taking app. Oh, it can do task management. Oh, it can do all these other things, and you just like, install all the plugins and make it do everything, and then you realize, like, none of this is the ideal version for me. My task manager things to do is whatever is actually better at managing tasks because of x, y, z, and you switch back to that.
So, there's this, like, constant struggle to find the sweet spot with the apps and services that we choose to use. But when you get clear on where the apps fit into your workflows and what job you're hiring them to do, how information flows into and out of your PKM systems because there's gotta be an input. There's gotta be an output. I use this analogy of, like, your mind is like a water wheel. So if the output stops, then there's, then the whole system breaks down.
Another analogy is, like, your PKM system should be a river, not a reservoir. Right? There's an inflow. There's an outflow. If there's just an inflow, it becomes a reservoir. There's no output eventually. An unattended reservoir becomes a cesspool. It's where all this, the nasty stuff is.
Joe Casabona: Yeah.
Mike Schmitz: Evernote roach motel. Right? Sound familiar? So, yeah. For me, it's just recognizing, like, I'm gonna use Obsidian for this, this, and the other thing. And over the years, I have chosen intentionally to use Obsidian for more and more things because I do think there is value to having your tasks and your notes alongside each other, things like that. But everyone's gotta figure out where that balance is for themselves, and I definitely am not gonna try just to do all of my work inside of a single app. I'm gonna use the best tool for the job.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. I like this a lot. I've come to a very similar conclusion recently where it was like, hey. Notion can do everything, so I'm gonna do everything in Notion. Right? And this was, like, a revelation after I switched from Airtable to Notion, which, again, at this point, I can't really remember why. I think it was, like, Airtable made a bunch of changes I wasn't, I didn't particularly care for.
And I moved to Notion, and I was like, oh, I can do all sorts of stuff in Notion, and I created, like, a widget on my phone for quick notes. And then I'm like, this sucks, We're stinks. I don't know if you're wearing headphones. You say you're recording from a remote location today, and you sound great. So I don't know if you have, like, a travel setup, but it's fantastic.
Mike Schmitz: Thank you.
Joe Casabona: And then I thought, yeah. You know what? Like, Notion will be for all of my content planning, and Bear Notes will be for notes and, you know, whatever. Fantastical for events. Right? Like and just finding the one job for each app has been really good for me. Right?
And I wanna shout out a piece that you wrote for the sweet setup, where, well, I'm in a different focus mode now, so I'm not seeing that. But it's an app called Blank Space. And you, it's basically just a list of this is from what phone is this from? Because this is a phone I almost wanted to buy. And then I was like, I'm, like, too into the Apple ecosystem.
Mike Schmitz: Yeah. It's a light phone.
Joe Casabona: The light phone.
Mike Schmitz: Yeah. My son actually has a light phone. My oldest son is 16, so he's at the age where he's driving places. We need to be able to get in contact with him. But we've also, like, sat through and watched the social dilemma together and just frankly, like, teenagers, their brains aren't developed enough, especially the prefrontal cortex, which is the logical decision-making part of the brain. So, giving them a smartphone is kinda like giving them a hand grenade. It's like, don't hurt yourself.
So, like, he's totally on board with this idea, but, ultimately, like, we want to teach our kids that technology is useful, use it to create, not just mindlessly consume. If you can learn to tame the technology and use it for your intended purposes, it can be really powerful, but there are, downsides to it. Most of them tied to social media and endless feeds, so you have to learn how to manage that stuff and, just really believe that our, that any kid is not really at a place where they can effectively manage that stuff. So it's kinda like, training wheels, in a sense. But then once I saw the light phone, I was like, you know, I could benefit from eliminating the distractions. And I've done that before.
I've written on the suite setup, you know, my intentional home screen. We actually had, like, a whole mindfulness Monday series when I was working with the suite setup team full time where we were showcasing, you know, intentional uses of technology. And, but this is kinda next level where it eliminates all of the icons from your home screen. So, you can basically create a widget in the middle of your home screen with just text, and then you can even, like, trigger shortcuts. You can customize that text so it's not even app names.
And that's what I've done with mine is I've kinda put, like, the mode I'm in when I get there. So, like, capture is for Drafts. Mind maps is Mind Node. Notes is Obsidian. Community is Circle, podcast is Overcast, writing is a shortcut that goes to TypeFully because I wanna be able to post to social, but I don't want to read social. Messages, mindfulness, and prayer are the other ones on my home screen. But it just kinda channels you down specific paths that you've determined ahead of time are positive uses of the technology instead of responding to the notifications and getting the dopamine hit, you know, when you see all the pretty colors.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. I like that. I'll share mine really quick. Right? Mine is weather, I use Carrot weather. I'm like, as much as a weather nerd that you can be without going super overboard about it. Like, I've, like, toyed with the idea of getting a personal weather station, but I haven't done it yet. So, anyway, like, weather is number 1. I'm always checking that.
Calendar, which is Fantastical, tasks, notes, and then, messages, Web, and Read. Web goes to Arc Browser, and that's usually just to play Immaculate Grid because I'm obsessed with baseball. And read will go to Readwise Reader because that's like, my one of my favorite apps. And it's a better use of my time than mindlessly scrolling or checking my email when I'm out with my kids or whatever. So…
Mike Schmitz: Yeah. Exactly. So, a couple of things to double-click on from there. Going back, you made a comment about how Notion was terrible for capturing things, and that just kinda highlights the point, that you have to have the right tool for the job.
Obsidian also is terrible for capturing. You open the Obsidian app. You see the purple bars go by for, like, 10 seconds, and then finally, it opens. Then you gotta click a button to open a new note, and then you name it. Then you can finally start capturing what you're gonna capture. It's totally, it's a lot of friction for that part of the workflow that I don't want friction at, which is why I have Drafts as my capture tool on my digital devices because I just want a way to get it down quickly. I can decide what to do with it later. The more friction you add at the beginning, of the beginning of the workflow, the more likely you are to try to judge something the moment that you're having it and you're really a terrible judge of those things in the moment. You just gotta capture it, give it some space, then come back to it.
But the other thing is, like, channeling your brain down these intentional paths. Like, this is something that people need to pay attention to. We're so good at just responding to whatever happens to be urgent, and we're our brains are actually wired that way. And business owners' brains are probably more wired that way because they've learned to operate that way.
I've actually done some. I'm not a brain scientist, but I'm fascinated by this whole area. And, basically, what happens is your brain gets a signal and it interprets it for meaning, and it goes through a certain channel, you know, to different parts of your brain. But there's a part of your brain, the amygdala, which a small part of the message just goes straight to the amygdala, and the amygdala is the emotional part of the brain, and that's the one that can, like, crank it up to 11. That's called emotional hijacking, and it's basically, like, triggering the fight versus flight response. The problem is that that fight versus flight response gets triggered in a meeting with your boss. You know? You're not fighting for survival anymore. The saber-toothed tiger is not hiding behind the bush to eat you, but your brain can't tell that. It still operates the same way.
So, with a little bit of intention, you can kinda create these boundaries to prevent that sort of thing from happening. And if you can put up the boundaries around distractions, where you can't completely eliminate distractions, but do what you can, what that also can do is it can create space for your brain to go into a whole different mode in terms of thinking about things instead of just, like, doing things.
Keith Cunningham wrote a book a while ago called The Road Less Stupid where he talks about this concept of thinking time. There's a quote in there that's something like, I don't need to do more smart things. I need to do less dumb things. I need to quit swinging at bad pitches. And when I heard that, I was like, yes. That is exactly where I'm at.
The thing is when you're so caught up in the day to day, they just feel like pitches, and you're just swinging all the time. You don't have any sort of discretion until you can take a break from that stuff, disconnect long enough to kinda get above and outside your different perspective, you know, Sam Carpenter talks about, and he can look at things objectively and be like, yeah. That's completely ridiculous. Why the heck am I doing that? Am I doing that? And then you can tweak and optimize your systems to do more of what matters and less of what doesn't.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. This is great. I'm gonna take this analogy one step further because you said, baseball, and I like your pitches, and I love baseball. New York Yankees fan and, you know, watching,
There are 2 batters that I think are worth watching for this analogy. Right? One is Giancarlo Stanton. He has the fastest bat speed by, like, 5 miles almost 5 miles per hour over anybody else in the league. Right? He can really whip that bat around, but he's a guess hitter. So he just always assumes he's getting a fastball. And when he connects, it's great. But when he misses, he looks pretty stupid. Right?
Whereas Juan Soto is an extremely intelligent. No. I'm not saying Giancarlo’s in his dumb. He's not. But John, but Juan Soto has an incredible eye and, like, very high, like, at bat intelligence. And so he puts the ball in play more because he is swinging at the pitch he's swinging at the right pitches. And so, that makes him highly productive, at the plate. And I just, I couldn't get that out of my head as soon as you said it. 50. Well, we've been talking for a very long time. And, again, act, this is this is taking us on a much better journey than I thought we would go on. I'm just like, we're gonna talk about Obsidian. And we've talked about philosophy, intentions, jobs to be done.
So as we wrap up here, instead of saying, how do I get started with Obsidian, which you still. I wanna you still manage to convince me to at least check out. Like, your screenshots is what I did. I'm like, oh, there's the WordPress logo, and these charts look cool. And, and, luckily, I do build in public live streams, so this can be a productive time for me.
There you go. But let's, let's take a step back and answer this question instead. If I'm trying to build a better PKM system, how do like, what app do I start with? How do I figure out, how do I find the right apps to hire?
Mike Schmitz: Well, I don't think there's a simple answer to that, but I'll share maybe my journey into using, Obsidian, and hopefully that will help.
There was a specific thing that I wanted to do when I first downloaded Obsidian. And when I actually, when I first downloaded it, I opened it up, and the user interface has gotten a lot better since then. But I took one look at it, and I'm like, nope. Immediately closed it, uninstalled the app, and moved on.
And then it wasn't till several months later that I had another friend who kept bugging me to give it a shot. And, like, okay. Fine. I'll give it you know, I'll download it again. But that time, when I downloaded it the second time, I had a specific project I wanted to build. I take these sketchnotes of all of the sermons that, I attend at my church, and I wanted to build my own cross-reference library. So what that means is, like, I could take my notes from last Sunday's sermon, and they mentioned a specific verse and click on that verse and see all of the other notes that I have taken that also link to that verse.
So, I had a picture, you know, this is what I want to build. Is this possible in Obsidian? And side note, I realized that it wasn't possible the way that I was trying to do it. I was trying to bring in whole chapter at a time as notes, and it was impossible to link to the individual verses that way. So I actually had to change my approach, and I adopted what I call atomic note-taking, which is essentially you have notes of the smallest component pieces of things that are valuable. And those small component pieces, that's what when you connect really produces a lot of value. Is that the same thing as Zettelkasten? Because this is…
Mike Schmitz: Kinda. So Zettelkasten is essentially, that's from Niklas Luhman’s who wrote a whole bunch of books, but he would have an idea. You know, he'd write it on a card, and then he would have all the cards, like, in order. So it's sorta like that, except I'm not dating the cards in any way, and I'm, well, I guess I have the sermon notes associated with like, the days that I took them, but that's kinda just based on, like, the the folders that they end up in. The value of a note taken, you know, last Sunday versus 3 years ago, like, there's no importance there. With we're Zettelkasten, I really think there kinda is.
Joe Casabona: Gotcha.
Mike Schmitz: So what I wanted to be able to do, though, was, you know, lay out my sermon notes side by side and then draw connections as I saw them, that way. And that's essentially what I was able to do, but I had to blow everything up and drop 30,000 notes into my vault as individual bible verses first, which was difficult to do at the beginning. But then once I did that, I realized, hey, This is actually better.
But the thing that I would, that I want to drive home here is, like, I had a specific workflow that I was trying to create, and that's where Obsidian is awesome because with the community plugins that you can install there, you can extend it in just about any way that you can possibly think of. So, you can build whatever workflow you want, essentially, with these plugins. But you can't just go in and be like, I want this one and this one and this one and this one and this one. I heard someone talk about this one, so I'll install this one. You gotta do it, like, little piece at a time, and you gotta have very specific this is the value I'm going to get out of building this system. As I did that, then I realized, oh, I could layer this on top of it, and I could layer this on top of it. I could layer this on top of it, but all that happens slowly over a period of years.
If we're gonna go into whether it's Obsidian or any other app that's related to your PKM workflows, do so with the intention of having it solve one specific problem. Hire it for one job. Once you hire it, you may find that, hey. Actually, it's good at this, that, and the other thing too, but we can expand the job description, but don't do it right at the beginning just trying to, you know, I'm gonna get rid of my task manager and get rid of all these other things and dump it all into this one app. That if you do that, then it's not I can pretty much guarantee it's not gonna stick. You're not gonna trust your system, and that's the valuable thing is you have to be able to to trust your system. You have to know how all the pieces fit together to produce the output that you're after.
Joe Casabona: I like that. That is excellent advice. Basically, my approach to using Notion was, I was using it to, like, co-plan and retreat with a few people, and I really liked it. And so I thought, oh, let me try this. And, oh, may, oh, it does, oh, it does this too. Cool.
So that's a real, I think that's a really good approach, especially for apps that could be as you know, it's like, you don't go to New York City and say, great. I'm gonna do everything today. Right? You say, oh, I'm gonna go see the Empire State Building, or I'm gonna take in a baseball game. Right? If you try to see all of New York City in one day, you're gonna fail horribly, and then you're gonna be like, New York's not that great. So, yeah, I love that.
Mike, this has been such a fantastic conversation. We're going to continue it for a little bit longer in accelerated. We're gonna talk about journaling and thinking time and reflection, which is gonna be very fun because I love that. My yearly theme last year was the, what was it, oh, the year of retreat, because I wanted to do more reflection. But, for those listening, if they wanna learn more about you, where can they find you?
Mike Schmitz: Probably the best place to go is [practicalpkm.com]. That will take you to the sign-up page for the newsletter, and there's a bunch of older newsletters there so you can get a feel for the type of stuff that I make. If that resonates and you like it, there's lots of other places you can go.
I've got a couple of different podcasts that I do focus on with David Sparks on the Relay Network, Bookworm, which is at [bookworm.fm], where we read a different self-help business-type book every couple of weeks, talk about takeaways.
Got the YouTube channel, [youtube.com/mikeschmitz], where there's a lot of Obsidian related workflows if you wanna see this stuff visually. Yeah. That's probably good. [mikesmitz.com] is the URL where we'll have links to everything.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. Love that. And I'm glad you mentioned Bookworm because you mentioned many books. And so, I'm glad that you mentioned that as well. I will link to all of that and everything we talked about as well as some of the screenshots that Mike generously shared. I won't share, I'll share, like, the ones that we kinda called out specifically, over at [streamlined.fm/422]. And there. You can also become a member, join my mailing list, and all that fun stuff. But, Mike, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
Mike Schmitz: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.
Joe Casabona: And thank you for listening. Thanks to our sponsors. And until next time, I'll see you out there.