The Simplicity of Yellow Legal Pads [Friday Wrap-Up]

Hey everybody, and welcome to the Friday wrap up on Streamline Solopreneur, a short

episode where I cover three things, what's on my mind this week, recommended reading

and something fun. This is the show that helps you build systems so your business

doesn't depend on you. Hopefully this week's curation will get you thinking about

your own systems before you close your laptop for the weekend. I'm your host, Joe

Casabona, and here's what's on my mind. For July 24th, 2026,

the thing that's on my mind is the simplicity of yellow legal pads. I am a man who

has spent 30 to $40 on a notebook, over $100 on leather bound disc books with refillable

pages, and

more than I'd like to admit on fountain pens.

But over the weekend, I rediscovered yellow legal pads. I needed a notebook and grabbed

whatever I found in the first draw I was near,

and I forgot how satisfying it is to use a yellow legal pad. The amount of space

I have on it, the fact that I'm not

worried about how I'm using it or if I'm using it for the right thing.

I stopped using yellow legal pads because most don't accommodate fountain pens. And

I, I like using fountain pens. My complicated approach,

complicated my whole system. You might say

for the past week, I've only used my yellow legal pad and it's been delightful. I'm

taking a couple of them on vacation with me next week,

and I still love fancy notebooks, but in my fancy notebook phase, I fell into the

trap of feeling like the notebooks I bought needed to be used for something important,

some big idea, my next book, a journal, just something that had gravitas,

so it added friction to my process. Every time I needed to do something, I would

think, is this the notebook I really want to burn on this random thing?

It's been nice to not have to think about where I'm going to write. And if you're

listening to this going, Joe, this is a little,

this is a little much, this is a little extra. Uh, yeah, it absolutely is. But I

do love a good notebook. I have a fountain pen collection

and I love using them, and I still have that paper. I still have those notebooks

and I will still use those notebooks. But

for everyday writing for scribbling down whatever I'm thinking for bringing stuff

with me when I want to think without a screen, the yellow legal pad is the way to

go. It is simple

and it is straightforward

and you don't have to think about it. And that's really the hallmark of a good system,

right? Reducing the amount of friction between you and the task you're trying to

accomplish.

Now, I do happen to like thicker paper in general, so I do recommend the AMPA gold

fiber legal pads.

They're a little bit more expensive than,

some other legal pads like I, I think Oxford, they make some, some old standbys.

you can get those for like a buck 50 each. And the

am padd gold fiber legal pads are like $3 each.

but that's okay. I mean, it's a, a long way from

20 to $30 for a single notebook. So that's what I recommend. I'll have a link in

the description as well, but that is what's on my mind for this week.

Recommended reading.

there is a great piece by Cashmere Hill at the New York Times called I Got Slopped,

and it's about

how she discovered her biography on Amazon,

but it's not something that she authorized or was even contacted or talked to about.

No, the book had been totally generated by ai, and she's not the only victim of someone

trying to profit off of her story in just the laziest way possible.

The article goes on to explore the world of AI book

writing,

and she even interviews an AI

author.

Would you believe that most reviews of these AI books, especially from this AI author,

quote unquote,

are one star?

I

tend to rail against AI writing,

for us more than most people, right? I, I constantly talk about how terrible and

toxic and destructive it is, and when someone tells me they are using it to write

for them, I am not shy about telling them how terrible it is.

If you are looking for a shortcut,

letting AI take a thought you have and turn it into a series of generic soulless,

statistically likely sentences, isn't it? And if you are sitting there going, well,

it,

it's not the LLM, it's the prompt. It's not the agent, it's the prompt. No, it's

not.

It is that it's a robot, not a writer.

And

I, I talk about this because I want

solopreneurs to spend their time

wisely

and doing things

to destroy the trust that your clients, your customers, the people you partner with

have in you

is detrimental to your business

in an age where you can create anything from nothing

with a few sentences to a word calculator.

The thing that will last is trust and human connection.

And you will not get that

by telling people you are too lazy to write your own thoughts down.

You will not get that by trying to swindle people out of even $10 for a book you

are claiming to write that you didn't write or research or review,

you will not get that.

AI is not the magical shortcut everybody wants to believe

it is.

It is a tool that is great for certain tasks

and not for craft.

That is and will always lie with us.

Okay,

Uh, I kind of feel like I need a drink now, which is good because for something fun,

I am recommending a piece by Peter Suman called Want to Feel Rich, drink a Pineapple

Cocktail. I enjoy trying my hand at interesting cocktails. I'm not really much of

a drinker. I like the craft

of cocktails, understanding the ingredients and how the flavors come together to

create something interesting.

I like the craft part of it. And my favorite cocktail website

cocktails with Suman

has been doing a fantastic series on summery drinks.

As I prepare for the beach,

I am checking the most interesting sounding recipes and bringing some ingredients

along with me to make cocktails for my wife and her family.

I am excited to try a pineapple cocktail. I just had like a pineapple sour

beer the other day, and it was just delightfully, delightfully refreshing.

As an aside, I also use Peter Suter Man's Eggnog recipe or on Christmas, and it is

always a huge hit. I mix it exactly the way he says to mix it, and then I age it

for two to three weeks.

So I'll usually make it like right after Thanksgiving

so that it is ready for an early Christmas party. And it's just, it's always such

a hit. It's so delicious. Uh, it, there's a lot of sugar, so you gotta watch, but

it's really good.

Okay? And for the automation of the week, I wanna talk about episode artwork generation

for the Friday wrap up. You'll know this if you are a listening and a podcast player

that supports this, but

I have custom episode artwork that is just the Friday wrap up logo with the current

date,

underneath it. So,

in something a bit meta, I wanna talk about a new action I added for my Friday wrap

up AI skill,

which helps me generate the assets for

these episodes and newsletters. And again, this is going back to the AI is for task

not craft.

So among other things, Claude has a Canva connector, and when I run the Friday wrap

skill, it will figure out the next Friday. This includes

Fridays on the day the skill is run, which is usually the case. I record this early

on Friday morning, so I can release it by mid Friday morning,

and then it will send that date to Canva, grab my Friday wrap up artwork template,

and change the text on the image to the current date

and then download it. This is a task that I was doing manually and would usually

forget until I was ready to publish,

when I was prompted by the upload custom artwork field

in my podcast host. So

this is something that I would forget to do, and then it would, you know, just prolong

the process a few extra minutes.

But now it's done for me automatically. And since this is done,

while the video for this episode is rendering, it's a huge time saver for me. It

means all the assets are done at the same time as I'm prepping for them to publish

or as I'm prepping them for publish, I guess I should say. So

this is such a fun one. I'm definitely going to explore

using Canva for stuff like this because the main episodes are also just like text

or sometimes a headshot, and my VA is doing that right now, but if I could take this

task off my VA's plate,

I can free her up for other more important work that requires human discernment and

not just filling in fields in an image template. So really excited about this automation

of the week. As a quick programming note,

I'm on vacation next week, so there will be no Friday wrap up,

but I will wrap this one up. Do you have something on your mind? Let me know over@streamlinedfeedback.com.

You can write in or leave a voice note. I might even play that voice note on the

show. So again, that's over@streamlinedfeedback.com. Thanks so much for listening,

and until next time, I hope you find some space in your weekend.