Inside Our Personal Notion Setups

When you create that complicated system, it adds complexity to how you have to think about using that system. And when you're dealing with things, especially personal or individual-based things, every time you add complexity, you're adding friction. And every time you add friction, you start to create resistance to adoption and you start to stop using it and your data starts to get bad. And then it becomes a system that's not even worth the time. When it comes down to what you need, especially at an individual level, That simplicity is such a critical factor.

Welcome to the Notion State of Mind podcast. I'm Josh Redd, joined by my co-host, Bryan Takayama. And today we're talking about tools we've built to assist our day-to-day. And the reason why we think this is be a fun one. We're always talking about Notion for business. We're always talking about AI, but the other side of the coin is that Notion is actually really flexible. And if we return to our first love, all of our first love, it was how Notion worked for us as, uh, as individuals, like our, our passions and our, our things that we do in our life. Um, so we're gonna maybe take it a more personal direction and talk about how we use, you know, Notion for sure. Maybe there's some other tools, but On a more personal side, what are we building for ourselves that has no pressure to, you know, be collaborative or make sense to anybody else? So, Bryan, what do you, what do you got for us?

In classic form, I'm going to push this one back right at you just because we were on your, you were sharing your screen yesterday during a, uh, an upskill conversation where, where all of our team members come together on one call and we learn and teach things. to one another and you were sharing your screen and there were some very interesting things that were present on there. So would love for you to actually start and kind of decompose a bit about what you're using it for. And I won't, I won't lead with what we saw. I'll let you—

No, let me push back a little bit. And what do you mean interesting things? Give me one thing. Like, what's the one thing that stood out to you?

The first thing that stood out to me was the top left item. which by the way, top left is always the most important item on any page, right? 'Cause that's where we learned to read, was compliance. And it's like, that's like 2% of our life. That was the first thing that I thought was very interesting on there. The second was cigars, third cars. I know you bought a van. I didn't know you were into other cars. So anyways, there was a lot of interesting things that were present on it.

All right, that's fair. Yeah. I feel like I'm already on the back foot. Like I already gotta defend myself and I shouldn't have needed to. This is like the one thing about sharing Notion Like, it's such a personal, like, like I of course like did a quick little scan of my Notion system, like to make sure like there's nothing that is going to show, like I did, just to clarify, I didn't have to remove anything. It's not like I have anything weird that needed hidden, but you know, you gotta do those quick little scans where you're like, there's a lot of stuff that could happen in here. Like, I don't want to immortalize it in a screen recording or a screen share. Um, 'cause I don't know about you, but. Anytime somebody shares their Notion, I'm doing a quick scan. I'm seeing, I'm looking at, I'm kind of looking around.

You do a detailed scan. I've seen some of the output reporting from your, your, your sleuthing.

I don't, yeah, I'm not trying to give that away, Bryan. Now everybody that we talk to is gonna, is gonna redact their screen or make us sign an NDA. Um, okay. Back to it. You want to know about my own personal instance, I guess?

Yes. I think the more important thing is to understand how it supports your workflow, but I would love to like hear about the personal instance and like how, like, what are the primary use cases for how you use Notion?

Yeah, well, um, it's going to have to have a little bit of background or a little bit of context as always, because things are always, always changing. And I'm always testing out new features for sure. I may be experimenting with how does this feel? You know, it may not be what I stick with, but. I'm going to try it out. I've kind of stuck to a similar system for a while, although with some of the new recent changes, definitely I'm trying out some new things. So you're going to get a, I guess, a snapshot, but by all means will probably be different in a month in some way. So, and I also want to just say that yes, compliance is maybe 2% of our life, but I feel like for the month or two after I moved from Missouri to Kansas, it was like 50% of my life. Um, getting things worked out.

Congratulations on becoming a homeowner.

Oh, thank you. Uh, all right. So I'm going to try and keep this audio friendly. So I will just describe it without, you know, relying on showing it. And I'm not sharing my screen because for obvious reasons now, because if Bryan's going to, Bryan's going to take me to town on it. So will the commenters. Actually, maybe that'll be the one thing that gets people to comment. I've kind of had this idea of like, I call it the terminal and it's just my fun way of like, how do you describe your like home or your HQ or main dashboard? I've just called it Terminal. I, I don't know. I've just more of like a branding thing. Probably doesn't make any sense, but that's my Terminal. And, um, right now what I'm doing and what you saw was I have kind of simplified things quite a bit and I now just have like a, a collection of, well, basically I call them collections. And these are kind of like areas. I was trying to be really cautious about like getting super systematic about like, what's a project? What's an area? What, what connects here? How do all these things relate? I'm just tired of it, honestly. And, and I don't want any sort of like expectation. I just, if I want to scratch pad it and that's all it is, fine. Or if I want to get super detailed with it and have linked databases, fine. I just wanted something that didn't already have some baggage attached to it. And so just called them collections and I break them up to into work or personal just because it's kind of helpful to separate those two. Sometimes things do overlap. Sure. So for example, some of the things I have in work are compliance, the podcast, our team, and finances. I got a few more, and these are just places for me to like, okay, I know where to go for like a quick reference for this thing. It's bigger than a note. It's bigger than, you know, but it's not necessarily a project that I'm trying to work towards completion. It's just like an area of my life I wanna make sure if I need to put it somewhere, it goes there. On personal side, I've got my home, I've got lawn care. That's a big deal to me. I'm trying to take care of this lawn so it doesn't fall apart. So I've got actually a decent amount of research on like, what's the fertilizing schedule? You know, how do you overseed? You know, all that stuff. 'Cause I wanna make sure I take care of it. And then like Bryan said, cigars. I've gotten into cigars recently and I'm actually tracking each one as I smoke it. 1 to 5 rating. You know, if I smoked it with somebody. And then like music, I have a lot of music notes over like literally the last, you know, 5, 6, 7 years that I keep track in Notion. And I was doing it in, I think in Evernote before this. So I've always had music notes, but yeah, I've got some, got a few more. Besides that, the, the main other kind of interface that I work with, which used to be, it used to be Perspectives. Shout out to anybody who knows what I'm talking about. You can go watch my YouTube videos. From 2 years ago on, on how I built a Notion called Perspectives. And it was basically building this sidebar in your page that you could click through pages and that sidebar would stay there. And, and I think it's actually a really intuitive way of navigating software. And so I was using Notion to recreate that. It actually all started from trying to recreate OmniFocus. If you know what that, that app is. But right now I'm experimenting with how do we use the new sidebar? And so I've actually moved my perspectives over to the sidebar because now the sidebar is super flexible. It doesn't rely on hierarchical storage of your pages. You can just put whatever you want in sidebar and get rid of everything else, which I think is such an amazing feature. Like I'm actually going to use the sidebar now. And so I've moved those over there to the sidebar and I have on, on one section called Perspectives, one of my tabs, I have shortcuts to like those main pages. So I've got my terminal, Get Things Done, which is like where my tasks are. Clear to Think. I'm kind of developing this like it's more than notes. It's like basically the GTD system, but for notes and ideas, like they're very separate in my mind. And then a few others like Read Later and Meetings and so forth. And then below it, I have the Favorites section, which I'm actually starting to use Favorites now for like real transient, like I want to show this on a sidebar real quick. I want to get rid of it real quick. So that's my Notion use. And honestly, Like excited about it, loving it. You know, I've got like that new spark that I haven't had in a while with Notion. So it's been pretty fun.

Can we just take one of them as an example and talk about what's inside of the collection? Like, I understand, like, one, super organized. And even just the way that you just curated that, the way you had described it, it's, it's very clear that it's simple and it's organized.

Like, uh, but like what's inside of one of those collections?

Mm-hmm.

Uh, let's take music. Let's take the music one. I'm curious since it's been years and I wanna know what's in there. Like, how's the information structure? Is it just pages and toggles? Is it an architecture?

So music is important to me because when I play, I always take like really, um, basic but like structured notes. I've been playing, you know, drums for, for, uh, my church worship teams, you know, over the last, since I was in high school. Um, started actually like writing my own notes, you know, for at least 10 years. And that has like slightly changed. Like I've gotten into like a shorthand for it, but really it's just like, what's the structure of the song? Like intro, verse, you know, chorus, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus. That's, I'm getting that. And then for each one, I'm writing a little note, like, you know, um, light cymbals or pick up this beat, or I might even like notate out the kind of structure of the rhythm. I can kind of read it. I don't need like sheet music. I just need to know what the feel is. As a reference, and so I have. Let's see. Well, I just have. I'm looking at it right now. I mean, I'm looking at. Yeah, like it's basically it's a database, and it's just the event and the date that it happened, and it's sorted by the event or sorry, it's sorted by the date. And so I basically just open it, and then it's got my. It's really simple. It's just like the songs with the heading, and then those. That structure like I told you about. So actually, let me look at one right here. It's intro, V1, C, sorry, intro, V1, chorus, interlude, V2, chorus, interlude, V3, chorus times 2, outro. And the notes are time, pings time, double quotation meaning repeat, uh, HH beat light, like a light hi-hat beat. Chorus is ride. I know you didn't want to know this information, but—

No, this is fantastic.

We're literally seeing a window into your brain and he's saying this and it's a fascinating place to be.

The only time I would switch this up is when I'm doing like a multi-day event. And so I might create like a more of like a dashboard or a portal. It's like the same songs. I might play them a couple times throughout the, that weekend or whatever that we're doing. And so I want to kind of have that all in one spot. So I'm not like having to go through a bunch of pages, but that's music.

So each collection has its own operating system essentially within it. And sometimes it's probably pretty light. Sometimes it's probably pretty dense.

Yeah. And that's the thing is I had to give myself permission to keep it like, to not, to not have to follow any sort of structure because as soon as you put up those guardrails, you, and they don't feel like the perfect ones, it kind of just creates that friction and whatever. So like lawn care is actually just like some subpages. It's a wiki, you know, it's like fertilizer, weed killer, soil test, you know, and that's where I've like logged my information that I know about those things. And then some scratch notes below it, like the schedule, late October, March, April, May, late May. And then at the very top, I also have an inline database for a log where I want to keep track of like the major events that happened in the, in the lawn care journey. So when I have my lawn guy come out and actually fertilize and overseed, I'll log it.

Do you ever go through this emotional journey where it's like, all right, I know I need to store things in a more organized way here. So I'm like, this is, I'm going to do it. It's just going to be some notes. And it's like, there's a point where you just reach and you're like, Ah shit, this needs to be in a database. And it's like, oh no, now that this part needs to be in a database, I need another one to relate to.

Does that happen to you? That's my entire, like, notion.

It's like life.

4 or 5 years ago, I would have been like, oh, lawn care, let's set up a database. Let's set up all the properties. Let's relate it to my house. Let's relate it to a database of all the people and a database of the different things that might happen to my lawn. And that's where I'll keep track. Like, it would have just been way overkill, but It got me really good at Notion. But it's funny, I've just come on the total opposite side of the hill of like simplicity of like, I actually, I don't think I've said this in a long time, but I love the concept of simplicity on the far side of complexity. And it's the idea that you start simple in your understanding because you don't know a whole lot. It's related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, like your confidence when you start something new goes way high and then as you get better at it, it goes really low. Like lower than it should be. And then it kind of equalizes, normalizes. Simplicity on the far side of complexity is, is I think fairly related where it's like you start simple, you start learning a bunch of complex things, you install complex things. And then let me throw in another law there. Uh, Gall's Law, you know, complex systems have to be built on top of, uh, previously validated simple systems. Getting all the way to the other side of it, you know, it's like I don't really care. Like, I just need to, like, I just need a place. And I think that has come from a bit of, like, I don't want to use the term burnout. I'm just over the, like, let's build it, you know, let's see what's possible. Let's build it as complex as we think it's possible to, like, model the data perfectly. And I, I think I've just finally, um, recognized, like, the futility of that. Like, that's not actually productive. It's not actually helpful, you know, only build those things when you need them.

I agree.

It's one of those things where when you create that complicated system, it adds complexity to how you have to think about using that system. And when you're dealing with things, especially personal or individual-based things, like every time you add complexity, you're adding friction. And every time you add friction, you start to create resistance to adoption, and you start to Stop using it and your data starts to get bad. And then it becomes a system that's not even worth the time when it comes down to like what you need, especially at an individual level. That simplicity is such a critical factor.

Yeah. I mean, I think this is not new to Notion. Um, but Notion is novel in the fact that it is so malleable that it's easy to change. So I relate this idea of like you said, it provides friction. Think about like Premiere Pro video editing software. You know, very powerful features, but you have to learn the software. Like when you open up a new software like Photoshop or whatever, you're like, oh my gosh. And you finally start learning it because it's set in stone. Like it doesn't change. Like you might, you might figure out how to customize it. But it really is just like the same software. Notion is not like that. You get to change it all the time. So you never like make it concrete in your head. What am I dealing with? So like you said, you have to carry that baggage of what is the system? Where do I go to track this? Like, what was the last time I, what was my last decision on how I wanted to do this? Okay, this one uses relations. Oh, I forgot to do the relation. So now it's not showing up in this other spot because I didn't think cohesively. It's a lot.

Nothing's funnier than getting into a, getting back into a system that you put on the shelf for like 2 weeks or a month and you're like, why did I do this? It's like, man, this was hard on the, uh, the Adobe piece. We have a couple clients now that are pretty big Microsoft shops. And I grew up, my whole Deloitte career was in Microsoft Office.

And we have the ribbon, and that ribbon has like 10 different tabs, and each one of those tabs has like 100 different options. And I mean, I had all those memorized, and I had the hotkeys to do all of those things like really fast. And then I've been out of that world for 3 years, and I haven't seen it.

And somebody was sharing their screen the other day, and I I literally had the reaction, oh my God, like out loud when I went, like saw him navigating through it. And this is like, man, it's such a gnarly way to approach software.

How different was it from what you remembered though?

Pretty similar.

Pretty similar.

Yeah, there's probably a few different options that were there, but it was, I mean, then they had some like glare effect that like made the ribbons look nicer and stuff and like rounded edges as opposed to like square, like the Hard squares, but it was pretty similar.

Yeah. So, I mean, like, yeah, after 3 years you already kind of lose, you know, I'm sure it's like riding a bike, like you'd pick it up, but like you lose the context of like the system, but it just goes to show that it hadn't even changed that much over 3 years. And now imagine doing that where, you know, in Notion where like one, you can change everything. And they're releasing new features every other day, man, like Krispy Kreme donuts, you know, on a Sunday morning. Uh, they're just pumping them out. So, I mean, it's no wonder, like, our clients, you know, want to keep us around. And, and I think part of it is like, actually, I think a major part of the value that we bring is we have a system in mind that works. It works at scale. We have a strong opinion on how it works and why you should do it this way. Yes, you think this is a good idea, but there's a pitfall here that we've already kind of gone through and figured out. And yes, we will modify it, but we're gonna do it holistically and we're gonna make sure that everybody knows this change, that it doesn't just work for you, it works for everybody else. That concept I think is pretty underappreciated or underrated.

I mean, the concept is just how software has always been over history, right? It was like, there was always a lot of thought that went into, I mean, not Always, but oftentimes a lot of thought that went into every change.

And then Notion just gave 1,000 people the chance to work in one system and change every single piece of it every day. Um, I just had someone yesterday go into, like, they had higher admin rights.

They went into the page layout and for some reason there's a reset to normal function for page layout and 70 properties just became a list on the database page. And they thought that they broke everything because there were only 4 pinned properties and then 7 folders. On the, on the page and you can't revert it. Uh, but like, it's, it's so funny how like Notion makes it so easy to, to radically change the user experience for the individual, which is good, but it's not for 1,000 people.

The antidote here is kind of, it's kind of there in permissions, but like, it is like the most critical yet most underused and invisible feature in Notion. Like, Permissions just does not get used like the way it should.

In this workspace, we probably only have 10 people in the admin group and this just happened to be one of them.

Even the right person who does have access, like you can't stop them from doing something they shouldn't do. Like, it's not like you can lock down a feature in Notion. You can only like give somebody access to a bunch of features or not. Um, yeah, I think with the new features coming out in Notion, they're great, but permissions is going to be even more, more critical, but. We can get into that. Yeah, but I, I feel like it's such an important part of Notion and so tricky, um, to wrap your head around how they even work. Anyways, let's talk about, uh, more fun things. Bryan, what's your personal system like? Like, how do you have like a central, uh, place or like, yeah, actually just give us a, an overview, a tour to, tour to Takayama.

Before I go into the chaos that is my personal operating system, um, I had a funny thought because we were talking about the ribbon of Microsoft and how like it's really overwhelming to see. That's literally what the sidebar was before they just made this recent change. Oh my gosh. It was literally becoming that.

That's fascinating. I didn't tie 2 and 2 together.

I could sing praises for the new sidebar. Um, whoever, whoever did that, actually, I know Cole was a big part of that. I just, cause I see him tweeting about it and he's the one that gave me early access. So. Cole, if you're listening, great job. Shout out. I'm sure there's probably other people, you know, involved. Shout out to all those people.

Love it.

I think a really interesting thing with yours is the fact that your work and personal are in the same workspace.

That's not the case for me. Um, like I have another workspace where my family exists. Kayla and I exist inside of it.

And, um, I started out with a really intentional operating system. And then it just, Kayla wasn't a great user at that time.

She is a great user now, but like that system kind of just didn't work. Uh, so then it just started to become like its own beast where we just created hubs left and right. And I've actually gotten to the point that I think is, there's actually a couple of different directions I'll go with this. Like one is I basically just create artifacts in the personal system, nothing that spans over time. Like, we'll create new activities and journeys and trip logistics database every single year now.

And that will just become our Christmas card that we send out. It's like every year we create a new one, which we don't typically encourage clients to do.

Like, we don't want you to create a new project database every single year. But we essentially do that for everything that is cadence-based. So I have a lot of different trips, I have a lot of different travel planning documents, a lot of different year documents, which is just kind of chaos. And I wouldn't wish anybody upon having to figure out what is going on in our workspace.

We do have a couple really robust tools though that need it. One is Kayla's medical record.

Because it's so complicated and there's so many facets of it, we've built an operating system for it that We feel comfortable enough sharing with doctors and sharing with practitioners. And, um, it's a really powerful tool for us to leverage Notion AI on top of and manage medical medicines on a, on a regular basis, uh, and inventory management schedules because some meds are 28 days, some are 30, some are 45, some are 90, some are 180. And we live across the country, the world from where we can have those meds filled. So we have to plan schedules. So like we have a pretty complicated system for that.

But yeah, uh, I don't track anything personal, nothing like cigars or nothing like cars or, lawn maintenance.

Um, I, I don't have anything like that.

I just went to Spain and, um, you, you were coming from a, a mountain trip, uh, from Geneva. And so I had landed in Barcelona and then was catching the same flight as Kayla to Mallorca where we were all meeting up. Or no, we met in Barcelona. Yeah. Uh, anyways, what, what was fascinating was Kayla, she had kind of a, a medical question. Um, and as we're going to the gate, she's like asking Claude, you know, using her voice. Check my medical records. I've got this going on. Yada yada yada. Like, I'm assuming that Claude was attached to Notion and it was accessing those medical records. And it was like a fascinating, like, oh, this is awesome. Like, you know, to to have like that quick of access and kind of just, you know, obviously it's not a doctor, but like she trusts all those medical records and and gets a good like baseline understanding of you know what's going on. I thought was really cool and being able to do it. using her voice on her phone as we're like kind of running to our gate a little bit, uh, was, was pretty cool.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, that's the power of when you have a good system, AI can, can bolt on top of it, become your, your partner in it.

Um, I mean, she has 30 doctors, she has 100 appointments a year, and she has 70 different meds. She's allergic to literally everything, which is a nightmare. Um, like different health things all day.

So like, like having all of that logged in one place that you can just interrogate, like she could have used Notion AI for it.

She's more comfortable with Claude though. Uh, but like you can interrogate it really well and you don't even have to be her to be able to understand things because, uh, if you have access to it, um, which is, uh, just so powerful.

Is there no other, uh, like dedicated point software solution for this?

Um, not really. I'm sure there are some, there's like startups or one-offs all out there that you have to like give all of your data to somebody else that's managing it. I'm sure there's quite a few of those. Epic Healthcare Systems does a great job doing your patient.

I can't remember the actual acronym, but like they now connect across hospitals, which is super valuable. So like Kale's Alaska hospital transaction or appointment records are connected to her NYU ones that are connected to her UCLA ones. That's sort of valuable. You can't tap into that with AI and the interface is horrendous. So like, no, not really. That's why we've extracted it all and put it into Notion.

Isn't that wild that in the field, like the medical field, where like, it just feels like the market there is like, you can make money if you really build something or do something valuable. That Notion is like the clear tool of choice to build what you need.

It's the clear tool of choice for the individual.

The reason there's not great tech there is because when you have more individuals, then you're in the HIPAA and it becomes really hard regulation and data privacy laws.

Um, I also just wanna clarify, um, my cars is not, I don't have a collection of cars. I have a minivan and a 2015 sedan. So.

I was assuming it was more like you were tracking like cars that you like or things like that.

Is it? No, no, no. It's like my maintenance, like schedule or, or log. Um, so anything that happens to my cars, I log it so that I have a record of it. And then I might scan the. the receipt and put it in there. I realize that it sounds like I'm really organized and do like it. This sounds so foreign because I'm not, I'm actually not that organized, but I like the way I sound on this podcast.

I mean, I bet you're way more organized than the average person. The fact that you have 12 collections, pretty impressive. I think 12 or 13. I don't remember how many I sold, but on the car one, this is where before, and I mean, in the way that you're largely using it and the way that we historically were largely using it, um, It was a lot of like data entry, like to use Notion, you were essentially the same person that was creating a really good Excel document and that you tracked your life on.

Like, I have a buddy that has a Word doc that he's formatted so well that has every show that he wants to watch and every show he has ever watched. And like, it's all like one place for him.

You're just a really good data analyst when you use it in this way. And what these tools like Chat and Claude give us the ability to do now is like Notion can become like a really epic backend, like 2 examples. One is a car one for me. So I have the van.

Your van is definitely more— is way cooler than my van. Let's just be clear for the listeners.

I don't know, yours is like a spaceship and yours can, can have more than 2 people safely in there.

You can actually live in yours.

You can live in yours off-grid, but only 2 people can ride in it legally. My van has a very— it has everything that you have in your home inside of it, which means that I was like, there's an insane amount of inventory that we never captured because we didn't have a good system for it. And the other day I was like, man, I have my van record. And I was like, let's connect it to my email and see what's going on in there. And I was able to create an inventory of every single thing I ever bought for that van based on the emails that I had. So now I have a living inventory of all that stuff and I can actually get a really good valuation on what my van is because of that. And like, that's where Notion becomes really interesting because Another one is I created a wealth management system for me over the weekend.

I've never really created a budget or really analyzed my spend or anything like that.

So, but I was like, you know, because I have really cool tools, let's create this. And now I have an entire financial management system that's tracking every transaction level inside of Notion that now has a really pretty front end that I built on top of it.

And that's only possible because like I was able to connect it to Notion and like create this really good backend. Using it. So like Notion's now this tool that if you're not just a data analyst on it, like you're now able to leverage it to be the surface area for all your data that you need to capture and then really create really beautiful things on top of.

The gaps for personal use cases are actually like pretty big that AI is, is kind of making it really interesting and effective and worth it to just tie it in real quick because yeah, it's like It goes beyond like, it's not just data entry, it's like data collection, like researching your past history in your email, finding it, not just collecting it, but like actually, you know, getting all the data out of it and then entering it in a way that's useful. And then on top of that, you can now ask AI like, tell me about my electrical system because this thing isn't working. Like, how do I troubleshoot it? That's pretty sweet.

It's going to be insane, right?

I'm going to go one layer further because, because I'm using Notion personally with all these things like my financial system, my travel system, uh, what have you, like, I'm going to be able to connect the insights from those 2 because they're both in there. And I'm going to be able to say, this was my favorite restaurant. And it's going to be able to say like, oh yeah, you went there 14 times. Um, and like, it's justified, but I'm going to be able to say like, This one I didn't love, but it's like, oh, you went there 8 times.

Why'd you do that?

Like, I'm going to be able to get that level of insights. And I'm confident that sort of thing exists in the data.

We just don't have the connections of those insights. And that's going to be possible because it's living all in the same Notion workspace, right? Um, eventually.

This is actually fascinating. The idea of, of like retroactively digging up really interesting insights from any sort of historical data you have access to is really cool.

Like.

And it almost is like the same effect as like, you know, back in the day. And I think they still do this. Facebook did the, like, on this day, 5 years ago, this was your memory or this was your post. It's like that on steroids. It's like you could ask, depending on what it could connect to, you know, let's— email's probably a good one. It's like you went to this restaurant this many times, or like, I noticed that you, uh, I don't know, I noticed that you got a, an invoice for $20 for this software just a year ago. It, it was $8, you know? Or that's not, that's not that fun, but like it would be useful. Um, and, and there's software out there that you pay for them to do that for you. And now you can just do it yourself. Um, but maybe it's like, I, I see you've got, you know, a trip coming up here. Here's all the times that you went to this place or yeah, man, super fascinating. Uh, the data hoarding just became real.

On the personal level, it's not an insane amount of data. Like if we were a 1,000-person workspace, it becomes a little crazy, but just for a couple of people. Having all that in one workspace, we'll still effectively have an LLM to like do MCP search around it and like create some pretty cool stuff. It's like a really fun concept and I, and I'm seeing it like materialize through these efforts.

So one thing, um, that I always kind of regretted, well, I don't know if that's a strong word, but I do regret it. Uh, so when I did all my traveling, I didn't keep track of like exactly where I went, what we did there. Like, you know, maybe we stopped somewhere and got coffee. Like I can remember like. Times where like I got an amazing burger in you know in Russia when you could still go to Russia. I have no idea where that is, but I have photos and photos on your phone have actually pretty rich metadata including GPS. And I always wanted like I thought Google would track this, but apparently it's not like super accessible to like see your location history. And like man, if I could have that, all of a sudden I've got you know this like. roadmap of everywhere I went, you know, over 8 years of touring, which that was a while back. So whether it's accessible or not, or how I have to get it, I don't know if I have to like request that from Google or something, but that'd be super cool.

You should look into the Google exports. There's some really interesting things that you can get from those. I was able to extract everything that I've ever pinned on the map.

And that's maybe like 7,000 things. So you're able to get like the, like all of the metadata associated with that pin. Coordinates, URLs, name of the location. I was able to extract that just the other day.

I think one of the, my favorite things about AI too, and one of the best parts is like, I don't even have to know how to do that stuff. I just have to tell it, this is what I want to do. How do I do it? Yeah. That's how I got through buying a house. I mean, that's how I get through like, like learning everything is like, just tell I, this is my goal. How do I get there? And you know, you have to have like a little bit of a, you know, I guess a, a mind for spotting the gaps and, and leading it where like you, you don't really know the answer, but you kind of know whether, whether it's going in the right or wrong direction. But yeah, that's, that stuff is super fun. I use Claude for that all the time. That's probably my biggest use case is like, how do I do this? Well, this isn't about AI. It was about our personal stuff.

If anybody made it here, thank you for joining Josh and I in a conversation with one another. I don't know if we, we were talking to the audience at all, but we definitely were We're having a good conversation.

Yeah, kind of a— that's kind of a podcast, I guess. Um, yeah, so if you're listening and you made it this far, well, first of all, if you had anything to do with designing the new sidebar, again, shout out. But, uh, if you have your own personal OS, would love to know how you organize your life. You know, how do you do it? Do you follow a methodology? Do you do it yourself? Let us know in the comments. We'll give a t-shirt to one of you. Besides that, Hope you enjoyed the episode. We'll see you in the next one.