Editing The Pen Addict 363/transcript (section)

== New Product Launch ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Michael, when you were on your travels, as I was in the past week or two, you also launched a product or at least had a product in hand with a partner that you worked on said project with. Yeah. What did you launch in the past week or actually in the past day or two that might be of interest to Panatic? Yeah. To Panatic listeners. It seems like weeks ago. It seems like years ago because that's about how long we started talking about it. So what did you launch yesterday, Myke?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Uh, it's a, it's a notebook called the theme system journal. It is a pre-printed journal, um, it's a system, uh, and it is all contained within a beautiful notebook, which is based on the studio neat tote book. And we'll get to why in a minute, I guess. Yeah, we will. As part of a show that I do called Cortex, um, on Relay FM with CGP Gray, where we talk about how we work. Um, a couple of years ago, Gray introduced an idea called themes, yearly themes. And since then it's become a huge part of our show because it's become a huge part of our working lives. Uh, every year me and Gray and many Cortex listeners set a theme for the year. Like this is what I want to brand my year as because there's a bunch of things that I want to achieve. And it becomes like a North star, like a guiding light for the decisions that you make throughout the year. Um, many people, including me will add in separate themes, maybe a theme for a quarter or a season or a theme for a six months, depending on how kind of things are going. And we also leave it up to kind of to change a move. Um, and then a, what, some time ago I started journaling and I've spoken about that on this show a lot, right?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Like, yeah, for sure. That's what I wanted to talk about. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' How this came from that. Exactly. Like I spoke about it on Cortex and then spoke about it here too, because there was a, like a cross between it all. Um, and basically I created a system in a Hobonichi, uh, Techo where I would ask myself a bunch of different things. So it was like a system of questions every day and it changed over time. Um, right now the version that I ask myself is what was good today? What was bad today? What am I proud of? And what am I looking forward to? That's what I ask myself that every day. Then I have a series of questions that I ask myself that I give myself a score on every day as well. And these are like, basically we call them daily themes now, which is how it's represented in the notebook. Things that you want to achieve every single day and you can give yourself a score for them. Um, and I asked myself like, you know, did I do anything to be creative, to generate revenue for my company? How am I doing? Like, what did I do something to make an effect in my marriage and my health, that kind of thing. And the way that I do it, and I've been doing it for a while now, it's, I used to give myself a score out of five, but ultimately didn't like that because what's a two? I could never really work it out. So now, and it's printed in this journal, which I'll get into a little bit more in a minute. It's a circle of a line through and I either don't color it in, I color half in, or I color it all in. And that's like a much better system, a binary system for me to, to effectively know whether I've done nothing, something, or felt like I've really achieved on those areas every day. This was a system that I was keeping for myself in a notebook that I was kind of jerry rigging into, right? I was putting this into a Hobonichi, which is not made for that. So about a year ago, feels like about a year ago, we came up with the idea of taking my system that Gray also used as a version of this as well, and creating a designed notebook to fit that system. So we worked on a design. We have a design. It's broken down into a bunch of sections. It's three main sections, really. It starts off with, this is where you write your themes and it's outlined. You put your theme, a description of your theme, and one you wanted to achieve. Then there are journal pages, enough for 90 days of journaling, which are broken down into four boxes. So two small boxes, one large box, and one even smaller box. And you can put the date and the page number on there too, and there's enough for 90 days in there. And then at the back, there is that final section of daily questions, right? So there's 10 large boxes where you could write down a question or a thing that you want to be doing every day. Then there are a bunch of scoring boxes, right? Where you could go in and score yourself each day as well. And there's enough there as well for over 90 days worth of scoring. This could also be used for a daily checklist of any kind, right? Like it's really just a habit tracker. Habit tracking has become a thing, right? And this is effectively habit tracking. But we kind of brand it and think of it as daily journal, like daily questions that I ask myself, right? Does that make sense? Am I explaining it well enough? You're explaining it. Okay. I've been very conscious of the fact that I feel like I haven't done a good job explaining. Uh, but that's also part of the point of this book at the moment. Yeah. So this notebook has been made because I believe that we have the beginning of a system, right? That the theme system can be a thing that people can use to help themselves kind of stay on track. But I am not sure yet if the system that I have designed meets the needs for a large amount of people because it's very simple. It's just structured, right? Like we don't preprint questions in here. And I feel like for me, a lot of the journaling systems that exist are way too heavy. And I think that they are heavy because they want to lock you in. Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. I mean, my, you've heard me say this a thousand times over the years when we talk about planners and, you know, other calendars and agendas. I do not want to be told what to do ever.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Exactly. And so what we wanted to do.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And that includes putting a date on the page.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. That means that day. We actually don't print any page numbers or dates or anything. I don't know if that's something we'll change in the future, but right now we don't. And the reason for that is because I don't journal on the weekend. Mm-hmm. So I don't want to waste two pages. Right. Right. So like. Exactly. We have 90 days, but you could use one of our books for six months, depending on how often you journal. And this is part of everything to do with the theme system is what I want to do is give people a structure, a structure that worked for me without locking them down. I still want people to go that extra step to work out what do you want to be writing about every day? What do you want to be recording? We just want to give you the ability to not feel like it's going to go on forever. Right. Like with our system every day, you're only really writing about four things. You choose what they are. Right. And it's, but it should all go, it should all ladder back up to the theme. What I wanted to do was create what I think is a nice product to allow people to do this. Mm-hmm. But we are very aware that this, what we are calling the first edition, it's like named as such in the book. This is effectively a beta product. So we have sold a small amount of these. I'll get to that in a minute too. And we want people's feedback who buy it. So the people that buy it, if they like it, I want to know what they like. If they don't like it, I want to know what they don't like. So we can make it a better product in the future. So there are no instructions in our book because it's not done yet.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I found that very interesting and that was a note. So I listened to you and Gray talk about this yesterday. I don't listen. I'm maybe like a one-third to one-half Cortex listener, right? I don't listen to every episode. But I obviously wanted to listen to this so we could talk about it. And I found it interesting. There's essentially no guidelines. There's no instructions. There's no chart. There's no reference. The books you see like this usually tell you what to do. This page is for this. It will. This is how you manage it. Right. Eventually. We're figuring that out.

'''Myke Hurley:''' What I want to do is I want to pre-print in the book like an example page from each of us. Right. So you can see how we use it. Right. But I didn't want to put what I figured would be a lot of time. Like that probably will take longer to design than the actual design to make sure it's coherent and makes sense. I didn't want to do all of that until we're set on the actual system. So this book as it is right now really should only be bought by people that are bought into the idea of yearly themes, which a lot of our audience are. Right. Because then they already know what they want to do in theory. But then they can come to me and be like, all right, so I would like it if there was this in the book instead because that would help me for this. And like I'm using one every day now and I know what I want to change. Right. But I don't know when we're going to make that change. I would like, I mean, ideally this year, by the end of the year to have the new design ready for next year. But manufacturing has been an absolute nightmare. Yeah, let's talk about that. So have I done a decent enough job talking about what the book is, do you think?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes. And people who are listening to this should hit the show notes to pull up a picture of the product. And you can see what the page layouts look like and see how the structure is. Yeah. And see the ideas that Myke's talking about. And it might be helpful to have that up at the time. The photos are amazing. At the time.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Cotton Bureau did a wonderful job. The picture they took of the debossing is incredible. It's really good. By the way, the debossing on this notebook is legit. It looks like it. I don't know how they did it to the level that they did it. Somebody mentioned to me, like, the debossing of the logo. It looks like two pieces, but it's not. And, like, so I had Studio Neat help me with this and we'll get to why. But, like, Tom was telling me, I don't know how they did this without it coming through the other side. Right. It's deep. It's deep. I like a good deboss. It's deep, deep bossing. So when the prototype came in, like, oh, no, this is 2D. I was like, no, no, it's not enough. Like, it's amazing. They did an incredible job with the manufacturing on this. But, yeah.