Dennis and Tom’s Second Brain Update

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Intro: Got the world turning as fast as it can.  Hear how technology can help.  Legally speaking with two of the top legal technology experts, authors and lawyers, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.  Welcome to the Kennedy–Mighell report, here on the Legal Talk Network.

Dennis Kennedy: And welcome to Episode 297 of Kennedy–Mighell report.  I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor.

Tom Mighell: And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy: Before we get started, we’d like to thank our sponsors.  First of all, we’d like to thank Nota powered by M&T Bank.  Nota is banking built for lawyers and provides smart no-cost Iolta account management.  Visit trustnota.com/legal to learn more.  That’s N-O-T-A, Nota terms and conditions may apply.

Tom Mighell: Next, we’d like to thank Colonial Surety Company Bonds and Insurance for bringing you this podcast.  Whatever court bonds you need, get a quote and purchase online at colonialsurety.com/podcast.

Dennis Kennedy: And we’d like to thank served now a nationwide network of trusted pre-screen process servers work with the most professional process servers who have experienced with high volume serves embrace technology and understand the litigation process.  Visit servenow.com to learn more.

Tom Mighell: And with so many new podcasts announcing their very first show these days, as we rapidly approached our 300th, we are three episodes away from our 300^th Dennis, we occasionally like to mention that at fifteen years and counting this is the longest continuously running legal tech podcast out there that I mentioned there were three episodes away from our 300th episode.  If you have ideas for the episode, if you have questions that we can answer in the B segment of an upcoming episode or any questions you want for the 300th that I mention, it’s our 300th episode, leave us a voicemail at area code 7204416820.

Dennis Kennedy: Tom, I was thinking we should either give ourselves an award for our 300th episode or maybe do like an Amazon gift lists where our listeners can buy us presents.

Tom Mighell: Now, that is an idea.

Dennis Kennedy: So, in our last episode, we discussed the current state of ransomware and what you can do to try to protect yourself and your organization.  In this episode is time for an update on what we are calling our Second Brain project.  Spoiler alert, I think we are making serious progress.  Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode.

Tom Mighell: Well Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell report we will indeed be bringing our listeners up to date on our Second Brain project.  In our second segment, we are going to take our perspective temperatures after the latest Microsoft Surface announcements.  And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots that one tip website or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over.  But first up our Second Brain project and where we are today.  Over the past year, we have been slowly building our Second Brain, if you are interested in learning more about the process and what we think is important to building a Second Brain, you’re going to want to listen to episode and you might want to rewind this a couple times to get everything episodes 265, 268, 274, 278, 281 and 284 were talking about the different parts and components of building a Second Brain.  We really like them, we hope you will too.  Since that last episode back in April Episode 284, we have both been working on our respective Second Brain projects.  Dennis probably more than me, seeing as he has a little bit more time on his hands than I do, especially during the summertime.  I know Dennis that you had a goal of getting to Second Brain 1.0 by September 30th, whatever 1.0 means I guess did you make it and what is 1.0?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah.  I actually was going over where I was that the Second Brain and that actual question this afternoon.  And I decided I really feel that the Answer is yes, and the reason is I had mapped out what I had hoped to accomplish and then I kind of tick through it and then I have now mapped out with Second Brain 2.0, which is going to add some new features that are going to be surprisingly like some of the things you’ve already done Tom.  And I sort of what I look back and I gave myself an assessment of where I was on Second Brain.  It really felt like 1.0 was finished and that’s why I shared a video with you of what I’ve done.  But it I feel really good where I’m at.  So I don’t know what you thought of the video I gave you where I am, but I’m curious about that and then also where your progress is.

(00:05:04)

Tom Mighell: Well, so I haven’t had as much time as I already said.  I haven’t had much time to do it, to deal with it as you have.  I have made what I would call incremental progress.  I have been able to build out some specific resources and I would call myself a preliminary really happy with them.  I think that they’re headed in the right direction, they’re capturing what I want and we’ll talk kind of more about what those mean.  I think there’s still a whole lot of work to be done.  I think and I will discuss this a little bit more in just a second.  I think that my Second Brain 2.0 looks very different from your Second Brain 2.0, because I’m not sure that I’m going to go much further in How I build it out from.  You are clearly looking at kind of a two-component process and I’m a little bit different in that regard.  I’m generally happy with what I’ve limited my Second Brain to here and we should probably just get into it, so I don’t keep talking around it and people know what I’m talking about, but I think in general, I’m happy with the progress, I did the same thing Dennis.  Since we wanted to kind of show each other what we had done and so we kind of knew where each of us stood.  We each kind of recorded on video.  I liked the fact that we shared video with each other.  I would love to use a different tool and not to get too far off track with the Second Brain, but a couple of episodes ago we talked about during our Hot or Not the asynchronous audio or Video Communications tools that are popping up.  Where you can leave a video message or an audio message, instead of talking to somebody.  Since we did that episode, I’ve seen about six more tools pop up and recently slack has introduced a very similar tool within its communication platform.  I’m not sure I like the fact that you recorded yours in Zoom, that’s okay, but it’s really not the use that Zoom is.  I recorded mine in teams which again the same thing.  However, the problem was you couldn’t open it.  You needed a password.  I had to get it to you in a totally different way.  So I like the idea of sharing video to do things like that.  Let’s get back on track and talk about the Second Brain.  I think maybe we can talk later about finding a new tool to do that sort of thing on a more regular basis.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah.  And it’s it was interesting to see how I would say our focus is a bit different and I don’t know that were ultimately going to end up in different places going to be somewhat different because it’s personalized or whether we just read different stages.  But the reason I wanted to talk about this because I had this is great Epiphany while I was working on the Second Brain.  And that’s what I wanted to share with our listeners.  And it surprised me a bit that I actually had this Epiphany, but I was looking at notion which is the tool that we’re both building in and I was thinking in terms of pages and templates.  So, I put information onto a page and be like a document and then I would kind of connect those documents together in some way that I wasn’t quite sure about.  And then notion has these templates that people have pre-built and I was grabbing any of those that looked interesting to me.  And then I was trying to work with them and I realized they didn’t, we work in the way I wanted and I realize this whole notion of thinking about the Second Brain as it sets of documents was wrong.  And so, my Epiphany is that what notion is about and what my Second Brain should be about is databases in filters and views and so that instead of documents, I want to have no data bases that are easy to understand that have elements.  I’ll call them elements but are really simple and I built from those and I pull from those and then I’m able to filter what I see and create actual views that have happened.  And so that surprised me, although it shouldn’t, because I know I’m probably go back to like, 20 or so podcast where I’ve said that we’re moving lawyers should be thinking in terms of databases and getting away from documents and email, because that’s where those World is going, but it resulted in a pivot and then it’s just a few days I got the Second Brain for what I was doing in Stage 1 to where I wanted.  So, it’s that that notion of saying in notion of saying everything starts as a database and then I worked from there and it’s not just a page that I put notes or create documents.

(00:10:11)

So, that was a big pivot for me.  So, I don’t know, maybe you started – you were ahead of me Tom in this way of thinking, but that’s the epiphany I really wanted to talk about in this podcast and it made all the difference.

Tom Mighell: Well, so I think, let’s talk for a second about our projects diverging.  I think they’re diverging and I don’t think that they’re going to come back and the reason is and maybe you want to talk about this a little bit more is that I think that what you are building so far in my definition and how I think about it is not really a Second Brain as we have defined it.  The way that I would look at what you’re building is what Notion expert — somebody that we’re — I’m going to put his link to his YouTube channel in the share notes, August Bradley calls a Life Operating System which we’ll kind of go into what that means shortly, but it’s more about tracking projects and tasks and results and metrics.  And the knowledge base may come second for you, but I don’t want to track tasks in Notion.  I don’t want to do habit-tracking or things like that in Notion.  I may do projects at some point because they may relate to if I ever start to create content on a more regular basis, I might want to setup that workflow in Notion to do that, but it would flow from my Second Brain in Notion, it would be a part of that and linked to that and I’m not putting — and so that’s kind of where they’re not going to link up.  So, a second parts for me is not getting to that.  I might get to some of that later but I’m not sure that I will.  I will say as far as the database thing is concerned, I caught on to — I did catch onto that before you did.  I sort of view now that pages are your lowest level and it’s where everything drives down to.  I am keeping the content on pages, the information that I want to view stays on pages but those pages live within databases that for example I’ve created and probably what’s my favorite part of it is media vault where I have all of my Readwise highlights, my highlights from Kindle, from Instapaper and all of those things.  But I’ve also setup separate databases so I can say “Alright, where are my books related to this?”, and I filter the same database but only show the books or I want to have the same thing but only show the articles or just show the podcasts or just show the tweets and it’s very simple to set those filters or those views so that you can only look at a certain part of it and put it all over the place.  And that’s to me, the major power.  That’s one thing that I’m kind of — we’ll talk a little bit more about what I want to learn and how I’m struggling with it is that I’m not great at databases yet, but that’s pretty much — I’ve been creating them early on and still am using them as kind of a foundation.

Dennis Kennedy: Yes.  So, it’s interesting you talked about the Life OS because part of the way I was able to kind of get the clear view I have of Notion Now came from my friend Mike Cappucci and what he has done in Notion is based on that Life OS system.  So I pulled from that but — and this is why I point out templates specifically is once I start to work with somebody else’s template, I realized, and this is kind of the key to the whole Second Brain and I think one of the themes we’re going to have here is it does become very personal.  And so, when I started to try to work with these templates, I realized that they made sense to somebody else, but they didn’t make sense for me and I was actually better off because it’s so easy to create and link databases in Notion and we’re talking about simple, simple databases.  So, it’s not like you have to have any database sophistication specifically we’ll talk about some other things to do that.  And then the other thing is that where I think we diverge a bit is that I, from the beginning wanted to have the Second Brain focused on — I don’t have a great word for this, I was trying to think of a word today that’s better, but I call it “actionizing”.  So, I look at projects so I conceive of things in terms of projects and then tasks, that’s the David Allen approach you know, there are projects and there are tasks that are associated with those projects and if I have some things out there, they need to be associated with projects to be useful to me and then that gives me the control I need because then everything is kind of organized into projects.

(00:15:02)

And the projects could be very future-oriented or vague but a lot of times, I want to see those and then I wanted something that was like a dashboard that could say, “Okay, here are my priorities for this quarter, here are the tasks related to the — the projects related to those priorities, here are the task related to those”, and then eventually, there will be the resources or reference material tied in some ways to projects with using tags I think will be the way that I’ll get myself flexibility and then I will create something; I think you – the time like you did with the media vault which I’m now thinking in terms of the reference manual where I will start to put those things in.  But even with that, I’m looking to say what is the action I associate with that?  So, what are these notes going to be used for if I have a list of books or video, YouTube videos.  What is the project associated with?  So, that to me is I think the overriding take for me is that action piece more than repository and I think you started more with that knowledge-base or repository of first and then we’ll do more of the action stuff later.  So, I think we’ll come a little bit closer but I suspect we will end up in some different places.

Tom Mighell: Well, it’s just my opinion that the actionizing aspect of it really doesn’t — to me it doesn’t, it’s not a Second Brain because I can use — maybe not in the same way, I can use to-do-list or you can use OmniFocus.  I could use Trello for all those things and those certainly aren’t Second Brain tools.  But that said, I’m definitely going with I’m using it as not only the resource base with the media vault, but I also built out two things that were an immediate need for me which is I’ve always wanted a place to be able to manage my vacations.  I like to plan vacations; I like to have lots of resources available like the restaurants we’re going to go to, walking tours, have a link to the map so I know how to get to from one place to the other.  I like to have at my fingertips everything about a vacation and I was able to create a bunch of different databases of sites and restaurants and hotels and other things like that and then link them to and creating a separate page for each vacation and then linking to those databases as part of each vacation.  So, there’s a place that will show the travel expense and really — I mean the travel reservations, really, what it boils down to on that page is, I create actually kind of a Kanban board that lists out all of the different sites in the itinerary which I pull over again, from the itinerary database that I built and each day has a separate card for each thing and each of those cards has a map to get there.  If I have a walking tour, I can click on it and it will tell me things about that once we get there, I can talk about it and it was when we went to Oregon, a couple of weeks ago, really, really a good tool to be able to do that.  So, I’m happy that I was able to do it, I need to find to learn better ways but let me come back really quick and say you looked at templates, I think there’s a value to looking in other people’s templates because I’m a scavenger.  I will take what works, I will take ideas and I will cobble them and mash them together into something that works for me and that’s what I did with the travel.  I couldn’t find exactly the travel template that I liked, there’s a ton of people who’ve done them, I couldn’t really find the exact one; so I just did a Frankenstein monster and put mine all together and I really liked what I’ve done a lot better than what other people are doing so I’m pleased with how it’s working, I’m just moving a lot slower, I think.

Dennis Kennedy: So, two comments there.  So, one is your vacation database is like a really good example of what I thought of as actionizing because you had the resources, you were able to pull them together into the view you want, you sort of had this great daily view of the stuff that was important and what you were doing and so that’s – 

Tom Mighell: Maybe so.

Dennis Kennedy: I would sort of think of for me, I would say a lot of the vacation is a project and then —

Tom Mighell: That doesn’t make it sound quite as fu, but okay.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah.  That’s my thinking there.

(00:20:00)

And then the other thing where you said that is scavenging on templates, see I went that route but I went too far.  I was going like, “Oh, here’s a template.  This is something I need to create.” And I felt like, “Oh, this is cool.  This is cool.” And then I just kind of cluttered up my Notion folder for the second brain with all these templates that I couldn’t figure out what to do with, and this is like the classic database thing.  The more you kind of plan out ahead of time, the better off you are.

Tom Mighell: Yup, absolutely.

Dennis Kennedy: So, those are two thoughts.  You and I have both done something that I thought was worth mentioning that we were trying to think through carefully.  So you’re doing a health records database.  I’m doing something I call vault for kind of like important papers and important information.  And that’s another approach where I would say it’s not so much a project.  It really is a repository of important things that we can pull up whenever we need them.  But you might talk about what you’ve done Tom and then the concerns that were both thinking about as we do these types of parts of the second brain.

Tom Mighell: Well for me, the reason that caused me to create the health records area is that I can’t find another tool that I like better.  My doctors all have separate portals where they keep information.  I suppose I could go to those places.  Microsoft had a great tool a while back that was super secure.  It had great dashboard.  You could upload medical records.  They called it Microsoft HealthVault.  It was a great place to store — I want to store my entire health history.  I am now at an age where I’m having to follow my father’s health history to know what’s going on with him.  I want to be able to have the same insight to say, “Now, when did I get that tetanus booster? When did that happen?” So I know all of that.  I don’t have a place to keep that and so I’ve decided to put it in Notion.

What’s interesting is HealthVault was terrific and then it shut down.  Microsoft decided to shut it down and what was fascinating to me was Microsoft actually recommend say, if you want to do this, go with this tool or is this tool, and both of those tools are either completely out of business or they haven’t updated in three years.  So, Microsoft bet on the wrong horses when they made recommendations.  And I’m saying, if anybody here who’s listening to this knows about a HealthVault tool, then I’m all ears.  The one concern that I have about the vault in Notion is privacy, is security.  Notion is allegedly somewhat secure but it doesn’t have two-factor authentication yet.  They’re working on it, but it’s not there yet.  So, I might probably want to think about a more secure option but hey, that’s one reason to use that tip line.  If you’ve got an option for a health records database that could hold everything that I wanted to put in there, then show me the way and I will jump on it, but that was my major issue with why I put it together.  And I actually really like it because I can filter it and say, “All right, here’s my list of vaccines.  Here’s my list of drugs that I’m taking.  Here’s when I’ve been to this doctor and how many times I’ve been to this doctor over the past five years.” It’s working well for me.

Dennis Kennedy: So, I think that you do have the concern about privacy and security, but you’re balancing isn’t going to be convenient for you or for someone else to access that information and that could be something like tax return or health information or life insurance policies, a bunch of those things that you might put into a safe deposit box back in the old days.  So that’s kind of interesting.  I did want to talk about one thing Tom because there’s a new story that Notion has bought a company called Automate.io and one of the things for me that’s really interesting is they’re working on a way to connect the pocket app which is what I call a read later app where you save things and to port things right into Notion.

Notion has its own Web Clipper and that’s part of the reason I went with the sort of Stage 1.0 that I did, and then I pushed back what I call the reference manual piece of this into 2.0 because I kind of struggled with how the Web Clipper worked in some of the importing tools.  So I pushed them down the road into the second phase.  You have a great application of the Readwise of interface with our API into Notion that has worked well.

(00:25:10)

So, that actually has got me really interested in moving forward with those importing tools but I pushed it back.  So you might talk a little bit Tom about what you’re doing with Readwise.

Tom Mighell: So, let me say first about the acquisition of Automate.io, I mean Automate is one of the two or three companies that was offering integrations with the Notion API when they first debut, and other companies I think Zapier, I forgot the other name, the other company that’s doing it.

Dennis Kennedy: (00:25:41).

Tom Mighell: Yes.  They have integrations with Instapaper, with Pocket, with those common things.  I’ve played around with them a little bit but I haven’t gotten them to work exactly.  But part of the reason why I don’t care as much about Instapaper or Pocket integrations is because of Readwise and how I think Readwise works so Well, I will say as far as the Clipper is concerned, Dennis, if you are not already doing this and anybody else who’s using Notion, ditch the Notion Web Clipper, it is terrible in my opinion.  Go instead with a Chrome extension called Save to Notion.  It is way better and it is a lot more powerful and has worked better for me in saving things.  It’s not perfect.  I think that the web clipper still has a way to go.  And the issue with a clipper like this is, is to make it really work in a seamless way, you really need to actually configure it to set up access to every database that you might want to save something to.

And so what I’ve done at least initially is I’ve created just a general inbox and that’s where all of my clipped stuff goes and I have to curate that.  I have to go and move stuff around to places.  And I like that as an option right now because it doesn’t force me to do a lot more work.  But I do have to go into that inbox occasionally and say, “Okay, now does this go here or does this go there? What notebook do I want to put this into?” And I’m still working through that process.  But that said, Readwise is flawless.  Readwise integration is just amazing.  Every highlight that I have goes directly into a card for that book or article and it’s automatically saved there.  I couldn’t be happier with Readwise.  That’s why I haven’t even looked at any integration because it’s getting everything into Notion in a much better way than I could ever have come up with.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, the integration you did is super cool.  It’s really impressive to me and that’s something that I wanted to do.  Tom, I know we’re running short on time but I think to wrap up, I would say that I think we’re both really liking our choice of Notion as the tool to build that of.  I’d also say that I’ve discovered the Notion training videos are really good.

Tom Mighell: Really good.  There’s a lot of good things out there, yeah.

Dennis Kennedy: Really helpful.  And then I would say my learning so far have been that once I kind of get the hang of the database approaches that the databases really do require some upfront planning and kind of mapping out what you want to do and then deciding on the key data elements.  So for me it’s like tasks and projects.  And then in the resource world, I’m going to have some fundamental unit that I will work with.  And then the other thing that I’ve learned is this Notion of dashboard creation.  That Notion allows you to filter a database and set up a view and then to link that to another page and show that as a dashboard.  So I can say, “Here are the number one priority things I have for the next week” and show the projects that are associated with.  And I can just go to one dashboard page and see that.  And so that I just see tons of potential in creating these little dashboards.

Tom Mighell: I think that for me, what I need to do better and what’s next for me is I really want to understand better how to organize the databases.  So, for example, right now what I’d like to build into my travel database is a restaurant database.  I read restaurant reviews all the time.  I read travel magazines all the time so I know about hotels.  I’m going to start listing cool hotels or restaurants that I want to try out whenever I happen to be in a place and I’d like to be able to surface that when I’m planning a trip to that area and just say “Filter, show me all the places for this city that I’ve got in my restaurant and hotel databases.” I want to figure out how to actually organize them in in terms of the Notion hierarchy, that’s step one.

(00:30:00)

Number two is really hardcore second brain stuff.  You know, I don’t really take that many notes.  I’m just not a note-taker, I’m more of a highlighter in articles and books and things like that and grabbing that kind of information.  I’m not really taking notes and I see that that’s an area where I could prosper within Notion is to do better about getting my own content in there.  So, I’m able to tap that whenever I need to.  But those are kind of the major issues that I want hopefully, some of this that we’ve talked about is of interest to you, that makes you want to think about using Notion, please feel free to reach out to us or as we said hit up YouTube, there’s tons of great instructional videos that can get you started with Notion.

Dennis Kennedy: And I would say that we recommend you try this and we’re happy to exchange ideas with you, especially like really cool ideas.

Tom Mighell: Especially really cool ideas.  All right, let’s get on.  Let’s go to where the second segment but before we do that let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsors.

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Tom Mighell: And now let’s get back to the Kennedy-Mighell Report, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy and it’s time for our segment we call Hot or Not.  We pick something people are talking about and argue whether we think it is a hot topic that you need to pay attention to or not.  We might agree, but odds are that we won’t.  So let’s get started.  Tom, we spoke at probably great length in the last episode about this September Apple event.  So it’s only fair to give some equal time to the September Microsoft Surface event and related announcements.  And that might just mean that now I get to turn the tables and call you as surface fanboy.  However, are the new Surface announcements hot or not? 

Tom Mighell: So I hate to deprive you of that pleasure Dennis, but frankly to be a fanboy of Surface, I’d have to own one or more of those devices.  I would think.  And as of today, I don’t, I’m not a Surface person anymore.  I used to have lots of service devices, and frankly I just don’t use them anymore for various reasons.  I am a fan of the product though.  I think that Microsoft has really become a solid hardware manufacturer.  They make some good products.  They just don’t have anything that I really want to use right now, for various reasons, but let’s get to the event and talk about it.  Similar to the Apple event, they unveiled a bunch of new devices and accessories.  What I’m going to do is I’m going to talk about things in what I consider most interesting to least interesting and I’ll try to go through this quickly.

Most interesting device was a something called the Surface Laptop Studio.  It’s the successor to the Surface Book, which was the big heavy laptop that would flip around, you could remove the screen I like this form factor a lot more, they ditched the removable tablet.  It’s not as heavy.  It doesn’t look as heavy anyway.  It might be somewhat the same, but it seems smaller than the last one.  You can now lay the screen flat across the top of the laptop where you can write on it.  It’s really a cool new kind of innovative design.  I think easily the most powerful of the current new Surface devices.  It looks like a great option.  The price is right up there with it being powerful.

Next up is the Surface Pro 8, which is what most people think about when they want to buy a Surface, which is the tablet factor that has the kickstand.  The Surface Pro is really the best made of all the surface devices in my opinion, and they’ve really upgraded this, it’s twice as fast as the last version.  They’ve added USBC.  I think this is a great upgrade for anyone who is looking for a Surface or looking to upgrade an older model of the Surface.

(00:35:02)

The next thing that to me is I’ll put it in the middle only because it’s interesting to me, this was last year’s sort of disaster for Microsoft, the Surface Duo, the folding phone that I actually purchased a version of and I really, really wanted to love it and I just couldn’t, I just was underwhelmed by it.  The new 2021 version fixes all the problems with the last version, every complaint that everybody had last year, Microsoft had fixed them all, a regular camera setup, an up-to-date processor, so it’s faster, 5G but it’s not any more innovative this year.  It’s still really not that interesting a device for me.  It’s not my cup of tea.  So I’m passing on that.

The next thing isn’t a device, but it’s an accessory.  I think it’s really cool that Microsoft calls it The Adaptive Kit.  It’s a set of textured stickers, labels, tabs that are designed to improve accessibility.  For example, there’s a keycap sticker to help people with poor vision, get alignment on the keyboard.  There’s a three-dimensional bump label for placing it on ports or buttons.  I think that’s incredibly cool.  And I think it’s free, I mean it’s free or incredibly cheap to get.

Finally, there were two other Surface devices mentioned Surface Pro X, which is a step down from the Surface Pro and then the Surface Go which is their low budget tablet.  I really didn’t think there were any drastic changes here, just kind of a New Year to Year upgrade.  Last episode, I gave Apples event a 7 out of 10 in the Hot or Not category.  For Microsoft, I think I’m going to give them a 6.  Solid announcements, although a little boring but, you know, what Microsoft is not the most exciting company in the world they just make solid good quality hardware so really no surprises there for me.

Dennis, what about you? 

Dennis Kennedy: Tom I feel like I’m wearing your t-shirt that says evolutionary not revolutionary.  So I haven’t used the Surface for a while but I really like them and I have like standard windows laptop that I use at work and I would much rather have a Surface.  So, I think everything here was good.  I don’t get the dual screen phones so much but that’s kind of my personal thing, but I thought everything was good and I looked at it the same way I look at Apple is that these devices are important in how easy they are to use, but what really matters is what they open up for you.  And so, the key to it is going to be Windows 11 and the Windows Ecosystem.  And so I was, you know, I was jazzed after the Apple event, you know, not so much with this.  But in the business setting, if I had the choice of a Surface device, I would take it, you know, 10 times out of 10 over any other choice out there.  So, I would give it kind of a 5 because I don’t have like a great sense of like, here are these amazing things that you can do like, you know, after the Apple event where I’m already thinking about the different ways I can do video and what I might create, which is sort of the Apple ecosystem is which I think is more designed to creatives rather than business people, but I love seeing things that are improving and you know, like I said, Tom this would be my choice in the Windows world every single time.

So now it’s time for a parting shots at one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast in, Tom take it away.

Tom Mighell: I love how you turn that Hot or Not segment about Windows into one about Apple ultimately so good on you for that.  So my hot or not is a new website.  It’s called — kind of website kind of service, it’s called Feeds Mage.  And what it’s designed to do is it’s designed to take your Twitter account, you give it your Twitter information yes, you’re doing that.  You’re authorizing this to access it.  It looks at all the groups, the people that you follow or the accounts that you follow on Twitter and it will let you know if they have an RSS feed.  If they have a newsletter, if they have a YouTube channel, if they have something offline on Twitter that might be worth following and I think it’s fascinating.  I’m going through here and I’m finding resources that I didn’t actually know were available and starting to look at them and deciding if I want to subscribe to them.  These are people who I care about their content.  So I must hopefully would care about their content in other places.  So, I think it’s nice if you have a decent number of followers, just checking up and seeing what you got, my feeds made tells me that I have 293 feeds in my timeline, nine are newsletters so I’m going to definitely go look at those see if there’s anything worth subscribing to.  Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah.  I thought this is really cool.  I love the idea of this.

(00:40:00)

I was actually getting an error earlier in the day when I tried it up to but it’s working for me now.  So two things, so this I think is cool.  I saw this other one which I think is called Author Lee(ph), which for authors it’s supposedly will go out and find all the articles you’ve authored all over the place and allow you to see them all in one place which is also super cool, which is not my parting shot for today.  But I love these things that are kind of fun finding other sources and aggregating them for you almost like aggregation assistant.  So Feeds Mage is really cool.  

The one I have is — so while (00:40:39) has this cool one, I have this thing that probably a lot of people know and it might be old hat for some but I just found it super useful lately because I’ve been really disappointed with Google as a search engine and a lot of ways for finding what I want.  And what I found is — and there’s a number of these little tricks you can do, but starting to use questions as a search term.  So how do I do X?  I think is really in the search box really gets you much better results than just typing keywords only.  So, just something to try kind of structure your Google searches as a question and see if it does some improvement for you.

Tom Mighell: I’ve done that for a while and I think it actually does because I think the quality of the results tend to be much better and much more what I’m looking for.

And so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell report.  Thanks for joining us on the podcast.  You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Network’s page for the show.  If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes, or on the Legal Talk Network site where you can find archives of all of our previous episodes along with transcripts, if you would like to get in touch with us, please reach out to us on LinkedIn or Twitter and as we said, probably more than we should have.  Please leave us a voicemail at (720) 441-6820, don’t forget we’ve got our 300th episode coming up soon.  So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy-Mighell Report, a podcast on legal technology with an internet focus.  If you like what you heard today, please rate us in Apple podcasts and we’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy-Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the Kennedy-Mighell report.  Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, Smart Ways to Work Together from ABA Books, or Amazon and join us every other week for another edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report only on the Legal Talk Network.

The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of nor or they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders and subsidiaries.  None of the content should be considered legal advice.  As always, consult a lawyer.

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Podcast transcription by Tech-Synergy.com

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