Michael Greenberg: Boosting Productivity with AI and Automation

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Nigel Rawlins (00:00):
I recently read the book 2 Second Lean, which

(00:02):
emphasizes continuousimprovement and simplifying
processes by making small dailyimprovements and fixing what
bugs you.
This inspired me to look atautomating repetitive tasks in
my business.
As a heavy user of AI, I beganto consider how to use it more
effectively for automation.
This led me to finding our guesttoday, Michael Greenberg.

(00:26):
Michael is a digital operationspecialist with extensive
experience in leveraging AI andautomation to streamline
business processes.
He deeply understands how tointegrate digital tools and
connect apps to optimiseefficiency and productivity.
Michael's expertise means he canprovide practical advice on

(00:47):
automating our workflows,freeing us from the boring,
repetitive tasks, giving us moretime for what we truly want to
do.
Join us as we explore howdigital operations can transform
your business, enhance yourproductivity and reduce the
cognitive load of managingroutine tasks.
Michael, welcome to theWisepreneurs podcast.

(01:09):
Could you tell us somethingabout yourself and where you're
from?

Michael Greenberg (01:12):
Well, my name is Michael Greenberg.
I'm from St Louis Missourie, Ihave an 80 pound that's about
34, 35 kilo dog.
And he is a poodle mix.
He's about a meter tall.
So he's a very large dog, eventhough he's not that heavy.

What's his name?
His

His name is Sobek.
He is named after the ancientEgyptian crocodile headed
protector god of the Nile.
Because when he was a puppy, hehad the crocodile teeth, as many
puppies do.

Yes.
So did he get a lot of walks?

Oh yeah, that's it.
We, you and I were just talkingabout before we got on air, uh,
about getting our steps in andgetting movement.
And I got a really high energydog and now we get four or five
walks a day.
I.
I'm always hitting 10, 000steps.

walk most mornings.
I won't, I be able to walk thismorning because I'm talking to
you.
But I don't have a dog, but Iget greeted by many dogs on my
walk.
They all come up and say hello.
It's a bit disappointing when Idon't meet one, but there's a
lovely one I meet towards theend of the, walk is behind a
fence and always greets me andgives me a lick.

Awesome.

So Michael, one of the reasons I came across you
is because you describe yourselfas a digital operations person.
Can you tell us what you mean bythat?

First, let me say, I did not invent the term.
I just plucked it out of theenterprise archives of Accenture
and all the other bigorganizations that have been
doing this stuff for years, andI've been trying to bring it
down to the little guys.
So digital operations is quitesimply, all of the operations of

(03:04):
a business that can becomedigitized.
And that means your software.
That means the tools you useevery day.
It means the messaging softwareyou use or the work management
software, like ClickUp andNotion to store documents.
And then it also means, and Ithink this is where most of us

(03:25):
think of it.
Using automation and using AI tointegrate all those tools and to
allow you to do more, faster,better.

I've sort of got into that since, I was having a
look at this Two Second Agilestuff going around is trying to
get everything into flow.
And I realized when I was doingthis podcast, it's about 50
things I do, and I'm thinking,I've got to make this easier.
And I that's what you're reallytalking about for, knowledge
workers or intelligent labor, aswe can name it.

(03:58):
People who are working forthemselves, and busy, they're
doing a whole lot of thingshard.
So what are some of the toolsthat you talked about?
And I noticed you mentionedNotion and do you Notion as
well?

No.
It's a good tool.
A lot of people love it.
It's very, very pretty.
But I have not experienced it ina positive way in teams of five
or 10 even.
Um, I've really only seen itwork well in small teams.

And I think you use Obsidian?

I do.
Yes.
And I host my personal websiteon Obsidian as well.
I love Obsidian.
It is the last note takingsoftware I will ever use.
It is.
available for free.
It is self hosted, which meansyou don't have to worry about
any data privacy.

(04:48):
And all of the files are astandard markdown format, which
is widely accessible across theinternet.

We probably should explain what Obsidian is.

Oh yeah.
That that's, that's an importantpoint.
Obsidian is just a note takingand text editing program, most
commonly used for personalnotebooks, or journals.
And it has two unique features.
One, it has plugins, so you canadd new features to it.
And two, you can link differentnotes in Obsidian to each other.

(05:26):
So that way you can create likea big mind map over time.
That is a lot of fun, there's alittle graph button, open graph
view, and then it creates agiant knowledge web of all of
your notes and how they'relinked together.

One of the reasons we use these note taking
apps, as we call them, isbecause we're reading books,
especially if you use a Kindleand you're highlighting, it can
feed into these apps.
I'm sort of stuck with RoamResearch because I started when
it first came out.
So I've got thousands of notesin there from my reading and all

(06:02):
sorts of stuff.
I did have a look at Tana, whichis another one that looks very
interesting, but it's verydifficult to change and shift.
So, let's talk about the reasonwhy people might want to use
Obsidian or Tana or any othersis to do something with their
notes.
So, what are you pouring intoyours, into your obsidian?

So I put pretty much every note that
doesn't live somewhere else.
And what I mean by that is allof my client specific work lives
inside of ClickUp.
All of my personal writing liveson Obsidian.
All of my, like, thoughtleadership writing lives in

(06:44):
Obsidian.
But if it's work specific, It'sgoing to be in ClickUp because
that's where I work with myteam.
And Obsidian, I really just tryto use as that personal note
database.
So I use a podcast listening appcalled Snipd, S-N-I-P-D and it
allows you to take clips andthose clips can sync into a tool

(07:09):
called ReadWise, um, and thenReadWise will sync to Obsidian
directly.
And so all of my podcast clips,they go back into Obsidian.
All of my Kindle book notes,they go back into Obsidian.
Um, all of my article clips onthe web, go back into Obsidian
the same way.

(07:30):
And those all come throughReadwise into one area.
And then all of my personalwriting gets handled in
Obsidian.
Ooh.
I know nobody's going to be ableto see this, but, can I share,
just for you and I, yeah,that's, hold on, we want entire
screen.
Boom.
So you can see sort of, theseare all going to be random,

(07:50):
different individual, notes.
But then here's the real meat ofit, where we've got a few key
documents then overlap and getreferenced just everywhere else.

It's like a star map, and when you click on a
node, it links out to all theother nodes around it.

then you can see just link, link, link, link,
link, link, link.

I have spoken to somebody else about Roam
research on the podcast.
So I've actually startedmentioning these note taking
apps.

And I was a Roam user first.
I should say I started withRoam, but the bullet point
system, I just couldn't getbehind.
And so I moved to Obsidian.

Oh, it's driving me a bit mad because the
difficulty is doing the searchesand I'm not, I'm not a tech type
person, um, or a coder oranything like that.
So I think Roam is more forsomebody who is very good at
coding and can actually findtheir stuff in there.
And that's the difficulty.
I've got nearly four years ofnotes in there and a massive

(08:51):
amount of notes.
I think I've got about 10, 000pages.
And yes, I'm just a bit worriedabout where I would go from
there, especially when my fiveyears is up, because I paid for
five years.
I'm just wondering what will Ido next?

Have you tried exporting to Obsidian?

no, I haven't yet.
But I, I see a lot aboutObsidian on Twitter.
I can actually have it on mylaptop because there is a laptop
version now.
But yeah, look, I think I willlook at that because I run
everything on a M1 Mac.
So the whole business,everything.
I think

I think everyone who uses a tool like
this is going to end up at it.
On Obsidian, simply because opensource extendability of it means
that it will have imports foreverything else and anyone can
export to something else.
But in almost every personalcase, Obsidian will solve for it

(09:44):
and it is free.
And so in the majority of cases,people will end up migrating
there.

Yeah, so our main point about talking about
Obsidian and these notes issomewhere to park your notes, so
you can actually access themagain.
So instead of being in anotebook that you can have piles
of, which I have got piles of,and piles of bits of paper, on
the docs and everywhere else,um, by having it in a format
like this, we can actuallysearch for it if you're good at

(10:11):
searching and can figure out howto do your queries.
So how easy is it for you tofind stuff on Obsidian?
That if you're looking for, youwant to write an article or
you've got to put together aresearch report or something
like that, how easy is it tofind and put the stuff together?

So I think it's very easy.
But that's because I have apretty simple organizational
structure.
Um, I use just a slightlymodified version of para from
building a second brain.
And so I've got an areas ofresponsibility.
I've got a resources section andI've got an archive, then I've

(10:50):
just got a priority inbox of thefew things I'm writing at the
moment.
And those generally have afolder.
And so each folder has any notesthat I've drug dug up.
Obsidian uses keyword search.
And so that makes it pretty easyto find anything I'm looking
for.
I will say I actually end upsearching on my website for my

(11:12):
own stuff more often than Isearch inside of the Obsidian
app, because I like to focus onwhat's like the public stuff and
get rid of all the excess noisefrom old notes.

So one of the things you just mentioned there
is, Para.
So this is where we just starttalking about.
Brains.
We, we have our own brain, whichis the first brain.
Second brains, and I think youalso have something called the
third brain.
So let's talk about second brainand what you mean by the para
method.

So the first brain, as already mentioned, is
inside our own head.
We're all very familiar withthat one.
The second brain, I like to sayis in our pocket because we're
all carrying cell phones now.
And really the way you can thinkof the second brain is there is
some notes app, or area, or manyareas for most of us, where we

(12:03):
store and squirrel away littlebits of knowledge on the
internet or on our phones or onour laptops.
And those of us who have maybeone point that we're looking at
all of that information fromhave organized it into a tool
like Obsidian or Notion or Roam.
And that tool is referred to asa second brain.

(12:27):
And that second brain is just anexternal digital, normally
digital.
It could be physical.
You could have a notebook, butmost often digital, uh, storage
device for memory andinformation.

Now, the interesting thing about this is
because as humans in the past,we might have had oral
traditions and we wrote andstuff like that.
But now it with the amount ofinformation out there, and you,
as you mentioned before, youlisten to podcasts and you snip
bits.
I actually listen back throughand take a note and then, I can
dictate it into my note takingapps and things like that.

(13:04):
So this is taking stuff outsideof our brains like an extended
mind.
The book, The Extended Mind,talked about this, taking things
out of our body into the worldaround us.
So what's the PARA method?

So the PARA method is a specific way for
organizing that information.
Stands for projects, areas of ofresponsibility, resources,
archive.
Projects are self explanatory.
They are your active projectsyou're working on.
Areas of responsibility would bethings like home, health, you

(13:37):
know, dog, and then all of theinformation related to those
things.
And so they're ongoingresponsibilities without any
clear start or end.
And then resources would belike, I have a resource that is
all of my tweet templates.
And so that is very useful as away for me to pull up

(13:57):
information, but it's notspecifically related to any past
project.
And then finally we havearchive, which would be self
explanatory.
Once again, it's an archive ofall your past information.
And if you don't know what to dowith it, you just throw it in
the archive.
I

So the interesting thing about this is
that it's a way of organizingour life, not just our working
life.
And this is one of the mainreasons I want to talk to you
about is organizing our digitallives.
When I was a kid, I can't evenremember we had a phone in the
house and things like that.
So, I mean, you're probably avery different generation to

(14:38):
mine.
We didn't have mobile phoneswhen I was young until I was
probably in my 30s, I think, ormaybe even my 40s.
So in the past, I think we wouldhave just had notebooks and bits
of paper or, and, but we neverhad, uh, a digital world.
So we weren't out therepublishing and getting on social
media.
So what you're talking about isa way of organizing the

(14:59):
information in our lives.
And hopefully when we writethings or we, uh, work for
somebody, we turn it intoknowledge.
So, how would you describe it?
Do we call it workflows, what dowe call this?

Workflows is the word we most often use at
least right now.
Those, I think, the second brainassists our first brain in
managing knowledge workflows.
So it helps organize informationto make it easier to retrieve or
use, but it does not think, andit does not do.

(15:34):
This is the failure of thesecond brain.
It is purely memory.
The third brain, whichcoincidentally is also the name
of my consulting company.
is the layer of automations andAI that help you move through
the steps of your workflow sothat way everytime you create a
podcast episode you have shownotes automatically created
because that's one of those 50steps

I don't think people realize how many steps I
have a whiteboard behind mebecause I'm thinking I've got to
try and sort out 50 things Ihave to do, with a podcast, and
that even starts with theinvitation.
I use Trello, to organizeeverything.
So I have to feed in all yourinformation into my Trello.
So as a guest, and then I havegot, the whiteboard, and it's

(16:15):
virtually full of all the steps.
And so I need some sort ofworkflow.
So the whole point I startedmapping that out is because when
I started looking at this TwoSecond Agile is how can I stop
all the little blockages and thethings that drive me mad and the
automation.
So the reason, um, we're talkingabout this today is for anyone

(16:36):
who's listening is that If, ifyou're working for yourself as
self employed or as a consultantor an independent professional,
you've got to organize yourself.
And to be more productivewithout being burnt out is you
need some systems in place.
So that's why we're talkingabout workflows and things like

(16:57):
that.
So let's Talk about a typicalday for you.
Now, I've just outlined, um, thereason I need to start
automating, it's because doingthings manually is time
consuming.
And I'd much rather read areally interesting book and take
some notes and work on thosenotes and write an interesting
article.

(17:17):
For example, I run a marketingservices company.
I look after 18 WordPresswebsites and I, I do a report
every month.
So I've put out all thedifferent emails ready.
I've got to get all of thesnippets out there and put them
in there.
And then I've got to look at allthe different reports.
That can take me a whole daythat I can't be working on
things I'd much rather work on.

(17:38):
It's got boring.
So I've been learning, how do Iautomate that process?
Well, the other day I figuredout that, cause I use Gmail,
that you could actually automatethe setting up of all of those.
Put in all the email addresses.
Sometimes I send them to fourdifferent people and that all
fits in there.
And then it fits in the outlineof what I've got to fill in.

(17:58):
And I'm going, that's just savedme a really boring, probably
hour of fiddling.
And that's the whole point thatI wanted to talk to you about
that in our world today, ifyou're working for yourself at
home and you've got a decentlittle computer, there's things
you can do to make your lifeeasier so that you can do stuff
that's more important.

(18:19):
So, how does your day look whenyou're doing something like
this?
You know, somebody contacts you,what happens?

A very interesting question.
Um, because there's a lot ofdigital operations that go on in
the background.
I get an email, every 15minutes, an AI checks all of my
emails, and email by email, ittags them.

(18:45):
And if it's a newsletter, or apromotional email, or something
else that isn't reallyimportant, then it will
automatically apply a label, andthat label will remove it from
my inbox.
It'll move it off to the side myexecutive assistant, Michaela,
is going to check once an hour,any, uh, of the messages that

(19:06):
remain.
If it's a message on LinkedIn orsome other platform, we have it
set up, so it will create anemail because I'm not checking
everywhere every day.
And then she'll let me know if Iget a message.
So, we are already deep intodigital operations at this
point.
I've got an AI categorizer, andthen I've got an offshore team

(19:27):
member who is helping me, and ifit's something I need to respond
to, she's going to create a taskin ClickUp, and when that task
is created in ClickUp, It'sgoing to send me a Slack
notification in a special Slackchannel called, you know, task
notifications.
And then if she can handle it onher own, she's going to handle

(19:49):
it.

Now there are a couple of interesting things
there.
How do you do that in an email,which particular one are you
using that can have an AI inthere Google hasn't got it yet?

I use make.
com.
But there are like dedicated AIinbox apps that are being
developed that do the samething.

Yeah.

I just use make.
com though, and I have a littleprompt and it says, Hey, is this
a newsletter?
And Hey, is this a sales emailor promotional email?
And I just use Claude 3, Haiku.
So I use the fastest, cheapestone.
And it just asks question,question, question.
And it's got a really longcontext window, so I can send

(20:27):
the whole email through withoutany formatting changes.

I have found that AI can do a whole lot of stuff
and we'll get into that soonbecause um, when I have stuff
sent through from Readwise it'sgot all sorts of things in it.
Now I'm just using AI just toclean it all up, give me a
summary and then I can stick itinto Roam.
I've got about, unfortunatelyI've got about 200 articles
sitting in Roam that I haven'tprocessed.

(20:50):
And this is the difficulty.
If we've got so much informationand the danger is we're reading
stuff, you're getting emails,you're getting newsletters, you
know, and.
I don't know, as human beings, Ithink we're so curious, we've
got to have a look at all thisstuff.
And it can be overwhelming.
And that, that's why you've gotto offload it.
So one thing you just talkedabout there, you've got AI

(21:10):
helping you process some of thework that's coming in, but
you've also offshored to a VA.
So why, why have you done that?
Why don't you try and do allthat yourself?

Well, because I tried to do it all myself, and
then I got overwhelmed and burntout and I wasn't doing what I
wanted to with my time.
And if my time could be betterspent.
Anywhere it's not in my email.
So that was an easy one for me.
So

The main thing is that if you are working for
yourself and you're gettingenough work and you can afford
the VA, then it's important, Ithink to offshore, we call it
offshoring.
I have about two or threepeople.
Most of them are in thePhilippines at the moment
because it's in my time zone.
I pay them a reasonable amounttoo.
I don't, I'm trying to do it onthe cheap or anything like that.
So yeah, I offload, um, thesocial media artwork I do to

(22:04):
promote the podcast.
And that generally comes backwithin a day, but then I still
got to process it.
So I've still got to automatethat.
So where is your VA?
Is it in your time zone?

Michaela does work my time.
Um, when I'm hiring for any roleI'm hiring around the world.
And so Michaela actually isbased in the Philippines.
She's one of two team members wehave there, but then I also have
team members in Nicaragua and inLebanon and in Ukraine and
Poland, and even in the US andCanada.

(22:40):
I try to make it more about whothe best person is, who can get
the job done at the price Ineed.

Well, I think that's a really interesting
point is, outsourcing extra helpbecause I don't think anyone
today can actually, if they'reworking for themselves, can do
it on their own.
Otherwise you're ending upworking 15, 16 hours a day, and
if you're in a relationship,that's going to be destroyed,
and you're sitting down an awfullot too, which is one of the

(23:08):
things we spoke about before, isit's not good for your health to
sit down all day.
You've got a dog getting outfive times a day is going to
make you far more productivethan sitting in a chair for 10
hours.
All right.
So I guess what we're really,really talking about is how do
you run a business?
So it's basically you with yourteam.

That's really how I think about it.
Um, even if I am the only personmy business employs directly and
everyone else is a contractor,they're still part of my team.
And the legal distinction is bigthere, but I think the
professional work distinction isnot.
That's one important point.
Especially when people hirethose of us who are experienced

(23:47):
in our work, they are hiring usbecause we have experience.
And part of their expectation isthat we have a team or we know
how to build that team when it'sneeded.
And I think that that's where alot of us, uh, like drop the
ball.
When we move back to becomingconsultants or freelancers and
that sort of thing, or coaches.

(24:08):
We forget that, Oh, the clientdoesn't really care if I'm doing
it all myself.
They just want to know that itgets done and they're hiring me
to make sure it gets done right.

And it is much faster to have a team but, the
thing I've learnt, use Upwork,and I think I've been on it for
more than 10 years now, but Ihave learnt to find good people,
and often that means that you'vegot to give somebody a go, and
you give them little jobs.
But I have been lucky enough tofind really, really good people,
and I like to pay themreasonably well in American

(24:39):
dollars, obviously, and inAustralian dollars, they're not
anything close to an Americandollar.
I think it costs us$1.50 to buyan American dollar.
So it's expensive.
Oh, it's terrible.
It's been terrible for a longtime, but I'd rather do that
because I find really talentedpeople who can do stuff very
quickly.
Whereas if I was trying to messaround, trying to do some

(25:01):
artwork, it's going to take me15, well, more than 15 minutes.
It can take me an hour and youcan get lost in it.
And that's the beauty.
So how do you find the talentthat you work with?

So first off, let me say, I am a massive fan
of Upwork, especially for anyonegetting started hiring, Like
hiring online or hiringremotely.
There are reviews on theprofiles.
If you hire somebody who'salready billed$10, 000 on
platform and has a 95, 98, 99percent success rate, you're

(25:34):
going to get good work done.
That's I think a lot of peoplediscount that fact that Upwork
has that value, the 10 percentextra is worth it.
Especially, when you're hiringfor like those one off roles.

Yep.

So let me start there.
Upwork's fantastic.
I love Upwork.
I also do a few thingsdifferently on Upwork and I
don't think I've told anyonethis before.
So this is new for the audience.
And then I'll tell you about theother platforms.
Um, but on Upwork, I alwaysinvite people to the job.
I will go and search them outahead of time and I try to send

(26:10):
10 or 20 invites.
Hiring from an aged account onUpwork really does make a
difference.
So if you have your paymentverified, if you have spent
thousands or tens of thousandsor hundreds of thousands on
platform, Freelancers can seethat in your job post and
they're just like, you'refiltering by how many hours
they've worked, how many dollarshave they paid out, they're

(26:32):
filtering their, their potentialclients the same way.
And they're saying, Oh, if thisclient is listing only at 20 an
hour and my filter's at 25,you're never going to see each
other.
And then I try to start mypricing and focus on a specific
region and a specific pricepoint.

(26:54):
And I start at the lowest endand then I go up from there.
So I start with the mostfavorable English accent
regions, and best time zones.
And I start by having the bestof both worlds and then I move
outwards.
So because I'm in the US, Istart with the Americas And then

(27:17):
I do Africa and Europe together.
And I especially focus on Kenyaand South Africa and Nigeria
because they have such highlevels of English speaking
population.
And then I expand to thePhilippines and to Southeast
Asia.
And so I sort of progress fromhow close they are to my time
zone all the way out.

(27:38):
And I focus on like, I knowArgentina, Mexico, Columbia,
those three countries are goingto have the best English.
which actually is a perfectsegue into the other few tools I
use to hire.
If I'm hiring in thePhilippines, I use onlinejobs.
ph they're hands down the bestplace to hire good Filipino
internet talent because that'swhere everyone looks.

(28:00):
And then I used LinkedIn jobsquite a bit and I get good
results from them.
You have to target to a localarea.
So that's why I'm only targetingthree or four countries when I'm
using LinkedIn jobs.

The whole point we're making there is, it's
important to have a team andit's important to realise that
it's not going to be easy.
In the early days of mymarketing services company, I
actually hired people tophysically come into an office.
So I used to have to have anoffice, used to have computers
and networks and everything, andthen bring them in.
But I wasn't really good atgetting a lot of work.

(28:34):
So I'd be paying these peoplemore than I'd end up getting.
So that's why we outsource now,because we don't need people all
the time, but we do need talent.

You don't even need a team.
You need a great Rolodex.
That's, I think, to your point,like, you don't need to employ
people full time for all thesethings.
I employ a lot of my people fulltime or part time.
And when I do part time, I tryto do half time.
But hourly is fantastic for alot of these roles too.
And it's really just a matter ofhaving the right person for the

(29:04):
job when you need them alreadyin place.

Let's talk about some of the talent you're
seeking What complements you?

Ooh, yeah.
So I tend to hire in a few areasto start.
First is just general follow up.
And like communicationmanagement, because I am busy
and I have ADHD and the busier Iget, the more things I drop and

(29:36):
I don't even notice and nobodytells you.
And so I need to hire people tomake sure I drop fewer things,
which is why I have an assistantwho checks my inbox every hour
and why we use ClickUp and othertools like that to track
everything.
so communication first, actuallydoing the work, for the kind of

(29:57):
work we do, we have to hire fora few different roles.
Uh, so we have to hire somebodycalled a Draftsman and they are
going to actually sit withpeople and design workflows and
draw them out into pretty flowcharts with decision trees.
So that way somebody.
Normally somebody we call aspecialist can automate it.

(30:21):
And the specialist has thisspecific tool set of tech
required to build the thing,even if they may not be an
expert in the business process.

an expert in the business process.
Now, that is very interesting.
Okay, let's talk about, say forexample, you work for yourself,
you have a team, a distributedteam, I suppose we could say,
and you have a team.
Workflows.
Let's explain what a workflow isand how you might automate it.
So for a person like me, there'sprobably a lot of people, not

(30:52):
necessarily like me, but outthere who are sitting in front
of their laptop.
They're running their ownbusiness.
They, they may be very, verybusy.
And the thing is people, youknow, I keep trying to tell
people it's not just doing thework that's important.
You've also got to run abusiness.
So you've got to do themarketing and selling.
You've got to do the admin work,uh, and you've also got to do

(31:15):
the work that the client'spaying you for.
And it's very easy to neglectthe admin and it's very easy to
neglect the marketing.
So, let's explain a workflow andhow that might be practical for
a person who's sitting in frontof their laptop.
Um, What sort of workflows areyou talking about?
And then what sort ofautomations are you talking
about?
Let's probably keep it fairlysimple.

Oh yeah, sure.
How about, podcasts?

okay, let's talk about podcasting.
So people get an idea of what'sactually happening as in a
podcast.

First there's putting together a list of
people to have on your podcast.
We do about once every month ortwo.
And we put together a list oflike 20 to 30 people generally
and then we send out invites toall of those people.
And so I'm going to be the onewho puts together the initial
list and I might rattle it offonto a voice memo or something,

(32:09):
and then that's going to getsent to Michaela, my assistant.
And she is going to pull thatall the contact information for
everyone.
And then she's going to load itinto.
a piece of software that willautomatically send a template
email to each person andautomatically follow up if they

(32:30):
haven't responded a couple oftimes.
And then automatically, it'llit'll say, Hey, these people
responded.
These people didn't.
And so that gets us to bookingand Michaela handles all the
booking and knows, Oh, we canbook at these times and that's
all handled.
So then we get to actuallyrecord it.
We record and it's awesome.
And we have a great episode.

(32:51):
Then we've got to cut thatepisode down to a final cut.
We've got to make sure it soundsamazing.
We've got to get an intro andoutro on it.
We've got to get it scheduledand posted somewhere.
We've got to make some socialclips and we've got to.
Then schedule all those socialclips to promote the episode
after it comes out.

(33:12):
That's a lot more steps.
That's a lot more pieces.
We have tools like Descript, andDescript is going to allow for
me or for one of my other teammembers to go in and look at the
entire recording and see it alltranscribed, and then to cut it
down and to edit the audio andthe text at the same time.

(33:33):
And so I'll do a rough cut andthen I'll send it to a podcast
editor and they're going to putthe intro outro on and they're
going to master it and somehowit sounds better than when I had
it thatwill get t us to a finalepisode and we can then take
that final episode and upload itinto a a tool called Swell.
ai and Swell is going to chop upthe episode into a whole bunch

(33:57):
of different clips.
And it's going to create somecustomized templates that we've
developed for social posts.
And then it's also going to sendall of that plus the original
recording in a Google drive.
To one of my other team members,James, and James is going to
handle all the scheduling andJames is also going to take the

(34:19):
original full recording and he'sgoing to go back over it himself
and make sure we didn't miss anyamazing things.
And then we're going to send athank you note and we're going
to publish the episode.
And that's that.

There's a lot of steps.
I do most of that myself becauseI'm sort of, I'm sort of
retired, you know, I'm supposedto be retired,

Just 18 clients, totally retired.

Oh, well, it's mostly automated.
I press a button every day.
And if something goes down, I'vegot to do something really
quick.
So I generally keep an eye onthings.
But they, they pay to keep itfunctioning well.
Like they all went down theother day.
Every one of the sites went downthe other day because one of
them overloaded the servers.
So I had to double the servercapacity.
And that was luckily on a Sundaymorning.

(35:04):
But it changed the IP address ofthem all, and people probably
have no idea what I'm talkingabout.
But an IP address is when you'vegot your domain name and it
points to where it's hosted.
It changed the IP address, so Ihad to change it all, but some
of them I couldn't get hold of,the owner of the domain name, so
it took nearly more than a week.

Oof,

Oh, well, one went down yesterday after one
week and luckily I got hold ofit.
It was an IT department of alarge health organization near
where I live.
And I didn't know how to findthe IT department to talk to
them cause they keep

they wouldn't be a public line or anything.

No, there wasn't.
So I had to go through, probablyIndia and then luckily somebody
called me.
So yeah, there's crazy stuff,but that's all automated too.
So really people don'tunderstand that there's lots of
ways, you can look at whatyou're doing and create a
workflow.
Now, automations, obviouslyfinding, um, apps or finding

(36:01):
cloud programs.
So what are some of yourfavorite apps that once you
figured out you need to automatethis.
How do I find something that'sgoing to help me do it better
and cut down my time?

So let's start with the step before the
automation step, which is yougot to choose tools that can
talk to each other, right?
If all of your notes for yourprojects are in pen and paper in
your notebook, there's no wayyou're going to be able to
automate anything from thatinformation.
I think a lot of people don'trealize how scattered everything

(36:35):
is until they start to go to tryto do some of this.
So I want to start there andsay, you got to pick a tool that
you can automate with.
Trello, fantastic for it.
ClickUp, Notion, both fantasticfor automation.
Airtable.
Fantastic for automation.
Google sheets, also great forautomation.
You got options, but you got topick options that work.

(36:56):
So once once you've got that outof the way, then you're going to
use one of two platforms to doyour actual automation work.
You're either going to useZapier and 90 percent of the
people listening are going touse Zapier and that's going to
be the one you enjoy, or you'regoing to use make.
com.
And different tools work withdifferent automation platforms.

(37:20):
So depending on the tools youuse, there's a good chance
you're going to be locked intoone of them.
And Zapier is probably the morebeginner friendly one.
So you need somewhere to putyour data.
They can talk with other placesand you need an automation tool.
And when you've got both ofthose, then you can start
automating things.
I know there's a million steps,every part of the way.

(37:40):
You go hire somebody off ofUpwork who already knows how to
use these tools.
Or you hire somebody like me anda whole firm, if you're a,
little larger company.
But there's a lot of people onUpwork who know how to do many
of these things.
And so if you have a really welldetailed flow chart of like, I
want it to do this thing, thenthis thing, then this thing, and

(38:01):
you can sort of step through theexact process already, or you
can make a video tellingsomebody step by step how to do
it, then you can share it withsomebody who knows how to
automate.
And most of the time, they'll beable to get it.

Again, spending the time to try and figure it
out.
Because the other day I wastrying to think, okay, I've got
somebody who's booked to talk tome on the podcast.
So therefore, it goes into thecalendar.
I want them to go to thecalendar to Trello.
And I looked at Zapier and I'mthinking, I'm going to have to
learn this.
And that's the whole point we'retrying to say here.
Well, we know what we want todo.

(38:34):
And you know, we can spend,what, a couple of hours trying
to get it to work.
I mean, AI will help, believe itor not.
It actually helps you figure outhow to do it.
I had to do it about 15 times toget it to work for setting up my
emails for the reports.
But the whole point we're tryingto say is, Hmm, I got it
eventually, but I'm thinkingevery time I got to do it, I'm

(38:56):
not going to be an expert everytime to figure out how to do the
automations.
The point you just made is,yeah, look, don't sweat this
stuff.
Find somebody, do theintelligent stuff, which is
figure out, as you said,drafting, draft the process you
want, find somebody who can thenautomate it, give it back to
you, and then you feed it.
I'm assuming you can feed, feedsomething back into Zapier to

(39:18):
work for you, if you've got anaccount

Oh yeah.
Well, that person will probablybe able to build the thing and
just in Zapier directly for you.
I mean, that's a$10 to 15 anhour skill at the high end for
somebody who really knows whatthey're doing most of the time
in like the Philippines orIndia, somewhere like that.

Yeah, so if you're charging out at a higher
rate and you're sweating on thisstuff, when you could be
spending say$15 or 20 to get asimple zap done.
So we should probably explainwhat Zapier is.

It's the number one automation platform
in the world.
you pay a monthly fee and thenit allows you to directly
integrate and automate, probablya thousand or 2000 of the most
common apps, worldwide.

So basically it says, if, if something happens
here on one of your platforms,if this happens, it zaps and
does this for you.
Like it sticks something on yourcalendar or take something from
your calendar and does it there.
So you don't have to think toomuch about it, but you do have
to set it up.
Alright, well let's talk alittle bit about, work with the
third brain.

(40:21):
So if an organization, so tellus about a typical organization
that you might work with thatneeds this digital automation.

Absolutely.
So our typical customer isgenerally between 10 and 150,
200 team members.
Most often they have a bunch ofsoftware.
Some of it talks to each other,kind of.
They've done half a digitaltransformation before, and they

(40:51):
know that they are fallingbehind when it comes to
automation and AI.
And they're starting to sort offeel that impact.
Normally it's, Oh, you know,maybe we've had more difficulty
hiring lately.
And so we're a little morestrapped for team members or
we're growing super fast.
And so we just don't have timeto always train.

(41:12):
One of the most common cases islike in a larger transition, so
like post acquisition, verycommon for common for it to be,
Oh, we've been doing the thingsthis way forever.
And we really have nodocumentation to support them.
And it's all very scattered.
And so most are that level onewhere I, everything's still

(41:33):
pretty siloed.

And that's the point about the single person on
their own who's working forthemselves.
It's the same issue, but in alarger organization, you're
wasting the time and the talentof all your people if it's not
automated.
So they're spending a lot oftheir time on admin and, the
hive-mind?
Where, they're constantlyresponding to emails and stuff

(41:54):
and they're never getting anywork done.

Yeah, exactly.
And, uh, the way I talk about itis.
The results of digitaloperations really fall down to
five C's.
First, all this unification andall this workflow documentation
is going to allow you to buildconsistency.
And that consistency and thatclarity of understanding, that's

(42:21):
numberr two is going to bringclarity to your business.
Everyone's going to know whatthey're supposed to do.
And you're finally going to beable to have dashboards that
actually work because when allyour data talks to each other
and all your tools talk to eachother, you can actually have the
information you want all in oneplace.
And that combination of clarityand consistency, allow your team

(42:43):
to increase their individualcapacity.
So they can do more with thesame amount of time.
Which is going to give you andyour team confidence in their
abilities, because they're goingto be less stressed.
You're not going to be stressedanymore, or your client isn't
going to be stressed anymore.
And ultimately that capacity andthat confidence lead to new

(43:05):
cashflow.
So it's the last felt, but thereis a direct impact here in this
sort of work to the bottom line.
In massive scale organizations,the billion dollar plus.
When they have fully implementedthese things, they're looking at
4 to 5 percent increase in theirprofit margin.
In smaller organizations, I seeclients 5, 10, 15 percent

(43:29):
increase in their profit marginbecause they can suddenly take
on 5 more clients per person.

That's the whole point is at the moment, if
you're trying to do everything,it's cognitive.
cognitively demanding.
And this is the point I'm tryingto make, is especially some of
my older, my age, independentconsults who are listening to
this, is it's exhausting ifyou've got to constantly be
changing and figuring out thingsand getting stuck.

(43:58):
It's about reducing thatcognitive overload so you can
actually focus on the workyou've got to do.

Absolutely.

I think that's the amazing thing.
Now, let's talk about how AI isimpacting, all of this.

The way I am thinking about this is that it
is taking the bottom 80% n everyone of these knowledge work
tasks.
And it's just throwing them outthe window.
That it's bottom 80 percent now,but it's going to be 90%.
And then it's going to be 95%.

to

If you're not the best at what you do, or one
of the best, and it is anentirely intelligence based task
or knowledge based, I certainlyam concerned.
Like I look at what I do and Ithink to myself, Oh, uh, AI, you
know, three, four or five years,I'm, I'm pretty concerned about
this thing.
AI is increasingly allowing usto automate steps we could never

(44:55):
automate before.
Mentioned standardizing yourReadWise information.
I have experienced that myself.
The ReadWise export sends you 60different useless pieces of
information with the one quoteand the little line of where it
was that you actually want.
Having an AI go through andHaving an AI go through and

(45:16):
delete that or just extract theone piece that matters is
massive.
I have a client right now,they're a few hundred million a
year.
And they manage, about a hundredrestaurant locations.
They have three people in Mexicowho sit and watch the security

(45:37):
cameras at all the locations allthe time.
And they're not going to replaceall those people.
But we can put an AI in placethat monitors all the same feeds
and flags the ones that looklike something's out of line for
them.
And their HR team, every Tuesdayhas Receipts Tuesday, when they
go through every single store'sreceipts that they take photos

(46:00):
of and upload to Google Drive,and then have to match those
receipts to the deposits on thebank slips.
And AI, same thing, it's tooimportant to leave it just to a
robot.
but, the AI is going to takeevery receipt, read every
receipt, move the informationinto a Google sheet.
So that way they can just copypaste from the Google sheet to

(46:23):
the bank confirmation one, andit's done.
It's going to save them sixhours every week.

That's the whole point, isn't it?
And also with writing, forexample, after my podcast, I'll
take the transcript and Icreate, outlines and I have some
prompts that I use and create amassive amount of material that
I can use.
But then when I'm writing, I amgoing backwards and forwards
because I want it to say this.

(46:48):
I want to try and say it thisway.
I want it to include this.
And it can take me a day towrite something, but it's like
it works with you.
You mentioned before, that it'sa fantastic assistant.
So tell us what you mentioned.

It's the best intern I've ever had.
AI is always smart.
It's always up to date.
It's not always up to date, butsomeday it will always be up to
date.
Um, and it's always available.
So at 10 PM at night, when Ihave that crazy idea that I need
to run by, uh, another expert,AI is there for me when others

(47:25):
can't be.
When I was trying to figure outwho actually came up with
digital operations.
AI was the one who I could goback and talk with because
everyone I was talking withpersonally thought I had
invented the term.
I was like, no, I know I didn'tinvent this thing.
I think I look at it and rightnow we see AI as kind of outside

(47:46):
the process.
It's a chatbot we have to talkwith, when you see it inside of
workflows, it's different.
I don't think the chatbot is howwe're going to actually use it
every day.
It's, Oh, let me send a voicememo to this AI.
And then the AI is going to turnthat voice memo into a proposal

(48:07):
or into a project brief.
That's a little bit of magic.
That's just a little step.
And I think that sort ofsummarization, formatting, uh,
knowledge retrieval, Are allgoing to be heavily augmented by
AI, but the tools and thetechnology we have now with
large language models, like GPT4, it's all based on prediction.

(48:29):
So do not be worried about itpredicting something that's
never happened before.
The real creativity still lieswith us humans.

That's the important thing.
You mentioned that AI is goingto probably replace a whole lot
of processes.
Therefore, we have to try and beat the top of our tree in many
ways.
So, and that comes back tolearning, isn't it?
To continuously learn, be openminded to some of the changes
that are going on there.
Like, I try and read a book aweek now.

(48:58):
I've got millions of hardcoverbooks, but I go mad on my
Kindle.
I basically read non fiction allthe time, apart from science
fiction at night.
You know, that, that's where wehave to have that process where,
in my Kindle, I highlight, goesto ReadWise, and then it feeds
into my Roam, where I then tryand process it and then use AI

(49:20):
to come up with a summary.
And then I've got access to thatif I want it.
So to stay as intelligent as wecan be, we've got to do a whole
lot of stuff.
So where do you see yourselfgoing with this

So I actually hired a team member, at the
beginning of this year, who istrained and dedicated just to AI
content, because I see so manyof our professional content
workflows, like writing projectbriefs as fundamentally similar
or the same to creating socialmedia content.

(49:54):
In both cases, the best versionsare much more similar than they
are different.
I hired him and all he does ishe stays the cutting edge of
what are the prompts that workright now.
He knows how to work with allthe tools.
And so for me, I said, okay, Ican set aside a thousand dollars
a month for this thing.

(50:15):
And so I'm going to hire thesmartest, most talented person I
can.
And then I'm going to have themlearn all this stuff because I
can't keep up to date with allof this all the time and build
my company.
The cutting edge is not what Ishould be giving my customers.
That's too new.

Now that's really interesting when you say that,
because the consultancy firmsout there sort of do this, but
they charge a fortune for doingit.
And they're generally hiring,well, highly intelligent people,
but, you know, they're running abig organization with fairly big
overheads.
So a lean organization or leanbusiness like yourself with a

(50:55):
team and with AI and withautomation is actually giving
them a run for their money.

That's thee plan.
And so far it's working becausewe can come in 30 or 40 percent
cheaper and we can do the exactsame work and we've got an AI.
And that AI is plugged intoevery template of every project
we've ever done.
And so whenever we're starting aproject, we can build that

(51:21):
project from the pieces wealready have.

And that's the nature of how businesses have
got to go, especially if you'rean independent professional,
you've got to start thinkingabout this.
So it's your value and you canbe replaced if it's fairly
ordinary stuff.
So that's going to be thedanger.
So apart from that, how do youlearn other things?

I'm a big reader.
I Use Twitter quite a bit.
I try to meet a lot ofinteresting people by going on
podcasts and being on Twitterand other places like that, and
that lets me have interestingconversations and they refer me
to new tools.
Like I'd never heard of TwoSecond Agile before.

I'll send you the link.
It's just a book and it was freeand it blew my mind.

And I had never heard of centaurs and
cyborgs either, but youintroduced me to both those
concepts and I've got thempulled up, uh, right afterwards.
And so I think I have tried toavoid news and I try to mostly
avoid media, uh, because I findI've, I've worked in marketing

(52:30):
long enough to know how uselessall media is for disseminating
any useful information.
So I look at that and I'm like,Oh, well, there's a tool.
There's an AI powered searchengine called Perplexity AI.
And I use that when I'm tryingto do deep dives into certain
things.
And then I use Google scholarand I use chat GPT.

(52:54):
And when I want to learn aboutsomething, I try to do more of
an academic dive into it.
And when I am learning things,it is either for a project or
for work.
So right now my big project isI've been learning about farming
because I want to build myselfjust a little country farm.
And I've been learning all aboutfarming in my region and the

(53:16):
different plants and theagriculture and how to build
like sustainable,environmentally friendly and
cool homes and all that.
And that's a lot of fun.
And I'm getting to drive out andmeet with farmers and do things
like that as a result.
And then at work, I'm learningabout AI all day.
And so I'm like, Oh, I've gotfive AI influencers.
And whenever they mention apaper, I go and read that paper

(53:39):
because I don't trust anyone.
I want to read the originalmaterial.

Yeah, so you're flagging information that you
find.
That's the biggest problem I'mfinding.
I, there's, I don't think I'vegot ADHD.
But boy, I see lots ofinteresting things I want to
read and watch this video andwatch that.
It's all non fiction stuff, butit can be overwhelming.

I passed my point of overwhelm with it.
So now, like I said, I used totry to keep up with like a lot
of different newsletters and alot of different podcasts.
Now I'll watch, but if it's notsuper interesting right now,
and, and it's not directlyapplicable to a project I'm on,
all searchable.

(54:24):
Right.
I know the 30 shows that Ireally need to look at when it
comes to podcasting for anytopic.
And so when I really want tolearn about that topic, I'll go
look at those shows.
I found a single podcast episodefrom eight years ago on Apple
podcast, and it was the onlyinterview, uh, with this one guy

(54:47):
about this one constructionmethod.
And it was just one search away.
As soon as I knew the name ofhis book, it was easy to find.

That's amazing, isn't it?
That the ability to find theinformation we want when we want
it, but what a world we live in.

We're so better suited to it than the new
generations.

so what do you think your world's going to be
like in 10 years?
Look, I'm 68, I'll be 78, soI'll be probably starting to end
up, well, I don't know, I'llstill be going at 80, I think.
But you know, in 10 years time,what do you think the world's
going to be like?

There's going to be a lot more AI, can say
that.
I think there's two big trends.
One is that technology isbecoming more and more
integrated into our lives.
And two is that it is a statussymbol to be able to reject that
technology.
And so just like how 200 yearsago, being fat was a sign you

(55:42):
were rich.
Now being thin and healthy andfit is a sign you are rich in
the exact same way.
Because it allows you to signalyour free time, and your ability
to stay away from the computerbecause you're not stuck in the
office working eight hours a dayand getting fat sitting at your
desk.
So I think that's like part ofit.
And I think at the same time,we're going to see a lot more

(56:05):
people who use technology andwho are like addicted to it.
And so I think that is becomingmore and more of like a known
trend where this is well knownin China already.
It's well known in some othercountries, but I think, at least
the English speaking West hasbeen very slow to adopt digital
addiction, even though we havealready recognized gambling

(56:29):
addiction as like a very realthing.
And it's the exact same.
It's literally the same dopaminepathways, just translated to a
different device.
But on a hopeful note, I thinkwe're all going to have quite a
bit more free time to do what wewant, and I think we're coming
to a reckoning in the worldabout how we make that happen,
because hunter gatherers onlyhad to work 20 25 hours a week,

(56:52):
and somehow we're working 50 andmost people still can't make it
through.

Yeah, that's pretty tough.
Okay, at this point, is theresomething else you want to
mention?

I think the, the only note I'd say is like
too many people try to game thesystem, and it's much easier to
just realize, Oh, AI can't dothis thing yet.
Or, Oh, AI will be able to dothis thing in six months.
Don't try to build everythingand make a million bells and

(57:21):
whistles and fancy tricksbecause most of this stuff is
still moving fast enough thatit's not worth trying to build
out.
Yeah.

By the time you do it, it'll be old hat, won't
it?
That's the danger of rushinginto something.
And I, I noticed that there's alot of.
Influencers out there, gurus,who are online and they're
saying, right, this is the nextbest thing.
And then you suddenly, a yearlater, it's all gone.
So they're constantly jumping onthe bandwagon.
I remember when Roam came out,there was all these Roam experts

(57:50):
and then Tana came out andthere's all these Tana experts.
And then it becomes mainstream.
And, um, you know, so they'reconstantly having to reinvent
themselves, but what do theystand for?
And that's the danger ofTwitter.
You can see a lot of people onthere saying this, this, and
you're going, this is justrubbish, repetitive rubbish.
And, but yes, Twitter at thesame time helps me find people

(58:12):
like you and very interestingpeople, but you just got to sort
of find them in

Yeah.
I'll warn everyone Twitter isgoing to get bad this year it's
a U.
S.
election year and any U.
S.
election year bot activity onall platforms goes through the
roof and AI bots are so muchbetter than they were a year
ago.
And they're so, so much betterthan they were four years ago.
So just be wary there's going tobe a million deep fakes.

(58:37):
There's going to be a millioneverything this year.
And you might, you might, ifyou're, if you've been thinking
about taking a social mediacleanse, 2024 is a great year to
do it

I think it's funny.
I've, I've got lots of followerson Twitter and they all are
wearing bathing suits and thingslike that.
And I'm thinking, they're bots.
Because why would anyone want tofollow me in an old bloke.

As they're mostly bots.
There's probably a few of themthat are, I don't know that,
well, not bots, but only fans,

Yes, right.
That's what I noticed.
Some of them say, oh, come to mysite, and I think, nah, not
interested.
Well, that's fantastic.
So, who would you like tocontact you, if somebody would
like to find out more about you,and how would they do that?

you can find me on the internet, gentoftech,
G E N T O F T E C H.

Yep.

Um, and you can reach out to me on any
social media, or you can go tothirdbrain.
co.
Number 3rdbrain.
co, uh, and you can contact methere and if you ever want to
talk about digital operations,feel free to reach out.

(59:56):
Or if you'd like to do businessand you think some of your
clients would be able to benefitor you'd be able to benefit from
this sort of work, feel free toreach out.

Nigel Rawlins (01:00:07):
They really should, because I think you know
your stuff from the sound of it,and everything I've read about
you is amazing.
So Michael, thank you very muchfor being on the podcast with
me.
This has been an amazing talkand I hope people are really
understanding what we're reallytalking about and what it means
for the future.
So thank you.

Michael Greenberg (01:00:23):
Nigel.
Thank you for having me on.

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Michael Greenberg: Boosting Productivity with AI and Automation

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