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- [00:00]
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Foreign.
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This is John Forrester, and I'm here for an interview with Scott Adams. Hi, Scott.
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Good afternoon, John. How are you?
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I'm good. Great to be finally talking with you this way. We've had a few preliminary discussions and talked with each other for many years on email. But it's. It's wonderful to finally be getting to record something here where you get to share what you're working on.
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I'm glad to be able to help the community out a little bit. Yeah.
- [00:41]
B
I'll just say that you. You've got an extensive GTD background, you've been at this for many years, and you're welcome to say anything you want about that. And you're also pioneering in how to apply that, apply AI to gtd. And that's how we got started on talking about an interview as you came up with some. Some great stuff, including a very sophisticated prompt system for AI. So let's just. What would you like to say about yourself and your background or anything like that?
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I live in Central Arkansas in North Little Rock, Arkansas. I worked with VA in. I'm involved with training in a group called I Lead for the Hospitals. And I started learning AI as a part of my job. And I started. I saw some of the discussions on Connect Pages and everything, and I decided that I would use the GTD method as kind of my guinea pig because that way I could be constructing things and seeing what happens to it without having to be concerned about data security, which is an important thing for us. Sure. And so anything that I learn, I can translate over to work practices as well. I've already done some of that already. So I started out and we have a few, a few gtd, I mean, a few AI engines that we have access to. And so there's some of these, they've got firewall off, we've got a version of Chat GPT, we've got access to Copilot, and we've got access to Perplexity. Of those, my favorite is Perplexity, just because of the level of detail that you get back from it. But I've tested all this and going from the simple to the complex, they will work in any of those engines.
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B
Oh, great. You've already answered one of my questions, which was, is any of this dependent on the engine or is it all completely independent and should get you good results?
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Regardless, the answer is somewhat. It will still kind of follow the basic breadcrumbs of the GTD process, but if you. If you have it in a more detailed engine, it will give You a better, more detailed flow than if you got it in a less detailed engine. So it depends on what you got access to, but it'll all work.
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B
Got it.
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A
Okay, so I'm gonna switch over.
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B
All right, good.
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A
I think this will work. I am using my iPad right now, so can you see that? Okay.
- [03:51]
B
Yeah, now I see the.
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A
Okay. IPad screen in perplexity. You can set up what are called spaces, and those are just concentrated storage for things. So what I had sent to John over the most recent days here is being cantankerous here. Yeah.
- [04:18]
B
Sending me back to Sunday school.
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Yeah, well, that I teach a Sunday school class, so. And I use that to. I use the AI to generate my lessons.
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B
Oh, interesting. Okay.
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That I use.
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Well, you just probably engaged a whole bunch of educators, teachers saying, oh, no, I can use AI to generate lessons.
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Yeah. So. So if. If we go back. Let's just go back to here, to the front here. And if I go to my history. Okay, this is the. This is the one that I sent you a few days ago.
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B
Okay.
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A
How I came up with this was basically I was curious and I told the system, just create a prompt for GTD processes. And this is what the system came up with. And I gave it a copy of the 360Microsoft 365 planning document, as well as a reference. So you can upload files to go with this as a reference. So this is what it created. And so it'll go through and you have to. I would strongly recommend people that you link it to whatever source of email you're using. So I've got my personal emails tied to Google Mail into the Google Calendar.
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B
Okay.
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Really strong recommendation there because that way it'll pull in your. Your data from your calendar. It'll also link into Outlook. Most of these systems will link into both of these, but you can link into your Google Calendar, your Gmail calendar, and Gmail itself. So then it'll go through, it'll look at your calendar. And so then this is what it comes up with. So for example, it's got a daily GTD review that you have got a call with a guy named John Forrester.
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Yep.
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Then it's got kind of next actions and next proposed things that are coming up with this and some projects that I'm looking at for work there. So then it'll go through and then you can either feed off of this and. Or you can copy it over to a. Like a file in Apple Notepad or Apple's memo under Projects Next Actions, and all of those. So this is. And you've got a copy of this? If my memory is correct, yes.
- [07:00]
B
Yes. You've emailed me and, or texted me this. Yep.
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And so this is shareable as far as I'm concerned, because it's based on ttd but so people can take this and adapt it for however they want. Another tip that I could give people is see what your, your AI engine does when you say, can you improve this prompt?
- [07:30]
B
Oh, that's always a good question.
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A
So you can take this for example, say if it was generated in Perplexity and you could feed it into Chat GPT and then you get a revised version of this prompt, you can do the same thing and feed it into Claude. And they, they have different strengths. The, the AI engines have different strengths. So Claude is the best at writing for those types of things. Perplexity is very good for researching. Claude is just very good for writing for those types of things. And so when you're, when you're looking at this, you may want to not just take the first draft, but see it through one or two engines and see how that changes it and if you like the changes for that.
- [08:24]
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Right, yeah. So that's, it's, you might get, you'll get different results depending on the engine, but it's not, it's not dependent on one engine in particular to work at all. It's not.
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And then just because we're, we're doing this for, for the group, once you feed it through all of the engines, it will still run on any of them. The prompt will still go on any of those engines for that. Interesting.
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B
So you could get a different, you could ask one of the engines for help refining the prompt, take the refined prompt and put it through another engine and still have it work.
- [09:05]
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Yes, exactly. And that's, that's kind of what you do is, is, or at least what I did is to go through with that. Then if I go back to my history. And so I had the idea then of taking the notes that David generated at the large kind of World GTD summit in Amsterdam.
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Yep.
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And I told Perplexity to not only take the planning guide from the 365 Planning Guide, but also to take these notes since in theory, if I remember the recordings right, that's David's ideal app. Yeah.
- [10:00]
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And that for, for those who are wondering what, what, what is that about? Back in 1994, David sketched out on paper his ideal of what GTD software would do. He more or less hand drew screenshots of what GTD Software would do to make it work to his specifications. And that when the 2019 GTD summit came around, he shared those, those drawings said, no one's built this yet, but if anybody wants to have a look at these and, and take a shot at it here, here they are. So that's, that's what Scott's referring to, is those PDFs of that. And we'll make them available at, with a link after this.
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A
And the version that I found is his handwritten notes. Yeah, not, not his typed notes, but these are ones that actually I guess at the original pin hand scratching for that.
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Yes, yes, exactly. They were done on paper and then digitized later and turned into a PDF, but they were for sure handwritten on paper at the time.
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So this is the prompt after that anstery of Summit. Okay, so this is the complex one. You're my GTD assistant. This document defines the system and is a single source of truth. One of the questions John was asking beforehand was can this go through and edit it? If you, if you put a statement in here like this is the Rosetta Stone, this is the Bible, is anything conflicts with it, this wins.
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Yes.
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So the role of the, the agent here is to clarify and think through gtd. Ask one question at a time. Group the output by the GTD view. It's got all the basic canonical views of gtd. Is it actionable if it's not trash reference or someday, if it is, do the basic actions there, what this applies to, which like inbox, email G calendar. Now these are the command triggers. The command triggers would be like when you're in perplexity in the space for this and you type run daily review. It will run a daily review of your Gmail and your calendar. Okay, same thing. Or if you just want a brain dump, you could do a brain dump and it'll go through that process.
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B
Is run shutdown, something you do at the end of the day to kind of.
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A
Yeah, you shut down and make sure it's saving things. Yeah, yeah. Well, you don't have to do it if you don't want to. If you just want to go. If you're in what some people have called a brain dead mode.
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B
Yep.
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You could look at your calendar or your inbox or you know, and just choose one action of that. And so this is what it told me on the way back after it processed all of that. So essentially I set this up as a GTD assistant using this as a single source of truth. What command do you want to run? So let's just.
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And you've told it to run the
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daily review and you can talk to this. But I'm not going to because I'm talking to John instead.
- [13:51]
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Yeah, for. For folks who have not used any of these AI engines yet, they're surprisingly conversational.
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Yeah. And they have. All of them just about have a voice mode. So is the John Forester call part of a larger project or the standalone? You're ready and the next action is called John at the scheduled time are you waiting for things to occur? And then it'll ask you what the project name is and the next action for this. So you can go through all of these steps with this. And it's set in segments so you don't have to do a daily, then a weekly than a monthly. If you're only in the mood to do a brain dump or to process your calendar for, you know, for three days or two weeks or whatever, you can give it a range and it'll go through that. It will do it in Outlook, it will do it in Gmail. But if somebody using somebody using an obscure package that I'm not familiar with, most people are going to be either using Gmail or Outlook, at least in my server, at least. So. So you go through here and then it'll go through and it will share the links that it comes up with, You know, different references that it found.
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B
So
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thoughts, questions, things that you think need to be elaborated.
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B
One quickie that'll be fast to dispense with. Earlier you mentioned that you're on an iPad showing on an iPad here and then you mentioned Apple. But am I correct that this is entirely operating system independent?
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A
It's. I believe the term that you guys have used in the past is it's device agnostic. Yeah, that's.
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That's it.
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Y. Yep.
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Okay, so this should work whether somebody's on Windows, Linux, Mac, et cetera. Okay.
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Because it requires a web. A web connection.
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Yep.
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And so if you have a web connection, you could access it on Apple, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever your. Your computer flavor is of choice. You could get it as long as you can get on the web with it.
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B
Yeah. Have you. So you've given it access to your calendar and email. Does that. How about tasks? Your. Your lists of projects and ask actions? Does it?
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I haven't really created a ton of tasks off of this, but I've got those just running in a Apple notepad.
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Ah, got it. Okay.
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So ideally I want to carry it over to Omnifocus, but I just did it in A notepad, a memo file earlier because I know I can access all of that across all of these, these platforms that I use.
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Understood.
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Okay.
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Have you been using this on a day to day basis in the last. Oh sure, month or so. Okay. Wow.
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If. Let me go back here because I, I pull it, have it regularly scheduled on like say here, this one. Let me get this out of the way here. Sorry. So if I go here and I wanted it to just read my Gmail and calendar, then that's my upcoming calendar related emails and Gmail. So it'll go through for, for that then, then you know, it'll go through and these are the history on it and so it'll go through. It'll give you a record of what you've done. You can also set up a, a task to summarize tools in something that you're interested in looking at. So I have it, I have it set to do a task of summarize the latest tool in artificial intelligence. So if somebody's interested in Albanian goat herding, something a little obscure, you could set up a query for to be automatically emailed to you on a regular interval.
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Okay.
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So like if you were, if you were looking for research on Albanian goat herding, if there is such a thing, it would go through and find it and then give you a summary plus a web link for it. So you can do those things from the kind of the, the directories here for this you can. Your connectors would connect you to like Google and the different things that you could do. Most people, I would just say Google and Outlook for those. But the others, you don't really, most people won't really need for that. Then you could go into preferences and then tasks for those types of things.
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Okay. Ready for more questions or what?
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Sure.
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Okay.
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So fire away.
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B
When you run, run the, this workflow and you're looking at the results, how often do you find yourself editing the results or you know, I guess if it were. If you were teaching a real live human assistant how, how often do you find yourself correcting or modifying so that in effect you'd be teaching it to do better next time?
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Very infrequently. Oh, I mean it. What, what I see makes sense in my brain.
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B
Mm.
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To it and. But that's the reason why I have it set so that it doesn't write to the task files that I'm using.
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B
Yeah.
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Because I want to make sure I like what I see before I actually put it into my system.
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Mm.
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I. I don't know it well enough to trust it that much yet.
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Yes. Good.
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I like what I see, but it's like the old. The old cliche that President Reagan said at one point about trust but verify.
- [20:47]
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Yeah. I also heard somebody say one time, trust comes from consistency. And so if you do this for months now and you find it's very consistently giving you very good results and you don't need to correct it or anything like that, then you get to a different level of trust.
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So there's always 15 things, 15 different ways you can do something on a computer. Yeah. And so if one makes sense to you and the second one doesn't, do the first one.
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B
Yeah, there you go. That's very, very much common sense.
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A
Ping me on. On Connect. I'll give the best answers I can, but when I'm around.
- [21:27]
B
Thank you very much. All right, well, I'll let you go for now. I know you're starting a probably busy week there, and we'll talk again before too long.
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A
Sure. Hope you have a great day, John. Thank you. Right.
- [21:40]
B
Thank you, too.
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A
Sat.