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Back to Work

Episode 36: Writing on the Wind

Back to Work

5by5

Business, Society & Culture, Barriers, Dan Benjamin, Careers, Communication, Merlin Mann, Creativity, Work, Productivity, Constraints, Technology

4.72.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2011

⏱️ 82 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Merlin Mann talks with Dan Benjamin about his dogged obsession with the flexibility of index cards—for propping up tables, giving very small cuts, and getting babies hygienically removed. Then, there is much talk of graphing your focal length against your time and attention.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

This episode of Back to Work is brought to you by Byward.

0:02.8

Byward is a fantastic writing app for OS X. It gives you just the tools you need,

0:07.0

whether you prefer to write in rich text, plain text, or my favorite, mark down.

0:11.5

Byward helps you get those words down fast and easy with as little friction as possible.

0:16.3

It is absolutely my go-to writing app.

0:18.8

You can learn more about Byward by visiting BywardApp.com.

0:22.0

That's BYW-OR-D-A-P-P-BywardApp.com.

0:26.5

Thanks to BYW-OR-D for supporting By-By-Five and Back to Work.

0:31.1

Oh, yeah. How's it going? Good. Good week.

0:36.2

Big week. Really big week. That's a couple weeks.

0:38.6

It's been two big, two big, two big.

0:42.4

Yeah, yeah. We should talk about a little bit of that.

0:45.8

Yeah, I mean, I think we should.

0:49.2

And I got other stuff too. I got some cards. I've written a few things down,

0:52.8

but you know, it's mostly, I think it's going to mostly, we're going to open the phone lines.

0:56.6

This week. How are we doing that?

1:00.5

You got that set up, right? Ask Faith. Can you ask Faith to just flip over to the phone line

1:05.2

acceptor? I do actually have phone lines. They're not on right now,

1:09.4

but I need to do a lot of questions. How do you do that? Do you do a custom

1:13.2

holder or a Byway sweatshirt? How do you do that? You do a full sweatshirt?

1:17.4

It's a custom thing. It's a voice over IP.

1:20.4

And it's basically you call it. It has like X number of lines that go into a holding queue.

...

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