Michael Greenberg: Boosting Productivity with AI and Automation

Nigel Rawlins: Michael, welcome to the Wisepreneurs podcast. Could you tell us something about yourself and where you're from?

Michael Greenberg: Well, my name is Michael Greenberg. I'm from St Louis Missourie, I have 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, even though he's not that heavy.

Nigel Rawlins: What's his name? His

Michael Greenberg: His name is Sobek. He is named after the ancient Egyptian crocodile headed protector god of the Nile. Because when he was a puppy, he had the crocodile teeth, as many puppies do.

Nigel Rawlins: Yes. So did he get a lot of walks?

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

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

Michael Greenberg: Awesome.

Nigel Rawlins: So Michael, one of the reasons I came across you is because you describe yourself as a digital operations person. Can you tell us what you mean by that?

Michael Greenberg: First, let me say, I did not invent the term. I just plucked it out of the enterprise archives of Accenture and all the other big organizations that have been doing this stuff for years, and I've been trying to bring it down to the little guys. So digital operations is quite simply, all of the operations of a business that can become digitized.

And that means your software. That means the tools you use every day. It means the messaging software you use or the work management software, like ClickUp and Notion to store documents. And then it also means, and I think this is where most of us think of it. Using automation and using AI to integrate all those tools and to allow you to do more, faster, better.

Nigel Rawlins: I've sort of got into that since, I was having a look at this Two Second Agile stuff going around is trying to get everything into flow.

And I realized when I was doing this 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 really talking about for, knowledge workers or intelligent labor, as we can name it. People who are working for themselves, and busy, they're doing a whole lot of things hard.

So what are some of the tools that you talked about? And I noticed you mentioned Notion and do you Notion as well?

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

Nigel Rawlins: And I think you use Obsidian?

Michael Greenberg: I do. Yes. And I host my personal website on Obsidian as well. I love Obsidian. It is the last note taking software I will ever use. It is. available for free. It is self hosted, which means you don't have to worry about any data privacy. And all of the files are a standard markdown format, which is widely accessible across the internet.

Nigel Rawlins: We probably should explain what Obsidian is.

Michael Greenberg: Oh yeah. That that's, that's an important point. Obsidian is just a note taking and text editing program, most commonly used for personal notebooks, or journals. And it has two unique features. One, it has plugins, so you can add new features to it. And two, you can link different notes in Obsidian to each other. So that way you can create like a big mind map over time. That is a lot of fun, there's a little graph button, open graph view, and then it creates a giant knowledge web of all of your notes and how they're linked together.

Nigel Rawlins: One of the reasons we use these note taking apps, as we call them, is because we're reading books, especially if you use a Kindle and you're highlighting, it can feed into these apps. I'm sort of stuck with Roam Research because I started when it first came out. So I've got thousands of notes in there from my reading and all sorts of stuff.

I did have a look at Tana, which is another one that looks very interesting, but it's very difficult to change and shift. So, let's talk about the reason why people might want to use Obsidian or Tana or any others is to do something with their notes. So, what are you pouring into yours, into your obsidian?

Michael Greenberg: So I put pretty much every note that doesn't live somewhere else. And what I mean by that is all of my client specific work lives inside of ClickUp. All of my personal writing lives on Obsidian. All of my, like, thought leadership writing lives in Obsidian. But if it's work specific, It's going to be in ClickUp because that's where I work with my team.

And Obsidian, I really just try to use as that personal note database. So I use a podcast listening app called Snipd, S-N-I-P-D and it allows you to take clips and those clips can sync into a tool called ReadWise, um, and then ReadWise 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 on the web, go back into Obsidian the same way. And those all come through Readwise into one area. And then all of my personal writing gets handled in Obsidian.

Ooh. I know nobody's going to be able to 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, these are all going to be random, different individual, notes. But then here's the real meat of it, where we've got a few key documents then overlap and get referenced just everywhere else.

Nigel Rawlins: It's like a star map, and when you click on a node, it links out to all the other nodes around it.

Michael Greenberg: then you can see just link, link, link, link, link, link, link.

Nigel Rawlins: I have spoken to somebody else about Roam research on the podcast. So I've actually started mentioning these note taking apps.

Michael Greenberg: And I was a Roam user first. I should say I started with Roam, but the bullet point system, I just couldn't get behind. And so I moved to Obsidian.

Nigel Rawlins: Oh, it's driving me a bit mad because the difficulty is doing the searches and I'm not, I'm not a tech type person, um, or a coder or anything like that. So I think Roam is more for somebody who is very good at coding and can actually find their stuff in there. And that's the difficulty. I've got nearly four years of notes in there and a massive amount of notes.

I think I've got about 10, 000 pages. And yes, I'm just a bit worried about where I would go from there, especially when my five years is up, because I paid for five years. I'm just wondering what will I do next?

Michael Greenberg: Have you tried exporting to Obsidian?

Nigel Rawlins: no, I haven't yet. But I, I see a lot about Obsidian on Twitter. I can actually have it on my laptop because there is a laptop version now. But yeah, look, I think I will look at that because I run everything on a M1 Mac. So the whole business, everything. I think

Michael Greenberg: I think everyone who uses a tool like this is going to end up at it. On Obsidian, simply because open source extendability of it means that it will have imports for everything else and anyone can export to something else. But in almost every personal case, Obsidian will solve for it and it is free. And so in the majority of cases, people will end up migrating there.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, so our main point about talking about Obsidian and these notes is somewhere to park your notes, so you can actually access them again. So instead of being in a notebook 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 actually search for it if you're good at searching and can figure out how to do your queries.

So how easy is it for you to find stuff on Obsidian? That if you're looking for, you want to write an article or you've got to put together a research report or something like that, how easy is it to find and put the stuff together?

Michael Greenberg: So I think it's very easy. But that's because I have a pretty simple organizational structure. Um, I use just a slightly modified version of para from building a second brain. And so I've got an areas of responsibility. I've got a resources section and I've got an archive, then I've just got a priority inbox of the few things I'm writing at the moment.

And those generally have a folder. And so each folder has any notes that I've drug dug up. Obsidian uses keyword search. And so that makes it pretty easy to find anything I'm looking for.

I will say I actually end up searching on my website for my own stuff more often than I search inside of the Obsidian app, because I like to focus on what's like the public stuff and get rid of all the excess noise from old notes.

Nigel Rawlins: So one of the things you just mentioned there is, Para. So this is where we just start talking about. Brains. We, we have our own brain, which is the first brain. Second brains, and I think you also have something called the third brain. So let's talk about second brain and what you mean by the para method.

Michael Greenberg: So the first brain, as already mentioned, is inside our own head. We're all very familiar with that one. The second brain, I like to say is in our pocket because we're all carrying cell phones now. And really the way you can think of the second brain is there is some notes app, or area, or many areas for most of us, where we store and squirrel away little bits of knowledge on the internet or on our phones or on our laptops.

And those of us who have maybe one point that we're looking at all of that information from have organized it into a tool like Obsidian or Notion or Roam. And that tool is referred to as a second brain. And that second brain is just an external digital, normally digital. It could be physical. You could have a notebook, but most often digital, uh, storage device for memory and information.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, the interesting thing about this is because as humans in the past, we might have had oral traditions and we wrote and stuff like that.

But now it with the amount of information out there, and you, as you mentioned before, you listen to podcasts and you snip bits. I actually listen back through and take a note and then, I can dictate it into my note taking apps and things like that. So this is taking stuff outside of our brains like an extended mind.

The book, The Extended Mind, talked about this, taking things out of our body into the world around us. So what's the PARA method?

Michael Greenberg: So the PARA method is a specific way for organizing that information. Stands for projects, areas of of responsibility, resources, archive. Projects are self explanatory. They are your active projects you're working on. Areas of responsibility would be things like home, health, you know, dog, and then all of the information related to those things.

And so they're ongoing responsibilities without any clear start or end. And then resources would be like, I have a resource that is all of my tweet templates. And so that is very useful as a way for me to pull up information, but it's not specifically related to any past project. And then finally we have archive, which would be self explanatory.

Once again, it's an archive of all your past information. And if you don't know what to do with it, you just throw it in the archive. I

Nigel Rawlins: So the interesting thing about this is that it's a way of organizing our life, not just our working life. And this is one of the main reasons I want to talk to you about is organizing our digital lives. When I was a kid, I can't even remember we had a phone in the house and things like that.

So, I mean, you're probably a very different generation to mine. We didn't have mobile phones when I was young until I was probably in my 30s, I think, or maybe even my 40s. So in the past, I think we would have just had notebooks and bits of paper or, and, but we never had, uh, a digital world. So we weren't out there publishing and getting on social media.

So what you're talking about is a way of organizing the information in our lives. And hopefully when we write things or we, uh, work for somebody, we turn it into knowledge. So, how would you describe it? Do we call it workflows, what do we call this?

Michael Greenberg: Workflows is the word we most often use at least right now. Those, I think, the second brain assists our first brain in managing knowledge workflows. So it helps organize information to make it easier to retrieve or use, but it does not think, and it does not do. This is the failure of the second brain.

It is purely memory. The third brain, which coincidentally is also the name of my consulting company. is the layer of automations and AI that help you move through the steps of your workflow so that way everytime you create a podcast episode you have show notes automatically created because that's one of those 50 steps

Nigel Rawlins: I don't think people realize how many steps I have a whiteboard behind me because I'm thinking I've got to try and sort out 50 things I have to do, with a podcast, and that even starts with the invitation. I use Trello, to organize everything. So I have to feed in all your information into my Trello. So as a guest, and then I have got, the whiteboard, and it's virtually full of all the steps. And so I need some sort of workflow. So the whole point I started mapping that out is because when I started looking at this Two Second Agile is how can I stop all the little blockages and the things that drive me mad and the automation.

So the reason, um, we're talking about this today is for anyone who's listening is that If, if you're working for yourself as self employed or as a consultant or an independent professional, you've got to organize yourself. And to be more productive without being burnt out is you need some systems in place.

So that's why we're talking about workflows and things like that. So let's Talk about a typical day for you. Now, I've just outlined, um, the reason I need to start automating, it's because doing things manually is time consuming. And I'd much rather read a really interesting book and take some notes and work on those notes and write an interesting article. For example, I run a marketing services company.

I look after 18 WordPress websites and I, I do a report every month. So I've put out all the different emails ready. I've got to get all of the snippets out there and put them in there. And then I've got to look at all the different reports. That can take me a whole day that I can't be working on things I'd much rather work on.

It's got boring. So I've been learning, how do I automate that process? Well, the other day I figured out that, cause I use Gmail, that you could actually automate the setting up of all of those. , Put in all the email addresses. Sometimes I send them to four different people and that all fits in there.

And then it fits in the outline of what I've got to fill in. And I'm going, that's just saved me a really boring, probably hour of fiddling. And that's the whole point that I wanted to talk to you about that in our world today, if you're working for yourself at home and you've got a decent little computer, there's things you can do to make your life easier so that you can do stuff that's more important.

So, how does your day look when you're doing something like this? You know, somebody contacts you, what happens?

Michael Greenberg: A very interesting question. Um, because there's a lot of digital operations that go on in the background. I get an email, every 15 minutes, an AI checks all of my emails, and email by email, it tags them. And if it's a newsletter, or a promotional email, or something else that isn't really important, then it will automatically apply a label, and that label will remove it from my inbox. It'll move it off to the side , my executive assistant, Michaela, is going to check once an hour, any, uh, of the messages that remain. If it's a message on LinkedIn or some other platform, we have it set up, so it will create an email because I'm not checking everywhere every day. And then she'll let me know if I get a message. So, we are already deep into digital operations at this point. I've got an AI categorizer, and then I've got an offshore team member who is helping me, and if it's something I need to respond to, she's going to create a task in ClickUp, and when that task is created in ClickUp, It's going to send me a Slack notification in a special Slack channel called, you know, task notifications. And then if she can handle it on her own, she's going to handle it.

Nigel Rawlins: 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  in there? Google hasn't got it yet

Michael Greenberg: I use make. com. But there are like dedicated AI inbox apps that are being developed that do the same thing.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah.

Michael Greenberg: I just use make. com though, and I have a little prompt and it says, Hey, is this a newsletter? And Hey, is this a sales email or promotional email? And I just use Claude 3, Haiku.

So I use the fastest, cheapest one. And it just asks question, question, question. And it's got a really long context window, so I can send the whole email through without any formatting changes.

Nigel Rawlins: I have found that AI can do a whole lot of stuff and we'll get into that soon because um, when I have stuff sent through from Readwise it's got all sorts of things in it. Now I'm just using AI just to clean it all up, give me a summary and then I can stick it into Roam. I've got about, unfortunately I've got about 200 articles sitting in Roam that I haven't processed.

And this is the difficulty. If we've got so much information and 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, I think we're so curious, we've got to have a look at all this stuff. And it can be overwhelming. And that, that's why you've got to offload it.

So one thing you just talked about there, you've got AI helping you process some of the work 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 all that yourself?

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

Nigel Rawlins: The main thing is that if you are working for yourself and you're getting enough work and you can afford the VA, then it's important, I think to offshore, we call it offshoring. I have about two or three people. Most of them are in the Philippines at the moment because it's in my time zone.

I pay them a reasonable amount too. I don't, I'm trying to do it on the cheap or anything like that. So yeah, I offload, um, the social media artwork I do to promote the podcast. And that generally comes back within a day, but then I still got to process it. So I've still got to automate that.

So where is your VA? Is it in your time zone?

Michael Greenberg: Michaela does work my time. Um, when I'm hiring for any role I'm hiring around the world. And so Michaela actually is based in the Philippines. She's one of two team members we have there, but then I also have team members in Nicaragua and in Lebanon and in Ukraine and Poland, and even in the US and Canada. I try to make it more about who the best person is, who can get the job done at the price I need.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, I think that's a really interesting point is, outsourcing extra help because I don't think anyone today can actually, if they're working for themselves, can do it on their own. Otherwise you're ending up working 15, 16 hours a day, and if you're in a relationship, that's going to be destroyed, and you're sitting down an awful lot too, which is one of the things we spoke about before, is it's not good for your health to sit down all day. You've got a dog getting out five times a day is going to make you far more productive than 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 your team.

Michael Greenberg: That's really how I think about it. Um, even if I am the only person my business employs directly and everyone else is a contractor, they're still part of my team. And the legal distinction is big there, but I think the professional work distinction is not. That's one important point. Especially when people hire those of us who are experienced in our work, they are hiring us because we have experience.

And part of their expectation is that we have a team or we know how to build that team when it's needed. And I think that that's where a lot of us, uh, like drop the ball. When we move back to becoming consultants or freelancers and that sort of thing, or coaches. We forget that, Oh, the client doesn't really care if I'm doing it all myself. They just want to know that it gets done and they're hiring me to make sure it gets done right.

Nigel Rawlins: 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 I have learnt to find good people, and often that means that you've got to give somebody a go, and you give them little jobs.

But I have been lucky enough to find really, really good people, and I like to pay them reasonably well in American dollars, obviously, and in Australian dollars, they're not anything close to an American dollar. I think it costs us $1.50 to buy an American dollar. So it's expensive. Oh, it's terrible. It's been terrible for a long time, but I'd rather do that because I find really talented people who can do stuff very quickly.

Whereas if I was trying to mess around, trying to do some artwork, it's going to take me 15, well, more than 15 minutes. It can take me an hour and you can get lost in it. And that's the beauty. So how do you find the talent that you work with?

Michael Greenberg: So first off, let me say, I am a massive fan of Upwork, especially for anyone getting started hiring, Like hiring online or hiring remotely. There are reviews on the profiles. If you hire somebody who's already billed $10, 000 on platform and has a 95, 98, 99 percent success rate, you're going to get good work done.

That's I think a lot of people discount that fact that Upwork has that value, the 10 percent extra is worth it. Especially, when you're hiring for like those one off roles.

Nigel Rawlins: Yep.

Michael Greenberg: So let me start there. Upwork's fantastic. I love Upwork. I also do a few things differently on Upwork and I don't think I've told anyone this before.

So this is new for the audience. And then I'll tell you about the other platforms. Um, but on Upwork, I always invite people to the job. I will go and search them out ahead of time and I try to send 10 or 20 invites. Hiring from an aged account on Upwork really does make a difference. So if you have your payment verified, if you have spent thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands on platform, Freelancers can see that in your job post and they're just like, you're filtering by how many hours they've worked, how many dollars have they paid out, they're filtering their, their potential clients the same way.

And they're saying, Oh, if this client 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 my pricing and focus on a specific region and a specific price point. And I start at the lowest end and then I go up from there. So I start with the most favorable English accent regions, and best time zones. And I start by having the best of both worlds and then I move outwards. So because I'm in the US, I start with the Americas

And then I do Africa and Europe together. And I especially focus on Kenya and South Africa and Nigeria because they have such high levels of English speaking population.

And then I expand to the Philippines and to Southeast Asia. And so I sort of progress from how close they are to my time zone all the way out. And I focus on like, I know Argentina, Mexico, Columbia, those three countries are going to have the best English. which actually is a perfect segue into the other few tools I use to hire.

If I'm hiring in the Philippines, I use onlinejobs. ph they're hands down the best place to hire good Filipino internet talent because that's where everyone looks. And then I used LinkedIn jobs quite a bit and I get good results from them. You have to target to a local area. So that's why I'm only targeting three or four countries when I'm using LinkedIn jobs.

Nigel Rawlins: The whole point we're making there is, it's important to have a team and it's important to realise that it's not going to be easy. In the early days of my marketing services company, I actually hired people to physically come into an office.

So I used to have to have an office, used to have computers and networks and everything, and then bring them in. But I wasn't really good at getting a lot of work. So I'd be paying these people more 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.

Michael Greenberg: 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 these things. I employ a lot of my people full time or part time. And when I do part time, I try to do half time. But hourly is fantastic for a lot of these roles too.

And it's really just a matter of having the right person for the job when you need them already in place.

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

Michael Greenberg: Ooh, yeah. So

I tend to hire in a few areas to start. First is just general follow up. And like communication management, because I am busy and I have ADHD and the busier I get, the more things I drop and I don't even notice and nobody tells you. And so I need to hire people to make sure I drop fewer things, which is why I have an assistant who checks my inbox every hour and why we use ClickUp and other tools like that to track everything. so communication first, actually doing the work, for the kind of work we do, we have to hire for a few different roles. Uh, so we have to hire somebody called a Draftsman and they are going to actually sit with people and design workflows and draw them out into pretty flow charts with decision trees.

So that way somebody. Normally somebody we call a specialist can automate it. And the specialist has this specific tool set of tech required to build the thing, even if they may not be an expert in the business process.

Nigel Rawlins: an expert in the business process. Now, that is very interesting. Okay, let's talk about, say for example, you work for yourself, you have a team, a distributed team, I suppose we could say, and you have a team.

Workflows. Let's explain what a workflow is and how you might automate it. So for a person like me, there's probably a lot of people, not necessarily like me, but out there who are sitting in front of their laptop. They're running their own business. They, they may be very, very busy. And the thing is people, you know, I keep trying to tell people it's not just doing the work that's important.

You've also got to run a business. So you've got to do the marketing and selling. You've got to do the admin work, uh, and you've also got to do the work that the client's paying you for. And it's very easy to neglect the admin and it's very easy to neglect the marketing. So, let's explain a workflow and how that might be practical for a person who's sitting in front of their laptop.

Um, What sort of workflows are you talking about? And then what sort of automations are you talking about? Let's probably keep it fairly simple.

Michael Greenberg: Oh yeah, sure. How about, podcasts?

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

Michael Greenberg: First there's putting together a list of people to have on your podcast. We do about once every month or two. And we put together a list of like 20 to 30 people generally and then we send out invites to all of those people.

And so I'm going to be the one who puts together the initial list and I might rattle it off onto a voice memo or something, and then that's going to get sent to Michaela, my assistant.

And she is going to pull that all the contact information for everyone. And then she's going to load it into. a piece of software that will automatically send a template email to each person and automatically follow up if they haven't responded a couple of times. And then automatically, it'll it'll say, Hey, these people responded.

These people didn't. And so that gets us to booking and Michaela handles all the booking and knows, Oh, we can book at these times and that's all handled. So then we get to actually record it. We record and it's awesome. And we have a great episode.

Then we've got to cut that episode down to a final cut.

We've got to make sure it sounds amazing. We've got to get an intro and outro on it. We've got to get it scheduled and posted somewhere. We've got to make some social clips and we've got to. Then schedule all those social clips to promote the episode after it comes out. That's a lot more steps. That's a lot more pieces.

We have tools like Descript, and Descript is going to allow for me or for one of my other team members to go in and look at the entire recording and see it all transcribed, and then to cut it down and to edit the audio and the text at the same time.

And so I'll do a rough cut and then I'll send it to a podcast editor and they're going to put the intro outro on and they're going to master it and somehow it sounds better than when I had it thatwill get t us to a final episode and we can then take that final episode and upload it into a a tool called Swell. ai and Swell is going to chop up the episode into a whole bunch of different clips. And it's going to create some customized templates that we've developed for social posts. And then it's also going to send all 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 and James is also going to take the original full recording and he's going to go back over it himself and make sure we didn't miss any amazing things. And then we're going to send a thank you note and we're going to publish the episode. And that's that.

Nigel Rawlins: There's a lot of steps. I do most of that myself because I'm sort of, I'm sort of retired, you know, I'm supposed to be retired,

Michael Greenberg: Just 18 clients, totally retired.

Nigel Rawlins: Oh, well, it's mostly automated. I press a button every day. And if something goes down, I've got to do something really quick. So I generally keep an eye on things. But they, they pay to keep it functioning well. Like they all went down the other day. Every one of the sites went down the other day because one of them overloaded the servers. So I had to double the server capacity. And that was luckily on a Sunday morning. But it changed the IP address of them all, and people probably have no idea what I'm talking about. But an IP address is when you've got your domain name and it points to where it's hosted. It changed the IP address, so I had 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.

Michael Greenberg: Oof,

Nigel Rawlins: Oh, well, one went down yesterday after one week and luckily I got hold of it. It was an IT department of a large health organization near where I live. And I didn't know how to find the IT department to talk to them cause they keep

Michael Greenberg: they wouldn't be a public line or anything.

Nigel Rawlins: No, there wasn't. So I had to go through, probably India and then luckily somebody called me.

So yeah, there's crazy stuff, but that's all automated too. So really people don't understand that there's lots of ways, you can look at what you're doing and create a workflow. Now, automations, obviously finding, um, apps or finding cloud programs. So what are some of your favorite apps that once you figured out you need to automate this.

How do I find something that's going to help me do it better and cut down my time?

Michael Greenberg: So let's start with the step before the automation step, which is you got to choose tools that can talk to each other, right? If all of your notes for your projects are in pen and paper in your notebook, there's no way you're going to be able to automate anything from that information. I think a lot of people don't realize how scattered everything is until they start to go to try to do some of this. So I want to start there and say, you got to pick a tool that you can automate with. Trello, fantastic for it. ClickUp, Notion, both fantastic for automation. Airtable. Fantastic for automation. Google sheets, also great for automation. You got options, but you got to pick options that work. So once once you've got that out of the way, then you're going to use one of two platforms to do your actual automation work.

You're either going to use Zapier and 90 percent of the people listening are going to use Zapier and that's going to be the one you enjoy, or you're going to use make. com.

And different tools work with different automation platforms. So depending on the tools you use, there's a good chance you're going to be locked into one of them. And Zapier is probably the more beginner friendly one.

So you need somewhere to put your data. They can talk with other places and you need an automation tool. And when you've got both of those, then you can start automating things. I know there's a million steps, every part of the way. You go hire somebody off of Upwork who already knows how to use these tools.

Or you hire somebody like me and a whole firm, if you're a, little larger company. But there's a lot of people on Upwork who know how to do many of these things. And so if you have a really well detailed flow chart of like, I want it to do this thing, then this thing, then this thing, and you can sort of step through the exact process already, or you can make a video telling somebody step by step how to do it, then you can share it with somebody who knows how to automate.

And most of the time, they'll be able to get it.

Nigel Rawlins: Again, spending the time to try and figure it out. Because the other day I was trying to think, okay, I've got somebody who's booked to talk to me on the podcast. So therefore, it goes into the calendar. I want them to go to the calendar to Trello. And I looked at Zapier and I'm thinking, I'm going to have to learn this.

And that's the whole point we're trying to say here. Well, we know what we want to do. And you know, we can spend, what, a couple of hours trying to get it to work. I mean, AI will help, believe it or not. It actually helps you figure out how to do it. I had to do it about 15 times to get it to work for setting up my emails for the reports.

But the whole point we're trying to say is, Hmm, I got it eventually, but I'm thinking every time I got to do it, I'm not going to be an expert every time to figure out how to do the automations. The point you just made is, yeah, look, don't sweat this stuff. Find somebody, do the intelligent stuff, which is figure out, as you said, drafting, draft the process you want, find somebody who can then automate it, give it back to you, and then you feed it.

I'm assuming you can feed, feed something back into Zapier to work for you, if you've got an account

Michael Greenberg: Oh yeah. Well, that person will probably be able to build the thing and just in Zapier directly for you. I mean, that's a $10 to 15 an hour skill at the high end for somebody who really knows what they're doing most of the time in like the Philippines or India, somewhere like that.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, so if you're charging out at a higher rate and you're sweating on this stuff, when you could be spending say $15 or 20 to get a simple zap done. So we should probably explain what Zapier is.

Michael Greenberg: It's the number one automation platform in the world. you pay a monthly fee and then it allows you to directly integrate and automate, probably a thousand or 2000 of the most common apps, worldwide.

Nigel Rawlins: 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 your calendar or take something from your calendar and does it there. So you don't have to think too much about it, but you do have to set it up.

Alright, well let's talk a little bit about, work with the third brain. So if an organization, so tell us about a typical organization that you might work with that needs this digital automation.

Michael Greenberg: Absolutely. So our typical customer is generally between 10 and 150, 200 team members. Most often they have a bunch of software. Some of it talks to each other, kind of. They've done half a digital transformation before, and they know that they are falling behind when it comes to automation and AI.

And they're starting to sort of feel that impact. Normally it's, Oh, you know, maybe we've had more difficulty hiring lately. And so we're a little more strapped for team members or we're growing super fast. And so we just don't have time to always train. One of the most common cases is like in a larger transition, so like post acquisition, very common for common for it to be, Oh, we've been doing the things this way forever. And we really have no documentation to support them. And it's all very scattered. And so most are that level one where I, everything's still pretty siloed.

Nigel Rawlins: And that's the point about the single person on their own who's working for themselves. It's the same issue, but in a larger organization, you're wasting the time and the talent of all your people if it's not automated. So they're spending a lot of their time on admin and, the hive-mind?

Where, they're constantly responding to emails and stuff and they're never getting any work done.

Michael Greenberg: Yeah, exactly. And, uh, the way I talk about it is. The results of digital operations really fall down to five C's. First, all this unification and all this workflow documentation is going to allow you to build consistency. And that consistency and that clarity of understanding, that's numberr two is going to bring clarity to your business.

Everyone's going to know what they're supposed to do. And you're finally going to be able to have dashboards that actually work because when all your data talks to each other and all your tools talk to each other, you can actually have the information you want all in one place. And that combination of clarity and consistency, allow your team to increase their individual capacity.

So they can do more with the same amount of time. Which is going to give you and your team confidence in their abilities, because they're going to be less stressed. You're not going to be stressed anymore, or your client isn't going to be stressed anymore. And ultimately that capacity and that confidence lead to new cashflow.

So it's the last felt, but there is 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 implemented these things, they're looking at 4 to 5 percent increase in their profit margin. In smaller organizations, I see clients 5, 10, 15 percent increase in their profit margin because they can suddenly take on 5 more clients per person.

Nigel Rawlins: 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 trying to make, is especially some of my older, my age, independent consults who are listening to this, is it's exhausting if you've got to constantly be changing and figuring out things and getting stuck.

It's about reducing that cognitive overload so you can actually focus on the work you've got to do.

Michael Greenberg: Absolutely.

Nigel Rawlins: I think that's the amazing thing. Now, let's talk about how AI is impacting, all of this.

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

Nigel Rawlins: to

Michael Greenberg: If you're not the best at what you do, or one of the best, and it is an entirely intelligence based task or knowledge based, I certainly am concerned.

Like I look at what I do and I think 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 us to automate steps we could never automate before.

Mentioned standardizing your ReadWise information. I have experienced that myself.

The ReadWise export sends you 60 different useless pieces of information with the one quote and the little line of where it was that you actually want.

Having an AI go through and

Having an AI go through and delete that or just extract the one piece that matters is massive. I have a client right now, they're a few hundred million a year. And they manage, about a hundred restaurant locations. They have three people in Mexico who sit and watch the security cameras at all the locations all the time.

And they're not going to replace all those people. But we can put an AI in place that monitors all the same feeds and flags the ones that look like something's out of line for them.

And their HR team, every Tuesday has Receipts Tuesday, when they go through every single store's receipts that they take photos of and upload to Google Drive, and then have to match those receipts to the deposits on the bank slips.

And AI, same thing, it's too important to leave it just to a robot. but, the AI is going to take every receipt, read every receipt, move the information into a Google sheet. So that way they can just copy paste from the Google sheet to the bank confirmation one, and it's done. It's going to save them six hours every week.

Nigel Rawlins: That's the whole point, isn't it? And also with writing, for example, after my podcast, I'll take the transcript and I create, outlines and I have some prompts that I use and create a massive amount of material that I can use. But then when I'm writing, I am going backwards and forwards because I want it to say this.

I want to try and say it this way. I want it to include this. And it can take me a day to write something, but it's like it works with you. You mentioned before, that it's a fantastic assistant. So tell us what you mentioned.

Michael Greenberg: 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, but someday it will always be up to date. Um, and it's always available. So at 10 PM at night, when I have that crazy idea that I need to run by, uh, another expert, AI is there for me when others can't be. When I was trying to figure out who actually came up with digital operations.

AI was the one who I could go back and talk with because everyone I was talking with personally thought I had invented the term. I was like, no, I know I didn't invent this thing. I think I look at it and right now we see AI as kind of outside the process.

It's a chatbot we have to talk with, when you see it inside of workflows, it's different. I don't think the chatbot is how we're going to actually use it every day. It's, Oh, let me send a voice memo to this AI. And then the AI is going to turn that voice memo into a proposal or into a project brief.

That's a little bit of magic. That's just a little step. And I think that sort of summarization, formatting, uh, knowledge retrieval, Are all going to be heavily augmented by AI, but the tools and the technology we have now with large language models, like GPT 4, it's all based on prediction. So do not be worried about it predicting something that's never happened before. The real creativity still lies with us humans.

Nigel Rawlins: That's the important thing. You mentioned that AI is going to probably replace a whole lot of processes. Therefore, we have to try and be at the top of our tree in many ways. So, and that comes back to learning, isn't it? To continuously learn, be open minded to some of the changes that are going on there.

Like, I try and read a book a week now. I've got millions of hardcover books, but I go mad on my Kindle. I basically read non fiction all the time, apart from science fiction at night. You know, that, that's where we have to have that process where, in my Kindle, I highlight, goes to ReadWise, and then it feeds into my Roam, where I then try and process it and then use AI to come up with a summary.

And then I've got access to that if I want it. So to stay as intelligent as we can be, we've got to do a whole lot of stuff. So where do you see yourself going with this ?

Michael Greenberg: So I actually hired a team member, at the beginning of this year, who is trained and dedicated just to AI content, because I see so many of our professional content workflows, like writing project briefs as fundamentally similar or the same to creating social media content.

In both cases, the best versions are much more similar than they are different.

I hired him and all he does is he stays the cutting edge of what are the prompts that work right now. He knows how to work with all the tools. And so for me, I said, okay, I can set aside a thousand dollars a month for this thing. And so I'm going to hire the smartest, most talented person I can. And then I'm going to have them learn all this stuff because I can't keep up to date with all of this all the time and build my company. The cutting edge is not what I should be giving my customers. That's too new.

Nigel Rawlins: Now that's really interesting when you say that, because the consultancy firms out there sort of do this, but they charge a fortune for doing it. And they're generally hiring, well, highly intelligent people, but, you know, they're running a big organization with fairly big overheads. So a lean organization or lean business like yourself with a team and with AI and with automation is actually giving them a run for their money.

Michael Greenberg: That's thee plan. And so far it's working because we can come in 30 or 40 percent cheaper and we can do the exact same work and we've got an AI. And that AI is plugged into every template of every project we've ever done. And so whenever we're starting a project, we can build that project from the pieces we already have.

Nigel Rawlins: And that's the nature of how businesses have got to go, especially if you're an independent professional, you've got to start thinking about this. So it's your value and you can be replaced if it's fairly ordinary stuff. So that's going to be the danger. So apart from that, how do you learn other things?

Michael Greenberg: I'm a big reader. I Use Twitter quite a bit. I try to meet a lot of interesting people by going on podcasts and being on Twitter and other places like that, and that lets me have interesting conversations and they refer me to new tools. Like I'd never heard of Two Second Agile before.

Nigel Rawlins: I'll send you the link. It's just a book and it was free and it blew my mind.

Michael Greenberg: And I had never heard of centaurs and cyborgs either, but you introduced me to both those concepts and I've got them pulled up, uh, right afterwards. And so I think I have tried to avoid news and I try to mostly avoid media, uh, because I find I've, I've worked in marketing long enough to know how useless all 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 search engine called Perplexity AI. And I use that when I'm trying to do deep dives into certain things. And then I use Google scholar and I use chat GPT. And when I want to learn about something, 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 is I've been learning about farming because I want to build myself just a little country farm. And I've been learning all about farming in my region and the different plants and the agriculture 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 and meet with farmers and do things like that as a result.

And then at work, I'm learning about AI all day. And so I'm like, Oh, I've got five AI influencers. And whenever they mention a paper, I go and read that paper because I don't trust anyone. I want to read the original material.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, so you're flagging information that you find. That's the biggest problem I'm finding. I, there's, I don't think I've got ADHD. But boy, I see lots of interesting things I want to read and watch this video and watch that.

It's all non fiction stuff, but it can be overwhelming.

Michael Greenberg: I passed my point of overwhelm with it. So now, like I said, I used to try to keep up with like a lot of different newsletters and a lot of different podcasts. Now I'll watch, but if it's not super interesting right now, and, and it's not directly applicable to a project I'm on, all searchable. Right.

I know the 30 shows that I really need to look at when it comes to podcasting for any topic.

And so when I really want to learn about that topic, I'll go look at those shows.

I found a single podcast episode from eight years ago on Apple podcast, and it was the only interview, uh, with this one guy about this one construction method. And it was just one search away. As soon as I knew the name of his book, it was easy to find.

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

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

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

Michael Greenberg: There's going to be a lot more AI, can say that. I think there's two big trends. One is that technology is becoming more and more integrated into our lives. And two is that it is a status symbol to be able to reject that technology.

And so just like how 200 years ago, being fat was a sign you were rich.

Now being thin and healthy and fit is a sign you are rich in the exact same way. Because it allows you to signal your free time, and your ability to stay away from the computer because you're not stuck in the office working eight hours a day and getting fat sitting at your desk.

So I think that's like part of it.

And I think at the same time, we're going to see a lot more people who use technology and who are like addicted to it. And so I think that is becoming more and more of like a known trend where this is well known in China already. It's well known in some other countries, but I think, at least the English speaking West has been very slow to adopt digital addiction, even though we have already recognized gambling addiction as like a very real thing.

And it's the exact same. It's literally the same dopamine pathways, just translated to a different device.

But on a hopeful note, I think we're all going to have quite a bit more free time to do what we want, and I think we're coming to a reckoning in the world about how we make that happen, because hunter gatherers only had to work 20 25 hours a week, and somehow we're working 50 and most people still can't make it through.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, that's pretty tough. Okay, at this point, is there something else you want to mention?

Michael Greenberg: I think the, the only note I'd say is like too many people try to game the system, and it's much easier to just realize, Oh, AI can't do this thing yet. Or, Oh, AI will be able to do this thing in six months. Don't try to build everything and make a million bells and whistles and fancy tricks because most of this stuff is still moving fast enough that it's not worth trying to build out.

Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: By the time you do it, it'll be old hat, won't it?

That's the danger of rushing into something. And I, I noticed that there's a lot of. Influencers out there, gurus, who are online and they're saying, right, this is the next best thing. And then you suddenly, a year later, it's all gone. So they're constantly jumping on the bandwagon.

I remember when Roam came out, there was all these Roam experts and then Tana came out and there's all these Tana experts. And then it becomes mainstream. And, um, you know, so they're constantly having to reinvent themselves, but what do they stand for? And that's the danger of Twitter. You can see a lot of people on there saying this, this, and you're going, this is just rubbish, repetitive rubbish.

And, but yes, Twitter at the same time helps me find people like you and very interesting people, but you just got to sort of find them in

Michael Greenberg: Yeah. I'll warn everyone

Twitter is going to get bad this year it's a U. S. election year and any U. S. election year bot activity on all platforms goes through the roof and AI bots are so much better than they were a year ago.

And they're so, so much better than they were four years ago.

So just be wary , there's going to be a million deep fakes. There's going to be a million everything this year. And you might, you might, if you're, if you've been thinking about taking a social media cleanse, 2024 is a great year to do it

Nigel Rawlins: I think it's funny. I've, I've got lots of followers on Twitter and they all are wearing bathing suits and things like that. And I'm thinking, they're bots. Because why would anyone want to follow me in an old bloke.

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

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

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

Nigel Rawlins: Yep.

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

Or if you'd like to do business and you think some of your clients would be able to benefit or you'd be able to benefit from this sort of work, feel free to reach out.

Nigel Rawlins: 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 much for being on the podcast with me. This has been an amazing talk and I hope people are really understanding what we're really talking about and what it means for the future.

Nigel Rawlins: So thank you.

Michael Greenberg: Nigel. Thank you for having me on.