A Friday email passed back and forth from the editors, but out just before happy hour!  A longer dive into email and other distractions disguised as productivity.  Here is a quick clip from John Krasinski, who gives a shout-out to his mom on Mother’s Day weekend.  A Twitter Turtle who wears his shell like a hat and an app to sync playlists from other apps.  A great mix to get you ready for a great weekend; enjoy!

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Caveday is a subscription website you can use to force some focus work during your work day.  The focus work starts with intentions, you join using Zoom, and you keep your camera on while you're working, and when the sprint is done, you can report your progress.  We have used the service sporadically, and if you have an extensive project or a static job that requires focused work and critical deadlines.  Harder to do if you wear a lot of hats and you like raising a newborn; you work (or sleep) when the baby is asleep!  The website also advises how to focus and get through deep work.  Today, we are highlighting an article with a great headline:

In my heavy consulting days, I could spend half my day reading, organizing, and responding to emails.  Half my day was 4 to 6 hours.  I used to tell people I'll know I'm retired when I no longer had an email address.  I currently have 5 active email addresses used for work.  My first email address was in 1995; email abused me for almost 30 years.  In most professional settings, working many jobs and reading hundreds of job descriptions, I've never seen email listed as a responsibility – yet many of us spend 25% of every day on email.

As time has passed, and despite the books, courses, and interviews with productivity experts, email continues its grip on my time.  At the root, email makes you think you are working when all I'm doing is shuffling digital letters, the equivalent of pushing paper.  Mentally mining for golden nuggets or idea sparks, but email is all about delays and distraction.  I used to put a line in my email signature saying, "If you are looking for answers, call me."  Email is an excellent alternative to what we use to use a fax machine.  Instead, we use it as a phone, fax, messaging, micro-thought, and document transfer device in the most unsecured distractable way.  Time to go back to a friend of the work, Cal Newport, and see if we can't find new ways to improve this dilemma; anyone say AI?

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Imagine if you showed up for your first day of high school English and Jim from the NBCs The Office was teaching the class.  According to this clip from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, we might have been three weeks away from Professor Krasinski.  You also have John's mom to thank for sticking to the acting thing. We linked up with this clip from our friends at 8am.

Krasinski talks about telling his mom he's going to move to NY and become an actor and John's mom says, "You have to promise me that if the acting thing isn't working after a few years, you have to pull yourself out because as your mother, you can't ask me to tell you to give up on your dreams.

A giant snapping turtle went viral on Twitter when Joey Santore spotted the monster while they were floating down the Chicago River on a kayak.  When a turtle starts wearing its shell like a hat, you know you are looking at a giant turtle.  Equally as impressive is the commentary of Joey Santore; the whole clip could have been on SNL.

The With A Shout newsletter is less than a year old, but we've been collecting music and building playlists for decades.  In a search for an app that would transfer one playlist from one platform to another, I turned up an app called Soundiiz.  We have no professional affiliation with Soundiiz, we are users only, but it was easy to set up, and the annual subscription was $36.  It took us 5 minutes to set up the syncs, and now any song we add to our designated playlists on Apple Music will sync with another playlist on Spotify.  Soundiiz also works with SoundCloud, YouTube, Pandora, and other media services we just learned of.

Brilliant cover.

Click on the Apple Music image to listen to the song on Apple Music or on the Spotify Image to listen to Spotify.

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Thank you for spending a few minutes with us. Here’s one for the road!

With A Shout newsletter is written by Johnny Christian with the support of a thousand idea bits and the help of many people.

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