Well, hello!
Welcome to Mappy Monday! I keep calling this a newsletter, but really it’s me sending you the highlights of all the rabbit holes I fell into this month - aka things that stopped me from being a responsible adult with a reasonable bedtime.
📦 From my MappyEverAfter website: Time Management for the Rest of Us
🤖 AI Shenanigans: What the heck are AI Agents?
🧪 Experiment: Back to Paper
🌍 Travel: The jet-setter’s secret weapon - (free) Global Entry
🌞 Health: Boost Your Dopamine Levels
💰 Money: US Bank's $400 Gift to Credit Card Churners
📺 Watch: Italian comedy-drama “Mid-August Lunch”
📚 Read: Michael Hyatt’s “Free to Focus”
💡 Mind Hack: Things that aren’t Doing The Thing
🎈 Just because: Learn how to Vanish a Coin
Note: I will always tell you if I’m getting any referral bonuses and how much they are.
There are three 'Support Your Mappy Writer' links in this letter. If you shop on Amazon, get there through any of these links: Full Focus Planner, Wyze Planner, or Free to Focus book and buy anything that day (even if it’s not the exact thing I linked), they might toss a few coins my way. Think of it as a virtual tip jar.
📦 From the Mappy Archive:
Time Management for the Rest of Us
Here’s a post I wrote a while back about the gap between what we think we could or should be doing with our time, and what we are actually able to do as humans with the days, weeks, and years available to us.
🤖 AI Shenanigans:
What the Heck are AI Agents?
Agent is the buzzword du jour. But what actually are they?
AI is evolving past the "I'll try to answer your question" phase into full-blown "let me do things for you in real world" territory.
AI agents belong to this movement, albeit working online (using your phone or computer), not in your kitchen cooking dinner. Think of an AI agent as an eager assistant who can browse websites, book flights, fill out forms, and do your online shopping, except it never needs coffee breaks and doesn’t bitch about coworkers.
I'm still looking for a free agent that takes less time to set up and use than doing the same thing myself (or with the help of a LLM like ChatGPT or Perplexity). So in the meanwhile...
Google's Project Mariner looks promising, but so far it's available only for Google AI Ultra subscribers at a hefty $250/month. Watch a demo (click the picture below) as it rifles through someone’s Google Drive to find a recipe, figures out what ingredients are missing, and then hops over to Instacart to buy them and get them delivered.
Their family recipe for goulash somehow includes ground meat, macaroni, and cheddar cheese (tutting disapprovingly), but otherwise the process is interesting to watch.
These agents read your prompt, see and understand what's on your screen and in different tabs, and then think, click, and type their way through each task just like you would, except with considerably more patience. They're also good at multitasking, so you can run several agents at the same time.
Let's hope that by the time they fix all the major bugs, Google makes Mariner free to use.
The biggest benefit of AI agents? They'll handle all the mind-numbing digital busywork so you can focus on the stuff that actually requires your unique human skills.
🧪 Experiment:
Back to Paper
After years of trying every productivity and to-do app under the sun, I’ve gone full circle, back to pen and paper. More specifically - a planner notebook.
I read Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt, who lays out a good planning process and, yes, sells a 3-month, $60 Full Focus planner to go with it. He also makes The Full Focus Wellness planner that gives self-care the same level of importance as work tasks.
Of course I didn’t buy either. Instead, I read reviews and studied their layouts, and then picked a Wyze Planner for half the price and with twice the months, that has many similar features (goal setting, habit tracking, monthly and weekly reviews, etc.). Then I tinkered and modified it to reflect the best ideas I pilfered from the Focus planners.
I gave myself six daily “non-negotiables”: three practical tasks (I wrote about a similar system here as well) and three self-care practices (anything from yoga to a scrub, movie night, or nap). It sounds small, but it keeps me from pushing these into the “if I have time” category, which usually means “never.”
Highlighters became my coding system: Green means done, Purple means bumped to another day, Orange means canceled without shame. I added a spot for The Biggest Win of the day, The Best Moment, the Don’t Do list, and checkboxes for things to go over when making the next day’s plan.
I still use Todoist for my reusable lists (like “Things to do before leaving on a vacation”) and quick-capture ideas in the inbox to sort later (Todoist app and widgets are snappy, free, and multilingual), and I use Capacities.io (also free) to store notes and references I want to keep forever.
I skipped my paper planner this past week while visiting family and I’ve actually missed the feel of filling it out. Without it, the days blur together and I don’t have a record of the Best Moments of the day. So today I’m happily back at it, highlighters in hand, still experimenting, but really liking how this mix of paper and digital is shaping up. Now I’m just waiting for the “Massive Success” that the belly band of the Wyze planner promises ⏳
🌍 Travel:
The Jet-setter’s Secret Weapon - (free) Global Entry Pass
You know the Disneyland’s Lightning Lane Pass that lets you skip the 80-minute line? Well, Global Entry is like that, but mainly for airports in the USA.
And trust me, once you've experienced those blissfully short lines and breezing through US airport security with your shoes on, your shampoo and laptop deep in your carry-on, there's no going back to standing behind families with seventeen bags arguing whether melted chocolate in Johnny’s pocket counts as a liquid.
See instructions on how to apply here.
Global Entry at a Glance
💳 Cost: $120 (valid for 5 years)
Cards That Reimburse the Fee: United Explorer (I just bought a $5 flight to Europe with United points, again!), Chase Sapphire Reserve, AmEx Platinum, Capital One Venture & Venture X, Bank of America Premium Rewards, IHG Premier, and a few more🛫 Perks: Skip long customs/security lines, TSA PreCheck for U.S. departures, keep shoes/liquids/laptop in bag. Valid for 5 years
🌍 Who Can Apply: Citizens/residents of the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Bahrain, Colombia, Croatia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Panama, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, UK
✈️ Where It Works: Primarily for entering/leaving the U.S. (some reciprocal programs in other countries.)
I still arrive 3 hours early for every international flight, just in case. But I usually spend 2.5 of them sniffing new perfumes at duty-free shops or taking a nap (with 5 alarms set, of course!)
🌞 Health:
Boost Your Dopamine
I stumbled across this fascinating Huberman Lab episode with surprisingly doable ways to work with dopamine (the brain’s motivation currency) to tackle procrastination and lack of motivation.
In a healthy state, the system is flexible. We can toggle between work, relationships, exercise, creative projects, or whatever else gives us a sense of meaning. But dopamine isn’t about any specific goal, it’s the fuel that drives us to pursue anything. Drugs and addictive behaviors can hijack the system - dopamine gets locked onto one narrow pursuit and everything else fades into the background.
Even quick dopamine hits like scrolling through short videos can drop your baseline levels. Interestingly, even rewards can backfire and tank our motivation. Give a kid gold stars for something they already love (like drawing), and suddenly the stars, not the joy of drawing, become the reason to do it. When the rewards vanish, so does the kid’s will to draw, which honestly explains a lot about my relationship with checkmarks and productivity apps.
The idea is to avoid activities that cause a big spike (and inevitable crash), and also to slowly raise your baseline dopamine level, which can be done by activities that keep dopamine elevated for several hours:
Regular, high quality sleep
Short NSDR (non-sleep deep rest) or Yoga Nidra session
Foods or supplements with L-tyrosine
Morning sunlight to kickstart the dopamine cascade
Exercise and movement of any kind
Cold showers
Speaking of dopamine hits that don't crash your baseline levels - for me, apparently, there's nothing quite like the sustained satisfaction of outsmarting bank promotions for extra cash 👇
💰 Money:
US Bank's $400 Gift to Credit Card Churners
If you're in the US, comfortable tying up $5k for a couple months in your new bank account, and you’re desperately trying to hit that minimum spending requirement on a shiny new credit card, this little gem is basically free money on steroids.
Somehow, in this age of banks tightening every possible loophole, you can still fund a new US Bank business checking account with $3,000 from a credit card and pocket a $400 bonus for the privilege. The beautiful part? This registers as a purchase (not a cash advance) with Chase cards.
For the full play-by-play on how the hubby and I tag-teamed a similar deal (because we're the type of couple that gift each other bank referrals instead of, you know, flowers), check out the March issue of Mappy Monday where I broke down every glorious detail.
📺 Watch:
Mid-August Lunch
If you're looking for something heartwarming, funny, and Italian, Mid-August Lunch (Pranzo di Ferragosto) will fit the bill.
It's about a middle-aged guy (played by Gianni Di Gregorio) who lives with his mom in Rome, just trying to make ends meet. To scrape together some cash during a summer holiday, he agrees to babysit a few elderly women. What starts as a reluctant favor turns into a charming, gently hilarious houseful of spirited ladies who completely take over his apartment and his life.
It’s short (just over an hour), lovely, and perfect if you want a little summer warmth without leaving your couch.
Watch for free on Kanopy with a US library card, or on AppleTV
📚 Read:
Michael Hyatt’s Free to Focus
I didn’t expect to like Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt as much as I did. It’s technically a productivity book seemingly geared towards business executives, but the advice is applicable to everyone trying to get stuff done.
It doesn’t hit you with the usual “do more, faster” energy. Instead, it’s about doing less. Hyatt frames productivity as a way to free up time, attention and energy for what actually matters, and he gives equal weight to rejuvenation, play, and rest.
I listened to it on Libby.
💡 Mind Hack:
Things That Aren’t Doing the Thing
A programmer and writer who goes by Loopy, on the difference between preparing to do something and actually doing it:
Things that aren't doing the thing:
Preparing to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
Scheduling time to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing.
Telling people you're going to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
Messaging friends who may or may not be doing the thing isn't doing the thing.
Writing a banger tweet about how you're going to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
Hating on yourself for not doing the thing isn't doing the thing.
Hating on other people who have done the thing isn't doing the thing.
Hating on the obstacles in the way of doing the thing isn't doing the thing.
Fantasizing about all of the adoration you'll receive once you do the thing isn't doing the thing.
Reading about how to do the thing isn't doing the thing.
Reading about how other people did the thing isn't doing the thing.
Reading this essay isn't doing the thing.The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.
🎈 Just Because:
Learn how to Vanish a Coin
So there you have it. Pricey planners were scribbled in, dopamine got boosted, Italian grandmas drove a man nuts, AI agents shopped for goulash, and somehow I walked away $400 richer.
Which rabbit holes kept you up this month? Just click reply (or comment below) and let me know!
Be Mappy,
Mags
