All of It: The Takers, the Tools, and the Treats

Two of my closest friends have been going to Costa Rica for years - part holiday, part pilgrimage to see a healer they swear is one of the most gifted people alive, one who truly channels something higher than himself. This year, for their anniversary, they flew him to Los Angeles for a ceremony, and I was so grateful that I finally got to meet him and to sit for a session of my own. It was a revelation.

He grounded me first. Then we began, and something shifted. I genuinely can’t explain everything I felt, and I’m not going to try to talk you into it. But when it was over, he sat me up, and my entire body just felt different. He told me to keep my eyes closed and my arms crossed, some of his stones still resting on me, and he started to talk to me about energy.

He said that for someone like me - someone who loves to create, who loves to share her energy - you attract a very particular kind of person.

Takers.

And that for years, I’ve been quietly taking on other people’s darkness. Their weight. Their stress. Their sadness. Just loading it onto my back and telling myself the thing I always tell myself: I’ll be fine. I can fix it. I’ll get through this one hard thing and then it’ll get easier.

Years and years of that, he said, had built a stress in my body he had rarely seen in anyone.

Then he offered to teach me a mantra. Which, in the spirit of generosity, I am now passing along to you. He told me to take a few deep breaths. He said that in the future, when these takers come to me with their darkness, I should breathe, and repeat this. Then he asked me to say it back to him.

Two more deep breaths.

“Fuck. Off.”

I started dying laughing. He did not. He just kept going, completely serious: Cut. Cut. Cut. Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off.

And then, softer: Rebuild your energy. Rebuild your brightness. Make the things that bring you joy, and put that joy back out into the universe. You don’t have to fix everything. You just have to keep making the light. Maybe it’s because so much in the world right now is so heartbreaking, but I was a little relieved to hear it.

The real takeaway, for someone like me, is permission. To say no. To set a boundary. To stop picking up every single thing as if it’s mine to carry. It’s okay to protect my energy for what I’m building right now - which is the greatest joy, and the greatest challenge, I’ve taken on yet.

So if you needed to hear this too: you are always, always allowed to say fuck off.

MY NEW OBSESSION IS GRANOLA

After the response to my last post about being completely obsessed with Claude, I wanted to keep this series going and share my other life hack: Granola.

Granola is an AI meeting notetaker that works with Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams. But here’s what made me love it: it doesn’t barge in and announce itself the way Fireflies or Gong does. No bot awkwardly “joining” your call. It just takes the best notes you’ve ever seen in the background.

It lives on your menu bar and pulls itself up the second before a meeting starts. It keeps everything organized by who attended, sorts into folders, and tracks the meetings still to come. Every call gets summarized down to the salient points and a clean list of key takeaways. And if you want it to fully record, you just ask. It even creates a brief for you in the tool that pulls from LinkedIn and other sources and tells you everything you need to know about the person you’re about to talk to. On days when I’m stacked with Zooms from morning to night, this alone is worth it.

But I’m burying the lede. My favorite part is that Granola is integrated with your favorite LLMs (I use Claude), so you can ask it questions and it pulls the answers from what was actually said in your meetings. It will go through all prior recordings and notes to answer the question. I can say “which mohair vendor offered us an MOQ of 150 units” and it will pull my notes from all relevant questions and summarize the answers.

Everyone on my team is required to download it, and if you miss a meeting, someone sends over their Granola notes, and now you have the context sitting in your database to search whenever you need it.

And if you really want to take it a step further: connect Granola and Gmail to your Claude account, then prompt something like, “Find the action items from my Granola meetings today, check my Gmail to see if anyone’s already emailed me about them, and give me my complete follow-up to-do list.”

This has actually changed my life and I really hope it changes yours.

After much healthy internal debate, we wanted to share our favorite office snacks that we can’t stop enjoying here at MDHQ.

1g. Solely Organic Fruit Jerky - Nothing added but the fruit.

1h. Coke Zero - Move over DC, we are CZ die-hards.

1i.

1j. Natural Delights Medjool Dates Pitted Organic - Of course dates need to be on this list.

“Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Don’t teach a man to fish… and feed yourself. He’s a grown man. Fishing’s not that hard.” - Ron Swanson, Parks and Recreation

Thank you for being here. What else do you want to know about productivity hacks? I'd love to know in the comments.