G Suite Becomes Google Workspace

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00
Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community Welcome to anything but idle the productivity and technology news show. Today’s show is brought to you by WCC web services. And I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. I’m stupid. And we’re your hosts for anything but idle. This is Episode 23. And we’re recording this on October 12 2020. Each week, we cover the productivity news headlines of the week. And to do that today, we have two panelists with us to cover the news. And they are Frank buck, Dr. Frank buck, and Matt Plummer, who’s the CEO of zivana. And so Dr. Buck is with us today, I’m going to bring him up. And so most people are overwhelmed by the amount of paper and digital information in their lives. Frank buck makes organization easy so you can increase productivity, decrease stress, and enjoy life. Global global gurus ranked ranked number one in the world in the time management category for 2019 and 2020. His career path took him from band director to principal to Central Office administrator and now to productivity coach and speaker. Welcome to anything but idle Frank. is pleasure to be here. Thanks. Right. And to round us out, I have Matt Plummer, CEO of Zavala, Matt is a former operations manager and strategy and management consultant who got tired of sacrificing his personal life to work long hours without moving up in his career as quickly as he wanted. So he began a journey to create to greater productivity and ended up cutting his hours by over 30%. and managing three to four projects in the time others managed to this experience led him to start as aurvana where he helps others, other ambitious professionals achieve the same results with workshops, coaching, and an online learning platform. And so with that, welcome, Matt.

Matt Plummer 1:46
Thanks, Ray. Thanks so much for having me here. excited for this topic.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:49
Fantastic. Fantastic. So this week’s theme, welcome to our live audience, by the way, welcome to you all watching. And so I know it’s probably last minute for those of you who did dial in, and I’m Welcome to the show. And so we’re going to be coming live each week, just like this. And we’re going to have a good one I and hopefully to other panelists each week to do this show. And each week, we’re going to try and theme it with something just to start off with a conversation that I think would be useful and salient to the personal productivity audience. And so today’s theme is actually mental health awareness. If you all didn’t know on Saturday, 1010 was a world Mental Health Day. And we also ended this past week with World mental was mental health mental illness Awareness Week. And so because of the two of those, I thought we would just have a conversation about some of the things that we see in the personal productivity and technology space around mental health, and just the awareness of those kinds of things. So first and foremost, I came across this study, and I just thought it was so dramatically interesting, which was that it said that 82% of people believe robots can support their mental health better than humans. And if you dig into this study a little bit more. In essence, this study was all about all of the various, both negative and other impacts of mental health on the global workforce. And so it just goes to show that we don’t really know as much as we should know, in our own kind of microcosms about what people are thinking and how they’re feeling as it relates to making their way through, really, the global pandemic, but but just the reality of being stuck in our spaces. And so I just wanted to like bring up the topic and hear from you all, in terms of what has your experience been so far in hearing about people’s or, you know, varieties of people’s experiences with mental health in the past year?

Frank Buck, EdD 3:48
Well, right, I’ll jump in my backgrounds in education, I was a principal for many years and still have great contact with schools, and it has just thrown everybody for a loop. Teachers are doing double duty there. In many cases, they’re teaching students in person, and also teaching students online and trying to build a plane as they’re as they’re flying the plane. And stress has become a real factor in the world of education. people leaving the profession, it’s just, it’s something we’ve never faced before.

Augusto Pinaud 4:26
It’s interesting. You mentioned the example of stress on education. I have two little kids and I have seen firsthand from these teachers, this trust to translate that real world that they know really well where they could move with no issues to now this third tool and how these things translate from them and this trust on top of that I coach being seen so many people struggling with the work in at home now. This is not my office, where are my you know, my whiteboards Word is interruptions, the distractions dealing with educating the kids at the same time they’re trying to work plus going to soon and everything else. So this Tresemme, this trouble I seen is real, I’m not surprised to to read. So many people believe that the problems into systems can’t support them better. We have not done a really good job supporting each other before of this pandemic. And it was there was so many other things that you could do. And many of the things were things that we need outside, not inside now that many people is constrained or where they can go. A lot of that stress was avocation a long weekend going somewhere now, everything needs to be where you are. And we really were not ready for that. It’s remarkable the number of mental health applications that are out there, and that have really come come to the fore in that timeframe, right.

Frank Buck, EdD 5:57
Yeah, I remember quite a few years ago, my first trip to Canada was I was invited by McGill University to the distinguished educator seminar series, they said, we’re, we’re doing a two day workshop on health. It was health and fitness. And I’m thinking now what do they want me, you know, a slightly overweight, gray headed guy that has never run a marathon and it will float to the top and they say, it’s two days day. Number one is the physical aspects of health day. Number two is the mental aspects. And that’s why we want you it’s it’s stress, it’s organization, time management, productivity, its relationship with reducing stress, and I thought they understand they get it. And it turned out to be a wonderful day. I don’t know what they talked about that first day. But, you know, we know having a system is important. You know, it takes us from being good to being excellent to being outstanding to being great, that kind of thing. I think right now having a system is the difference between sinking and swimming.

Matt Plummer 7:07
Yeah, I like that point, Frank, because you know, if you think about what creates stress change creates stress and the number of changes that have happened over the past few months, and are continuing to unfold. I mean, there’s such a level of unpredictability that that is creating huge amount of stress. And systems have a way of standardizing things. They take things and make order and make it more predictable for us. And so I agree, and I’ve seen that in the workplace that, well, I’ve led with some, some, you know, I’ve talked a lot about productivity and critical thinking and management, the topic that keeps coming up in my conversations with business leaders is around burnout. And I’ve recently launched a burnout recovery retreat. And that has been kind of the most popular thing over the last few months that people know whether it’s technically burnout, or not just this sense of like, how do I make sense of everything that’s happening, and continue to refuel myself, in the midst of a changing uncertain environment? Yeah,

Frank Buck, EdD 8:03
and I think once this whole pandemic is over, that’s where we’re gonna see even greater change, when everything is back open again, all of a sudden, all it wants, are we going to be ready, you know, our, our systems gonna be good enough, that when we can kick into high gear into life, as we knew it before, that we’re ready to do that?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:27
Absolutely. Yeah, I wanted to just point out to folks, kind of the importance of self care in this environment, not just systems, which I think is absolutely power mountain, and both of you are on point here, related to that. But the, the real goal here is to have a, some level of understanding of what self care means. And you know, like, for me, you know, like being in both a global pandemic, with both family and friends who have been affected by it, you know, like having to go to funerals for elderly people. Those are, those are things that I’m fairly resilient to, but I know that they affect me. And so we all have to kind of step back and take a little bit of heart, a little bit of awareness to the to the reality of it all, and figure out what for you kind of de stresses you what what releases the pressure valves for you, I’ve had to step back from certain volunteer projects, I’ve had to step back from certain other projects at work, just because I know, it’s just too much at the moment, right. And that, of course, causes friction for me because as you can all imagine, I like being productive, and I like taking on more than other people can. But I also recognize the importance and power of stepping back at this time, and really taking stock of what I have, you know, being thankful for what I have, I’m extremely lucky in life, you know, with my family and friends and my work and everything else like that. So just taking stock of that has been actually very, very powerful and doing self care in that environment. I also want to note that there are There are so many different resources. And I’ll put all of these into the video description as well as the show notes for those who are listening to the, to the show after the fact. But the the substance abuse, mental health, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, they have a national helpline which is free, confidential 20 473 65. And so you can call that number, we’ll put that into the listing there, but it’s 806, six to help 4357 and, and then it also put a list to checkpoint.org, which has global mental health resources. So no matter what country you’re listening to us from, if you just scroll through the list, whatever that issue might be, whether it be substance abuse, whether it be a mental illness, you can go through the list and choose the appropriate contact information for the resources that are available to you. But go get help if you need it. This is not the time to think that you’re a tough guy or gal or other, you decide to get help, because you’re watching us and you want to be productive. So you can’t be productive if you’re not taking taking care of really, you know, the other half of yourself, which is your internal mental well being any other thoughts? Yeah, go for it, man.

Matt Plummer 11:12
Yeah, one thing just to jump on that ray is one of the things I like to do for myself and for others is to go through the exercise of defining I use the term sustainability, what would have to be true in order for you to feel like your work life situation is sustainable. Because most people have a vague notion of I need things to be balanced, they need to have a manageable work life, but they haven’t articulated specifically in a way that affects their actions, what needs to be true in order for them to feel that sense of sustainability. And so going through the exercise of actually defining that, and usually I talk about defining it for a season because as we all know, you know, seasons change, and you might, that might be different in three months from now, six months. But taking the time to define what would have to be true can be helpful as even as you think about the next three months.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:59
All right. And so with that, we are going to move our way along to the stories of the week. And when I want to let folks know who are watching us at least live if you’re watching us live, you can feel free to leave a comment in the chat. If you’re at least in the YouTube Live, you can leave a comment in the chat. And we’ll be able to see those and bring those onto screen. and answer those if you if you have any questions or comments or thoughts, feel free to add them, we’ll be happy to go ahead and provide that. And I’m sure as the weeks go on, we’ll get better at all of this. And we’ll be able to interact with everybody more and invite more people to the show as well, which I’m looking forward to doing. So welcome all of you who are watching live, this is really a lot of fun. We’re going to do the stories of the week, we are going to break that up into two parts. And in essence, we’re going to cover what stories we have this week. And just as a point of note, we’ve now broken the show up into the stories of the week. And in essence, productivity app updates, in essence, a change log of all of the various apps that are out there, there are hundreds of them, but we try to point out the highest level ones that we think are are most important for us to really dive into. So we’re going to get into the stories of the week. And if any of them require me to bring them up on screen, I can do that also. So gentlemen, if you need me to let me know. But let’s start off with our first story, which is Ulysses 21 I’m going to guess that’s you gousto so Augusto, what’s going on with Ulysses

Augusto Pinaud 13:16
Ulysses is it’s a fantastic application they do a software for writing that is really incredible. And they add a new integration where you can now do a revision that says think on grammerly but imagine grammerly inside of your document in the software writing that you’re using to write so you can now don’t need to go and copy your user browser you can do it all in one and I for people who write and write copywriters and tech writers you know you this is one of those software that works incredibly well if you can do markdown you can do many other things. And now having that ability really make it powerful. So so let me let me throw the question or two we go into the news this is a beautiful thing was the first step so you know we can we can invent or get a slap in the wrist later. what you guys are doing are you any of you guys use something like Grammarly to check though things I know Microsoft has also their solution. I am not the right person to to ask about Microsoft products because I tend to be not the most updated version since I leave on the iPad. But did you use any of those things and why or why not?

Frank Buck, EdD 14:30
Yeah, I use Grammarly. I use actually just the free version. And you know, it’s amazing. Yeah, we catches your spelling, of course. But then also just word usage and you’re suggesting a simpler word for something. So I highly recommend.

Unknown Speaker 14:48
Yeah, I’ve gotten

Frank Buck, EdD 14:49
good. Sorry, go ahead. I was gonna say I write much better emails as a result.

Matt Plummer 14:54
I’ve had I’ve gotten to the point where I actually because I use Microsoft Office, and I’ll tell you Have something up in word and then if I want to make sure because word will catch the, you know the obvious spelling errors and some clear grammatical errors, but then I’ll often just drop it into a blank Google Doc, and have Grammarly check it just to make sure that there’s nothing because it does seem to catch kind of next level things that words, spellcheck seems to have focused on being concise now. So every time I use a contraction, for example, it’s always calling that out. But, but yeah, Grammarly does seem to pick up on some of the other points.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:33
Yeah, I’m a big fan of Google. And so I use Google Docs. And it does really everything that I needed to do in terms of editing things. And I will frequently paste things into the system, just for to look at it and tell me what needs correction. Otherwise, there is the Hemingway app. And I’ll put this in the show notes as well. But the Hemingway app is a web based editor. And if you just take your text and throw it into Hemingway, it’ll go ahead and just really eviscerate you in terms of your really long sentences. Raymond Yeah. So I get I get good tongue lashing every time I use. Having my

Frank Buck, EdD 16:08
Yeah. Where was Hemingway app when I was in high school, and Oh, good. Oh, yeah. It’s literally every high school student, every middle school student needs to know. Hemingway app.com you just paste your stuff in there. Check your ego at the door now, because it’s gonna mark your long you know, this is hard to read. This is very hard to read. This is passive voice. And when you can make the colors go away, you’re gonna go, this is better. theists eat. Yeah.

Augusto Pinaud 16:44
Yeah, I love that. You mentioned that as an educator, because we have a discussion recently here in my household, because my 11 year old was using Grammarly on her school. And, and we had the opposite sides. You know, I believe it was a good thing to do. And, and my wife wasn’t sure. So it’s good to hear from an educator, that the value that Dan has for for students. Mm hmm.

Frank Buck, EdD 17:06
You can you can imagine if you’re an English teacher, and you’re having to sit down with 120 papers, and mark all this stuff, and get it back to the kid a week after he originally composed it. Imagine without the teacher having to do any of that, for the student to be able to self correct for the student to be able to throw that thing in there. See all those colors happen. make some changes, watch the color go away. And of course after a while, you start to get a feel of what what Hemingway app is gonna mark and what Grammarly is gonna mark for that matter, the student fixes it so that the teachers doing less work and being able to concentrate on the higher in things rather than market passive voice passive voice run on sentence. Yeah, let

Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:55
automation handle some of this. Absolutely. All right, moving moving along. What is this about niebo. Next story up is niebo 2.7. And this is more in the education space. So So what does niebo 2.7 do for us a gousto.

Augusto Pinaud 18:10
So niebo it’s an app, you know, with all these Apple Pencil and the writing on the screen comes niebo. And niebo is a digital notebook on on the on the on every application really, but on an iPad is obviously where I’d use it or what one of the things that allows you to do is not only to handwrite notes, but only transcribe, convert them into actual text into actual characters into that. So it makes it a really, really powerful tool to take notes in class and take the craft and you can make different notes. What Nero it’s doing. That is really, really amazing. Now, it’s they are really, they took it to the next level for the students. So basically, if your student can use livan that’s neat. Oh, by the way, it’s made by the people have a script. So they have a long story of handwriting and text conversion, and all that. And now you can do faster notes faster, synching faster editing on the notes on the previous version 2.5 it was challenging to edited some of the things now it’s a lot better. You can do sharing, you can do organizing, organizing. In the past Western I used to take mine from there to another app now you can do it in there. And same thing for the kids to share so that way not only they get the benefit of the handwriting, but then select it all and try and convert that into actual text to be able to do more so it’s an incredible app. If you think if I think I

Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:48
think fantastic. All right next up we have the Facebook portal if folks don’t know what the Facebook portal is it is a device that Facebook that is a facebook.com fame. They have created this device that is a video conferencing tool that you use your Facebook account to be able to have video communications with family members and friends. And now they are supporting zoom. And so this whole idea is that now you can potentially collaborate with coworkers and friends using zoom on the portal. Does anybody have a portal? Is anybody going to use the portal for zoom?

Matt Plummer 20:23
I have a portal. I don’t necessarily understand the use case here, though, I know Facebook is pushing their workplace application, you know, to try to get teams using that. So I’m guessing that it’s a push further in that direction. But yeah, it’s hard to see, you know exactly how that would be used, except as an external camera, potentially. So that you don’t you know, you could locate it somewhere else and have a different angle or so you could be looking up at a different screen.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 20:51
Yeah, I have. I have this, I have a Facebook account, I continue to use Facebook, because I have to not have to, but I have family and friends on Facebook. But it’ll be a cold day and on planet Earth, when I put a Facebook device in my house and start communicating with clients over it knows it’s not gonna happen. So I don’t

Augusto Pinaud 21:11
think I don’t think for that for that. But for the family, as you said, it is cool. You know, one of the things we have been doing now is doing it every, every other week, we do dinner with my in laws. And we do it that way because of the distance. So it’s a way to keep the communication. But if you try to put the laptop and all that that feels too intrusive for them, well, a device like this field format.

Matt Plummer 21:34
And what is really nice about the portal is the camera functionality, especially if you’re in a group is that it, it adjusts in real time to the people that are on the frame. And so you know, if somebody comes in and it will zoom out a little bit, or if they leave, it’ll zoom in. And so that’s nice, particularly if you’re trying to do some type of group based video conferencing, which in the workplace application is certainly not happening too much of right now. But you could imagine in the future, that could potentially be helpful.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:03
Definitely. Okay, moving along to our next story is Google meat. And those of you who are in the education space, you probably are using Google meat in some way, shape or form for your children to be schooling at home and otherwise. But Google meat has brought the ability to do breakout rooms, akin to the zoom functionality that we were just talking about. Zoom is the video conferencing platform. And so now Google is trying to match all the features of all of the other video conferencing tools like Microsoft Teams and otherwise. So they’ve brought breakout rooms to the G Suite for education, space. And so it’s currently available there. And anybody going to use Google meet breakout rooms, either. I’m curious, oh, there we go. Good. Oh,

Augusto Pinaud 22:50
no, the breakout groups, but I use Google Maps for most of my meetings, even more than zoom. So I have it for the for the company. So it’s, I really do more meats than than what I do so so I’m sure eventually we’ll get to be.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:08
I will note that I am the Google Small Business advisor for productivity, so you can’t find a bigger fan of Google products. However, every time anyone on the Google team, Google, small business, anybody in my client world that they say, hey, I want to have a meeting, I immediately gravitate toward my zoom account. And when they say, Oh, can we meet via Google meet, I kind of grumble. Because I’m just used to all the functions within meet. And so it just becomes a an additional tool that I don’t want to have to use in order to be able to make things happen. So but you know, I’m really excited to see them bring feature parity, to do more in that space, to be able to make the product, you know, better. And I hope that, you know, they bring more Google meet features to the point where I don’t need zoom anymore. I mean, I don’t mind keeping it all inside of the Google sphere. First on the last person who would be worried about that, but at the same time, you know, I just see the features that zoom has brought to the platform and the stability. And quite honestly, zoom always makes me look better than Google.

Frank Buck, EdD 24:15
Yeah. And you know, if if I was a classroom teacher today, and I was using Google meat, I would definitely definitely do the breakout, adding some variety, it would be back when everything was face to face. You know, we’re talking about student engagement and adding variety. Don’t just stand up there and lecture. And so we’re kind of having to go through the same kind of thing virtually now. And that’s one of the tools we have you break up in those small groups come back together discuss. Yeah,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:45
absolutely. All right. So anything else about Google meet otherwise, we’re going to move on to Apple bear and their panda release. And so who uses Apple bear here does anybody Apple bear no. Okay, I play with it because I feel like I have to. And so and so they’ve actually released a couple of really interesting new pieces. So they are doing kind of some some interesting things in the note taking space. So that’s pretty much it, they they’ve brought YAML support, if you guys know what YAML support is, if you don’t, don’t worry about it, you’ll never use it. But the idea is, is that they’re, they’re really improving the platform and bringing new features and improvements to the fold. And so, you know, they have some, you know, minor marked down advancements and some emoji support, and some other things like that, that are really quite nice to see. But either way, you know, Apple bear is out there for those who are interested in that note taking space. And then continuing on in the note taking space, obsidian, one of their major releases that has recently come out version 0.9. Point two. So obsidian is a local note taking software, right, you install it, and then you have it available on your, on your desktop computers. And one of the features that it has brought is the ability to do a what they call the Publish service. Now publish service is an add on service, it’s one of the paid items that you need to be able to do this, whether what it means now is that you can publish webs web pages, basically publish note pages, to the public web using the tool, which is kind of nice to be able to go ahead and publish from the system. I know that I I’m not particularly interested in the obsidian interface. But I but I do appreciate its kind of different flavor that it’s bringing to the note taking space, and the ability for you to kind of link and backlink between notes so that you have this kind of richer visual ontology that I think not a lot of other productivity tools are focused on. So that’s really quite interesting. And the obsidian users out there, let me know and we can we can talk about that. But any thoughts on obsidian Apple there so far, feel free to hop in. And so Alright, with that, they I just wanted to make a quick note one of our colleagues, Francesco de lessio, he has just published a new course, which is called obsidian Made Simple. He and one of his colleagues, I believe it is put together this, this course there’s kind of a beginner, intermediate and advanced section of the course. And I’ll put a link to the Thinkific link up in the show notes for anybody who’s interested. But it’s $59. us and you can go ahead and check out all the various functionalities of obsidian. And kind of its main rival, I guess is Rome research. Those are the two kind of competing with one another. And and so they put out this course. And so I just wanted to give a quick shout out to Francesco and that next up in news then that brings us along, Lee Hi Lee. How’s it going? Lee says he loves obsidian. So we have an obsidian fan in the house. I don’t know what you would call the the denim for an obsidian user, I mean an obsidian night it’d be a difficult one to say obsidian Indian wedding. So next up, we’re going to talk a little bit about good notes, good notes has provided some updates. And the most interesting thing kind of continuing on in this kind of education and note taking space is that they’ve actually added a flashcard feature. And actually, a gousto is the good notes expert, but he has clued me into good notes and now I use it on my iPad and it’s become really my handwriting, my handwritten note taking device of choice. It seems to start trumping my everlast rocket book notebook sometimes except for the fact that my rocket book except that my rocket book has automation functions tied to Evernote. So good notes still is a limited tool for me because if I want to automate from notes to system, that workflow, being able to tie directly to Evernote is really just too powerful for me to give up but I really do love the fluidity of good notes and so on so forth. So okay so have you played with the flash cards feature yet

Augusto Pinaud 29:18
I have played with a flash card was a flash card I have get my daughter to play with a flash cards and the only downside of that is her iPad do not have Apple Pencil. So every time now she wants to build cards to once my iPad that is not a good deal that was not so that’s something that needs to be fixed pretty soon but other than that, it is a really amazing on the sense that you can go build them have them with the colors do the drawing it is a really powerful. So it’s as a tool. Again, what we were talking to the trance that translation into create them and make the things for them easier and cool to begin. You know, as we were talking to the beginning of the show about the teachers or the struggle, I think also we cannot ignore the kids on this turmoils they are having for all this, so there is also their struggles also real. So, tools like this that can make the creation of those flashcards cool and fun are really, really important.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:20
I will note that the good notes flashcards feature also provides you with spaced repetition. And for those of you don’t know that’s a it’s a basically an algorithm that shows content to you based on whether or not you get it right or wrong when you look at that flashcard. And so then it goes ahead and interleaves the content in that sense, so that you can see it over and over again until you get it right. And you have reinforced it in that sense. And it’s a pretty effective strategy for memorizing things. And so I’m really, I’m excited, I am currently studying a foreign language, and I want to continue to keep studying it. And now I’m thinking, the current tool that I’m using whether or not I need to make the migration to good notes at the present moment to continue with that, I think it’d be fun. But I see the I see the real value in being able to do these kinds of drawings. I mean, the example they show is chemistry, and just being able to outline and show the chemical bonds and the chemical structures, and then being able to see those over and over again, in that kind of fluid environment. I just think it’s really brilliant. And I’m looking forward to playing around with it more

Augusto Pinaud 31:28
as we go to your flavor of the week. So let’s talk about the green elephant. By the way, since I This was random that the Evernote was put just after good note, but I will say I’m sure good notes is coming to replace that rocket books.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:46
Oh, no, no, no, it is. It is a great tool. And I have no problem with having many tools for the things that I use. But the but the really interesting thing that happened this past week is that Evernote launched its new desktop applications. And and so I happen to be the Evernote regional leader from North America or one of them there. There are three of us, Evernote regional, there are eight global Evernote regional leaders, and I’m one of them for North America. And actually, we have Dr. Frank buck, who’s also an Evernote certified consultant on on the panel today. And so we’ve been very excited about seeing the new desktop applications for Mac OS and Windows launch. This is version 10 jumping leapfrogging all the numbers between six and 10. So we went from 6.25 to 10. And what what I’m what I’m really finding is that one you can actually run, if you if you’re on Windows and Mac, it seems as though on the Windows system, I’m able to run Evernote for Windows 10, alongside six to five. And so I’m running both of them concurrently. And I will probably continue running them concurrently as long as Evernote allows me to and then and then we will watch as Evernote has really, you know, rebuilt the product from the ground up, we have some missing elements from Evernote right now there are just some missing missing features, some will come back to the system. And some I believe Evernote has just decided they will no longer give energy toward and so there’ll be discarding. We’ve been working to try and figure out what the what the complete list is that that is the users in the forum. And and but I think that ultimately this will make for a better Evernote. I know that there’s a rampant criticism of any technology product when they make these kinds of big changes. And certainly everyone could have done things better. But I’m really excited, I have to say I’m just glad to rip the band aid off have the new applications out watch to see the team put out new releases every two weeks and for us to see what and wherever it goes. I interviewed in small who’s the CEO of Evernote a few weeks ago and and that’s I’ll put a link to that in the in the show notes as well. And you know what, what Ian said to me in the interview really still resonates today. And that was that, you know, you may not be necessarily pleased with Evernote today. I don’t think he said that I’ll put words in his mouth but but in a year from now, you’ll be glad you stuck with it and and that was really the sentiment that he tried to put forward to us. And and I’m really quite bullish on the future of Evernote because of what he talked to me about in that interview. And so I’m just really excited to have it out. Frank, did you have any comments or thoughts you wanted to add?

Frank Buck, EdD 34:23
Well, I think you’ve covered it pretty well. One of my projects over the next couple of days is to download the desktop version, the new windows on the laptop and then continue to run the old one on my desktop and just see what the features are that are missing. You know what I can live with not having right now. And what I may have lost it’s it’s fairly critical. I think it’s so good to network more on the same page that instead of it looking one way on Windows, it looks one way on Mac and looks one way all the way up that no matter where you are, it’s going to look the same You know, for the long haul, it’s just going to be better for Evernote. And whereas, you know, every time there was a development, they had to write code differently for each platform, it’s going to be so much easier to move forward with all of it looking the same,

Augusto Pinaud 35:17
I like to think also that that is going to be a significant help for users. Because one of the things with Evernote is, because of the way it was built, it was really different on functionality, and how it looks and how it acts depending on the device that you pick. Um, I think those kinds of things make it difficult for, for users, because he takes the miscibility out of the tool, you know, one of the the more invisible the tool is, the more powerful it is, and I believe in that. So the more you can go and pick your Mac, or pick your iPad or pick your phone and have that in visibility for the tool, the more you will use it on, the more power it will get. So I’m hoping that now with this, really Evernote accomplish that in visibility all around.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:07
Yeah, there’s the synchronicity across the applications. Basically the same interface is really the ultimate goal.

Frank Buck, EdD 36:13
You know, and for those of us that teach this stuff, you know, imagine going out and doing a workshop on Evernote, especially one for beginners. And to not have to say okay, now if you’re on Windows, it looks like this. If you’re on Mac, it looks like this, and you’re on the way it looks like that it looks like this period is much, much easier.

Unknown Speaker 36:32
Yeah, I think that will be a really powerful in the midterm.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:35
Yeah, every time someone says to me, oh, what is the what is the desktop applicant, you know, they kept asking me what the desktop application was going to look like. And I would just say, go to Evernote comm and lock in. That’s what it’s going to look like. And that’s a huge, huge advantage. Now in the system, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Evernote has to offer going forward. You know, obviously, we’re gonna have, you know, a few steps backward in this process before we have several steps forward. And I’m prepared for that, and preparing my clients for that. And I just think that ultimately, it was something that needed to be done, and they’re doing it, we’re going to slog through it, Evernote is going to get a obviously a hit. There are other great competitors out there, we just noted a few of them plus notion and others people can play and and figure out what tools work for them. And in a year from now, I will be I will have been glad to stay with Evernote for my primary hub. And and I truly believe that and if I’m not then then well, we’ll we’ll assess that when we get there. Right. But you know, the end of the day is that Evernote has satisfied my needs for the better part of 11 years, since I installed the application. today. While it’s missing a few features that I kind of like I continue to use 625. And no hiccup there, I get to play around with basically best of both worlds. And as long as they continue to support the new system and allow us to be able to run the older version until they get the new one. parity with the older version. I’m not really going to sweat it, I’m just going to continue to use those on my production devices and play on my on my test systems with the new versions and have a great time and and see as they put out new additions. And yeah, but either way, I’m just really excited for the future features once they get to feature parity is one thing, but the future features that they can now build kind of on the fly and its speed of modern development is really the part that excites me. And we have a lot to talk about over the coming months and months as they start to push out these new updates. So I’m looking forward to what Ian and his team are doing. Okay, we have one more story before we take a break. And that story is back to Google. Because you know, why not? But what is Google doing Augusto, they brought a new feature to the pixel line. And they’ll probably roll this out, of course, to the other pixel devices before they go out to the broader Android ecosystem. But what was the feature they announced

Augusto Pinaud 38:53
I really want them to have them on the iOS platform is where I want it again it’s the pixel is going to have a feature called say goodbye to hold music So basically when you get into a call where you get that fantastic hold music, you will be able to tell your pixel device you know listen this for me and let me know when I’m ready I’m the pixel will let you know when a really real person answer on the other side. So you don’t need to enjoy on the pleasure of the music. So torker is going to be over soon. If you have a device for iOS users. I’m sorry that’s not Oh

Raymond Sidney-Smith 39:32
yeah. So the feature is called hold for me. And and so there used to be actually an a third party service that did this and then they kind of folded but in essence you would punch your own phone number in and say that you wanted to connect with say Verizon support, and you would plug your phone number in and then it would dial them and wait on hold for you. And then when it came off with hold it would say hey, I’m calling on behalf of you know, Ray, and you should go ahead and hold while I connect him and then it would dial in I would pick up the phone, and there would be the customer service report, service representative, whether it waited for an hour or 30 minutes, I didn’t have to wait. Now Google is doing this through its own machine learning technology. And it’s facilitating that process. And of course, they’ve learned a lot from having Google Voice. And now they’re bringing those technologies together in the interface. So pixel for a users, and I think pixel, five users are getting it first. And then they’ll scale it back to probably the other pixel devices. And then beyond that, but it’s really quite phenomenal to see this artificial intelligence out of Google, really coming to really real world application and real world usage, you know,

Frank Buck, EdD 40:39
so. So then now the customer support representative, etc, etc, they will be on hold just for a little while, while you pick up. You got it.

Unknown Speaker 40:50
All right, that’s fair.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:52
Well, um, right now, if you use Google’s technology in Google Maps, on a pixel device, I think, actually on any Android device, you can have them actually call and make a reservation for you. And it’s using the same kinds of technology in their Google AI sphere. And what it does is it calls the restaurant and basically a an artificial intelligence, you know, software is talking to the human and scheduling things like hair appointments, or restaurant reservations, and that kind of thing. This is taking that to the next level, and being able to do this on hold functionality for us. So we’re just going to see more and more of this really powerful technology. take hold.

Frank Buck, EdD 41:31
Yeah, I’d seen that advertised on one of the Google events. So is that only available in for the pixel now? Right, so you have to have,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:40
you have to have either the for a or the five, 5g versions right now, then they’ll scale it back and give it out to the others. But they’ll bring it to the other pixel phones, probably thereafter. And then they’ll probably bring it to everyone who’s on the most updated version of Android 11 after that, but you know, it’s one of those things, it’s, it’s like any other fancy new software, they want to give it to their top line folks, and then trickle it down to the rest of us. So with that, we’re gonna take a break and be back in just a minute. For a word from our sponsor. Did you know half of small businesses don’t have websites in half

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 43:07
back to your show. Welcome back everybody to anything but idle. And we’re gonna continue on with the show. And so what we’re going to do is do our second set of headlines, and second set of stories of the week. And so with that, let’s pick up in the second part of the stories with a little news out of remember the milk. So remember, the milk has released their homescreen widgets on iOS 14. So if you have an iOS device that is running off version 14 or later, you now get homescreen widgets, which is just phenomenal. And for those of us who are remember the milk users, I’m excited to have that come to the system. Okay, next up, Facebook has brought something to the Facebook Oculus world. And so if you don’t know Facebook has a tool has a platform called Oculus. It is a virtual reality headset company that they purchased a few years ago. And with the Oculus quest to Facebook is in essence trying to bring those people who are remote working or working from home into a virtual workspace. So this is, I think, remarkable. I’m curious to hear what you all have to think to have to say about this. But in essence, the company is trying to create an immersive workplace experience. So those people who are working from home can join something they call the infinite office and the infinite office will basically you put on this Oculus quest two headset, and then you’re brought into a layout of what would be an you know, kind of a dual world. You know, your office in virtual reality. And you are there with your colleagues so to speak, in a virtual sense. What do you think this is all about? Do you think it’ll work? Do you think people will use this what what what do you think is the the use case here for The Oculus VR headset in a virtual workspace environment

Unknown Speaker 45:05
that’s just a little far

Frank Buck, EdD 45:06
out there for me is that, you know, I think we’re those who are working at home are seeing some definite advantages of working at home, you know, and it, to me, it seems like that headset might give you back some of the things that you’re attracted away from, to start

Augusto Pinaud 45:25
with, you know, I wonder if things like this, I and I don’t know the workspace, okay, I cannot, I don’t know, if I want to be that integrated to the workspace and the other people bought schools will be a good thing for the kids to have a more immersive experience of the classroom. So instead of feeling they are at home, instead of the classroom, if they can be integrated with that they could feel and then see the teacher on front, but in one, and then could see at the sides and see other kids that may be more interesting on the workplace. I don’t know, this thing’s this kind of headset for me, give me the idea of gaming more than the idea of serious work. You know, I can envision, hey, the flight simulator or the cars, those kind of games, but I don’t know, if I want to be able to see around my work environment that way, that’s not completely true,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 46:28
I think it’s really going to take some time. And, and so it’s a little clunky to have that device on your head, I can’t imagine being in a workspace for eight hours with that thing on my head. You know, even if I took a break, it would just be a little bit much. And even with the now deprecated Google, you know, Dream headsets, the the VR headsets that they had out, you know, it was a bit much to have the weight of your iPhone on your face inside of this mask, you know and enclosure and and so if they can get it down to kind of Google Glass level or with you know, the Bose you know, smart glasses that are out there. Now, the Amazon glasses that are out there now they’re we’re starting to see more and more of these, if they did a more augmented reality style headset, that was glasses with maybe as Bose does, you know it’s a it’s a, what do you call it conductive bone conduction, you know, audio, so you’re not having things in your ears necessarily, you can wear it in a much more natural way, you’re actually capable of being productive and seeing augmented reality of maybe avatars of your co workers or their video feeds of your co workers in an augmented space, similar to the way that Microsoft Teams currently has those kind of stadium seating inside of the environment. Now you’re you can put yourself around a round table, for example, and actually truly feel like you’re in a round table, it is not going to feel real, but it’s going to feel much more facilitated in the space, then you just having a you know, like us four squares rectangles up on a screen, right? Like it’ll feel better. And I think there’s something very powerful to that, it just needs to get there, I’m sure the technology will get even better as the the ability to have three dimensional, you know, highly rich visuals can be placed out in the out in the physical space around us.

Augusto Pinaud 48:17
But it is because if I remember the first time we traveled to this mainland, and we saw this new world, and we saw a future land, and you know, this is 1998 assumption. And I remember the day describing this exactly thing we are doing right now the communication on the video like the Jetsons. Okay, and people say, oh, that will be so uncomfortable, we will never do that we will never be ready to do that. Well look at this, this pandemic is making us do this, you know, eight hours a day. So and then on top of that, we do it with family droppers. So I may not see it right now, how that is going to work. I I’m not a technologist on that sense to be able to prove to see the future. But I could see how things like this could help too many things. And that that you said maybe negotiations, maybe a round table, maybe something that is useful? I don’t? I don’t know. Again, I don’t see it as of today.

Matt Plummer 49:21
Yeah, I hear a lot of people talking about the desire. And whether this is good or bad. You know, in terms of interruptions and the ability to focus, I hear a lot of professionals talking about the desire to be able to just kind of swing by someone’s desk to drop in to collaborate informally without having to use an online communication channel. So I can imagine there being some interest in this. I think a lot of it too would come down to what is the company culture and policies surrounding it. So is it something where you always have to be on you always have to be available because that will replicate some of the harms that we’ve already seen or it could it be something that you can kind of exit and kind of leave And then come into selectively at times. Like everything, you know, combining those behavioral aspects to it to make it function in a way that would be optimal. Alright, let’s

Raymond Sidney-Smith 50:10
move on then to some more news. So just ever so briefly, we I mentioned notion earlier notion has now created a community workspace, which is, which is a template gallery. So they now have launched the ability to look at templates that they, you know, are guessing people can go ahead and submit their own to the template gallery as well as the ones that notion themselves has produced. And so if you go to notion dot community, you can go ahead and see the templates that are available there in their notion community workspace. And it’s great to have templates, I just think it’s really just easier to use some tools when you have a quick upstart to all of the pieces. And so next up a gousto, some news out of mind node, the mind mapping software,

Augusto Pinaud 51:01
I love my note, and he’s one of those applications that I use. And I have never consider having on my note on the widgets or something that is open. So when it was this news came to my hands, who was really interesting, oh, I kind of started using a mind map as a capture device instead of other things. So it was really interesting to be able to go from the widget directly into that mind map. And now they even have the ability to handwrite and the iPad convert that handwriting into text. So that can really change the way you mind map in devices like like the iPad was iOS 14, they add a couple of things to that they you know, they fix the Apple Watch and the things you can do with that Apple Watch and the synchronization and the iCloud container. But the most important things, two things are those one is the ability to open a mind map as something really quick. But more importantly, to be able to hand right into that mind map and transform that using iOS 14 into actual text. I think

Raymond Sidney-Smith 52:09
this is using this is using Apple scribble basically that to be able to Okay, writing into the field. That’s phenomenal. That’s great. And then moving along. OmniFocus got some updates, you want to talk to us about some OmniFocus updates,

Augusto Pinaud 52:21
Oh, of course. So three counties out. And they have basically three new things they theaker. So on iOS 14, again, they updated how you select iOS 14 change how you pick the dates and the times into what they think is a new and more effective way we can argue about that. But I think it’s like everything. Okay, some people was really useful use to the old the old ways. And now these new ways we can argue about the more effective but they also add larger fund for the watch that for some people who’s getting older, it’s really useful. I don’t know anything about that. I’m not going to admit anything, but and also some updates that they did. But I think the most important thing is the date picker and the large font for the people as a complication.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 53:12
Fantastic. Moving right along, then I’m just going to talk a little bit about ifft. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it is a web based automation service. So you can tie different web based tools together. So like say if you, if you tweet something on Twitter, then it can capture that into Evernote. So it’s kind of if this, then that, which is where its name comes from? Well, they have gone to a paid platform for those folks who want to use the tool beyond kind of the basics. And so they call it ifft Pro. And they also have What does now ifft platform, which is for businesses to be able to create their own IoT automation stuff. Either way, they have gone to a pay what you want model to start with as low as I think $1 99 a month. And this, this opportunity to set your own monthly price. Will will last on they’ve extended it until October 31 2020. And so you can name whatever price you want as low as I think $1 99 on November 1, it’s going to switch over to a fixed price of $3 and 99 cents per month. So if I were you, I would go in and lock in a price if you ever think you’re going to use ifft Pro. I’ve been an ifft user across multiple accounts for many years. And I immediately upgraded all the accounts because I figured you know they have done so much for me over the years. It’s worth giving them just a nominal amount of money to be able to satisfy all of the too many if the counts that I have.

Frank Buck, EdD 54:43
So well right that that is that’s definitely updated from what I had heard. You know, I think it was like October 6 was the deadline. So first of all, they’ve extended the deadline and secondly then the price because it was going to be $10 A month. And so they’ve lowered that now to 399.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 55:03
They’re gonna set it up at the at the low bar 390 low bar. Yeah,

Frank Buck, EdD 55:07
yes. So that, you know, and I thought, Man $2 a month. That’s, you know, I love if this than that, um, but especially the new user who doesn’t already see a number of ways they can use it to pay $120 a year, which is what it would have been, you know, that’s more than your Microsoft Office, that’s a lot more than Evernote, so forth and so on. So I thought, well, you know, a lot can happen in a year, I locked in $1 99, immediately, you know, back when they said, you know, for the next year, I thought, okay, a lot could happen in a year, I’ll do $1 99. And we’ll see what happens over the course of the next year. Well, it turned out over the course of the next week, they said, If you lock in the dollar 99 and give you like the name your price is forever, not a year, but forever. So I was telling everybody I knew go get it now. So even the people who missed it, they, they still haven’t missed it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 56:03
Yep, they have it October 31. But Don’t do it. Don’t wait till November 1, because they know, a double No. And and so with pro you’re actually capable of not only creating custom applets, but also now doing similar things to Zapier, which is having multi step applets, where you can have multiple steps in the same automation, which I just, you know, again, I just think it’s phenomenal tool, and its ability to to automate things where you don’t need to, you know, be involved in just, you know, rarey wrote mechanisms, very happy to see it.

Frank Buck, EdD 56:37
Come to pass it right. Like one thing for all those people out there, and there’s so many that have an Instagram account and a Twitter account, and they want to post to both, well with you, no, no, no, people say what she can, you can do that automatically, you can post on Instagram, and you can flip that little switch, and it’ll go over to Twitter. But what goes over to Twitter is just a link back to your picture. But if you do it with if this than that, if on Instagram, I post a new post, then on Twitter post, you get the full image that in itself is just, you know, phenomenal for somebody that has that particular need.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 57:23
Yeah, I mean, just for the social media components is, is just save so much time. And I really, really love it.

Frank Buck, EdD 57:29
Yeah, is it still gonna be they have a free plan, but

Raymond Sidney-Smith 57:35
three, Atlas, you got it. So on October 31, you’ll have through October 31, to archive anything above the three custom applets. So if they’re branded applets, that means the company is paying for you to be able to have access to those pre templated applets. Those you don’t pay for. It’s the ones that you’re creating custom customize, which are most of mine. And so the the reality is, is above that you’re going to have until October 31 to archive them, and then they’ll go ahead and cease to operate until you upgrade to lift Pro. All right, this takes us on to a conversation that I think will be very interesting. So Wired magazine in the UK had a work smarter article that came out that said, email is broken. And this company has a plan to fix it. And that company is superhuman. And this is the company built by rebel vora. He’s the founder and CEO of superhuman, and in essence, they claim to be the fastest email client in the world. And so they they say they’re not just an another email client, they basically have built email inboxes from the ground up to make it you know, this very subtle and minimalistic interface user experience, while at the same time being fast. They have what they call the 100 millisecond rule that is every interaction should be near instantaneous. And what’s interesting to me is really not the application itself. But in this context of now we have Hey, which is built by the folks at at at Basecamp you know the 37 signals formerly company, David Heinemeier Hansson, and, and the team over there. DHHS he’s best known is actually the progenitor of Ruby on Rails for those of you who are of a geeky sentiment, and so he’s fairly notable in the world, but they’ve launched hate.com, which is a whole new email service. So just like you [email protected] with [email protected] [email protected]. On the Microsoft side, they had an essence created a new email service and they’re charging $99 per year, you get an ad hey.com email address, and that’s actually a permanent email address. So even if you left the service that email will permanently forward to an email address of your choice into perpetuity, but superhuman is basically creating an ad a client For you, and they’re charging, what is it $30 per month for you to have access to this email client. And I’m really curious Vohra seems to think that people are going to be willing to pay for email clients, as much as Hey, is, is thinking that people are going to pay for a highly opinionated, new email service with clients built on top of it. And I’m really curious about this whole world in productivity, whether or not the market can sustain it, when you have major tech giants who are basically giving us email for free. And to be quite honest, Gmail is doing some really innovative features. And I don’t seem to have a problem with using those tools for those things now, on the outlet side, much to be desired. But it’s still doing some phenomenal things. And I’m not paying extra for it. What are your thoughts in terms of whether the super humans of the world and the haze and other platforms like that can really exist and withstand the market forces?

Augusto Pinaud 1:01:02
You know, I think one of the the problem is where is the perceived value of this. And it’s not if it’s valuable or not, you know, people were excited about a different way to see email when he came. And what superhuman brings in theory is an integration with that contact, and their whole social media and their old thing plus AI, if you are on certain buckets, they don’t need really everybody to to come to the platform. And I actually think the price is set up to take people out of the platform. But if they can convince high level salespeople, you know, for example, high level sales people I used to when I was doing high ticket sales, I leave in LinkedIn, why? Because allows me to see what was happening on people’s life, I can, at that time could get a platform for $30 a month, who do that work for me and put it in front of me, I will have pay that happening. Because in one deal I will have covered the whole year. So wasn’t a big deal. What I think is, it is a tool for specific and particular audience, not necessarily productivity people, but really that high end ticket people who are doing that manual work of going to Facebook, going to LinkedIn to find about their clients before they have a conversation. Yeah, I

Matt Plummer 1:02:26
think that’s a good point. And certainly superhuman has used this kind of exclusivity factor to try to drive the engagement, the stories around that. I think the other thing is, by and large, I would say most professionals still feel like emails a challenge, even despite, you know, the numerous features in Gmail, Gmail, or even outlook. And so as long as that continues to be the case, I think there will still be an appetite for new tools, whether their promises of solving those problems are really, you know, just the way I talked to someone recently who’s paying the $30 a month for superhuman, and they’re like, yeah, it’s I basically just like the interface and the keyboard shortcuts because it feels like I can move around a little more quickly. But in reality, the functionality isn’t too much different from what I use in Gmail. But I think as long as there’s a dissatisfaction with the overall experience of managing one’s email, we’ll continue to look for other tools, whether or not they promise something dramatically different or not.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:03:27
It’s interesting, though, for me, because you have tools like woven, which has come onto the market, and it’s a calendaring software that’s bringing new features. One feature that I particularly always need is a group calendaring functionality. What I mean by that is that I can send a link to all three of you, gentlemen, and be able to have you submit your times to the system, and then be able to decide on a singular timeframe for us to be able to get together. And that’s a feature that was in my paid calendaring feature. And, you know, I’m the type of person I don’t have a problem spending money on, on the things that are going to help me be more productive. So I don’t mind spending money on on technology, I wouldn’t be in this business if I if I didn’t. But I spent a lot of money across it. And it feels like a death by 1000 cuts, if I start paying for additional tools that are not providing me with really market changes in my productivity, but little marginal gains. And I can I can do all kinds of implementations that allow me in a workflow sense or even using automation, like with ifft, or Zapier or local software, like active words, where I’m able to it really, you know, increase my productivity by marginal gains, but I’m not spending more money to get there. And it seems like there are some people who are willing to throw money at these problems. And they’re using tools that are not tried and true. And so they come to me and they say, Okay, well I need help with business process improvement. And I have to say to them, well get rid of all of the junk you’re using, and not To say that super human is junk or anything like that I have great respect for this technology. But it ends up being that they’re just not using the current tools well. So if they use the current tools that they have, to their full effect, all of a sudden, all of the compound benefits of what they’re what they’re currently are paying for, versus what they’re paying a premium for, can be can be divided, and we can get rid of that other stuff, and they can still be more productive from it. And then maybe sometime in the future, they may decide to do that. But at least with the, you know, I tend to deal with older executives. And so those older executives have no need or want, they see a shiny object, and they want to be able to, you know, buy buy a solution to a problem. And then they realize they can’t actually make those kinds of gains, because it requires a specialized level of technological and technical skill with that application. And at the end of the day, if they’ve been using Outlook, or if they’ve been using, you know, their email system for 2030 years, and they, they’re comfortable with it. It’s not, it’s just not sensible for them to make that kind of change. So I think it ends up being, you know, segmenting yourself in perspective, you’re comfortable taking on high level technology and testing in that space. Cool. Go for it, spend the extra 30 bucks a month, and you’ll see hopefully, some compound gains. If you’re not that person, and you’re not excited about taking on new technologies, don’t waste your time, don’t get yourself mired in in those kinds of details, and you’ll be better off for it. So any any final thoughts or talk? Go ahead?

Augusto Pinaud 1:06:26
I think it is, it is like a WordPress installation. Okay,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:06:30
people come, don’t use stars.

Unknown Speaker 1:06:32
Yes, I’m going to go.

Augusto Pinaud 1:06:36
I make it mute. But that’s fine. Okay, people come and think on one problem that they’re trying to solve. But don’t think on the overall system. So when you go and say, what my WordPress, it’s really a slow down, but you have 70,000, you know, programs installed in that, that you really don’t need, if you will have tried to solve the problem as a whole, you will have discovered anything. This is one of those solutions. You know, most people, a lot of people don’t know how to integrate those solutions. So they think on silence, I will let me solve the email issue. And then but then you get, I’m not saying this solution, but you gather other solutions, and then they can now integrate with the other. So that’s where you see it. Now, yes, they gain productivity using this, but then they lose it in the other components, same as happened in a WordPress installation. That’s all that I’m going to say about it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:07:31
Alright, let’s move on to just a couple more stories this week. And then we can head into the final segments of the show. So there was recently a survey that was done. And I’m sorry, an article that was written it was called the six trends on the hype cycle for the digital workplace in 2020. And I don’t, we don’t have time to really go into this deeply. But I did want to show you the Gartner study that actually, you know, kind of shows where all of these various technologies are and kind of at the end where they call it plateau of productivity. And I just thought this is really interesting. So spend some time with it, you know, I’ll send a link out, you know, I’ll put a link to this in the video description in the show notes. So you can look at this and kind of muddle over it. But you can see where all of these various pieces are in their the various timeline of development, and what they call hype or expectations as it relates to it on the is that y axis. And so is that x or y axis, I never get it, right. So expectations are I believe on the y axis. And so, um, so when when we think about these things in terms of pieces, you can see here that at the very tail end of this, we have enterprise social networking applications guessing like Yammer and even workplace by Facebook, I’m I don’t know, anyway. And then you have cloud office software. And I actually am a little bit in disagreement with this only because we now have tools like Cloudera know, collabora online, which is an office suite in the cloud inside of things like next cloud, where they’re really pushing the envelope of secure office editing, office document editing. And I think that my expectations are that we’re going to actually see much more come out of cloud based services in the future because of tools like collabora. In essence, what they’re really doing. And they just recently announced this next cloud conference is they have, in essence, a secure environment where you’re editing documents, whether that be a text processing document or word processing document, or an Excel type spreadsheet workbook, you’re doing all of that, where the document is actually secure on the server, and the users only interacting with the document as kind of like, it’s almost like being in a VM environment in a VMware environment. You’re just basically interacting with The document and manipulating it, but you actually don’t have the document. And that creates the secure enclave for the documents in those spaces. And so even in something as seemingly mundane, and kind of tried and true as cloud office, you know, document, you know management and, and manipulation, I tend to think that there’s a lot more that can be brought back into that hyperspace if the right press was around those types of documentation. But I just wanted to show it because I thought it was a really unique, you know, art and very interesting for people to kind of noodle over if you are so inclined.

Augusto Pinaud 1:10:37
So I’m going to use today we have the principal here in the green room, and I’m going to ask you to go to their good notes and put one of those flashcards and then you remember this x to the left y to the sky, you will never forget

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:10:53
it, it’s always x&y, but I you know, if I’m, if I’m talking, I can’t do it, you know, like, I can’t move my hands because

Unknown Speaker 1:11:00
I literally why this guy?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:11:03
Every time I think of it, I have to do the hand gesture, otherwise, I can’t get it right anyway. So next up, Microsoft Edge is actually going to now be able to in Apple, iOS 14, b made the default browser on iOS and iPad and so on. So you can probably clarify this for us. What this means is that we’ll be able to set any browser of our choice as our default browser now in iOS 14, or is it just the Select?

Augusto Pinaud 1:11:30
No, that’s correct. Basically, any browser that is updated to obviously, the requirements for iOS 14, you will be able to select as your default, and also to the email client, you will now be able to select Gmail as your default email client. If you don’t want to use mail dot app. That’s a one of the big, big changes that Apple introduced on iOS 14.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:11:53
Fantastic. And

Augusto Pinaud 1:11:55
I will tell why to use fetch when you can use Chrome being the same, but that’s no, well, I

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:12:03
think it makes a lot of sense. If you’re in Microsoft 365, and you want all of the Microsoft guts available to you. Okay, I think that makes it, it makes a lot of sense for edge users, you’re still using the chromium engine, and you’re going to be able to do all of the things you would want to do in that sense. But if you’re logging in, and you have to deal with, you know, enterprise level, login credentials, you don’t want to have to deal with, you know, being locked out of different systems and whatnot. If you could just do that all inside of edge. I think it may make sense there. Outside of that, you can imagine I’m

Augusto Pinaud 1:12:39
okay, you sell me you sell me an argument in which I did not imagine why why could do that, okay, I that I can buy that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:12:48
And to close out our stories this week, I just I just brought to everyone’s attention. In about mid September, NBC news.com brought out this article about GPT three, and I just wanted to bring this to everyone’s attention only because you may be reading articles online that are productivity articles, but they’re actually written by a machine learning algorithm. So just be mindful of this reality now, which is that GPT three is a is a type of machine learning technology, artificial intelligence technology, that, in essence, can look at all of the you know, as many websites as it can it can find on the internet and start to write natural language. And so it basically can write like we do as humans, and right can very fairly convincingly and to the point that this particular researcher, he launched a blog, a productivity blog, and had GPT. Three, just start pumping out blog posts. And no one was the wiser. It seemed like, you know, some of the people in the comments had some, some Inklings that it might not be a human, but it was pumping out, you know, fairly kind of benign productivity advice, you know, the same stuff that we sometimes see the see being pilfered as productivity advice online anyway. And so it didn’t seem like it was any any different. And, and so it proved that, you know, you had this thriving blog with a thriving engagement with people all done by a, an algorithm. And so just be mindful of that, as you’re kind of moving along. Those who you follow, hopefully, are humans and, and the, I mean, it comes down to really an issue of misinformation and disinformation on the internet, right, you know, if we are not following real people, and we’re following entities that are putting out content, there’s nothing wrong with that, but just make sure there’s a human behind it. Because, you know, you don’t really know what advice or why it’s giving that advice. And I think until it’s good enough, and it replaces us, I don’t know. I think it’s worth paying attention to real opinions and real experience from real humans. And, and I’m not anti technology, as you can imagine, but I just I found it to be quite fascinating that that this was possible. And we’re there now, you know, we’re at that precipice where so much of technology is going to start rubbing up against the capabilities of humans. And what does that mean for us, going forward is wonderful existential thought experiment for you to spend in your own time. Not for us here and now tonight. But that being the case, we are now at the end of our stories of the week. And that takes us to the change log our productivity app updates each week, just for time purposes, I’m, I’m going to link out to our chain blog so you guys can check it out. In essence, you know, I keep track of dozens and dozens of applications, and many of them have brought to bear some really interesting and unique updates, I’ll make a quick highlight of some of them that I think would be useful to you. And then you can look at the other change logs, I’ll put these put these together for each episode, so folks can keep up on top of it. But air table gets GridView in the Android app, which is really nice. And now you can see all of the fields of any particular any particular row and air table in that grid view in the Android app now and brings parity to the other systems. Asana unleashed a whole bunch of new functionality, including dashboards for projects, which brings charts and graphs to the system. They did updates to sections on timelines. So you now can add, rename, delete, and rearrange, as well as collapse sections and timeline view, which is kind of like the Gantt chart view within the system. You can create follow up tasks from the iOS inbox, which was before limited. There’s some improvements to boards, you can do some editing of goal, progress metrics, all kinds of fun stuff that’s happening on the Asana side. If you’re a clickup user, you now have map view, local location, custom fields, you can export list and table views to excel, which is kind of nice. Dropbox as Facebook data transfer, basically, you can connect your Facebook account to Dropbox now and have photos and videos exfiltrated, from your Facebook account to your Dropbox account as you post them, which is just really nice if you wanted a backup of those things. And they brought a couple of other really interesting pieces to it. fasil thing has done a whole improved perspective section. So if you have used the OmniFocus perspectives concept, kind of similar in the GTD world, so good to see facile things, doing a whole bunch of really fun, new pieces. And they’re going to start updating checklists and other parts in the mobile app to come and we’ll we’ll cover that when, when it does come out. notion made a whole bunch of updates, I don’t have time to go through all of them

to do list for web published on October 7, version 1035. And with that, they brought a whole bunch of new updates and a little bit of bug fixes. And and so drag and drop tasks now more easily. So you can drag and drop tasks in the system. You can it says you can zip from a project’s comments back to the main project view a little faster, then that you can simply click the project name and I guess you could click on the project’s name to basically go from comments back to the back to the main project. And then if you all didn’t know toggle, the time tracking application changed its name because now they have multiple applications. Toggle track is the tool that formerly was known as just toggle. So now toggle track. And with that they’ve changed the application icon. So now you’ll see the red icon or gray icon depending upon your view has now changed to that pink icon and now there’s a new application icon and so that’s good. And Zapier to close us out, has brought sharing. So with that Zapier sharing has has the capability now for you to share zaps, both both privately and publicly with folks, which is just phenomenal. So now you can just like with if you could share that zap that if applet with other folks, you can now do that with Zapier but in a private setting as well. Zapier is actually hosting a webinar, it is on the 29th of October. So there’s a link in the in the video description and in the show notes for you to be able to register to watch it, I will be there. I’m very excited to learn about Zapier, zap sharing. And so, so know that that is available to us. And so with that, that is the productivity app updates. And this takes us right along swiftly along to our segment the science of productivity. And so with that, we’re all gonna go off screen and Matt, you’re up for the science of productivity. We’ll see after the break.

Matt Plummer 1:19:37
Sounds good. Thanks, Frank. So the science of productivity segment is a short segment that we do each week, where I bring together some of the new research that has come out on how to accomplish your goals faster, how to become more productive. In this week, I want to talk about some research that talks about how our pace or productivity fluctuates over the course of a project. And so research has long documented a U shape in our productivity or pace in both athletic events and projects in the workplace, which that means basically, we start off strong, we start off fast. And then we as we go towards the middle of that, we hit a slump where we slow down, and, and then as we get towards the end, we come back up, and we accelerate towards the end. And so this U shape, you know, has been documented in all kinds of sports, running from the one mile to the 10,000 meter, which is over six miles, rowing, cycling, etc. It also happens, you know, in the workplace, and in control studies where they do studies where they have them work on a task for a certain period of time and one group, they don’t tell them when they’re getting towards the end. And the other group they do and what they find is that the people who know that they’re getting towards the end, receive an uptick towards the end. And so how do we kind of level this off, instead of having this, you know, U shape, we can be more consistent across and maintain our productivity throughout the length of a project? Well, when I mentioned two different effects that are related to this, the first is called the N spurt effect. And that is the second kind of object, the other side of the U shaped that goes up. And what they found in the research there is that when people near 90% completion, they often experience an uptick in their performance and uptake in the rate of productivity. So how do we get ourselves and then that happens for two reasons. One is motivational. We feel like we’re getting towards the end. And the other is conservation of resources. We know that we’re getting towards the end, we can kind of accelerate because we don’t have to hold back and conserve resources as much as we did when we were only 50%. So how can you create that same type of effect without being at 90% of the way through a project? Well, part of that is creating interim goals. So interim goals can allow you to feel like okay, I’m approaching that goal, even at the daily basis, or the weekly basis. And as you get close to that goal, then you can experience that and spurt effect there. The other. And second piece that I want to talk about is what Daniel Pink in his book, when he talks about is the midpoint slump. So how do we deal with this big drop in the middle? Well, a researcher Connie garsik. And also researchers, Jonah Berger, and Devin Pope, what they found is that there’s something that they’ve called the effect, which is that if we realize that we’re a little bit behind in the middle of a project, we’ll actually accelerate forward and make significant amount of progress quickly. And so Birger, and Pope, what they found is that basketball teams that were one point behind at halftime, so in the middle of the game, actually had a better chance of winning than those who were two points ahead at halftime. And so being a little bit behind actually creates that motivation to say to wake us up and say, okay, we need to move forward. And so how do you kind of create that effect? Well, part of it’s just having milestones along your project that you’re keeping track of, and then communicating them to yourself or to your team to let them know, okay, we’re a little bit behind. Because as you do that, that will create an acceleration and allow this U shape to flatten out more so that you can maintain and stay at higher levels of productivity. So that is the science of productivity segment for this week, talking about how we can level up our U shaped performance and maintain that pace of productivity through the end spurt effect and the effect.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:23:33
Thanks. Thank you, Matt. And so let’s get into our featured story this week. And then we will do the new tools of the week before we close out. So we are in the homestretch of the show. And I’m really enjoying myself. And I hope you all who are watching are enjoying, feel free to comment in the comment feed and let us know. the good, the bad, the ugly. We’re always happy to hear from you. And it’s all good in that sense. So again, thank you, Matt. For the science of productivity segment, we’re gonna try and do different segments throughout the month from different experts on these topics on I think the science of productivity is a great first anchor segment for the show. So let’s talk about our story of the week. Did I say we’re gonna do STORY OF THE WEEK first or new tools, I think story of the week. Okay. So story of the week is, is kind of near and dear to my heart. Because Google has Didn’t they haven’t just changed a name. I mean, they they basically have brought to bear a new and a new and improved interface to G Suite with what they’re now calling Google workspace. So for those of you who have been using Google’s office Productivity Suite, G Suite, cross the many different, you know, areas. Google has now brought out Google workspace in essence, Google workspace is a is a bundling together of all of the various workplace and kind of work improvement pieces of their puzzle into this new environment. And they’re providing this in both a business context. And then there’ll be rolling that out to education into enterprise, and so on and so forth over time. And but it’s just, I think it’s going to be a really kind of interesting new chapter in the world of Google, as we both improve the user experience so that you’re able to utilize all these various disparate parts of Google in more kind of seamless ways, right? Like, there should be no reason why I can’t start a Google meet, meeting from Gmail, or from Google calendar or from other tools, and still get things done while I’m doing it. And that’s really the goal of workspace is to be able to bring together all of these functions so that no matter where you are, you’re able to get things done in other parts of Google that you might be utilized. Gentlemen, what have you seen about Google workspace? so far? Questions, and I’m happy to answer those questions. And we can talk a little bit about what Google workspace will look like. And just to start off with know that Google workspace includes all of the tools that you currently experience with regard to G Suite, it’s just the level of integration will will scale out a little bit more slowly for less used products. So Gmail, Calendar, Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, slides, meats, and chat are all those first products within Google workspace that are really going to get that high level of integration. And then over time, you’re going to see more and greater improved interoperability between the other 50 plus products that are inside of what is currently known as G Suite,

Augusto Pinaud 1:26:33
I think is something time to do as, as I think, you know, your assumption you have seen with Microsoft, for many, many years, Google, even that it has all the tools have them, not necessarily in integrated Wi Fi, in a seamless way for everybody, I think bring them into a one uniform thing, it’s going to really be a game changer. Again, this is not for technology, people, the technology, people have been using them, you know, one way or the other. It is from the none necessarily technology, people who are using these tools, the people who don’t know that you can really do with Gmail, and G calendar, and Google Drive and everything else have all those services, and they think they are silos instead of something that really can integrate with each other. I think it’s a fantastic next step to Google, really slowly find themselves into this enterprise market, I people still believe that Microsoft is a lot more powerful and a lot more functional than most of the Google world. And I going to agree on certain specific things and ease but in most things is not Google, it’s really far better. But because of that lack of integration that Microsoft has done really, really well, for so long. For the non tech people. This is the impression that it is you know, it is similar to that discussion you have on the 80s about, well, if you have a Mac, you cannot play on a PC. That was true in 1994, or 84. But 94, that was not true. And for the longest time, people, even to this day, I hear people saying, well, but you have a Mac, we cannot share files, and you’re like what you’re talking, I think this is going to be really, really use

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:28:27
any other questions or comments about Google workspace? No, good. All right, let’s close out this segment, then, which is our featured story of the week, and move on to the new tools of the week. And so a gousto. And I come across many personal productivity tools and services each week. And in new tools of the week, we each bring you a tool, we think you might like of course, we always invite our guest panelists to share their tools as well. These don’t have to be new tools necessarily in the sense that they’re new to the world, they may just be new to you. And so they may be tools that have been around for a while. And so we’re gonna go ahead and go through our various tools this week. And since it’s a mental health awareness, themed this week, I figured we’d all talk about various mental health awareness apps that we have or not, it doesn’t have to be but I happen to have picked one that was and so the first tool of the week is the app calm, and that so you know, has multiple competitors in the market. But I’ve just been using calm for forever. And I don’t use it for all of my meditation. But whenever I need some kind of guided meditation to just help me through a meditation, I’ve been meditating, oh, gosh, it’s been for the better part of 25 plus years. So I think I think I can calculate back 25 years, and the level of calm that I have experienced overtime, thanks to meditation has been profound. And calm is just a great app to be able to get you in on the ground level. You can use the free version, you can upgrade to the premium version and it It’s just a really great tool for being able to listen to it there there are, there’s a sleep side to it. And there are other functions there. I don’t use the those functions. But I really like the guided meditations for being able to just step in and and just have something guide you through that process. And so that is my, my app this week. gousto, do you want to talk about your app, you are muted,

Augusto Pinaud 1:30:22
I will talk about my app. But before I go into my app, I want to share something that change my meditation practice. I’ve been trying to meditate consistently for so many years and failed miserably every time until I decided to use my Apple Watch to track it. And now I track it to the Apple Watch. And that has given me for the first time that consistency to really reap the benefits of the company. So if I have the meditation, so if you struggle with that, and have an Apple Watch, try that you can find mindfulness, whatever you want, there are many options you can pick. But it’s really been a game changer for the app I want to try. It’s not a new app. I’ve been using it for a really long time. And it’s called day one. So journal, I use it on all my devices. And I have been journaling in this thing daily for a really long time as my meditation practice took much longer than journaling didn’t. I don’t know how long have I been journaling, but at least 10 or 15 years for sure. And they want he’s been my application. Since it came out in the market. I, I’ve been upgrading and upgrading. And it’s really a game changer. For me, I have multiple journals. So that way I can find or group things depending on what I want to write and how I want to write and it’s been simply incredible.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:31:45
Fantastic. And so with that, Dr. Buck, your app,

Frank Buck, EdD 1:31:50
yes, um, snip board.io. I don’t know how long this has been around. So I don’t know, if this is new, I don’t know. It’s, it’s new to me, as of the last few weeks. And the way it works is just think about how many times in your life, you’ve taken a little screen snip, maybe you’ve copied your entire screen, maybe it’s just been a little portion of the screen, maybe it’s an an error message that you’re getting that you want to hang on to maybe it’s a little photograph some something like that. But now you got to deal with this image and share that image with someone upload the image, what snip board does is let you take that image and turn it into a URL. So the way it works is this, you just you just take your little snip, you go to snip, board.io, you paste, and it gives you the URL. Right you were you were sharing before a little graph, and I just took a little screen snip of it, and paste it into snip board. But I just put in the private comments. What’s the link to that? Are you able to grab that, and so that everybody can see what happens with that link that I just shared in the private chat that ray will now be able to, and he just copied and pasted that and boom, there it is. So if you wanted to send that little graph to somebody else, you don’t have to see the image, you can just throw it into snip board.io. And it makes the link for you. And that works without even creating an account without logging into anything. If you do create a free account, I think it saves your snips for up to six months or something like that. So once I found it’s something that I find I’m using every single day.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:33:41
Fantastic. And Matt, your tool? Yeah. Hold on one second I tool that I will go for

Matt Plummer 1:33:48
it. Oh, sure. So I want to talk a little bit about a tool enjoyable. When I in my former career, I was doing a lot of advising of organizations that were working in the diabetes prevention space. And it was the idea of taking that behavior change around healthy eating and physical activity and putting it in an app to make it digestible for people attaching coaching to it. And after. And so that was a company called omata health. And then after working with them for a little bit, we saw that there was a number of companies that were taking that same concept and applying it to the mental health space. enjoyable is one of those that has these five minute activities that are based on cognitive behavioral therapy you can see built with leading experts. And so it takes these activities that are designed to change how you’re thinking if you’re facing things like social anxiety or minor depression. It’s not you know, for some of the more serious mental health conditions but it can help in those kind of mild symptoms. And they’ve recently made it available so that individuals can do it as well. You can try it for seven days and then there’s an annual plan that you can buy into that. You can engage in these activities and change kind of the way you think about some of the things that might be causing some mental health challenges that you’re struggling with. Fantastic. Thank you, Matt. Thank you everybody for the new tools of the week. And that takes us to near the end of our show, we just have a couple of announcements. And then we’re going to close out. So, Augusto, what are we doing on Wednesday.

Augusto Pinaud 1:35:22
So Wednesday at noon, eastern time, there is a Tuesday tomorrow, actually, it there is a new Apple event called high speed. And on Wednesday, we are going to be doing an especial event of everything by but I don’t live like this. But he’s going to be happening instead at 12 noon. And we are going to have Michael solinsky from NUS. We were trying to confirm our other guests. But we are going to discuss the event what happened what was and try to geek out a little bit about the exciting news or not so exciting news that Apple may bring on Tuesday. So if you are listening to us or want to come to the event, the link will be in our page and you will be able to find it and come to the live event. If you want to see us geek out a little bit about Apple pod.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:36:12
Fantastic and so that everyone is aware each week, we’re theming things. So next week, we’re going to have a theme around cybersecurity. And and so this is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. My company is one of the champions for the National Cyber Security Alliance and scissor which is the cybersecurity infrastructure and security agency for the federal government. And as as a champion. We’re basically ambassadors for the Cybersecurity Awareness Month. And so we’re just doing all kinds of events throughout the month. And so we figured we’d bring this to anything but idle. And we’ll talk a little bit about security next week on the show on Monday evening, or at least Monday 6pm Eastern Daylight Saving Time for us. And so just know that that’s up and then you may actually see a gousto and I and our panelists in costumes for Halloween, one of these upcoming weeks. And so, yeah, it’s gonna put me a little bit outside of my comfort zone. But I’m excited to come to you as I may or may not becoming a Spock. So we’ll see how that goes. So those are some of our upcoming events and items there. And with that, anything else that I’m missing Agusta before we close out,

Augusto Pinaud 1:37:23
yes, I can already confirmed for that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:37:27
Well, the Star Trek universe is always gonna win against your you’re

Augusto Pinaud 1:37:31
serious. No, well.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:37:35
I’ve just I just made a few internet enemies. But anyway, I want to thank Dr. Frank buck and Matt Plummer from Zavala, for joining us here today as our first but hopefully not our last guest panelists. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us.

Unknown Speaker 1:37:48
It’s pleasure. wonderfully Great to be here.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:37:51
Fantastic. So with that, we’re gonna just close out. We’ve covered the productivity news this week. I want to thank Agusta pinout, of course, for joining me here always as my co host. And and so thank you so much for being here, of course, and helping put all of this together. With that, let us know if there’s a story we missed. Of course, there’s so many stories happening throughout the week. We can’t keep on track, keep track of everything. But if we didn’t miss something, and it’s important, if you head over to anything, but idol.com you can go ahead and post a comment on the show. And we can of course therefore keep track of those things and update people in urata. in future episodes, you can also tweet and we do have the DMS open on our Twitter account at anything but idle. So you can go ahead and tweet at us there. If you have a question or comment about anything we discussed. Feel free to leave a comment on the video. If you’re listening to the podcast episode, head over to anything but idle calm. And then again, click on the episode and you’ll find the comment section at the bottom of the page. There you’ll find show notes, you’ll find a transcript for to be able to read and download. So that’ll be there as well for you. If this is your first time watching the live stream since this is the first live stream, that is probably the case, go ahead and hit the subscribe button. That way you’re notified when we go live weekly. And if you’re listening to the podcast show, please consider adding us to your favorite podcast app. If you click on the subscribe tab on anything but idle calm, you’ll see instructions to follow us there and get episodes downloaded for free each week. If you’ve enjoyed spending time with listening with us today, it would be great if you can help us out by adding a rating review in Apple podcasts or Stitcher. If you’re on YouTube. Again, you can hit the like button. And that really helps us to open up to a greater and broader personal productivity community. And we’re looking forward to growing that as we go. We do run a personal productivity community called personal productivity club. And so if you go to personal productivity dot club, you can go ahead and join us there and we haven’t anything but idle group where you can post and engage in conversation around all the various productivity news and technology news that we talked about. And so with that, that brings us to the end of our first anything but idle live show. Take care everybody. Here’s your productive life.