Notion Projects Arrives to Help You Organize Your Projects – Anything But Idle, the Productivity News Podcast

Notion Projects Arrives to Help You Organize Your Projects, and the Productivity and Technology News of the Week

Each week, Ray Sidney-Smith (🌐 https://twominuterule.com) and Augusto Pinaud (🌐 https://productivityvoice.com/) review and provide commentary on the week’s news in the world of personal productivity and related technologies.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://anythingbutidle.com for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you’d like to continue discussing any news from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Notion Projects Arrives to Help Organize Projects

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Headlines & Show Notes | Notion Projects Arrives to Help Organize Projects

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

HEADLINES, PART A

HEADLINES, PART B

New Tools of the Week

FEATURED STORY OF THE WEEK

What are Notion Projects?

ANNOUNCEMENTS

NOTES

Raw Text Transcript | DRAFT

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

[read more=”Read the raw text transcript” less=”Close the raw text transcript”]

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00
Hello, personal productivity enthusiast and community Welcome to Anything But Idle, the productivity news podcast. Today’s show is brought to you by co-working space by personal productivity club. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. I’m Augusto Pinaud. And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. This is episode 117 notion projects arise, help you organize your projects. And we’re recording this on June 5th 2023. Each week, of course, you know that Augusto and I read and review all of the various productivity news headlines of the week. And we bring those together here today in Anything But Idle. And so with that, okay, so let’s get into our headline for this week, with our first productivity headline of the week,

Augusto Pinaud 0:42
we’re beginning with an article talking about the unveiling of the long term effects of the long term exposure to screens. And that’s not been a secret, you know, you have eye discomfort, physical discomfort for poor position, you know, sleep issues. You know, there was the fourth and the fifth, the first tree I agree on, I’m aware of them. The fourth was cognitive challenges on reduced productivity. And the fifth was the psychological impact on the isolation. And I understand that I’m very, very grateful, because I am, I could do this and have the camera and that fit my social human connection, that that is a good luck. I don’t, you know, during the pandemic, as other people were suffering on the lack of physical contact and seeing other people, I was not I was fine looking people in the screens. So that I that that psychological impact, and I experienced it with my kids, you know, one of my kid, he was completely fine, okay, he was his father, his father, son, and he could leave in cameras and be happy. And if he will have been allowed to not go back to school, you will have a stay remote. My daughter, instead, she means that and she really got their facts from from that. But where I disagree with the article is the cognitive challenges and reduced productivity, sorry, leave surrounded by screens. And I consider myself reasonably productive. Not only that, I work as a consultant as a coach with people who are surrounded by screens. And I don’t think that part is necessarily true, I think

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:35
it has to do with the way in which people set up their systems, like you’re working with people to help them manage their focus effectively. And I think that a lot of people who have multiple screens and multiple devices on which they’re working, they’re challenged because of the fact that they don’t have things correctly set up. And it’s, it’s being set up for their workflow, so that they can focus on the things that they need to at any given time, and also be triggered to change context at the right time. So what I take from this article regarding cognitive challenges and reduced productivity is that if you’re a manager, or if you yourself are self directed, you need to make sure that if you have a prolonged amount of screen exposure, that you just spend a lot of time with your devices, and you need to be able to set it up. I think of these on plots, you know, from from the book for clean, by Dan Charles, right. The idea here is that you have your you have your station setup, so that it is like a cockpit, right you are you are designed to be able to focus on the right measurements and the right dials and the right visual landscape at any given time. And when you do that, you’re then able to function in the cockpit, you’re capable of directing the plane where it needs to go. If you don’t, then you get a crash. And that’s going to kill a lot of people. So how about we not do that? Right? So that’s what I think is really the genesis kind of the gem of the article in that sense. But I agree with you, if you have things set up correctly, then it’s not the fact that you have prolonged exposure to the screens. It’s the fact that you don’t have things probably properly set up. All right, onward to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 4:12
Image article is how to take better brakes for work, according to research. And it’s an article from the Harvard Business Review. And you know, every time I read about the brakes and stuff, and I mean, without going to the unreasonable, I think many times what people need is not necessarily the break, but the change. It is how do you adjust from going to perspective or focus a to activity B to activity c? So don’t get burned out? Can I ask you were mentioned in the cockpit you make me laugh because yes, my office looks like a cockpit I get it and when I work with clients is that is how are you going to change So that way, you don’t spend seven hours looking at the same screen, but you can change not only what you’re doing, how you’re doing, what are the different movement, the different positions that you can have. And when you do that, you know, you can then work into much more smaller breaks, because you don’t get to those points where, okay, now I need to take two hours so I can recover, because you are getting small breaks or small increments of recharging during the day.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:33
I have this vague sense that burnout wasn’t real for a while. And, and it’s not that burnout doesn’t exist, it’s so I do believe that burnout does exist now. But I have this sense that we have the ability to, you know, keep burnout at bay, very effectively, if we do the right kinds of mitigations. And these behavioral interventions are not, they’re not grand, right. It’s like, you know, self efficacy is a way to, you know, challenge burnout and to overcome burnout, obviously, taking reps true rest, Getting proper sleep, which is different than rest, right, rest is purposefully not doing something. And that’s not procrastination, either. Right is purposeful, you know, relaxation. The other side is sleep, you need proper sleep, that’s different than rest, but exerting energy giving, giving yourself time to do those things. Again, we talked about these philosophies on plastic, your visual clutter on your desk, and of course, compete with your visibility to make decisions and to have that clarity of space and time. So all of these various little things, they add up. And they really can help you buffer yourself from burnout and otherwise. And so I really liked the idea of taking breaks. And making those breaks productive, productive doesn’t mean that you’re doing things toward the work end, right? It just means that you’re purposefully utilizing that time, you’re being mindful with your time. And that is the thing that makes it productive. So I really like that concept. Okay, onward.

Augusto Pinaud 6:59
Before it before we go, because it was tied up to the next one. You know, one of the things that I tell people is change when you’re doing certain activities, if you can grab the laptop, and then walk to somewhere else, check your email, because anyways, you only have 10 minutes to do that. Move that so that way you change all that render. So you said that reduced the time, you know, the the change of background, a change of scenery, the change of desk and chair. And change of activity helps you to prolong that working time. Before you get to that burnout point.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:34
I absolutely.

Augusto Pinaud 7:37
know our next one is technological change in here in hybrid working on the benefits of the psychological safety in the work place. And it is interesting, because Jordan Harlow talks, his occupational psychology consultant, and he talks about how people feel more secure or confident in the video in the virtual video environment than what they ever felt in the conference rooms. And this is the first time at least I hear that. And it, it really brought a lot of thought to me and how, you know, all right, we said at the beginning of the pandemic, part of the problem was a pandemic. So we’re going to see to know very quickly who are the poor managers, that’s proved to be completely right. What I didn’t consider at that time, is that also was going to provide people the ability to feel safer into those environments into those digital environments. So that was very, very interesting.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:48
Yeah, so So for folks who may not be aware, psychological safety is a kind of a psychological concept that allows us to basically have that space in order to make mistakes, right in order to expand ourselves and take risk. And that’s a space where creativity happens, it’s a space where problem solving happens, it’s a place where we can reach out and make new relationships and network in an organization. And when we don’t have those things, and that’s in any group setting, not just an organization, but here we’re talking about the workplace. But that is actually really important place for people to be able to go you know, just taking risks means doing a project, or taking on a task or an assignment of in that sense. So the idea of psychological safety is really important in productivity. And we don’t talk about it enough because that a lot of folks want don’t really understand the concept. And, and that is better. managers don’t understand that concept. But if you can create psychological safety, that is the ability for someone to be candid with you to be appropriate with you, you know, to have boundaries with you, and to know how to kind of expand and contract on those things. Particularly you’ll have a better workforce. And what this is basically saying is that You know, hybrid working gives you, you know, quite a number of those benefits because of the different working modalities, right, I may not feel comfortable telling you that someone else is doing something wrong or inappropriate, or just making a mistake. And, and saying that to you in a live environment in person environment, but I may make, I might be I might be more comfortable with doing so in a, an asynchronous chat based environment, right. Or I might be more comfortable doing that in a video environment as opposed to in a physical environment. So these things that create this kind of psychological safety is really important to the to the organizations, and the teams, and your family’s overall productivity. So I like this article for that very reason. And I think it makes a lot of sense to me. So all right, onward.

Augusto Pinaud 10:49
The next article came from Darius, for action is things in life that I underestimate, for way too long. It was a really awesome article. You know, he said, he mentioned five things, you know, where I grew up, and where I live now, you know, the power of my mind, and he mentioned something that really hit me closely. I remember getting so swamped by my emotions, whenever something bad in quotes happened to me, and I say bad in quotes, because never something bad happened. But that’s a thing that happened, you know, when two people and we the mistakes that you make, he mentioned, you know, the time that you have, and the wind bad. And he mentioned he moved to, from the Netherlands to Spain, the perfect weather. And then he find out all the people in Spain complaining when it was too hard on their condition on expenses. And you know, that that part remind me when we moved to California, and we used to joke that 74 was to call and 75 was too hard, there was nothing we can do about that. But those things are very important to, to appreciate. Because the more you’ve put your reticular system to look at those things, even though they sound little things that you’re grateful, you know, the fact that I have an offense, the fact that, hey, he was not hot today, those things, allows you to also see the other good things that are happening in your life, and appreciate all those things, too. And the thing

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:31
that stood out for me in this for this article was the concept of making mistakes. And let he says here, let your mistakes be teachers, I really liked that phrase. And it’s so important because you’re going to make mistakes, and or you’re going to watch other people make mistakes. And so it doesn’t necessarily need to be your mistakes that you learn from. But definitely letting your mistakes be your teachers is a fundamental thing that I think everyone who wants to be more productive, needs to pay attention to. Don’t seek perfection, right? Seek progress, and progress is begotten through watching those mistakes, or seeing other people make mistakes and trying to avoid them in the best possible ways. And I think that’s really just a very sound piece of advice that kind of was a little nugget that I found in the article. And it really resonated with me. Okay, onto onto our next article for the week.

Augusto Pinaud 13:27
Our last article for dissection is for a friend, Charlie weekly, and is how to tame a gazillion of ideas. And the article comes and mentioned the new momentum program that he just released or is going to be released the action item catcher figure, and he had the worksheet that is a free download. So if you are looking into how to manage all those ideas that you are having, and you don’t know what to do with them, because you don’t want to put them in the system, or in your system, you want to prefer to have them on some separate place. This is a great article to get ideas and to get even a tool how to deal with all that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:11
Yes, it’s a simple download. And it’s a simple tool, but you would be surprised about how powerful having a centralized location to put your tasks can be, you know, the thing that I’m challenged by is, you know, is this an inbox? Or is this a task list? So you do have to figure out what you’re doing in that sense, right? And being a GED or as you Risto you know, I tend to have those things separated into two buckets, right, you know, very different from an in tray. And so this whole concept of an item catcher speaks to me that you have some kind of inbox and then you’re placing your actions, your next actions, whatever you want to call them your to dues here onto this task list that he provides them to easy, click it, click on it, and it downloads a PDF and you can go ahead and check it out. Also Somewhere in personal productivity club, I must have made mention or given folks access to the the major projects queue. So if anybody has questions about the major projects, too, if you have a lot on your plate, it’s really helpful to be able to have some way to offload it from your mind in a way that helps to structure it. And so I created this concept and this kind of tool, so to speak a minister you can manifest it however you want, called a major projects queue. And it’s akin to what really, you know, Charlie’s talking about here. If you have a lot of projects, and you want to be able to make them happen, you must focus. And so the major project skew allows you to create conditions by which you will focus on one or very few projects at any given time, make progress on those and then have some condition precedent, whereby then you will trigger the next projects to be born, or the next projects to be moved forward. And that gives your, your the monkey on your shoulder an opportunity to go take a nap, so that you can really focus on the work ahead of you. So definitely, if you haven’t seen or read materials on that, let me know and I can always get it over to you. All right, and with that, we have reached the top of our productivity articles. For this week, we are going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsor, which is co working space by personal productivity club. And then we will come back to a healthy section of technology articles. We’ll also cover our new tools of the week. And we will get into some other stories of our featured story of the week and then some other announcements. So with that, we’ll see you you’re

Sponsor Voice Over 16:34
well working in person maybe normal for you, it’s unlikely your co workers are as interested in being productive as you are, or working remotely or from home can be isolating. And there’s something powerful about being with productive people, even virtually that helps you be more engaged. If a flavor of these sounds familiar, co working space by personal productivity club is for you. co working space is a virtual work community designed to help members be more effective and efficient in their work and personal lives. At its core, we provide goal tracking and host focused action sessions throughout the week for accountability and camaraderie, visit anything but idle.com forward slash co working to learn more CO working space lives inside personal productivity club, a digital community for personal productivity enthusiast. So you can find people who use methods and tools you do to, again, head over to anything but idle.com forward slash co working to see how co working space can help you be more productive. And now back to our show

Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:43
everybody to Anything But Idle, the productivity news podcast. And so, uh Gousto and I are going to now kick into our technology articles of the week. And so with that to do so let’s take it away to our first tech article this week.

Augusto Pinaud 17:57
So our first article is the new Microsoft Mac admins community from Microsoft, it’s not that they there has not been Microsoft Mac communities before they have. But this is the first time that Microsoft is putting their foot forward creating, you know, these chat official chat for companies who are using Apple devices. On the enterprise, you know, it is the Mac’s are more and more you can see them more and more in business, the iPhones are on the iPads are present. So it’s good to see Microsoft given really support to the IT pros with these two things are now being able to go to the official source. Now you need to conquer people to go there. But but that’s a step in the right direction.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:50
Well, you would imagine that a lot of these IT folks are already in other IT admin groups in the Microsoft community. And so they’re already in that system. And so this is just giving them an opportunity to talk about the mackage stuff in that space. I think this is really great. You know, because if I’m, if I’m the CTO or CIO or whatever it is, you know, it supervisor for a larger enterprise. And I have a bunch of Mac’s inside my organization. Now I have a place to go to, to have that kind of dialogue with others who are administering Nexus when I’m sure those are all kind of sideline compensations in other fora. And now, it gives you a direct specific forum to be able to have that base. Like I love it. I love it. Get on Microsoft. I mean, that’s it for Microsoft, I don’t say that very often. You know, good on them for recognizing the need, even if it’s a little bit late.

Augusto Pinaud 19:41
No subsidies is said often in this show. But hey, our next one is Amazon is sending out emails with showing people how to use the feature of Send to Kindle from Microsoft Word so allowing you with a Kindle scribe to send the PDF and being able to work and annotate and, and send it back. And, again, I have not got my hands into one of these. But I love the fact that they are doing this, and I’m talking about Amazon because the more they get this concept to the main stream, the better and the stronger this concept is going to be.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 20:25
Yeah, so so just so folks are aware, this is when you’re inside of the Microsoft Word app, there is now an add on that gives them the functionality to send a Word document to your Kindle. And specifically on the Kindle scribe, you’re then capable of going ahead and annotating right directly on the document, including, of course, reading it, if you if you’re utilizing any other Kindle e reader, you can highlight and annotate in the old manual way, you know, typing on the screen, and so forth. So this is great for a wide variety of reasons. I don’t use Microsoft Word as much as I do Google Docs and otherwise, so I hope they bring this feature functionality to Google Docs. And that would just, I mean, in essence, it’s just basically doing the same thing, just exporting the Google Doc as a Word document and sending it along to the Kindle. So it’s a very simple concept, you can do this today, just by going into your Kindle account and getting the email address associated with your Kindle device and emailing it to that device itself. So you can you can kind of work around this. Now note that when you go ahead, and there’s two options in there, you can send it to include it like a Kindle book, or you can send it to be like a printed document. And as the article here notes, it says, The difference is that the like a printed document will let you write on the documents with your Kindle scribe. Okay, so if you if you do it, like a Kindle book, then it seems like you’re not able to do that. I haven’t tested this. So I’m just reading what the article says here. And so I’m really excited about this, I think that I want to see it says here that it’s also coming to potentially Microsoft Word for from from web. So that’ll be interesting to see when it does that. Because then obviously, that means they could do it in the browser, which means they could do that in Google Docs as well. So hopefully, we see some, some movement on that sense. And in that way, as well. So I just I like the ecosystems to talk to each other. I like these integrations. And even if I may not use them myself, I know so many people use Microsoft Word. And I know that it’s going to make people more productive. By being able to tie these two things together, what would be lovely is that they were able to then, you know, be fully integrated, right? So that you could take things in, annotate them, get them out, and they’d be back in that Word document in some way, shape, or form. Just the same way you would use a Microsoft Surface Pro or something like that, and right on the screen and have that handwritten annotation be interpreted by both prop both platforms effectively, but we’ll see. Okay, onward to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 23:10
Oh, I mentioned article, you may need to go more into details, you know, but Google messages the magic compose betta brings some I an RSS chat. But it talks about limitations, but I am really not as familiar as what’s happening there to really know.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:33
Sure. So most folks can see this happening in Gmail right now. So if you’re inside Gmail, and you start typing, Google will basically provide you with some great text, as you’re typing, to allow you to finish a sentence, or, you know, providing the next words or few words that you that it thinks you should be writing. That’s the artificial intelligence happening in the background. So it’s basically machine learning, right? So remove AI from this is called machine learning, right? So this machine learning is going ahead and understanding what’s your what’s your typing, and then attempts to go ahead and complete the sentences. You can do this today in Gmail, you can see what it’s all about. This same magic compose feature is now coming to Google messages, which is the which is the Google product for sending SMS and MMS messages on Android. So now you’re capable of starting to type within the Google Messages app once the beta rolls out to you. And you will then be able to see those machine learning based compose messages appear. And then all you have to do is just tap at the end of the screen, or, you know, on the keyboard is tab, you know, when you’re in Gmail, but on the screen, you’re just gonna hit tap, tap forward, and it’ll do that. Now today. Google messages and all the other messaging apps are doing a little bit of this already. Right. If you see a question, it maybe will have yes, no, or maybe you know, kind of as options to be able to choose because it understands the question, it will have things like you Guess Yep, as as an option, it’ll give you some some other words that it thinks that you will want to use. Those are just chips that are being displayed on the screen as options. With matching propose, it’s directly within the field where you’re typing so many times, it’s absolutely correct, very good at being able to select these things. And it’s because we tend to say the same things over and over again to people all the time, right. So this is very, very useful, I think it will be very useful, I don’t think it makes it makes it any less authentic, because it has to understand what you’re typing before it tries to complete the sentence. So it’s just guessing what you’re typing based on what you already were already typed. This is going to be, I think, very, very productive for a lot of folks, especially since, you know, I hate to say it, but many times, you know, I’m sitting at a light, you know, while I’m driving, and I want to quickly respond to a message or things of that nature. And magic compose will then let me safely be able to just tap at the end, see that the message has been properly typed. Because many times, you know, I’ll say something out loud and have a dictate. And it’s completely the opposite. I don’t know what’s wrong with Google lately. But it inserts the opposite of what I said many times, and I say, please, you know, don’t kill the dog, it would be like, yes, please kill the dog. Like, what did you interpret, don’t kill with kill, like, there’s a whole word in there, you just didn’t listen to. So these are the kinds of things where if you see magic imposed, you know, extrapolate based on what you’re going to want to say. It’s a really easy, you know, tool to be able to use, yes, there are going to be some limitations, like with anything. But this is mostly because of privacy and security reasons at the present moment. But I think it will become more robust as we make our way along. And I’m glad to see it happening. On to our next story. If you still

Augusto Pinaud 26:47
know, you can finally share your screen in WhatsApp on Android. And I think this is awesome. I been doing it on Apple for a while where you can share your screen. And I did say it is an incredible tool for tech support. You know I am I have two elderly parents I have in laws, who, you know, require that tech support. I have clients and there is nothing easier than when they come and code and say how do I do X on the phone or the tablet, or the iPad and you share the screen they share the screen and you’re told to click here, click here, click here go. And I think being WhatsApp, probably the most common app on Android phones and on phones. I think it’s very, very awesome that that feature is coming.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:41
Absolutely. Yeah, I’m really I’m really pleased to see the whatsapp on Android comm obviously, this is a this is a great feature for any number of reasons. And I like the idea of being able to have just a backup option, right. So you could do this in in Google meet. Currently, you can do this obviously in zoom and many other applications. But a lot of people have WhatsApp. And while you know I’ve been I’ve been diligently trying to get all of my people in the world over to telegram. There’s still a lot of people who are on WhatsApp. And so it’s just helpful to be able to have that additional option. Right now with telegram I’m utilizing loom recording those those loom videos or just screen recording it through the native functionality within the Google Pixel, which is the Android operating system built in screen recorder and then grabbing that and either if it’s short enough, I’ll just paste it directly into the telegram chat and upload it. But if the if it’s if it’s too large that I’m going to upload that to loom Give, give loom access to create. So just a quick, easy link. And I can paste that in there as well. If it’s if it’s too much for loom, then I will actually put it into Vimeo and then and then go ahead because I have a paid Vimeo account. So I’ll go ahead and upload it to Vimeo and then share it. So all of those things are, you know, like layers of stuff to be able to make that happen. That’s for asynchronous communication. So you know, this gives us the synchronous capability now as well like in meat or zoom or teams or otherwise. So it’s a great business great to have a backup option. Okay, onward to the lurgy deck review.

Augusto Pinaud 29:19
So I did a review on the 399 logic duck. I laugh when the writer of the article divergent talks about how he discovered was the pandemic how he have not have any kind of clear system organization for cables in his laptops. I discovered that many years back but I decided not to do anything about it. Anyways, Doc, basically will bring a beautiful, it’s a beautiful, heavy but beautiful and it has, you know a bunch of USB C USB, a port as well as DisplayPort, HDMI, the power. So you can connect everything basically to the back of this port and just take the machine I do something similar, not that many ports, of course with the keyboard on the iPad, and I use the magic keyboard and it has an additional USBC port where hub is connected that is connected to everything. So it’s one cable in one cable out. But it allows me to have access to everything and it works pretty good.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:35
Yeah, I’m actually really interested in something like this, because there are so many cords and cables that I have managed within the system. So of my desk, and so most of those are managed under and in a cable management system underneath the desk of mines have, you know, automated up and automated sit stand desks. So it’s motorized. And so all of that is there, but I do have a standing, reprimand because I’m looking at it at the moment. It’s a standing desk, that is a we call a treadmill, treadmill, and I kind of have this desk attachment on it. And I feel like this would be a an option that might work if I set up more of that treadmill desk for working and doing more meetings in that sense. But I feel like this could be a really nice little management tool. And again, having that built in, you know, like speaker system and everything else like that, so that you’re capable of just being hands free and having a conversation on the move, just to me seems very appealing. The price tag of 319 doesn’t. Three 319 USD doesn’t seem overly outrageous for all the things that it’s doing. And it seems like it has a pretty good power capability 100 100 watt power supply. And so I like that as well. It doesn’t have Thunderbolt Ethernet, or a 3.5 millimeter audio port. So that is a limitation, I would really like the Ethernet port in there. But presumably the computer that I would put up there would have an Ethernet port or I can add one and or use some kind of adapter to be able to turn Ethernet into either USBC or something else like that

Augusto Pinaud 32:19
many USBC you will be able to put an adapter USBC to Ethernet without any issues.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:25
Right, right. I mean, not ideal again. But it’s it’s something that you can work around. And so I really liked that. And yeah, and honestly, you know, you could probably expand this with another hub. So even though it has fewer ports than other laptop Doc’s out there, you could, in the circumstance I’m thinking about, we just kind of limited right, I don’t need it to do that much on that particular desk, it’s going to be fine. But if you wanted to use this for many more connections, this is going to have a more limited set. And but I would imagine you could probably plug in a USBC hub into it and kind of daisy chain or you know more ports arguments that kind of giving that some consideration as well. All right onto our next.

Augusto Pinaud 33:10
Our next one is apparently Google Keep, or Google has decided to make some changes in Google Keep so Google Keep reminders will not show on your calendar anymore. And at least Michael Perego of Cronenberg said was very, very unhappy about it. And I understand that if you use Google Keep on the reminders, and now you lose that EC productivity thing. I I will be on Happy to.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:40
Yeah, so So what’s actually happening is that those reminders are actually being transferred to tasks, which is basically the system inside of the Google Tasks ecosystem. And so in essence, Google is just taking Google reminders and binding it to Google Tasks. And so at the present moment, it’s going to be removed from Google Calendars view. Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to come back in the future. I don’t know that that’s the case. That will, but I also have the sense that Google Keep and the Google Calendar team are going to continue to work together to be able to make this all work, right. They want to make it more productive people, not less. And part of the first step here is to be able to not have five different types of ways that you can keep track and maintain tasks. And right now that’s the case. In Google, you have reminders, both in Google Assistant, which are now being bound to Google Tasks as well. You have calendar tasks, you have reminders, you had goals. And then of course, you have the Google Google Calendar events themselves that you were capable of creating. So you know, having these having all of these various disparate items all over the place, bringing them together into one On one element that you can manage central in a centralized space is just make sense, right? So I’m trying to look at this from the most positive perspective, which is how do we get all these things into into one ecosystem into one place? Now, I would have rather than just keep everything in Google keeper, right, make, make the individual keep notes, kind of the tasks embedded within them. And that becomes the thing, especially since Google Tasks itself has a mobile application, but it doesn’t have a desktop experience, right? It’s embedded within the calendar embedded within Gmail, you can see them in there. But you can’t really see that as an element inside the system, is why we actually use a tool called G board, for tasks forums, our tasks board, in order to be able to to zoom the the tasks from the ecosystem and giving you a desktop experience for them. That being the case, I think that, you know, here we are was just a step forward, right, it may feel a little bit like a step backwards to the present moment. But I think ultimately, what Google wants to do is to get all the users into one centralized place where those tasks can be spoken to, through the the assistant that can be tracked and maintained from within the calendar interface, even if it’s not directly in the calendar, and also be able to track and maintain those things within Google, Google’s Gmail product, where you get an email, you can add it to add a task to it and make it a task. And therefore it becomes resident within Google Tasks, I hope they can bind. They can bind the spaces, chat tasks, right, because now you have the spaces tasks. And those are separate also, from Google Tasks, I hope they can bind those spaces, tasks into your, into your Google Tasks system as well, and kind of give you some way to manage all of these things in one centralized perspective. So this is, this is an ongoing problem for all of us. And I’m hoping that Google is is thinking about this thoughtfully, and are they’re, they’re being advised by Laura Mae Martin, who’s Google’s productivity advisor, and others to basically get all these things to kind of work together in one seamless way and bringing back location based. So right now, you can still, I’m not sure whether they’ve deprecated, or you can still do this, and someone can let me know. But Google Keep you can, you can location, bind, a, a note, right. So when you come in proximity to something, it will remind you about that thing, you still can do it. So. So that’s great. And I want to make sure that as they make their way forward with tasks, that they that they keep that functionality, because it’s so powerful, right? You know, if I, if I want to remember to do something, when I get to someplace, I create a note, and I say, do this thing when I get to that place, right. And I don’t have to have it already in my system, like you do with Remember The Milk or some other tools, I can just literally type in any location and sourcing it from Google Maps. And so it knows that when I get to Oklahoma, I land there, it’s going to pop up a little note and say, Hey, you said you were going to do this thing, or these series of things when you got to this location. And it’s incredibly helpful when you’re just stressed out, and you’re trying to get from one place to the next. And you want to make sure that you’re prepared when you get there. So I do this for most of my presentations, right? It prompts me to have my, my speaking checklist, you know, pop up so the wine get to a speaking venue, I am there and prepared. Because all the things will then just be in that list to quickly go down and say, Okay, I need to do these five things before I go on stage. And then it gives me those those items to be able to do it. So again, this is I guess this is this is a step in kind of backwards for the author. But I think it’s going to lead to in the next few months, as Google rolls out more improvements to tasks. This will be a few steps forward, ultimately. Okay, next story.

Augusto Pinaud 38:37
Mitchell door is well, the next artist, it’s a review on the final Pro for the iPad. What is important about this article is not that the article talks about the limitation, it’s not that there is the fact that Apple brought final Pro to the iPad, their final final cut. That’s what I meant, sorry, you know, since 2015, Apple is been kind of shy, okay, saying, hey, the iPad can replace your machine, the iPad can replace their machine, but they are they’re being very shy into really releasing the beast and putting final pro into the iPad. Now it’s showing you even with the software limitations, the power for the regular user that your iPad had. Why? Because it’s finally showing that you can really do video professional video editing on a device like the iPad. So even if it’s a version one, even if it’s not perfect as the article mention, and it has the things this is a fantastic step in the right direction and he’s showing us what Apple is discovering and is that creative They are preferring these kind of machines over other machines. So the iPad, it’s in a way, the entry level now for those designers, that’s what I’ve been found in with clients is that the first machine they use and then they go to the very powerful one.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:19
Okay, on to our next story,

Augusto Pinaud 40:21
or next article, it’s a new bodyguards is not a new company, the apex ceramic screen protector is. And what is interesting about this is bodyguards is claiming that is virtually unbreakable. It’s an $80 product, okay, but it comes with a guarantee, okay, or a free limited lifetime replacement of the product. If you break it, I didn’t read the, the lifetime guarantee. But you know, replacing the screen in in a phone, it’s anywhere from 350 to $400. I’ve been using a brand called Tech armor for many years that do the ballistic. But this seems to be even more harder or more resistant than the ballistics. So putting that and putting a lifetime guarantee behind your product. It may be an interesting thing for those people who are replacing, you know, the ballistic glass consistently, and aka kids is what I’m thinking about.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:37
Okay, onward to our next story about

Augusto Pinaud 41:41
Lenovo, a big new tablet is beautiful, and prove that Chrome iOS is Google better desktop OS is showing, you know, the new Lenovo machine. And again, it’s coming well for sale the laptop, you know, and he’s saying how he finished working in his Chromebook has been instead of on the tablet, and I need to remind me, you know, well, yes, no computer is perfect. And that is a reason you don’t want your computer to die. Because you don’t want to replace it doesn’t matter how many you have doesn’t matter. When you find one that does everything you do, you don’t want to replace it. And this is a case in this. But it’s showing, you know how Lenovo, it’s going, you know, with a cantilever keyboard, you know, and following some of the things that Apple has done? Well, you know, that cantilever design keyboard, I have been praised in it since it was released, because it allows you to do angles that you were never able to do in a laptop and make it very, very, very nice to work.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 42:53
Yeah, I have to agree with the article author here, you know, for a desktop environment, you’re not going to be able to get once you go past a particular size screen, I don’t think Android is the appropriate one for productivity at large at a larger size. And perhaps if you are using a very limited set of applications, and all of those applications are available in that device schema, right you know the size and and proportionality and everything else like that, you probably won’t have a problem. But once you get into high levels of productivity, and very technical forms of productivity, Chrome OS is just going to be better than Android in that form factor. Android is really great in a mobile phone form factor that is that retains a size pretty small, right? So we’re talking phone up to a small tablet. Once you turn it into landscape mode and start wanting to really power through stuff, I can see where it starts to degrade plus criminalist gives you Android applications in it, right so you can access the Google Play Store. And it augments Chrome OS in a really thoughtful and good way. And then of course you have the ability to install crostini, which is the Linux capabilities within it. So you can have a Linux desktop environment right there in the Chrome OS when you need it. You can technically install Windows on the crumble SOP really needed to as well. So, you know, it gives you a lot of functionality within Chrome OS. But I think Android doesn’t give you that doesn’t mean that Android doesn’t have a I mean, I really love my Android OS on like Google Pixel. Right. What I like it so much if it were on a more affordable phone that was you know, a lower Android version probably not right. It would have probably a lot of bloatware. You know, and it would probably not be as fast and fluid and not as nice of an experience. So, you know, we just have to keep mindful of those kinds of things that if we have larger Android tablets that are that are beginning going to be utilized for productivity of it’s got a lot of bloatware on it from from lower end producers. That’s just not going to be a good look for Android. So we have to kind of as a, as a ecosystem, really decide on how that’s going to work. And Chrome OS has been really solid about giving you a very nice experience that’s not, you know, chock full of garbage. And it really makes for a nice experience for everybody. So I feel bad for the Lenovo tablet screen because it seems like a really nice device from from all the looks of it. But I think being limited to Android is not the best thing. on working. Next story.

Augusto Pinaud 45:31
Next article is the new Barnes and Noble Nook GlowLight. It’s starting to show and the glow light for its middle range one, you know, it’s trying to go and get now it’s at a better resolution, 300 PPI glare free and more memory instead of eight as as entry level had 32. And then it has a night mode that what I’m going to guess based on what I read is that it removed the blue light out of the device. So you can read in bed much longer, but still keep the light or illumination on the on the reading on the tech.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 46:12
actually excited to go to Barnes and Noble, I have a gift certificate gift card that I have for my family for the holidays. And I’m actually looking forward to actually looking at it when I go down that provides a bullet for plus, but I am interested in looking at it just to see the feel and and playing around with a little bit because it seems like a really nice solid device and a good kind of level up from the prior low light line. So all right onto the honor magic vs.

Augusto Pinaud 46:41
The honor magic vs. It is a foldable device similar to the Samsung C fold. And it is the first real

Raymond Sidney-Smith 46:53
one of a football

Augusto Pinaud 46:55
either picks a fall, but it’s true the bigs are full too. And but it’s it’s coming in a different price point is coming to not the high end, that Samsung and the pixels come in, but actually into the low end, you know, or lower end because it’s not exactly that cheap. But yeah. But it is another competition we are coming, you know, and I think we are going to see more and more of this foldable devices. And hopefully that means it’s, you know, we are going to see at least a small size tablet, you know, going into this phone, that you can now expand and have the equivalent of an iPad Mini with you.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 47:45
Yeah, so the first thing to note is that if you’re outside of the United States, this is not going to be sold in the United States. Right. So it’ll be it’ll be retailing at 1399. I’m sorry, 1599 euros, which is a route around 17 $1,800 USD. And so of course, this is, you know, this is a mildly less expensive version of the Samsung Galaxy fold. Four. But you know, notwithstanding, and this is also stepping outside of China with the magic vs. And so that’s really are trying to like figure out whether or not they can challenge Samsung, in that greater Asian Asia Pacific region, in some way, shape, or form. So this will be this will be interesting to watch. Because if it is successful, then potentially, it will be it will be broadened to more and more countries and then potentially to the US. Now again, because it’s honor, we’ll see what happens with regard to regulation and the desire for folks to have a Chinese made phone here in the United States. You know, because it’s a Chinese company and not branded, you know, Google or otherwise, you know, whatever. So we’ll see how that plays out. But I’m actually very interested to keep watch on this particular phone. Because the the fold itself is actually an interesting design. I actually had the opportunity to play with one technically yesterday. And so I was actually using one yesterday and the pixel fold is a very, very nice device. I was not expecting the feel of the device, the the thinness of the device itself, how it how it plays in the hand. In this particular case, it was in a cave, so I took it out of the case. And I felt like this was the kind of film where even with my Google Pixel seven parental it, it was it was still a nice feel it felt like a normal phone and then I had the opportunity to open it up into that larger tablet experience. I did data, I really didn’t hate it. So I think that’s a, that’s a step in the right direction and having more challenges in the market means that the price of price points on all of these folds will come down. And I want to see that as well. So that becomes more accessible to people. So that’s my, my 234, and five cents on the subject. Alright, if you so we are done now with our technology headlines for the week, which brings us along to new tools of the week. So new tools of the week is a segment where Gousto and I talk about the various personal development time tasks, project management and productivity, collaboration tools and services that we come across, we choose one each, and then we try to let you know what we think you might like about them. And so my tool this week is going to be a tool called wave box. So I have been looking for, in essence, as I talked about last week, we had mindstream, which was used as a Gmail client for Mac OS. And so that’s great on the Mac OS. It’s not my primary computer. So I need to be able to have something that works across all of my various devices. And I feel like wave box is it, it is a browser, and you’ll note probably got to talk about several of these types of browsers station, and many others that have kind of come out and really haven’t wowed me. Wait boxes are the first one to really do that. It gives you a browser, but it gives you these application environments so that you’re capable of managing multiple, what they call profiles. And so these profiles allow you to be able to hold multiple accounts inside of these, these spaces, these workspaces and inside the workspaces, you can then have multiple profiles, or multiple accounts, and also some extensions. So right now I have polo, I have a sauna, I have multiple Gmail accounts, I have Google Calendar, I have Google Drive, all of those basically embedded within the the wave box environment. Now it’s a browser. So it allows me to be able to seamlessly open up links, and so forth, and view them and interact with them, and then close them up when I’m done. I don’t want it to be my default browser at all. It is built on Chromium. So it is it is basically like a Chrome browser. And you can install extensions, like I use bit Warden for my password management. So bit wardens in there. And I use one password with some clients. So I have that installed there as well. And so all of those kind of kicked into the browser experience, which is perfect. But at the same time, I’m capable of really managing all of those pieces, you can open up each of the wave box, you know, applications as they’re in their own windows, so you can kind of manage them separately, I can have telegram running using the PWA. So it just gives me this really nice hole for all of those things. The other piece to it is that it’s Mac OS, Linux and Windows. So it works completely cross platform on all those devices. And I’m, I’m really impressed. The pricing on it is also very, very good. You can use the free version of it. And just continue using that that gives you only two Gmail accounts. So you’re limited to the two Gmail accounts and one Chrome extension. But you can use those across multiple computers. Once you get up to the pro account, it’s 33 per month paid annually. So I’m going to do and so that is being basically 100 bucks a year, so $100 USD, and then you get the access to everything right, you can unlimited containers, unlimited apps, unlimited profiles, unlimited workspaces, and all the Chrome extensions you can jam into, into the browser, right. So this is this is really great. What I what I also liked about it is that it has a ton of features, right, you can really tailor the look and feel of each of the workspaces as well as your profiles. So that when you go into that context, you can visually immediately see what context you’re in. And so I’m, I’m looking forward to seeing this grow. Of course, it’s running chromium, so it’s running another browser. So you don’t really want chock full of a lot of extensions, because then that’s going to kind of slow down your device. And especially if you have them running on multiple devices across multiple different systems, that’s going to be problematic for you. But I’ve been really impressed with it, I have to say this is this is going to this is going to be something that I will probably continue to use for a while and it has unified search. So I’m capable of searching across all of these things on the Pro Plan. So this is a really, really nice tool. And I’m I’m I’m hoping that it continues to grow continues to develop. It seems like the development team is putting out new and better things every day. There is a team’s option for those folks who do want to, you know, buy a license for a company wide kind of plan. And then you get some additional pieces, you know, they encrypt all of the pieces. You can share workspaces, you can share templates, and you can of course manage those profiles once they build that functionality out into the system. And of course, it has a consolidated, consolidated billing. So you can, you can pay for your team, and mass. So that’s wave box at wave box.io. And we’ll have obviously a link to that in the show notes. But Gousto, what is your new tool this week,

Augusto Pinaud 55:14
my new tool of the week is a replacement to the Apple Pencil, it’s called a nova plus a seven. And, you know, I’m a big backup things of things that I use all the time, because over the years, you know, it has happened that I need them and then and the Apple Pencil is something that I use a lot, but I understand Apple pencils, significantly 600 bucks or okay to buy. So, I found this pencil, it’s called the Nova plus. And I drop it, okay, it is a black pencil, they come black or white. But it has all the things that the Apple Pencil two has a charge on the top of the iPad, it has palm rejection, you know, the magnetic decided to function, you know, you can change the tip. And the tip is even a little bit thinner than my apple one. And I’m going to say I love the fact that is black. Because what happened is if I get to meetings, and people use iPads, mine is the only one black. That has been honest back that plus that this thing has given me but the price is 25 bucks or 2499. So the price is very, very reasonable to have that backup on your desk that you may need.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 56:45
All right, that is the new tools of the week segment. And onward to our featured story this week, which is that notion has put out a new, I don’t want to call it a product, but a new set of features. They’re calling notion projects. What do you think about it the good

Augusto Pinaud 57:01
stuff, you know, I know art Gelwicks. Loft? On notion I have not really play long enough with notion to see. But what I think they are giving me sort of what I understood is really a way to use the tools that they already had for this. And I think that’s good. There is a lot of small teams into Nazmi. into into notion because of the ECS of share things that now we’ll have a more instructor possibilities to do some project management and to do some charts and to be able to understand how things move. So I think it’s very, very positive.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 57:48
Yeah. So on the website, they note a couple of things here, they say that it’s infinitely configurable, so you can work the way you want. So

Augusto Pinaud 57:56
terrified of those concepts. Yeah, I know,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 57:59
I know. Because he wants to have one particular set of ways in which you show things in your in your system. But I understand what they’re saying is that you can set them up. And you can limit the number of ways in which you get views. But in essence, you can have projects by status, you can have Timeline view, Kanban view and many others, so that you can do them. And they’ve tried to put in all of these various, they’re calling them AI features, but you know, automations in the system to then be able to get you moving, right. So you can automatically fill in tasks by identifying a project, and then saying, I want this project to fill in x, y, and Zed you know items. And so to fill in, fill in those pieces, you can create automated workflows so that it can update the status of, of projects, or be able to check things off and provide a report and then make some database entries and then outline a document, you can create these kinds of up automations allegedly that are coming soon. You can obviously do all kinds of filtering and sorting, which I think is really, really powerful. And then of course, they have all these other kinds of details that are great. I like the idea of having dependencies, right. So just like in a Gantt charting perspective, having the ability to condition precedent, so that you say, okay, until this thing happens, then hold this thing down so that it doesn’t it doesn’t come into view or otherwise or pushes it forward or or pulls it backward knowing based on the current actions that are being done. If I do something sooner, that thing becomes a live action sooner. That’s the kind of stuff that really gets me excited. And because everybody’s talking about artificial intelligence, they can’t not talk about AI here until they talk about how AI can use generative capabilities within the notion system. I would be very skeptical of that. But you could probably ask art Gelwicks More about that he would have more to say on how the autofill feature within notion works. The AI autofill fill feature It gives you that ability to generate, you know, content within your tasks. I would again, I would probably be very skeptical of that. But you know, that’s my nature. Yeah, so I like I like the idea here, it has something that they’re calling automated sprints. These Sprint’s look to me like quick steps in Outlook, but for projects, and so the ability to have multiple actions taken by virtue of up in the project management system, so you can look at the various legs of a project. And it seems like some of those things are a workflow automated in the system. So I liked that idea of having, you know, like I said it to me, it feels like quick steps from Outlook in, in a project management form. And so I liked that I liked that flavor of things. So we’ll see it has lots of integrations into GitHub, Slack and other tools, which is great figma JIRA amplitude, it seems like they’re building more and more as they go. I have not had a chance to play with this. But I can, I can see how this can be useful to a lot of people. Because what do you what do you think? Is the is the right team that would want to utilize this?

Augusto Pinaud 1:01:10
You know, I think I think this is, this is perfectly aim for startups where they need a tool that they can add and modify and make things as they go. I don’t know if it’s a proper project management tool, unless you have really people heavy into the understanding of project management. That was my concern. Because when you said you can do everything, that’s normally a red flag for me, not because you can or cannot do everything. But because most people don’t understand the basics off, then they get themselves in trouble.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:01:55
I got it, I guess. All right. On to our analysis, you’ve got two announcements, and then we’ll close out.

Augusto Pinaud 1:02:01
So well, one, we have to announcements. One is Google Chat. GPT rebuild, a rival just announced on the search. And you can read more Apple announced the July Friday Night Baseball is scheduled for Apple TV plus. And you know, I really loved that I am not a big baseball guy, but my family is. And it’s very nice. Well, we’re going to do it. And they know what what games are coming. And finally, we have the Apple event today, there was a bunch of announcements there replay is including, obviously the secret ber thing that we knew that we’re going to be announcing. But if you want to look, those announcements and those news, they are there for you.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:02:52
Wonderful. And I will note that I have had access to the search labs within Google search for the past couple of weeks, and I’ve been utilizing it and it feels very fluid to me, I think they’ve done a really great job, I actually really liked the fact that they have, they give you a choice in and when it presents the AI components versus when it doesn’t. And so that’s been actually really lovely. I’ve liked the way in which he’s done it, it’s not always been correct. I think it will get better over time. So you know, I’ve asked it to do things, like summarizing an article in the search, and it doesn’t quite summarize the article, it provides me a summary of things. And then it references other articles about the article I provided to it. So there’s a little bit of, you know, dullness to the to the system in that sense. But I think it will get smarter, as you see more and more of it being utilized it utilized. And I do like the fact that in, in some cases, and I don’t know how to make it not do this. But I like the idea of it just being there. And it not always presenting itself. But that giving me the option to be able to launch it. And when you do a search generally, like you wanted to find a word, you can you can obviously just type the word define. And then you know, and then type that word into the Google search. It will go ahead and do that search. It will generate it, it’ll show you the rest of those SERPs, right, rest of the surface search engine results page. But above it, it will show you the the generative AI item there and it gives you these chips at the bottom. And it says hey, you want to ask a follow up question. So you can continue to dialogue with the AI if you want to. But it also presents other chips that are other questions that you can potentially ask it. So I typed in here define stochastic right? And so it goes ahead and gives me the definition of stochastic but then below it it says hey, you want to ask a follow up so that I can either narrow the search or broaden the search as I need want to. But then it says hey, what’s the difference between random and stochastic Right? Or what’s the difference between stochastic and probabilistic and So it continues to give me these other options, mind you, right to the right, it’s showing me cards that tell me where the sources came from, for this particular search, which I think is really smart, from Google’s perspective, to be showing us these kinds of things, that GPT is not doing that, right. It’s experimental. And it’s just, you know, vomiting stuff into your into existence and existence, telling you where it’s coming from and outsourcing it. Bing and Google have decided to give you this kind of sourcing, it’s very, very important and powerful. And to a great extent, it gives me a little bit more solace, maybe a little bit more calmness, that these things are going to be generative in a an accurate way, as opposed to an inaccurate way. But again, I’m gonna stay skeptical in that sense. All right. With that we have reached the end of our stories for this week, I do. So thank you so much for all the work you do to make Anything But Idle happen. With that on anything, but idle.com, you’ll find our show notes, they’ll have links to all the stories or tools of the week, and extra stories that we didn’t get a chance to cover. And it also includes text transcripts, one that’s readable right there on the page, and one that you can Download as PDF, and listen and read and flying as you listen to the podcast. If you review the notes, and there’s a story that we missed, feel free to leave a comment on anything but idle.com forward slash 117, which is the episode number for this page, the URL to the episode for this episode, the URL for this episode. You can also tweet at us at Anything But Idle, you can use our contact form on the website, the absolute best place that you can engage with us is by going to anything but idle.com forward slash community that will go ahead and take you to our community, our group that lives inside of personal productivity club, and so it’s free, you can join and then you can interact with us around the episode. And so with that, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of the show. See you all next time on Anything But Idle. Here’s to productive life.

[/read]

Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.

In this Cast | Notion Projects Arrives to Help Organize Projects

Headlines & Show Notes | Notion Projects Arrives to Help Organize Projects

Raw Text Transcript | DRAFT

Leave a Reply Cancel reply