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This week, we discuss: Will Google Assistant Push Aside Samsung Bixby on Samsung Devices? and lots of other personal productivity and technology news that happened in the past week.
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In this Cast | Will Google Assistant Push Aside Samsung Bixby on Samsung Devices?
Headlines & Show Notes
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Phone backup and a new storage manager in the Google One app
Google Cloud Claims Another Win With Box Partnership
Google Lens appears in Gboard with ‘send to keyboard’ – 9to5Google
Google employees working from home until summer 2021 – Business Insider
Nozbe Teams launches today on Product Hunt! – by Michael Sliwinski
- Getting Things Done in Nozbe Teams with Nozbe CEO Michael Sliwinski (ProductivityCast)
Amazon Debuts Revamped Alexa App That’s Rolling Out to iOS Users Soon – MacRumors
Microsoft Teams | New Meeting Experience – First Look – YouTube
Microsoft is about to solve one of the web’s biggest problems | TechRadar
Microsoft Analyzed Data on Its Newly Remote Workforce
Microsoft (MSFT) earnings Q4 2020
How to Use Airtable, Trello, and Other Apps to Fix Your Life | WIRED
Protect Yourself From the Hack of Alcohol Delivery Service Drizly
CES 2021 shifts to fully virtual experience after originally planning for in-person event – 9to5Mac
This Company’s New 2-Sentence Remote Work Policy Is the Best I’ve Ever Heard | Inc.com
Target and Walmart May Have Just Killed Black Friday as We Know It – Slashdot
Your tax refund from the IRS this year may be a lot bigger than you expected – BGR
Spotify says listener habits are almost back to pre-pandemic levels | Engadget
It’s time to redefine workplace productivity | TechRadar
Council Post: Productivity Tracking: The Do’s And Don’ts For Successful Implementation
Carleton Students Create Browser Extension to Help Remote Workers
What Is Intuitive Scheduling? This Hack Could Be The Key To Better Productivity
- The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play by Neil Fiore, PhD
- Unschedule video tutorial and template
Apple starts making first flagship iPhone in India – The Verge
Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 111 With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements -MacRumors
My favorite new iOS 14 feature so far is a hidden iPhone trick you’ll use all the time – BGR
New Tools of the Week
Mimestream | A native Gmail client for macOS
Roam Research – A note taking tool for networked thought.
Featured Story of the Week
Google reportedly negotiating with Samsung to push Assistant over Bixby – The Verge
Announcement
What to expect from Samsung’s Unpacked event next week | Engadget
Raw Text Transcript | Will Google Assistant Push Aside Samsung Bixby on Samsung Devices?
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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).
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00
Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community Welcome to anything but idle, the productivity news podcast. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:05
I’m Augsuto Pinaud.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:06
And we’re your hosts for anything but idle. This is Episode 15. And we’re recording this on July 30 2020. Each week, we cover the productivity news headlines of the week. So you know what’s going on in the current research tools, services, products and more in the world of personal productivity. And so with that, let’s get into our headlines. Augusto. What is our first headline of the week?
Augusto Pinaud 0:28
The first headline of the week is pretty exciting is that phone backup application from google google launch sometime last year, what they call the Google one where they’re trying to make simplify the invoicing for storage and these things and now they release a new application for my for iOS, as well as Google Android phones, where you can go and do the backup of those phones and the data of those phones really released into your Google Drive into your Google one. It works incredibly well, it was really exciting for me because I see a lot of problems with people not backing up their data, their pictures, their stuff, even that every technology company has tried to make it simple. People still don’t back up. So having one more thing that we can recommend to people. It’s exciting
Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:17
for me, I love the new functionality being pulled in from Google files. So if you’re using the Google files app, where it helps you clean up the storage on your system, those functionalities will be pulled into the Google one app eventually, or, you know now when the new app launches, so that is great. Next up, Google has won a contract by their partnership with box if you don’t know what boxes, boxes, a Dropbox competitor, so this online storage and productivity collaboration platform, they have just secured a contract with them, beating out Microsoft Azure and Amazon’s AWS. They also got MLB, the Major League Baseball contract ranked in March. So this is kind of their, their got a bit of momentum underneath the Google Cloud CEO Thomas curien. So good on them. And they’re going to keep on making inroads to catch up with Microsoft, as well as Amazon in cloud services. So more of your productivity is going to be housed within Google Cloud. I’m interested to see whether or not that means more and better integration, since they’ll be running separate. But now they’re running on the same technologies in the background, which means that there may be opportunities for those technologies to talk to each other better that are running on Google Cloud.
Augusto Pinaud 2:38
The next one, it’s also Google News is Google lense is starting to appear in some of the keyboard integrations so you can now use that directly in your keyboard there is an article where you will see how in the in the park you How were you had the one hand that you now have the Google lens so it common for people to the keyboards on Android devices.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:04
So Google lense is Google’s product to be able to use the camera to be able to identify things in the world, whether that be a product, a barcode QR code, or otherwise. And now the idea of being able to copy text that you see in the real world, and use that in your phone is now possible with this update for G board. If you have a sheet of paper and you want to be able to lift the text off off the paper, now lens will be able to give you that functionality. But you could also put lens on a on a billboard, and grab the URL from the Billboard and now it’s on your keyboard clipboard in G board. And you can just go right directly to that URL very, very powerful stuff that I think is going to really not only increase productivity, but you know, in the in the business world now give more capabilities to businesses to connect digital displays. And out there in the real world, as well as you know, any any type of physical display out there in the real world and connect that to the digital. So very cool. All right, rounding out our Google News. This week,
Augusto Pinaud 4:11
Google announced that they will extend their employees on working from home until at least the summer of 2021. They reserve the right to extend that deadline but at least now there’s going to be until the end of July, that people are Google employees are going to be mostly working from home or working from home. It has been an interesting change as you see many many many major technology players extending those headlines and moving forward so that shows that sadly, we are not moving really forward regarding this pandemic and COVID-19 and everything else.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:51
This next news shifts gears to Nozbe Teams has launched on Product Hunt. Agusta Do you want to give us a little bit of background here on As B teams and what the big news is,
Augusto Pinaud 5:02
yes. So Nozbe Teams is a different way to look at productivity that has come from the people who make Nozbe Personal that are the Nozbe people. They came, and they surprised that they’ve been working for a while we had the chance to interview the CEO Michael Sliwinski on another podcast ProductivityCast they built now an application where instead of focus into that component of personal productivity, there are companies focusing on the component of organizational productivity. Everybody been dealing and looking at the same things and the same projects and been able to comment and reduce the friction of email and slack and text and everything else and they’ve been continuing to this is the first time they launched a product on Product Hunt. They were really really excited and it has a really cool video they even find out a professional videographer who did the video The video is in the link. So if you are looking for a different approach. Nozbe Teams, it’s one of those.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:06
And now over to Amazon, and big A. So the big a app has rolled out a new iOS version that’s coming soon. And what is coming in the new Amazon app,
Augusto Pinaud 6:22
the Alexa app for iOS has always been clunky. Okay, that’s the sad way to refer.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:31
But it has also has improved consistently for a while. So they now when and really revamped the whole thing made a lot a lot better. And even now there was a new improvements of iOS, you will be able to open the app put it on the desk and interact directly with it that currently version you can only in order to do that you need to click but this is still pretty cool, you know, more and more. It’s getting to play a big game and I think Now the third big competitor against the apple ad, the big G, Amazon is putting personalized functions up for people who have been using the app. And so they’re putting Amazon services kind of in this, you know, machine learning algorithm and showing amazon music or audible or reminders and shopping lists where they think you will need it. When you open up the app. For those who are new to the app, they’re going to get recommendations in terms of what the app can do what big a can actually do. And that will help give them suggestions and tips for being more productive with the tool. With that, that takes us over to some news from Microsoft. And Microsoft is putting out a new team’s experience. And so the Microsoft team’s meeting experience is going to be updated, and several things are coming to the platform in that regard. And so you’re going to see the ability to now Take meetings in separate windows. So when you’re in Microsoft Teams right now, you know, you open up a new meeting, you’re stuck in that same window. Now, you’ll be able to separate the meetings so that you could dock say, a meeting on the right side and still see the team’s other teams window on the on the other side. So that’s really great. The toolbar will now be on the top. And and then you’ll you’re also going to get a new gallery view. And the together review, which is where Microsoft takes all of the videos and kind of lays them into what looks like theater style seating, and so that everybody is kind of in the same quote unquote, virtual room together. That’s kind of cool. There’s some other minor changes to the new meeting experience. And so this will come to at the present moment Windows and Mac users, this won’t be scaled out for everyone yet. So you should start seeing this in the targeted users category. And this is not available in the browser, either or Linux, so Windows and Mac targeted users. And presumably after that, they’ll roll it out to everyone else. But the new meeting experience is coming. There is an update for it once you are identified as a user to get the roll out, and you know, you do the update, and then it will go ahead and put you into the new meeting experience. Okay, Microsoft made some updates to Microsoft Edge. What are they doing?
Augusto Pinaud 9:26
This is quite interesting for me, and we were discussing this outside of the show a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft one and create edge based on chromium. So based on the same principles that Google Chrome has, and this article, you know, it’s going to bring the Do Not Disturb is going to bring some improvements into the dark modes, and is trying to improve the way you get notifications. That is the main thing of the article is how do you get the notifications to be less prominent than than they are on other systems and they’re claiming that To be a big, big solution. And I don’t know about that, I know it is important to manage your notifications. And I also know there is a lot of people who don’t know how to manage them. But notifications play an important role. I think that’s one of the things that iOS allows you to do. With notifications that is really powerful, where you can define which ones you don’t care. And you don’t need to have them which ones you want a minimum interruption versus one, the ones that you want to interrupt you. And I think giving more options is better than deciding what the options should be. So it will be interesting to see what edge is going to actually bring and how that’s going to work in the real implementation.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:42
Continuing on with Microsoft news. Microsoft took the opportunity of being in this new remote work environment to do some analysis on their workforce. And so over the past few months, they have been tracking several teams working and they’ve identified that in a new published report on Harvard Business Review. So I just felt like it was a good look at this. And they looked at, you know, their 90,000 employees across the system for certain types of metrics against the smaller group that they were looking at in terms of the remote work environment. Yes. So some some interesting insights that came out of this at any anything that stuck out for you with Augusto.
Augusto Pinaud 11:26
There was one thing that was interesting to me where they talk about employees who will protected their weekend that was slipping terminology they use and how they have now increased that work over the weekend. And I like data. I know data can live. The beauty of this data is can be presented in many ways. And this is one of the things that I’ve been arguing lately when people come Well, I’m now working more over the weekends. Yes. But you’re also are having during the week time that you didn’t have it before. So what I would love to see on this question is not Are you working more on the weekend? But overall, how much that has a balance? Because yes, you may have tripled the work or the communication over the weekend, but also how much things now you can do on the other side of that equation during the week that you may not be able to do during the week, how many lunches now? Are you having, you know, with a family or dinners with a family or, or those kind of things. So I think those kind of things on on any study like this one or anybody else, it’s important to look at the data but understand how the data is coming. And I will love to get more information on those things, because I don’t see, as I said, the beginning of the pandemic, people complaining about that. Those complaints are coming down because I think people is also starting to look the other side of that equation. But yes, I may be sending more emails on Saturday morning, but I’ve also been able to do these other things Monday to Friday, and I’m okay with With that,
Raymond Sidney-Smith 13:00
and so to round out Microsoft news this week,
Augusto Pinaud 13:03
CNBC it’s saying that there is a 13% of revenue grow despite of Coronavirus and as I said earlier today I am not publicly not a big fan of a big fan of Microsoft but I’ve been impressed with the work they have done on the pandemic, they have really got into understanding we are, you know, one of the major tools that people will use, what can we do to use this opportunity to make them better and as teams and other pieces I mean, these are big monster software, it’s difficult to improve and change but they have been really trying to get the people to use the tools and to integrate the tools and to make it better. It may have been a thing of the fate that they did everything was already planned six months ahead on everything happened in this 90 days but the reality is they impression in these 90 days is Microsoft has been really On top of the game on how can that their products can be used for better in the current conditions.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:06
Next up is a an article from wired. It’s actually from February, but it came up in, I think my feed recently and I thought it was worth sharing with you all. In essence, it is talking about how to use some productivity apps, productivity software, to what it says, fix your life. And I just thought it was interesting to look at the list of things that allowed you to be able to use productivity apps in ways in which you wouldn’t traditionally think about it, and how they could be helpful. And so some examples are hacking Google Sheets in order to create a playlist. And one individual is using a code editor for programmers Microsoft Visual Studio code, in this case, to be his notetaking application of choice, which is great for him and a person who’s using a dating app to find out employment to find a job. Just really interesting ways. And I just think, you know, reading the article, hopefully will give you a sense of maybe how to look at your productivity tools that you’re using, really all of your software and that you’re using, and thinking of different ways in which they may be able to help you outside of their stated use. And I think that’s just a really interesting perspective. All right, next up, there is some cybersecurity news. Coming out of the drizzly app, what’s going on there?
Augusto Pinaud 15:33
Well, recently app was recently hacked. So if you put your credit card directly on the app, your credit card may have been compromised. But I bring this news for a couple of reasons. Two weeks past we talk about, do we bring a product or service that allows you to create a temporary credit card same as the Apple Pay do same as Google Pay do. So I got the notification from them saying hey, we were coming My eyes. And when I look into Dallas, I have only use Apple Pay with them that create a new number every time. So I was. So I wanted to bring these because I wanted to make the importance of that news when we mentioned that product and use in systems that will protect your actual credit card number that cannot change in a dynamic way. So if you were affected by this sorry, but it’s time to call the bank and monitor your credit card and look into the future how you can protect yourself with this really security ways to continue using your card in the online world.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 16:41
Continuing on. And just as a forcing function of the pandemic. Ces, the Consumer Electronics Show 2021 has decided to shift to a fully virtual experience. I said that correctly. 2021 CES 2021 will be a fully virtual exhibition. experience. So even things into next year are now going virtual preemptively because we are where we are with regard to the pandemic. So just be mindful of that.
Augusto Pinaud 17:14
It is interesting as a person who for many years, went to CES and was part of CES, it’s hard to imagine CES going virtual and how that’s going to work. That said, I think is a really, really fascinating challenge for for the people of CES. CES, if you’re not familiar with a Consumer Electronics Show basically takes over the city of Las Vegas and any space can I locate people, it’s taken for something from the convention center from the open spaces from the hotels, people rent hotel rooms, so they make them or turn them into conference rooms. It is it is really crazy. And this reason change and how this year next year CES is going to have and what that’s going to happen in the world of consumer electronics and dealings. You know, there is a lot of international consumer electronic people who travel from China and Hong Kong and Asia in general and Europe. I’m common. This is a big big meeting. So it’s going to be interesting what’s happening. 2021 we sold this.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:25
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Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:26
Before the break, we were discussing headlines and so let’s do a rapid fire of the next set of headlines at gousto
Augusto Pinaud 19:33
Siemens recent make an announcement that all of us have known to be true, but he’s awesome to hear it from a company they’re going to adopt a new model where people can average two or three days a week, you know, working from anywhere. And the CEO came basically and said, well, we’re looking into a bottle, you know where we trust our employees and we empower them to work themselves to achieve the best possible result. sold. Hopefully this is the first steps into publicly changing those two things, trust with employees and lead them or empower them to do their best work. It was a really exciting thing for me to read this massive companies starting to look into what a small business has known for years,
Raymond Sidney-Smith 20:19
you know, the number of hours spent, but in chair is not the right metric for productivity. outcomes are the right metric. And it’s really, as you said, great to see a major CEO make that stance apparent. Next up, target and Walmart have both just decided to cancel Black Friday, which is the shopping holiday after Thanksgiving day here in the United States. The changes that will that will be downstream from that are going to be really interesting.
Augusto Pinaud 20:50
So tax refund. This will be for some people a lot bigger than some expected because the IRS is been beating On the payments on by law, if they are behind on your tax refund, they need to pay you interest. So some people will be happily surprised to get more than one refund, the refund, and then the interest payment for that. So hey, some good news in in the midst of every other news that we’re looking right now,
Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:18
next up, Spotify has said that listener habits are basically coming back to their normative levels before the pandemic. So Spotify has noted that they have roughly 300 million users around the around the globe. And they have noted that their listening numbers are basically back to where they were before, and their revenue has increased. And they have started to go out there and make more inroads into the podcast world. They’ve brought the Michelle Obama podcast on board. And so they’re really doing what they can to, to stabilize their own business. But at the same time, just noting the fact that we’re all kind of just getting used to this new normal is probably a good sign. You know, we shouldn’t let our guard down regarding, you know, fighting the virus, but that people are not maybe as anxious and they’re capable of reaching out and doing more entertainment in the way in which they used to, is probably a good sign for mental health and for everyone.
Augusto Pinaud 22:20
The next article comes from Forbes productivity, tracking the do’s and don’ts from successful implementation. And again, it’s a good article to read it’s but not necessarily bringing any new but it’s important to discover which are where are the red flags that you have an that you need to identify for you same thing as planned, see what are the metrics you need? And you need to they’re irrelevant. When you measure your own productivity and I love them. They said stop trying to micromanage everything and invite and invade personal privacy that is really really important as well as Try to be supportive for your team and not to create more stress.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:03
Yeah, I think the message is that if people feel like they’re being watched, they’re going to have reduced productivity. All right, next up is news out of Canada. at Carleton University. They a pair of students have created a an application called hourglass. It basically does tracks screen usage and gives prompts in terms of how people can do more meaningful work on their computers. And so this is a browser extension, you can get access to it by by going to the website on in the link in the show notes. And you can just download it and install it. And in essence, it gives you a little dashboard display of what websites you were on and how much you spent on those websites, shows trends. And so useful little app so it’s it’s kind of like rescue time light. Okay, next up intuitive scheduling.
Augusto Pinaud 23:57
This was an interesting article. I don’t know if I necessarily agree 100% of, of the concept, but I think there were a couple of things that you know, they are trying to get some of famous Marie Kondo principles to to scheduling and what brings you joy will bring me joy is not having meetings. Doesn’t happen yet. Okay. But But on the other side, it brings another two elements for me that were that I’ve been advising to my client for a year. And it’s where you create breaks, where you create those mindful breaks and on how you’re going to look at the calendar to now that the meetings are change, how can you bring yourself those breaks that you need? Well to catch up, we’ll process the notes well to rest and decompress and you can be on the top of the game on the next meeting. So it was interesting reading. I don’t know if I’m able to bring Those Marie Kondo you know whatever sparked me Joe joy into into my calendar. But again, the other two points, two points, I think were really valid points.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:10
I appreciate the concept, which is it just brings mindfulness to your calendar and and people who are more aware of their inner world and wanting to use that as use their intuition for that that’s fine. But you know, there are things like the now habit by Dr. Neil Fiore that helps you create the unschedule that really does this stuff in a much more thoughtful research based perspective. So I would definitely encourage listeners to check out the unschedule and the now habit and look at those things that actually, we know work for you. She’s She’s lightly touching on here in some ways, but really isn’t doing it in the most thoughtful manner. So I think, great if you want to try it and it works for you, but I would would probably look at the unscheduled material and and check that out. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. Okay, next up, Apple is going to be making their first flagship phone in India, they’re going to be making the iPhone 11 and assembling it in Chennai. And that is huge news. I mean, they’ve been predominantly using, you know, Foxconn to produce these phones in in China. And now they are going to be bringing India on board to be producing their phones and so we’ll see perhaps more and more phones being made in India and and how that will affect supply chain delivery times. All of those things for Apple to be able to reduce costs, predominantly, you know, their import duties that they’re paying, and, and of course, speed to, to market. Next up Apple releases Safari technology preview. 111 What did they fix?
Augusto Pinaud 27:02
It seems like we were releasing one of these every week, we should remember that iOS 14 is coming and the big sore that is a big change, we’re changing the chips on the back end. So we’re going to see a little bit more of this once and then after that they’re going to to disappear. But we’re going back. So the this one includes bug fixes and performance improvements from web impactor, inspector scrolling, rendering, the Web API and text manipulation. So it is I installed him I play with them and it is it is solid. I like it so good again, required to have the little geek
Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:39
Bowdin Colleges giving students iPad pros magic keyboards and iPad pencils to start online classes in the fall. And this is really a unique change from say moving to two laptops that they would be giving out like a MacBook Air to Dell, the iPad Pro model with the magic keyboard and Apple Pencil. Really, you know, it’s for a number of different things, the better camera, better processing power. And it gives them multimodal use, right? It can be a laptop, it can be a tablet, and now it’s going to give them also the ability to have more streamlined app experience across their devices. And so the students are all getting them and, and starting, you know, with that, and of course, Apple has all of their assistive features built into their iPad OS. And so they’re going to get the benefit of the vision, vision, hearing, mobility and other learning needs, assistive features built in into it. So very cool to see a college you know, taking a good stance here, I have a friend who’s a professor there at Bowden and and I’m excited to see the experience, kind of behind the scenes of students using the iPad Pro in an education environment.
Augusto Pinaud 27:47
And I think there was something that administrator, quote, last quote on the article saying that with all this pandemic, and the students don’t know if they’re going to be able to come or not come, you know, to the day to day experience live, this will also give them LTE. So students who may have or may not have a great internet connection will be able to keep all this connection that the MacBooks don’t have it. So given that it also means that students are going to get or being able to get a lot more out of the device and experience, I think it’s a great step. I think that products is great for that. And the camera without a doubt is much better than the MacBook Air. Next up is a feature that came into iOS 11 disappear on iOS 13. And it is the ability to touch your screen two or three times and configure what’s going to do so now you will be able to do again on the touch double tap and triple tap and get your phone to do stuff when iOS 14 gets ready. In our coverage, you will be able to configure double tap to open Control Center for example, or triple tap to open Notification Center. So, right now you can activate on current iOS 13, only to do the accessibility, but do once removed to be able to access other things. So that is for people who use those advanced features on iOS, the iPads on their phone at some exciting exciting news. The last news we have is parallels parallels he’s working into simplify the experience with parallel six on Windows and Mac. The parallels has been a great device or a great component for many years and change companies a couple of times, but it’s giving now access to the people to be able to do remote support to remote quick support with a new version. So you can now send a link to somebody and share their screen on old ads without using soom in a intuitive way, in a certain way, more importantly allows you to work with their mouths and their keyboard, assuming they give you or they approve you to do that they authorize you to do that. That is allowing people to work much better regardless if you are on an iPad on a Windows on a Mac.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:17
And with that, those are headlines for this week. And that takes us to our science of productivity segment with Matt Plummer of Zarvana. Matt, take it away.
Matt Plummer 31:26
The science of productivity segment brings you scientific insights you can trust into how to accomplish your goals faster. In this week’s segment, I want to share new research on whether agile methods increase or decrease team innovation. agile methodologies emerged in the 1970s with the goal of facilitating more adaptive and innovative ways of developing software. After getting its more formal roots in around 2000 2001 when a group of developers met in Utah to talk through, you know some of these more lightweight project management approach agile has become the go to project management approach definitely in software development, and increasingly in other fields. And that’s because it’s thought to improve the agility of teams, enabling them both to be more innovative and to waste less time on work that ultimately becomes irrelevant. As Jeff Sutherland, you know, one of the CO creators of Agile said, quote, innovation is what agile is all about. companies that create an environment in which agile flourishes find that teams can churn out innovations faster, and quote, however, emerging research from Harvard Business School professors, Saru goosh and Andy Wu suggests that agile has a mixed effect on innovation. Goosen Wu embedded an experiment within a hackathon software development competition at Google. And what they found was that the teams using agile scored higher on one dimension of innovation that has value but lower on the other dimension of innovation, novelty Essentially teams using agile created more valuable, but less novel products, specifically to agile practices drive this increase in value and decrease in novelty. The first is taking time to define and update team goals, that coordination activity and secondly, a high frequency of meetings novelties. He comes from allowing individuals to think differently from each other, and then to bring their creative ideas back to the team. But frequent coordination focused meetings prevent this from happening, teams may need to rotate between periods of high frequency coordination meetings and lower frequency meetings to produce more innovative ideas.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:40
Thank you, Matt. That was Matt Plummer from Zavala. Now, let’s get into our new tools of the week segment of this show. And I come across many personal development time task project management and productivity collaboration tools and services each week. Some we use some standout from the pack. And so in our segment, new tools of the week, we each bring you a tool we think you might like. This week, I’m bringing mindstream. mindstream is a gmail interface application. In essence, what it does is on the Mac OS, you have to have Catalina, or later and it creates an application for your Gmail or G Suite account. And it just gives this wonderful interface for you to use Gmail, it puts all the features that you want Gmail to have in an application environment, and they are in a beta stage. So it’s currently free, they will eventually charge for the application. They just give you this beautifully designed Gmail client on the Mac OS. And you can use dark mode, you can, you know, structure, the interface the way that you like it. And it’s just optimized to be fast and a familiarization experience on the Mac OS by giving you kind of the flavor of the mail, you know, it’s got, it’s got mail oriented buttons, and so on and so forth. You can have multiple accounts, you can manage your labels in Gmail, many people kind of don’t quite grok, the folder structure when they pull Gmail into another client. This one is showing labels natively, so that you can really manage labels properly, and it gives you all of your inboxes. You know, Gmail gives you Gmail categories, promotions, updates, forums, and so on and so forth. Well, it’s putting those directly in the mailbox environment so that you can go ahead and really work well in a gmail environment, multiple signatures, really good stuff built into the application. I’m looking forward to seeing how they develop and how people use it. So far, I’ve been able to go to request access, type in my email address and immediately be able to download it. So go ahead and give it a try if you if you’d like to during the beta for free. So what’s your tool of the week
Augusto Pinaud 36:01
an application called Roam Roam research that allows you to create a network of your notes. So you can go and create a note and said okay, well, for example, you can go and say well I’m doing this research about iPad magic keyboard and then now create that as an hiper link for another node that has all that what I have found are all the links I have about the apple magic keyboard. So it is a really interesting it’s a paid service is around $15 per month, it was really caught my attention because especially for research for it may allows you to now create a whole network of where though things are instead of getting lost sometimes in a similar way that tags can do and we have been doing it with tags. It will allows you to sort and organize your information. I know some people do this or similar to this in our Now it was attacks and other pieces of software. But again, it was a really different approach. And it really got my attention how simple it seems to and how powerful it seems to do all this integration.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:13
And with that, let’s get into our featured story of the week Augusto. So this week, Google as been negotiating behind the scenes, it’s being reported with Samsung over something really major, which is what, what are they doing?
Augusto Pinaud 37:29
They are trying to push Google Assistant over Bixby for Samsung. And I think he’s going to be a big deal. I am not a Samsung user. I’m not a Android user. For that matter. I’m I live on iOS, but but I think one of the things that I have always liked about iOS is the fact that doesn’t matter which device I grab, I found exactly the same thing. This iPad is a phone. And I think it’s really, really important that Google accomplished this and then can provide for Android users. The same universal experience doesn’t matter if you grab a pixel, you grab a Samsung and you grab something else. And that will additionally give them a better experience to every user across the board. So I think it’s a really, really exciting news that Google is trying to bring uniformity in this.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:21
Yeah, this is a really interesting development. I think that it’s going to be interesting to see whether or not Samsung is open to the idea. Samsung has their own app store and their own digital assistant, which is Bixby. And I’m actually not sure how you trigger that. So whether we should even be using that in the podcast. So I apologize to anybody if that triggers your, your assistant, but Samsung has their own assistant. And so the goal here is to figure out whether or not the Google parts the Android parts that Google really wants to bring like the Play Store Get more billing on those devices. I know that I have the pixel line of devices because it gives me a more pure Android experience. And it gives me the Google parts that I really want. And Samsung does not have that, you know, there’s some bloatware there. Some of its good, some of it people like, but I don’t, and I don’t want it, I just want the Google parts. And so I’m very curious because the Samsung hardware is really good. They’ve, you know, the screens are unparalleled. And we really, I like the dex platform and the ability to return your Samsung device into a into a desktop environment. The the tabs, you know, are fantastic, which kind of brings us to a bit of a news of kind of in our announcements today, which is that Samsung is hosting a an event next week by the time you hear it. We will be this week. We’ll be announcing five new devices. And the event is called unpacked, and Augusto. And I will be doing a special episode to cover that event. So stay tuned for the Samsung unpacked event where Samsung is going to be releasing a whole bunch of very interesting things. Was there anything about the Samsung unpacked event you wanted to note because Joe, before we close out,
Augusto Pinaud 40:25
no, I’m still going to stay on iOS. I’m going to report the event and you are not yet trying to convince me to get an Android device.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:34
That that Tab S seven is pretty beautiful in the rumors. So we’ll see. Okay, we have come to the close of our episode, but we have a few items that we want you to know about. If we missed a story, and you want to let us know about it to put in the show notes. Go ahead and head over to anything but idle calm, you can let us know on the contact page. If you want you can Also, tweet or dm us at anything but idle on Twitter. Follow us on social media by finding the links on anything but idle, calm. And if you can, please leave a rating or review on Apple podcasts or Stitcher or if your favorite podcast app does allow giving feedback. Please do that. That helps us grow our personal productivity listening community here at anything but idle. And finally, thanks for joining us for anything but idle, the productivity news podcast. Until next time, here’s your productive life. Take care, everybody.
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