Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00
Welcome to anything but idle the productivity news and commentary podcast. Today’s show is brought to you by W3C Web Services. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith,

Augusto Pinaud 0:09
and I’m Augusto Pinaud,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:11
and we’re your hosts for anything but idle. This is Episode 33. Salesforce buys slack for 27 billion USD, and we’re recording this on December 7 2020. Each week we cover and discuss the productivity news and technology news headlines of the week. And each week we bring two panelists with us onto the show to talk about all things in the personal productivity and technology space. Today, we have Dr. Frank buck, who makes organization easy so you can increase productivity, decrease stress, and enjoy life. Global gross has ranked Dr. Buck as number one in the world in the time management category for both 2019 and 2020. From band director, to principal, to Central Office administrator and now to productivity coach, and speaker. Welcome to anything but idle. Dr. Buck.

Frank Buck, EdD 0:58
All right, right. gousto It’s good to be with you this evening. Thanks for inviting,

Unknown Speaker 1:03
welcome back.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:04
Absolutely. Next up we have Francis Wade Francis wait is the author of perfect time based productivity and the host of the upcoming task management and time blocking virtual summit in March 2020. He has lived in Kingston, Jamaica since 2005, and is an avid content creator, newspaper columnist, and cyclist. Welcome to anything but idle. Francis.

Francis Wade 1:24
It’s my pleasure to be here.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:25
Wonderful. Great to have you all here. And this week, I wanted to have a little bit of discussion around our theme this week. Each week, we just start off conversation with a little bit of a theme. And this week, what I want to do is talk about reflecting on 2020 and planning for 2021. And I’m just curious about what are your biggest reflections on the impact on productivity that 2020 had on all of us, not just from the perspective of the of the pandemic and how it really has changed the global workforce and all those things. But really, what things should we thinking be thinking about in terms of reflecting on 2020? And how can we plan for better 2021 who wants to kick us off in terms of conversation there,

Francis Wade 2:09
I think 2020 2020 was a reaction year, a year of surviving scraping through variable and things together, I think productivity took a backseat to doing whatever I need to do to survive and make it through the year. And I think 2021 there’s going to be a bit of a backlash, or backlash, front lash, but whiplash, whiplash, it’s gonna be it’s gonna be a bit of the opposite. I think people are going to settle down, realize that we’re not going to, most of us aren’t going to die or anything, we’re actually going to make it through and given that we’re going to make it through Are we going to go back to what we had before, are we going to go to something better. And that’s going to require some thinking. So I think we’re going to go back to thinking I don’t think this was a year of thinking or even trying to be productive. But I think next year will be

Frank Buck, EdD 3:01
now for me, for me, with sort of everything shut down. And so many things being canceled. It was the suddenly the gift of time that I was home, doing whatever it was that I wanted to do. And I was able to undertake some projects that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to undertake before. So many things where I would have gotten in the car and driven an hour or two or gotten on an airplane, and spent two days engaged in turned out to be something done online in an hour or two hours. So you’re doing the best with the hand that’s Delta’s.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:41
But personally, I don’t feel the worst for where likewise, I have to say that this year was definitely a weird weird year for me. And reflecting on it, I got more done this year, because I wasn’t traveling and had more time, at the same time work for me and just the nature of the industry that I’m in sped up exponentially. I mean, there’s just a deluge of new work that landed on my plate. And that required me to have to do that. So in terms of reflecting on 2020, I think it’s really important for us all to take stock in really what things worked this year, what things didn’t work this year, and what things going forward into 2021 are going to work for you in a state of flux, we’re going to be in the state for at least another six months, potentially nine months more. And we need to be able to be like I know I keep saying this throughout the year flexible, dynamic, you know, we have to be adaptive in this environment. And so what are those parts of your productivity system that are currently doing that? What parts are working well, which parts are not? And can you rise to the occasion of kind of fixing those pieces that are not working for you and that are maybe a little too rigid or maybe are missing maybe there’s like a missing productivity system. That’s not that’s, that’s that can be implemented to bridge the gap. There. I think that’s the part that I want to really hone in for everyone is, in this reflection time, where we’re coming to the close of 2020, the calendar year, you should really be thinking about next year and how you can, you know, really bridge those gaps and say, Okay, these parts are bad for me this year, you know, I had a huge gap in my financial management, or I have a huge gap in my task management. All right, a huge gap in my family management, how can we level up in those ways, and we’re all predictivity of booziest here, right? We know what it’s like to be productive in an environment. And I think now’s the time to be thinking about those things, which is why I wanted to bring up the topic,

Augusto Pinaud 5:34
what I think is really important also, to start with what worked well, because this was an anomaly year, and it has a year that has had really marked periods in which we start in the beginning of the year with, Okay, great, all these great things are going to happen. And then suddenly, what’s going to happen here, oh, we’re going to be closed, not close. So I acknowledge that this is not a traditional year, this is a year who has had periods, we are not going to go remote, then we are going to go remote, but we are going to only go for weeks, and now we are going to be God knows when so take all that uncertainty also plays a role. You know, for a lot of people, he was not only going to home, he was going to home to have now the kids to be, you know, part educator, part parent, part worker, okay, there was a significant amount of variables that were thrown at you. So it’s not only Oh, well, the work that you used to do, or the activities that you used to do. It’s really everyone who is on your clothes, or semi close circle needed to adjust those realities and how you interact with those realities from the people who travel a lot to the people who didn’t travel, you know, I said, Yeah, I didn’t, I set up to be on my home office nine years ago, but the reality is that I set up to send people away, so I could work quietly, okay, not, if not 2020 perform. So um, that part is really, really important, you know, artists signing there Do not strategize based on these year, but it’s trying to gize for another like this year. And I think that is really, really key, you know, we don’t know what is going to be 2021, or at least I will not be, I will don’t have the courage to make a bet on what is going to be 2021. But we know is going to be different than 2019. And there is a lot of things. We all have learned from the productivity standpoint, from efficiency standpoint, from family standpoint. So take into consideration really important, what didn’t work, what worked and what you’re going to do to make it work to make sure you keep what is working, working, and adjust or fix what has not worked. But it’s that part. As a coach, I see so many people are going to change all these things ignoring to make sure that the things that are work, or they identify first the things that are working before they change everything

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:14
wonderful. And so let’s get into our stories this week. What is our first headline of the week? A gousto. You are muted. That’s like one official every show

Augusto Pinaud 8:26
to be at least one every show. Okay, that happened everywhere a spark of the things we don’t do well in 2020.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:34
Okay, first headline.

Augusto Pinaud 8:35
So the first one is Amazon sidewalk. And we’ve been listening, reading and listening about all these projects about make the internet available for everybody. And Amazon is taking their shot at it basically getting their echoes on the rings and their other devices to be that HubSpot. So we can have internet available everywhere. And they announced this September 2019. And well, we know what happened in the in the means between this and now. But now they’re finally getting back to Okay, let’s start implementing this word, Wi Fi network and what are they’re trying to sell? What are going to be the benefits? And also this article talks about the downside. So what do you guys think about this sidewalk? What do you guys think about giving access to your Wi Fi to whoever passed in front of you as you can get Wi Fi to whatever house you pass in front of.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 9:33
So let’s let’s clarify this for everybody. This is a smart neighborhood infrastructure piece that Amazon is rolling out. The idea behind Amazon sidewalk is that it’s a new type of wireless network. In essence, it is a low data. So they’re running this across the 900 megahertz band along with a little bit of Bluetooth low energy to be able to connect mostly smart devices. So your Amazon wring other kinds of echo devices and whatnot are basically connected in this way. It says that it can have a range up to about a half mile. And in essence, you are sharing this network with all of the other people who are connected to what they call the sidewalk bridge. And this is the the platform within Amazon sidewalk that gives your account your Amazon account and those devices access to this network. So in essence, as of Cousteau said, you’re basically sharing this network connectivity among your neighbors, so And anyone who comes into contact with your connectivity, in essence, so say, if your dog has a tile on them, you know, for tracking that them, potentially that tile can be picked up by Amazon sidewalk, but you’re also sharing that data now with the Amazon sidewalk network, and who really has access to that information, aside from Amazon, and what does that really mean? And so there’s a bunch of security implications there and privacy implications there as well.

Francis Wade 11:01
Well, no good in theory.

Augusto Pinaud 11:05
scary to me. It’s,

Frank Buck, EdD 11:08
it’s an interesting concept. I think, just the security, the privacy concerns, I think the average person is already a little suspicious of who is seeing and finding out about them, whatever it may be, even though they’re not doing anything bad. They just, it’s just the principle of the things I want a privacy.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:34
Yeah, yeah. Well, from my perspective, I think that I’m going to deactivate sidewalk, as soon as it shows up in my system, for no other reason than the fact that it is currently, you know, they’re basically beta testing this technology out, and I would really not like to be at that first round of, of connectivity. I’d like to see once it, you know, kind of has its gonna have issues, there’s no question there, they’re trying to push the envelope on this, I don’t particularly feel like you, Frank, I don’t feel like this is like, you know, big bad, you know, technology giant trying to somehow do something wrong. But at the same time, I don’t want to be their guinea pig in making this happen, I don’t want to be their lab rat. So the system is opt out. So you’re automatically added in as soon as one of your devices is made available. So I’m going to opt out. And, and you’ll just see the options. So you go, you know, in your Amazon Alexa app, you’ll just go to settings, account settings, Amazon sidewalk, and then you can go ahead and disable it. But know that if you do have have an Amazon ring, or any number of those devices, you know, you’re going to be automatically enrolled in it. Art is noting here who doesn’t benefit, you know, me or Amazon. And I would imagine that there’s probably has a kind of a combination of benefits. I mean, the reality is, is that some people have really poor connectivity. And now if you have, say, a wireless camera, like one of those Amazon cameras way out on your property, you know, you know, I don’t have a large tract of land, but some people do. And so if it’s out way out there, and that’s near a neighbor’s connection, that’s going to reconnect your Amazon camera and give you greater connectivity further away from say, your home or we fine tuned for Wi Fi network, as opposed to the Amazon sidewalk bridge. So I feel like there are some some trade offs here, of course, but there can be benefits here in being able to extend this network, especially if a lot of people have it. I mean, this is a traditional mesh network. Sorry, this is an a non traditional mesh network, right? Because we’re using other bandwidth protocols, other communication protocols other than just normal Wi Fi. But it’s basically the same concept. The real problem though, is that you’re really connecting to people you don’t necessarily know or trust and so how do you do this in a trustless environment is really kind of the main issue but just know that it’s coming All right, let’s take a take on

Francis Wade 13:57
I think we have an issue given that we have an issue we’re in masks I don’t think that requires a certain level of cooperation just that we don’t make each other sick. I thought that the level of cooperation

Augusto Pinaud 14:07
when you put it that way then people will do it no issues you’re climbing to common sense and let’s go to Amazon Kindle now has common sense and increase our storage to eight gigabytes instead of four. You know the Kindle introduced I don’t know was two or three years ago where they introduced the ability to download on your Kindle audible books and some people with a four gigabyte start having issues now because the audiobooks take a lot more an Amazon trainers that four gigabytes on ebooks was so much that you can download them forever and never think about delete them. As soon as you start putting the audiobooks oops now you don’t fit so I’m a son came and double the internal capacity of the kindle the reader from four gigabytes to eight gigabytes and I think that’s really nice. Yeah,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:00
yeah, so just a couple of things. Some folks in the states will see eight gigabyte models, eight gigabit models, when you purchase them, some people will still see the four gigabit models. So this seems to be mixed. Presumably they’re moving through their older inventory, and then everybody will get eight gigs going forward, I am really sad because I just got a new Kindle and minus the 40 gigabit version. And so I will likely be upgraded very soon, because you know, you could trade it in, you can just do the Amazon Kindle trading program, if you don’t know there’s a trading program, you can just trade it in. So I will be trading it immediately for as soon as I’m able to afford the eight gigabit version. So I’m going to give it a few months to make sure that they’re all eight gigabit models. And then upgrading to that because there’s just no reason not to get double the storage and a much longer longevity out of your device by virtue of having the the, the larger storage capacity. So good on Amazon for doing that.

Francis Wade 15:57
Next up with this though, what’s

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:58
our next story

Augusto Pinaud 15:59
is we’re still in Amazon. And it’s unusual, we get that many. So Amazon is rolling out a type with Alexa feature for the iOS. And basically now you will be able to start doing searches and stuff looking directly with Alexa, text them using all the full device that you can use. You can type to Siri and do a bunch of things. So it for for people who speak a second language, or at least English is their second language, it is interesting, how different is to talk to Google or to the big a or to talk to Siri so having the multiples and any change I this is hard to explain when you this is your second language, your the quality of your pronunciation Annunciation and the language, as you get tired gets worse and worse than worst. So you’d need to change that technology in the morning, Siri understand me much better than in the afternoon when I’m tired that I need to stop using Siri basically. So I’m pretty excited about having this. And being able to search within the app search the routine, the home devices, I am really, really excited about it as our house have many of these things around.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:10
Yeah, and I think this is really great for a whole bunch of other circumstances. Case in point, obviously people who are multilingual, but also, you know, if you are in an environment where sound is an issue, you know, so you have loud music playing, you’re outside in the yard, and you have your phone, but the echo device can’t hear you. You can go ahead and now type into it or the kids are sleeping a spouse or partner is sleeping, you can go ahead and type messages for for things to be executed without you disturbing those folks or the kids are playing. I have not

Unknown Speaker 17:39
thought about that. That. Yeah, that’s a cool use.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:42
Yeah, the that was a big thing for me originally with the Google Assistant. And then as soon as I realized that I could open up the Google Assistant application and type into it what I wanted that removed that barrier of having to say something out loud and wake people in the household, because I have a big booming voice. So it turns out inside of my house, everybody tells me that so I try to be just quieter when I do those things. But I am fairly commanding when I speak to the assistant because it’s the assistant you know, I want it to do what I say. And if I don’t say it at a commanding voice, I won’t do it. So I like the idea that I can type to it more often than not as opposed to, you know, disturbing others with executing things. And so that’s a really good addition to the Amazon Alexa app.

Augusto Pinaud 18:31
Our next news is Apple released their max a dual charger when they announced their new iPhones and we cover on the anything but I don’t special edition with Michael solinsky. We couple the whole the whole thing but they talk about the max safety one basically, it’s a little mad that can charge your phone on your watch and using the new magsafe. charger. So it was a really cool to see it here coming finally out is 129 bucks. So if you have a new device or you were waiting for this, go for it. It’s ready for you.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:06
Yeah, so my understanding here is that it can charge a an iPhone and then another ci certified device simultaneously. And so that’s what I’ve heard, there’s been some obvious reviews that I’ve read that basically say it’s, it is what what you’re getting right $129 USD, and all it does is charge one device plus another. And so the, you know, overpriced, expensive for me sounds just like Apple premium, but I think a lot of people expected it to do more for it. Plus, you have to shell out another 20 bucks in order to buy the power adapter to charge the thing. So this whole notion that Apple is using for kind of environmental purposes, is is you know, there’s basically saying we’re not putting adapters into the boxes of our devices to be able to save in environmental costs. That is environmental impact. But at the same time, people who don’t have adapters for these devices now have to basically buy them if they don’t have them. And that’s going to cost more money for folks. So I think it’s great. I mean, they should be adding more products into the magsafe space now that they have the features on the iPhone 12. And but at the same time, you know, it’s it’s kind of a weird reality for folks. Okay. Yeah, what,

Frank Buck, EdD 20:22
what’s the speed Do you need as far as how long it takes to charge legged on this, as opposed to plugging it in

Augusto Pinaud 20:31
the theory is that at this, if you put it in here will charge around the same time that you have the cable is just the version of the cheap charger. But as I think that do Apple, okay, they now came back the magsafe. And instead of make it as it was, they add a little magnet so your phone doesn’t move. So when you put it in their charge that they all charger didn’t have that. So if you we have an old one that you need to pay attention if you’re charging or not. Now they put a little magnet, so for sure is charging, but in theory it charge on the same speed as the regular cable does.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:09
Alright, moving right along more Apple news.

Augusto Pinaud 21:11
Well, the next article is about the top share and downloaded apps in 2020. And obviously, we will cover the Googles we will cover the the Amazon the apple, but it was interesting to see some of these apps obviously, you know, there they assume was obviously one of them on Tick Tock and but what impressed me the most was on the top paid games was played Inc. for a year of pandemic, okay, that the game must have loaded or one of the game must download it was playing. It was like I had played game playing. I’m not saying it was really fun gaming 2018 19 not as fun in 2020. That part honestly shocked me that that was one of their top games for for this year.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:05
Well for me when it when you look at the top free charts and the top paid charts of the apps themselves, not the games. I think from a productivity perspective, it’s weird for me, because number one is zoom, that makes total sense. Zoom is a productivity tool that we’ve all been using. And zoom became a verb this year, you know, people people are going to zoom with each other. And but at the same time down in what is that eight or nine? We get to 123456789? Yeah, nine places Gmail. So our first productivity app comes out in number nine in the free tier, which just seemed shocking to me, not a single task management or project management application shows up in the top three charts. So that’s just something to kind of pay attention to. It’s not until we get down to Google meat in last place. Is this a 15? Top Free list? Yeah. 15. So in 15, places Google meat, Google and then Google meat and 14th and 15th place. So Google shows up, of course, though, four times in the top 15. And of course, Facebook shows up multiple I’m sorry, no, Google shows up five times, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google and Google meet. So they’re not slacking off on the iOS platform, Google is clearly still dominating in a lot of these ways. amazon shopping shows up there. But then, of course, Facebook shows up multiple times as well. Instagram, Facebook, and messenger. So and WhatsApp, I’m sorry, but WhatsApp as well. So they are definitely you can see that the tech giants still command in the free space, most of the exposure, not a single Microsoft product, which is kind of interesting, that we don’t see any Microsoft products on on the top 15 list, you would I would have thought maybe something would have creeped in, not sure what but I just thought maybe something would have creeped in on the paid side. What I thought was really interesting is that forest showed up, it comes in probably the same eight or nine numbered space. And forest is an application that you basically use it to stay focused, right, it’s in the title forest, stay focused, and it’s a game where you actually play it and the more you you stay focused on a task, the more your forest grows. And so this is a way for you to actually train yourself to focus and, and I know a lot of folks who use it and appreciate using it. But that’s kind of the only productivity what I would consider productivity focused tool that showed up on the list in in this paid list and in both top 15 lists this year. So something to kind of pay attention to.

Frank Buck, EdD 24:39
Well, right if you think maybe that say with the productivity apps that people have already got theirs, they didn’t download it because they’re already using remember the milk they’re already using to do as they’re already using Evernote and of course there are a lot of people out there that are selling you a paper plan or for paper planners a year you know the chapter by one for free 90 days. Yeah, I

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:01
think I think it’s a part of what you’re talking about on the other side is that these lists are somewhat neutered. The reality is, is that Apple is choosing these top lists for their own reasons. I mean, they really aren’t, these aren’t the top of, you know, they basically decide the statistics that choose these top apps, right. So who knows how they choose these as their top apps, it’s not just probably by downloads, they, you know, they know the ones that make them the most money. And so they probably give a little bit more credence to those, and so on and so forth. So, you know, I’m not particularly, you know, not to be like conspiracy theorist here. But, you know, I think that they probably position these to be more in line with what’s going to value be valuable to them more, right, like hotschedules, shows up as number four on the top paid chart. Have you ever heard of hotschedules? I haven’t, you know, and, but but it’s a, but it’s an employee scheduling tool. And, of course, it’s probably going to make them a lot of money by having put it in the top four and more employers recognizing that hotschedules exists, and being like, Oh, you know, what, we have a problem with employee scheduling and, you know, communicating with our staff around schedules, we should use this tool, it’s the top in the top four for 2020. Right. So this is a great opportunity for them to make some money. So I see that as the likely reason for it.

Augusto Pinaud 26:27
Well, that and that is true, and you get a lot of traffic for that, too. There was an article recently from from our friend, Mike solinsky, talking about how when not be going to the top list, not the top 20 for the year, but the top app or the app of the day was what it was he and he share graciously, you know, all the data and or some of the data that he got on and how much traffic he got. That is really, really interesting. How much traffic you got from that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:00
All right, moving right along from the top 20 list to telegram. telegram has a new beta feature out unless you want to tell us about it.

Augusto Pinaud 27:09
Yes, telegram inventor right now. It’s the first third party app to use the announced messages with Siri. So Siri, when you are wearing the apple airports, the pro or the non Pro, and you get a text message. Or I message she said, Siri has the ability to read it that is really convenient. You’re listening and you’re thinking and it read you that text message. And again, for a person who speak multiple languages, that doesn’t work. Every time is really a theory don’t yet read it in the proper language. Read it in English. So when you get them in Spanish, it’s kind of confusing. But telegram now will have that for me. That’s awesome. I’m so excited about it. Because I use that feature a lot. And it’s really convenient to listen to the message, but don’t need to move open the thing. Yes, you got to get into the good distraction, but you only go and respond. Do you know what the message is? and decide? No, I’m not taking right now care of that or just I will. So I’m for one super excited about this. This little little feature?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:17
Yeah, so understand that telegram is in probably second or third place and in numbers. I mean, Whatsapp has 2 billion users worldwide telegram has probably around 400 million, but they will continue to eat up in terms of numbers. I’ve seen more and more people taking on telegram. I feel like I have impacted at least a million of those. Because I just tell everybody how wonderful telegram is. And but telegram is beta beta testing this in testflight, which is the apple test application beta testing application. This is only available the feature called announced messages with Siri is only available for iPods, iPads, Pro, power, beats, power beats pro and Beats Solo Pro, so it’s only going to support those five tools, those types of headphones. So far, you have to be running iOS 13.2 or later for you to be able to get that feature. So over time, I’m presuming they’ll support more headphones and more devices. But right now they’re only supporting those. But I think this is just great. I mean, I love being able to with my Google Pixel pixel buds, I’m able to, you know, have that kind of fluid conversation with Google Assistant to be able to respond back to messages as they’re coming in. And it’s just nice to be able to, you know, answer a message by voice and then go on with your day. So very good there.

Francis Wade 29:39
I can’t imagine the hell that would be for me, I get too many messages. It would be I would be I couldn’t get anything else done other than replying to messages if I were to have that,

Frank Buck, EdD 29:49
sort of sort of like this little voice in your head all the time.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:56
Yeah, you can you can actually disable that or even reduce The notifications so that you’re not getting them constantly for me, I don’t get overburdened by it, I did turn on the email for important email so that I get those notifications in my, in my ears. And that’s been actually quite convenient for me to be able to respond to those most important messages so that I’m getting responses back, especially since they’re usually one or two word responses. I’m not trying to write a book via, you know, voice response. And it’s been pretty good at being able to do the voice transcription, where it’s actually putting in punctuation and getting the thoughts out in clear text. So I’ve been pretty pleased with it. Most of it is one sentence, two sentence responses and not particularly difficult for them to say, artist noting here, one more voice in his head. I love the voice in my head. So I don’t have any problem with that.

Francis Wade 30:53
Okay, your preferred list, please. Thanks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:57
All right, moving on to a an article that was on the Trello blog that I thought was really well done. And so the article is weird, because it’s called what astronauts and submariners can teach us about the necessity of team routines. And what they’re talking about here is the structure of creating routines in in the face of what is changing environment and uncertain environment, and really being able to put in place structure, you know, redundancy, repetitiveness, and therefore reducing anxiety that people might have in team environments. And so they were there talking about some experiments, some some studies that were done on teams of people in submarines, as well as people on the space station, and, and so and so forth. And they came away, they come away, I think, with some interesting components here. One is that structure, like routines, reduces anxiety. And this is well understood. And I’m glad to see them, you know, talking about that. They, they talk about habits and routine. And they somewhat tried to define habits, routine and ritual in the article. And I thought this was a bit muddy for me, because I particularly don’t like that. But the the idea here is that they talk about habits, and which of course, is a repetitive behavior that becomes automatic over time, or is, is automatic in some way, shape, or form, what they call it psychology is automaticity. So it just happens naturally by virtue of a cue, they talk about a routine is something that lacks a cue, but is it a series of repetitive behaviors, and they call those habits, I don’t particularly define a routine as a set of habits, but they are a set of repetitive behaviors, that happens in sequence. So I somewhat disagree there. And maybe I’m disagreeing with the scientists that define routines. But I disagree with that notion, just generally, we can call it habit stacking, if you want to talk about a series of habits strung together, but I don’t see routine as necessitating habits, routines can can be non habitual, and still be useful. Look at the checklist, right? a checklist is can be a routine, you can do the things in a checklist that doesn’t require to be habitual, and you can still do them as a sequence of tasks in a row. So I don’t see that then they talk about rituals. And they say that rituals are basically a routine with some quote, unquote, deeper meaning. And again, like I said, I don’t particularly like to add this, to conflate the scientific piece with the spiritual piece, if you want to have a ritual, and like to see that as more being a spiritual thing. And that should be in the spiritual category. So rituals, great, if you want to have a ritual that’s spiritual to me, I just don’t see that as a routine. So I see the notion of having a routine with a deeper meaning. That to me just calls like, that’s a celebration, doesn’t, it doesn’t seem to me to need to be, you know, like, prayer is a ritual, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t sound like a routine to me in the productivity space on it. I just don’t like the conflating of those of those terms, generally. Anyway, any anything that stood out for you in the article and any thoughts you have on the article?

Augusto Pinaud 34:12
Yeah, but I agree with what you said you know, and I can set as an example my travel checklist, you know, I have not used these years of that Senator, I use it this year, but at the beginning, but it is still a ritual it is what I do what I do every time and it’s not necessarily to have consistency. I I agree with you i already I also enjoy a lot the the article so

Raymond Sidney-Smith 34:36
yeah, so the good five routine items just as a quick run through for everybody, they talked about building good habits with a Trello daily habit tracker, of course, it’s on the Trello blog, so they’re going to feature Trello product, but but I think these are still useful. They kind of have to have a daily habit tracker that they call it. They have something for teams to have an ideal project workflow. Then they have establishing a weekly review, and they Say ritual here. But that would be a retrospective, not a ritual. They say also known as a retrospective, but it’s just really just known as a retrospective. So I don’t know why they are trying to continue to conflate things. They talked about hosting monthly, all hands meetings, and scheduling regular one to one meetings with your colleagues. And again, this is all about establishing routines so that in the face of uncertain times, you’re capable of really having a set of structural components to provide predictability. And then of course, reducing anxiety because people are more productive when they have reduced anxiety, which, of course, means psychological safety, right? You feel mentally safe to be able to risk and, and, and seek out new areas to be curious, and all those other kinds of things. So just good to good to see that written out in mostly good way. I mean, you know, they’ve got a couple pieces there that I don’t particularly just agree with. But you know, I think for the most part, the article provided a pretty good foundation there are is noting a ritual results in completion of actions and the establishment of a state of mind. And again, I just, I just don’t like the term ritual in productivity. I think that that shouldn’t we should we should separate those pieces, but sure, whatever. I’ll keep beating that dead horse.

Frank Buck, EdD 36:14
Yeah. did not read that particular article, but but to me that the whole thing sort of revolves around on the front end, making some decisions about what you want to happen. You know, I think with these routines, we’re probably looking at morally, daily things that you’re doing, although it could be weekly, it could be monthly, it could be yearly, but just making decisions about what you want the future to look like what things need to happen on a regular basis for life to be better for you. And then just building those into assist that happen. So whether it’s a daily repeating tasks or daily repeating set of tasks or weekly repeated set of tasks, and you know, and you’re not having to do that thinking every day. Absolutely,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:01
absolutely. All right, moving right along some new news about Evernote, as all of you know, I can not in just in full disclosure, but in just so that people know I am an Evernote certified consultant and one of the Evernote regional leaders for North America. And actually Dr. Buck is a fellow Evernote certified consultant. And Yep. And so Evernote just released Evernote for Android, the new Evernote for Android. And so you should start seeing this rolling out on certain devices, not all devices. So let me clarify what’s happening here. The new Evernote for Android is coming. And that means that on the across the board, Evernote has rebuilt iOS windows and the Mac apps. So we are capable on the desktop versions running side by side your legacy six dot 25 version that you’ve always been running. And then you can run the Evernote 10 version. Again, you have to have premium, if you have basic, you can only run you know two devices at any given time. So that’s Evernote Web inclusive. But anyway, now we have Evernote Android finally out in its version that’s rolling out for all Android version 10 devices or later, which means that if your Android version nine or earlier, you’re not going to see this new Evernote for Android yet, they’re working on that and are hopefully going to stabilize the those installs and then roll it out to everybody as they make their way through. But this of course brings the same new intuitive editor to the environment, you’re going to have faster search. And of course more powerful search with the new filters. And you know, now you have a consistent interface across all devices, which is really the, you know, part that I’m looking forward to is just using Evernote on all of my devices and then looking and feeling and acting the same in the same way that I’ve always used Evernote. So very happy, happy to see it starting to launch and now having the same consistent interface across all of them as Evernote goes ahead and improves those as well. One final point about this, once you do get the Evernote new Evernote for Android, you can’t go back. So like the with the desktop versions, you can run those two apps parallel. But unlike that on the mobile devices, iOS and Android, you will not be able to revert back to the old one. Android, it’s a little bit easier to kind of you know with baling wire and duct tape to make it go back to the old one. But you’re you’re gonna break a couple things when you do that. So just be mindful of the fact that yes, you could do it touch base with me if you absolutely need to. But for the most part you’re talking about once you go forward on that new version, you’re you’re now in the new Evernote and you’re not going back. Anything else about that? No good, wonderful movies. Good. Moving right along. What’s our next article? Good stuff.

Augusto Pinaud 39:39
So our next article, an article from life, heart life hack.org and is how not to lose focus while working in the article was an interesting article on in quotes. Dr. Newport Professor Newberg and talking about his work on his deep work and but goes about really more focused on distractions. And and it’s really it was interesting it was again, it was a it was a fun read, because one of the things that they’re trying to do is to show what is the importance of that. And how backed by science is I don’t know. But what I like about was the Dan of the article, the 16th, to focus that to improve that focus and, you know, do the physical activities to the digital distractions, and we were talking earlier about the voice in our heads and, but be conscious about the voice that you hear on your heads, as well as the internal distractions, what are your working habits, you know, Francis here, it’s a big proponent of time blocking. So that all those things are there to really help you find what worked for you, you know, what is your physical environment? What are the tools that you use to manage all the things and how can you make them better? So I know, I know, Francis, it you have to, and you do a summit every, every year, this is going to be our second year 2021 on time blocking? So did you had a chance to look at the focus on the article and what you find about it

Francis Wade 41:18
on new thing? Yeah, they are all the points make sense. I don’t I look back at last year, or this year is time blocking summit. Those are different topics that were all covered. I didn’t see any new science that says that you need to do anything new or different. So it’s pretty much reiterate what I’ve read or heard before. And I use a I use a number of the things that they talked about. But I think that the the challenges, as you mentioned before, how do you do it when you’re working from home for the first time? It’s a change in environment that makes it difficult because the workplace a traditional workplace is more helpful, somewhat in terms of being focused? How do you be focused when all of a sudden you have to work from home as kids, there’s other people in the home school, there’s animals running around, there’s phones ringing, there’s an awful lot of distractions come in Adam seen any kind of definitive research or anybody even talking about focusing after you’ve made the transition? The assumption is that you’ll just apply the principles in the same way. And I think we all know from experience that that’s not true.

Frank Buck, EdD 42:22
Yeah. And I think for some people, it’s it’s easier to focus from home. Without the distractions, you know, that there are more distractions in the workplace, co workers sticking their head in the door. And you know, when you’re home, you can, you know, put the phone on silent, you can, you know, you have more control over those distractions is you have small children, etc, etc, etc. So I think it varies so much from person to person,

Augusto Pinaud 42:49
as a principal at heart on x principal, Dr. Bach, we are going to do a road trip to Alabama live you my two kids that you train them on how to not get weaker, so them? week.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 43:03
Fantastic, fantastic. All right, moving along to our next article, Scott, he on blogs at Scott h young.com. And he wrote an article about how to become more curious. And I’m uniquely curious about most things that Scott young writes about, and sometimes I agree, sometimes I disagree. In the recent couple of weeks, he had talked about another article about you know, how to, you know, kind of grow and develop by having conversations with people and he kind of attacked, but he, he said that reading was basically a lesser function than, than having conversations with people who may be more knowledgeable or smarter than you or otherwise. And now he comes up with this article called How to Become more curious. And he talks about this notion of, of looking at the world in curious ways, and really a little bit about the science of curiosity, which is the fact that, you know, not to be, you know, kind of circular logic. But the reality is, is that the more curious you are, the more curious you’ll be, and but what he’s really talking about is that asking questions is important. And this goes to my point, a couple of weeks ago, then maybe last week or the week before that, which is that, the more I look at a book and and recognize that, that when I’m reading, I’m in dialogue with the author, the more curious I am about the material, and the more I get from it. I’m a naturally curious person. So there’s not really a likelihood of low curiosity ever happening in my life. Like curiosity probably happens when people talk to me about things that they think are exciting. But for the most part, things that other people would otherwise think are mundane. I actually want to understand I want to understand how those things work. And so I don’t particularly have that problem, lacking curiosity in many ways, but he talks about really just asking good questions and continuing through That there’s a book about how to learn and the name, how to make it stick, I believe is the name. And it has about four authors. And these were, you know, research scientists who came up with this idea of the concept of learning out of order, so that you learn how to consume in a way that keeps things vital and dynamic. And the more you do that, the more likely you are not to lose interest in the material. And I think that really pushes home the point that curiosity is an is an integral part in learning. And we need to do this with with our children that we’re learning from a pedagogical approach, but also from an Android logical as well as how to logical approach, we need to really be pushing this notion that learning isn’t just about passively consuming, turning on a video and just, you know, having our eyeballs, you know, bombarded with info, we need to really be actively involved. And I’m learning how to make these things into challenges into quests, where we are really, truly being challenged. And it’s only through that challenge that we make those brain pathways that make us actually retain the material that we’re learning thoughts, gentlemen,

Francis Wade 46:08
yeah, I remember reading a whole bunch of time management articles written by academics and 90% of the time, they never actually defined what time management was. So it struck me that whereas they were trying to get an expertise, in an area related to time management, they never actually defined the term that they weren’t curious enough to go back and ask, Well, what does this actually mean, because there’s considerable disagreement about, even if time can be managed. And I think I like what he says about being directed in your curiosity. It’s almost To me, it’s like, like being hard headed. And fighting for the truth, believing that there’s a truth behind what you’re curious about. And then pounding away at it kind of like always doing a PhD thesis in a way, pounding away at it until you get at the truth, that kind of hard headed kind of fighting, I find it’s rare. in academia, it’s rare in the general world, it’s rare among bloggers, content creators, we kind of get satisfied very early on, and then move on to something else, as opposed to really nailing, nailing the problem, that kind of curiosity, I think we don’t

Frank Buck, EdD 47:16
just get we kind of skim the surface and quantity, instead of quality, you know, hitting a number of different sections that are going

Raymond Sidney-Smith 47:26
down focus. And that’s why I continually throughout every year, decide on what I’m learning. And then I build out my own syllabus, my own syllabi for those topics. And so every year, I’m learning in a way that that forces me challenges me to step up to what I’m doing in terms of learning. And that means I can’t learn everything. But what I do learn, I learn deeply. Right. So if I’m going to learn about, you know, cybersecurity one year, I’m going to go very deep into that subject. And once I do that, I’m going to do enough to get a few certifications to really feel like I have a command of that. And then the ongoing learning keeps my curiosity high. Because the reality is, is that mastery breeds greater levels of curiosity and greater momentum to staying current, right? Once you’re once you’ve excelled in an area, then you know, enough to be able to ask better questions. And those better questions are both the right questions. And the answers are, are maybe more specific in that sense. And so you’re not actually spent a lot of time with all of the baseline stuff. So there’s a rate of of compound return, when it comes to some level of mastery. Art is saying here, productivity that cliffnotes antithesis, antithesis of that, but always good to have arts with with us. Okay, any final thoughts regarding curiosity? Otherwise, we’re going to turn our our sights it looks like on Android. Okay, we’re going to turn our sights on Android. Android has five new features coming to Android in the next few months, if not weeks, or months. Those five new Android, Android apps updates are enhanced map navigation. And that means that there’s going to now be a go tab in your Google Maps app on on iOS and Android. This is going to give you an option to be able to quickly navigate say to home or work or if you want to, you know have a label that says school and that will give you quick uptime up to date information so that you can have directions live traffic and so on and so forth and quickly go ahead and execute navigation to get into that. Next is going to be g board. g board has the what they call the kitchen. And so the kitchen of course the Moji kitchen has many stickers in their keyboard drawer and the keyboard drawer. I’ve said this before, but I just can’t help but not say this again. keyboard is a fantastic keyboard. And you can install it both on Android and iOS, you can actually install g board on iOS, and it gives you multilingual swipe gesture typing. It gives you access to a whole bunch of other categorically wonderful capabilities. But now they’re adding going from 100 unique combinations of sticker mashups to 14,000. So you will start to see those available on Android six or later, coming in the next few weeks. Hopefully, they bring g board over to iOS with the same emoji kitchen soon are as noting here that g board can be installed on Chromebooks. And absolutely, it is installed on all of my Chromebooks, and I love it. But

Augusto Pinaud 50:47
also, it is important to mention that when you install the G board, you get access to the Google. So if you want to do dictation, even on an iOS, if you install that, then now you get access to that keyboard that, again, it turns to be fantastic. You can use you know, as I was mentioned earlier, we’re talking about the Alexa stop, you have all these pieces installed, you can get the best of every world in the moment you need it. So I think is a it’s an amazing thing.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 51:22
Yes, I I always on all of my iOS devices, I install g board, I installed the Google app. And that gives me the Google Assistant on my iOS devices. I mean, really, all Apple devices are just a good hardware vessels for me to be able to access my Google products. So different than then a gousto, where, you know, it’s probably the opposite, but, but I really I find the iOS and, and Mac OS hardware, great. But it’s just ends up being a vehicle for it. When I had my old iPhone, I remember transitioning to my first Nexus device, I decided to go over to the Google platform, having been, you know, you know, elevated to being one of the Google small business advisors. And I thought, Okay, well, I’m just going to move everything over there. And I moved from the iPhone to the Nexus and I realized, Oh, yeah, the iPhone just had all of my Google Apps to deal with sign in on the Google side. And everything just kind of popped up and I went on with my day, there was no real loss in that regard. Okay, continuing on in the Android updates, Google is adding potentially more audiobooks in the Play Store. And the way in which they’re doing that is that they are providing publishers in the United States In the United Kingdom, with a tool, a tool, a machine learning tool, that is going to be able to read books, and in essence, give those books voice in the Play Store. So you’ll be able to go to the Google Play Store, to books and into the audiobook section, and now be able to listen to books that otherwise didn’t have a narrated function. So this narrating tool is going to be pretty sophisticated with some, you know, natural language, and so and so forth built into it. So that’ll be coming to publishers in early 2021. And that means that if you have a book, and you are available in the Google Play bookstore, and do not have a narrated version and audiobook version, you can potentially get access to this in early 2021. And then turn your written book into a, an audiobook content to our authors on the panel today. Okay, moving right along.

Augusto Pinaud 53:30
Google is offering capturing right now.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 53:32
Yeah, there you go. There we go. Right. I mean, Google’s doing it for you. Google is also bringing enhanced voice access navigation. In essence, they’re going to be again, using they’re there, they’re doing a lot of this machine learning, you know, technology. And they’re being able to get more and more of it shrunk down to be able to fit on device. And so Android 6.0. And later devices will start getting voice access. That’s already available on Android 11. So in essence, now you can speak to your Android device through the google assistant and gain access to items inside of the interface that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to access buttons and labels that the system doesn’t have natural tags associated with. But now you can do it because the system is able to access them better. So that’s coming as well. Last two items. Google is bringing nearby share functionality for the direct sharing of Play Store apps with other Android users who are in your vicinity. So this is just extending nearby share that already exists to now being able to take two phones or two Android devices that is and being able to come within the vicinity of each other and share an app, that app being in the Play Store. So they can just very quickly and seamlessly move an app from your phone and make a copy over to the other person’s phone. So you know, things like oh, gosh, you know, I have to pay for the, the, the the the, what do you call that? You’re in a parking, parking meters. You know, many times you know you’re out somewhere You have to pay the parking meter and you know your low bandwidth area, you know, low Wi Fi, low mobile connectivity and you want to download that silly application. Now you’re able to go ahead and say, Oh, you know, Hey, can you if you have the application, we come nearby, I can now share that application from one phone to the other over Bluetooth, le, web RTC, whatever it is peer to peer Wi Fi, and it just quickly transitions, transfers over to the new to the other device. And now you have the application. And you can go ahead and go on with your day. So very, very good. To do that. Just going back to the prior story, art is noting notice, noting that He replaces his Samsung keyboard with keyboard because of the better dictation. And yeah, I find it to be just a much more fluid app, generally in terms of the keyboard over all of the other keyboards built into the devices. And then last but not least is Google is expanding Android audio on Android Auto, Android Auto to 36. more countries, I’m not going to list all the countries, but just know that it’s going up to 36 more countries of the many other countries that it currently supports. And so that means you’ll be able to have Google apps and services in the dashboard of those compatible cars. So that’s really good to hear. Of course, they need to be running Android 10. Above. So those are for those cars, and an Android nine users need to download the application and then it will use Android Auto in the app itself. Alrighty, any commentary on that otherwise, we’re going to move along in our stories. We have a couple more stories before our first break. Next story is about bilingual speakers, and how they deal with pain in their preferred or what they feel is their more culturally, you know, dominant language. And so Augusto, what did you think about this article? Is our resident multilingual person here?

Augusto Pinaud 56:54
You know, it is it is absolutely true. And he’s really interesting. Because I didn’t know that your main language could change. So my, my language was English and no Spanish sorry. And I learned English Okay, my kids, my especially my oldest, her first language was Spanish. Okay, she’s been, you know, those for years to see I work at home. So it’s a she’s been more listening to Spanish than English. And as a little kid, before, you know, going full time to school Spanish was her first language, no question about it, when she when begin going to school, that switch, and she’s bilingual, but her main language now is in English. And you could see how that pain changed from being in Spanish to being an English that is really interesting, but it’s true. If I hit my toe with a corner, or more my little finger with a corner, there is no work in English. And I thought my brain can process.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 57:52
Yeah, it makes it makes a lot of sense that whatever is going to be the more dominantly mapped language is going to be where your thoughts are going to naturally go. Right. And that that makes a lot of sense.

Augusto Pinaud 58:04
It happened as I was saying, as, as you get tired, you tend to go to that language. So if you talk to me, and I’m really tired, for whatever reason, my English is worst. And I tend to do more expansion has happened to maybe everybody in this in the panel today that I go and throw sentences in Spanish and they look at me like English, please. Okay, but everybody’s that is just that is you get tired you and your brain goes to that main language. And and it happened to most of the people I know who speak more than one language.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 58:40
And it was fascinating to me. My brother was telling me recently about a study that I don’t know if there’s a study, but he come in, he’d come across something and this was maybe a year or so ago. And he said, You know Russian Russian has four words for the color blue. And people in Russian see the color blue and think and emote differently based on that. It’s completely it’s a it’s a different experience of the world. And I feel a little bit I feel a little bit marred, I feel I felt cheated, yes, that I didn’t have four colors blue growing up.

Augusto Pinaud 59:15
Dream of the sign.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 59:19
Right, exactly what the language, language. Language has a way of impressing upon you your experience of the world, emotionally and otherwise. And that’s a really good note for us all, when we’re trying to be productive, that we all we are emoting potentially in our native languages. And thinking outside of that can also be useful. Like for example, those of us who maybe have high anxiety or have issues with emotional regulation, it may be actually really good to learn if this is not scientific. I’m just thinking out loud here. Like maybe learning another language can be really good for people to mediate language. If you think of that language. When you are feeling anxious, then you have maybe a little bit more control because it’s slowly Between your brain and, you know, basically the outer portions of your brain, your prefrontal cortex and your amygdala. So like, since you have to do more processing, it slows things down and maybe have a little bit more regulatory control. So I just feel like there’s a lot

Augusto Pinaud 1:00:12
of that, and that that you’re saying is accurate. I, I, particularly Jordan, in English. And the reason is that is I slow down, I forced to slow down the speed. Now, if I journal in Spanish, I can’t there is no way for me to write down or type.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:00:29
Yeah, yeah, I can totally see that.

Francis Wade 1:00:32
I did a training in which you, the person, the learner, learner, or the individual would actually use a list of emotions give us in these lists, they have like maybe 100 different words for different emotions. And when you start using it, you realize that you might say that I’m sad at a certain kind of high level. But as you go down to be more specific around the kind of sadness you’re feeling, I noticed, and other people who have done this, saying similar things, there’s a shift when you go from a high level description, to a more detailed, more accurate description. And it’s almost like you’re learning a wider vocabulary for your emotions. And if I take that all the way to the other end, the people who have experienced as being more sort of violent and short tempered, my anecdotal evidence is that they don’t really have much language. So they use basic words like you, I hate you, you disrespected me, I’m going to kill you. So it’s very sort of basic language that they’re using. They don’t have access to the full range of emotional language in English. And my time in therapy, I noticed that that’s kind of what happened with me. I was I was learning to identify, yes, but then also to find words for feelings that were more fine than the gross gross feelings. And I think that’s, that’s powerful. Definitely.

Frank Buck, EdD 1:02:02
Yeah. And then also, the profanity comes in with that limited language, that it suddenly becomes peppered with those few. Those few words, where the purpose is to elicit emotion from the other person.

Francis Wade 1:02:19
Right, so unfair, it’s so unfair, it’s

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:02:23
up, but there’s expletives. And and there’s, there’s actually a rich psychological and sociological reason for expletives. And, and so, you know, not to get too far into the weeds here. But I think it’s really important for people to recognize that expletives are actually really important for cohesion within groups, there’s a lot of reasons for it being there. But at the same time, what you’re both talking about is actually very, to me sounds very sound psychologically, which is that the more words you know how to describe things, the the greater your brain has to map where you are feeling on that now spectrum of things, right, there are roughly about 10, different positive emotions, for example, and you know, what that research scientists really categorize there, there are fewer on the negative side, maybe by one or two. And when you think about like, 20, that 20 range emotion, right from positive or negative effect, if you if you teach people those things, then they are far more capable of now identifying what’s causing the underlying issue than people who are just saying, I’m happy. And I’m sad, when in reality, those mean nothing, and I’ve and I’ve all but tried to, you know, throw them into the rubbish pile of my own lexicon, because it’s useless. And, you know, I wrote an article some time ago about the psychology of fulfillment, and you know, how I really have a strong kind of hatred, but really disgust for that term happiness, or happiness psychology, because what it really does say is that we don’t know how to term how we feel positively. So let’s just use this umbrella term, like, happy. And as soon as you say, Well, I’m feeling contented, or I’m feeling a moment of joy right now. I’m elated. Those words have much more specific meaning and actually, on earth for you something really positive. And I think once we start to use positive language, especially with self speak, you know, because a lot of what we do in personal productivity spaces, we have a lot of negative self speak, and I hear a lot of people in my personal life, and certainly clients as I’m talking to them, you know, I have a rule by meeting with you, you can’t talk badly about yourself. And I will keep poking, poking and poking at you when you when you do that. And it starts to people to recognize Oh, yeah, you know what? I’m feeling this emotion, right, this negative effect, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I am that thing, right? Certainly like people who say, Oh, I’m a procrastinator or those who don’t label your life self those are really really bad and which is why I’m actually while I really liked the atomic habit and atomic habit and James clear and his work I’m very much against the notion of, of taking on personas, like, I’m a runner, and that’s why I’m going to develop a habit, because what that really does is it creates this sense of, of tribalism, and it makes you feel like an outgroup. Or when you fail, and this can be very detrimental to greater psychological safety and greater risk taking, which is what humans need to do, you need to be curious, you need to take risk. So, you know, we have to remember, there’s a double edged sword to all of the kind of positive language that is around habit development, when in reality, habit development, I think, is actually rather useless. In in the sense of, we spend a lot of time focused on habit and none of time focused on routine. And that means a lot of people fail. And, and they don’t step back up to the plate to do more in that category. So I can spend hours talking about this, but we have the rest of the show to go. So we have one more item here in the stories for the first part of the week. And that is how to take a nap on the life of productivity blog that Chris Bailey writes, and he talks about how to take a coffee nap. And since Francis, you are the resident expert on the coffee nap, thoughts, you’re muted, you are still muted.

Francis Wade 1:06:16
Could you not read my Read my lips,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:06:18
I could, but not but the

Unknown Speaker 1:06:21
podcast listeners.

Francis Wade 1:06:25
Okay, so the coffee nap is simple. You drink a cup of coffee before you take a 20 minute nap. And even if you can’t take the nap, you take a fake nap. And the fake nap works just as well as or better than the real nap. So you essentially put your body into a state of semi nap ness. And that, I found that it works maybe half the time. But when it works, it really gives you a big kick in and it is all brain chemistry involved. And all these reasons why but it something does click. And the energy after a nap is substantially different than at any other point. And when I take the nap, and it doesn’t quite work that way. And I can’t tell why sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t do a bit of a mystery to me, you know,

Augusto Pinaud 1:07:14
isn’t resting because I have tried that. And I have tried that successfully and take the coffee before they take a little nap. I but as you said it’s not every time I don’t I have not discovered what is the the secret to to do it. But

Francis Wade 1:07:35
when it works, it is really really good. There’s some secret sauce to it that nobody seems to have grok just yet.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:07:43
Yeah, there are certain reasons for that. That’s that’s probably very unique to individuals. And the reality is, is that it really has to do with the amount of adenosine in your system. adenosine is the is the the chemical in your body system that once it reaches a certain level. You you feel, you know, wakefulness or sleepiness. And the reduction in that adenosine is what of course causes you to reawaken and to feel that wakefulness again. So just as the takeaway, which I think is really useful here, Bailey says that you take a toffee nap, kind of summarizing what you said, Francis, drink a cup of coffee, then immediately nap for 20 to 25 minutes, depending upon how quickly you fall asleep, if you’re capable of it and awake with a boost from both the nap and the coffee, the effects of the caffeine are stronger after coffee nap. And it takes roughly about that time for your body to you know, kind of absorbing oils from the coffee from the caffeine and coffee. So good. Good to note. And that also feels good. It does it does

Francis Wade 1:08:46
you feel like Cuba, you know, one of

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:08:49
the things Yeah, one of the things that I have noticed is that earlier in the year I was using a straw to drink my coffee because I was I was on I was recording on podcasts. And so therefore since I didn’t want to make noise you know and putting the cup to my face with a headset on and that kind of thing. I was drinking out of a straw. Well the oils tend to reside on the surface of your coffee cup if you’re not stirring regularly, and so the oils would stay up there and so I would drink down and not actually get any benefit from the coffee so just know that your your coffee the caffeine is in the oil. So remember that you have to drink the part that has the oil in order to get the the benefits of the caffeine boost

Augusto Pinaud 1:09:36
us art quote in here and we are going to be quoting apparently Francis from now on we are not going to be sleeping at work. We are going to be on a state of semi nothingness from now on. So you need to jus quote Francis Wait a productivity expert. Are you sleeping in the job? No, I’m not sleeping in the job. I mean, it’s semi Napa state.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:09:56
All right. And so with that, we have reached the first Half of our stories for this week. And so now a word from our sponsor this week WCC web services. Did you know half of small businesses don’t have websites

Unknown Speaker 1:10:09
and half don’t make it past one year in business? Are these stats correlated? We’re not sure. But we think you should have a website. W three see Web Services provides affordable manage WordPress website hosting, along with VPS, domain name registration, and other small business focused services. For listeners of this podcast, you can book a free 30 minute digital marketing strategy session, when you purchase a new hosting plan $150 value. Once you purchase your new hosting, plan forward the receipt to support at W three c inc.com. With the podcast title in the subject line of the email message. And we’ll get you scheduled for your digital marketing strategy session.

Unknown Speaker 1:10:54
Head over to anything but idle.com slash web hosting and get started with your small business website today.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:11:01
And now back to your show. Welcome back everybody to anything but idle. We before the break, we’re doing our first half of our stories of the week. And now we are going to close out our stories of the week with our second half. And so let’s get into it. Let’s talk about our next story of the week. And this one’s about a little bit of negative news about Google illegally spying on workers and the NLRB. What’s going on there Cousteau?

Augusto Pinaud 1:11:27
Well, they’re claiming that that didn’t happen. Google Westcott is fine on their employees. And, you know, those are not the news that anybody wants to read, but happens. And it may be legal, and it may not be great, but you know, they have been caught spying on workers before they fire them, at least according to the US Labor Board. And no, it’s a story that is in process. But if that is actually get caught was a big violation of the US labor law,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:12:04
right. So So in essence, the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, put down a ruling that basically said that Google should not have spied on some employees basically, spying is the wrong term here. They recognize that employees were looking at other people’s calendars in order to be able to start the process of having discussions about establishing a union and unionizing is protected by law in the United States. And so Google was, in essence, told that they shouldn’t do that. They are going to appeal that ruling, and probably go before and Lj and and figure that part out or administrative panel of some some sort in front of the NLRB. So this is still not yet determined. It’s a first step win for the plaintiffs in this case, before the NLRB. And so, you know, I don’t I don’t know what the right choices here, I think, from Google, they’re basically saying, we protect our employees privacy, and to have people having access with highly sensitive credentials to our employees. You know, data is a breach of trust and privacy and security. On on the employee side, they’re saying, Yeah, but the reason we were trying to do this was for this, you know, this other purpose, that seems to be a higher, higher moral ground. And so I honestly don’t know the answer there. And hopefully, the NLRB can come out with a, an appropriate response here. And we can figure out what really happened and why it happened. And hopefully, Google adapts, I think there are good corporate culture, even with all of the things that have been noted of late, you know, they’ve had walkouts and other kinds of things. And they have the whole issue with Andy Rubin is, you know, the, I don’t know what what type of scandal it was, but some kind of sexual assault scandal or something similar to that. But either way, they’re not really worth worrying about in the grand scheme of things. Okay. Next up, Chrome 87,

Augusto Pinaud 1:14:05
Chrome 87,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:14:06
and 87, Chrome OS 87, I forgive me, os 87

Augusto Pinaud 1:14:12
and Chrome OS 87 is out and one of the cool things that they’re bringing is top search and Bluetooth battery level and among other things, but I think those two are, are a big deal. So at least for the people who again, leave on Chrome OS 87 so they are going to give you new wallpapers they’re you know, you were talking earlier in the show about that. Intentional learning may have not been the word you use but but on how you create your your learning thing. One of the things for me this year was to really learn to use from and and, you know, one of the things that this show has brought to me and same as ProductivityCast in the productivity podcast that we do is I am Apple centric, I work on an iPad, I have iPads, iPhones, Macs, and having other people in other platforms and the chrome platform specifically has allow me to understand better. So one of the things I did was I got an old machine, turn it into a Chromebook with the idea of learning what the Chromebook OS can or cannot do. And I’m going to say, I mean, I have been impressed now for a while even it was going to be a three month project. And the thing is what I use now to record the shows, because I like the form factor of the old surface, so it works really, really well for that. But the more I seen, what Chrome OS is been doing, the more interesting it is, and the more part apart is so. So I’m pretty excited of this kind of things.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:15:53
Yeah, so folks can have a strong understanding here. So Chrome OS is what runs on your Chromebooks. And so in the 87th version of that different than Chrome, the browser, chrome version 87, which has other new features associated with it, but Chrome OS 87, now you will be able to click the little top right hand button in your browser. Again, this is an 87 of OS, not Chrome, the browser, but you’re able to click that little button, and you’ll be able to search your tabs, so you can just quickly jump to them. Now in Chrome 87, the browser Google Chrome 87, you are now able to search for and through your tabs. So if you have, like I do, sometimes 100 tabs open in your Chrome browser, you can now type into the omnibox, that that upper level address URL bar, and type in. And if it’s, if you haven’t an open tab, a tab that’s in one of those, it will actually open it up and will give you a new chip that you can click on it says switch to tab. So you can quickly jump to those things. Because at some point, you know, the, the tabs get really, really small. So you aren’t able to actually click on any of them with high dexterity, or without high dexterity. And so for me, it’s really great, because now I can just go to the omnibox, type in the name of the of the tab that I want to go to. And I can also learn Do I have one of those tabs open, especially if I’m doing really high level research, I want to be able to do that. Chrome OS 87 is also bringing the capability for you to see the Bluetooth power level of your devices that are connected. This is obviously a really nice addition to the system. Now snapping back to Chrome 87 the browser. This is really awesome.

Augusto Pinaud 1:17:33
Okay, so, um, I don’t know exactly what happened on the house on this. Yes, but I’m sure he will be back on and get into that news is back.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:17:46
Sorry, I closed the wrong tab.

Augusto Pinaud 1:17:49
That’s what happened.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:17:52
Exactly, exactly. promo 30. Yes, exactly. More dexterity. So my going back to my point, which is that Chrome 87. The browser version now gives you the capability of, of going in and executing different actions. They’re calling them chrome actions. So you can now go in if you’re in the latest version of Chrome. Now, so go to you know about Chrome, click on that button, update to the latest 87 dot x, you can now type in delete cache, for example, CA, ch, E, which is your temporary file storage, you can now delete browser history and things of that nature just from typing certain phrases into the system. So you have a greater deal of natural language capabilities over the system than having to poke around in the settings. Now you can actually type some of these things into it more chrome actions will come over time. But the one that works, at least most consistently for me is delete browsing history, or delete cash in your omnibox. And that will, again open up a chip, you can click on that chip, and then it will execute that function that file. They’re going to bring some of the finance pieces with Google pay, you know, so you can bring up your wallet, change passwords, those kinds of things, all from the omnibox. So we’re going to see more and more of these features come into the omnibox so that you don’t have to go poking around in your settings, you can now find them directly from from just basically searching for them in the in the interface. Next up Agusta. What’s our next story this week, you are muted.

Augusto Pinaud 1:19:22
Well, that’s because it’s a mystery story. And it’s about Samsung is not going to release their famous Galaxy Note in 2021. So the galaxy brand as we know, at least for 2021 it’s not going to be here. Samsung is reporting that they’re going to let the brand rest or go.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:19:47
Yeah, and and the reality is it makes a lot of sense. They have so many phones. I mean Samsung has like a bazillion different models. So a little bit of concentration here makes a lot of sense. They’re going to take the S Pen and they’re just going to put it into their galaxy. line of phones, which is makes sense, you know, now the phones are big enough that they can fit them probably. So, you know, they could just basically put the S pens on the existing Galaxy phones. And we should we shouldn’t see any major hiccup there. Well, I

Augusto Pinaud 1:20:14
think the phones has the, the galaxy when the note came, it was at least on on what the standard phone size, a much larger phone, but as you said, the phones have been growing and growing and growing. So it makes sense to to go to that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:20:30
Yes. And art notes, the S Pen remains. And so he’s confirming my note here that, you know, we’ll still see the stylus form in the stylus accessory in all of the Samsung Galaxy line going forward. So it will be at least capable, even if it’s not capable of being shoved into the into the phone itself, but we’ll still see it there. Okay,

Augusto Pinaud 1:20:53
so the next article is a video in nine to five Mac showing how windows virtualization on the apple m one, give nearly two times faster performance than a Surface Pro X. And I needed to put it in there because hey, if you need to leave in Windows, at least get a chipset that is going to fly was that

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:21:16
I still do not see the reason for putting windows on a Mac. I know that lots of people do it. But I but I respect everyone’s choices.

Augusto Pinaud 1:21:27
Well, I did it for I did it in a in a time where I work in a corporation where you were required to leave on a Windows because of the software and the stuff. And before virtualization in parallels was really, really good. I install windows in indymac with bootcamp so that way I could run both because it was impossible otherwise,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:21:51
yeah, and see in my, in my world, I wouldn’t have allowed that if I were CTO. Anyway, I would have blocked your capability of cross installing on a different chip. So it wouldn’t have made any difference. But the the the fact of the matter is, is that it’s great to see people being able to put the operating system of choice on their hardware of choice. I totally understand that I just I’m joking. But I think that what we’re what I’m really curious about seeing is what are these m one chips once they bring out the next line next year, I’m gonna I’m gonna probably get a Mac Mini to play. But the but the next line of Apple hardware that comes out with Apple silicon, I think is going to be much more exciting to me than this existing one. And the ability to go from to x faster performance on you know, then the Surface Pro X. If I can get, you know, factors double that, then that’s worth me moving over and putting windows on that sucker. So cuz then I’ll that’ll be excited about it. So Alright, moving right along. What’s our next area Cousteau?

Augusto Pinaud 1:22:57
Well, Microsoft create this productivity score and is scaling back on what is being called a privacy invading productivity score. And basically, they create this study. And the idea was to allow employers to check how productive their workers were. And people didn’t like it. And not that I can blame them for that. I don’t know, as I’m not unhappy of not having a Microsoft application in my life. So and part of that is, is that is I don’t you know, I didn’t enjoy outlook, I didn’t enjoy many of the things that came with leaving on a Microsoft environment. The question that the article have is, is this too late? And now people will have the doubt and the controversy surrounding this will not make it, you know, really good? And really, who knows?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:23:51
Yeah, so so to explain for everybody. So Microsoft, put out this new tool, it’s called the productivity score. It’s still out there, they’ve just made some modifications. But in essence, before they made the modifications, what would happen is it would take, take some statistics from how long you were in Outlook, how long you were messaging people in teams, if you didn’t turn on your webcam, during video calls in teams, and it would put this all into a score that would be provided to your employer, and your employer could see you individually in the system. And that of course, raised a whole bunch of hairs on the back of the necks of everybody who knew this was happening. In essence, in response to that Microsoft has changed 365, Microsoft 365, the platform itself, so that now the productivity score removes identifying information from individual people. I think they’re doing the right thing here, which is removing this, this kind of both privacy invasion but also potential huge exposure to litigation. You know, think about the companies that are gaining all of this access about their employees. At their homes, and all, I mean, just a nightmare situation why they thought this was was smart. But anyway, the point is, is that now Microsoft is redefining how the user interface works with a productivity score. And they’re measuring on a holistic level on the business level, which means that individual employers say a manager who has, say, a, you know, a romantic inclination toward an employee can’t start, you know, analyzing that data and using it inappropriately against employees, like that’s the level of stupid that Microsoft created here with this tool. And so they scaled that back. In essence, now the service will continue to produce a score between zero and 800, similar to like a credit score your FICO score, right, zero to 800. And it adds up these scores in eight different categories, I’m presuming you can get up to 100. In each of the categories, the categories are, and I think this is important for us in our own productive lives to be thinking about how Microsoft sees productivity, they see this in the categories of communication, meetings, content, collaboration, teamwork, mobility, and point analytics, which means you know, where things are touching at the at the edges of your network, network connectivity, and then the 365 app health, each with a total of 100 possible points. So I’m confirming my my thoughts here, which is that each category goes up to 100. So in essence, you know, Microsoft is scaled back. Now a company can see this more on that holistic level. But of course, at the same time, Microsoft filed a patent for an employee scoring system. So these, these specific metrics, you know, are now in the patent process, at least in the United States. And so we’ll see how this how this bears out. But I think Microsoft has made the right choice here. And backing off of this, and scaling back, our galaxy is noting that he’s reserving the app name for permittivity karma to boost your score. And so yeah.

Augusto Pinaud 1:27:02
Oh, and our next news comes about talking about that karma? No, I’m joking. But he’s about how to better manage what the article the article mindless call your life admin. And I remember when I read the first, the first time I read, getting things done by David Allen, and, you know, he talked I don’t remember I was on the book, or he was on the getting things done fast, I must be because I got those two things pretty close timewise and a decent to both and read both many times. But, but I remember him telling the story of people who were having seven, seven figure salaries, but having their light cut off. And at the time I was beginning, my professional career just had finished, my master was moving to Los Angeles. And I could not understand the concept of that happening, mostly. So that was a luxury for us soon. But as I have grown in the productivity world, and as a coach and I have helped people with their productivity system, one of the things that is really interesting to me is how people don’t have this concept of life admin for their own life, and how they have this separation, but really, in the same way they manage incredible their professional life. They have ignore completely that administration of their personal or many of the things or their personal life. So it was a really good article, because I agree, you know, in the same way you manage productivity for one side of your life, you need to do it for the whole you are not different components when I teach the connecting visible dots thing, protocol, the first pillar is the pillar of totality. Why because you are one you cannot, you don’t need to make distinctions between work and play. And anything else you can really have it all but you need to learn to manage also. And they make a list paying your bills, you know, parking tickets, your taxes, personal email, shopping and return staff planning parties and many other things. But so there is for productivity people in here. What is your experience into how your clients that people you deal with is really dealing with this concept of their life admin? Yeah,

Frank Buck, EdD 1:29:27
I had I had found that article somewhere skimmed a little bit and we’re just pulling it up and rereading it. You know, we’ve we’ve got all of the deep work concept of, you know, get rid of the little things focused on that big huge thing that’s going to change the world or that that one thing that’s gonna make everything but then you get to the, you know, who’s gonna pick up the dry cleaning, who’s gonna empty the dishwasher? You know, who’s gonna see the The dog has his heartworm feel that that sort of thing. So you know, the whole the whole idea of just identifying those things big and little, and putting them in a system that has some kind of order to it so that you batch related activities, so did get done quickly. It just, it makes negotiating lives easier. So that you’re doing preventive maintenance, rather than handling things when they get broken. And yet, when those little things have now become big thing,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:30:33
absolutely, I see all of life as a system of systems. And so your productivity system has many subsystems. And if you really want to manage effectively in life, you need to have control over the systems in your life. And so all of this life admin stuff sounds to me like the concept of deciding what is going to be a part of the system and what’s not going to be a part of the system, and everybody has varying states of wanting to have control over these pieces. And I happen to want to have more control than others. But that also means that when I have that level of control, I am creating a level of reduced anxiety for myself, so that I can spend that energy that otherwise would be spent concerned about making sure that, you know, everybody gets to where they need to get to on time, and that the work gets done on time and on budget, right, all of those things get reduced down to the the optimal level, so that I can then use creative faculties in the upper levels and use more of it throughout the course of my day. And so I know when my systems are working, when I have that time, and energy, and like this year where you know, the the rails went off, because of all of the work and everything else like that, you depend upon those systems to be able to say, Oh, you know what, I can double down on these, these systems. So that are the subsystems that really allow the life admin to continue to keep going on. While we are in this changing flux, and, and so on, so forth. It provides some really unique and interesting comments here. So I’m just want to read a few of them. If you want to, you can obviously check out the articles in the show notes, but they talk about performing a weekly brain dump, I’m a little concerned about that idea. For some folks who have high levels of output that can be very difficult to keep up with, if you just keep emptying your brain of stuff. You might be more generative than others, and you’re not going to really be able to catch up on that. So I don’t particularly tell people, oh, just empty your mind of everything. You know, all the time, there’s a time and place for a mind sweep. But big treasure troves of piles of inputs or outputs into an input tool, like an inbox sometimes actually creates more trouble than it’s worth. So I don’t particularly recommend to people because you know, doing weekly brain dumps and having that pile up week after week, after week, especially since many times those things will be new, there’ll be, there’ll be, I’m sorry, there’ll be the same things, right, you just keep tracking the same things over and over and over again. And that’s really not useful to you just, you know, deal with what’s in front of you. In those initial states, it talks about holding regular meetings with family, and that being your spouse and or with the children, and potentially with other relatives, if need be, I don’t know if weekly is necessary, but you know, talks about having regular meetings, scheduling, regular maintenance, and and kind of dealing with some of these more gnarly issues, like procrastination, and using some automation and so on so forth in life. So it gives some good examples. It’s well worth the read.

Frank Buck, EdD 1:33:38
Yeah, of course, with the idea of a brain dump once a week, you know, I’m thinking of brain dump would happen more when you institute a productivity system, you know, when you go from everything’s in my do, everything’s in the system, that’s when you’ve got the brain dump. From there, it’s it’s sort of an ongoing thing as something hits your brain, you either handle it, or you dump it into the system, Lee and I couldn’t imagine waiting, and oh, gosh, what’s, what has piled up in my brain over the last week? No, no, nothing has right into the system?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:34:19
Well, unfortunately, I think life is imperfect. And I see a lot of people who fall off the wagon, and therefore need to come back onto the wagon and those things. And so I think that’s what it’s mostly about is the fact that if you have a stretch of a month and a half, since you’ve done a weekly review, some kind of retrospective, you need to sit down and do that again. Right, that makes a lot of sense. What I’m what I’m and I hear what you’re saying, Franken, it’s what I do, which is I’m regularly capturing so therefore it doesn’t pile up. My big concern is that many times what I see when I sit down with people is that they are piling on the pile, and so they create a bigger mountain out of a molehill because it really truly becomes a Mountain, because they just keep taking smaller mole hills and jamming them with more stuff and more stuff and more stuff. And so I really, you know, over time have kind of shied away from saying, Okay, let’s just get it all out of your head, it’s more, let’s build up the skills for learning how to clarify that as processed and organize, and then actually do the things on the list so that you feel that sense of efficacy of self efficacy, and then you can start getting more getting more out of your head and more into the system. So as you feel a greater sense of control, and perspective,

Francis Wade 1:35:30
fN fN, articles like that. This one, they skip a level. Because he goes right into the details of what essentially what he does, or, or the specific actions. There’s a software I use, here’s a brain dump I do every week. And I think, well, well, the actions are based on sound principles, and they work for him, you’re lost if you have to use the principles, he used users, because he skipped over that part and gone into the application as opposed to staying at the level of principles. It’s like teaching someone the specifics of doing something without teaching them exactly why and how. So when the time comes to need to make it a need to make a change, you can’t make the change, because you never really understood the principle.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:36:12
And I think I think part of this is that it’s a hodgepodge of, of suggestions. You know, that’s always a, that’s always a risk you run when you are trying to give advice and blog format. It’s a mechanism for starting a conversation. Remember, blogs or blog posts are about starting conversations, they’re not about ending them. And so if he’s doing the right job, he’s started us in a conversation about it, and we’re talking about it right. So he’s done his job, or she has done her job. And and that’s the that’s the main point about it. I think, for those of us who are interested in the material, then we can sit down and say, Okay, what are our life admin systems? Right? What are the subsystems, we need to have an optimal life for us? Right? Maybe you don’t care about the messy dining room table, it drives me nuts, right? Like, I can’t have that. So I need to make sure those things are taken care of that requires a subsystem in my world, right. So when the when the, the male comes in, and that’s the natural place for the male to come into the house. Now, in this layout, we things go on to the dining room table, we need to deal with them every day, I cannot not deal with that. And so these are the kinds of principles that are really ultimately part of the routine, right? We need to figure out what is our daily routine? Where do things pile up, both internally and externally? And then start to figure out how do we move through that? Why don’t we get beyond that first level challenge, and really be become become productive in those spaces? As we move around in our places and spaces? How do we make them more productive for us? And we can do that. We just have to bring that to our awareness. And we frequently don’t, that’s all Okay, do we have a final story,

Augusto Pinaud 1:37:44
we have a final story, how to fix the audio level problems in Windows 10.

Unknown Speaker 1:37:49
So for

Augusto Pinaud 1:37:51
in the past week or so due to videos has been watching and sound a little faint. So there is an article and how to fix it. If you are found in this problem and your windows 10 come from life hacker. It’s a five minute fix like or that’s a column. But you know, if you’re having any issues, go and look to the volume mixer, and you are going to find the solution to it, fix it and be on your way.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:38:16
Yeah, so anytime you see that little volume icon in your taskbar, in Windows 10, you could just right click on it. And you’ll see both the sound settings and your volume mixer. And you could do all kinds of things in there. And frequently, whenever I’m having a problem with audio changing, it’s because windows 10 is attempting to do that equalization that bound that sound balancing when I don’t want it to. So I try to turn off all those, you know, anything that says automatic in the system, I turn it off. Because again, I’m a little bit of control freak, we already know that that’s established. So I like to have control over those pieces. And I don’t want things to be changing around it, especially since I have you know, I have a mixer and an interface sitting on my desk. So I am in direct control of my audio settings. I don’t want Microsoft Windows messing with that. So just know that you have that capability of turning those features off. And that gives you a little bit more control. So good on that. That brings us to the end of our headlines this week. And we’re going to go now into our new tools of the week. And so a good one, I come across many personal productivity tools and services each week. And in this segment, new tools of the week, we bring you a tool we think you might like and we invite our panelists always to share as well. And so they will today. And so let’s get into it. Let’s talk about our tools this week. Our our first tool this week is actually a pair of them. I’m actually going to talk about two tools this week. I’m going to try and bring this up on screen and bear with me while I only go ahead and do that. But my first tool this week is a tool called clippings.io and clippings.io is a tool for To be able to take your Kindle highlights going back to that Kindle story, you can take your Kindle highlights, and in essence, pull those highlights and notes into a another tool. So for me, I want to grab those Kindle highlights and notes and bring them into into Evernote. And so I can go ahead and connect clippings.io to the Evernote account of choice and it will just pull those notes into the system. So I can read books, take notes, annotate, and go. And that’s just been so so helpful for being able to do that. So very, very happy to be using clippings on IO. Now, this is another tool that I recently came across. And this one’s called read wise, read wise is akin to clippings. And it has its own app though, so different than clippings, you’re you’re consuming some of that content inside of the read wise applicant both take notes. And it also then synchronizes with a few more applications than just say Evernote and a few other I forget what the other application clippings connects to I just use it with Evernote but I know it connects to maybe another application or so. But this one connects to a highlight that you can make from the Kindle instapaper pocket and iBooks so it gives a greater kind of surface to pull from. And so I’m I’ve just started playing with read wise I will probably use clippings and read wise now you know clippings for my primary Kindle reading, and then read wise for the other applications when I read it in different places. But in essence, I want to ultimately centralize all of my data into into Evernote so that I can go back and refer back to these things. So anything that allows me to do that, especially in an automated way, I’m just really excited about and so I’m glad that I have found read wise and I’m looking forward to playing around with it more and and grabbing that data out of the system and into my note taking choice of note taking a choice. Right now it’s saying that it works with Evernote notion and Rome. So they’re really trying to be a little bit you know, more progressive, not connecting to maybe some of the older tools like OneNote and otherwise but currently they’re connecting to Evernote notion and Rome. Alright, those are my two new tools of the week for you. gousto What is your new tool this week? I think you are muted

Augusto Pinaud 1:42:23
for me Dr to unmuted myself there muting what bottom is not working. f e File Explorer for the iPad is also available for Android and on the Mac, but really discovered this app on the iPad and we go back to iOS 12 or less, you know, managing your files organized your files was painful. And for some people is still painful. This little app can allows you to access files and computers server drives. Anything that cloud do file transfers that for the people who use devices, it’s painful sometimes, okay, I want to move this file from my phone or from Google Drive to somewhere else and is difficult and painful. So this application may get a piece of cake to go from anything to anything. It also has discovery files, you can edit some basic documents, you can play videos on it, view photos, or any sort of really, really powerful application. They have a free version or a pro version. Honestly, I begin with a free version and pay it up because I wanted to It was so good that I didn’t want it to disappear. But if you struggle with files on your devices or tablet, your Chrome’s your iPhones, your this is a priceless application to you.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:43:50
Fantastic. All right. Next up. Frank, do you have a tool for us this week that you wanted to?

Frank Buck, EdD 1:43:56
Oh, yes, yes, a one one calendar that’s kind of been on my list to kind of explore for a while. And I really like it. For anybody who’s got a Google calendar or Outlook calendar. It just it pulls it right in it just syncs back and forth. And who maybe has say they have to use Outlook at work, but they use a Google Calendar, fully in both of them into woven and and sync them up comes in handy is where you’re trying to schedule meetings with somebody else. And maybe you’re using calendly. It does the same thing. calendly does only is built white right into woven. If you’re trying to have a meeting where six people are going to be in that same meeting, and you’re trying to find a time for everybody can meet. Like we’ve always used Doodle, well

Unknown Speaker 1:44:54
woven we’ll

Frank Buck, EdD 1:44:56
handle that as well. And then plus it gives you Some some neat little statistics down the the sideboard. When you log in in the morning, and you open your calendar in the morning, it tells you what that first event is how long it is to it. And it gives you a little button where you could quickly email the other people who are in that meeting. It lets you know, for instance, right, if they were, you know, you and I collaborate on a number of different things clean No, where are all the different meetings coming up that you and I are going to be in together, we your names listed down there inside, I can clearly there’s every meeting in which we are both participants. It also gives you the meetings that you have scheduled recently. So let’s say I’m adding things to the calendar during the day. And at the end of the day, I want to review with somebody, here’s the things that were added to my calendar, instead of having to remember what those are, or sort of thumb through my calendar, it gives you a little list of these are the things that were recently added to your calendar. So it’s just very, very neat, very practical thing. Um, and right now it’s free. I know, I haven’t paid any third eye. So I you know, I can see there, it does have pricing. And you know, when I’ve clicked on that it looks like there is a free plan and a paid Plan B that when I got it, it was still in beta. And maybe I’m grandfathered in, and I’m getting a little more than I should be getting. But it’s something to definitely, I think check out. They do have a YouTube channel with a couple of really good tutorials on getting started with it. So I’m liking it. And it’s it’s nothing that if at some point, I became disenchanted, my Google calendar is still there. And it’s 100% up to date, whatever is added to woven, goes on my Google Calendar and vice versa. So it’s very seamless. Fantastic. Thank

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:47:13
you, Frank. Francis, your tool this week, this week.

Francis Wade 1:47:19
Yeah, in video, before

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:47:23
we start talking about

Francis Wade 1:47:26
pizza magic, felt like it’s a, I went from being a novice, ignorant, useless. Not really understanding how to put together short 32nd two minute ads to putting out one last week, it took me about a half an hour from concept to completion. And it looked for the monetary put in it look fabulous. And I had previously relied on like a design company, you know, a graphic design company to do this for me, it would take about a week with the script, write this cycle. And all of a sudden, and putting them all that at similar quality for half an hour. So they have this built in templates, that essentially you go and you change the language you change the pictures, it keeps all of the movement, the animations, keeps the transitions, you’re just changing, you could just change words and pictures or words and videos, and put in your own logo. And in no time you have a video that is looks amazing for them or the time that you’ve put in. I’m on the business plan, I think they call it which is they recently had a sale and I believe I’m paying about $10 a month or something like that. But the value is ridiculous the value I’m getting from the time I’ve spent learning the app, and the amount I’ve spent more than paid is just out of this world. And I mean, it’s not the one you want to go in and edit the half an hour. I don’t think you can edit these long videos that you would need a shortcut for or, you know mega heavy duty video processing type of program. It’s not that but its bells and whistles squeezed into just a few minutes when you want it to really look snazzy and, and sort of catch the attention. I stopping video once again, the return the return on investment is all to this this best thing of the best return I’ve gotten on investment in years and in terms of time and time and money, really anything. How did they do that? That’s

Unknown Speaker 1:49:37
really

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:49:39
probably by using AWS or some other cloud server to be able to produce cost to bring you something of value. So let’s go on. You know me liberal is always okay with that. Thank you gentlemen. We are going to move on to our story of the Week. This week. As I told you at the top of our Our show, we are going to be talking about the fact that Salesforce had been rumored to be in discussions to buy Slack, the chat tool, and it’s just been confirmed. slack sells Salesforce, the CRM company is now going to be buying slack for $27.7 billion, according to folks, you know, who know about it. So, in essence, Salesforce made 20 billion in annual revenue, just this past year, I believe. And they were going to be paying, you know, 1.5, X, almost 1.4, I guess 1.3 1.4 X of that annual revenue for the purchase of slack. And this is going to obviously have profound effects on the productivity market and the productivity world with Salesforce becoming a part of slack. And I’m really curious from you all, how do you think this is going to change the nature of how people use slack because it has become somewhat of a Silicon Valley, you know, de facto tool, a lot of those folks are using in the tech space, slack. And this will naturally and presumably become more tightly ingrained in Salesforce, many companies use Salesforce and slack. And now we’ll be able to integrate those things more tightly together. How do you see this changing the way in which people work,

Augusto Pinaud 1:51:29
so it is going to be interesting for from the for you look at from the sales perspective, hopefully is going to provide a really tight integration, or it’s going to eventually provide a tight integration with Salesforce, that communication with things I probably is going to allow you to send contacts to send information helped me with this a perfectly so from that perspective of a speed up issues inside of a sales organization with Salesforce, I think for Salesforce is an incredible thing to do from the slack spirit of communication among the company, it’s going to work really well. If you leave on Salesforce, the question is going to be what is going to happen if you use Slack, but leave on something else. Because it’s respect that that integration is going to be tightly done with Salesforce and Salesforce, integrate with an incredible amount of platform, but it’s not going to be integrated that tightly with another CRM. So if you are a heavy use of slack in your organization, well, it is going to be a time to see when this transition transition is going to happen. And start figuring out when you are going to transition and to what and what are the benefits that you get currently, from slack versus other? If anything, I think this is an incredibly celebration day for Michael, your mute Francis. Sorry.

Francis Wade 1:53:04
Why is it a celebration for Microsoft,

Augusto Pinaud 1:53:06
because what’s going to happen when they tied up with Salesforce and Salesforce, try to make people really keep on slack by using their platform is people is going to leave and Google don’t have jet I strong sorry, chat, hang up is not a competitor to slack at this current version. The real solid competitor is Microsoft Teams.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:53:33
You got it? Yeah, I think that this is really, this is interesting on multiple different sides of this one is coming into the pandemic slack lost 40% of its valuation, and it was in the process of its IPO. So this was a little bit of a of a desperate space for slack. I think that in a year or two years time, if they weren’t purchased by someone slack was was, you know, you could ring the death toll. Because slack would ultimately die out they wouldn’t die out in the classical sense, they die out the way social networks today die out, they get bought by some, you know, large, you know, conglomerate, and slowly Yeah, they slowly eke out, you know, efficiency and and eke it out for every dollar and ultimately it dies by virtue of having a name but being basically a skeleton of its former self. The The goal here though, I think for slack is to be able to stay independent long enough to keep its users using it while the integration happens. So I think Salesforce is probably going to be like, like LinkedIn, to Microsoft, where LinkedIn kept everything intact, and they really try to not let people know that hey, by the way, behind the scenes, everything is gonna start to be Azure connected, and slowly but surely, we’re going to put all put in all of the Microsoft departs and you’re going to see tighter integration over time, that’s going to happen. The Salesforce suffocation of slack is going to happen, but they’re going to try and do a very, very Slowly, I presume, over time, so that so you know, just like a frog boiling in the water, if you just raise the temperature very slowly over time, they’ve I don’t

Augusto Pinaud 1:55:09
know, I don’t know, because they can, they can integrate that communication immediately into Salesforce into Salesforce and will have more seats than what they’re going to lose. So aren’t you saying just wait up to Salesforce, try to improve the UI will on a slack? And yeah, that’s exactly what I think is going to happen. But

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:55:31
yeah, but I mean, reality is, is that slack already integrates fairly well, with Salesforce, I mean, they have an integration, they connect, they do everything I can think of Salesforce doing with slack reasonably right now. And so the the real, the real purchase here was the user base, right sales force was buying a user base, and oh,

Augusto Pinaud 1:55:52
yes or no i the user base, but I think more than the user base 30 friends has more than the user base. It’s also the fact that now they can have this external app that is going to be approved for communication, because communication inside of Salesforce is not great. But for a lot of companies, even that they integrate means another app to approve. Now it comes with this software package. So for them probably was cheaper to buy than development, or speed wise and return wise,

Francis Wade 1:56:26
I could buy those benefits, I don’t see $27 billion of value in solving any of the problems that we’ve talked about. So far. I don’t get I don’t get the 27 billion at all, it, it. I when I read it, it boggles my mind. I, I couldn’t read a little bit about it. But I couldn’t understand where $27 billion could be allocated to solving the problems that they’re, I guess gonna solve by putting the two together, I just didn’t get it just didn’t add up at all, for me, like way off. And if it’s gonna be a service, it was gonna pass out in two years time, then you spent $27 billion to get a bunch of people who aren’t sales people to use Salesforce. But yeah, but if you haven’t got me,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:57:11
yeah, if you have a lot of folks who are interfacing with the sales team, and you need that tighter integration, I can see here, them converting to customers over time. So actually, art is noting this, that slack customers are potential Salesforce customers. And I absolutely agree here, I think that that they they bought a user base. And and in essence, over time, they want to slowly but surely turn up the heat until some of those people become Salesforce customers. And the rest of them can stay happily in the slack environment until they ultimately either die out or migrate to other platforms. That’s that’s just a natural point of reference here that I think is is makes sense in the grander logic of things. I’m with you, Francis, though, I am boggled at the, at the $27.7 billion dollar price point. But they may they not they know things we don’t know, right. So it could be things about the code base or the talent that they acquired and the purchase that really made them jump up that number. So I don’t want to I don’t want to cast aspersions, where I don’t have enough data to know this. They’re they’re now a public company. So we will see all of this in some way, shape or form in the future. And I will be interested in diving into this more deeply, because this really has a profound effect on the productivity app marketplace. And it is something that companies like Evernote, which at one time had very deep integration with Salesforce, and and has other integrations with many other tools. I’m fascinated by how these companies play each other in order to be able to gain greater user adoption. And otherwise, I’ve said this multiple times. And I really felt like evernotes integration with Salesforce was their strongest angle at building a stronger connection to Microsoft and building their user base that way, right? Because, you know, greater integration with Salesforce, Salesforce has deep integration with LinkedIn, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Evernote, more users. And so I saw a lot of opportunity there and you know, things changed and ever had to rewrite their applications. So obviously, that got put on the back burner. LinkedIn was purchased by Microsoft, all of these things kind of happen in in real time. So but slack here, I, you know, I I don’t see them as that grand of a challenger to teams in the long run. And, and so I think I’m gonna stand on the side of nothing’s necessarily going to change productivity wise for a lot of folks who weren’t using slack. And were Salesforce users. But for those who are slack users, and now Salesforce, coming onto the pipe becomes something distasteful to them. And then there’s a change, right management decides, we want to integrate more tightly with say copper or with another, you know, CRM, and they want to move away from Slack, then we should all be kind of mindful of that if you’re in that section. And you’re watching or listening, start to think about what that transition looks like for your company, and how that’s going to impact your productivity, even if it’s going to another chat platform that still requires some level of of transition process. And you need to think that through final thoughts, gentlemen, on slack being purchased by Salesforce for

Francis Wade 2:00:21
$27.7 billion, if I had heard 3 billion, I would have said, a billion is pocket change. Yeah.

Frank Buck, EdD 2:00:32
Yeah, and I don’t use either one. Of course, I’m familiar with slack. But don’t use on a regular basis. Don’t use Salesforce at all. So I really don’t have much in the way

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:00:45
not to worry not to worry that I mean, you know, there’s there’s just a, there’s a lot here in the productivity ecosystem. And what I consistently try to remind myself is that productivity is a vague term, to the point where it encompasses a lot of different ecosystems that are blended together. And so some of us may use different parts. And some of us may not use complete sections, components of the ecosystem, by virtue of the way in which we work. So this has been a wonderful conversation. And I thank you, gentlemen, for it. That takes us to some announcements. And then closing out. I just wanted to make a quick announcement that I put out today, as some of you watching may know, or some listening may know, I run a podcast and a virtual book club called productivity book group. And today, I announced, and if you’re listening to the podcast yesterday, I announced that we are going to be doing a group reading and discussion of getting things done the art of stress free productivity in March 2015 edition. And we are going to, in essence, be reading that book by the book by David Allen, we’re going to be starting on January 7 2020. And so we’re going to run for four different sessions. So every other week, every two weeks, for sessions on those Thursday afternoons, at least Eastern time. If you go to productivity book group.org forward slash community, you will join the online community for productivity book group, and CV events there. So you have to join productivity book groups community in order to access the event, it’s free, but it’s all there in there. I just don’t want to have to manage it in other places. So you’re gonna have to join the community, you can leave afterwards. But if you go to productivity book group.org, forward slash community, you can find all the details there. And you can read along with us and implement GTD if you are interested. And so with that, we’ve covered all the productivity and technology news this week, we could cover and so thank you all for being with us this week, I want to give an opportunity to our panelists to tell us where we can find them. We’ll start with you, Dr. Buck, Dr. Buck, where can we keep in touch with you and learn more about you

Frank Buck, EdD 2:02:52
then come over to my website, dot o RG which you see right here?

Unknown Speaker 2:02:57
Right. Want to say that one more time?

Frank Buck, EdD 2:02:58
Right book, dot award g alamy. On Twitter and Instagram. I’m at doc Frank. But

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:03:07
yeah, Dr. Frank Butler, Easy as pie. Wonderful. And thank you for joining us. As always, Frank. It’s pleasure, Francis, working folks, keep up with you and learn more about you

Francis Wade 2:03:19
time blocking summit dot info is the sort of what I’ve been focusing on in the productivity space for the next three months. And I’m also on Twitter

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:03:30
at two time labs, the number two,

Francis Wade 2:03:33
the number two ti m e l abs, and I think it’s the same on Instagram could be wonderful.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:03:43
Thanks for joining us here on anything but idle Frank. Francis.

Francis Wade 2:03:46
pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:03:48
Of course, of course. All right, a gousto. And then there were two. Thank you so much. It used to pan out for joining me as always, as my co host here for anything but idle.

Augusto Pinaud 2:03:57
Thank you very much. I’m gonna now there’s one, I don’t know.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:04:01
All right, everybody. If there’s a story we missed, feel free to head over to anything but idle.com there on the contact page, you can go ahead and either comment on the episode page, we have comment section open. But you could also contact us on the contact page. You can always tweet or DMS at anything but idle on Twitter. And so we have the direct messages open for you to be able to do that. If a question or comment about anything we discussed during the show anything but idle calm. That’s pretty much the place where you can find us while you’re on anything, but I will calm we do have show notes. with links to all the stories tools of the week, you name it. Even some extra stories once in a while those are all linked there on anything but idol.com on the episode page, we also have a machine generated transcript. So if you want to read download that in PDF, you can go ahead and do that the text is on the page, just click on the Read More link but we also have a PDF that you can download and read that there. If this is your first time watching the live stream, feel free to click on the thumbs up icon that helps us to grow our listening and watching community live. And so thank you For doing that, you can also click the subscribe button, you’ll be notified of future live streams. for that. If you are listening to the podcast, feel free to go to anything but idol.com and click on subscribe and you learn how to access the free subscription to the podcast in your favorite podcast app of choice. And, and so go ahead and do that you can also leave a rating a review. So if you’re listening to the podcast, ratings and reviews on Apple podcasts and Stitcher help us to grow our personal productivity listening community. And so thank you for doing that. With that, see you all next time on anything but idle. Here’s your productive life. Take care, everybody.