Remembering Your Notes

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00
Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community. Welcome to Anything But Idle the productivity news podcast. Today’s show is brought to you by co working space by personal productivity club. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:12
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:13
And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. This is episode 121. Remembering your notes, and the productivity and technology news this week, we’re recording this on July 5 2023. I hope you all in the states enjoyed a Happy Independence Day weekend, hence the late recording date. But of course, each week, we cover the productivity news headlines of the week. So you know what’s going on in the world of personal productivity and its related technologies. And so with that, I’m going to have Augusto lead us into our first headline this week. Augusto,

Augusto Pinaud 0:44
the first article came from 14th. And this is going to be a short section today covered by three articles. The first one is the forced Return of the office is the definition of insanity. And being a person who don’t want to go to an office ever again. Since 2004. Okay. I agree. Okay, there is a myth that people work better in the office that there is something that the office will provide, other than distraction and bad coffee. So that’s what the article goes talk about the roadblocks of productivity, and how CEOs are founding this hard balance into let’s try to go back and really what productivity is doing with those.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:35
Yeah, so So this article is, is very well in line with the next two articles that we’re going to be discussing. So I’ll kind of put my piece here and then we’ll go on to the next article and how it kind of leads into it. But I have a lot of thoughts regarding this forced return to the office, I think the article author makes some really salient points here. And this is a this is a fortune article, it’s written by Dr. Gleb Tsipursk, hopefully got that name, right. But this is a is a person who helps tech and finance industry executives drive collaboration, innovation and retention in hybrid work, according to the little bio that’s there. And so this consultant is kind of in that space. And for me, it seems pretty intuitive, that this would be the problem that we see when there is any forced culture change. So we had this in impressed upon us, right, we were we were forced into a cultural change by virtue of the combination of the COVID 19 pandemic and many other issues as we came out of it. And so people were in this hybrid and remote environment. And here we are now on the other side of that with people who are who are basically overworking to a great extent, we saw a lot of people during the pandemic worried about their job. And so they were, they were working many more hours than they probably needed to they were overworking this high level of productivity. And of course, that couldn’t, wasn’t sustainable. And so we’re coming out of that. And of course, I think, you know, managers who just believe that they have to have people in person are causing this kind of problem. What I really liked was how the author talked about this Gallup study, and, and how coming out of the pandemic, the this Gallup work this the state of global workplace 2023 report, and it talks about what people really are feeling and needing in light of this, this whole new perspective. But one of the things that I found really kind of interesting about this, is that the author talks very clearly about the hidden roadblocks to productivity. And how if, if employers and F folks are managers generally or at large, are not doing the right collaboration, the right socializing the right mentoring, and giving people those opportunities, then they’re really going to be up a creek because those people are ultimately going to burn out and or be less engaged and leave. And so they actually also talked about this recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Harvard University in the University of Iowa, where they had software engineers located in different buildings on the campus. And what they what they posited from the study was that while you have higher productivity, clearly higher productivity when people are distributed, you have less mentorship. And you and I’ve talked about this consistently, which is that, you know, we need to have different and better ways of being able to elevate and to mentor and to guide new members of the workforce, right, we need to be able to help them in some way shape or form. There are ways to do that remotely, and we are

Augusto Pinaud 4:44
you know, one of the problems is we are assuming that these people want to be mentoring this way that we were mentored many years ago and these people is different you know, I I don’t do as many coaching on business as I do with families, and one of the things that I laugh very often with my clients is how do you communicate with your kids? What do you mean, I call them and I want them to pick up the phone. So you understand that concept. Application your kid do not understand his phone has is capable of, they understand text, they understand snap, they understand other things. Phone call, they don’t video call, maybe phone call, they don’t. So when you call and inspect that callback, as a parent, that is not going to happen, why the client doesn’t understand it, the kid can relate if I call my kids 11 and 15. Okay, sorry, they understand video calls, they understand your FaceTime in that, if I dial the phone, okay, it’s annoying for them. They don’t understand why even you want to call without seeing why do you didn’t text and it is the same thing for many of these people entering the workforce, they work in a different way. No good, no bad, different. And the mentoring to be effective, really need to be adapted to that this is people who use technology, and are much more comfortable with technology than many of the people who are doing that mentoring.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:22
Absolutely. So you know, as this article notes, when you force people back into the office, employee engagement is the thing that suffers, especially those people who want to continue working remotely. And so we can have structured mentoring, that is in a hybrid model, where you’re not forcing people to come back into the office all the time. And, again, this is all fairly new, we still have a lot of culture to shake out shake, you know, culture is to is to organizations, as habits are to individuals, they are slow to be creative. And once they’re created, they’re tough to break. So it really takes time for people to be able to get used to some of these things. And so I think that this preliminary research, and I think these studies are very interesting to watch, because it gives us some sense of it. And again, a lot of this is really intuitive, that productivity would increase as people are not forced into, you know, having to have their time taken up by chit chat and other kinds of things happening around them. People are generally self directed in their positions. And the other side is that, you know, employee engagement is going to obviously, be lower, because they’re not consistently interacting with each other. That’s probably where the productivity increases are coming from. But we also have to force we have to structure that that level of mentorship of that employee engagement so that we do have a culture that is retained by virtue of this remote or distributed work environment. And with that, let’s continue on the subject of remote work in our next article. Okay, step Oh,

Augusto Pinaud 7:49
since Doom, probably mispronounced our first article, I’m going to say that the second article is right, written by Aki Ito. So I get the responsibility of butcher the second one, but his Business Insider, and he’s in the war of remote work. Companies are turning full time jobs into low paying gigs. And, you know, yeah, we can argue about how these corporations are getting more temp people and more outsource people for do these jobs and more of, you know, independent contractors. And there are a couple of myths that are are good to dispel. One is independent contractors are more expensive than full time employees. In most organizations, they are not cheaper. The advantage that gives to the organization is flexibility. That’s it. It’s not a cost issue, it’s a flexibility issue, when you are your employee, if you need to replace that person, there is a complex process an independent contractor, you can end up a contract right there. So people need to understand these things. Yes, there is a hidden reaction to remote work as the article said part time employees independent contractors, but also we are ignoring in this case that there is not everybody who wants to do the full time employee who is fine into the independent contractor work into the temp into their, you know, being able to work now with a company that is in Europe, okay, being here from the United States or the other way around. So one of the things that all these things did was that all these things that were happening underground, hey, independent contractors, outsourcing, okay, offshoring that was happening before the pandemic, but he was hearing nobody was talking about it. Now that all came to light and there is many companies and many people shocked by the realities. Now there is not I don’t think companies Returning full time jobs into low paying gigs. Companies are evolving jobs, some of them are going to be smaller things that they’re going to pay less. And some of those are going to be things that can be done in a better way. The question is, how are you ready to evolve to use your skills and translate that into the way you want to work? And leave? You know, that point of the article says, well, people is losing the benefits of the W two? Well, most likely the benefits of the W two are dead anyways, it’s a matter of when not a matter of if so many of these people may be ahead of the curve and figure it out how they can make it differently.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:49
Yeah, I come out with come out with a slightly different perspective for folks to kind of consider. And I agree with everything that Cousteau said. And the the other perspective is for the small business entrepreneur, who is a service based business that is providing these kinds of services to others, right, they now have greater competition. And because more and more basically, gig workers side hustlers are coming onto the market, because they have that capability, plus FTEs, full time employees are now being shifted into this gig work and or this gig of fied economy. That creates a number of problems here in the United States and probably globally, but I’ll focus on the state’s issues, which is that we here in the United States have a bunch of benefits that are tied to our primary employment. One is our tax bases, right? Our tax base is tied to our full time employment status as a W two employee, when we’re 1099. Contractor, we’re we’re being taxed higher. Because we’re you know, the employer in essence is paying part of that payroll tax to the federal government on your behalf. There’s also things like retirement benefits, those are usually strictly tied to them, you’re usually getting benefits from the employer, whether that’s a 401 K, or some kind of SEP IRA program, or something like that you’re paying as a small business entrepreneur into your own IRA, or you’re paying on behalf of your employees. And then of course, healthcare. Healthcare is usually directly tied to your FTE status. And you’re a part of that group benefit policy, sometimes you’re also getting long term disability short term disability policies, so that if you do go into some kind of, you know, incapable state, right physically or mentally, you are covered by some kind of policy, depending upon where you are in the food chain in the organization, all of those things go away when you’re when you’re a gig worker. And, and we need to figure out as a, as a global workforce, how to deal with those issues. People need some kind of safety net, this is not the Wild Wild West, it’s 2023. And so there is this reality here that we all have to kind of come to terms with, do we want a traditional work environment? Or do we have a government that’s going to step in and provide some of those things, whether at cost or otherwise, to be able to provide those things? That is a political and a public policy problem that is seemingly intractable right now, but it’s something that we have to deal with. And it’s going to start affecting productivity? Because if people I mean, we talked, what was it last week or the week before it goes to about how financial stress impacted people’s productivity, if people are constantly worried about their health care about their retirement, about, you know, bringing in the next contract, because now, the company could let you go at any moment, and you have no, there’s no unemployment insurance for a 1099 contractor, you’re just done. When all of those financial stresses start to compound on people, even when someone is getting a lot of contracts all the time, there’s still that financial stress involved, because you’re basically a self employed individual, that financial stress is going to compound and ultimately hurt productivity across the entire labor market. So just be mindful of that as we move forward. If you are in a position of leadership, if you’re an executive, start thinking about how you’re going to handle employer based health insurance for your folks, especially if you’re a small business, and all of a sudden you go say you had eight employees, and then you go to three because you decided that you could save some money. Well guess what? Your group health insurance policy may or may not want to cover only three people, right? So you may need a requisite number of people to even have a group policy. So all of these things are kind of intermixed, and and then of course, you have less control over that individual right. You can’t ask them to work overtime or otherwise, they have the ability and right under the IRS regulations, right. IRS has a checklist of things they say this makes someone an employee and the moment you start checking more and more of those less and less of those boxes, the more likely they are an employee and therefore deserve the the Employee Benefits rights of a regular employee. So just kind of keep that all kind of rolling around in your ecosystem, as you’re thinking about all of the things around job security for the people who are working for you, and the benefits that are provided to them traditionally, you know, I, I consistently say this, you know, an organization’s most precious asset are its people. And so treating them like a disposable commodity is not going to get you the best performance of those people. And I think that’s something that we all have to kind of keep in, keep in mind as we move forward in this very tenuous, you know, back and forth between that which is the gig economy and the traditional work economy. With that onto our next and final article in our productivity headlines related to this whole remote work world,

Augusto Pinaud 15:50
as we have discussed multiple times during the show, you know, about a phenomenon called Quiet quitting, where people are stopping, you know, doing the minimum to stay the job and keep the salary now, what they’re describing is that frustrated employees are loud, weary. That, you know, I was a little confused, because loud quitting, I thought was what people used to quit before. But okay, let’s call it something new. You know, as they said, everything gets recycled and new. But, um, they’re talking about, you know, that this resignation trend is even worse for the business leaders. But he’s exactly what you said it’s not about location is not about remote is not about the office. It’s about what these employers are feeling. What are you letting your team feel? Are your team feeling a we are part of this, are we moving forward together, or we’re not it doesn’t matter if you are a gig, an independent contractor or a W two, what matter really is how they feel when people feel fair, contributing, and moving forward, there is no quiet or loud, quitting, loud and quiet quitting happen when something on the organization broke. And normally what it broke is that is people stop pushing to make sure these employers or employees are well and are taken care of. And more importantly, they feel taken care of.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:31
Yep, all all of those things. And I this, I’m not quite sure if I’m I miss, read the first article and whether that was also part of gallops 2023 state of the global workforce report. But this article also covers that report and talks about it in this other in this other vein, and I just want to underscore something of the article notes about the report. Specifically, it says, quote, but management is largely to blame with 70% of team engagement attributable to the manager, according to the report and quote, and, you know, we I’ve said it many times, and I will keep saying it, when we have these arguments over. And I think they’re legitimate rhetoric, right? This is all good conversation to have when we have these arguments over remote work versus in person or in office work, when we have these arguments over, you know, quiet, quitting, or loud, quitting, or otherwise, many times where we’re forced into this idea of the moral culpability of the individual who is who is doing it. And there’s, there are examples of that, obviously, there are some bad employees out there, there are bad apples. However, by and large, by and large, this is management’s responsibility, and is typically men and management’s fault, and not creating an environment in an ecosystem that supports their workers. And this comes all the way down to you know, salary and benefits, all the way through to creating a team culture and, and fostering an environment that is supportive of those people. And I just like it seems so on its face, simple to understand to me, yet, it seems to be such a difficult thing for most organizations to recognize, which is that it’s not the employees that are disengaged, or, you know, purposefully, it’s not like they’re just wanting to be disengaged from their jobs, they want to get paid, they want to do their work, and they want to do their work well, they want to they want to have meaning associated with their work. And so often trust is the thing that is so marred between management and employees, that that’s why they disengage and then loud quitting, you know, causing this harm to the organization by going out there and lambasting their their employer. They recognize, I mean, you have to have a really, really difficult situation to go out there and ruin of a future recommendation, right, you’re not going to get a recommendation from a company that you basically you know, out loud fire, you know, in that sense, and that you leave and kind of a huff but these people are compelled to do this because of their this lack of time. Justin, this, this breakdown in engagement with their managers. It’s not the organization, it’s not like, oh, this big, you know, conglomerate hates me, it’s that this person, this person is causing me problems. And so often than not, I really feel like we’re not taking advantage of elevating the knowledge set and the skill set of our managers. And we’re not dealing with a mental health stress the the absolute distress that managers have, when they are managing teams, both in person and remote, right, we need to be able to give professional development managers because bad managers create bad teams. But also as a high level of stress with managing people, I know it, I got the gray hair to prove it. And so we want to make sure that we are we are helping to kind of, you know, have a stopgap measure some way to defuse the stress associated with managing people. And it’s tough people management is tough. And we’re not giving enough of credit to managers in a lot of ways for the for the tough people work that they’re doing. So I just I really enjoyed the series of articles because it gives us time to really reflect on how difficult it is to create a an environment that is fostering productivity, and that we have an opportunity here to do that. And so with that, we’ve covered the productivity headlines for the week, when we get back, we’re going to go ahead and head into our technology headlines. And so with that, we’re going to take a word from our sponsor this week. And then when we get back, we will head into our technology headlines. As I said, See after the break.

Sponsor Voice Over 21:32
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Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:42
And we’re back welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle with acoustic bonauto myself Ray Sidney-Smith. And so we are going to go on to our technology headlines. Augusto what’s the next Headline?

Augusto Pinaud 22:54
Headline is a review from good e readers on the Amazon Fire Max, they call them a decent tablet. And I it’s a good review. Okay, and they talk Hey, some of the you know the displays are good display the performance, you know, the battery is good. And you know, they make the accessories are cool. You know, they say they love and display the price, the fingerprint sensor for unlocking the device, the number of speakers so you give good, decent sound quality. And they complain they found three things. One is the lockscreen has ads Well, Amazon hat and higher version you can buy without the ads, the lack of Google Play store that has been a standard on any Fire tablet since 2012. And if you’re a vendor enough, you can figure it out on the web how to how to fix that. And then thank you and then this screen ratio. And I wanted to bring it because this is the kind of reviews that people read and say, Oh well, great. It’s a $250. Let me buy it. And there are two things that are important to remember. Yes, this is a $250. But it’s a device that is designed to be upgraded consistently. This is not a device that you’re going to buy and keep it three or four years. Amazon has no interest into this they will come 24 or 25 with the next 11 inch and they want you need to upgrade and they make it in that way. And I’m not criticizing Amazon. That is their model their model is, is they bring a very cheap tablet that you can consistently upgrade and buy a new one and buying products through them. So be aware of that as you read these reviews and consider this tablet. Is this tablet decent. Yes. It’s going to last you three years. No so be Be aware of that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:03
Absolutely. All right on to our next particle.

Augusto Pinaud 25:07
Our next article is Onyx Onyx do a tablet call the books, the B O X. And they lounge, a new Pocket PC one that has the pencil very similar to the Nova Ersi that we have review and I have talked about it. It’s the specs are very, very similar, except that they add something on the bottom like the iPhone where you can put now some applications that I’m very, very, very jealous because mine do not do that. So, but this is another tablet. Another thing but remember, this is when people ask me how well do you use the tablet? No, no, this is an Kindle in asteroids. Okay. It’s better. It’s better than a Kindle. Yes. is faster than a Kindle? Yes. It allowed me to install applications. Yes, it has substitute for a tablet. Now. So if you are looking for a more powerful, then this is an option. If you are not, if you are looking for a tablet, this may not be the option you are looking for.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:18
Yeah, I think that again it the article actually tries to compare it to the Kindle scribe or the remarkable two tablets. I don’t think that that’s a an appropriate, I think in functionality, I suppose but certainly not in quality of the experience. This is This is in essence, it’s running Android. Right? This is an Android device. Yeah. So it’s running Android. You know, I think that it has a pretty good set of specs. I wasn’t actually dis disapproving of the specs. I do like the fact that it’s a color tool. And I think that it’s important for us all to kind of take heed to the fact that this is this is Onyx is entry into this space to compete with scribe and the remarkable to vertical to though is very high end technology, right? It’s a high end device. The Kindle Scribe is like any other Kindle quality build, right? It’s nice, but it’s also as you said, with the with the with the Macs, you know, it’s just something that you’re going to replace on a regular basis, it’s not going to last very long. Although I will say that I own every single one of my past candles,

Augusto Pinaud 27:27
the candles last but the timeless, the fire is a different story. The Kansas is a reader, they will last forever because they are indestructible apparently according to the ones I have at least. But the fires will not the batteries and the processors are not fast enough to continue lasting for a really long,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:48
right. Totally, totally understood. And so again, I’m I’m actually very interested in this from the color perspective, I like the the ability to be able to play in the color, I like access to the Google Play store here. And I like having the additional functionality for someone. This is not for me, because I do not want the additional functionality on any tablet that I’m using except on my iPad, right? So my iPad is that tablet that has that functionality, which is a full purpose computing device. Anything else must be must be context specific. Right? My Kindle is there for reading. The Kindle Scribe is there for taking notes and annotating documents, right? So it’s it’s all about giving the tool a purpose. And many times what we try to do is we try to say we want all of our devices to do all the things that’s not as productive as giving the tool a purpose, and then using it for that purpose effectively. Which also means that you don’t have to learn every feature of every every device, you’re learning the features of the device that that it works best for. Right. So, you know, like the Kindles have a browser built into it. And you can do all kinds of things on those devices. Why would you fight a browser built on a Kindle? To get things done, I get it, if it’s in a pinch, you need to be able to access blah, blah, blah, but it’s really not worth it in my book, to fight that uphill battle on a device that’s inferior to browsing for browsing the web. So just kind of keep those things in mind that this is doing some really sophisticated things. But it’s also a fairly, you know, overpowered you know, like, basically reader and and so yeah, it can do some extra things. And you got to keep that in mind. I do like the fact that it’s on Android 11. And so it’s pretty, pretty high up there and the androids, doing doing its thing. All right, on to our next article about Android getting a brand identity facelift.

Augusto Pinaud 29:42
And that’s all yours. The Android is changing their brand identity once again, and I don’t understand this game from Google. But

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:55
I think it’s I think it’s like well worth an effort to tell appears through. So Android for a very long period of time has been in this lowercase older view with a very two dimensional Android head. So kind of the head of the robot has been, has been very two dimensional, this rebranding, which I started noticing some time ago, but I’m guessing it’s like kind of official now, which is that they have now capitalized the A and Android. And they have kind of three deified the, the head of the Android robot. So now we are seeing just a little bit more kind of just updated, modern look to the Android logo. And honestly, I like it, I like everything that I’ve seen about it. So far, it looks crisp, it looks modern, and it was just looking a little dated. And I think they recognize that and this was an opportunity for us to be able to do that. I think there’s probably some more refinement to come as, as Android continues to grow. But I think, you know, as we kind of move with the cheese, in terms of brand identity, you know, just modern trends and brand identity, especially with material, you, this is just a good opportunity for us to be able to see Android make that that upward, you know, movement in the brand identity. All right, onward to the introduction to reminders on Todoist. And I will say I didn’t know that Todoist didn’t have this feature already. So I was little

Augusto Pinaud 31:26
Todoist had its has our version of this future, what they did was they really, really expanded so you could do reminders before but he was a little challenging and not very intuitive. So as a coach have to do is I have helped people set up reminders and use them, what they really did was when explain it better classify who have access, so you need to have a pro or a business account. But third, they really extend what they can do. So one of the things that to do is do that is very nice, is you can type I want to call re Monday at 12pm. And this belongs to this project and this tags or categories, okay, you could type all that or verbally do it. Reminders require you to do two or three clicks before now you can even do it on that syntaxes that improvement is fantastic, you can now set them to be automatic. So saying, Hey, I have a deadline at 4pm. So for example, this show has a deadline every week, I need to finish the agenda. So under a certain time. So that in my to do is has okay agenda for Anything But Idle. Okay, on a time. Now I can say to you know what, remind me of this two hours early. So I get a reminder that, you know, I have two more hours to submit this agenda before I get in trouble. So that’s very, very useful. And again, what they did was make it very, very easy. And that helps significantly for the heavy user of two dudes.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:14
antastic. Great, great on them. All right, on to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 33:18
Our next article, it’s on the Reddit. And it’s more to share. Okay, somebody’s implementing two week gear in Todoist. And they went into the detail, what is a 12 week gear, what is and why to do is and how they have done it successfully. I thought it was very worth it, to spend the time reading this and really understanding you know, how you could do do this many people is looking for more productivity ways to be more productive, you know, we’re talking early I we’re going to do more? Well, this is this may be something that you will be interested in in to look at a study.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 34:03
Fantastic and just know that we do run a 12 week year group here in personal productivity club. So if anybody’s interested in the 12 week year, you can hop into that 12 week year group. It’s an under channels currently. And you can kind of ask folks how they set up their 12 week year how they set it up in Todoist. I’m sure that their Todoist users in the 12 week year group. And so that’s all kinds of fun there. Wonderful. All right on to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 34:31
Interesting thing on this article and we have mentioned when we talk about the Apple vision pro how exciting that is, and there is a new podcast in which the co founder of Oculus Oculus is one of those VR headsets is sharing how excited he is how this can change things and how much you know he’s excited about the price. Everything about it you know and even he’s he said on the on the interview and I think if Apple will have tried to go after the low end of the market that will have been a mistake. And I share my opinion of this apple is going to go on apply this same strategy they have done already twice very successful. That was iPad and Apple Watch, they lounge those devices, underperforming, expense expensive. They conquer, discover what the market was really going to use with these devices, how they were going to use it and then change the product for the third or fourth generation to make it mass push. And I think they are going to do exactly the same this time.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 35:38
So for folks, just to have background on this Oculus is the company that was bought by Mehta. So as the Oculus quest, it’s now the meta quest. And so the Oculus co founder, he’s speaking I’m presuming not on behalf of any longer of meta in terms of your so. So just keep that in mind that this is not someone who’s speaking on behalf of meta and so the you know, it’s just interesting to hear someone who has left that environment and is talking about how Apple is really doing well here to step into this new market with the vision Pro. And so we’ll see once it’s in people’s hands, and in the next six to nine months. And and what people are really feeling about it, these are predominately going to be developers and folks who have had the vision pro in kind of an embargoed state, as journalists or YouTubers, or whatever else they are. And so it’s gonna be very interesting to watch that whole, you know, kind of market unfold, and what Apple really has envisioned for vision Pro, ultimately, because Penultimately, they have been talking about productivity, right, and really focusing on productivity. All of the other headsets have been focused on entertainment, specifically, in the gaming field. So how are they going to navigate those waters? And will they shift to gaming? Because that’s going to be somewhere that they can find immediate traction? Or will it be both right and go apple arcade have arcade available, plus these productivity applications as well. So it’s gonna be pretty interesting to watch this develop and, and go from there. All right, on to our next story of Gousto

Augusto Pinaud 37:25
hobbled Apple glasses, according to nine to five Mac and Android Central is not going to face competition right now for Google Google House announced that they’re canceling the iris smart glasses. And I’m sad about it, because I really want to see competition. And I was hoping Samsung or Google will be that competition. But it may be later Windows.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:51
Yeah, so Google Glass obviously didn’t make a huge Google Glass made a huge impact, I think on on on on the industry in the sense that it came too soon, people rejected the notion of being recorded in some way, shape, or form. And, and that was, that was really difficult. However, while Google abandoned the consumer side of Google Glass, it actually was embraced by an enterprise. So Google Glass lives on in the enterprise space. And, you know, think about, you know, we talked about this actually, way back in the day, you know, the idea of having a heads up display, while you’re on say, you know, you’re a cable runner, you know, you’re you’re a cherry picker up there really high, you need instructions, or you need overlay of kinds of instructions, that kind of thing, the enterprise world is, you know, pretty good. And, and then, of course, Google decided to get rid of the Enterprise Edition, as well. And so, you know, I think that Google Glass will live on in some way, shape, or form in the vestiges of the technology in something new, I will be curious to see how this, this whole environment of having a heads up display, especially for the augmented reality space continues to develop, there’s, um, was it Sony, that was collaborating with either Snapchat, or it was it was Ray Ban that was collaborating with Mehta with the Facebook glasses. So, you know, everyone is kind of trying these different things out, and it’s just going to be a matter of time before we find a an effective set of glasses that people can wear. And that ties to the computing system. This was being done in the 80s folks, so it’s not a new thing. It’s just a matter of of getting it into a small form factor, right. This is all about battery power for the most part right because if you put a pair of glasses on, you have to be able to have enough battery power to be running such high processing power plus heat conduction, you know, heat dissipation that is so that you’re not having your glasses. burn your face. So you know, there’s just a lot going on in this whole thing. You know, Apple glasses is an interesting concept where you can have, you know, a pair of glasses you put them on, and they give you an augmented view of the world. I think that we have seen already some of this, you know, Bose and others have put out glasses that play music, Amazon had a pair of glasses that had music as well, they were typically sunglasses, you know, you go to the beach, you put your sunglasses on, you listen to your music, some of them use bone conduction, or otherwise. But this is the future. I mean, until we get contact lenses, where the contact lenses have the superimposed lens, and so on and so forth. Google has been playing around this with regard to glucose monitoring, in their in their health project. And so I see that I see that movement in the direction of now a display, you know, on glasses that you can put on, and it gives you just like you’re walking around town, you’d like to be able to see directions, you know, right now, if I have my Google Pixel watch on and I’m running, you know, around the block, you know, I can turn on directions, if I get lost, which happens, I can go ahead and say, I need directions back home. And now it can go ahead and just show it to me on my watch, it’d be much nicer find my sunglasses on. And it just showed me the directions in which I should be going. And now that can facilitate my getting home safely. So those kinds of things are, are just have to it’s the natural progression of where people can go, you know, if you’re not a watch, wear or if you’re not sunglasses wear, then you’re not going to probably lean into this as quickly and readily. But for those of us like myself, who was always a watch were having a smartwatch was the next logical thing for me, I wear sunglasses. So I’m going to naturally want a pair of glasses to be able to have that heads up display and apply that augmented reality. So I see lots of opportunity here. It’s just getting all of the companies together to make this work together, just like the matter protocol for IoT for Internet of Things, technology protocols, that that matter, protocol. While you know, I’ve heard you no good and bad about it. If Apple and Google and otherwise can have an interoperable wearable, and they can at least protocol regarding those wearables. Because if I buy Apple glasses, and I can’t use them with my, my Google Pixel phone, it’s dead on arrival, right? But if I can, if I can use it across the system, yeah, sure. It’s not gonna be as good, right? As it might be, if I were pairing with an iPhone, fine. But I should be able to use 80 to 90% of its functionality just the same way. And then it becomes powerful enough for anyone to buy those that kind of heads up display, and put it on and use it. So I see all of the productivity benefit benefits of this kind of technology. And I really hope that they, they just set aside their differences for the future of a huge market. I mean, there’s a huge market here for those who can make it work. All right on to managing your notes with OneNote and Google Tasks.

Augusto Pinaud 42:57
Comes from Flexi I use Flexi personally, it’s a great application. And they have come to work, how to integrate, you know, these things that supposed to be universal how to integrate all the things and they’re not. And now they are talking in this article, how to integrate your OneNote with the Google task and how to make them work together. It’s a short article. But if you use those two products, or you use products that we love to have integrated, I will recommend you to go and check out flex.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 43:34
Yeah, and it’s Plexi, right. It’s p l e x y, right. So for anybody who may be confused by the weird spelling, there are two E’s in the name, I don’t know how they actually pronounce their name, I’m gonna go with Plexi. But either way, they have the ability to synchronize between many different tools. So Microsoft to do to do list and Google Tasks are kind of like the Mainstays and then they are capable of then integrating with other tools across the system. So you can you can synchronize to Trello and asana and JIRA, and Evernote, base camp, you name it, all of those can kind of synchronize back and forth, which gives you that much more power to be able to work in the tool you want to, while still integrating with potentially the tools you have to use for work or otherwise. So this is just a really, really great tool. It’s, it’s akin to the tool I use, which is Unito, Yuen Ito, that allows me to fully synchronize between asana and Trello as well as many other tools and and so you can kind of use these tools and this is different than say, Zapier or a Microsoft Power automate or if because those tools are like step based tools, right? If you do this, then you get this particular result. Please see as well as unito are synchronizing those tools are staying in a near real time synchronization between those things. So as you’re making changes between one or the other, those things are going back and forth and making them it synchronous, would that that’s the power of these things, and I please see is, is much more affordable. So that’s the thing about Plexi, unito was just a bit more expensive. But, you know, by a bit more, I mean, a lot more expensive. But you know, that’s what it is. So I think that it’s great that they’re adding more tools to make the integration, synchronization more robust. Okay, on to our next and final

Augusto Pinaud 45:32
activity, technological is now you can add notes to cite password, save it on Google Chrome. So in the latest version, you can go to Chrome, you know, go to Settings, Password Manager, open your password, and add notes, Hey, you want to give things I will help you to find a search faster and things that you may want to remember. So I think this is something in the right direction from Google passwords.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 46:00
Yes. So the reason why you would want to take notes are things like if your username and password are not your email address, but you want to know what email address is tied to that particular account, you know, you can go ahead and put that in the notes. It’s not going to compromise, necessarily your security that much. And it gives you the ability to go ahead and know what those things are, I see that all the time, you know, you’ll have to you have a username and a password. But you need to know what email address it’s tied to because you do a password reset, and you have no idea what email address it went to. And so you’re just stuck there, you know, going from email to email to kind of figure that out. But there are also things like just having a pin associated with your passwords and knowing what that pin might be, you might want to put those into the notes as well as again, being mindful of that security risk, you can go ahead and play some of those pieces in there. You might even put in a hint as it relates to your password. So you can remember say if you have a mnemonic for your passwords, you can put a in the note that particular mnemonic and you don’t need to actually expose the the the actual password, you could just look at it. So if you’re in a group environment, the mnemonic will help you know what the password is it okay, and now you can go ahead and type that into another device, especially if you’re not, you know, the password manager is there. So it will automatically put it in as on the device. But if you’re trying to put it in on your phone, and you don’t have access to your Chrome browser, say it’s a brand new install, you can use that mnemonic to go ahead and remember the password and Sound Support. So you have lots of really good options for that. All right, that closes out our productivity technology headlines for this week, and moves us into new tools of the week. I guess when I of course come across many personal development time tasks, project management and productivity, collaboration tools and services each week. Some of them we use, some of them just stand out because they’re interesting. And so here in new tools of the week, we each bring you a tool we think you might like and so this week, I am going to talk about two different tools, but in a different way. So the tool I’m recommending primarily is called Glass. And glass is a tool that I’ve been looking for for a very long time. glass glass is basically a highlighting tool and an annotation tool for the web. And this is in line with another tool that I have been using for quite some time, called hypothesis. And there are kind of two pieces to hypothesis that I really like. But let me talk about glass first. So what glass allows you to do is you install a Chrome extension. Unfortunately, this is not a desktop application. I really, really wish this was the desktop application, but it’s not. So it’s it’s fixed into the web browser, whether that be any chromium based browser or Apple Safari. And what you do now is you can go ahead and highlight any text that appears in a web page, you can highlight it a specific color, and they give you a selection of colors. And you can also add notes to that highlighted text. So think how you have a Kindle, right, you highlight a part of the Kindle, you go ahead and add a color if you’re using a Kindle app, as opposed to one of the Kindles that are black and white. And you can go ahead and apply color, you can also apply a note you can comment on that particular item. And then you can go ahead and export those, copy those highlights. So say for example, I go through an article for today’s Anything But Idle, I will then be able to see all my highlights within the article, exhume them right extract them from the document the webpage immediately from the article and copy them into their own note in Evernote, or OneNote or wherever I want to. And now it’s in that space, it’s inside that note, and it’s just the highlighted things plus my comments associated with it and sourcing back to each of those items. So I’m capable of clicking on a link being taken directly back to that thing. You can create a portal where you have all of your various comments, highlights and notes, and you can share them with other people. So glass is a really really powerful tool that allows you to do this with YouTube videos, you can do this in many, many other tools. So you can kind of do that it has a direct injury integration also with read wise, which is kind of like the the ability to synchronize all of your various notes when you’re reading across different environments like Kindle or otherwise. So I just am I’m really pleased with Glasgow so far. And I’ll just add a side note to this, which is the reason why like hypothesis hypothesis allows you to basically implement this kind of highlighting. So if you know medium, and how medium.com you go to medium, you can highlight something and just apply an annotation directly in line within the text hypothesis has a function for adding that to your website, if you have a WordPress website, so you could just install that WordPress plugin. And now someone can visit your website, they can highlight text and leave a comment directly on the text that they’ve highlighted, which is really freaking cool. And so it just gives you that ability to have that level of inline conversation with people and knowing the parts of your your content that are actually relevant to the reader, right? Because if they’re highlighting that specific text, you know a lot more about what they’re talking about than them going down to the bottom of the page and typing a comment that is maybe quoting maybe not quoting the text that you are that’s relevant to their to their comments. So glaspie and hypothesis, I’ll put links to those in the show notes, of course, so you’ll be able to access them. But the the hypothesis plugin that you can implement on your website, is this really powerful as well. Okay, so what is your tool this week?

Augusto Pinaud 51:37
Oh, my tool is weak, it may not be a new tool. It’s not me. And the productivity tool. I’m one of their certified experts. So I spend a lot of time talking about nursery but the reason this became was because Michael publish an article talking about the article step titled nuts be a trusted productivity system for life. And regardless of the application, what I like to highlight is this article because as much as I believe nothing is great. Really, this is the article brings what I think most people should look into productivity, or you bring them or building a trusted productivity for life, or are you playing with the next app? And you know, I remember when I begin in the world of productivity some months ago, I remember people saying, well, when you find that system, you will not change it. And it’s true. My system, it’s been very, very stable. I begin OmniFocus. And I move into Todoist. And even as a certified expert, there are some things that listen, there may not be many things lives in Todoist. Today, nothing left in Omni, but I still teach the three of them. And what he, what I help people to do is to build that trusted system doesn’t matter, you can blow my thing. And I will be able to move my system to the next application and build it exactly the same way. And I think that’s one thing that nos B do incredibly, incredibly well. So my advice, go and read that article quickly and get a little more into what that means.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 53:37
Fantastic. And we’ll put a link to those be in the show notes as well. So with that, let’s go on to our featured story of the week. This week, we’re talking about how to remember what you type with digital note taking. So what’d you think about the article?

Augusto Pinaud 53:58
The article was very interesting. And we have talked about digital ink we have talked about things but you know, the reality is we still type more than what we write. I love good notes. I leave on good notes, but I understand I carry multiple devices most people carrying our device or things like OneNote it’s great when you are typing Evernote, great when you’re typing. The question is what is what you have to remember though things are you trusting search? Because if you’re trusting search, you may be in trouble if you use different terminologies. How are you going to remember what it is? Are you typing and processing? What is what you’re using? I thought it was a good article to remind people that is not only the content is not only captured and created, it’s also how you’re going to retrieve it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 54:58
So so the article actually walks through some techniques for being able to help you remember what you type. The first thing, though, that it recommends is the idea that you can go ahead and capture handwritten notes, digitally, right, just taking a photograph of your notes. And it uses Evernote as it’s a specific example. And obviously, you all know that I’m an evidence certified expert, but you could do this just on your phone, right, you could literally just, you know, take a photo photo with your phone, both Android and iOS have an ability to extract text from images. So you don’t need an exterior tool to basically lift the text from handwritten notes, which means that you then have the ability to move those that that OCR text to wherever you want to be able to place them. So you get the benefit of those things. Now, I have a working hypothesis, and is hypothesis not a theory, but working hypothesis that the whole reason why some of these social studies that have come out have shown that people, quote unquote, learn better or retain more from handwriting versus with typing is purely concentration right there. If you’re typing, you’re less engaged with the material, there’s less time being dwelled on what you’re writing, right, because you’re putting more effort into the writing process. However, I think that as new generations come onto onto technology, you’re gonna see more and more students who are dwelling on the material that they are typing. And therefore, you will get the same level of retention and capability. What What I’m really concerned about, though, is the fact that, you know, students can just like click a recorder, right, you turn on your voice memos app or Google recorder, and you can audio record and transcribe the entire lecture. Many times professors are already doing that and providing that in a portal. So kids are are less likely to take notes, and therefore they’re less likely to learn a very, very powerful skill, a skill set, really, that is necessary for being out there in the world and being successful as a professional. That being the case, if we can, if we can digitize our notes, we get a central source of truth, right. And we want to really get to that place where we have that central source of truth. And then the article basically walks us through different things we can do to better do that level of comprehension, retention, and then our ability to be able to not just retain, but then what do you call it, when you bring it to memory again, so, you know, recall, thank you, retention. And recall, I couldn’t recall the word for recall, that’s a bad sign. So being able to go ahead and recall at at will, those kinds of, of datum, or data that are that are living within our system. So I think that what we all need to do is we need to recognize that there are different modalities for taking notes, learn some some different modalities that work for you. And then going ahead and making sure that you are, you know, just like approaching the material on a regular basis that allows it to move from short term memory and working memory into long term memory so that you have better retention and recall. So that can include spaced repetition, where you use some space repetition applications, like Anki, or otherwise, that allow you to see the material over and over again, on a particular spaced repetition, pacing, so that you’re capable of remembering the things that you remember, and then being reinforced of the things that you don’t remember as you are making your way forward. And that gives you the ability to reinforce and and strengthen those neural neural pathways. So good article, I think it’s always important for us to think about the fact that we still have lots of digital notetaking, that is handwritten note taking, we have lots of note taking that is physically writing on paper, and that we have that capability, even if we don’t utilize it as much. And quite honestly, like, I like using my iPad and taking notes directly into Evernote. Using the digital tool. I use good notes as well, I use the Kindle scribe. So I take notes in handwriting in a lot of different environments for very differing reasons. All right. So if somebody is going to give me a document that I’m going to need to mark up and then show them, I’m likely going to use the Kindle scribe, not because the iPad or Evernote can do it. But because it’s a little less daunting for that individual. Right? If you put put an iPad in front of them, they think about all the other things they could do on that iPad, and all the other things that I could be doing on that iPad, but because it’s a very limited device, it’s just like, No, it’s just a document that happens to be digital. And we’re going to look at it together. And that really helps reduce some of that immediate kind of response that some people have to touching an overpowered device, a powerful device. So I think the dumber the device for the first purpose, the better and it just makes it for a much easier experience. And that just may be with an older audience. You may not have any of that response to a younger audience that’s much more used to a tablet, being in front of them and working in that in that environment. So Any final thoughts that you stow?

Augusto Pinaud 1:00:02
Yeah, no, I don’t have any more thoughts with our story of the week. The only thing I want to add is, there is an article in our notes, but it does what I read in an enjoin. It’s an article from Paul Graham, it’s a long article called how to do great work. And it’s something that I found last week, and I’ve been sending to a bunch of people, especially young people, because it’s a fantastic description of what we should have been, somebody shouldn’t have shared with us many years back. So I just want to leave the link in there. And if you have a time, go and enjoy.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:00:46
Yes, and when you do read it understand that Paul Graham is, is explicating an interesting perspective for being able to find how to do great work, he, he gives some, some recommendations, the one area where I feel like you may struggle is of course, where he talks about the idea of finding that thing that you may want to work on, right, that thing that you want to do great work about, and how difficult and challenging that particular task is. And the fact of the matter is, is that as he kind of underscores in the article, when you are younger, and you have to decide on that thing that you want to do great work about, you’re probably too young to know what that thing is in the future. So I kind of liken this to arranged marriages, for whether you like the idea or not arranged marriages typically work out, whether that’s because of the culture in which they typically are, you know, enforced, or otherwise, when we are given fewer choices, we have a tendency to just fall in line with those choices. And we thrive in those choices. So it’s not a bad thing, to be thrust into something. So one is really, anything is better than nothing, right? So, like we talked about in productivity, right? Many times action is always better than inaction. Right? Obviously, there are edge cases where, you know, inaction not walking off the cliff is better than walking off the cliff. But those are few and far between, especially when it comes to learning about what you want to do in in with your life. Right, you can always change course. But the other side to this is that many people in at least in the Western world, fall into this individualistic perspective that they have to love what they do, in order to start, when in reality is actually the flip of that, the more you do something, and the longer you do it, and the deeper you understand it, the more you you create a sense of motivation and, and passion about something, passion is earned. For most people, some people come to it, you know, they love baseball cards, they love baseball, they get into the baseball industry, and they have a wonderful, you know, fruitful career In, in baseball, fine. Good on them, pat them on the on the back. And, and kudos to them, for the rest of us how we have to create meaning and passion. And therefore, it is through doing something deeply for a long period of time, that actually creates that level of mastery, and therefore passion about that thing. So don’t get too hung up on the idea that, that what you’re doing is not something that you’re passionate about. Because the reality is, is that some small percentage of you will dislike that thing and need to move away from that career, but you will have learned something and that learning something is deeply learning about something, right. And now you can apply that to learning deeply about something else. And the other side is that for the vast majority of you, you will find passion by virtue of having been with it for an extended period of time. And so that’s the piece that I really focused in on in Graham’s work. And I felt everything else about it was interesting enough, from from a how to perspective. But that piece specifically I think, is really important for us all to really take to heart, especially if we’re young enough to have a first career or a second career or for many of you who are much younger, you’re going to have fourth and fifth careers, because folks are just moving between careers more and more and faster and faster throughout the generations. And so thank you, Gustavo. And with that we have covered the productivity and related technology news for this week. I want to thank you Augusto for putting together the show this and every week, and we will see you next week. All right, on to anything but idle.com Which is where you will find our show notes links to all the stories, the new tools of the week, and any extra materials that we have provided for this particular episode. That includes our text transcript, which you can read through Click on the page, just click on the Read More link. And then the Download PDF, which has the transcript which you can read offline and listen to along the way. If you go to anything, but idle.com, forward slash 121, which is this episode number, you will find the specific show notes. If you’re watching the live stream, you have to come back the next day. Because it’s not available right here and now during our live stream. But for those of you who are listening to the podcast episode, it is available of course, right now, after looking at the show notes, if there’s anything you want to discuss, if you feel like we missed a story, you can go ahead and leave a comment directly on the episode page. But you can also join our community and discuss it directly inside of our community. It is embedded within personal productivity clubs. So if you go to anything but idle.com forward slash community, you will be taken to a landing page to sign up or sign in. If you already are in personal productivity club. 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