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Google Pay and PayPal Reinvigorate the Mobile Personal Finance, and More Productivity and Technology News This Week

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In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Art Gelwicks is a productivity and collaboration consultant, blogger at The Idea Pump, and host of the Being Productive podcast joins Augusto, Francis Wade and Ray each week on the podcast, ProductivityCast.

Frank Buck, EdD

Most people are overwhelmed by the amount of paper and digital information in their lives. Frank Buck makes organization easy so you can increase productivity, decrease stress, and enjoy life. Global Gurus ranked Frank #1 in the world in the “Time Management” category for 2019 and 2020. His career path took him from band director to principal to central office administrator and now to productivity coach and speaker.

Headlines & Show Notes

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

This Week’s Theme… Thanksgiving / Gratitude

How to Do Thanksgiving This Year, With Andrew Zimmern

How to Host a Virtual Thanksgiving

The Third Step on Everyone’s Gratitude Journey where Many Stumble | Leadership Freak

Stories of the Week

My experience of the Weekly Review Habit. : gtd

The task of least regret | A Life of Productivity

Apple updates iWork for Mac with new icons and macOS Big Sur compatibility

Apple Launches an Embeddable Web Players for Podcasts

Apple Drops App Store Fees to 15% for All Developers Making Under $1 Million From App Store

GeForce Now arrives on iPhone, iPad and brings Fortnite too – 9to5Mac

Zoom Update – Share Multiple Programs – iPad Notebook

It’s Time to Break the VPN Habit — Neverware

Samsung’s new Smart Monitor works with wireless DeX, Apple AirPlay, native apps

The Remarkable has a vibrant hacking community | Good e-Reader

Here is a first look of the Onyx Boox Poke 2 Color e-reader | Good e-Reader

3 ways procrastination affected my life — and how I’ve overcome it

How to schedule your day to reach peak productivity – Timeular

When and How to Use Subtasks – The Asana Blog

Our Favorite Updates to Chrome 87 and Firefox 83

Introducing Google News Initiative Conversations

Gmail for iOS adds home screen widget as Chrome makes multi-window support on iPad official

Starting Next Year, Chrome Extensions Will Show What Data They Collect from Users

Google teams up with Citibank on mobile-first accounts

Three quarters of workers across the globe struggle as lockdown mental health pressures hinder work productivity – HR News

Alexa Routines Now Work on Amazon Fire TVs | in MakeUseOf

Oxford study finds that video games make people happier

Being wrong can actually be your fastest path to achievement

Letting Go Is Not Something You Do | The Minimalists

10 high paying jobs in the US (and the companies hiring for them now)

Apple M1 Mac mini already discounted for holiday shopping — a great Christmas gift!

The Complete Guide to Motivation

Raw Text Transcript

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

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:06
Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community Welcome to anything but idle. I’m your host, Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:13
And I’m a goof up now.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:15
And we together are your hosts or anything but idle. This is November 23. And this is Episode 31. And each week, we cover the productivity news and the technology news headlines of the week. And and to do that we bring two panelists with us to do that. Or usually we bring to the panelists last Monday, we weren’t we just it was just the two of us. And so either way, today we have Frank buck and our galax and so I will introduce both and bring them up on the stage. So Frank buck, he is on sorry, most people are overwhelmed by the amount of paper and digital information in their lives. Frank buck makes organization easy so you can increase productivity, decrease stress, and enjoy life. He’s the global Guru’s ranked number one in the world for time management for 2019 and 2020. His career path took him from band director, to principal to Central Office administrator and now to productivity coach and speaker. Welcome to anything but idle.

Frank Buck, EdD 1:19
Right, thanks so much. Always a pleasure to be here.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:21
Fantastic. And we have Art galax. Our galaxy is a productivity and technology collaboration consultant. He’s a blogger at the idea pump.com. And he’s host of the being productive podcast, as well as joining us on ProductivityCast podcast each week. Welcome to anything but idle art.

Art Gelwicks 1:38
Hey, Ray, how you doing?

Unknown Speaker 1:39
Good, good.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:40
Welcome to our audience. And to this evenings, rendition of the Thanksgiving slash gratitude episode, what I wanted to do was to kind of kick off the conversation with a discussion about Thanksgiving and gratitude. Thanksgiving actually falls in and around my birthday. So usually I think about Thanksgiving is everyone being thankful for me. But But beyond that, you know, really, it’s a wonderful thing. And so, the the but the the real goal here, though, for me always is to think about how gratitude impacts our personal productivity, how it impacts our lives, both from a contentment, but also from a fulfillment perspective. And, and so I’d come across several articles that were talking about some of the things and we’re coming into a fairly unconventional Thanksgiving, for example, I am not going to be with my family this year with everyone. adoringly telling each person around the table, why I’m so great. Instead, I will be home alone, alone, but we will be home without everyone around the table, because we won’t be going to my parents house or, you know, to the in laws homes in order to celebrate the holiday. And it’s it’s unconventional, I’m sure for all of us. And I’m curious about one how you go ahead and deal with gratitude, like how you kind of mesh gratitude into your life. And then maybe some tips for folks in terms of how to deal with this unconventional holiday during a pandemic. wants to start us off.

Art Gelwicks 3:20
I’ll jump in, go for it’s gratitudes one of those weird things because you hear about it a lot. You hear about Oh, gratitude journals and things like that. But I want to be a little bit more pragmatic about it. One of the reasons I think a lot of people will procrastinate on things, especially for other people, is if they don’t think there’s going to be appreciation for what they’ve done. Now, that’s, that’s a, I don’t want to say a selfish but self focused point of view. And I think to spin that, we have to be cognizant of the fact that others have that same thinking. So we’re doing something for someone else, or if someone does something for us, we’ve got to be cognizant of showing them. We appreciate that effort. If we expect to be able to get that back to ourselves at some other point. I don’t think the high road is always Yes, you know, appreciate on both sides. But we all know that the high road isn’t always taken by everyone all the time. But just reminding, personally reminding myself that when someone does something for me, I need to make sure that they understand what that means to me. Even if they don’t return that favor. I’m not worried about that as much. But I also have to be cognizant of, well, if I’m putting something off, is it because I don’t think I’m going to get that. Thank you for doing it. Or is it just something I don’t want to do?

Augusto Pinaud 4:55
I remember my first son’s giving in the United States in some days. The only one here that he’s not American born, and I moved to this country, October 23 2000, to learn English, and my roommate at the time. Somebody invited me for son’s gaming and a friend I have made. And then my roommate invited me for some skimming too. And I told him that I could not I already have suggest to these other people. And he said, that’s fine. Let me see what I can do. And he called his parents and said, Well, he cannot make it for since giving very really want him to go. So can we celebrate son’s giving instead of Thursday, on that Saturday, that out of many other things, teach me the concept of sense giving. It’s given things for things that you cannot put $1 sign next to it, or a value, or anything else. And that’s probably out of my definition of since given ungratefulness. What has guide for the last 20 years, what I define as this day, and this is a memory that I will be grateful forever and eat what this day means to me, what can you give, that there is no way to repay back? You know,

Frank Buck, EdD 6:35
I think in our day to day lives, it’s so easy ox to kind of get in the ditch, on the negative side, you know, little by little it moves that way, unless there’s something to sort of bring it back to the center. And so this, you know, this time of year, to set aside a little bit of time to just focus on what’s, how have we been blessed as a people what’s going right for us? What are those things happening for us, that we don’t have any we don’t have any right to it’s, it’s been a gift. We didn’t do anything to deserve it. It’s not owed to us. It’s given to us by other people who care about us.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:22
Yeah, from a, from a more pragmatic perspective, I’m thinking about, for my own holiday, how to engage my family across a vast distance. And so I’ve been thinking about, you know, how to invite people to, for example, a holiday open house. So in years past, I normally when I lived in both DC and New York, I would hold what would what was kind of an annual tradition, I call it the holiday open house. And, and so the HOA that I called it was was basically a time when people that I haven’t seen all year long, I might see somebody once a year, I may talk to them throughout the year, but I just don’t see them, I would invite everybody over. And I would plot all of the holiday decorations. And in essence, you know, everyone would kind of help pitch in and put up the the holiday tree and, you know, decorate the house and whatever. And I’d be cooking or baking pastries, and whatever. Or I get, you know, a friend who is better at baking pastries than I do that stuff. And, and so make holiday drinks. And throughout the course of the day, people would come through the house and decorate with me. And we catch up and we’d have a great time. And I’d introduce you know, maybe a business client to someone who, you know, didn’t know somebody and they, they struck up a conversation and they got to know each other better. And it was always the highlight of my year, just being able to have everybody in my home and celebrating and so on so forth. And so it’s a, it’s a huge hit to me in in now living in Pittsburgh, where I have not been able to do that for several years. And looking forward to doing that again, once the pandemic is over. But I thought, well, why couldn’t I do this in kind of a virtual environment? Why couldn’t I invite people over and do that? So I’m in the process of planning something like that. And it’s, it’s kind of strange, you know, because you’re, you’re having to like, navigate all of the, you know, you’re muted, or your camera’s not quite great. Or what just say, Grandma,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 9:21
would you say Grandma, would you say Grandma, you know, that kind of conversation when people have hiccups in their in their internet connection. So I’m trying to overcome all of those pieces, and making it not so burdensome on everyone. So you know, trying to find like maybe a period of time throughout the day when people can log in and log out, say, Hello, stop in, you know, drop out as they need to, and and still be able to actually be productive because I need to actually still decorate well. Well, everyone’s kind of dropping in and out of the environment. So you know, that’s something for you to consider. If you are thinking about having a holiday gathering maybe you know instead of me where I’m doing it after the Thanksgiving holiday Maybe doing that before or on the holiday itself.

Augusto Pinaud 10:04
You know, we the need applies and it doesn’t apply at the same time to since giving but my daughter’s birthday happened last weekend on this they make there was obviously no no gallery no pottery, no nothing. So we were discussing what to do and she decided well can I have a zoom? So of course you can have a zoom if you want to. So she did exactly that she said this zoom for God knows when to notebook but you know, the longest party ever I’m her friends just coming come out coming in. And she has game senate stuff that she did was different group of friends. And as I was asking her after that, say it’s one of the best birthday ever. I didn’t move out over here. I eat cake four times. It was fun. So, yes, it may not be different, it may not be the same as being under table eating at the same time. But also that doesn’t mean it cannot be fun uncool and make it really, really good.

Art Gelwicks 11:04
Yeah, I have to agree with you on that. Because it’s easy for us to get to get caught up in the what we’re missing out on. I have relatives that we’re going to fly in who can’t now I have relatives who are 15 minutes away, who can’t come to Thanksgiving now, because they’re quarantine. And you it’s easy to fall down that flight of stairs, mentally and say, well, everything’s just so off the rails and there’s so much we’re missing out on. And we have to be we have to be gracious of the fact that that’s even an option, that we even have the ability to connect remotely that those people are still available to us. And we can make that connection. And I’ve been trying to work through as we as we end out 2020 on how do I make that more a part of just daily every day activities. When I talk to somebody about a project and I know they’ve done something, have I made a concerted effort to tell them I appreciate what they did. And I have to remind myself in the backup, back of what I’m doing is that at any possible time, that person might not be there, for some reason, something may happen. And if I haven’t taken the effort to show them what I appreciate from them, I may not have that opportunity. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:28
yeah, this is definitely a year to honor those that we’ve lost. And we have lost many. But also at the same time being thankful for being here, you know, and, and feeling good about being able to have an opportunity to right wrongs, you know, and to reach out to people that you care about that you might have wronged in some way, shape, or form. This is a good time of year to do all that stuff. And I really I really do enjoy it for that kind of reconciliation. And it’s a good time for all of those things.

Frank Buck, EdD 13:03
And I’m wondering, a gousto with your daughter’s birthday party. Were there people who came to the party from other parts of the country. Friends who had moved away, that wouldn’t have been able to do coming to the live birthday party wouldn’t have been, you know, wouldn’t have been possible.

Augusto Pinaud 13:23
And that is exactly correct. She has her grandparents who lived in Venezuela, she has her other grandparents who lived in Mexico. She has her friend from Indiana, she has friends from Chicago, she has friend from Texas That is true. Otherwise we’ll have never make make it to the party. So that’s I think that’s what makes it so much fun is that she look she found a way a solution to make and she had she thought on activities that she could do remotely and next time I’m going to weave Can we buy this board game and we send it to my best friend so we can play this game over two together so she so that there is even more opportunities and actually is one of the things we have planned for this as given is we bought a board game called How To Build your house think as Welcome to your time I think it’s called I will put the show notes and I will find the show notes send it to write but it is a game that can play up to 100 people and it can be playable soon, remotely and no issues. So we add it to a couple of our friends and then we are going to connect to play all together the game and have fun that way.

Frank Buck, EdD 14:36
Yeah. So we were able to take something that was originally a substitute, you know, we can’t do it the way we’ve always done it. Substitute it’s the parallel, but now we were able to take that and move it a step further. We haven’t just substituted one for the other. We’ve substituted and enhanced and when this pandemic is over Over. Now we’ve, we can do what we did before. But we’ve also got this other thing where we can literally talk around the world as easy as we can talk across the table.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:13
You’re absolutely right. And I’m definitely thinking about, you know, in future holidays, how we can bring and incorporate people beyond just our nuclear family, to our extended family that way, and now, they can’t say that they can’t do it. They’ve already done it.

Augusto Pinaud 15:29
I’ve made my fire.

Art Gelwicks 15:33
Well, that’s true. That’s true. Although, you know, if you’re dealing with a relative, you don’t particularly care, you can always just make them think you froze, and then they reset it, and you’re good. And yeah,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:46
and if you’re the host, you can mute them, and you can do so. Alright, this has been quite lovely. I’m appreciative of your thoughts about getting geared up for the holiday season and gratitude. And I hope that kind of triggers your perspectives. Those of you who are watching and listening to you know, just how you can do this, we’ll put a link to a couple of items that I picked up along the way, that kind of talk about how to organize a Thanksgiving remotely and those kinds of things. And even if you’re having people over how maybe to deal with that, as well. And and I hope that you all really take to heart, you know, if you’re certainly here in the United States, where the pandemic is kind of out of control, you know, take to heart the fact that, you know, doing everything possible to be able to mitigate transmission is important here, and I want you around next Thanksgiving, to not just watch and listen to us, but to live your productive life. And you can’t be productive if you’re not here. And so I want you to really take to heart that this is a difficult time, but you can get through it if you pay attention to these protocols. That being the case, let’s get into our headlines this week. Agusta Do you want to kick us off with our first headline of the week? And you’ll need to unmute yourself in order to be able to talk gotcha.

Augusto Pinaud 17:06
I was ready and completely conscious that I was so our first our first in news of the week come from no other than Reddit and it was it is called my experience with a with a review habit in getting things done. And interestingly enough, I I made sure this I didn’t know that there was this Reddit group in for for getting things done. Thank you, Ray I my productivity has been permanently damaged because of you. I really appreciate that. That said it was a really interesting article and it was a good way to talk to to enter and talk about the wicker review and how you know this person do his weekly review avoiding me so why do you Why do I do it? Well, to avoid getting out of control to live more intentional to gain clarity, and he went into how he do it. And there are many ways to do The Wicker review and what he has is our way and it’s not necessarily the only way but it is important what what was really key for me on this article was the three things are the three main advantages as he called him to avoid the getting out of control, to live more intentionally and to gain clarity and those two things you cannot deny, have a good weekend review. And interestingly, the more consistent that weekly review is, you get more of that intentionality you stay much in control, and your clarity really improved. So as always tell people that one of the hardest things of the wicker review is to turn weekly review for something you feel you must do to something you really want to do. And since we are people who need praise and and things fine, what are those things? Okay, for me, it’s a coffee, I put cinnamon in my coffee there and I only put cinnamon in the coffee for the week review. So my buddy said like we can, once a four week review none of them. It’s Friday morning. Okay, but he’s really make a difference. And when I sit in there and I play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that I only play when I’m going to do the weekly review, my brain knows Oh, it’s weekly review time I need to treat. Okay, it’s a symphony that I love dearly that I only play when I’m doing my review with a cinnamon coffee. And those two things now means that the weekly review is a treat. So what are on Dr. Buck are doing to make that a treat.

Art Gelwicks 19:54
I just love the fact that you’ve got that whole sensory connection Doing your weekly review, you’re mentally setting yourself up, you have the auditory reinforcement, you have the tactical, you have the taste, all of that just compounds on that being an experience that you want to have on a weekly basis. I’ve actually gotten back into doing my weekly reviews, more than I have been over the past couple of months, because the projects I’m working on currently have shifted. And I’ve started a large group of new projects all at one time. And I found that they like proverbial herding cats, they keep running everywhere. So the the weekly review is the only point I have to stop all of that work, bring everything back together and say, okay, what’s gotten away from me, and then start to reset it. But I like the idea of basically setting an event for that. I’ve tried to do it around the schedule, but I haven’t tried the other pieces. So I think starting this week, I’m going to pick a piece of music, I’m going to pick a specific t that I’m going to tie to it and see if that doesn’t help me make it that much more of a thing that I want to sit down and do.

Frank Buck, EdD 21:10
And then for me, mine is much more flexible. And and I really do a daily, a weekly, a monthly, you know it once a month to really look at everything, and what do I want to undertake over the next month? And then some of those things I’m not seeing a month. And then once a week, what are the things that I want to be working on over the course of the week? And then in the evening? What do we want tomorrow to look like? Did I bite off more than I could chew for today? How do we need to reschedule and for me that so much of it happens during those spare moments that I’m watching television without a lot of mental bandwidth, and work on shifting things around making tasks. You know, why did this task not get done? Well, I need to work on more clearly, I’m not exactly sure how to do that thing. I need more information. Where am I going to get the information from sort of thing to clarify? That sort of thing. So mine is much more flexible?

Unknown Speaker 22:16
I guess you’d say?

Unknown Speaker 22:18
Fantastic. Oh, go ahead.

Art Gelwicks 22:20
I was gonna say that flexibility in the way you approach it. I think everybody needs to keep that in mind when they’re trying to set up their own weekly reviews. Because where I’ve seen people struggle with it, and eventually quit is they try to put too much structure in, they try to create it, the weekly review becomes its own series of tasks. And at that point, you’re really not gaining anything. You’re just making your to do list bigger. Yeah. So I love the idea that you’re doing it with a highly flexible design.

Augusto Pinaud 22:51
Not only that, you need to find what works for you, and what works for you may shift. I had a friend who he failed miserably trying to do the weekly review on Fridays. Because Friday’s was a time early in the morning, he feel he needed to get into the company tried to get people to see what their can’t accomplish. So what what I would did with him was he moved his weekly review to Monday morning. So he had a first critical meetings, you know, nine in the morning making sure nothing is on fire. And as soon as he saw one of those meetings from 10 to one, he blocked his calendar every Monday. And now he goes into his regular review his grab his iPad, leave the office and go to or used to leave the office. No, no, no, I think you fill the room. But okay. And do his wicker review? Right there. But then he’s ready for the week for the next five days to come. And he’s completely clear. So and I know when you hear the interviews with David on and over the years, there is people I forgot his name who do it Sunday afternoon with a bottle of wine and again coming. They make it your time because he has a bottle of wine that he’s waiting for him every Sunday to do that week review. Okay, so it doesn’t matter what you do do. Mike Williams was famous for doing it in church while his daughter was singing in the choir. So it makes it special for you. so that it’s easier to stick with it.

Frank Buck, EdD 24:21
Yeah. So yeah, I could really relate to what Mike’s doing, you know that that is time that it was potentially wasted time that he’s turned into something very productive. You have to take those spare moments, those little pockets of time and be productive

Unknown Speaker 24:37
are

Art Gelwicks 24:39
it’s interesting, because it ties to one of the things that we commonly will bring up and that’s using mobile technology. And if you think about designing your weekly review in a way around a mobile platform, then you can take advantage of those opportunities. If you know for example, you have Well, back when we had like sports practices. You had a sports practice, you could sit and Way through there, or just anything, I mean that those opportunities, you can strike when the iron is hot. Now, if you think about that, that’s time you want to use. But I did want to touch on something I just mentioned just in passing about the iPad in his office, normally, he would go to another place, I’ve actually found that when I have struggled on a review, the easiest way for me to kickstart my review is grab my laptop and go to another room. Just that transitionary state gets me away from the mental distractions of everything sitting around me and says, This is the job I’m about to do. I can’t do it all the time, because that just that loses the shock value for lack of a better term. But I find that that’s enough to often kickstart me into the process.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:45
And lasting All right, I know that I have plenty to talk about as it relates to the weekly review, but I’m going to hold my thoughts and move on. I’m sure we will talk about this again in the future. The next article is an article that came out with the life of productivity, which is the blog written by Chris Bailey, who’s the author of hyperfocus, as well as a year of living productively. I think that’s know the productivity project. His prior blog was a year of living, productivity, whatever the productivity project was the name of his book. Either way, he wrote this article called the task of least regret. And the takeaway really says it all, there’s not much more to say about this other than I’m quoting here, it’s common productivity advice that you should begin each day by quoting, quote, quote, unquote, eating a frog, doing the hardest thing on your list. He continues, I find it even more helpful to begin each morning with a task I’m proudest of, I’m proudest and most relieved, to have accomplished and quote, so in essence, he’s saying, What’s the task that you would least regret doing in the morning? And, you know, I think it’s a useful kind of mental, you know, exercise. And so I found it to be useful. And maybe it will be to you to think about things from what would you least regret as opposed to, you know, most regret not completing, but basically the antithesis of the frog? What would you be most excited to want to do? And again, going to kind of the GTD principle of what would what appeals to you as opposed to repels you? Okay, so what is our next headline?

Augusto Pinaud 27:16
Our next headline is Apple updates. I work for Mac with new icons, big shortcut compatibility and everything else. So now we have pretty icons again. You know, I mentioned this when the icons came my my first comment was, okay, like the icons, why they did not update it in the iPad, and I will complaining about it continue complain, complain until they do, because I really like the new icons. But there’s a lot of workability that they did with four big four. And the next news is also an apple, he finally they finally lounge, and battable web players for Apple podcasts. So for people who has their podcast now, it’s much easier than ever to embedded their podcast and have it there anything. That’s great news for everybody. Yeah,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:11
you want to continue on with the next few Apple stories.

Augusto Pinaud 28:14
So the next one is Apple drop their 30% fee on half to 15% for all developers making under $1 million on the Apple Store. And I think that is amazing for all those small developers crying, the next one is g force is available on the phone and the iPad. And for certain people, they are happy that they can get touch friendly for night. Coming soon to the G platform, the G platform is going to work on the browser. And it’s going to be really interesting what they what they build with this.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:53
Next we have an update on the iPads. And he says assume on date soon finally now can do you can share multiple programs at once. You can share Safari and numbers and other things when you are doing the thing. So you don’t need to do now to share all you can select certain programs in the version 5.4. Point three. And that is a great news for the people who use soom on their machines. Now that’s on the desktop applications. So that’s on Mac OS and Windows, you’re able to select multiple programs to share at one time as opposed to sharing your entire screen or an individual at a time. I think a lot of people don’t also realize you can have multiple users, multiple participants in a meeting share their screen. So I can go into a zoom meeting with all four of us together. And each of us can share our screens and and toggle between those various screens. So you’re not actually limited in that way and I think people think you are, but it’s just a matter of changing the setting as a host. All right, next up with gusto.

Augusto Pinaud 30:00
Next is the new smart Samsung monitor that will work wireless will dex dex is the Samsung solution to connect your phone and turn it into a full machine will work with Apple play as well with native apps all will be wirelessly. And I think is awesome that technology is coming to the place. I have praised the decks can’t praise it enough. And I think it’s awesome that you can come from there and directly to that and continue in.

Art Gelwicks 30:35
So here

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:36
Oh, go ahead. Well, one second, I have a question for art, which is do you think dex is going to survive? The fact that Microsoft is in partnership with Samsung and bringing the Android application ecosystem to the Windows system? Like what’s the what’s the value of dex beyond the system now, especially with something like the smart monitor? Why would I have a monitor hanging around if I don’t have a computer attached to it? What’s the value of the next platform once Microsoft and now if you’re on the Mac OS ecosystem, you know, iOS and and the Mac are now starting to play nice together.

Art Gelwicks 31:14
I mean that the integration, Samsung and Microsoft have always had a relationship and making moves like the your phone application, being able to have your messaging show up on a Windows based machine. Those are nice things. Yeah. And

Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:27
the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Right? So

Art Gelwicks 31:29
right to a degree, the thing that struggle I run into with decks and I love the concept, I’ve always loved the idea of having my whole computer be that little brick that’s in my pocket, I think that’s great. The challenge is, is the execution of it. And its competition is not Windows or Mac, the competition to dex is Chrome OS, because there isn’t that direct value. Now what I’ve always wanted, and there’s a couple of companies that have brought it out, is when you start to see the the laptop configuration platforms that use Say, for example a Samsung phone as the core processor, and you plug it in, and the only thing that the laptop has is the screen the keyboard and there’s a thing called next doc and there’s a couple others. The operating system itself has potential. It’s not a Chrome OS, though that’s part of the hang up is you don’t have some of the similarities. I do like the ideas of them having a monitor that you can wireless wirelessly connect to. But as somebody who’s run decks for extended periods of time, you really need a docking station for it because of battery drain, not so much monitor display, it will suck the life out of a phone if you’re not careful. But that said, I’ve used it as a replacement desktop. And I literally had a client location where I couldn’t have a dedicated machine. So I took them a dex Doc, I hook that hook my phone to it hooked it up to the monitor keyboard, mouse, and I had a full workstation and nobody could say anything because it’s my phone. But it It didn’t look like it It didn’t act like it. Does dex have a long future. I’m not convinced as of yet. Microsoft just released notifications that are notification announcements that they’ve got a much tighter integration now between OneNote sticky notes and the Samsung notebook. But Samsung is also making a play to change how their devices work. I mean, there’s a rumor running around right now that the note line will be dead. Because on Samsung 20 ones they’re going to be adding the stylus to those. I don’t know if that’ll happen or not. But dex is a solution. If you hear me often say it’s a it’s a solution in search of a problem. Unfortunately, I think dex falls into that category yet again. I love it though.

Augusto Pinaud 33:51
But you know it is interesting. I was a big fan of the Palm Pilot and in 2007 Jeff Hawkins were still the palm was alive. They put all their eggs on a product that was named the palm folio. Okay, and people laugh about the guy and only a few people like me were ridiculously excited about that product and suddenly was the end of the company because they put all their eggs in that basket and no people didn’t understand it. But what you are describing is exactly that concept. is just 13 years later we have more power I get it but that was the constant it is bring the phone and have that that terminal that basically make your phone now a full fledged computer and that is exactly what excited me about the phone do exactly what you described. If I can get my phone I get it. There is limitations, I understand will not work for 100% of the people I get it for my authority that will make this their main device that they can now come plugging into a master If this screen worked, like you’re working in a really comfortable screen, mouse, keyboard, everything, and when you’re ready to go home, just take this, I will still 13 years later pay for that.

Art Gelwicks 35:14
And that’s really I think the value add of dex is a platform when it comes to the hardware technology, the fact that it is the most portable hardware operating system. When I say portable, I mean, physically portable, of any of the devices out there. Now, I’ll make this prediction. What will kill it outright? Is the chrome phone, when they finally release a phone that runs off a Chrome OS, game over, because it changes the entire dynamic, when that’s going to happen. I don’t know. I mean, they still got to figure out how to make Android work on some of it. But when we see that change, and that shift, I think then we’ve got a different I mean, as it like I said, as a dex user, one of the hang ups I get into is that not all the Android apps work on it properly. They don’t all necessarily rescale. And that’s because it’s something specific to Samsung. Now. Android has a desktop. I don’t wanna say emulation, but a desktop client built into the latest version, or they’re working on building it. Will that move the ball? Like I said, I don’t know. Because the problem we get into is like that notebook that I was talking about, you have to deal with all the different form factors of the physical device. I mean, if Apple were to say, hey, let’s take the iPhone 12 pros and make a doc that out of dead Mac errs, that have no brains in them now, but that’s what’s gonna drive them. They could do it because they have a fixed physical form factor.

Augusto Pinaud 36:54
But is good to live in record that if that happened, they will embed the concert?

Art Gelwicks 36:59
Oh, of course, because they’ve invented everything. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:04
I see I see a value in the next platform for at least the next few years. And so if you are thinking about having something I think the what is it the M five and the M seven series displays, I think it’d be really useful. But I’m with you are I think that now that Chrome OS can run Windows, Linux, and Android, all in on one device. It’s only time before they bring that to a smaller form factor. We have the computing power processing power, that’s not really the issue. The issue really ends up being power management, and, and then compatibility of the applications on top of the OS. And once those things are solved by Google or otherwise, it’s game over for a dex platform.

Art Gelwicks 37:49
Well, and you’re absolutely right. And I think we’re seeing where this game I think is really going to change is actually Microsoft is making inroads. Big inroads. When it comes to gaming on the mobile platforms because of the new Xbox and the Xbox game past clients, where you can stream from the cloud, or stream Yeah, it’s i i ponied up my money. I love it, or stream from an Xbox directly to that device. Well, it’s not a far step to stream a virtual desktop to that mobile device, then, well, now why do I even need a really high end laptop? I’m literally just running a VDM hook it to whatever monitor I’ve got everything right there. And honestly, my phone is three times more powerful than my laptop by processor, Ram and other capabilities. So why wouldn’t I make that logical step? So I, I would say that we’ll see Microsoft doing that we’re going to see Google make that same run in that same space as well. And I’m sorry, Samsung, but dex is going to be sharing a room with Bixby pretty soon if we’re not careful. All right, we’ve

Raymond Sidney-Smith 39:01
got a couple of follow up items from last week when we were talking about digital note taking tablets. And and so one of the articles that came up, Augusto, do you want to touch base on that and then we could talk a little bit about the Onyx color

Augusto Pinaud 39:19
bar wisdom. Let me start with a remarkable and you know, there was an article and good reader talking about how vibrant is the hacking community on the remarkable and how many people he’s trying to really get more of this device that what this device is designed for. I get it the power of ink, but it is really interesting that people is really more how vibrant or how big is people trying to already make this device a multifunction device. When was a uni Tasker and art was on the event on the Last time art was here we were talking about the unique Tasker on the Alton Brown. So now they bought this beautiful blender, but they’re now trying to break it, to figure it out how to put attachments to do what he could do with the older devices.

Art Gelwicks 40:17
It was interesting because I was listening to another podcast over the weekend, and one of the hosts had gotten one of the remarkable tools to try. And his comments were one, it’s really, really thin, which that’s great. The hardware is wonderful. But the software leaves so much to be desired. He wanted to do things like pull PDFs over and mark them up. And he was having a hard time getting them in and marking them up and making change. And I think again, we see yet again, an opportunity for hardware to take a leap, and software to fall on its face trying to get that leap to happen. And thinking about afterwards, a gousto it occurred to me there are a couple of companies that make screen protectors for the iPad that create a paper like experience. So it enhances the interaction with like, say an Apple Pencil or something like that. That’s a $30 investment versus a $600 investment for a dedicated tablet. I still want.

Augusto Pinaud 41:17
That’s correct. Not only that, so we talked last week, you can get the iPad to show completely gray colors from grayscale, turn off all the colors. So you get with that $30 Theater, it’s okay and do the ad put in the filter for the colors, you get super close to ink and that really paper like on the iPad that then you don’t need to hack if you want to get all those other things now you can completely asleep.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:46
Yeah, and that is the paper like two screen protector. And I think it runs for roughly I think it’s $40 USD. And and yeah, it basically is it’s a great screen cover, it does feel like when you’re running the Apple Pencil across the surface like it is an actual piece of paper. I don’t actually like the feel of the paper like now, but I’ve tried it actually like the smoothness of writing on the screen without it. But I can understand why people would want that. And of course, it’s a great screen protector, because you don’t want your iPad screen to be scratched. And so that’s also an added benefit of it. Note that the the hacking communities are available on GitHub, as well as on Reddit, this new platform that Agusta just learned about making fun of Google. But the point is, is that if you are interested, and you have a remarkable to or remarkable generally, but then obviously the newer remarkable to those are where those communities are and you can really figure out how to do a whole bunch of stuff with those tablets. And so you can extend them, I would not want to of course because I want to make sure that it’s a single task or dissimilar to art but I want I want it to do that. Of course I would never use it a remarkable to because it is not just a single Tasker. We’re not because it’s the single Tasker but because it’s siloed data. And you know me, I want to be able to centralize my data outside of that system in a system that I can control and integrate with other tools. And you can do that with remarkable too. Okay, next up is a little bit of a note, again, cleaning up from last week on the Onyx books, poke a two or poke two, I don’t really know what the, the pronunciation of that is. But the Michael Kozlowski on Goody reader did a first round review of the Onyx, this is the second version of the tool. And, and he was actually fairly positive about the E reader. So you know, he said, that was a fairly, you know, big, color based ereader. And, and it’s Android nine, and all of it is, you know, pretty much good to go. He was he basically gave it a very positive review. So if you want to check it out, I don’t know if I want an ereader at $280. us, but it’s certainly something that is worth looking at if you really truly want color on your E reader. So there you have it.

Augusto Pinaud 44:13
Well, and I will give you the reason why. Now that I have a really poor iPad, no, no, no. If If assuming it’s compatible without one of those.

Unknown Speaker 44:26
It’s a fire tablet exactly

Raymond Sidney-Smith 44:28
for 80

Art Gelwicks 44:29
you want a cheap iPad,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 44:30
that’s 5080 bucks. Come on, you got it

Augusto Pinaud 44:33
well, but he’s assuming it have the ink. And with that precision of Amazon to comixology do now that you may not do it with signing. You may do it with this device to be able to read comics and old comics in color in this device. Good. You can make it to the to the fire to

Art Gelwicks 44:57
I got it. I gotta agree with you to me. That was a game changer when I discovered comixology on like the fire tablet. I’m like, Oh my goodness, my comic books are back. Finally, because I’ve got, I’ve got one of the original Kindles, and I love that thing and it will never die. And I could just load books and read off it. But you can’t read a comic often. No, this is a whole different world. And I just pound through lives. The comic was

Augusto Pinaud 45:23
written in black and white, in which case, no matter if he’s colored comics, he cannot be read at all black and white i. So I get it. He said, super, you know, this is another micronaut blender. Okay, Cody Brown, but it’s a unique Tasker. But as a unique Tasker. For that it will be awesome to be able to upload a bunch of comics and then take it where the sun will not bother you and read.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 45:52
Great. We have two more articles before we hit our midway point break. Augusto, what’s our next article?

Augusto Pinaud 46:00
The next article come from the latter is tree ProQuest. Three ways procrastination affected my life by minorities. And she talks about three things how procrastination stopped her from stepping into the spotlight. The second and and how then that you know how took imperfect action to overcome it. The second one is how procrastination prevent her to getting her finances in track. And, again, how she took imperfect actions to overcome and I’m finally there, procrastination has stopped me from getting my driver license. And it is cool to you know, understand that and see how the procrastination but more what I like about this article was not how this person was perfect, how this perfect, I’ll figure it out and solve the problem forever. But how she comes open and say, you know, the way for me to fix this was imperfect, okay wasn’t perfect, but start getting some move to get it done. Hire the financial advisor for the finances, you know, and, and other things. And this is something that procrastination or not, we tend to fail miserably a lot of times into, we don’t know how to fix it some unknown, or we are procrastinating about it because we don’t have all the pieces. And we want it to the next action to be perfect. And that is one of the things in which for me, in particular getting things done was a game changer when I understood that I did not need to have every piece of the puzzle to make the next movement. But I could do it in perfect wiki review and imperfect project planning and still get some things moving forward out of that process.

Frank Buck, EdD 47:51
And so often you don’t know all the steps, you know, the next step is going to be called a gousto. Well, what if what comes after that? Well, I don’t know, the outcome of that conversation may be the next is A or B or C.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 48:10
Yeah, I think at some point on ProductivityCast or otherwise, we’ll have to have an episode on the progress principle, the progress imperative as I think about it, which is really an antidote to perfectionism and procrastination. And we’ll have to talk about that. But yeah, it’s it’s absolutely true that we need to have various ways in which we view procrastination, and how we overcome it. Okay, next up, we have an article from the blog. At time, Mueller time healer is a both a physical product business and a software that matches up with that physical product. Basically, it’s a timing device where you can set your own versions of say pomodoro is if you kind of the closest relationship to it. But it’s a sophisticated timer for being able to gamify or game design, your use good game design principles. And this article from Tim Miller was called How to reschedule your day to reach peak productivity. And it covers several different ways. Six, to be exact, in terms of organizing your day to be productive, and I thought it gave fairly, you know, typical advice in terms of how to do these things. The one item that I I kind of I’ll continue to harp on and i think is important is the concept of calling anything a ritual. I think that we should secularize the language and productivity so that we’re not conflating potentially spiritual acts, and that which is really psychological and scientific act, especially biological acts. And that’s not to diminish spirituality. It’s just the fact that I think people conflate the two of those, and then they get mixed up in it. A morning ritual is not the same as a morning routine. You can be a very spiritual person and have morning rituals. But that is not the same as having a routine routine is a biological process. And so just remember that you’re Life is designed by routines, you can’t change those routines. And that’s what makes them different from a ritual. So don’t don’t think about setting up rituals, just remove that language from all of productivity lexicology that just kind of nonsense. Focus on routines, routines are the combination of things you already do. And you can tie things to those routines. So I’m a little I’m always a little bit, you know, upset when I see this idea of morning rituals, because that’s not, you know, if you want to pray, pray in the morning, you want to do other kinds of spiritual activities in the morning, that’s completely cool. The problem is conflating the two of those for being more productive. And But otherwise, I thought the advice was pretty good. Create a morning routine before getting to work, making a daily to do list not quite sure, that’s really the best use of your time. Since most people don’t do what’s on the daily to do list. It says use time tracking software to optimize efficiency, you know, my my ideas around active and passive tracking. And if not, check out ProductivityCast, where we did two episodes on active and passive tracking. It says tackle your hardest tasks toward the beginning of the day. And that makes a lot of sense. Know your limits, and then maintain a good balance. So you can check out the article if you feel like it’s worth kind of diving in more deeply into that topic. And so with that, that brings us to our break. And we’re going to take a word from our sponsor, which is WCC Web Services this week, and then we’ll come back after the break and continue our headlines. And so with that,

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 52:35
Welcome, everybody. Welcome back everybody to anything but idle before the break, we were covering our first set of headlines of the week. And now we are going to get into our second half of the show with our second set of headlines of gousto. Take it away. What’s our first headline of the second part of the show?

Augusto Pinaud 52:56
You know, the second part of the show the first one come from the Asana blog, and is when and how to use sub task. And the reason I this article was interesting for me was there was a couple of things one that I have not noticed, until I read this article that a seminar now it’s posting everything in French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Japanese on their blog. And that is a massive undertaking that it’s awesome to see how much they are, but it is been discussions forever into should I use sub task or done use sub task and when they are, you know, good to use them. So are you using subtask instead of other projects, and I want to start saying the risk of sub task first. And if you start getting too many layers, and those two main layers, add complications, and then now you have a whole terrible spaghetti that you don’t know what your middles are. Okay, if that is what happened to you don’t use subtasks there is other people who can create this spaghetti but still know when or where they are their nipples. So that is the first criteria to answer that sub task. If you need that simplicity on your system that create more projects done, create layers on there that if you are the kind of people who handled those layers, well then create them. But I think it’s really really important to understand that difference because there is people who really want to get into the subtask or they’re cool, look how the people is doing and then they really hang themselves with that.

Augusto Pinaud 54:56
Yeah, yeah, they

Art Gelwicks 54:57
are good.

Frank Buck, EdD 55:00
Yeah, I think you have to really understand how the sub tasks work in whatever software because different task managers, they they work differently. The Jo question is, you know, when does a sub task appear and when does it not? And I’ve seen all kinds of questions, too, forum on the Asana, forums, that sort of thing. Personally, I never used subtask. until probably, I’d say the last two years, when I moved to remember the meal went to the pro version that supported subtasks. And what I tend to do is use the sub tasks. Use the parent task as more what people would normally term a project, you know, kind of a small project, and use the sub task as those individual pieces. Like I have a task that is handling my Christmas cards. Well, the subtasks Are you buying the Christmas cards, buying the Christmas stamps running the Christmas card labels? Yeah, that that sort of thing. But really, I think the big thing is understanding when and how the sub tasks. And when they don’t, my personal rule and remember the meal because I you know, as I’m looking through my task list, anything that has subtasks is going to show up with a little number beside it. Anything that is a sub task has a little arrow beside it. And either one of those two for me, when I get to that means one thing, click on it to see the whole thing, that if I click on something that has subtasks, let me see what those subtasks are all the subtasks. If I see something that is a sub task, click on it. So again, I see what’s the parent, what are the other sub tasks, so that hopefully, I can do one sub task and then just keep working through that project as long as I can. And then when I can’t, the remaining sub tasks that are already defined, they’ve already got dates, and I just move on to something else.

Art Gelwicks 57:12
So I always get into the conversation with people when they start to think about tasks and subtasks. Especially looking at it from a software perspective, I say, look, there’s nothing smaller than a task, you have to look at a task as the only actionable point where you start to work with what you’re working on. And I tell him to look at it from the idea of tasks, and super tasks, reverse the order. And what you’re doing is you’re creating relationships between the tasks, to help coordinate manage them, rather than trying to take something that you think is actionable, and breaking it into little smaller pieces. So if I think about it from something purely tactical, which is taking out the trash, taking out the trash is actually not, it doesn’t have subtasks going out the door and getting the can. That’s the task kick dragging the cat around to the front of the house, that’s the task, those roll up to the super task of taking out the trash. So it’s easier for me to get people to think that way, when they think about what are the things they’re actually going to do. And then what’s the relationship between them. The reason why I push that for people is when you look at the way task management software is typically developed, it’ll be released to manage tasks, and then you’ll have this idea of sub tasks come into play, will all they’re doing is putting a organizational layer on top of the task database that they’ve created. So when you look at tools like to do list, for example to do as a great example they released sections within to do is to be able to group tasks together, well then you go in, you look and say, oh, now we have cards, so you can look at it with different, it still doesn’t change the most basic part, which is the simplest common denominator is the task. And then building from that point up, makes it much easier to think if you try and get too granular. It just runs away from

Raymond Sidney-Smith 59:05
the article itself, I think gives some really good examples where people can group together tasks I don’t again, I don’t particularly like the term subtasks. So I while I use them and remember the milk, I don’t actually call them subtasks. They’re just items within a project. And those don’t tend to be my actual next actions because they’re placeholders for future action. And so it’s helpful as kind of an inbox for that project. And so I might collect ideas and other kinds of things into that listing. But I will only then tag the next action under any particular project as the next action. So I’m not, I’m not using multiple actions within the system. I want one anchored action as the next thing or the next few things. There can be multiple next actions associated with that project. I can do any one of them and then they’re tagged appropriately so they show up on the right smartlist and So I’m not particularly concerned so much about the semantics of it. Because while that’s important, it doesn’t necessarily drive or diminish my productivity. It does. It’s not a hindrance in that capability in that capacity. And it usually isn’t quite the reason why people are not doing something on their lists. You know, I don’t, I don’t frequently hear a client Tell me, gosh, it was called a subtasks. So I didn’t get it done. There’s some other reason that’s outstanding that’s causing them to not get those pieces done. And it functionally is whether or not that task is displayed at the right time in place, right, whether context matters for them at the moment in which they’re doing that, and whether they’re motivated to make that action on that product on that project. So I thought it was good. It gave gave some useful examples of really how to use Asana better the subtasks function of Asana in the system, you know, like using it in meetings and being able to identify things in meetings and being able to have group conversations, all of those things are useful items. And I was appreciative of Sonic giving people useful pieces for that. All right. Okay, so our next article is about Chrome 87, and Firefox 83. What is new about are two, pretty much major browsers on the internet.

Augusto Pinaud 1:01:21
Well, well, well do you leave Safari out of purpose. And we are not going to I’m going to let it slide. But let’s talk about Chrome itself. Chrome, now it’s optimizing your active tabs versus everything that is open so that way help with the use of the CPU. They claimed that it started 25% faster. And Chrome on Android now load page really, really fast. They say almost instantaneous I I don’t know. And I will say that my experience was chrome 87 on on the Mac, as well as my Chromebook has been interesting. So interestingly, in the positive, in the positive, so if you are user of Chrome, you should test it and Firefox also continue getting faster and faster. And most of the improvements, they are announcing it’s all about speed. They also have now an HTTP, HTTPS only mode that you can enable. And that was really interesting for me to be able to say only one to be said, you know, or enable to have this HTTP mode, on all my windows are only on private windows or avid the activated. But that is really interesting. And it seen how the standard, it’s really more and more turning into a way to stop non secure websites. I think that’s really good. I will, it will be one thing that I would love to install in my parents computer and convince him, this is the only thing they should use. I have no, we’ll have no look. But that’s what I actually wanted to install in there. So they are more safe.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:03:14
And I just wanted to defend a gousto and make sure that he Everyone knows that I am wrong, as Chrome is at 66% of global stats right now. And Safari is at 17%. with Firefox really trailing fairly far behind with 4% Samsung’s browsers, there are a few of them, I think 3% edge is at 2.8%. So nearly 3% in offers down there. 2% also, so I just wanted to make sure everybody knew I was

Art Gelwicks 1:03:44
they just come along. Along along

Augusto Pinaud 1:03:48
along and hopefully, you know, if you look at that, and the problem is if you look into red exploder that may be even more percentage.

Unknown Speaker 1:03:57
We don’t talk about that any

Frank Buck, EdD 1:04:02
free instantly. No friends. Friends use Explorer. No.

Augusto Pinaud 1:04:08
The best jokes I heard when windows 10 came, somebody asked how about the blue screen of death and somebody else respond and say, oh, that thing is not available on somebody else as well. Did they change their color?

Art Gelwicks 1:04:23
Yeah, there’s that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:04:27
All right, next up is just a quick note about Google News. They have launched something called the Google News initiative. And it’s just an outreach initiative that they have put out there. And it’s called initiative conversations. And this is just basically for industry experts and their partners to discuss the challenges that the news and media industry are really facing in, you know, not just in COVID-19 but really the ongoing, you know, issues that they’re dealing with, you know, someone who works in small business economic development and I see, you know, small news agencies, as well as individual publishers. So you might have a blog, or you might be covering various things in a newsletter, and charging subscription rates for those things. I see all of those kinds of small, you know, considering, like micro printers or solopreneurs, in that category. And Google is really trying to put out information to be able to help those folks. And there’s a lot of, you know, political conversations around whether Google News is as Google’s attempting to hurt them, the news media, and so on, and so forth. You know, my stance on it is that, really, for the most part, these businesses are doing their own, you know, grave digging, there, they’re not getting their digital experience up, they’re creating a horrendous experiences for people in terms of digital, you know, you get to these paywalls. And they’re just difficult to read the articles, they limit you after X number of articles, and that kind of stuff. And, you know, ultimately, the news industry needs a fundamental rethinking of how to fund these things. investigative journalism is important. local news is imperative, certainly in our democracy, but democracies around the world. And so it’s not that I don’t believe in the news, it’s absolutely true. But the news industry as a whole has some fundamental problems, it needs to figure out. And I think that Google is on their side, they direct a lot of traffic and pay them a lot of money over time, with regard to the indexing of those articles. So I don’t particularly see that as the problem. And for us who want to be more productive and gain access to information, Google News does a fantastic job of pulling those pieces together, so that we’re able to access many news sources, and not get sucked into this, you know, kind of cult news space that so many Americans kind of get stuck in, right, you get you see only this type of news. And then you think this is reality. You know, you need to look at a wide variety of sources and and start to see the whole world as it is. And I think part of the not the whole, but part of the real problem we’re having with this pandemic has been, you know that certain people are seeing very limited amounts of data. And then they make snap judgments. And I think that, you know, Google’s doing a good thing here. And I’m not particularly a Google apologist. As you all know, I’m very happy and love Google, but I’ll call them out when they when I see it. And here, I think they’re really doing a wonderful job of being able to bring people who can discuss these issues. They’re tough issues. They’re thorny issues. And I’m just thankful to see them bringing that to the fore. All right,

Unknown Speaker 1:07:32
next up.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:07:34
Gmail for iOS has had adding homescreen widget and a gousto. Is it useful? The widgets are useful. But Gmail for iOS and iPad useful? That’s my claim.

Augusto Pinaud 1:07:50
No, no, it is. It is. So easy you. And there is people who love the app. But they there’s been complaints of not being able to use the app on the multiple windows support. And being able to it is by the way, we use Trello for the notes of this show. And every week when I need to make the shows for this, I complain because I need to use it. It will be so much easy. If I could use Multi Window support for Trello. No, it doesn’t work. I don’t care what the supporting document said, Okay, I cannot open a card on one side and work with the other cards on the other one, I need to use two devices. So I can do copy pasting five for easy. Now windows now, Google, it’s working into the multiple. So you can open source and have the two Gmail open side by side. And that it is beautiful. If you use there is a couple of projects in which the email I have his Gmail and I don’t want to have any mail.up. So I have the app. And now I can open and do all the plain. So that works beautiful. And the widget now allows you to check your inbox know how much is unread as a notification in there that there we we are, we have fatigue of the little number on the corner, and allows you also to search your email from the widget. That is great. You don’t need to open to search. You can start right there. And you can also compose email directly in there. So yes, as much as I tend to complain about Gmail, or Google under apps on iOS, as well as Microsoft on iOS, this time, they did it right.

Art Gelwicks 1:09:42
All right, let me just be clear, get this out there. Android has had widgets since 2008.

Augusto Pinaud 1:09:50
But we invented

Art Gelwicks 1:09:52
that. Yeah, uh huh. Uh huh. Yeah, it’s it’s we welcome you to the party. Thank you for coming and joining the rest of us in the modern world, you will find that widgets are more of a pain in the butt than they are practically times

Augusto Pinaud 1:10:07
they excessive widget it is. I agree with you. But for example, I don’t know, I’m not familiar with the Android world enough to tell you how this work. But I have one that basically is you can flip over two or three of them. And it’s really, really useful. And the artificial intelligence show me the one I went to see when I went to see it. And that has been useful because there is quick things that I do every day, that now I don’t need to open the app and all that I can do in the widget. But I can see like, I can see how that can get out of control and turn into something completely unproductive super quick.

Art Gelwicks 1:10:48
Yeah, just looking just looking at the icon on my desktop here from my phone. If I press and hold on it, I don’t, I don’t actually have a widget loaded, it’s tied to the icon itself. But I can jump into any of my mailboxes and I can compose an email right from the icon. The widget allows me to see the stuff without actually quote, opening the app. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s useful. A lot of times, it’s there for a very short period of time, and then it goes away. So widgets are one of those things that have always held so much promise and have perpetually under delivered. I don’t know if anybody remembers back on Windows. I think it was 95 or 98. I think it was 98 that had desktop widgets that you could actually load on there. And again, that was really cool until you realize you were killing your processor power. But

Augusto Pinaud 1:11:44
well, I mean, Hindi iOS, you can also do what you described, push the app and then that will tell you depending on which I account, you have to compose the email directly from there. Again, it is one of the things that I think a few really a small amount of them are useful, but it could be a completely mess.

Art Gelwicks 1:12:08
For me, I’ve

Frank Buck, EdD 1:12:09
got an Evernote widget, I’ve got to remember the meal widget, those two. So my task and my reference system. And it’s a Yeah, it’s really useful as a shortcut to be able to, you know, do an Evernote search without opening Evernote to add a note without having to open Evernote to add something with my voice. Okay, I can open the app or in creating the task.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:12:40
Yeah, I think I think some widgets are really useful to me, I have actually been using more of the long press on the icons, the application icons to trigger the most important actions. And that’s been far more useful for me because I can have just a lot more icons on any given screen, and therefore kind of trigger what I need to get done. But I do like having like the remember the milk widget, I use that all the time. And I just can’t imagine life without it. So you know, just having that there is a real godsend.

Art Gelwicks 1:13:14
Now there are a couple of widgets that I use quite a bit and one of them is from IFTTT, and it’s the manual button widget which allows you to on your phone, literally put a button that triggers an IFTTT pro routine. And I’ve tied that to my IoT devices. So I have a widget button that says turn on all lights, I have one that says turn off all lights. So I’ve created among others. I’ve created a Smart Remote on my phone that routes through IFTTT. So I have routines like you know, leaving for work or coming home. And I know that that’ll trigger those routines. Those are really practical widgets. They have control over it. It’s when developers look at the widget and they’re trying to take functionality that’s in the app and pull it forward. That often the widget kind of falls on its face when they recognize that the widget is a key opportunity to do something very direct, very specific and very efficiently. Those are the ones that I see work pretty well.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:14:15
Awesome. We have a couple more Google stories a gousto. Want to continue us along.

Augusto Pinaud 1:14:24
Yeah are. So starting next year, Chrome will begin showing what data is collected from the users. And I think that extensions,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:14:34
Chrome extension

Augusto Pinaud 1:14:36
Chrome extension, so sorry, Chrome extensions will show that the data this extension are collecting from the users and I think it is something really really good most people have no clue they add the extension they add the software and they have really no clue what what information is being collected. So I think that’s a good a good a step in the right direction. The next news is also about Google and Google’s team up with Citibank on mobile first accounts. And not only they revamped their pay pad app that we will talk more in our feature story today. But also, they announced the Plex bank account that basically are going to be bank accounts that are going to leave on your devices. As far as I understood, there are no plans to have banks per se or anything. So he will be first mobile account. Now we’ll be interesting. what’s what’s, what that is doing.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:15:42
Yeah, we’ll circle back to this when we get to our featured story. Okay, next up is some HR news. HR news, a UK based site, talked about the the fact that three quarters of workers across the globe are struggling with mental health because of the lockdowns. And that, of course, is causing some impact on work productivity. This is, of course, known and understood, I think it’s, you know, still important for us to talk about. But I think, you know, it’s important for us all to remember that any group of people who are restricted from being able to, you know, go about their daily life, is going to feel some level of negative emotional impact. This is not the right data to be presenting to people, for or against personal productivity in a remote work environment. So just so we continue to keep conflating these two things where I say, Oh, I took a lab rat, and I locked it in a cage, and it’s unhappy. That’s, and we’re like, oh, it should be happy and productive inside its cage. But it’s very different, then you creating an environment for that lab rat to work and be productive in. And it has the choice of going to do those things, and is encouraged to go ahead and do those things, very, very different environments, and circumstances. So we can’t use all of this data in, in saying for or against remote work, or hybridized work or anything else like that.

Art Gelwicks 1:17:10
It has a very nice hamster wheel, it should be much more appreciative.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:17:16
Exactly. So good article, I think it’s useful for us to be paying attention to how people are negatively and positively impacted by these lockdowns. But I think we should also be mindful of the fact that we don’t have the whole picture. And we should continue to keep researching. I think, at the end of the day, most people can be productive, wherever they are, if they’re given the right tools, the right mindset and the right motivation. So don’t keep kind of getting concerned by seeing these statistics, you know, it’s just like eggs, too much cholesterol, not enough cholesterol, you’re gonna, you should have so many eggs every day, you should not have eggs at all, you know, like the every year is a different study on the other side of the argument. Let’s not get into this, you know, bouncing the ping pong back and forth over remote work productivity, we know that people can be productive, you know, remotely, period. Let’s not try and decide whether or not everybody on the planet is right for remote work during the pandemic. Okay, good. So, Alexa now has routines on the Amazon Fire TV devices,

Augusto Pinaud 1:18:27
under devices that has them for a long time, what is new is that they add those now to the fire TV. So for teens, you can tell the big a, hey, do this, you know, and now you can even tell them, hey, do cartoons and she will be able to go, you know, for parents of small kids. That sounds wonderful. Actually, you know, when the kid come and wake you up? That doesn’t happen anymore in my house. But I remember when the kids will come at 6am and open your eyes, you know, like, are you sleeping? And you’re like yes. And they look at you and say can I watch TV will be really nice at that time to be able to say, Hey, lady a please turn the cartoons on the living room and turn around and continuously been that sounds wonderful. The moment that morning routine can bring me coffee and milk. It will be set up for life. But for now, you could do it on the on your fire TV. And I think that more and more we’re going to see all these routines and this Alexa, really, Amazon is trying to make it up our house.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:19:31
Oh yeah. One thing that I found to be quite interesting here is that I have always considered the fire TV or any of the Amazon devices to be really things that I wanted to turn on only when I wanted them on, and especially things attached to the television because I don’t want it turning on unexpectedly or otherwise. And so I’ve had my fire TV we have a fire TV attached to the to the living room television and it’s been inside of a smart plug so I can turn it on when I want to execute the fire TV too. Turn on itself, independent of the fact that I can turn the TV on via the Android shield, you know, by voice through the Google Assistant. So I’m, I’m really interested in this component, because that would mean, kind of plugging it in and having it ever presently on and I don’t particularly like that idea versus the like any of the echo devices, which I don’t have a problem with being on, I wonder why I have this disconnect, where I feel like the TV should only be on for productivity purposes, like I only want it on when I tell it to be on. And no other time.

Art Gelwicks 1:20:31
You can do that, though. I mean, if you have a fire stick, and I’m assuming you can do it with fire TV, too, you can use an echo to say turn the TV on, and do this kind of thing. So it doesn’t have to sit on. It’s ironic, though, because we’ve got a Roku box hooked to our living room TV. And it has a screensaver that’s the lovely fish aquarium, and it’s got digital fish, that thing is up a lot. Because they’re cool looking fish. So we have the aquarium we don’t have to feed. So I consider it a highly productive pet. But I like this idea of what you’re talking about gousto being able to say, Hey, you know, let them watch TV, I would like to see it go a little further. And I don’t know if it does or not, hey, madam may turn on cartoons for 60 minutes. And then be able to attach that time limit to it and be able to cut it off that level of control for the routines I think makes more sense. We may see more. Can

Augusto Pinaud 1:21:27
you can you like that? Yes, because you can currently do stuff. For example, when I when I arrived to the house, I can tell turn, you know, I’m here I’m home. And then it will do a certain sets. And after a certain amount of time it start turning off the lights. So I can basically walk into the house forget about that everything else on the on the routine will turn the lights after a certain amount of

Art Gelwicks 1:21:51
Yeah, I just didn’t, I didn’t know if you could do that with any fire TV. Because I do have that setup with the lights and what you’re saying in my living room, I have what’s called night mode. When I say night mode, it kills all the lights in the living room except for one which it takes to 50% and then brings it down to five over the period of five minutes. So that way I can finish my wandering around the living room without stubbing my toes, and then eventually it turns itself off,

Augusto Pinaud 1:22:15
you will be able to do that now that he’s dead. He’s really cool. Actually. not related to this, but we was because of the oldest pandemic. And you know, the kids been homeschooling on our screens all day, we put the beginning of the pandemic, the rule that the Sunday it’s basically of devices, and they don’t have access to their devices other than Monday to Saturday. And it has been really interesting to see them interact with other things that way, and of course, they have been playing with mme a lot. And they discover now that you can tell my MA that you want to talk to Chewbacca for Star Wars. And I mean, if you guys have little kids on your watch this show, tell me that I’m a that you want to talk to to back and she will make the noise and have a conversation with you. In as you were talking to the Wookie. And it’s really funny, at least my kids are been having fun.

Art Gelwicks 1:23:18
Since we’re talking. Since we’re talking about it. I know it’s not on the rundown, but I wanted to throw it out. Amazon just released a new functionality for their echo shows that is tied to caregivers. And specifically, if you have like say an elderly parent who has an echo show, and you have one, you can you can put yours into a caregiving mode. So what it’ll do is it’ll monitor what’s going on, but not obtrusively. So for example, you can configure it so that when they start playing music on it, you get a notification. Well, that means they’re up and about and they’ve talked to it. Or if they haven’t interacted with it by a certain point in the day, you’ll get a notification, you can do calls, they’ve done some good thinking around this as as somebody who has an elderly parent who lives by herself. That peace of mind knowing you have that connection without feeling like you’re babysitting and hovering is a huge step for adoption on their side of the equation. And I just have to applaud amazon for taking that step especially in the environment where we are now where you can have someone who literally is by themselves for a month, two months because you’re afraid of going and interacting with them because of COVID another thing so

Augusto Pinaud 1:24:31
same thing we put two of them on my parents house one close my mom one close to my dad, my mom, my mom device worked incredibly well my dad goes more to the Saturday Night Live sketch of what they call the silver I will put this link in the show notes but that’s exactly how it is by that there is no way he think we have changed the name to every possibility in the in the settings and doesn’t matter.

Art Gelwicks 1:25:00
No, I went through that, too,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:25:02
went through that, too. So So what art is talking about is the Amazon Alexa, care hub, and Alexa care hub is the is the function for being able to add that on that check in functionality for family and friends who may need it. Okay, next up in the notes are another ladders article came up. And it was about an Oxford study that talked about gaming as a mechanism for greater, I really dislike the word happiness. So I’m going to say, positive effect. And so the the goal is to think about how gaming can be utilized to make your life better. And in this case, they’re talking about video games in this particular Oxford study. And so you can go ahead and check it out, I thought it was kind of an interesting perspective on the whole concept of playing games in order to be able to in this case, it was Animal Crossing New Horizons, for those of you who are animal crossings fans, I have not gotten into the game. But in essence, they used plants versus zombies battle for the neighborville and Animal Crossing New Horizons. And they found, they found that playing the games, and created a social experience with others, and that, of course, increased their positive effect. So it’s not necessarily I think, you know, calling anything happiness is a difficult pill for me to swallow generally. But we knew that people can be positively impacted by social experience. So why this is a big shock to anybody that it’s extended to the digital realm. Remember that on the other side of technology is another human. So we’re interacting, notwithstanding the fact that there’s a digital bridge. So I don’t find that to be all that, you know, regulatory, or revolutionary to me. But it’s just good to see the science start to bear this out, seeing the research that he’s kind of

Art Gelwicks 1:27:00
picked this up. It’s, it’s one of those things that I find is interesting. When we, when you use it’s one of those loaded terms gaming, because often people will say, oh, okay, it’s gaming, like my kids do. So it’s like, they’re playing, you know, NBA 21 K, or they’re playing, which I just messed that up, or fortnight, or they’re playing Halo or something like that, doesn’t necessarily have to be, I have found many times when I feel actually productively burnt out, that spending an hour or two playing a procedural style game, something like a Skyrim, or something like a No Man’s Sky, that doesn’t, it’s not a running gun, high stress type of thing. But it’s one where I can make progress and making I can advance what I’m trying to do. And it’s, it’s an open decision, it actually gives me that little bit of an endorphin lift that you would get from completing things on your to do list. And you and you can literally drop back into that mindset and say, Okay, I got that, at least moving forward. Now, let me try and tackle something else. It’s not optimal. And it’s easy to become a time suck. I mean, I’ve lost four and six hour time blocks to No Man’s Sky. Thank you very much. But it is something definitely worth considering. I mean, there are some definite values. There’s, it’s like Ben Franklin said all things in moderation.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:28:22
Yeah. and video games can teach resilience, it can teach strategy, it can teach hand eye coordination, it can teach the functions of doing hard things over and over again, or no, no real tangible reward, which can of course, not just from a resilience perspective, but also just a building up, I hate to call it willpower, but you know, for lack of a better word, this concept of grit, can be really be built up beyond just resilience. That is resilience and grit are different functions. And so I dismissed the the bunk about how video games are bad. And otherwise, obviously, there’s a notion about, you know, violence in video games, and some of those other pieces. Those are arguments we can have about impressionable minds. But even then, I haven’t seen anyone, you know, come up with any real good data about violence in a fictional world, influencing real world violence in any, you know, competent way. So that being the case, I think the more important part that really blends ourselves into the productivity space is how important productivity tools can utilize these game design principles. And I know we’ve talked about this over and over again, both on ProductivityCast. And here on anything but idle. But I really find that, that productivity, software developers really can use this material to start understanding how to better engage users in the apps they’re using. It’s not about like near at all and making addictive applications. It’s actually about using games. same principles so that we can be more productive. You know, what if I had 10 ap tasks to do in my application, and it gave some game design principles, so I could level up in the app in some way, shape or form, I think I would probably be more productive, just because it was giving me an opportunity to do that directly in the application, as opposed to having to manufacture that in other ways through pomodoro, or otherwise, kick it right into the application, I can turn on the feature, I can turn it off if I don’t want it. But give people the capabilities of being able to add these kinds of game functions, game design principles into the into the tools, and you will see greater, both adoption and retention of those tools. And I think that’s really the the important point that I take away from it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:30:46
All right, next up is another ladders article, talking about failure. And they call this article, the failure fallacy, why being wrong can actually be your fastest path to achievement. And I have to say, there’s very few times when I say like, Oh, my God, I love an article. But this was one of them. I really, I enjoyed the article fully. You know, it’s so often that what we hear is the overnight success, you know, this idea that an entrepreneur should work hard, and, and work late hours, and, you know, be a night owl and a lone wolf and all of these stupid tropes, that bring out a negative work environment. When in reality, consistent work done well, breeds reward. And sometimes that will mean failure along the way, failure is a stepping stone to success. achievement is it can’t be found, cannot be found without making mistakes. And sometimes you’re like me, and I watch my siblings make mistakes. And then I’ve learned from them, but but notwithstanding, that is, that is still watching failure, right, you still need to see failure. In order to know what is right, you need to make mistakes, in essence, and we use failure as kind of a really strong term, it’s very charged term. And, and what we should really be talking about are kind of like trip ups. If you if you stumble, I think stumbling happens more often than failure, failure, science sounds like there’s a fatality associated with it. And while it brings brought me to the article, that’s the only part that I criticize is that really, what we’re really talking about is that many times in life, we’re stumbling, until we get ourselves righted. And then we continue walking, running, sprinting to the finish line, whatever that finish line is for that chapter of your life. And so I just really fundamentally believe that we should stop talking about success. And, and grand topics and failure is this hitting bottom. The reality is, is that most of the time, you get, you know, punched in the lip, and you’re like, Ah, damn it, and you get back up from the situation, and You’re busted appeals, and you go on with your life, but it’s not that big of a deal. And, and when we have bigger trip ups, we may stumble, we may fall, I’ve heard the term failure as opposed to failure. Because we stumble, we trip, we fall, we get back up. And it’s not all about the finality of it. It’s really about, you know, like the constant, you know, cliche that, you know, it’s, it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. And I really found this article really spoke to that point, which is that we have to stop thinking about that on that level, and really hearken to the experience of vow and the journey.

Art Gelwicks 1:33:30
If If you don’t get failures, I wouldn’t be inclined to praise the quality of what you’re testing, I would be inclined to question the validity of your testing criteria. Because you’re apparently not measuring in the right way. You’re not evaluating in the right ways. Because you’re right, you’re not getting opportunities to improve. And I’m okay with failing, I expect things to fail. And when they fail, I know what went wrong, and I can prevent it in the future. If I had something and it never fails. It will eventually because there’s this dude named Murphy that shows up every time. But I’m not prepared for that. Yeah, the more time something can fail in advance, the more prepared I am for when I need it. And I agree with you completely. We just we have this problem, that failure is tied to the measure of worth. And if something fails, and it is not worth as much as it was previously and I think that is the exact opposite of what you need to look at it as. Right, so

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:34:40
the next article that stepped up I’m sorry, Frank, did you have something you wanted to say?

Frank Buck, EdD 1:34:50
We have just I think if the bar is just too low, yeah,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:34:55
it’s like David Allen says, you know, if you’re if you’re if you’re not feeling that, you know, pressure You’re not playing a big enough game, right? You know, you have to you’ve got to work up against those, those barriers and really elevate. So, with that the next article in the headlines is actually a, I’m gonna call it a poem. I’m gonna say it’s a poem. But Joshua fields Milburn, who is in partnership with Ryan Nicodemus, known as the minimalists. on their blog, called, I think it’s called stop. They wrote, there’s a poem called letting go is not something you do. And so while I am not going to regale you all with my poetic reading of it, I suggest you go check it out. There’s a link in the show notes. And it’s interesting that if you are feeling difficulty with regard to letting go of things, and and kind of embracing that methodology that that mindset that they talked about in terms of minimalism, it’s an interesting perspective, they talked about it as not being something that you you are going to do you don’t let go of something on a continual basis, but you stop letting go. And that’s kind of the inverse within the poem. So worth worth checking out. Okay, next up is our last article in our headlines before we get into our featured story this week, and that is a ladders article that talks about the top 10 highest paying jobs in the us right now. And they’re ones that companies are hiring, and what were some of the highest paying jobs.

Augusto Pinaud 1:36:32
You know, the number one is material scientists, electric engineer, information security chemicals, veterinarians, actress, an astrologist, giant psychologists, psychiatrists, but then the number nine was interesting for me, there was marketing managers, and it was really interesting, then the number 10 is the lawyers. And, but but number nine was really a surprise for me. And I did not expect them to see as the top 10. Best paying jobs,

Art Gelwicks 1:37:09
so it’s best pain, not necessarily best valued. And so, yeah, I know a lot of marketing managers, a lot of make good money, I’d say a fair number of them, probably make a little bit more than what they need to based on what they’re doing from the job. I hate to say it that way. But yeah, I don’t know that that’s me just, if I’m comparing like a material scientist or marketing manager, I mean, I love my marketing managers, but I’m gonna pay more the guy who’s designed, or the lady who’s designed the alloy that’s holding the bridge up. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:37:49
yeah, I was, I was actually a little taken aback that I didn’t see project managers on that list. And, you know, highly technical project managers especially, and some of those other more, I think, in demand roles that I consistently see kind of in the various job boards, when I look at them, it’s always good to keep an eye on kind of what’s unique and interesting, in terms of the the job landscape. And especially since you know, I’m, I’m in the small business space, and I’m always looking at what small business owners are going to have to pay for employees, if they need a highly specialized role. So I’m always looking at what those look like. And I was, I was uniquely surprised, because that is a job that I see consistently, a lot of clients are hiring for, but are not capable of filling, because they’re highly technical roles. And so that was interesting that I didn’t see that.

Art Gelwicks 1:38:40
But you’re gonna, and I think you’re right on the target with that. Something like a project manager as a genericized role is on the lower end of the scale. If you have an Agile Project Manager, or a six sigma project manager, that’s, that’s more specialized, but it’s similar to what you have in the medical field, the difference between a general practitioner and a surgeon. They both went to medical school, one just studied a specific thing longer and got better at

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:39:10
so absolutely. All right, that brings us to the close of our headlines and to the start of new tools of the week. And so obviously, you and I, we scour the web for all of the various productivity and technology news that we talk about each week. And in that process, we also come across many personal productivity tools and services, some will use some, we just find cool some we’ve just found them and we’ve heard from others who have used it. And so we share those with you and we invite our panelists to share tools with you that they maybe know like or love. And so with that this week, we’re going to talk about some new tools. And my first new tool is one called rally and this is kind of in a category of tools for Being able to schedule things with other people. And so bear with me a moment because I’m going to pull it up on screen so you can see it with me here. But in essence, our rally, and the other tool is let us meet. But in essence, rally is interesting. I have not actually tested this fully. So I’m new to this as much as you are, but I will be using it very soon. And what rally is rally has three L’s ra LYRA, ll y Yep. And, and so rally allows you to be able to do collaborative scheduling, in essence, you can send a link to folks, and they can vote on things if you know, doodle or other kinds of tools that do this, this allows you to be able to do that this gives a little bit more of a, a conversational thread for people to be able to schedule. And I like that because sometimes people do need to say, hey, by the way, folks, this date doesn’t work because there’s a holiday in this particular country that you may or may not know about. And, and so that’s really useful to me, so that I can know for the future. And I try to keep a track on you know, I work with people all over the world. And many times I’m not sure about a particular holiday or whether they they honor that holiday, right, they may not care, they may work on that holiday. And so being able to say in the meeting, hey, by the way, I know this holidays coming up, let me know if that day is off limits for you, people can then go ahead and leave that comment or message right directly in the group message messaging space. The next app is an application called Let us meet and it’s obviously a homonym pun. And so it’s spelled let us like the the vegetable, and then meet, let us meet. And it’s a very simple interface. It’s so simple that the first few times I used it, I actually didn’t know how it worked. What I had to do then was go ahead in and record a video so that folks who showed up to it afterward knew how to use it as well. And so let us meet is a free tool. And it allows you to be able to, in essence, set dates and times for people to schedule meetings, and then send sending them to that link as well and being able to schedule. So it’s just a very simplified tool. It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles. But if you need to be able to do the work of connecting people together in a group environment, it’s fairly decent. So worth checking out. Okay, so what is your new tool of the week?

Augusto Pinaud 1:42:29
My new tool of the week is never we’re cloud ready. And basically Neverwhere, what allows you to do is to turn an old computer or LPC into a Chromebook. I’ve been using that I, I had a I mean, using that I’ve been giving that to clients who really don’t need more than a Chromebook, but had the hardware already then use the old hardware installed, you can do the personal home use for free, so on that keep you a latest version of the system. And it really works incredibly well. And so if you have an old computer, especially the people now that are homeschooling and you know the needs of for a lot of people in this pandemic thing, you know, the need for devices continue growing and seems like he’s never going to stop. So if you have all devices or access to all devices, this is a great solution. You know, I had a friend who had on hold Mac, the Mac, per se was good. He’s just didn’t run and not run any of the current software, because he’s too old. So we would never war. And now he had a full Chromebook that kids can use. And it works really, really well.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:43:47
Awesome. And so continuing on. Who is up next? And Does anybody else have a new tool this week?

Augusto Pinaud 1:43:56
Yes, Dr. Frank Bach is going to talk about Google Photos. Yeah.

Frank Buck, EdD 1:43:59
My new tool ism is actually a very old tool. But the reason is back in the news is because of a change. Google Photos, of course, to this point has been upload as many photos as you want. It’s unlimited storage for free. And Google has announced that starting in June, for some somewhere in June, that your storage is going to start counting towards your 15 gigabyte, great storage limit.

Unknown Speaker 1:44:29
So of course,

Frank Buck, EdD 1:44:30
I’m already seeing people going, Oh, gosh, what are we going to use instead of Google Photos because it’s not going to be free anymore? And so my message is why wait, folks, you’re looking at this thing wrong. If you got Google Photos, you’re fine. The photos you’ve already uploaded are gonna continue to be free. They’re not going to count against your 15 gigabytes. Everything you upload between now and June is going to be free. It’s not going to count against you.

Unknown Speaker 1:44:57
So

Frank Buck, EdD 1:44:59
thank you. Every digital photo you have and put it into Google Photos, take everything that you’ve uploaded to Facebook. And now you’ve got a second place that you can have it, take everything that’s on your phone, put it there. And none of that’s going to count. And then of course, once we get to June, and it does count 15 gigabytes, I look to see how much I’m using. Every Digital Photo I’ve got is in Google Photos, 1.89 gigabytes, it’s taken up. So it would take an average person years to to fill it up. So now’s not the time to get out of Google Photos. Now, time to jump into Google Photos with both feet.

Art Gelwicks 1:45:48
Now I I will comment on one thing there, Frank is the fact that I don’t think it’s necessarily photos that are the problem. It’s the videos that you load up there. For example, off of my phone, I can shoot 4k video. And if I shoot 4k video and push that up to Google Photos, I’m going to chew up space. Fast. I think that’s what some people are sparking a little bit. Now. I have I went ahead and just got the tear. I think I have two terabytes, two terabytes. $10. Yeah, yeah, I mean, to me, to me, that’s just worth it just flat out with all the videos there. But if you’re doing just photos, you’re absolutely right. Yeah, put them up there. There’s, there’s so many things you can do with it once it’s there. Mm hmm. It’s just mind boggling, and really smart about finding things and finding related people. And that’s hard.

Frank Buck, EdD 1:46:36
Work for people who are new to it, you know, once you start getting some photos up there, then you’ll see a little screen that was just images, who’s this person who’s this person, you type the name one time, and then you searched for that person, and he pulls up any image of them, even if it’s that person in a group shot from a high school reunion 10 years ago, and just saying, and it’ll it’ll, it’s a month or so ago, my wife and I and a couple of relatives took a trip to Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, of course, you might want to come back and put together a little album. For us, my phone was with me the whole time. So as I’m taking pictures, my phone knows where those pictures are, Google knows where to. And so it put it together for me that, oh, you be left home on this date you got back here, this was the trip to so and so. It put a little maps, it put little sections, you know, here the pictures from this bed and breakfast. Here, the pictures from this museum, here are the pictures from whatever other landmark and was. And then if you ever want to have a hardcopy photo album, you just do it all through Google Photos, it actually suggests to you, here’s the hundred pictures from your trip, I would suggest you include. And I get suggestions you can swap it out with other pictures. But it is so easy, so intuitive. I, I used to feel like my photos just well as a lot of other parts of my life. And Google Photos, just totally turn that around.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:48:24
Just so that everybody’s aware when you level up to that two terabyte plan, which is $10 a month or $99 a year. So you’re saving some money there by buying it on the annual basis, you’re buying into the Google one plan that gives you what is currently the Google one VPN. So you’re getting an Android VPN for now. And eventually that will scale out to the devices in your home on the desktop. And you’re getting a whole bunch of also Google one perks. And so you should always check your Google one app and see what perks are available. So for example, when I buy things from the Google Store, it provides a discount back a percentage back in terms of credit to the Google Store. So each device I buy after that I’m saving money on that on that future purchase. So there’s some little benefits that Google one gives you, once you are subscribed to Google one. And especially at that two terabyte plan, you’re given some greater benefits on on that. And you can extend that to in your family. So in your Google family library, you can extend to those people. And that’s been really useful for being able to say, oh, by the way, here goes a little Google Play Movies, you know, dollar 99 rental, where you would normally pay seven or $10 for that rental. Now you get a little bit of a perk so you end up making your money back by being at that level. I’ve definitely made my money back on being at that level now. You know, twice over just taking advantage of the perks in the system. Art, your new tool of the week. Are you going to screenshare

Art Gelwicks 1:49:57
Yes, I’m gonna try. Let’s see. share screen. All right, everybody wait and look at each other. So what I am going to show you is in Microsoft Edge. Yes, I am a fan of edge. I think they’re doing good things since they switch to the chromium engine. And what I’m going to show you is we’re going to go to a different page here. So you’re not looking at yourselves. collections. collections are a function that’s built into edge that allows you to capture webpages. In a style. Similar I’ve heard similar to Pinterest and thinking. It allows you to create these collections of webpages, you’re able to go through, and it not only grabs the image off of the page, but a direct link, the actual destination link. What I like about collections are two things one, actually three things. One, it’s very easy to go through and organize and create these collections of bookmarks. And honestly, bookmarks up here are just a bit of a pain in the neck. These I find are much more intuitive and much easier to work with. Second, along with capturing things off of the page. Let’s say for example, I have this article and I just want to, I’m going to, I will throw it in the window folder here, I’m going to add the current page I’m looking at, sure enough, it’ll go and grab it and drop it in here. There’s my link. The other thing I like it, I can add in notes. So I can put in facts for whatever, check for deals. And then that gets added into the collection. The other thing I like about the collection is the collection synchronizes between here and edge on my phone, because I run the Edge browser on there as well. So I have these links available all the time, including the notes. And the last thing, this is probably the showcase piece that I like the most is if I’m using this for research, I can take one of my collections. And I can say send it to excel, send it to word or send it to OneNote and create a document of all those links, and then use that and send that out for whatever I need to. So it’s really a useful way I think, in getting these links organized. That doesn’t require an extra plugin, because it’s built in as part of the browser.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:52:19
Fantastic. learn something new about Microsoft Edge, go figure. All right, those are our new tools of the week. And so with that, that brings us to the featured story of the week, we saved the best for last year on anything but idle. And today’s story is about Google’s new application pay, along with the fact that PayPal is now letting us buyers buy sell and hold cryptocurrency you’ll start seeing a show up within your PayPal application in the US. So what does this mean for the state of mobile finance, when Google is making a play, right, they’ve got Plex. And the the waitlist has now opened up for the installation of a mobile first and banking experience using Google Plex, which will basically happen inside I’m presuming the Google pay app, Google pay has gotten a whole new kind of revamp, I’ve installed the beta version of the application I’ve been using it myself and and and inside the Google pay app by the way, so that you’re aware, it’s in essence giving you a more like different deals and different things going on and various vendors so that you’re able to see what you can get in terms of discounts within the application. And they’ve done this on a light weight scale in the past. But now they’ve really amped it up and and brought that to the fore in the new Google Play beta application. What do you think about being productive with mobile Finance? Now, thoughts?

Art Gelwicks 1:54:02
I love the idea of, of it getting more of a foothold, because I use Google pay a lot paying just contactless payments when they go out to stores and things like that, especially in the environment. We’re in now, contactless payments are that much bigger of a deal. So to me, it’s a logical extension. If you are able to integrate more and more into that core platform, where you’ve already created the relationship to your existing banking institution. It just makes logical sense that this becomes the banking institution from a guy who works in the financial services industry all the time. there’s money to be made there. I am not shocked that Google wants a piece of this pie and wants to play in this space. But I think what they can bring to the table for this will take it in a huge step and maybe hopefully, get more and more people to start adopting And using this because I think that’s one of the challenges we have. You look at platforms like Venmo. And that sort, they get a lot of traction. Because people, it becomes a ubiquitous transfer between individuals. The closer this gets to that, the more people will see adopt it. And the more we’ll see it spread.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:55:19
Yeah, so Google had at first, you know, Google Wallet. And there have been a couple of iterations of this, but Google Wallet was the one that I particularly picked up on a while back. And that had a physical card associated with it. And of course, because of the end compliance issues, bringing the chip card many people know of, from europay, MasterCard, and visa, hence em v compliance, that chip card which the Europeans have known for the better part of 20 years here in the States, they are pushing forward and bringing that security provisioning to our physical cards. And by doing so, that really killed off a lot of different the whole smart card movement, right, there was a, for a short period of time, there’s a whole bunch of interesting cards that would show up that you could put multiple credit cards on the same card I bought, several of those are all now defunct, but I was I was all bought in on the smart card concept. I could go to the gym, use NFC pass right in with the same card, I could have multiple credit cards associated with it, there was a little display on it punch, the card, shuffled through the various cards worked like a charm. That was all with magnetic striping. But because of EMB chip compliance, most of those businesses have gone out of business, or there’s only one left on the market. And they’re really still only magnetic, they have a chip, but the chip actually is not for payment, which is very frustrating. So where Google goes with this is really important tied to the physical ecosystem. I think that if this Google pay application can be tied to a bank card, and can give us some backwards compatibility. I think that can be useful and probably the piece that’s most difficult for almost anyone to deal with. So I think the Citibank connection is the part that I think makes it more useful because you can get a Citibank Visa Debit Card, and now use that out in the real world where your phone if it’s dead, you can’t access your money. And so I think that’s the piece that’s kind of the missing element here. And and then Augusto, go for it and then I can double back on the cryptocurrency topic.

Augusto Pinaud 1:57:29
You know, I I also use those and I agree with you, I love my Apple Pay, I don’t do the Google pay. Obviously I live in iOS, but I love the watch. I love my credit cards and everything on the watch. And I think it is interesting. When you look PayPal, how all the ways they have gone into really being a really serious solution for many of this. And they have that they now will have the cryptocurrency they have the virtual carts and, and

Unknown Speaker 1:58:05
it is

Augusto Pinaud 1:58:07
for me so amazing seen how we have really evolved into move, I even had a friend of mine who traveled from Canada to the United States pre COVID. And he got in here and when he got to the airport to rent the car, he discovered that he has forgot his wallet. Okay, that is a big, big problem when you’re traveling from a country to another country, and he just carry his phone with his ID on the bag with. That’s the only thing he carries. So but with the Apple Watch, he was able to spend the week on every place, you know, the only condition to go out is the place to accept the digital wallet. But other than that he was really fine. So it is really awesome to be able to see those things.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:58:59
Yeah, I think I think my only other comment is, and by the way Google pay is coming to iOS. I think they’re currently testing it in India. But the the application is going to be available on the iOS platform. I see it already in the app store but I’m not quite sure you can download it in the in the States. Either way. The other side to this is cryptocurrency coming to paypal obviously PayPal is making a huge kind of statement in furtherance of cryptocurrency becoming a mainstay of our whole, you know, financial ecosystem. And that really means a couple of things for me. One is that cryptocurrency is now capable of being bought and sold in a trivial manner. That is a fundamental change to how it’s been today. You’ve needed to either be very tech savvy to be able to mine cryptocurrency and and make it from the systems which is you know virtually impossible for some of the more mainstay cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and others Just so everybody’s aware of cryptocurrencies, basically digital money, think of it as digital money, it is not tied necessarily to fiat currency, except in the except to the extent that you exchange money just like you would exchanging foreign currency for another foreign currency for another currency. But in essence, instead of that fiat currency, you are now exchanging it for a digital form of money that is not tied to a particular country to a government’s, you know, monetary system. But in this way, we are, in essence, creating a number of different productivity problems. One is that now, every time you make or receive a payment, and you want to move that money from cryptocurrency to fiat currency, say US dollars, you now need to exchange it, which means that the value of that crypto cryptocurrency, and it’s equal fiat currency changes whenever you buy and sell, it’s like buying and selling stock, or changing to foreign currency. So you have to be aware of that function. And those cryptocurrency have a public and a private key, basically, your ability to exchange cryptocurrency is based on these public and private passwords. You need to manage those papers of doing that for you currently. But you can do that separately and outside of the application. And when you do that, there are all kinds of problems that arise. And I’m I’m curious about how people are going to really manage that component, because PayPal is making it really easy, but then you step outside of that PayPal ecosystem, and it becomes much, much more difficult. There are physical and soft, physical, meaning hard little physical hardware that you can save these cryptocurrency onto, as well as soft wallet as they call them applications. PayPal is a soft wallet. So be very mindful of the fact that cryptocurrency isn’t as easy as just having money in the bank and having cash, physical bills and change. This is only digital, they’re only ones and zeros. And they’re protected only by the value of that currency in and on the exchanges. Any any other final thoughts, comments, clarifications regarding PayPal US currency cryptocurrency, Google Wallet, Google pay, and all that fun stuff.

Unknown Speaker 2:02:18
Very good. We’re

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:02:18
good. Wonderful. All right. So with that, I want to just a couple of announcements, one, there, I just came across a free for a limited time copy of the Wiley book, office 365. All in one for Dummies. I’ll put a link to this in the show notes, so that you can download it, but you get a free copy of the office 365 kind of tutorial on it’s useful to kind of run through and if you use Office 365, it gives you a real quick rundown, Apple m one Mac Mini is currently discounted. There’s a link to it. And I forget what the discount is, I think it’s like $50 or something like that currently. So it brings the price down fairly well, and this is kind of a pre you’ll see this this holiday season, a lot of the Black Friday holiday discounts are not on Black Friday, they’re like before, they’re a week, two weeks beforehand, trying to get ahead of the other retailers. And so the apple one Mac Mini is on discount right now. And last but not least, is Scottish young, which is also his.com, Scottish young.com, he put out this complete guide to motivation. And I just thought it was a really useful and wonderful deep dive into motivation. I don’t agree with everything, but it’s a good primer. Or if you’re British primmer on the concept of motivation, and the various modalities within or the various components of motivation, sometimes called factors. So just a really good guide to get you started. And so it’s well worth checking out. That being the case, we have reached the end of our time together for anything but idle. And I wanted to give Frank and art a chance to tell everybody where they can keep up to date with them. And so with that, Dr. Buck, I’ll put you up first. Where can folks find you and keep on top of your work?

Frank Buck, EdD 2:04:14
One playbook dot o RG that’s

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:04:17
so once you get tripped up again on audio there. So it’s Frank buck.org. Cool, go boom. Keep going.

Frank Buck, EdD 2:04:24
Frank buck.org. And as you see there on Twitter and Instagram, I’m at Dr. Frank buck would love for you to come by and learn more about me. Publishing do publish content every Tuesday. Get on my email list. I’ve got a couple of free gifts for you right off the bat. Wonderful.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:04:43
Thank you so much for joining us on anything but idle Frank. And art working folks keep on top of work that you’re doing over there at the idea pump.

Art Gelwicks 2:04:53
Well right now that’s a perfect place to do it. Although there is something new coming. Something has sprouted and it’s starting to grow Then once it’s ripe, which should be just after the first of the year, it’s going to be something fun. So just keep, you can stop over there. And you’ll get little tidbits as we as I get start to get closer. But the idea literally started today. And it seems to be off and running on its own. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:05:18
wonderful. Thanks for joining us on anything but idle art.

Art Gelwicks 2:05:21
My pleasure. Thanks a lot, guys.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:05:22
All right. And with that, that brings us to the end of anything but idle. Thank you gousto for joining me as always, and helping to prepare for these shows. It is not easy putting on anything but idle. And Augusto helps me tremendously to make sure that happens. So thank you, sir. Thank you. And with that, that brings us to the end of the show. If we miss something if we missed an article, a story that you think everybody should know about, feel free to go ahead over to anything but idle calm, and you can post a comment directly on the episode and let us know. You can also tweet or direct messages DMS on twitter at anything but idle. We’ve got the DMS open for you to be able to do that. If a comment or question about anything we discussed here. You can also do that by visiting anything but idle comm going to the episode page or going to the contact page, and shooting us a message there on anything but idle. It actually contains our show notes for each episode, which includes links to all the stories tools that we talked about any extra items or announcement links. And we also provide a machine generated transcript. We use otter.ai to just transcript, the audio from our episodes, and we put that there for you to read and download. If this is your first time watching the live stream or listening to the podcast, feel free to subscribe and or rate and review us on the like button on YouTube helps to bring new productivity listeners to the fold. And those reviews on the podcast application ecosystems really helped to bring new listeners to the fold. And so thank you for doing that. With that Take care everybody. Here’s to your productive life.

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Google Pay and PayPal Reinvigorate the Mobile Personal Finance, and More Productivity and Technology News This Week

Google Pay and PayPal Reinvigorate the Mobile Personal Finance, and More Productivity and Technology News This Week

In this Cast

Art Gelwicks

Frank Buck, EdD

Headlines & Show Notes

This Week’s Theme… Thanksgiving / Gratitude

Stories of the Week

New Tools of the Week

Featured Story of the Week

Announcements

Other Links

Raw Text Transcript

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