How Words Matter in Personal Productivity, Virtual CES 2021 Announcements, and the Productivity and Technology News of the Week – Anything But Idle, the Productivity News Podcast

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In this episode 040 of Anything But Idle, we discuss semantics–how words matter in personal productivity, virtual Consumer Electronics Show 2021 and some of the productivity-focused product announcements, and the rest of the productivity and technology news of the week.

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In this Cast | How Words Matter in Personal Productivity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity and the host of the upcoming Task Management and Time Blocking Virtual Summit in March 2020. He has lived in Kingston, Jamaica since 2005 and is an avid content creator, newspaper columnist and cyclist.

Trevor Lohrbeer

Trevor Lohrbeer is founder of Day Optimizer, a web app that helps freelancers and entrepreneurs create a daily plan that reflects their priorities using guided workflows designed around neuroscience principles. He splits his time between Asheville, North Carolina and Berlin, Germany, and enjoys running, writing and swing dancing.

Headlines & Show Notes | How Words Matter in Personal Productivity

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

Virtual CES 2021 Announcements & Semantics on Productivity

Stories of the Week

New Tools of the Week

Augusto and I come across many personal productivity tools and services each week. In this segment, New Tools of the Week, we each bring you a tool we think you might like.

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 0:00
Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community Welcome to anything but idle. The Productivity news podcast. Today’s show is brought to you by co working space by personal productivity club. And I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:13
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:14
And we’re your hosts for anything but idle. This is Episode 14 040. We’ll be talking about CES and semantics related to productivity. So it’s gonna be an excellent show, and we’re recording this on January 18 2021. Each week, we cover and discuss the productivity and technology news headlines of the week. And to do that, we invite two panelists to join us to expert experts in the world of productivity and technology in organization to talk about all the things in personal productivity and technology. Today, we have Francis Wade and Trevor lobby. And so Francis Wade is the author of perfect time based productivity. He’s the host of the upcoming task management and time blocking virtual summit in March 2021. He lives in. He has lived in Kingston, Jamaica since 2005. He’s an avid content creator, and newspaper columnist and cyclist of all things, welcome to anything but idle Francis.

Francis Wade 1:10
Thanks, guys. Good to see you again.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:13
Good to see you, too. Next up, we have Trevor law beer. He’s the founder of day optimizer, a web app that helps freelancers and entrepreneurs create a daily plan that reflects their priorities, using guided workflows designed around neuroscientific principles. His he splits his time between Asheville, North Carolina and Berlin, Germany, and enjoys running, writing, and swing dancing. How fun. Welcome to the show, Trevor,

Trevor Lohrbeer 1:37
thank you so much for having me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:39
Great to have you as well. So today is the source day, it also happens to be Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. And so hat tip to Dr. Martin King, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the work he did in the civil rights movement. And but on the productivity side of things, it happens to be thesaurus day. And so I thought what we would do is have a little bit of an opening conversation around semantics, and really how words matter and productivity. And I’m really curious from everybody here on the panel, what your thoughts are around how you structure your productivity system, in words, things like choosing the right verbs, when you’re writing out projects, or actions, or things of that nature? How do words really affect your own world? In my case, you know, I have a legend that I’ve created, where I have particular words, that means certain things in my own personal productivity system. And I’m curious how you see the manifestation of words, some of your wordsmiths here, being authors and such. So, you know, and coders too, you know, words matter in coding, right? So, you know, variables matter. So how does how does word How do words matter in your world, in personal productivity,

Francis Wade 2:49
I think what I’m trying to explain a new concept. I try to not use words that people already have heard and already know and have already defined in their minds. That leads me to some strange language at times. But I tried to push the envelope so that at least someone could hear it. But I tried to be provocative and some of the things that came with I come up with like an article I wrote the other day, had to, in the middle of it, I realized I was trying to explain a concept that I didn’t have a word for. So I created a term, I can’t remember what the term was, but it was something passive and something active. But that’s the kind of thing I found myself doing inventing, if they’re not words, if I mess up inventing phrases, and then attaching a meaning to them, and kind of hoping that they’d stick.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:38
So making things up is a mechanism for anchoring people in in memory, because it’s unique, it’s novel, it’ll help them kind of be drawn into the material.

Francis Wade 3:49
Yeah, it was something to do with contexts. It was a concept that came up with that. If you want the lumber expedition, without the display, sorry, you get the idea.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:02
How about you, Trevor?

Trevor Lohrbeer 4:04
Yeah, I mean, words are critical for me, I in fact, I was having a conversation with my partner earlier about how it’s going to be hard to translate the optimizer because I’ve used specific words for specific meanings, and trying to commit things to to translate things. So one example is using the word commitment. The original name of that was intent, like so this idea that you take your task list for today, and you you create a separate list. Well, that can just be Tesla’s can be a talentless. But commit is just a much stronger, more powerful, psychologically more powerful word. And so I’m like looking for things like that. And then I’m also very interested in pattern languages, and how do we create these, this terminology that people can use to, like use those things in other contexts? So like, I’ve had things like the jumpstart, you know, what a boomerang is and all these sort of terms, you know, just like Francis that can

Trevor Lohrbeer 5:00
hook into someone’s mind, give them a concept, and then let them really use that concept in some way.

Augusto Pinaud 5:07
No language, for me comes into two things, you know, I saw bilingual coach, it is interesting, as you were saying, Trevor, how little some of these things translate, you know, you the concept in English completely clear or vice versa. And they don’t translate that make it you know, a challenge, you know, you try to, I always say try to explain procrastination to a person who only speak Spanish Good luck, the word doesn’t exist, and the concept doesn’t exist either. So that that is going to be an impossible, but at the same time, you go to the other to the other side to the Spanish, and there are certain concepts that you can define in English in one way. And then when you go to Spanish, you can define the same thing on different levels of emotions in two or three different ways that make it a challenge, to teach your right to explain and even to coach people on how to be more productive, depending on which side of the fence they are on. You know, I work with a lot of clients who want to change careers. And you know, there are good the technical capabilities work with go to that new career, but when they go to apply for the jobs and all this, they fail, and they cannot understand it. And again, that’s semantics, how do you explain and I always said, and Dr. Buck is not here today, but when you think of the school principal, for most people have never come to think, Okay, what is the school principal, when you extrapolate that person from the school system, and now plugging in into business, and there is a series of capabilities this person has that will make match to certain things. But if you don’t get into those semantics, and you apply to that job and say, well, we are getting here, we need an account manager, what are you? Well, I wasn’t school principal yet doesn’t it doesn’t fit, because those semantics are really, really critical to make those things match. Yeah.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:11
Am I thought? Go ahead. Go ahead.

Trevor Lohrbeer 7:14
Oh, it’s gonna I was gonna agree with that, in that.

Trevor Lohrbeer 7:18
Particularly in the programming world, we’ve developed concepts that the whole again, going back to pattern languages, there’s whole architectural patterns that were published and that have names that even if you haven’t read the book, you now know that concept. You know, if I say facade, what that means it’s a specific pattern, you could use the same thing in another domain. And it will just be completely meaningless to someone if you use that terminology.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:45
I’ve two thoughts here, when it comes to the idea of using words and personal productivity. One is that there are many terms in personal productivity that lack a central definition for a concept. And that really creates just all kinds of collateral problems that some people call habit stacking, the same as habit sequencing, and the same as routines. And you know, those terms, then create all kinds of downstream problems. And I’ve tried as much as possible to start to define some of these things and say, No, only when we use this term, do we mean this thing, and that way, we can start to have the same conversation about the same things. And that can be just incredibly powerful for everybody in and talking around productivity. But also, in the context of working in an organization, you have to have the same language if you’re working in the same organization. And when you are trying to speak two different languages about the same concepts, that just becomes problematical just generally. The second is, when you have your own system, your own personal productivity system, consistency begets efficiencies. And so if you’re able to have a set of a language that you were using, with yourself, a set of words that you use, when you’re doing x and y and z, then you are much likelier to surface those words, when you’re trying to capture when you’re trying to clarify when you’re trying to, you know, write down those brainstorming concepts. And that speeds up production. And there’s nothing like sitting and thinking, Oh, you know, what, I really don’t know whether I should write down, decide or commit or resolve to or, and all of that vacillation, all of that, you know, indecision slows the process down. So so just, let’s say commit to the word commit, and then you’re done. Right? You don’t need to worry about this thing. Now if it appeals to you to use that word word or it repels you from using, you know, from from getting to getting things done, then you know, to change the word, but choose a set of words that makes sense for you. There’s probably about 15 or 20 verbs that I use in my entire productivity system. Why the fewer words, the more likely I am to know exactly what those things mean. And it removes choice. And there is this Paradox of Choice that we all have to be mindful of that the greater numbers of choices that we have the lower likelihood that we can make a decision. And so that’s those are my kind of general thoughts. Any final closing thoughts about semantics and personal productivity before we move on?

Trevor Lohrbeer 10:16
I’ve got two things here. So art just noticed, add a comment saying establishing a common glossary. And that is also a common technique. When you’re working remotely with a team, they say the first thing you should do when you’re creating a remote team is let’s come up with a glossary that says what those common terms mean. But the second thing is related to the to the personal productivity thing that you were saying you have specific words, the other benefit of that is you can then sort your list. And everything that is like is grouped together. So if use three different words, or four different words, for the same concept, you can’t sort by that if I’m saying, Oh, I’m going to fix I’m going to repair, I’m going to do this, then all those things are kind of split all around across your list, using the similar terminology lets you search it easier, lets you sort of easier. It’s a wonderful system, I think.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:03
Yeah, it’s almost like tagging in a way. Right? Yeah. Capable of sorting in that in that sense. And I’ve used that mechanism for many, many years of being able to say, okay, all of my calls are started, start with call, you know, I’m not going to say phone, I’m not going to say ring. I’m not going to use any of those words, it’s just going to be call and that way. Yes, I could tag it calls. But I also know that I can just see them all in normal search. And I can see that across many different lists and that kind of so great, great mention of that as well, Trevor. And so and welcome art. Glad to have you in the chat. Okay, that brings us to our stories of the week, let’s transition into our headlines, a gousto is our first story this week.

Augusto Pinaud 11:46
Well, the first story is going to be related to two products and CES and fun. So the first one is some of the products or some of the best Apple related products that came into CES and macrumors came with a couple of articles, Kargbo products, you know, this Apache, Apache they produce they have been producing really high end qual good quality products for for Apple devices, iPads and all that. So they they came with this five products same spire near, you know, pioneer came with their apple cart, or CarPlay. And it is interesting, I don’t know, I came from a third world country where the first thing you do when you get a car is replace a stereo. Okay, why I don’t know, that’s what you did, at least when I was young kid, you get the car and you got the stereo. And in many cases, the stereo was more valuable than the car. But that’s a story of another day. So pioneer was the brand I like, and it is really fun to see all that all that happen. So. So there was a lot of things that came out of out of CES and I was in in a past life. You know, I was one of those who get to see us or to Vegas, Sunday morning, you know, and leave Saturday night, after meetings of meetings and meetings and products on products. And you try to handle the meetings and the products and announcements. And these year, everything changed last year, they did some remote because of the beginning of what we were understanding was the COVID this year, was all fully remote was really different. And it is interesting to see an event that really mobilized a city. I mean, CES and the porn convention happened on the same week. So it is a packed city. And it is really interesting to see how these things are coming into play to be all virtual. So now we are getting more used to this. But what do you guys feel about all these remote things? And all these remotes massive conference? And do you guys are thinking this is going to stay or is going to go before we go and cover a lot of more products that we have in here.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:17
So I will say that I have been saying that things like CES would probably go virtual and stay virtual. I’m I’m thinking that I’m changing my my count on that now. Because feeling the the almost like cabin fever of the people around me wanting to get back into a real environment with other people. I think there’s going to be a little bit of a whiplash there. And once that happens, I think we’re going to settle back down on the pendulum to some middle hybrid where we’ll see more and more events go virtual because the technology gives us the capability. And we’ll see some of those larger events at CES Mobile World Congress Congress, other large scale product and technology. conferences, and of course, other ATD, we’re gonna see more of those be in person, because that’s a networking opportunity, as much as it is a money generating opportunity for those organizations that fund that that host those larger events. That being the case, what do you all think, Francis?

Francis Wade 15:19
Don’t agree. I think that that, I think when when poorly done or not very well done, the networking is not as well, it’s not as good as it could be if your life. However, if you do it well, if you have a community like mighty networks, and if you create connections between people that have started happening before the conference and continue after the conference, all in the same space, I think the value of that far exceeds anything you can do in person. So I think the the, the technology of delivering large scale, online conferences, is going to have to improve. But once it improves, and get it to a point, and people start realizing things that you can do online that you cannot do in person, like many people at once, then I think they’re gonna stay, they’re gonna stay virtual. And I went to add last year with 10,000 people. And it won’t say anything on charter, but it was just like a matter of like a ton of people, everybody rushing from one room to the next. And I don’t think they made the most of a live conference, to be honest that so I think they didn’t do the best that they could. But I think those things could be a meeting the revenue, if you do them online, and you do them well.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 16:45
And good, good event management, creates great events are great event management creates great events, I think that that means the same in a digital environment as much as in a physical in person environment. And I have been to physical in person events that could not be replicated in a virtual environment. And I’m glad that I went to them in person. Today, I think that there’s a rarity that I couldn’t experience something very similar not to that level, but very similar in a virtual experience, and that a lot of those are going to go that way, purely for the convenience of the fly. I don’t have to spend spend the cost of travel room board and otherwise, and warehouses. Yeah, there’s a health factor now as well. So that’s probably going to create some travel hesitancy on the part of those participants. But overall, I think that there will be, like I said, I’m standing by my statement, I think that we will have a, a, a whiplash effect, where those people who feel a little bit of Cabin Fever are going to go back to live events. And then we’re going to, we’re going to quickly see that move back toward the center, where we’re going to see more and more either hybrid or virtual events. Because of that, I really do think that we’re going to see more established, virtual event platforms also get better, right, and that I think, is gonna really help to elevate the level of these kinds of meetings. I mean, look at where we are right now, in terms of technology. We couldn’t do this just a few years ago. And now here we are, you know, connecting from four different locations and streaming to, you know, multiple platforms, just with trivial technology, it seems trivial to do now, it is trivial to do now, which is just remarkable. So can I talk about the air things now?

Unknown Speaker 18:33
The air, the air things. So the next topic,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:36
unless anybody has any thoughts about virtual events, the air things is a, an air, an air sensor technology, so air things, sensors, we have one in my house, and they’re rather pricey. And they detect all kinds of anomalies in the air from radon to carbon monoxide, and all kinds of other things. And they have added in the newest air things at CES, the ability for to analyze the risk of indoor virus spread. And so this is really remarkable technology. And I’m really curious to see how this plays into it. And I’m, I’m wondering, Is this a software update? Or is this a physical product with an additional sensor inside of the air things? I’m presuming I’m presuming it has an additional sensor, which means that the overpriced sensor we have at home now is obsolete. But, but this is phenomenal. I think this can really revolutionize a lot of small businesses. And again, you know, that’s in the space in which I work most days in economic development and working with businesses who are in a place where they don’t know whether or not their their place of business is safe. And being able to have something like the air things, you know, on an ongoing basis, testing the air and telling you whether or not there is fire spread is a remarkable achievement. I’m really looking forward to seeing how that kind of plays out.

Augusto Pinaud 20:00
You know, unless daddy said really expensive software of date, you just make wizard here cry 1000 of salespeople.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 20:09
I know, I know, it’s better than the last Oh, which is a recycling container that’s like 30 $500. So, which I’m not buying, I’m not buying an in home recycling container that, you know, does whatever it does it like removes labels and it it steam cleans the containers, and then it you know, does all kinds of intelligence sorting and grinds the products up so that you can ship them off to the appropriate recycling facility. Not for 30 $500 I can, I can just use the existing infrastructure that we have. But yeah,

Augusto Pinaud 20:44
well, the next product we have is thinkbook. From Lenovo, that was a really interesting thing, again, I, part of my past life was as a salesman, and these computer, this laptop has the regular laptop, and the back of the screen has a screen that I’m going to pursue. Because you could not find the information that you could use to do presentations that you can share, obviously, your calendar when you have the laptop close, so you can use it as a, you know, eat paper and ink a screen on the outside. But I’m sure that you should have the ability to use it to do presentations, or show your screen or share your screen with that military grade. It really looks awesome. I am not a PC World, I think you very much have zero interest on a PC ever again. But I need to admit that that concept was really really nice.

Francis Wade 21:42
As far as I saw it, but and I’m a big thinkbook user, but I don’t know, it just seemed like a convenience versus productivity all of those things. It’s like, nice, but no, I was I could I just couldn’t imagine a sort of a real solid need for it. In the real world other than the fact of the genius factor knowledge, what do you think?

Augusto Pinaud 22:11
You see, I don’t know when when I remember when the first tablet PC came out that people could not understand why you care to flip the screen and turn it into on for me as a salesperson at that time. And we’re talking about 15 years ago, that turned to be into one of my best tools because I move from one having hiding behind the laptop, okay into a conference because now I can switch it have the same thing but don’t have the laptop, to obstruct to being able to flip my screen and show the person the same thing even live even in the presentations. So I think this technology is gay can be convenient. I’m obviously but use it properly. It can be an incredible tool, assuming you can do the things that we’re sharing. So the next one is some military great Chromebook. And and yes, we talk here a lot about Chromebooks. Why? I don’t know maybe because they’re coming all about examine Apple guy. But this is interesting because at least to my knowledge. This is the first time I hear about such thing about such high end military grade durability. I know this on a Chromebook that shows all how much the Chromebook has making advanced into those high end markets that are looking for products like this, we may need Ray to cover more into into this into the Chromebooks. He knows a lot more than than I but that was really really interesting to see x nine and on what they’re bringing really a high end product.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:51
Well, I think this is a play at getting government contracts. I mean, you know, the reality is it’s just it’s similar to the way in which Dell and other manufacturers back in the 90s and early 2000s. They went after setting up these you know, high durable laptops to be able to put into the hands of military officers who wanted to have something that was you know, macho looking to be in the military You know, they’re gonna spray painted with camo and it becomes saleable marketable to that audience and that’s just a reality factor. Now of course there I think there was a value to having a very tough laptop in a lot of different environments say that you’re an iron Smith or carpenter, I know art you know, has a has a woodworking shop, it would be nice to have the laptop out there knowing that it wasn’t going to get you know, puncture destroyed, or dust those kinds of things in in use. So, is is is really going to be the case for artisan noting here that military grade is needed for 10 year olds. Maybe your 10 year olds

Augusto Pinaud 25:00
chance of getting a military grade. But

Francis Wade 25:02
how does it work.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:05
But there are definitely use cases outside of the military. But I see this as being set up as a model for being able to show that to the military, that these devices are strong enough in, in physical form factor, and powerful enough in CPUs, to be able to do stuff in the military. And, and I think that’s a really strong market that has not yet been tapped into in the chrome world. And this gives them that chance at it, so good on them for doing that.

Francis Wade 25:31
But why a chrome versus a tablet, though? Why, why, why, why not just use a rugged tablet, and other you know, if you’re in a tank, and you’re firing at the enemy, yeah, you probably don’t have a lot of time to do all this category for

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:44
the Pentagon, you can’t have a screen that can’t be closed up and the screen not be visible at times, right, you want to be able to, for security purposes, not have, you know, like, you can’t just leave the tablet laying face up, and you walk into the Situation Room, you know, these things have to be closed and physically, you know, sealed in some way, shape or form. And they want to be able to lock those. So in those cases, you know, it will probably have some kind of locking mechanism so that the clamshell closes over the keyboard. So someone can actually look at the keys and see like, there are all kinds of security mechanisms put in into place into a laptop form factor that a tablet would be susceptible to, you know, I can see your fingerprint touches for your your screen lock on the tablet screen, things of that nature that need to be thought through. And just turns out the laptop factor is just a little bit more secure in that capacity. So I maybe it’s not more secure, but it is has that appearance. And of course, it’s what people what people are used to, right, like if people are used to having laptops, they’re giving them a form factor that they’re used to carrying around and are capable of utilizing in that sense. Art is noting here, military grade hardened via VPN, and the powerwash features, make it make it a very useful tool. Absolutely, that power wash feature within Chrome OS is very powerful. It just takes five seconds to hit power wash, and then you get to power wash and click it and then it basically purges the entire operating system and puts on a fresh version on it. So that’s what power wash feature is in Chrome OS. And anytime you have a problem with your Chromebook, just power wash it log back in, and you’re good to go. So it’s not the same as Microsoft or Mac. Being able to just power wash a Chromebook is so so powerful, and that can be very useful out in the field. And things are critical, right? You need to get your your system back up and running after whatever might have happened. A power wash can be the difference between life and death. So good on that. All right, next up, what are some of the other highlights from CES this year?

Augusto Pinaud 27:46
Well, one of the other products we’re going to talk is the neck gear. Wi Fi six, nine gear or Nighthawk is that they call that their power high end, next gear thin and a side of the fact that as everybody’s trying to go miniature in the devices, Netgear has decided to increase the size so everybody know who they are, you know? Well, it’s, it’s without a doubt, you know, one of the best. Or consider one of the best routers. I was looking for the price and I can’t find it right now. But I had a little bit of a shocker price when when I saw it the first time when it came into my attention but anyways,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:35
but it’s a Wi Fi six router. That’s amazing. The Nighthawk ra x d 500. What is what is the name of the Star Wars flying vehicle that it looks like? It looks like this? No, no, no, no. We have a Star Wars.

Unknown Speaker 28:54
No, no

Unknown Speaker 28:55
millennial.

Augusto Pinaud 28:57
It is true that when the soap and it looks like like Darth Vader, Darth Vader machine but no, it is he will not he will not make me buy it because of that. I’m so sorry.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:07
Well, either way, I think that what we are seeing in the midst of the pandemic is an understanding from people that in order to be more productive, you have to have better connectivity. And, and so that’s not just for you, but your your children who might be homeschooling or remote schooling at the present moment. And there are just a necessity for everybody in the house to have multiple connected devices and to have consistent strength in that. And that in that sense. And so Wi Fi six is a great step in that direction. Even though the Wi Fi six protocol, I think, you know, is a benefit. In a security perspective. The the real benefits I think in Wi Fi six is the just the robust, new, you know, capabilities of it to carry multiple, you know, signals and really traffic those in an intelligent way. And so it’s good to see the first ones out on the market. And of course, we’ll hopefully see more more of these coming to market as

Trevor Lohrbeer 30:02
one common in that though, is that you need a device to be able to connect to it. And that’s most devices probably won’t like I’m actually still on Wi Fi five, I’ve got like a Netgear router. And I’ve got a gigabyte connection to the house. But I can only get 300, megabit to my computer via Wi Fi. And we can have, we can both be streaming, but realistically 300 megabits, plenty of speed for anything you need to do, right, like 300 megabits is a huge speed factor. And so we can vote we can do that. I got I got like a year old Mac. And that’s all I can get. Right? Because I only have like, I don’t know, whether it’s two or four, six antennas, I don’t have enough antennas in my Mac, to go with the current router, which is like the Wi Fi five. So buying a 45 six router, you have to be like, completely up to date on your tech, I think to support that. So it’s probably good for them to release it now. But it’ll be probably several years before you can effectively use that in the house.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:09
I would I would agree with you. And there’s there’s a factor which is I always say by the by the newest router, when you’re ready to I mean, if you have no reason to upgrade, don’t upgrade for no reason, are ready to upgrade, upgrade and buy the latest version because by the time you sunset that so you buy a Wi Fi six router this year, you know, it’ll be another five to seven years before you replace that. And by then we’ll be at nine. Right. So I don’t know what we’ll be at, you know, but we’ll be several versions forward. And and so you kind of want to hedge your bets that you get the latest technology to have the longest longevity in essence in that. Yes. So I fully hear you, Trevor, because

Augusto Pinaud 31:47
as soon as you create a nightmare for the people of night gear, you know, I under we understand that the Imperial shuttle shuttle was what Darth Vader pick and the Emperor sometimes travel on it. But nothing, no good adventure came out of it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:04
Thankfully, I’ve no idea what that means. And I’m a Trekkie, and I can’t I can’t speak to that, but it does give 10 gigabytes per second over Wi Fi in a fully accessible environment on that device. So I can see at some point, really upgrading, you know, to it with the future upgrades to, you know, devices and being able to support that. And of course, you know, the other devices are backwards compatible. So there’ll be on Wi Fi five and otherwise, and you know, that’s fine. But to be able to have a device that can do 10 gigabyte downloads, not just amazing, to 10 gigabytes per second. downloads just seems egregious? Well, as you said, Trevor, he really really don’t mean it’s a little crazy. Okay, let’s move on.

Augusto Pinaud 32:47
Well, Microsoft is your next Microsoft Surface may not be compatible with that yet, but hey, it’s announced Surface Pro seven, it’s out. And don’t know I I had one surface at some point. And they’re doing a really good Microsoft is doing a good job on the hardware there I you know, if I will need to get a PC probably will be data getting I love the form factor of the tablet, but I think they have been trying to really do a solid work with with those machines. But there is one thing that they add to this one that is interesting. And they add an SSD storage that make it removable. That’s awesome. The time that the pro that I had or my mother in law broke and then you lost everything because the machine is so compact that you cannot open and work with anything of that. So the fact that you can now take your hard drive with you if the machine die, put it on the new one, or at least save the information is a big thing. It’s a big step in in the right direction, at least in my opinion. Is that a standard SSE

Francis Wade 34:05
question? Is the SSD format. The combo? No, I’m

Augusto Pinaud 34:13
sure it’s a customer. The customer? Doesn’t don’t answer that question. But I’m willing to make a bet dollar to $1. There is a specific one.

Francis Wade 34:23
Yeah, because the picture looks, it looks very small and very unique looking. The picture in there are two

Raymond Sidney-Smith 34:32
benefits of removal SSD you’re going to have a not proprietary SSD, but a proprietary slot in which it can go into so you would have to buy a form factor that fit it. I wouldn’t, I would presume that there’s not like a interchangeable case that you can’t swap out the SSD without more good work than the not but you know, if you’re if you’re a DI wire, you might be able to do it. I don’t know. So I’m not the electronics engineer in my family. So I’m gonna try it. But yeah. So All right, next up.

Augusto Pinaud 35:05
So next up comes from Samson. And they are partner with Samson whisk or partner with eighth made to help people with meal planning it is, you know, it has been something that has happened in every family around the world who discovered year ago Oh, we need to meal planning, especially at the beginning was restaurants close? You know? And how do you do this? And how do you do it more effectively. And even though now there are a lot more places open that you can take out, this is still something that people discover, you know, I, we laugh at the beginning of the pandemic, when people were looking how you make bread and these things, but at the same time, there is an art out of that that a lot of people discover and enjoy. And we like to keep it to a certain extent. So Samson whisker partner to help you doing a much better job getting into communities helping you to continue in this creating a family hub, connect your refrigerator with your tablet, with the meal planning so you can do everything together. And hopefully that refrigerator will or they’re in instacart. So you don’t even need to worry about them.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:22
But but this really shows the the productivity component of being able to have a connected world and Samsung made this statement in implicitly, in the Samsung unpacked the galaxy unpacked event last week, was that last week, yes. Last week, they made that they made that statement that they they, you know showing the smart car and the connected car and the fact that they have all of these other home based appliances that are connected within the Samsung world, your your phone and your other small electronics are capable of being a part of this larger ecosystem. And meal planning, being something that can be automated in that sense can only be done when you have all of these different disparate tools connected to each other. And they were showing a first case, you know, kind of expose a of how this can be done kind of an example of how this can be done. And this is really going to be interesting to see whether or not is is Samsung going to find challengers in GE and others in partnership with the big four tech and whether or not they can actually do that I’m really curious to see whether or not they can get to these end results. And which competitors will want to solve which problems it seems like Google with way Moe has distanced itself, the Apple Car concept is probably a dud, what are the first IoT solutions that are really integrated across the entire kind of lifestyle workflow for people, those are the things that really help us in our routines productively, and they need to figure those pieces out. And once they do that first great example is going to be the winner in that in that market for probably the next decade or so. And so I’m really excited to see Samsung doing this, they have the infrastructure, right, they make everything from, I always joke, they make everything from phones to toilets, so they have the opportunity to really cover that gamut. And, you know, even the Samsung refrigerator, that it’s got a camera inside, you know, scanning everything inside of it. And it’s got a wonderful display on the outside. So you can see inside and do all kinds of interesting machine learning. There’s some power there that I really feel can be useful to people in that in that way.

Augusto Pinaud 38:33
And I’m really excited to be able to say to text, hey, let’s use this recipe. And the thing will tell me if we have it not have it, order whatever needs to be order and stop on the way home and pick it up in the grocery I think I’m leaving for that moment where I can throw that in, you know and and get it done. That will be fantastic. And I for one like like you said I’m really excited about this and see how this is improving and how you know for us, we give it a maybe the geek in the house or we I start moving at least the things that I cook into digital many years ago and I love that I can go and Saturday and select the recipes and the software that I use called paprika manager and it adds if I add a quarter of the milk in one and a quarter of the milk the other one give me a list that says half cup of milk I don’t need to even do the math or anything and it is fantastic to look that you have what you need to plan for the week or for the dinner or for whatever so I’m for one super excited.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 39:42
Well, there was only two things I wanted to talk about in the segment on CES, the the air things. And now this product. What is our final product that we’re gonna be talking about from CES?

Augusto Pinaud 39:54
Oh, dude, our final product is $130 Liberty here. Pro from anchor anchor, again, like stachy has been known for their quality products and this is their response to the airport’s I’m really curious, I don’t know if I will pay 130 over them, instead of a I bought but, but I’m really paying attention to this product they, they are known for really high quality one. So it will be curious to see.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:30
Well, nobody can say that I, I have a lack of headphones in my life, I have, I have headphones that within just hands reach, I have probably more headsets than most people have had in their lifetime, I have ones that kind of hang out for almost every purpose in my life. That’s just what I can reach in within like a few seconds. Time. So it’s about five. And the and I’ve probably got maybe 789. I’ve got about 10. And within hands reach. And I actually have the the prior sound pores. And these are not the soundboard pros. And I’m I’m very happy with the soundcore pros. And so I’m really looking forward to the soundcore to the Pro Tools to see how they have kind of leveled up this one has a physical charger plug. This one obviously I’m presuming is wireless charging and the the external mics on it, you know having I forget how many mics are on the outside of that. But they’re they’re more than 10 microphones on the outside of that device, being able to one do Active Noise noise cancellation when you’re when you’re in an environment that has noise, while still giving you clear call quality, I’m going to be really looking forward to seeing how those match up against the Samsung Galaxy buds Pro. Was that what they announced yesterday with the buds pro buds to either way, whatever they announced last week, in competition with my Google Pixel buds to and the new Anker soundcore Pro two because I think that we’re gonna have some really, really great, I’m sorry, I keep calling sound core Liberty air two pro because they make the name longer. But the the two pros I think are going to be are going to be really, really a great product anchor has been putting out some really good headsets, I’m looking forward to trying them out. So you can’t beat that $130 for high end, you know headsets and they’re they’re gonna go up against the AirPods. Pro. And I think they’re going to probably do just as well or better than them in in, you know, out in the wild.

Augusto Pinaud 42:35
No, I agree. They I agree that that’s the reason I brought it. They are like super techy. There are two brands that my experience has been super positive with any final thoughts about CES, gentlemen, before we hit our first break.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 42:51
No, good, wonderful. And so with that, let’s take a break and hear from our sponsor this week co working space by personal productivity club. We’ll be back after the break.

Sponsor Voice Over 43:03
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Raymond Sidney-Smith 44:33
Welcome back everybody to anything but idle. Before the break, we were covering ces 2021 in its virtual capacity. And now we’re going to cover our stories of the week this week. And so Augusto, what’s our first story?

Augusto Pinaud 44:47
Oh, first story is Samson. Galaxy upcycle is going to start turning their old phones into IoT devices and they are going to start keeping Certain updates. So people can use their old hardware for other purposes, you know, turning your old phone into a security camera and turn it into a baby monitor, or some people has turned old tablets or iPads into recipe managers, and those kind of thing. And I think this is awesome. Samsung has made a big deal about this idea, and they call it galaxy upcycle. But I think really, every manufacturer should join their version of this and allow their users to keep using these devices instead of polluted wisdom.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 45:37
Yeah, forget the we’re gonna leave the adapter out of your new brand new high end phone box, and how about you actually put in some real, you know, capabilities of these devices to allow them to extend their lives in these different paradigms. I think this is a fantastic program. It’s akin to what Google is doing now by purchasing the Neverwhere cloud ready product line and allowing you to be able to read and, you know, reinvigorate What are old devices into Chromebooks. So that, you know, you can hand it off to the, to the niece or nephew or to a young child, and they could just have a wonderful device to run with, I see a lot of opportunity here. And I think that a lot of these companies should also be supporting, whether that be, you know, Raspberry Pi foundation or other organizations to be able to bring more Linux devices online, by virtue of writing them over, they can put their own, you know, bloatware on top of it, so that they’re able to better have a little bit of control, because, you know, that’s what this is all about, you know, you put a Samsung Galaxy, you know, upcycled, you know, software onto their system that allows them to continue to control you. And and so to some extent, that’s what it’s all about. But at the same time, it’s helping to reduce environmental impact. And I’m all for that. So good stuff there.

Augusto Pinaud 47:01
Yeah, that’s awesome. So then our next news is, Biogen announced on January 11, that they are launching a new Apple Watch study to see if they can detect declining cognitive health, using the Apple Watch. And, you know, there is no doubt that the Apple Watch or danderyd watch or you know, are an incredible productivity tool. You know, when I got my first one, I remember, people asking me what it is, I said, That’s the problem. The problem is, my watch to this day, don’t do one thing that I can tell you well, is because this feature that I used to thin but it do a bunch of little things that make me true today, so much productive, you know, from waking me up in the morning without waking my wife. So she don’t get mad at me at seven in the morning, hey, just that is worth the price of admission. Okay, like many other things during the day, but now, I have participated in a couple of these studies. And I think these are an incredible way to, for them to collect the data to analyze the data, and to hopefully, help a lot of people with their health, in this case, cognitive health.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 48:24
Yes, I’ll say on one side, I’m, I’m really excited about the study, because I think this is going to be helpful for humankind. On the other side of it, everybody needs to be aware that think about it, there is a computer on your wrist that is collecting so much data about you that it’s capable of recognizing cognitive decline, which is, you know, usually requires some cognitive inventory, administered by a medical professional. And so this is remarkable, you know, multiple CES products this year, that came out, are giving the capability of having a medical grade, protocol, EKG, you know, or, or ECG device that you can use at home, for also remarkable advances in technology there. But also recognize that there is a trade off, you need to remember that there’s a data privacy and security trade off with all of these tools. And but i think i think it’s remarkable science, and I look forward to seeing whether the study actually births, a finding that they can actually do it, if they can, that’s that’s just simply remarkable, that will help so many people, because you think, you know, if you have a family member, and you know, they’re not tracking this data about themselves, and they are going through that circumstance, you now can have maybe early warning signs, just like these ecgs EKGs, where someone’s taking their their heart rate, you know, they can tell whether you’ve tak accardi or a bradycardia or whatever it is, before they ever actually exhibit real symptoms. Now they can do that kind of stuff and have early prevention, which is just phenomenal. All right, cool. Next up, what’s up so our next news and chat

Augusto Pinaud 49:59
call Microsoft chat. Yep, Google and Microsoft chat. It’s a little video with the accessibility from Microsoft and Google talking about how this chat and and how these companies can come. And really, let’s move on into judice energies. And let’s come up into how we can do it better together. And it is, even if it’s just for any marketing purpose, because of the time of the year, it is still naive enough that hope this lasts for more than a month of the year. And they really come to the table and continue working into that. So that way, we can make it happen into a long term, we see a lot more collaboration, and really a more platform agnostic, productivity.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 50:55
I think these design principles are really important. And it’s really great to see them working together to make that happen. And so yeah, I’m totally for it, I think that what we have to recognize is that we need to be productive in different phases of our life with different levels of ability. If I go to get, you know, cataract surgery, when I’m 65, or 70, hopefully that says, I can wait that long in life. And and then I go for that I will be visually disabled during that period of time. There are periods of your life when you have some different ability. And there are periods of life when you have perhaps permanent disability. But we should limit our technology. And certainly the design principles behind that technology. By virtue of thinking about it from just those folks who are permanently disabled, we should be thinking about it from an all abilities and potentially temporary disability perspective. And that way, it’s just always inclusive by design. And that’s kind of what Microsoft has been doing for several years. And I’m really pleased to see their inclusive design principles, they have a whole site dedicated to it. And I haven’t quite looked at what Google has been doing. But it’s glad to see Google as a partner there. And yeah, I just think that we have to remember that, you know, if I break my foot tomorrow, I still want to be productive. You know, convalescence is good. But I also want to be productive in that timeframe. And if I happen to break my hand, I still want to be able to have voice input with the device, so that I’m capable of continuing to be productive. Even if I don’t have use of a limb, there’s so many ways in which we can be more productive by taking advantage of these. And I know that I always look gousto, great examples, you’re talking about replacing eating displays with your iPad by enabling some of the accessibility features on your iPad. these are these are components that we have built into these devices. And the assistive technologies can actually make us more productive in different ways. So we need to remember that these devices have these kinds of tools, I use Microsoft speech recognition all the damn time, I love it, I love being able to talk to to Windows 10, I love being able to navigate the device in that sense. And, you know, when I’m by myself, and I can talk to myself, that’s great. You know, I just talked to the computer, and it does what I want it to do. And those things are really powerful. And it wouldn’t come if we weren’t thinking about this from a perspective of giving people of all abilities, all the capacity to be able to compute. And so I’m very, very much a fan of that. All right, moving right along.

Augusto Pinaud 53:21
So the next news come from Google and Google, or alphabet, employees are going to have their union and the union is going to happen. And that’s us, as far as I’m willing to cover the news, because I have, it’s it’s an important news, but I don’t know enough of the details. And the information is not the care to find out to be honest with you. But the next news is kind of sad. No surprise, Gazelle is shutting down their meal trading businesses. And and I’m not surprised because the price between used to be that you could sell your device put a little bit of money on buying a new one. And, you know, years ago, and that gap between buying new versus buying us is every year smaller and smaller and smaller. So I’m not surprised that they get a squish out of that business, you know, the Apple had discover as Google as others that it was a great business to be. And now they leave you the device so they can get the device back and repurpose and undo all this. So it was to be expected that that was going to happen.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 54:42
Yeah, so Gazelle had the ability for you to mail products in to them in the process of selling in a you know, selling to another it was selling to another person or within purchasing from you, sir. So

Augusto Pinaud 54:53
they purchased it from you.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 54:54
Yeah. And so they are leaving the kiosks that exist in physical imprints. Those will still exist after this mailing component is shut down. And so I don’t know who’s going to malls to trade in their, their phones, but, you know, during a pandemic, but presumably they think that once people go back to in person retail, you know, by and large, then those in person kiosks will continue to do their job. But you’re absolutely right, I think that, you know, this is just the the way of the market, you know, we now are much more comfortable with buying new, and the, the market for being able to buy used is now trivial because of eBay and other platforms like that you don’t need a gizelle in order to be able to make that happen, because we’ve pretty much figured that out in these other tools that exist. I’m curious if this is kind of akin to, I don’t know, if square trade or other kind of phone insurance type products like that are still around and working and operable, but I’m curious how that whole market really plays into gazelles, lack of kind of strength here now. Because

Augusto Pinaud 56:03
I think I think that market was before but what change is, How easy is to get the new phone from directly to one factor or directly from the phone company, you know, used to be, you go to get the phone, and you know, now you go and you can get a phone for 10 bucks a month. I mean, why buy used you know, I I not only that you can now get you know, with any almost any phone, or manufacturer, you know, you get into there, okay, I’m going to pay you $30 or $15 or $20 for the rest of my life. And every 12 months, I go turn on my thing, and you give me a new phone. So that has make a lot more people playing into that game that then garcelle get choking plus the cost or the price that these devices are selling is not as low as it used to be. And parking part of that because what you are describing you can sell it to Amazon, you can sell it to eBay, you can sell it to others that will give you on the exchange even target now, here in the US. You can go when when the new devices come in, and they give you they buy your old device. So there is a market that has been cannibalized by everybody.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 57:22
Yeah, I’ll note that squaretrade, which I referenced earlier as a kind of phone insurance program, and they were purchased looks like by Allstate. And so as little as $5 per month, or they have a family plan that’s for phones for $20 per month, and covers all kinds of, you know, catastrophe to your phones and includes a screen repair facility as well. So that’s, that’s pretty good. I thought they had gone the way of the dinosaurs, and didn’t didn’t exist any longer. But it looks like they’re alive and well and still doing their thing. I mean, I thought that most people would just go to I fix it, or another kind of retail outlet like that and get their phone screens fixed there. But if you have a phone plan that’s paying for it, that’s pretty much a insurance plan of some kind that’s paying for it. That’s pretty, pretty good. All right.

Augusto Pinaud 58:10
Moving on the next news, apple, it’s hinting that they will have new service development. They talk about mail plus packet loss. And other thing they just announced and released the end of last year, a bunch of service. And I’m going to bring my sore eyes to this. Okay, how about you fix, you know, mail alias and other things on the current mail application before you sell me the last concert. My sore thing has come out but but they have, you know, done the services they have done the apple plus that they actually there is a news also rescinded the extent the free trial to the middle of the year for the people the extender initially was until December. Then they did February and now they did June. But Apple has been seen some success was a fitness loss and the newest plus, and now their new Apple one where you can go into a lower price and get all the services at once. Let’s see what happened was that I have no doubt that more services will come. That’s what Apple do. And that’s what they do.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 59:22
So what are your gentleman’s perspective on premium services on top of the apple ecosystem? Is that a is that a good direction for people’s productivity? Not?

Trevor Lohrbeer 59:33
I don’t know how it is for the productivity perspective. But I’d say that Apple appears to be doing a content plus premium strategy rather than a feature plus strategy. So like when I read that article, and it was like this group hypothesizing what services they might reach. Now plus didn’t resonate for me because it’s like, well, that’s a feature thing. If you’re going to add more features, you’re going to have an outcry from users saying Why do I not need to pay For those new features, where’s the podcast plus makes sense, because now I can offer you premium channels that no one else has access to. And that model I feel Apple feels more comfortable with. So the content Plus, I think is where Apple is going to head with a lot of their premium services.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:00:15
Yeah, I know that I’m a little bit weird on the subject only because it’s like, Apple has had this kind of stranglehold on the podcast world with the directory. And to be quite honest, they’ve done really well by podcasting, by hosting this directory. They haven’t monetized in any way, shape, or form, you know, anything else like that, but I almost have a knee jerk reaction to the idea that they’re going to somehow then step in and monetize it in some way that’s going to be detrimental to podcasts. But I don’t I don’t think they will, I think they actually do a good job. But you know, there is a kind of like a heart palpitation because so much of podcasting depends upon, still depends upon the apple podcast directory, if Apple is smart, what they’ll do is they’ll actually make it more of a acquainted marketplace. But basically, by monetizing it,

Trevor Lohrbeer 1:01:02
they actually allow people to monetize their own podcasts in some way, in a similar, you know, like, almost like YouTube. So it’s like, Okay, if you go into and put yourself onto podcasts plus, then we’ll give you some of the revenue stream from the pocket plus, and I think that would be very compelling for some podcasters to try to monetize the podcast.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:01:22
And that’s why those with very large audiences, certainly some celebrities, and those kinds of things, but even some, some smaller podcasters, I think, could really benefit from that. Yeah, that’s a good, that’s good point. And people are hungry for content. I mean, we see that now, by and large, and podcasts plus would be a type of content that would be easy to produce. Because it’s not, it’s not, it can work around COVID-19. You know, it really is capable of being done in an environment that doesn’t require Not, not that every podcast doesn’t require in person recording, but you can do a lot more virtually than you can in person.

Augusto Pinaud 1:01:56
Oh, sorry. Sorry, go Trevor,

Trevor Lohrbeer 1:01:59
I was gonna say to tie back into the productivity thing is a lot of times the, the premium content is a higher quality content. So if you are trying to be productive and trying to limit what content you consume, it can be more efficient to just subscribe to the premium service, use the premium content, and not get the all the free content, which tends to be like anyone can jump on. So it’s a little bit, you have to sift through a lot more to find the gems are, in theory, the premium content will give you the gems, so actually aid your productivity in that way. Right.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:02:31
What is Netflix? And then they have not solved that problem for me?

Augusto Pinaud 1:02:36
No, but I think you make a really good point about content not feature. And I and I. And I think they have done reasonable weigh in there. You know, you see the fitness part, you know, you cannot get the content, but you get all the other features with it with the Apple devices. So I think you made a really great point in there that if they continue that strategy, even even to male plus whatever that means to get more content, not more features for the extra, they may be pretty successful at it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:03:12
All right, moving right along in the news. Next story.

Augusto Pinaud 1:03:16
Well, apparently, you’re hagey now you can go into go Hey, g turn on guest mode and my house do not have G’s devices. But I understand that you can say the voice so that the G knows who is talking about so he can do certain features and certain things, certain actions based on that. And now you will be able to turn on guest mode for certain people to come. So it’s going to be pretty interesting.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:03:50
Yeah, it’s gonna, of course, shut off different capabilities because it is in guest mode. So it won’t have access to things like calendar or sending messages or those kinds of things. But it will give them you know, call and response answers. So you can control presumably you can control lights and those kinds of things inside the network. And you can also ask it questions like How tall is Tom Cruise? I have no idea. But ask ask big G. But the the idea is that you then have capabilities for guests when they are there and not have to worry about them being locked out of using and utilizing lights and other things when they’re in your home. Especially when you have like a guest for a couple of days. Okay. Next

Augusto Pinaud 1:04:33
jail professor, find a formula to sticking to resolutions. And you know, we are in that time of the year. I don’t know actually we are this year count on your path. This was a time of the year that you might get used to swim in the YMCA pre COVID. So this was a time of the year that you need to calculate 10 minutes more so you can find it to park into the YMCA tend to ends around January 25. Okay, and by February, you can go again, regular time on Park, I don’t know, what is the effect of resolutions in this year with people not moving? Are they people sticking to them are going to, they will be able to stick longer with them or not, or what this not leaving not going out, it’s going to make a change, regardless of that jail Professor Santos thing, he has a couple of, or a simple formula to stick into these resolutions, but I don’t know.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:05:37
Well, so the combination is, in essence, a self kindness, kind of activity, combined with the smart, you know, kind of goal formula, right? Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and timely type goal. And using the two of those together, they were able to see an improvement in people’s ability to achieve resolutions. Because we know that, you know, less than 20% of people who make related resolutions, keep those resolutions. And so they’re seeing some efficacy there, which is interesting. Francis,

Francis Wade 1:06:14
I was I wasn’t sure I could operationalize what I read, you know, self kindness. What is the self kindness was the activity that generates that? Is it even different for each person? So nice sentiment, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:06:32
Yeah, I think this is probably some specific set of behavioral interventions that they applied during this particular work. And so I’m not sure it didn’t identify that in the article. And I will likely dig into the paper when I have a chance. I just didn’t have a chance before our, our recording today. But I am looking forward to digging under the hood and seeing what the the actual, you know, study noted. But I’m presuming it was some specific set of behavioral interventions that were around self kindness, and then applying the SMART goal formula to or they

Francis Wade 1:07:10
could have just been observation, they the start the, I forget what you call it, the smart, that’s my start. But the fresh start. That observation is true, the more people who do marathons when they’re 2939 4959, the ninth year of the decade of their age than they do in the years before. And it’s because they’re crossing, they’re crossing a Rubicon, they’re crossing a big milestone, and they want to achieve this accomplishment before crossing the master. It’s an observation, but there’s not much you can do with it. You know, in practical terms, so I’d be interested to see if she’s not just observing something as opposed to actually being able to translate it into steps one, two, and three.

Trevor Lohrbeer 1:07:59
Um, I just want to jump in and say, I think there’s there there are techniques that you could use for some of these things were part of it is I think people are too strict with themselves. So when they fall off of their resolution, it’s like, oh, I just totally, I didn’t do my exercises today. It’s all gone. Nevermind, blah, blah, blah, and giving you that kind of recognizing that we’re all human, we’re all gonna make mistakes, and to build that into your system. So I’ll often use a stoplight system where like, I have green is my goal resolution, or my goal activity, I’m trying to have it I’m trying to do, and then I have a yellow level. So if I’m trying to exercise 30 minutes a day, that’s my green level, my yellow level is just 10 minutes. Or I now have this thing where, you know, I track every single day that I’m doing, I’m a really big fan of Don’t break the chain, that really works well for me. But some days I break the chain, and I have this app called every day that actually lets me mark the day as a half day. So it’s like a, like, I didn’t quite do it. But I didn’t break it. And so now I have this rule is I have to keep a chain of at least five days. And if I do that, and I happen to slip up. That’s okay. And I don’t actually break my chain as long as that only happens once. And then if it happens two days in a row, on the second day, I can recover the chain by like just doing it. So it’s like this way of giving myself. Yeah, that self kindness, this recognition that I’m not going to be perfect. But there’s still a system in there that allows me to achieve my goals, if that makes sense. So something about recognition that we’re not perfect.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:09:40
Yeah. And I think that there’s

Francis Wade 1:09:43
sorry, there’s good science showing that if you you set up implementation intentions around these, their failures, failures to achieve your objectives. And you say if if I fail, then I’ll see if I can hit the yellow level. And if I Failure low level, then I got a piece of chocolate so I can forgive myself. If you set these things up ahead of time, they actually work. And if you rehearse what you’re going to do, if you don’t, if you do break the chain, and you decide ahead of time that here’s the, here’s my forgiveness activity. You know, here’s my my way of acknowledging the progress I’ve made, I write down all the wins I’ve had, and this is our last year. So that’s good. It says that if you if you pre rehearse failures like that, then they don’t have the same effect as if the same psychological effect. Yeah,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:10:37
I think it’s useful that so I pulled up the abstract to the paper, which is self compassion increases self improvement motivation. And the I believe this is the paper I may be getting this wrong. Now, because I, I was plunking around trying to find the right paper. And it says, I’m not sure if this is the paper. But this is really interesting nonetheless. So the abstract of this particular paper that is that I have in front of me, that was linked to from the article, it says, Ken treating oneself with compassion after making a mistake, increase self improvement motivation. And for experiments, the author’s examine the hypothesis that self compassion motivates people to improve personal weaknesses, moral transgressions, and test performance. So it says participants in a self compassion condition compared to a self esteem control condition, and either no intervention or positive distraction control condition, expressed greater incremental beliefs about a personal weakness, the reported greater motivation to make amends and avoid repeating a recent moral transgression. And two other experiments. Either way, these findings suggest that, somewhat paradoxically, taking an accepting approach to personal failure may make people more motivated to improve themselves. So it’s right on point there, Francis that if we, if we take self kindness, that self compassion approach actually can help. I wonder if this is self selecting the people in the study where people like us who tend to be tougher on ourselves, and therefore that that negative self talk actually competes with our overall productivity, that would be curious for me, like, what they how they group together the experimental study participants. But it’s one of those things where I absolutely believe that the more we speak to ourselves negatively, the less likely we are to be motivated to do things that competes with our self efficacy. And ultimately, we get less done. And so if we can increase this self compassion, and certainly self positive self talk, we’re going to be better off and starting just a little bit with being lenient on yourself once in a while, so that you can get back on track, as Trevor was noting with his with his practice. That’s really great. I love it. All right. Next up is

Augusto Pinaud 1:12:43
our next, our next story is came from Chromebooks. And it is about how to get into really complicated extent to install the newest version of Firefox in your Chromebook. But if you want to have the options, we thought it was important for productivity there is people who I talk about browsers and we have talked about browsers and I have said for years, you should have two different browsers. Doesn’t matter if your device a Chromebook one for play, one for work. So if you use Firefox, as any of those two, are there is the link in there how you can upgrade and install the new version of Firefox into your Chromebook.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:13:29
Fantastic. Next up,

Augusto Pinaud 1:13:31
ring doorbell now will support or now supports end to enter script encryption. So they they released that and they want to go come into Well, it’s good, not good. What are the sacrifices that we are going to make? It is worth to try this out just for that. I

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:13:52
think it’s worth trying out? I mean, why wouldn’t you try to have greater better and greater encryption across your connected devices? These are things that are on your home and work networks. So why wouldn’t you want them to have greater security, there’s going to be impacts for all of the greatness of any particular security implementation, you’re going to have some offset of convenience, and certainly more data being transmitted, which of course can bog down a network. So I’m curious to see how this all works. But I’m happy to see it come to pass.

Augusto Pinaud 1:14:25
Well, our next news is it’s an article from make use of 10 reasons why you should be using signal in the last weeks has been old his comments about WhatsApp and the news on the change of term condition if he’s going to share more information or less information with Facebook and there is a significant amount of people who is moving out of WhatsApp getting into signal getting into telegram Elon Musk talks about signal and there was even Some people who decide to be clever, go to the stock market and buy a company that they thought there was signal. So the price went from God knows how many cents to 60 bucks. And then of course crash and burn, because he was not the company, the actual company on the penny stock needed to come and put a an official announcement, we are not the signal, you’re looking for it in a fine. Another one. But anyways, this article comes in 10 things why signal you know, why is free of charge, the transparency, being open source, the total encryption, that he has, you know how your number is secure with signal that may not be in other places, you know, the biometric security options, the local storage that he produced, and you can protect the, or the IP address that the device use screen protection screws, can privacy, read and receive options. And finally, the popularity really was a seven, in my opinion, a seven reasons article, but it’s still it’s a pretty, it’s a pretty good article. If you want to understand a little bit more, you are confused about what why this term of conditions affect you or just simply jump the boat. You know, if you already jumped about one segment you want to understand more about it is a good article to read.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:16:27
Yes, people have to understand that WhatsApp is changing their privacy policy in order to let people know that they would be collecting some data and sharing that with Facebook. Now Facebook owns WhatsApp and Instagram, Facebook has been going through the process of of merging Instagram direct messages and Facebook Messenger. And that same in the same way. And in order to do that they’re not sharing the messages themselves within WhatsApp, but some of the metadata like location, and who you’re messaging with, and certain types of information around that, which of course caused a little bit of a stir. And people decided to jump ship from WhatsApp and run to signal that, of course, crashed the signal servers these past couple of days, which has been a little bit struggle for those of us who have been just happily using telegram and signal without the rest of you. And now, of course have had a little bit of impact, but signal will ramp up their servers and be able to withstand the new users. And I think that’s all good. I think that you know, we need we need options out there in the market that aren’t, you know, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and apple. And so I’m glad to see other options in the market, gaining steam telegram, you know, just noted 400 million users, I think they’ll probably they probably just raised another 100 million in the last few days just in you know that that’s probably not that’s egregious, but, but they probably have increased that number substantially in the last week from all the things that have been happening. And I think that’s a good thing. So we should have options.

Trevor Lohrbeer 1:17:54
The one thing I was gonna add to that is apparently WhatsApp uses the signal protocol behind the scenes for encryption. So my question is, can you actually, what’s the transition strategy? If you want to move over to signal from WhatsApp? Can they interoperate in any way? Or is there a way that you can bounce the server?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:18:13
Nope, nope, there’s no connection whatsoever. So the signal the signal protocol, which is why the messages are not accessible, it is just the data around it. And so using the using the signal protocol, in Facebook’s perspective, means that they’re just using that for the messages. So you cannot get access to the messages, Facebook, can I get access to those messages? I’m sure that there is some you know, I’m not sure about the specific details about it. But it would be the messages themselves. That would be you know, not able to be turned out of the blob basically extracted from the blob, that’s, that’s transmitted. But all of the metadata around it is not I mean, that’s, that’s a WhatsApp and proprietary and so therefore, they do know some of that data.

Trevor Lohrbeer 1:18:54
And potentially your photos too, because your photos get saved to your photo roll and are not encrypted. And so then WhatsApp have access to any photo you get sent or the photo you send. Correct,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:19:05
correct, especially with the new, the new storage capabilities within WhatsApp to be able to to save storage, they’ve given you greater capacity, which of course, probably reduces security in some way, shape or form, not in any grant perspective inside the app. But as soon as you take those photos and save them to local storage outside of the app, you’re increasing that surface. So yeah, I think that, you know, it’s interesting, I don’t think it really has a great impact on the average consumer in terms of their understanding or care. But I think certainly for those of us who are paying attention, a more secure messaging tool is great. This is a great opportunity to educate your family and friends, circulate the articles and scare them a little bit so that they come over to telegram and signal with you at this time and has many of the same features. You can make phone calls and you can do little video chats on telegram and so on and so forth and you’re you’re creating a better, more secure experience with those family and friends. That will ultimately help them. one less person hacked. All right, final two stories before we get to new tools.

Augusto Pinaud 1:20:09
Well, then the next story sinister from life hacker it is okay to delete people on social media. And I’m going to open the question before I give my opinion about this to Francis and Trevor knew, before I opened my big mouth about this, I’m going to let you guys work the work the blank before I jump in,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:20:32
I’ll cover for everybody. And I’ll say that I feel like it’s completely okay to delete people on social media, I have no problem with doing so it’s just like in a personal relationship, if I don’t want to communicate with you anymore, I will, I will just tell you, I do not want to communicate with you anymore. And an unfollow or a block tells you in very clear terms that I no longer want to communicate with you. And it just happens to be I guess, a little bit more public in that perspective. But you know, I think that relationships, healthy relationships begin and end. And and so why wouldn’t those be possible in social media? As I you know, as I trained small businesses on this subject, I always say that social media is like any other social technology, and therefore human principles apply human social principles apply. So if I have a problem with what you’re doing with me, then I should communicate that as a human to another human. And if you don’t abide by the social compact, or the social pact that we’ve created, then there needs to be repercussions. I need to be able to know that I can disconnect, especially if it’s unhealthy for me. So yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s perfectly fine.

Augusto Pinaud 1:21:43
Yeah, I think it’s actually healthy is part of in the same way. And I agree with you in the same way that you do weddings, in real life, you know, you do need to do it in social media, and you need to get over that. Well, what if, and, and the reasons, or the reasons people give to themselves, why they should not do it, it’s healthy, it’s good. And there’s people who need to be blocked as news and out of your social media life.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:22:11
All right, who’s gonna take devil’s advocate,

Trevor Lohrbeer 1:22:13
I’m not gonna take devil’s advocate, but I’ll go one step further and go into the, it can be healthy to just remove people who you don’t have conflict with, but you just are no longer connected with. I think that social media creates this awareness drag on us, where we’re suddenly aware of social connections that we normally would have just let go of. And so that just creates a drag on our mind. We open up social media, oh, yeah, that person, I haven’t thought about that person a long time. I’m not really connecting them anymore. I don’t care about their news. Why are they still in my feed, and they still are, because it can be socially unacceptable to say no, or something like that. But yeah, this whole cleansing of letting go and letting relationships fade and disappear, is useful. And to get rid of that awareness drag, because I think that awareness drag drags us down. Because now it just saps a little bit of awareness, each time that we can’t put where we really want to put our awareness and our focus, I’ll make it even more aggressive statement, which is that you don’t need to accept

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:23:15
everybody connection requests that you receive on social media, either that even people you know, and even like, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to accept their connection requests on LinkedIn or on Facebook or on other other platforms that have that kind of mutual acceptance modality. I just don’t, I don’t need to be connected to people that I knew 30 years ago, and and we have not kept in touch and we aren’t going to keep in touch. So why do I care about seeing their, you know, random pictures of their life, you know, scroll through my feed, it’s not providing me with any greater value in life. And there there are certain circumstance Actually, I reconnected recently on Facebook of all things. Because it’s not my preferred platform. I reconnected with a friend I had in I guess, elementary school, maybe middle school, junior high school in New York City type of of some people call Middle School, some people call junior high school either way. And it was it’s really lovely to reconnect with someone that I lost touch with. And I probably will establish, reestablish that relationship in a close sense. But if I didn’t have that belief, there’s no way that I’m accepting a friend request from somebody that is going to just basically create more drag on my system. Every individual that I have connected to me is another individual that I have to maintain and manage around. And I want to because I want to have those, those close bonds and those close relationships. And that means that I can’t have all the relationships I can only have so many in order to have a vibrant life that isn’t over overburdened, and I have a lot of siblings, and that means I will probably at some point have a lot of nieces and nephews. So I got to manage. I got to I got to keep it. I got to keep the reins on things with all the kids in my family. Okay. Last but not least, Augusta What’s our final story this week?

Augusto Pinaud 1:25:04
It’s an article from the New Republic called gainst productivity in a pandemic, why we have been told by bosses fitness app ourselves to optimize the new time to get things done. And it was a really interesting article, or at least I enjoy it a lot. You know, on. I think all of us got a great opportunity with the pandemic. And I’ve been arguing since September last year that we need to look into a pandemic has brought terrible things. Yes. But there is also brought great things and one of the things that was interesting was looking at people saying, Oh, now I have this time, and I need to do more and get more and and I suppose productivity person, as a coach, I wonder, wait, did you want to do more of what is important to you? Or do you want to do more so you can get the time and one of the things a lot of people discover was their agendas, under calendars. And their to do lists were full of stuff that they didn’t care for, that we’re not making their life better. And because you are at home or because you are now working at home and you have more time, that doesn’t mean that you need to get that time fill up with anything, it may give you the chance, maybe for the first time ever to reclaim some time, some healthy time, some free time, some quiet time. So it has been really interesting to, you know, look at this. Look at what it is and the article make a couple of good points, you know, hey, understand what are you? What are the rules that you’re going to put for this? You know, what are the things that you are okay with and what are the things you don’t you know, hey, not every call need to be a videoconference. Some of them, it’s okay to turn off the camera, you know, it’s not all of them do not need to be available to to slack, 24. Seven, common set those, those rules, and don’t think that because we are in the pandemic, now, we all need to learn how to make bread and cook. Okay, even even if your Samson will tell you what is on the fridge, as we were discussing early, make sure that you can tell the Samsung back Nope. Tonight we have pizza,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:27:40
I’m going to speak out of two sides of my brain, which is on on one side, I see. You know, because I pay attention to the economy, just generally for work purposes. I see payrolls bloodletting, I see an increasing, you know, unemployment throughout this pandemic, and we’re gonna see more and more of that happen. And when we have, you know, 750,800 1000, and a million people who are unemployed week over week filing for unemployment, I can see how, you know, employers kind of get greedy. And they see this as an opportunity to be able to eke out more than this happened in the last economic recession. It happened, you know, in the prior economic recession, where we, we see employees worried about losing their jobs, and therefore want to ramp up productivity, and therefore, look for ways in which they can show themselves to be more valuable to their employers. So on one side of this, I very much feel for the people who want to be more productive, because they feel fear, from, you know, the the ecosystem from the work culture, and the economic impacts of that. On the other side of that I fully resonate with this quotation from the article. This month mindset is the natural endpoint of America’s hustle culture, the idea that every nanosecond of our lives must be commodified, and pointed toward profit and self improvement. And in a literal pandemic, as millions of us are trying to practice home isolation, while also attending to the needs of our families and communities. The obscenity of pretending that work and the self are the only things that matter or even exist, becomes harder to ignore. And it’s just a great distillation of that kind of absurdity that we’re all dealing with. But at the same time, I also find the articles perspective, that productivity, again is one of these undefined, you know, blobs, we talk about productivity, and I try to always use the term personal productivity or individual productivity because what you define is productive is not the same as what I define as productive. I think that sitting with my thoughts is productive. And I think that there is something about intentionality that has to do with productivity, that is what other people would consider time wasting. And so with this malleable amorphous definition that we frequently have around productivity, I find kind of unfortunate because Because this person clearly is feeling something about being put upon by being more productive, and I don’t feel that. And that means all of our experiences are so very different in the context of this pandemic. And we have to take that into account as we all move forward. And there’s just as much self compassion as compassion and kindness being extended outward toward others throughout this because, you know, if I was an essential worker, that had to be out there working every day, that’s stressful, on top of the fact that I need to be more productive, so that my employer sees that, you know, sees my productivity and therefore, doesn’t want to let me go when things get rough, when it comes to cash flow. So I see it, I see it in both ways. I really do I have great, you know, concern for everybody in this in this circumstance.

Francis Wade 1:30:48
I thought their article responded to notion of productivity, in terms of it being about hyper work. But the response seems to me to be saying, here’s what you should do instead, I don’t think it’s like, you’re saying, wait, I think there’s a should or shouldn’t, or should, I think the way to think about productivity in the standards, you are aware of where you are at any point in time, and you’re able to generate choices. And you always make the best choice, whether that choice is the work, rest, exercise, or just veg out whatever it might be, play, whatever it might be, I think that’s the, that’s the, that’s what me is the new, if there’s a new definition of productivity, that’s it, it’s more about, it’s more about being present, having choices and making the choices than it is going from one should, to another should personal,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:31:49
see how I see I brought us all circle back around to how words matter and productivity and

Francis Wade 1:31:56
I did on purpose, thought

Trevor Lohrbeer 1:32:00
I was just gonna say is, I think one of the dangers is that fear and stress, kill your productivity. And so you can get into this downward cycle where you feel like you need to be more productive, we’re actually all probably less productive, just because of the stress of COVID of being locked in our houses, all of that, you know, some of us are affected more with that than others. But we’re all affected somewhat by all this stress. And that is reducing our productivity. And then when you try to amp up your productivity, especially if it’s a fear based, where I might lose my job, I might do things like that, you can actually get into this place where you’re just like trudging and you’re and you’re and you’re going into this downward spiral. Because the more productive you try to be, you’re not really relaxing. So I think that, like Francis said, that the the making the decision to step away to whether you call it productivity or not, I would say to just not be productive, to relax, to reset, to refresh yourself, that actually is better for your productivity than to trying to be productive all the time, especially in these times of high stress and high fear.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:33:11
Yeah, and I’ll go back to this like, to produce, you know, being productive is to produce producing is what you decide to produce. And so, being not productive is what you’re saying. And I that’s just again, it’s just semantics. But I but I see that as I see that as producing, when I, when I sit down, and I meditate, you know, I’ve had a very long term, multi decade, you know, meditation practice, when I sit down to meditate, that is productive for me, I am producing a state of being, that allows me to reduce anxiety, to create greater clarity, to focus my thoughts, all of those kinds of things. Production doesn’t have to mean outward, you know, output, you don’t need to see it in order to understand that I’m being productive, spending time with a spouse, or partner, that can be productive, because it keeps a happy home. If you and that doesn’t require you to, to build something or do something, it’s just being with a person, you know, it’s like holding the hand of your loved one as they pass away. There is nothing that has to be done. It’s just being How can you not consider that to be productive. And so the, this is an agreement with you, Trevor, I think, All told, which is to say that we all need to take into account what what values we have, and I don’t mean values in terms of morals, but values that we place on the things in our world, and whether those values are worth us putting time tension and energy and otherwise finances into and making those kinds of choices as Francis talked about. And I think ultimately that is what allows for kind of that Socratic good life. And and so that’s what interests me and intrigues me always about personal productivity, and certainly the technologies that we talked about. And so thank you all gentlemen, for the stories of the week. We are going to go into our new set in our next segment. The new tools of the week. And so in essence, gousto. And I come across many personal productivity tools and services each week. And we’d like to share a couple of them that we come across. And we think you might like to use or to at least learn more about, we invite our panelists to also share a tool that they may be used or know about that you might also find interesting. And so with that, this is new tools of the week. And so I will start us off with my new tool of the week. Again, playing on the thesaurus day theme, I thought I would show you all a tool that I actually really use and enjoy using. And it is called Hemingway. And so Hemingway is this really simple application that does something really profoundly important and powerful. So what you can do is you can take any amount of text, and just paste it into the Hemingway application. And once you do paste it in here, I think I just there we go. So let’s say we paste this in here, it actually automatically highlights text in different colors and tells you whether or not you’ve written it well, it actually grades it, it tells you how many words and it gives you more statistics about that particular item. And you can go ahead and edit the document that you’re writing right here. I use this all the time for email, because I tend to write really long emails. And the sentences are too long. And while I’ve used multiple add ins for Gmail and other tools, this is just a really great place for me to be able to throw them especially when I’m going across multiple email clients. Or if you’re just writing a document and you want it to just be a little bit, you know, clear a little bit pithier just throwing this into Hemingway, it’s free. And there’s a desktop application as well. And so that’s Hemingway app. And it’s very, very helpful. Okay, who’s next? Oh, gousto. What’s your tool this

Augusto Pinaud 1:36:44
week. My tool this week is an application for the iPhone and the iPad, it’s called scanner Pro. And there has been a lot of evolution with with the cameras and the phones. But a scanner Pro has been an app that has been on my phone for incredible time. You can save them there, they save directly to Dropbox, they save to iCloud, you can scan multiple documents from black and white and color, they will put it together as a file as a PDF. You can send it you can make annotations. It’s been incredible not only that it has the ability that when you take the picture, it do it shows you the border of the papers. So people, if you do it properly, don’t know that you’re doing that with the camera. And you don’t need to get the, you know, when we had this when we were buying the house, the last house, we were scanning some documents and I, my wife sent the picture of the document that they were asking it was a two page document and the person responded saying, sorry, cannot be taken with a phone, you need to find a scanner. And so she called me and said, Well, what I can do. And I said well, let me pull my phone I took it was kind of bro, send it to the office, thank you very much for using your scanner. That was fantastic. So it’s an incredible application and really powerful.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:38:07
Fantastic, I am going to check out scanner pro for my iPad. All right, next up, I think it’s you, Francis Francis, what’s your tool this week,

Augusto Pinaud 1:38:16
um, you are muted the first one of the

Francis Wade 1:38:20
most did save my time. It’s a an app that is connected to your smartphone, it allows you to track your time, in retrospect. So it’s how you spend the last number of minutes since the app last lock screen. So you can’t, it pops up about you can’t use your app unless you deliberately tell it tell the program how you spent the last hour number of minutes since the last time the screen was locked. Which makes it just a perfect fit for natural behavior. You don’t have to do anything, you’d have to remember anything, you don’t have to set up a reminder, I’ve tried all of those. And they really haven’t worked all that well. But this one has allowed me to, I don’t know, double, triple the quality of my time tracking all of a sudden became precise. Whereas before it was all about guessing. And trying to recreate days based on my calendar of activities, which has never really worked very well. So this is a big winner. So it’s worth thought of this, you know, actually said how can we fit into people’s natural sets of behaviors? How can we fit into their existing habit pattern, and that I think is a winner in every case.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:39:42
And so this is an Android app available in the Google Play Store only so there’s not an iOS iOS. Yeah. And okay, it’s it’s free. There’s a free version and then there is a professional version that I think when we last looked at it, it was just a couple bucks per month. Let’s see here. What’s the You’re welcome. Here we are. So the free version is up to nine activities, unlimited history. And then with professional, it’s $3 USD per month if you billed annually or $5 per month otherwise, but then you get unlimited activities, unlimited history, data export, calendar integration and a custom date picker. I think that that’s good that they left that last, because it is the least valuable of the other features that are in the pro version. Wonderful. Thank you, Francis. And last but not least, Trevor, what’s your pick this week.

Trevor Lohrbeer 1:40:33
So my pick is tasklist. And this is basically a new app, it’s still kind of under development by the sky art. And it’s designed to help you go through your getting things done, weekly reviews, more efficiently. And so what it does is it guides you through each step. So you kind of have a guided step, which tells you each step to follow, and then has a timer that lets you time that so you can kind of see which steps are taking a long time, which steps are quick. And then you can also start calibrating how long it takes for you to do your weekly reviews. And then he has different processes. So you can actually set up different types of reviews and break it down in different ways. So it’s very, very young app. But I thought it was interesting to go through. I really liked the workflow process that he uses.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:41:26
Fantastic. And so the pricing looks like it’s $10 USD per month. And you can,

Augusto Pinaud 1:41:33
the pricing is really interesting. I have never seen this approach. And I good. General, was really interesting. He’s 10 bucks a month. But if you do your review, you will pay less. That’s awesome. Yeah, it’s

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:41:47
incentivizing you to go ahead and keep up the good work, but also to keep using their app.

Unknown Speaker 1:41:55
Exactly.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:41:56
Fantastic. Fantastic, great new tools of the week, this week. And so with that, that brings us to nearly the end of the show. Gentlemen, this has been really great time. And I appreciate everybody being here. And so with that, how we’re going to say goodbye to you all, Francis, how can folks keep up to date in terms of what you’re doing out there in the world? what’s the what’s the best way for people to keep up in touch with you? I think we’ve lost Francis for a moment there. Okay,

Unknown Speaker 1:42:27
we’re gonna turn to Trevor cover.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:42:29
We’re gonna close you out first. Trevor, how can people keep up to date in terms of the great work you’re doing out there in the world of productivity?

Trevor Lohrbeer 1:42:36
Yeah, certainly. So people can if they want to listen to me on Twitter, I’m at fast Fedora fedora hat. And of course, my app is called the optimizer so they can go to the optimizer.com or the day optimizer app. And in general across all the socials, either fast Fedora, I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, all that fast Fedora. And then the optimizer is the all the other socials.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:43:03
Wonderful. And for those of you who don’t know, you know that we run personal productivity club and, and inside personal productivity club. We’re excited to announce, we’ll probably make it public tomorrow morning. And I’ll post it to let everybody know, but we’ve created a day optimizer channel, a group inside of personal productivity club dedicated to day optimizer and Trevor’s work. So go out there if you’re listening to the podcast, those of you who are watching live, you have to wait till tomorrow. But those of you who are listening to the podcast will have already made this live. And so you’ll be able to find the public channel the channel inside a personal productivity club dedicated today optimizer and thanks, Trevor for launching and running that group inside a personal productivity club. Hope it’s useful to everybody.

Trevor Lohrbeer 1:43:43
Yeah, and if anyone has any questions about time management jump in that channel, and I’ll be happy to answer them.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:43:49
Fantastic. Great to have you, Trevor. Yeah. Thank you. Francis. How can people keep up to date? Yes, sir. work you’re doing out there a big event that we

Francis Wade 1:43:59
have coming up as a kind of task management and time blocking summit coming up. On March 4, the sixth went to Taiwan. And that’s a big house somewhere in the reason a lot of the 50 speakers.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:44:16
Were losing you a little bit. So time blocking summit dot info for folks to be able to learn more about the time management task management and time blocking summit that’s happening. What’s the date again?

Francis Wade 1:44:29
March 4 to six.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:44:31
Fantastic, fantastic. always wonderful to have you, Francis. Thanks for joining us

Francis Wade 1:44:35
today. Thank you very much, Vicki.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:44:39
Oops. All right. And then there were two of you. So thank you very much for joining me as always, and helping make anything but idle happen. It’s my pleasure. It’s always My pleasure. Wonderful. All right, gentlemen. And hello. Those of you who have stuck with us to the end, we have reached the close of this episode and Our productivity and technology news this week. If there’s any stories we missed, you can head over to our contact page and go to anything but idle.com Click contact, you can tweet or dm us at anything but idle. And you can also leave a question or comment directly on the Show page. So if you go to anything but idle.com forward slash 040, you’ll be taken to the episode page, you can comment there as well. On that episode page, you’ll find our show notes with links to all the stories we covered, we sometimes have some extra stories that we couldn’t cover in the episode, we placed those there as well, we put our new tools of the week, we have a text transcript, both a text one that’s right there on the page, just click that Read More link, or you can download the PDF and therefore read it’ll, you know, kind of track along with the audio, it’s machine generated, so it’s not going to be perfect, but it’s good enough to be able to run through if you need to. This is your first time watching the live stream. Feel free to subscribe so you can learn about upcoming weekly shows that we have here. And feel free to hit the like the thumbs up icon that that helps us grow our listening and watching community. So thank you for doing that. And feel free to subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can find all of those at anything but idol.com forward slash subscriber just click on subscribe when you’re on the anything but idol.com website, you’ll see instructions to go ahead and follow us and get episodes downloaded for free each week, or every show that we put out with that. See you all next time here on anything but idle and here’s your productive life.

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

In this Cast | How Words Matter in Personal Productivity

Francis Wade

Trevor Lohrbeer

Headlines & Show Notes | How Words Matter in Personal Productivity

Virtual CES 2021 Announcements & Semantics on Productivity

Stories of the Week

New Tools of the Week

New Tool 1 (Ray)

New Tool 2 (Augusto)

New Tool 3 (Francis)

New Tool4 (Trevor)

Raw Text Transcript

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