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Google Drive for Desktop Gets an Upgrade, The Power of Simplicity and the Productivity and Technology News This Week
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In this Cast | Google Drive for Desktop Gets an Upgrade and The Power of Simplicity
Headlines & Show Notes | Google Drive for Desktop Gets an Upgrade and The Power of Simplicity
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Facebook to launch its own podcast platform next week
Amazon Appstore copies Apple’s Small Business Program – with a twist
Microsofts new Office UI now available for testers
Google Home gets redesigned Wi-Fi Devices tab w/ old Wifi app features [Update: iOS]
Best Collaboration Tools for Business
6 new features on Android this summer
The [Checklist] Method: How to Supercharge Your Life
How Kickstarter’s 4-Day Week Can Improve Work-Life Balance and Output
Clinging to an 8-hour workday? Research suggests 5 hours is better | The Seattle Times
Five Stages of Working With Accountability Partners
Penny Zenker, Priority and Decision-making Research (The Priority Report)
Penny Zenker is a focusologist, international speaker, business strategy coach and best-selling author.
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.
Featured Story of the Week
Google Drive for Desktop adds Google Photos upload and multi-account switching
New Google Drive for desktop app w/ Photos starts rolling out – 9to5Google
Other News
Home Working Is Here to Stay, Survey of U.K. Companies Shows – Bloomberg
Loom And Trello: Add Video To Asynchronous Work
New Day at Amazon as Bezos Officially Steps Down
Andy Jassy officially takes over as Amazon CEO from Jeff Bezos
Google Chat will now automatically suggest quick sync groups based on your Calendar
5 Most Effective Ways to Overcome Procrastination while Working from Home
A Wholesome Approach Against Procrastination
Chrome is taking steps to untangle your sacred bookmarks from the Reading list
The 12 Best Deep Search Engines to Explore the Invisible Web
Onyx Boox Nova Air is going to be released soon
Iceland ran the world’s largest trial of a shorter work week. The results will (not) shock you.
Raw Text Transcript | Google Drive for Desktop Gets an Upgrade and The Power of Simplicity
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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 host for Anything But Idle. This is Episode 69, Google Drive for desktop gets an upgrade and the power of simplicity. We’re recording this on July 12 2021. Each week, we review and discuss the productivity and technology news headlines of the week. And so this week, we’re actually gonna be talking first about the power of simplicity. Before we get into our stories of the week, which are kind of two parts. In the first part, we talked about, you know, technology articles in the various productivity technology, you kind of headlines. And then in the second half, we talked about the various productivity articles that we found throughout the week. This week. We also have a segment from Penny’s anchor for the priority report, talking about priority and decision making research. We’ll do our new tools of the week. And then we will close out with our featured story this week, which is all about Google drive’s upgrades. And so with that, let’s start with our discussion on the power of simplicity. And the way in which I think about it is that simplicity is one of those things that looks, looks on its surface easy. But things that are simple and complex are very different than that, which is simple or easy and easy and different, easy to difficult, in essence, right? So we tend to kind of fluctuate between this concept of that simple is, say a few steps. And then something that has more steps becomes more complex, that could actually be quite easy. Even though it may be difficult to do something very simple. Like if you have a very difficult discussion you have to have with a spouse or with a family member, that can be very difficult from the perspective of it being emotionally charged. So simplicity is not necessarily easy. And and so that’s where I think about things when it comes to simplicity. And I really want to talk, I usually want to talk about simplicity from the perspective of how do we make things better by making them simpler. But so how do you think about simplicity in your own productivity world?
Augusto Pinaud 2:19
You know, I, I did not start my journey into productivity with simplicity in mind. Okay, that’s not, that’s not how productivity came to me. Simplicity came for me much later, but he’s not about having less steps. But it’s about understanding and having everything that I need. But not, not anything that I that is nice to know, one of the issues initially for me in simplicity in my life in general was I got a lot of things that yeah, it’s so problems it did thing, but that tend to be the maintenance and the upkeep of the things make my life more complicated than the benefit I was getting from that such tool or, or equipment or so one of the things I have learned now is to look at both parts. Okay, what is the benefit I may get? versus what is going to be there on Cape. So for example, when people ask me, well, you are right, but only, you know, but if you go to other devices, you can get so much more power is true. Okay, but also then give me the risk of wanting to play with customization. That then it’s a big, big rabbit hole for me. So that simplicity that the iPad brain, also keep that other side of the maintenance of the, you know, the iPad is super easy to maintain, I don’t need to think whatever the iPad supposed to do. It’s going to do it. Every time I play with other platforms. That simplicity sometimes gets trolled out thrown out.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:07
Yeah, so the way in which I see simplicity, I kind of touched on it earlier, which is that simplicity, for me is kind of the genius or the elegance of something. Simplicity is actually for me fairly difficult to achieve. Because you have to go through all the complexity of any particular situation. And I’m really thinking of, in this case, regarding workflows, but I really try to when I approach a scenario where workflow has to be designed, I think about how to make it the simplest, which usually means working through all of the potential pitfalls, and then solving for those so that when either I or other people are going to go do that thing. It becomes so much easier to do simplicity than begins to get ease of accomplishments. Because I’ve thought through all of the pieces to make sure that people can actually do the things that need to be done and Potentially automate or optimize the things, optimize away the things that don’t need to be done. And that really for me is where simplicity really comes from. But simplicity can be utilized in so many different ways. You can simplify your task lists, for example, just by saying, you know what, I’m not gonna do this work, because it’s not necessary. Right there. There are so many things in our life that we complexify, so to speak. No, it’s not over. But we create that level of complexity that’s just so unnecessary.
Augusto Pinaud 5:31
Yeah, I’m really good at that, that I didn’t do the extra complex No, really, it is something that has taken me years to, to understand and and even ask myself, I’m making this process more complex. I’m doing this more complex than what it meant to be. It’s really simple. And do you really we assume that No, no, we we think about it is going to be simple. Not necessarily I there is people like me, who will look into tend to overcomplicate it, putting unnecessary steps are things that you can do much faster. So if you are on that group, it is important to be aware that Yeah, I will tend to overcomplicate things. I will. It took me years, again, I had gadgets galore. Okay, why? Because I have the gadget who can do the thing. Great, except that now, that gadget require other set of maintenance. So do I was making my life simpler? No, I was complicated. My life was some of those things.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:40
Yeah. And I also tend to think about simplicity in the, in the sense of, when we, when we look at all the various things that could be done or should be done, or would be done, those things all need to be looked at through some lens. And that might be you know, in the planning phase, for me, I tend to create greater complexity on the planning side than I do in the action steps, and certainly in the reflection phase of any part of my world. So I need to know that I need to simplify the number of steps I do during planning. Whereas I’m not particularly concerned about that, when it comes to action or reflection, I’m, I’m pretty good at doing a simple debriefing. I’m pretty good at implementing in a in as simple a manner as possible. And so those kinds of of, of protocols are easy for me, but difficult in planning. And so you should know that about yourself so that you’re able to actually start to figure out, Hey, can I simplify this planning process? Or can I simplify this workflow in the action phase, and that really helps you overall in becoming more productive over time. So with that, I think that really covers what I want to talk about in terms of simplicity. Was there anything else gousto. Otherwise, let’s get into our technology headlines as we know,
Augusto Pinaud 7:59
let’s begin with our technology headlines.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:02
All right, let’s, what’s our first headline this week?
Augusto Pinaud 8:05
So Facebook is going to lounge their own podcast platform, and it’s getting there. It’s not it wasn’t out today, as of today, as a moment, we’re recording this show even that’s supposed to it’s going to be out by then. But it is coming. But there is a couple of things that are interesting that people who are reading all the terms of services, you know that that thing that you most people don’t read on click accept? Or say I do I read them. Yes, I know you do. I’m and that’s recent. When these things come, you are the first one I asked you, where are we in this, but apparently Facebook put on there that the company will have the rights to make derivative works from the content that you upload in there. So that’s
Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:51
what again, so people should recognize this. You have agreed to that Terms of Service for everything that you posted on Facebook ever. You know, your your profile photographs, you know how they do those ads, and they have pictures of people? Yeah, that’s because of your terms of service. They pulled them from real people. You know, they they have basically said anything you post on Facebook then can use for promotional purposes and other derivative works. And I’m and I’m pretty sure that the podcast fits right? Well within that space. They also talked about this notion of creating clips, so that you’re able to, you know, source, smaller portions. I talked about this in the past on my other podcast about the notion of YouTube, YouTube doing this, YouTube now has a feature called clips. They’re not actually separate videos, they’re just time signatures that show up in their own playlist that allow you to do this. I think Facebook is doing something very similar to that where you’re capable of of sourcing these pieces. I don’t know if they’re going to be separate files. That’ll be interesting to see whether or not they’ll be separate files are whether they’re actually going to just basically play that portion of the audio on the platform. This will not be a replication of your podcast, you are going to be sourcing from your podcast feed so that people can actually listen Do it there. So if you spend time on Facebook, say if you’re a workplace, workplace by Facebook user, hopefully this comes to that, that in that interface as well. And that becomes more productive for you. Because you’re you’re in that space. But otherwise, you know, I don’t listen to podcasts on Facebook, and I probably won’t ever.
Augusto Pinaud 10:15
So. Yeah, I probably will not, will not listen to, to podcast on Facebook. But But again, it is there it is, you know, depending on what your business is, if your marketing strategy includes Facebook, and you have a podcast, understanding what you’re doing their and all this, it’s going to be good for people.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:41
All right, on to our next story.
Augusto Pinaud 10:43
I’m assuming store. Yeah, it’s working into the Small Business program, you know, Apple reduce for small developers 1 million, I’m below their percentage to 15% Google follow suit with that. And now Amazon is came in, not the 15. But the 20%. But he’s saying that you can get AWS credits, up to 10%. So that will technically make it that your Amazon store thing, it’s really 10% was the credits you will get if you use their own servers. So it’s been out of this. But it’s interesting nonetheless.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:23
Yeah, they want to, they want to encourage people to use AWS and this is a way to pull from some folks from Azure from Google Cloud, in you know, in that way. So
Augusto Pinaud 11:34
I need to be an interesting because, at least for for what I’m see, you know, on on the day to day work, there is more and more companies that were looking to Google, and we’re using AWS now pull into Azure. So it’s getting interesting how much Paul, Microsoft and I want to mention Microsoft has been getting out of assure.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:57
All right, onward to our next story this week,
Augusto Pinaud 12:00
Microsoft’s new office UI, it’s now available for testers, and it looks clean the images, at least I did not download it. But it looks clean, it looks round, it looks it actually looks pretty, I’m going to say
Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:21
yeah, so they announced a wide sweeping set of changes to the office product. And they are just putting in those first refinements, I would call them you know, a little bit rounding of the of the areas, the ribbon is still there, the ribbon will go away and will become kind of a command center, so to speak, that can float and be moved about. And so those who want to see the new version, the new changes that are coming now, but you know, most likely with the release of Windows 11, you can go and join the office insider group. And that will give you access to those betas by turning on the beta channel. But you know, for the for the most part, I’m happy to look at it I’m have no interest in testing these things beforehand. I just I don’t think that it’s necessary. So we’ll see what happens. But
Augusto Pinaud 13:09
yeah, I’m on the same boat, I’m happy I see the images I have even is a sale, you can download it and play with it. I have 00 interest into into this. But our next story, Google Home gets ready, set ready sign Wi Fi device stub. And they have been making you know, a bunch of changes to when this article was pulled out initially, you know, they were not good. Not all the changes were rollout by July 5, the rest of the changes now were active on the app. So they were showing really everything so but it’s really interesting. Again, if you have the Google Home, then at least in the iOS now looks completely different.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 13:53
Right? So this comes into play because Google, the Google Wi Fi app was deprecated. And they have now put all of the Wi Fi components finally into Google Home. So when you click on Wi Fi, you can see your Google Wi Fi devices. And you can manage them completely now that you couldn’t before, including I know in the article, it noted that the test device speed function was yet not available, but it is across all of my devices. So I am able to go in, you click on how you know the number of devices you have. And then you click on your device. And then from the drop down menu, you can actually check your device speed. So it looks like all of the features are now available.
Augusto Pinaud 14:32
Yeah, I think what happened was the I but the application came out and not.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:39
Oh, looks like we lost it. He’ll be back shortly but we’ll continue on with our stories this week. Next up in the lineup is an article on medium. This is from the echo chat folks. And they were talking about the best collaboration tools for business and they listed five of them of course one of them being their own app. The echo messaging app for teams. But they listed a couple of good apps that I think you know, we all know about and have used for a long time, or at least know exists. So they talked about Asana, zoom, Google Docs, Slack, and then echo. What I thought was actually really interesting is that below that article had another article about voice messaging apps. And I thought this was really interesting, because while of course, Echo was one of those apps that they listed, the other apps that they actually talked about, were kind of, you know, in the same kind of genre of, of, you know, Skype, and blah, blah, blah. But then I kept thinking there are actually a whole series of applications like this, from voxer, to other apps in that ecosystem that allow you to have one if you want to call it like asynchronous meetings, in a way. But basically, they allow you to go in and have conversations with other folks in in this way. So so they listed Vox voxer, Marco Polo, I’m not particularly come back to because this point earlier, I’m not particularly a fan of the voxer Terms of Service. So I actually have never installed voxer, a colleague of mine asked me to use voxer. And I basically said no, because I was not particularly pleased with the terms of service and the way in which they handled privacy and data, data security. So just be mindful of that I’ve not played with Marco Polo. But I know people who have, there are all of these kinds of apps that allow you to interact and engage in that way. And know that also telegram, for example, you could use telegram in that same way. The the goal, though, is to say, Hey, gousto, you and I are going to have a meeting asynchronously about topic x? Well, what we’re going to do is over the next three days, everybody who’s going to be in the meeting, is going to go through the agenda and say their piece about each of those agenda items, you record your audio, and then they record back. And so you get this chain of of conversation that’s happening asynchronously. And then there’s a cut off point, right, like 5pm, Eastern Daylight Saving Time on Friday, the meeting basically closes, and then all the decisions that are made are then in that space. I think that could be really useful. I haven’t tried it yet. But I feel like that could be a really useful form of asynchronous meeting, where you have these agendas that are designed around, whether it’s audio and chat or text, it doesn’t matter audio or video, chat, and and text, I think those things can be bundled together. But you don’t have to set a meeting for some concentrated period of time, I think there can be some really interesting things there. Let’s go on to our last story in the technology listing of gousto. For Android, what is going on there? Sorry,
Augusto Pinaud 17:46
we haven’t you need to read it because you need to read it because my technology crashing here.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:51
No worries, no worries. So so so so that everybody’s aware, Android has brought a number of new features to the system. So I O and I each actually even prior to that, Google had been announcing several new features to be launching on the Android platform. And now they’re just announcing that some of these things have come about some of them are really, really useful. So what first and foremost, they have the Android earthquake alert system is now rolled out globally, or should be rolled out globally. Bye, bye now. And in essence, you will get a notification when systems when the Android of Android earthquake alerts system recognizes that there is an earthquake coming. And so it’s it’s just going to basically notification just the same way you get a notification when there is thunderstorm alert or an amber alert or, you know those kinds of alerts that happen on your system, just basically going to do that Google messages got the ability for you to star messages. So say you frequently communicate with you know, your your friend, family member, spouse partner, and in it, they shared some piece of information that was really important, you can now star that information. And then it basically tags it with that star so that you can find it later for similar to Gmail, where you can star things and then find it at for later purpose. They talked about finding more emoji within the emoji kitchen. That’s that secondary bar that when you pull up your emojis in G board, which is the keyboard application, both for iOS and Android, when you pull up that Google focused keyboard keyboard, you now have called the emoji kitchen banner that are the bigger emojis which are stickers that you can push into your chat. So really nice that it is faster and more rich. They then talked about the Google Assistant getting more shortcuts. And so you can ask, Hey, big g shortcuts, and it will then go ahead and tell you what you can do now you can actually have deeper richer experiences within some of your applications by voice. They talked about improve password input and gaze detection on voice access for those with you know, motor disabilities. And finally, the customization with Android Auto is now here. And I actually experienced this yesterday, while driving, you open up the the Google Maps application. And right below your Google Maps, you now see what the active secondary application is that’s being utilized with a microphone, you click the microphone. And then you can say, hey, big G, you know, do X or Y, and it goes ahead and starts the process for you playing music, you know, sending messages, playing podcasts, all of those things are there in that kind of lower tray seems to take up a bit of space, so wasn’t particularly glad about that. But you can actually click the little tray and it’ll drop down and take up less space at the bottom. So nice new set of features that Google has provided to us with this Android update, and so all good there. And with that, we have reached the end of our first half of news, we’re going to hear a word from our sponsor, co working space by personal productivity club. And when we get back we will continue with our productivity articles. Our story of the week, our new tools of the week, and our segment, priority report, see after the break. Well, working in person may be normal for you. It’s unlikely your co workers are as interested in being productive as you are, or working remotely or from home can be isolating, and there’s something powerful about being with productive people, even virtually that helps you be more engaged. If a flavor of these sounds familiar, co working space by personal productivity club is for you. co working space is a virtual work community designed to help members be more effective and efficient in their work and personal lives. At its core. We provide goal tracking and host focused action sessions throughout the week for accountability and camaraderie, visit Anything But Idle comm forward slash co working to learn more CO working space lives inside personal productivity club, a digital community for personal productivity enthusiasts. So you can find people who use methods and tools you do to, again, head over to Anything But Idle comm forward slash co working to see how co working space can help you be more productive. And now back to our show. Welcome back, everybody to Anything But Idle. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith joined with Augusto Pinaud for our second half of Anything But Idle. And so Augusto, what is our first productivity article in the lineup?
Augusto Pinaud 22:36
So the first article is from two minute madness. And it’s called the checklist method, how to supercharge your life and the article talk about well, how to use acronyms and really to make your brain remembering what are the things you need to do. So what they talk about is the example they give a basketball acronym they give an example is Michael Jordan, and he talked to beef. So the and but how you can use this acronym as checklist for your routines. And in my experience, the acronyms may not work but the checklist, it works incredibly well for me. So I know, when I wake up, what are the 10 things that are going to happen and they tend to happen mostly on that order Monday to Sunday. And that give me a lot of bandwidth. You know, my shirts tend to match pants doesn’t matter the shirt I pick, you know, but it’s part of the process is part of trying to make sure that you are not making every time a new decision that you can think about them ahead of time. And you can just execute the plan as they happen. This checklist system, what is just going to give you a way to remember them easy using this I purism.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:04
Yeah, so I actually have never actually seen of all after all this time. This is the first time I’m actually seeing like, I’m very used to mnemonics I’ve heard you know, the use of phonics and the use of acronyms in all kinds of other ways for more productive output. But this is the first time I actually saw someone say, Well, why don’t you create a routine and then create an acronym for that routine, and then utilize the acronym for remembering the routine. That was kind of the genius in the simplicity, Allah Our topic today, but I thought was actually really novel here. And so if you want to do a series of things, and you want to be able to remember that series of things on on call, being able to do them, you know, on demand. I think that’s a really interesting way to do it. And so I just use a digital tool to externalize that for me. I don’t really think about it staying in my head. But if you are in a place like you know you want to be able to remember survival techniques where you want to be able to do things that are really important. And you’re not going to be able to depend upon your technology always, that’s a really good way to think about it. So, okay, on to our next article.
Augusto Pinaud 25:14
Some article then talks about the paradox of motivation. And it’s bringing in flow the research by Hi, thank you very much. And someday I will be able to pronounce his name or on one of the things that he’s talking about is the motivation when you do work versus due to leisure and why this motivation seems to be different. And the answer he gives is, well, at work, you get into flow, that at leisure, you don’t, I didn’t know if I necessarily agree on that, or maybe that my leisure, it’s really close to what to do for work. But
Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:55
yeah, I think you’re an outlier. And, and I think that’s actually that’s the case, right? Most of us, most of us who are in the productivity space, are people who are inclined toward action. And people who spend their leisure time vegetating right turning off, they end up being less happy, they actually end up being, you know, feeling mundane, and like things aren’t really organized. And and, and that’s actually competing with them. So they actually get higher success and, and feelings of fulfillment at work, except that they feel only motivated to go to work for the paycheck, and then they come home. And they actually don’t feel that same level of organization in order structure to their world. And so it ends up being that they just like loaf, and the only times they actually do the things that they need to do, or when they do laundry, go grocery shopping, and so on so forth, those are done in sporadic fashion. And of course, that doesn’t provide the level of order and structure for them to be able to enjoy themselves. And so the article author talks about the idea that if you provide just a little bit of structure, right, having hobbies, having having a schedule for your weekend, just like you have a schedule for your week, all of these things actually beget greater fulfillment in your personal and leisure time. And, you know, it’s it’s really sad in my perspective, because we have an have had, at least in the United States, a strong long term push toward liberal arts, education, and, and, and liberalism. Right, free living has been the end, you’ve heard me talk about this before, I know. But it’s just it’s makes so much sense to understand this on a fundamental level, we’ve been pushed to understand what it’s like to live a free life, a liberal life. And yet, we go through these liberal education processes, liberal arts education process, and we don’t learn productivity, we don’t learn to actually utilize that time to actually feel fulfilled. And and so it makes me sad for people who do that they get home from work, and they don’t actually engage in what I call rejuvenative activities, those activities that actually are structured, and actually do do something that expends energy, but ultimately makes you feel better makes you actually happier in life. If we want to use such a broad term, I’d like to say contented or fulfilled much more, you know, structured terms for those things. But I just really feel like we need to think about that. And this article really pointed that out for me, and I enjoy it for that reason, alright, on from the paradox of motivation to the four day workweek.
Augusto Pinaud 28:22
But Kickstarter is motivating his people to work four days a week, and I think that’s brilliant, actually, that that we are finally, you know, for many years, we have said, we got all these benefits from technology just work more. And now we’re finally catching up to the point, okay, maybe we can go into this for word for word for the week, and work for days that we can be more effective and keep the effectiveness and, and it is really interesting to see companies is starting to embrace that. And hopefully, that will bring change for
Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:59
all cognitive countries. I mean, Spain, Spain, went out there and tested a four day workweek and saw productivity increases, Microsoft, Japan, did a four day workweek and saw a 40% increase, I think it was something like that. It’s a huge jump in productivity output. We’ve seen Unilever do it. We’ve seen a number of other companies buffer, the social media scheduling dashboard tool. We’ve seen a lot of companies try this. And of course, we know that we are capable of doing so much more in less time than we currently do. wages have been stagnating in, especially in this country. But globally, we’ve seen wage stagnation. And why not give back again, going back to this, like, you know, the the, the supposed benefits of liberalism, give people back their time, and there’ll be happier and therefore there’ll be more productive. So if we actually do this, it’s not that people are going to do nothing with that free time. It’s their choice, right? That’s a concept of free society. But you would hope that they would actually do things that are interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, where they would actually have hobbies, they would have extracurricular activities, and those ideas that they spur and have, you know, you go rock climbing, and you’re like, Hey, you know what, I work for this industrial manufacturing company. And when I’m rock climbing, we do this with these carabiners in this particular way. I wonder if we actually did those with our machines, whether that would actually innovate in our, in our factories, and voila, what someone was doing in their free time, ultimately begets millions of potentially billions of dollars of innovation in their work time, we forget the value of being able to give people free time. And I think that, you know, the invention of the eight hour day, and the five day workweek, was, you know, revolutionary, or if not evolutionary, at its least, now, we are at that place where we can go to a four day workweek not even diminished productivity, and probably increase it across the board. And that leads us, of course, then to the reduction of the eight hour work day. And that brings us to our next article, Augusto.
Augusto Pinaud 31:05
So the next article is exactly that is Seattle Times talking about cleaning into the eight hour work day where research suggests that five hours better and say was written the article was really interesting, because my day is longer than eight hours, and it’s fine. But, but my day also was designed to spend time with my kids on the afternoon. So when I look at that five hour, really, it is a big log block, probably four to five hours, then it has a massive chunk of relax, and then you go to another big chunk of three or four hours. And that works really well for me when I was this pandemic that, you know, diverse carriers have that has coming closer and closer and closer. Also, productivity has come in decline, because I don’t have as you were saying that time of decompress of disconnect or do Marine, we’re playing with the kids on this thing. So the article was on, you know, as I was looking at my calendar and the current projects, I need to mark on get this off again, and walk away from the office and get back again, to split in my day into big chunks of less than eight hours.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:28
I think there are lots of opportunities for companies to test different levels of time, I know that some people talk about a six hour workday, many folks are advocating for different splitting of time, in terms of the of the work day, if we have more hours in some days, then we can take off hours on other days. It’s kind of like the way in which I’ve seen several governments do it, which kind of misses the point, right? If you make people work 10 hour days, four days out of the week, then then they think that they can get rid of that fifth day, because they still work the same number of hours. But in reality, we’re really not increasing productivity. There is a form of of us stress, positive stress, which is time pressure that can happen for folks if they concentrate their work in these periods of time. And so we not just, we not just get the same amount done, we actually get more done when we were putting putting ourselves in this period of time. And there’s always going to be positions and people who work beyond those hours. And so that’s fine. But the reality is, is that for the vast majority of people, they spend a lot of wasted time you get in the office in the morning, there’s coffee clutching water cooler talk, there’s all of this personal personalizing and personal time that gets kicked into the workday just to make the day filled. And, and even with economic downturns, where those tend to actually go away. And in the case of the pandemic, all of that went out the window. And people just started working more and more hours because they were, you know, working from the same place that they were living, and that became unhealthy. So we need to be able to kind of do a couple of those things, and really work hard to create greater and better productivity, that’s healthy for humans, we are still human, we are not machines, we are humans. And humans are actually productive in counter intuitive ways. And so we need to be able to utilize our creative and innovative capacities. And that is not a checking the boxes of time. That is giving and setting people up fundamentally for success. And success doesn’t mean but in chair time. And so we need to keep getting ourselves around that that we should be worried about impact on output versus time in chair. So out of the way on to our next
Augusto Pinaud 34:48
story. Our next story is from Friday dot app and his 10 tried and tested tips for a super productive way and it was a good reminder for Sir productive week, it was a good reminder, you cannot focus on a single class. Yeah. If you are still multitasking, there are problems. Okay, there are things you can do. You can do music, and but most of the multitasking is programmatic, you know, optimize how you work and learning to say no, and I have write about that, you know, multiple times, begin your day with movement, what are you going to do? What are your set of smaller goals, so it was a really complete list, you know, complete better than perfect. So as I said, with writing publish better than perfect,
Raymond Sidney-Smith 35:35
I’ll just point out one little point here with beginning with movement, I have now started my workday, in the standing desk position for my desk. And I have to admit, I am way more productive by starting my day standing than when I start my day sitting. And just that one modification has all of these downstream effects that have been really, really positive. So starting with movement doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to go walk or run or do exercise, there is just the point of me standing has a different effect on my overall productivity throughout the day. So that which has been really powerful. Anyway,
Augusto Pinaud 36:11
for me, for me, it was an It was a change, I every 30 minutes, the watch will vibrate or sound, I have charities on the show, and then I stand up and stretch, that’s all that I do, it takes two minutes or less, and I just go stand up. And that has bring benefit from eliminate the back pain from energy for so many benefits, having that consistent movement. So block distractions, you know, automate repetitive task, create a list of what you are going to do in the work day, and take frequent short breaks. And I will say to that list and the work, they make them as short as you possibly can. One of the common mistakes I seen is this long list, and then you at the end of the day, Mark three, five things and feel, you see I make no progress, I still have 100 things when instead when you mark two, and you get them done and you want another one, you are always getting that feeling of success that is going to allow you to get to the next task.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:16
Absolutely onward.
Augusto Pinaud 37:20
The last one, and I thought this article was relevant to our sponsor, co working space is a five stages of working with accountability partners. And what are the benefits of that, you know, if you are hearing the show, and you don’t know what it is personal productivity club has the CO working space, you can go there, people will go into the camera and work. Okay, there is no much that put the goal in the chat what you’re trying to accomplish. And everybody’s there working doing their business, but that it is really incredible. The levels of motivation that you get out of that simple sharing screen there with everybody.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:06
Absolutely, I think that there are all kinds of ways in which we can establish accountability. And if anybody has heard me talk before, I think about accountability in terms of four level levels, one to one group or both. That is it starts off with self accountability, you can be accountable to yourself, which is kind of 01 is one to one accountability, then we go to group accountability, and then public accountability, where we make statements that we’re going to do things in public forums like Twitter or Facebook, to everybody that we know, these levels of accountability on the group accountability level that you’re talking about in terms of CO working space is a structured program. But you can also create accountability partners, just one to one with family and friends about all kinds of things. gym buddy is a form of accountability partner, having someone who is going to help you with your nutrition, having a nutritionist or registered registered dietician who works with you to create a meal plan. That is a form of accountability. It’s a paid professional relationship, but it’s an accountability partner. And so with all kinds of ways in which we establish accountability, and it works, we know it works. And so we should always embrace accountability, where it’s possible. And think of it from the productive outputs. This person who’s writing the article talked about some of the travails that come into play, when you do establish an accountability partnership. And what we all need to do is to say, Okay, how do we partner with ourselves? First, that zero right? Before we get to one, we need to think zero? How do we keep ourselves accountable and really work to do that? How do we also then in a one to one relationship, whether that be a collegial, friendly accountability program, or a paid relationship with a coach or a trainer or somebody else like that, and then in a group accountability space, like co working space, where you have many people are joining, you’re in essence really being accountable to yourself, but only through the vehicle of having other people see you do that work, which is a weird psychological structure, but it works and it’s really awesome. Fascinating. And then of course, I always say, you know, public accountability is great in small bits, it really doesn’t provide you with a lot of great benefit in the long term. Because if you say, Hey, I’m gonna go, you know, run a marathon. And that’s great, you can go do that, and maybe you will. But if you don’t, there’s actually high risk, and you feel that failure that much more strongly. And that will sometimes compete with your ability to then feel a sense of efficacy, self efficacy in the future. So use public accountability very, very sparsely, studiously for those purposes. All righty, that takes us through our stories this week, at least our main stories this week. And that brings us of course, along to our segment this week, which is by Penny zenker. She’s a focus ologists International speaker, a business strategy coach and best selling author, and she’s in our teams have special segments inside of Anything But Idle. And her segment is called priority report. And here today, she’s gonna be talking to us about the sunk cost. And so with that, take it away, Penny.
Penny Zenker 41:09
Welcome to today’s priority report. My name is Penny’s anchor. And today, I want to talk about the sunk cost effect, and how it can be sabotaging your decision making. So the way that you can get more effective in your decision making is to be aware of the sunk cost effect. So what is a sunk cost? First of all, well, a sunk cost is any time money, energy and investment that was made in the past, that’s no longer recoverable. That’s a sunk cost. And the sunk cost effect is the bias that that investment in the past is creating, so that we actually continue to invest past the point that it provides a cost benefit. Because when our emotions go up, our intellect goes down. And so we have this emotional connection that tells us, but look, we’ve spent so much time money and energy on this already, we should keep going. So I want you to be aware of what the sunk cost is, and what’s the criteria that you’re defining for success from this point forward. So if you have a new product that you’re bringing to market, this was the case for me I was in software development, we would develop a beta, we would have it tested. And based on the feedback that we got, we would need to determine whether this product would be continued to be invested in and brought to market. If we took into account the sunk cost and allowed that to influence our decision, then we might make poor decisions and invest in areas that were not good decisions to make for our future because we were taking that into account. So we would have to shut that down and say, Okay, this is already being invested. And we can get other benefits from it. But the decision making about bringing this to market, we had to look at the economic factors, we had to look at, you know, what the users were telling us in terms of usability, and and also in terms of the need of the marketplace, and so forth. So you want to determine what are the success factors and make sure that you are not coming victim to that sunk cost effect. My name is Penny’s anchor. And that’s today’s priority report.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 43:32
All right, thank you, Penny zenker. From Penny zinkerz. She put her URL on the screen, but I’ll put that in the show notes for everybody. So that you have that. But it’s Penny’s keynote calm. And so you go, you guys can go check her out there. And so onward with our new tools this week. So each week, a gousto. And I come across many personal productivity tools and services. And in our you know, scouring the web for productivity and technology, news articles, and so and so forth. So in new tools of the week, we try to bring new tools that we think you might like. And so this week, we have two tools. And I will start off actually with three tools because I’m going to cheat and talk about two. But our The first tool is a tool called reclaim.ai. This is the actually the one that I’ve been testing out myself. And so reclaim is a start time blocking calendaring tool. And it allows you to take your work and represent them in the calendar and then populate your calendar in these time blocks, but they’re coming from your existing task lists, so that you’re not actually keeping them in in more than one place. In essence, you’re not replicating them in that sense. So this integrates with Google Calendar. And so you’re capable of going ahead and doing this but it does a whole bunch of things. You can synchronize your calendars so that you can have you know catch up time and put all kinds of things into the calendar. You can do Meeting buffer time, you can see stats you can integrate with slack and all kinds of other fun things. I’ve, I’ve actually enjoyed the concept of it, it’s got a learning curve is it’s a little bit of a high learning curve, and from my perspective, kind of getting into it, and, and so for me, I know how these tools work. But I think for the the average person just jumping into it, there is a bit of a learning curve. So just be mindful of that. And, but otherwise, it’s actually really, really interesting to watch yourself start to, quote, unquote, reclaim time here and identify focus time for yourself in all of the work that you need to get done throughout the week. So something that certainly consider it’s currently a free tool, you can use it for free through 2021, to kind of see and test it out. And then of course, they have one of their competitors. There are many others in this market, but clockwise, is the other one. And one of the links in the show notes will be a comparison between these two done by reclaime. So understand that it’s bias because it was written by one of the tools, you know, you know, writers, but the idea here is that clockwise does something very similar, but it actually looks at it from a little bit different of a paradigm, looking for what they call focus time and trying to establish focus time for you. I will note that both of these tools are Google Chrome, I’m sorry, Google Calendar focused. So they connect to Google Calendar. And I don’t believe either currently connects to Microsoft 365, or Apple or anything else like that. So both of these work with Google, personal as well, Google consumer workplace accounts, and Google business workplace accounts. So if you were using Google workspace for consumers or Google workspace for, for business, you’ll be able to connect your calendars from that system, and it’ll work just fine. But you know, they’re obviously all going to be working on bringing greater, you know, integration or integration, just add its baseline from the Microsoft 365 space. Because, you know, Google calendar is the dominant, but then we have Microsoft 365, and others that are in the marketplace as well. Alright, good. So what’s your tool this week?
Augusto Pinaud 47:02
Rice, f e File Explorer, and they have a paid version and a free version. And there is a comparison but allows you organize the files allows you to connect, you know, I get sometimes people who think sync to Dropbox, and then they need to go to Google Drive or they need to go to iCloud or they need to go to an NA s on the server, okay, or a directory and with the iPad, I’m I live on the iPad, I get it. If you’re in a PC, you’re on a Mac, it’s there’s ways to do this, if you’re on an iPhone, you are an iPad, it’s a little bit more challenging. So this allows me to transfer to copy to save, save the drives is saved to disk. Even though there is somebody in here who have that I can transfer files, I can edit documents, I can play music in their videos if I want to. It is a really it is the application that I wish the files app from Apple will do. And it allows you to really copy from one place to the other really make for this network and data and transfer from services from Dropbox to iCloud to Google to even a pen drive. Really something really, really simple. And they are iOS, they are on the Google Play. They are on the Mac store. So it is a really fantastic application.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 48:33
Fantastic. Alright, so that brings us along to today’s story of the week. So our feature story this week is that Google Drive for desktop has gotten some upgrades. What are some of those upgrades a Cousteau.
Augusto Pinaud 48:46
So Google Drive finally will allows you to do multi account switching. That is interesting when they when we talk about the article. I used the Mac so little that I don’t think about the things and on the iPad, you can do them relatively easy. So I when it came out, I read that as similar to you see, what do you mean? So I pulled him back out of the out of the bag, looking I say, Oh, yeah, that’s updated. Right away, you will also be able to do pictures. But I store your files. So you will now be able to work much better on the on the iPad. on the iPad. Sorry, on Google Drive.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 49:31
Yeah, so Google Drive for desktop just so folks are clear on this Google Drive for desktop. You have the backup and sync from Google application, that Google Drive for desktop application, pretty much is the same thing. And now you can check a box it’ll add a feature which is allowing you to upload photos to Google Photos to the platform. So now you have the seamless synchronization up to the platform. And it gives you the ability you could have multiple accounts, but you really couldn’t get between the accounts very easily. Now you can actually switch between those accounts seamlessly. And that’s obviously just good all around. I think that what we’re seeing here is that all of the various platforms are starting to just kind of have the same features. We’re currently, you know, you talk about this, you know, with Art Gelwicks, you know, in the sense of, you know, most of the platform’s having pretty strong feature parity in terms of the the strongest core features. And now we’re seeing this really extend beyond that, and bringing those features from Cloud services to the desktop. And I think it makes a lot of sense, both desktop and mobile, I think we should really across the board have these kinds of strong features. And and since Google, I mean, we used to have a Google Photos app. I mean, I don’t know if everybody remembers, we had a Google Photos app. And you can install that Google Photos app. And in those early days, and Picasa, it was Picasa. And then you know, after that, but, you know, with Picasa, you have this really rich photo management technology that you could utilize, they got rid of that in deference to, you know, kind of bundling Picasa into Google Photos proper. We’ve gone through all of these machinations. And now we’re just like, kind of full circle backward, going back to getting some of those features, not all of them. And I hope that over time, you know, because Google saw the advent of mobile becoming the primary place where photos were going to be edited, so to speak, I think they probably gave up on the idea of desktop, photo editing, and to a great extent, but photo management is still really important on the desktop. And so I’m hopeful that they will continue this step forward in bringing more Google Photos, technologies to it, especially now that they have bundled, you know, they got rid of the free Google Photos component, right. So now, except if you’re still utilizing one of the supported pixel line of phones, but that means that they now have revenues that support the ability for them to bring new features to Google Photos. And I think that’s a really important part here. Because I want Google Photos to do better I pay Google, both on my business side, and on my personal side, to manage my photos, I want them to do more for me. And so now that more people are paying, that means that they now have a pool of money to use to iterate in the sense. And so I hope that they get kind of Google, I’m sorry, apple, iCloud, Apple photos, type services and capabilities, and go beyond that even I want a full fledged application that I can utilize. I want to do those kinds of things with Google Photos. And now they actually have the underlying revenue to be able to drive that. Any final thoughts about our story this week? Yeah,
Augusto Pinaud 52:32
I think it’s exciting that they are finally coming to index. Again, I’m not an expert guy. But I. The difference between Google Drive and Dropbox is abysmal on the desktop, when I pulled them back, the difference between those two is abysmal. So I’m hoping that this release will bring them a lot closer.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 52:55
Absolutely. And with that, gousto we have covered the productivity and technology news of the week,
Augusto Pinaud 53:03
we have survived with a beautiful background backdrop that I have, this is a picture of people.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 53:11
Well, you did the show mobily. And it and it worked just fine. We had minor hiccups. So I think it all worked out. Well. Thank you so much for putting together the show each week.
Augusto Pinaud 53:20
Always, always My pleasure.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 53:22
All right, gentlemen. All right audience, we are done with the show. But if we missed a story, feel free to head over to our contact page at Anything But Idle Comm. You can tweet or DMS also on Twitter at Anything But Idle. So if we missed something, you can go ahead and let us know about that. But just so that you’re aware, we do have in our show notes on Anything But idle.com forward slash 069, which is the episode number. So you can find all of our episodes by going to the episode number. So Anything But Idle comm forward slash 069. That will take you to our show notes that actually includes links to not only the stories we covered, but stories we couldn’t cover, we have an extra and Other Stories section in the show notes. So check out those other stories. They’re just the ones that we couldn’t cover in the show’s timeframe. But that also includes links to our new tools of the week. It includes a link to the priority report with pennies anchor. So we have that information in there if you want to find penny. And we also have the transcripts. So we have transcripts in both a readable format, just click on the Read More link and we’ll expand it and you’ll be able to read you can also click on the download link below that and click on that link. It’ll download a PDF version for you to be able to download and take offline as well. If this is your first time watching the live stream, feel free to subscribe so that you’ll get notified when we go live weekly. If you’re listening to the podcast after the fact Feel free to follow the podcast or subscribe to the podcast as it’s called, go to Anything But idle.com if you need instructions for that, click on the follow subscribe link that’s at the top of the screen and you’ll get instructions on how to follow or download new episodes when they come out each week. And so it’s If you’ve enjoyed our watching or listening feel free to give us a thumbs up on YouTube give us a rating and your favorite podcast app, whatever you’re doing those reviews and and and indications help us increase our personal productivity community. And so thank you for doing that. And with that, we’ll see you all next time on Anything But Idle. Here’s to your productive life.
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