Google turns on two-factor authentication

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Google turns on two-factor authentication and the Productivity News This Week

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In this Cast | Google turns on two-factor authentication

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

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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. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:13

And I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:15

And we’re hosts for Anything But Idle. This is Episode 85 or October 18 2021. Google turns on two factor authentication for almost everyone. Each week we review and discuss the productivity and technology news headlines of the week. With that, let’s get into our technology headlines. I’m sorry, our productivity articles first, Augusta, what’s our first productivity article this week?

Augusto Pinaud 0:38

The first article is from Ramit Sethi and is my morning routine isn’t guru approved. And that makes perfect sense for me. And he said he mentioned his rules for the morning. I know you don’t need to meditate to be successful. You don’t need to journal you don’t need to do yoga, it’s okay to check Instagram, it’s on she’s not on your calendar. It’s okay that if it’s not on your calendar do not exist decide what is what he called the rich life. And that should include your morning routine. And the reason we brought this article was because you hear so much on you will hear today on the next article about 10 things to tweak your morning routine. And I’m always aware when we discuss this because it is important to know what are those things, but also is really important to know what works for you. I have share in this podcast before I don’t check email on my phone. I don’t have it. But that doesn’t mean that is the way to be productive. That is the way that for me productivity works. That is a way that email works effectively for me. So I thought it was an important article or article because of that. Yeah,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:58

he ends with three I think important questions he says three questions to ask yourself when designing your morning routine. Number one, what would your perfect morning look like? Number two, what are all the reasons this will never work? And then number three, what are all the reasons you could make this work. And I think those are three questions to address. And it helps you to build a morning routine that fits your quote unquote perfect morning, I would I would satisfice to good enough morning, then perfect morning. But you know, you can like I have an ideal daily routine. And I know it as being ideal because I know that it’s not going to everyday happen. The goal is to have the routine that is good enough for me on the average. And so with that from from ignore all the advice about your ideal daily routine, or the perfect morning advice to an article about 10 tweaks to your morning routine that will transform your entire day. Yeah,

Augusto Pinaud 2:57

I get I get the irony of that. But that was a recent I wanted to put that one first and this one second. So if you can,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:04

I’ll start with I’ll start with this though this is from Dr. Travis Bradbury. And so he’s the chief people scientist at lead x. And he’s also the best selling author of emotional intelligence 2.0. And all of this is, from his perspective, research backed you know, so these are all scientific studies that he has been looking at. And so you know, this is this is fairly research underpinning why he’s making these 10 suggests

Augusto Pinaud 3:31

my computer crash, so you may need to read the three articles.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:35

Yeah, no worries. So So the idea here is he gives a 10 tweaks you can make, all of them are pretty good suggestions, I’m not going to go over them in totality here. Again, if you want to pair this with Ramit settees suggestions, then you get the opportunity to kind of say, okay, are these things that I want to incorporate into my morning routine, and then you can do so I thought it was just a really good kind of component there to think through, what are the things that you want in a morning routine. And again, I try to avoid the concept of, of like talking about habits so much, and really focusing on routine. And here these articles really do talk well about the idea of having a good routine, and how that actually focuses you on having a better life generally, because it’s those little moments that actually make things better. The next article is really a series of articles on the topic of the four day workweek. And there’s just been quite a bit of news around this. What brought it to my attention mostly was the fact that we keep Miss understanding the research out of Iceland, and so Iceland in 2015, decided to start doing some experimentation with the concept of the four day workweek. So a lot of people keep saying then, and you see this being discussed in a lot of the news media that all of a sudden, you know, the entire Your country went to a four day workweek. And they were more productive. And that is not quite what happened. Iceland has been experimenting with giving people different opportunities, depending upon their roles and their jobs, and so on so forth to have more flexibility with regard to their schedule, it has been a resounding success among the Icelandic people. And that’s great. But it’s not that everybody just all of a sudden, you know, turned on a switch and went to a four day workweek. So I think that the articles that they’re talking about here really do talk to the fact that a lot of these companies both in the US, and some that are in New Zealand, some are in Australia, you know, that they talked about three particular articles have all had measures of success in being able to go ahead and not only stabilize revenue, you know, keep stable revenue, but not certainly any declines in revenue and engagement at the office has either increased or stayed stable among all of the various companies that have been testing it. Of course, this requires experimentation. It’s not to say that a four day workweek is for everyone. But it certainly is important for us to take heart to the fact that this is being experimented with around the world right now. It’s a global experiment, we are all doing this remote work experiment as well. And so we have to kind of understand there are a lot of different factors going on all at the same time. And I think it’s important and incumbent upon us to actually try these things out. You know, Augusto and I have said this multiple times in past episodes, which is that those companies that have progressive policies, the ones that are thinking innovative policies that are thinking through how to keep their employees, and how to engage them, and then how to attract new employees in the recruitment side, these kinds of policies are the ones that are keeping them giving, giving workers flexibility, to be able to get the job done, and still keep the business doing well, I think is a win win. If there if there is ever one, right. And here we have the great resignation happening. And this is one option in the many other options that might be available to everybody in the course of of giving people basically a three day weekend. But I also think about it from the perspective, it doesn’t have to be necessarily a three day weekend, you could say for example, tell folks, you know, it will shorten Sundays, so that you’re able to, you know, work more days, but you basically have a few extra hours every day so that you can go do those things that you want to during the workweek, maybe you give off Wednesdays, or maybe you take off Tuesdays, whatever the slowest day in your week is take that one off, you know, or the slowest day for the company, you take that day off. And now everyone kind of gets around the idea that we’re actually working for efficiency and effectiveness as opposed to just showing up to have a button chair time perspective.

Augusto Pinaud 7:54

Oh, and here in the states for years, even before the pandemic, General Mills was famous for that, because they are in Minneapolis, where it gets cold soon, quick, and summers are short. And they had the policy that I think it was on Fridays, you work half day, the whole company work half day, so you can get during the summer month, that extra time to be outside to enjoy and everything else. And as the article said, I agree it’s you need to find ways to improve productivity more hours in the office are not going to improve that productivity. So there is important that we start finding ways to make this happen.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:39

Fantastic. And so with that we move along to make use of article about how to optimize your to do list more to be more efficient,

Augusto Pinaud 8:48

you know, I they talked about to do is when they talk about, hey, you can create a label, you know, email contact displayed your list and I have been arguing for years that you should have, even if you have them on the same system, a clear way to see what is your personal and what is the work so that way you create at some point that disconnection. Um, and the reason for that is you may not know what is on that list, or you may not want to recognize that you know what is on that list. But when you have them all and you open and now you see email, re do this, and you get all that guilt. And even if there is something on that list that you can do, and you can get done just that, all that negativity already killed the possibility. So having the list where you can come in sections and not see certain things, I believe make list way more effective.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 9:52

Yeah, the thing that really stood out for me in this article was the description of the Moscow method. I’m not sure if anybody you know, this was it. I heard of it in passing parlance. But this is the first time I’ve seen it really explained in clear terms. And what it is, is using the, the acronym I guess is is what you’re using here, Moscow and SC, W four must have, should have could have won’t have. And so you’re in essence, not just prioritizing your list, but also delineating what you, you know, must, should and could versus won’t have in terms of your work. And so this particular author, put it into a matrix, Allah, Eisenhower the Merrill covering matrix and put it into a really good perspective there. And I and this is the first time that I looked at it. And I thought, this could work in a matrix perspective, if you are trying to prioritize the things that must, should and could be done, as opposed to the things that are not going to be done. And so you can kind of throw them in the rubbish, because they’re potentially not urgent, not important, and you don’t want to do them. So I just I found that to be very useful in the article. And that takes us course on to this better humans article from Sarah curry about what happens when your to do list takes too much of your time. And she took a interesting spin on this.

Augusto Pinaud 11:20

So there are two things interesting about this, Sara is mentioned that she’s been using the bullet journal for the last five years, that is a product that we have talked in the show, we have talked to productivity cast, too, but I have never been able to get or use it in any effective way. And she said, I use it five under some moment, but it broke. And I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts that the reason it broke is the volume. It just was more than what bullet journal what good could do efficiently. But the second thing was, I found fascinating is to say I do automation for a living, I spent eight hours of my life, automating everything. And that’s the reason the bullet journal was such an attractiveness things. And I have seen this with clients over and over that they’re do this thing, automation, or they handle this. And then when it comes to their system, they don’t want to do it the same way they do it, they want to find something radical, radical different. So I wasn’t surprised by that. But it’s really interesting how she moved to our table. Because as a person who has used our table for certain things, I will have not recommend her table for clients to manage their to do list, even though she’s doing it unsuccessfully. So it was a really interesting read.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:49

Yeah, I thought I thought it was very interesting. I think that the thing that broke her in terms of bullet journaling was the resistance to the administration associated with the bullet journal, which some people really adore. I mean, some people really enjoy the sitting down with that time and being able to go ahead and structure your next week and recreating the lists, and therefore choosing what are the vital things that need to be done. That’s what Ryder Carroll talks about in the bullet journal method when he talks about the idea of choosing those vital things. And that means you do have to say no to things you do have to pare down in that sense. And you know, she’s not willing to do that here. And that’s understandable. I know what that feeling is like, and so you need to take the time that you would otherwise, do an administration and find some other tool to be able to do that. Now my only criticism of the article is that she talks about air table, but she doesn’t quite explain what she means. by automating these things in air table. She explains that she is managing things like cleaning the house, and that things are automatically doing things in it but she doesn’t quite explain a little bit more about how she automated some of these pieces. Like she talks about going to the grocery store and the grocery lists are auto populating. Are they auto populating because she has it connected to some kind of Zapier script to her grocery store application. Like I don’t really know how she actually automated any of these pieces. And I think that someone coming to this would be excited about the idea of automating parts of their life, but they wouldn’t really know how to do so based on the article so I would have really enjoyed a little bit more there. Perhaps she has some YouTube videos perhaps there are YouTube videos on how to connect some of these pieces but it would have been nice to see a little bit more there in terms of her actually showing us the automation because I I still have no idea how she’s doing some of these automation pieces.

Augusto Pinaud 14:40

Oh so for what I understood is you can put dinner tables on a second table and a side table connected table. You can put the ingredients so you can say okay, this week I’m going to make tacos, pizza and spaghetti and then when you mark those, her table has the ability to say okay if you’re going to make pizza this started the five ingredients that you need to buy to make pizza. Same with stackers. And so far, so that’s that’s the extent I’m thinking cheap, or I thought she was talking about automation,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:14

right, I’m thinking more like, I think he use paprika, right. And that whole notion of using an application like grocery IQ or something else where the ingredients pull from some centralized database, so you don’t actually have to data enter that stuff. And this is where, you know, I find like, I’m not going to use a better application than amazon for managing my shopping lists. Because Amazon has a database full of products, and I can, I don’t have to buy everything from Amazon, but they just control that piece so well, that I use the tool or I use grocery IQ, because they’ve got that really down. If I want to track what I’ve eaten, I’m going to use a bespoke application like My Fitness Pal, because it has a huge database where I can scan products, and I can enter in, you know, all of those things and nutritional components will, will surface. And so I think this is one of those cases where Yes, centralized centralization can be really powerful outlook for one, you know, centralizes, a bunch of different productivity pieces, all in one solution. But that means it’s usually a jack of all trades and an ace of none. And that here sounds to me, like what’s happening with air table for her. And again, I don’t want to, I don’t want to put on her things that are not true, she may be very happy with her air table and implementation. But I warn everybody, I caution people to think about, you know, oh, all of a sudden, you know, if I put everything all into air table, it’s just going to be magical and beautiful, and, and so on and so forth. And it’s not quite as simple as that there’s still some underlying administration here that we all have to think about. And maybe there’s a better application out there that can do it. And I found that using multiple applications. While they are disparate, they are really good at what they do. And so therefore, it really ultimately saves me time. So just want to kind of put that in there. So with that, we have covered the productivity articles that we put together for this week. And we are going to take a break for a word from our sponsor this week, which is co working space by personal productivity club. When we get back we’ll do technology headlines. We have our contributor segment this week, productivity resources of the week, and then we will talk about our featured story of the week. And so we will see you after the break

Sponsor Voice Over 17:22

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:30

Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith joined with a gousto pinout the second half of the show and so we are going to move on to the major tech productivity articles this week. And so Agusta What’s our first tech article?

Augusto Pinaud 18:47

Well, we should make a disclaimer before we started doing that this is a particular week because Apple did a show today Google is doing a show this week and Samson is going to do so we are trying to keep distance from these three so we’re not trying not to share news that are going to be involved with or involved with this shows. But the first we are going to share it and that is one password new password secure sharing tool. I’ve been a big fan and user of one password for so long. And finally they gave me a way that I can share passwords with some other people and I can define hey this password or This link will be only available for an hour or a week or three months. So that way when I send that password with my wife, for example, she will click but then I know the link will expire so I feel a little safer since that’s the best way to share that password.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:55

Yeah, that’s great. I think it’s a you know, it’s it’s just another opportunity to be able to Do quickly and easily share with people in limited risk in limiting your risk when you do share passwords in that sense. And I know that most of my training actually on password management ends up being while I’m a LastPass user. And so it was my my business and companies on LastPass. I do most of my training on teaching people how to use one password, most of my clients ultimately use one password. It’s a really great application. And this is a great, you know, tool in their toolkit because so many times clients are asking me, Oh, can you log into this one thing for me and fix it. And now I can say, Okay, well, you can just share that one password with me, I don’t need you to share an entire vault, let’s just get that one password to me. So I can go in strategically help you there. And then I don’t have to worry about having access to those things longer than that timeframe. So I love it. I think it’s fantastic. All right, on to our next one. And I’m gonna just jump in here because I’m super excited about this, which is that Google Calendar now has a feature within your calendar events to create meeting notes. And so if, as many of you know, I’m an Evernote certified consultant and one of the Evernote regional leaders and and so Evernote in Evernote home now you can connect your Google calendar to Evernote and Evernote home, you can go ahead and just see your calendar of events. If you have a Google account, click on the little create note button. And a new note will be generated. And it kind of has a nice little agenda so to speak, that you can go ahead and use Well, I’m guessing Google Calendar, you know, got a whiff of that and decided they needed to get into get in the game also. And so they’ve created this wonderful little button, where you can click on a link inside of the Google calendar event. And you should see this now. And when you when you see that little event, it will create a new Google Doc. And that new Google document will go ahead and open up it’ll have the title to the meeting the attendees who are invited to the meeting, and then a notes and action section. So you can just start taking notes directly in a Google Docs document. Now, I really wish this would have been Google Keep, it would have made a lot of sense to be in Google Keep. But I also understand the flexibility and need for something more than Google Keep, maybe they should have given us an option to be able to go to Google Docs or Google Keep just you know, two different buttons, maybe one, you know, that’s in full, you know, mode and then one this kind of a transparency, you know, 50% opaqueness, but either way, they gave us Google Docs, I’m hoping at some point, they give us an option for Google Keep, because that would be that would be the appropriate place where I would be thinking about creating notes for a meeting, since it is their note taking product.

Augusto Pinaud 22:48

You know, just yeah, that’s a point. That’s a good point. But I think this is really exciting. What I hope is that now people get to take notes in meetings, because I go to too many meetings where the actions are not defined, the notes are note taking. And then we go to the follow up meeting to find out what what is what happened in the last meeting that we didn’t accomplish, so we can accomplish for the next one. So that was really, really, really exciting. I’ll actually, since my my business runs in Google, but I have keep my distance from Google pages. Google Sheet. Now Google notes for the love of God, the software is escaping me. But anyways, I mean, give my distance, Google Docs. And more and more, I have seen how I have Google Docs to the point that finally I needed to figure out a way to sort them, because he was getting on manageable. So now this will give me one more set of documents. But at the same time, I’m super excited, how easy will be to get these documents going.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:01

Yeah, I’m I think this will be really good for a lot of people. And I’m looking forward to seeing how people ultimately utilize this more in their meeting management. Also note that Google calendar events can also now include chat, so you can just click on that little chat icon and execute a Google Chat among the attendees who have Google accounts. And you’ve always been able to attach files from Google Drive into that account, you could also upload some images, there’s some lightweight features in there, but you can attach things to the Google calendar event, which is incredibly helpful to just organize things around an event. And so that that can just be really useful when you need to say if you have a conference, and you have four or five sessions, and you want to share with each of the speakers for those sessions, the documentation that they’ll need, you can now include all of that stuff attached to the calendar events, and it becomes a central repository and a place where there’ll be easily and ultimately know where to ask. access that information. So I think Google calendar events are becoming much, much richer, Allah Outlook calendar events, but in this centralized database space, and outlook does this already. So it’s good that we now have parity in that sense. So good good to see that.

Augusto Pinaud 25:15

As I mentioned, one or two shows ago, one of the good things is that yes, the big players has been Microsoft and Google, it’s good to see that they are leveling the strengths of others, so we can get equivalent things in one side or the other.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:34

Absolutely. Alright. So from Google calendar to the chrome base, and I

Augusto Pinaud 25:40

am excited about this. I might, may put the disclaimer that I do not have had a dekstop, same leaf 1997. I’ve been a laptop iPad base for so many years. But this Chromebook massive thing that you can put vertically, I, I can justify, I don’t have use, I don’t even have a table to put this thing. But I every time I look at I say I said please, Scrivener do not release a chrome book application because I will be dead.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:24

I’m really excited about this. I mean, I constantly say this, and I’m I really am, you know, torn this this recent season of new devices coming to the various platforms, the form factors, the chipsets, all of them have been really, really amazing. This year. And so the Chromebook base from HP, the 22 inch screen all in one has really taken the cake for me, it is an affordable, beautiful display great sound. And you can you can really put some good processing power behind the device, and it has this rotating screen. So you can put it both in a landscape and portrait view, or portrait view as you want it. And I am just really excited about this. I don’t know if I’m gonna get it. But I’m I’m teetering on the edge, because I do have a spot here on my desk.

Augusto Pinaud 27:26

I have this bug but I’m willing to make one that’s the problem.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:31

They have, they have made a really good argument, HP that is has made a really good argument for this kind of device. And I feel like for me, you know, maybe an iPad, I’m sorry, an iMac next to an HP chromebase 22, those two side by side would be really nice pairings for this good cameras, good. You know, good. Sound good. You know, the screen is probably not amazing. But you know, it’s it’s still going to be good enough for what I needed to do in terms of productivity. And I have for a long time wanted to make the conversion to not solely, you know, because I’ll never be solely only chrome or Chrome OS, but doing more in that space as my daily driving in terms of productivity. And I would love to give that a go. I would like to see how I would make all of those pieces work predominantly with having the Linux distro now built into the chrome operating system, anything that was going to be blocking me from being able to utilize the Chrome OS on a desktop perspective, I could now do because I have the ability to run, say audacity or, you know, other desktop applications in a Linux option for it and seeing how it goes. And really with the with the advent of Windows 365. coming very soon to a consumer near you. Being able to launch windows 365 in a browser instance means that the it doesn’t matter, I can just open up chrome and launch into it. And to be quite honest, I already have desktops here. So I could remote into my windows desks and just do that if I really needed the Chrome. If the chrome was really that limited, I could continue running the Windows machines just without you know, they’d be headless, underneath my desk so I could see myself doing this. In that sense. I’m really curious about it either way. Great specs on it. Great review coming out of Chrome unboxed and really affordable coming for 549 USD. Top of the line. I think it shakes out at 750 USD. That’s a great price point for this really large, beautiful all in one device. All right. Well let us move on to our next article, which is all about the Kobo. And they’ve released. Was it two devices? Yeah, they’ve released two new ereader The Kobo rieber two and the Kobo sate.

Augusto Pinaud 30:03

Yes they released that and they also so this the sage now you will be able to do unwritten and I was confused because I have never heard about the ellipse pack. But basically the lips are back even though they on the article describe it not like that it is a great one to one comparison with the remarkable two. So you will be able to do create notebooks do the handwriting, but also connect to the Kobo bookstore so you can even do it on the E pub on the books and have an reading tablet that said it was the same as the remarkable the Libra it’s a seven inch screen you can do out your books, that is the new things. It’s a waterproof that’s what the Libra to bring to the table. And it’s 179 bucks. And then you have the sage that also you can do all the books. And it has a stylus compatibility. So in theory you could do similar to what they lipsett do. And it’s 250 bucks. So it is really interesting what what they provide. For me the fact that they start adding this you can hand right on the PDF, coming $200 or 150 bucks less than the remarkable if you are in the verge to test this technology. Okay, do I really will enjoy handwriting everything and all this? Well. This is a great device to get it. I always think on kids maybe because well that’s what happened was apparent. You know, my kids has regular Kindles. Why? Because they can take them to bed and I don’t need to be concerned. What are you doing at bed you’re reading, that’s the only thing that device do. This device turns into a great thing for my oldest daughter, did you want to do electronic notes, I’m okay, investing 250 bucks, knowing that that’s what you can do, and do PDF and handwritten. But I’m not giving you an iPad where you’re going to be fully distracted, or the possibility of a fully distracted at school.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:21

I think this is really fascinating. I think that giving the the devices a Linux underpinning as they have been these are all e readers that are built on Linux. This gives a lot more flexibility to the tools so that you are capable of doing more if you wanted to. And I think Kobo was just trying to go into the markets where Amazon’s audible and Kindle are not prevalent or not dominant. And that makes a lot of sense. But it also means that here in the States, if we want, you know, better specs in some regards, on a on a less expensive tablet, and we’re not bought into the Amazon ecosystem. These are great tablets, and you’re getting handwriting, you’re getting audio books, you’re getting the ability to have a nice ereader. And so and that that the carta, I think has it has a beautiful display. Now it looks like it has really great high contrast ratio from the specs I read. And I think that the Libra and the ellipse are going to be really nice devices going forward. And so yeah, if you’re not bought into the Amazon world, I say this is definitely well within the the spectrum of of devices you should look at. And as you talked about good for kids, but I think also good for those that are elderly, and are not looking to really, you know, build up a large library of things. You can you know, connect, connect, connect to overdrive. Am I wrong? And when I was reading that, I thought that it didn’t. Yeah, I thought it connected to overdrive. So you’re not disconnected from the library system, you’re really set in that space. And so I think it’s a really good set of options for those folks in that space. And then rounding out the news today, with a little bit of Apple news.

Augusto Pinaud 34:02

There is a rumor that they knew or puts will or could monitor cluster held us a hearing aids and measure your temperature. So the rumor basically is that Apple is contrived to continue to expand this x health tracking into the other devices as the headphones here. The reality is a lot of the users of purpose, have their things wearing all day. It will be great if this thing using that technology could tell me Hey, you’re slouching that will be down that will make me feel great again.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 34:42

Yeah, I think it’s I think it makes a lot of sense for Apple to be going down the road of building more health technology into your Apple Watches into your air pods, basically into any wearables, you’re going to have an opportunity to increase your your use adherence to the health metrics that it wants to prompt you with, but you know, they’re using them already. If I get an you know, walk out of work put in my earbuds and our air pods and go on my walk home, it’s nice that it’s tracking that information if I don’t happen to have something else on me that’s tracking that information. So I think it makes a lot of sense that they’re pushing the the continuing to push the branding and marketing effort that their privacy and security minded, although I think that that’s a bit contradictory with their, you know, their business goals, or Trump, their privacy and security, but it just happens that it works to their to their advantage, you know, it’s like things like they’re, you know, they made this effort to basically prompt people to kill off the, the, you know, do you want to be tracked feature with feature within iOS 15 that rolled out, what did they have record ad business for their app store, you know, so their app store ad platform has gotten a huge bump in, in revenue increases, because obviously, now, apps to be able to get more visibility, whatever. So you know, Apple is doing what Apple does best, which is making them look good. And that makes a lot of sense. And so the other side from privacy and security is, of course, health and wellness. And they want to push on that concept that this technology that that you are embedding in your life is good for you. And so these are branding and marketing messages, and it makes sense that they’re going to put features into place that reinforce that message.

Augusto Pinaud 36:35

Somebody private texted me today during the event. And they just text me says now Apple, invent colors. And yes, that’s what they do best.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:47

Alright, that brings us to the end of our tech stories this week. And that means we are at the point of our contributor segment and today we have a segment from Penny’s anchor. So Penny’s anchor, take it away.

Unknown 37:04

Welcome to the priority report. My name is Penny’s anchor. Today we’re going to talk about decision fatigue, and how to avoid it. Let’s start by understanding some studies that were done by Dr. Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University, they did a number of studies, which determined that the number of decisions that need to be made was very much like willpower, where they say we have an exhaustive reserve. So at some point, we exhaust that mental energy, and we’re in a less capable place to make decisions. And when that happens, then we’re more likely to make one of two negative decisions, or let’s call them unproductive decisions. One, we avoid making the decision altogether. And two, we choose the simplest decision, or the easiest decision, which isn’t always the best decision for the situation. So we want to bring this into our heightened awareness. And we want to take a look at what are measures that we can do in order to but before we do that, I wanted to name one of the studies that they did, where they worked with judges, and looking at the cases of where they were offering parole and when they weren’t offering parole. And it was interesting that they found that 70% of the time, they were more likely to offer parole in the morning than they were in the app. And that was one of the examples. And they studied many different disciplines. That was one of the examples that helped them to better understand decision fatigue, and its impact on our decision making and the quality of our decision making. So let’s look at three ways that we can avoid decision fatigue. Number one is we want to pre decide some things and that would be sort of eliminating decisions that need to be made in the moment. So for instance, Steve Jobs, he had a regular uniform, a black turtleneck and jeans, and therefore he could eliminate the pre decided eliminated the decision that he needed to make every day about what he was going to wear. It may seem very simple and simplistic, but it works. If you’ve pre decided what you’re going to eat for the next day. It reduces the number of decisions that you have to make. And it frees up your brainpower to focus on the most important decisions. That’s why planning is so important in your decision making process. So that’s one thing is to pre decide. Number two is to simplify the decision making process. And that means if there’s 10 choices, how do you quickly reduce them down to two so you can decide between A or B. It makes it much easier to decide. It takes less mental energy to decide between A and B as it does to decide between four or five, eight different options. And then lastly, how do you delegate decisions to other people to protect yourself and protect your time and your energy And that, that willpower and that mental energy that you need to make more critical decisions. Some people have what they assistants or gatekeepers that decide whether that person is going to get on their calendar or not. That’s a way to protect your decision making as well. You don’t have to decide it, someone else has been instructed, what to Yes, and what to know. And they make that decision. So you can delegate decisions to other people so that you can focus on the most important decisions. So that’s what I have for you today. Be aware and look at ways that you can reduce decision fatigue, so you can focus on the most important decisions that need to be made today and every day. My name is Penny sanchar. And this is the priority report.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:47

All right, thanks so much penny for the priority report. And with that, that takes us on to our next segment, which is the productivity resources of the week. And so every week, Agusta and I come across many personal productivity tools, apps and services in our productivity journeys to put together Anything But Idle. And so in this segment, productivity resources of the week, we each bring you one new or old, we think you might like and so first up is, since it’s Mental Health Awareness Month, I thought I would use a mental health awareness app to kind of show you all you know, something that you can use. And this is why ZWY s A and you can download the apps on Android and iOS. And so this is an AI chat bot. And it’s really great, it’s anonymous, it’s secure as 24 seven because it’s artificial intelligence, it’s a it’s a chatbot in essence, and when you open up wiser, you can just literally start chatting with it. And it is really helpful in being able to guide you in a discussion so that you are basically managing whatever you’re dealing with whatever that difficult conversation is you’re feeling if you’re elated, great, it can have that conversation with you. If you’re feeling stressed out or anxious or feeling symptoms of depression, you can have those conversations with wiser as well and it can walk you through those pieces for self care. And it just helps you reframe and cope with various issues as you go through with it. And it’s an evidence based application and it’s been proven to be clinically safe and so yeah, it’s just a really great app and you can use it for free and there are other pieces where you can upgrade and whatever else but I think that the really interesting part is that there’s like an employer application so if you want you can get your your company to basically sponsor the application for the entire staff and you can use this in all kinds of environments but yeah so I would check out why is it if you you know just kind of want to have an AI chatbot available to you whenever you you know are not feeling great or whenever you’re feeling great and you want to just kind of track those those moments of joy and and positive experience and I actually do use visor for that I I’m always kind of chatting with it when I want to express positive things with it as well as when I’m feeling not so great and wanting to see about it and so it has additional layers of capabilities but that’s the primary core of the application and I really like it for that and with that Augusto What is your productivity resource this week you’re muted

Augusto Pinaud 43:16

Alright, I went from something totally different and it’s a cable it’s a cable that I have but I don’t know how many of them because every time I go to somebody’s house I live one on purpose because these are problems that everybody have you have the iPhone connector then you have the micro USB and then you have the USB C and you carry this incredible amount of cables I found this cables in Amazon Prime now they’re 13 bucks and I bought different versions of them but they have the tree tips on one cable so now every time I have I have one in the kitchen I have many rooms my office tree so that way I don’t need to think okay do I have the right cable where is the right cable which connects these device views. It doesn’t matter what they use, I can grab the cable and plug it in. So in this instance something that has made me productive and has helped me and again I have live in many houses the things behind after people say oh that’s really cool fun here to do. Because it’s really safe.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 44:27

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve actually been looking at something very similar I think who was it It must have been Rosemary orchard who made a recommendation on a podcast about a product from I think it’s called digital nomads, I’m not sure but they have fairly Apple specific products and but you know multiple tips, travel set with a nice Kevlar sheathing and everything else like that. But this is great to just have as you know just especially when you’re traveling and you lose things, this is a nice option to be able to have just in case so great product. every resource, and so thank you. So that’s productivity resources of the week. And that brings us along to our final segment, which is our featured story this week, which is that Google is turning on two step verification automatically for 150 million Google accounts. And so yeah, let’s let’s start off with some of the facts here. One is that this is not automatically enrolling you per se, it is enrolling only people who have the capability of turning it on safely for their accounts. So that’s number one. So that’s why we said almost everyone, but if you have basically an a security key set up with your account, that is you have a phone that has the ability to be used as a security key, then you will be auto enrolled, and you will be taken through the protocol for being able to do so. Or they’ll just automatically turn it on in the background. Now, the reality is, is that it’s very similar to the way in which you, if Google perceives you having some kind of, you know, tampering with your account, someone trying to log into your account, and they present you with a message on your phone that says, Hey, are you trying to log in to you know, this from some other weird location? It’s kind of utilizing that same kind of prompting mechanism. But instead of doing that, for what seems to be, you know, issues of sickness? What do you call it? Someone is trying to tamper with your account, a bad actor or a cyber criminal, they’re basically doing this in the reverse, basically turning on two factor or two step verification for you username, password, and then that additional third step of saying, okay, with my phone, I can tap Yes, this is me trying to log in right now, and then allowing that in as well. If you want to, you can actually turn on two step verification yourself. And I highly recommend it by going to your security checkup and running the security checkup. And I’m going to put a banner here for you so you can see what I’m talking about. And I should have set this up earlier, but I didn’t answer now I’m going to do it now. And so there so on your screen, which is going to my account.google.com forward slash security hyphen, checkup, security checkup with a dash between it. So my account.google.com forward slash security dash checkup, that will take you to your Google account to start the security checkup. At that point, if you scroll down to the section that says two step verification, you can turn it on. Now the things you want to do are you want to turn on Google Sign In prompt with any devices that allow for it, you want to turn on security key, which would be your Android device or a device that allowed you to act as a security key. And if you have any UB keys, or Titan keys, or those kinds of Phyto keys, you can use those for USB and Bluetooth enabled additional keys, you can use authenticator app, and you can use backup codes. If you do use the backup codes, make sure that you download, print and put the backup codes in someplace that is water theft, and fire safe, right, you want all three of those things and turn off your SMS verification, because SMS is not secure, you can just easily spoof phone numbers. And that’s not good for security. So you can do all of that from this, this place. And that means that your email is now in a lockdown mode, and highly secure from those kinds of hackings that happen from people taking advantage of getting access to your Gmail, you know, a password or your Google accounts password. So that’s really what’s happened here. Google has also required all youtubers with channels, that’s 2 million YouTubers who have you know, who are producing content for YouTube to go ahead and turn on two factor or two step verification also. And this is protecting them from their videos being, you know, ultimately, somehow taken over by some bad actor. So I think all in all, a good thing for Google, those of us who are not among those 100 50 million Google accounts that can have an auto enrolled need to do it manually. And that’s kind of the I think the tougher part, you know, when you have billions of users getting only 150 million of them, maybe we have 160 million total people who have two step verification turned on across all of Google, we really need to get more people to turn this on to really nip this concept in the bud of having bad actors break into accounts because there isn’t a second factor or multi factor authentication component really built into it. Okay, so any other thoughts regarding Google’s step into this two step verification space, although i

Augusto Pinaud 49:50

think i think it’s awesome that they are finally doing this and unmake it. Again, normal for people you know, there is something interesting when you talk to people talk about to format education, and they look at you like, I don’t know, now that it comes from Google as part of the process, you know, people may start embracing understanding it is important, you know, and I suddenly hear more complaints about that than the actual people who use it, because it’s like, oh, what do I No need to log in three times, yes, the true you’d have the double authentication you need to check. But that will bring security to everybody in the organization, and even person.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 50:34

Yeah, the thing that I really also appreciated about them was that they take took the additional step of highlighting in an activity account management, and this is a feature, you can actually appoint someone, I have appointed someone in my family as my inactivity account manager. So if my account goes into no use for some period of time, and for me, it’s actually fairly short, because I know that my gmail account is attached to many, many parts of my life. If I were when I die, you know, it’s not an F. But when the situation I’m hoping no time soon, but when that happens, then Google will basically start the clock of, Hey, you know, he hasn’t used his account in this amount of time, when that time elapses, it will then let my family member know, hey, Ray has not logged into his account in this amount of time, we’re not going to give you access to the account so that you can take over and access it from that point. And so then the inactivity account manager can do things like access your, your, your accounts, and those kinds of things, if they do need to do password resets, and so on, and so forth. So it is a really, really nice feature. And I wish that every service, Facebook, and all of the others really got on onboard with this kind of thing. Because if you are inactive for some period of time, it’s really difficult and frustrating, you know, I have a lifetime’s worth of photographs in my Google account. And if I were, you know, to perish on timely, and not have my inactivity count account management set up, then those would be locked away from from my family potentially forever. And so, you know, this, these kinds of, of mitigations, from data loss after death or, you know, even incapacity mean to say I was in a car accident or some kind of accident, and I become unable to unable to communicate this activity account management would allow people to be able to access it after some time, which is a really, really nice feature. And so I’m glad they highlighted that in the entire overall announcement for that, I think, a really good positive issue, something

Augusto Pinaud 52:34

really important that they made an incredible way to, to explain people to announce it to people say, Well, this is no worries, no, no, this is the why and make it a slow, slow enough for people to understand.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 52:51

Absolutely. And so with that, let’s go on to announcements this week. We have three events this week, a gousto.

Augusto Pinaud 52:59

So the first one is the apple event, who happened on October 18. And we are going to do our live discussion on Thursday night 9:30am. Eastern time, we are going to have Michaels Lewinsky and we are going to be talking recording live so you can watch it live and you will be able to listen to podcast episode later. Then second one is Samson is also doing an event on Wednesday, the 28th of October, and we are discussing this event live with Art Gelwicks. And we’re doing that 12 to one on Thursday, October the 21st. And finally, on October 19. Google is doing a special pixel event. Apparently they are going to lounge false. I don’t know nothing has been released or leaked or anything. But 1pm we are going to be recording live with Art Gelwicks this episode ADA and discussing about what surprises this event could have since nothing has been leaked,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 54:13

will just be commentating on what we know and what they ultimately announced. It is it’s reconciling the two things Yes. lots lots of lots of rumors about what’s going to be happening but we already know the phones are coming it’ll be I think the curious whether they put out the pixel pass whether the very light rumors about a watch. I don’t think we’re gonna see a smartwatch come out of this, although I really, really would love for them to surprise us with a pixel watch. I don’t think that’s going to happen. But we’ve got those three events on Thursday. So you’re gonna see a lot of us this week, if you want. But obviously if you can’t join us for the live events, feel free to join us via the podcast after the fact those will go out in the feed. But otherwise, thank you Augusto Pinaud for joining me this every week on Anything But Idle.

Augusto Pinaud 54:58

Thank you very much. All right. Everybody,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 55:00

everything you need to find can be found at Anything But Idle comm that includes our show notes with links to all the stories, our productivity resources of the week, including our extra stories, things that we couldn’t cover there, probably a dozen other stories or more that just don’t fit into our hour long time with you each week. And so those go into our show notes. So if you review those extra stories, and for some reason they are missing something, feel free to let us know, head over to Anything But idle.com click on Contact, you can tweet at us at Anything But Idle on Twitter, you can let us know whatever way you want to comment on the video. And let us know that we’ve missed something and we’ll be happy to add that into the following week. And we appreciate those things also within the show notes within the Anything But idle.com episode for let’s say Episode 85 if you go to Anything But Idle comm forward slash 085, you’ll find a text transcript for every episode that includes one that you can read directly there on the page, but also one that you can download as a PDF offline after the fact as well. If this is your first time watching live stream, feel free to click the subscribe button. And that of course will give you an option to get notified for when we go live weekly, or when we go live for these special commentary episodes as well. If you’re listening to the podcast, feel free to consider adding us to your favorite podcast app by subscribing and following whatever they call it in their app of choice. You can find instructions on our website as well at Anything But idle.com. If you enjoyed spending or watching and listening to this to us today, feel free to click the thumbs up icon on the video. You can also add a rating review in Apple podcasts or Stitcher and of course your compliments really help us reach more personal productivity community members and so thank you for doing that. Thank you to those who have already left ratings and reviews. We really appreciate that. And so with that we will see you all next time on Anything But Idle here’s to productive life.

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