The Checklist Contains My Manifesto, and Google Contacts Keeps Getting Better

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In this Cast | The Checklist Contains My Manifesto, and Google Contacts Keeps Getting Better

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Frank Buck, EdD

Most people are overwhelmed by the amount of paper and digital information in their lives. Frank Buck makes organization easy so you can increase productivity, decrease stress, and enjoy life. Global Gurus ranked Frank #1 in the world in the “Time Management” category for 2019, 2020, and 2021. His career path took him from band director to principal to central office administrator and now to productivity coach and speaker.

Headlines & Show Notes | The Checklist Contains My Manifesto, and Google Contacts Keeps Getting Better

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

The Project-Driven Life

Do You Have Trouble Moving Projects Forward?

Create a Place for Everything That Matters

A new ASUS Chromebook CX9 just appeared and its the device youve been looking for

First Look at the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite 5

Youtube reveals who will be leading its Podcast initiative future of Google Podcasts uncertain

Zoom now has auto-generated captions available for free accounts

Productivity Resource of the Week

Featured Story of the Week

Announcements

Other News

Raw Text Transcript | The Checklist Contains My Manifesto, and Google Contacts Keeps Getting Better

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00

Hello, personal productivity enthusiast 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

I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:14

And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. This is episode 90 090. For November 1 2021. The checklist contains my manifesto and Google Contacts keeps getting better. We couldn’t choose a title, so we just shoved them together. Anyway. Welcome, everybody. Each week, we review and discuss the productivity and technology news headlines of the week. And this week, we have a special guest, we have Dr. Frank Buck joining us. Most people are overwhelmed by the amount of paper and digital information in their lives. Frank Buck makes organization easy. So you can increase productivity, decrease stress, and enjoy life, global gurus ranked ranked number one in the world in the time management category for 2019 2020. And 2021. Went for the streak. His career path took him from band director to principal to central office administrator, and now to productivity coach, and speaker. And so welcome to Anything But Idle Frank.

Frank Buck, EdD 1:11

All right. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. I’m looking forward to this discussion tonight.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:17

Absolutely. You’re no you’re no stranger to our audience. So if anybody has any questions for Dr. Buck, throw those into the comments. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And we’ll be happy to engage and answer any questions that you might have. What I thought we would do to get started today, just because we were trying to decide on the title a little bit in advance of today, we decided to talk about checklists. And October 30 was checklists day, and it, it turns out from a little bit of research pre show that checklist day came about because budget planes were crashing, and they were crashing, because of very simple things, people not paying attention to just some pre flight, you know, tasks that once they were done, allowed planes to fly safer. And so checklists day was born. And so I wanted to just quickly just, you know, touch on some of these items before we got into the productivity articles of the week. But my first question to you all, is, how are checklists helpful to you? I’m presuming that neither of you are around flying planes. But maybe you do have your air, air air license to fly planes. But either way, how are checklists helpful to you on kind of a regular basis. Dr. Frank, Dr. Buck, you want to start

Frank Buck, EdD 2:30

where you’re thinking back to all those years in education. And I’ve said this over and over and over, I don’t know that there’s a more cyclic profession, in the world in education with all the things that happened as far as starting school in the school, the end of the grading period all through the year, and the little tasks that surround that. And it’s not that the tasks are difficult to do. The difficult thing is to remember to do them all, and not let something fall through the cracks. Oh, well, the honor roll didn’t get published in the newspaper, because I didn’t email it to the I got busy. I didn’t think about it. And that checklist, it takes the thinking out of it. You just go down the list and do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it done. Don’t worry. It makes life easy. It makes life stress free. Yeah, same

Augusto Pinaud 3:20

here, I have a number of checklists for things that are simple things that are more complicated. So for example, the podcast, you know, I prepare Anything But Idle every week. And there is a checklist of what need to be, do we have to we have the theme? Do we have the feature story? Do we have what are the apps, and then after the beginning, and then there’s a bunch of other things that need to happen for the show and for us to come in here. And then same thing after Okay, after the show is recorded. There is a second checklist that is all this things that need to happen, as Dr. Bach said, I don’t need to think. So I just can pull that checklist and follow step by step and checklist has many forms. Yes, it can be a traditional 1234 steps or it could be in many different ways. You know, when we get the Bagger done, there is a checklist and may not be as formal as the podcast. But there is something that there’s three steps that need to happen before we get into there. And our instructor that way in the same thing, take something as simple as take the trash down or out. You know, I take the trash out every week in the morning, but he’s my son responsibility to bring them back in after school. And it is on the checklist that even that he have them to do is as part of his responsibility. It is still something that I checked. It’s a checklist that I have Every Wednesday and it’s it, my son brought the trash can into checklist has many ways, but the number of uses are incredible. And you were mentioning planes. But I remember he was on The Checklist Manifesto, the book that they mentioned about the planes, but they also mentioned about surgery surgeons, and why these checklists begin. As soon as they start implementing them, they begin saving lives and reducing the number of human mistakes in incredible percentages. I read the book many, many years ago, I don’t remember the numbers, but I remember shuck by the heart. How high was that percentage as soon as they implemented those checklists?

Frank Buck, EdD 5:48

Yeah. And they, and they reference the, the airplane sort of stuff. You know, in the book, the author says, Hey, pilots do this. They run through this checklist every time before they leave. And that, you know that doctors sometimes are offended at having to follow this checklist, like, Don’t you trust me? Don’t you trust me? But the thing is it again, it’s not that the doctors don’t know these things. It’s remembering all of them. And it just takes that remembering out of it so that you can be creative. So, you know, yeah, hey, give me a checklist. Don’t like be reinvent the wheel. Don’t make it harder than it has to be.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:37

Yeah, my thing about doing and using checklists is that it gives me a certain standard of excellence to hit. Right? It’s not that it’s easy. It’s that it makes it useful to me in the sense of knowing where my standard is. And if my standard is that making sure each of these things happen, then I don’t have to worry about what the order of operations are, I can actually worry about the quality of the work being done. And that that’s so often is very helpful to me. I’m curious what other tips and tricks you have for checklists, maybe tools you use to keep checklists and and then we’ll move on to our productivity blogosphere topics. Yeah, Dr. Buck, what, what are your big toes? Yeah, well,

Frank Buck, EdD 7:17

for me, it’s all in remember that remember, the milk is my digital task list. And so I put them in there, and you’ll see things like, every Saturday, here’s a task, that’s the weekly repeating task. And here’s just a list of little things that you know, for. And for that matter if I didn’t do them this week, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. But it just, it keeps things from breaking. It keeps, you know, it keeps me from doing things when there’s a problem. And then likewise, at the end of the month, here’s some here’s some just routine things to do every month. Let’s give the dog the heartworm pill. Let’s change the air filter. There are several things that I want to check out around the house. Just look under the house. Look at the crawlspace under the house. Is there water under there, go out to the road. Look at the meter is the meter spinning when no water is running in the house and there’s a leak always all of these little things if it catches a problem early if there’s a problem, and it gives me a peace of mind and there’s no there’s no way in the world that I could remember to do all these things. Or if I did it would be remembering them at inopportune times it would be remembering them in the middle of the night it would be remember the remembering to go out check the water meter. What is pitch black darkness snake bites me or something like that. You know, with this, I can just okay, Saturday morning. Let me just run through all of these and be done with it.

Augusto Pinaud 8:55

And you mentioned a good one because not all checklists are weekly or daily. You know, we’re coming to the full checklist and I have one that is called the full checklist and just list on my notes on the phone and it is done. Okay the weather. It’s getting to the point that freeze will come. So I want to make sure hey, hoses are not connected, you know, and those kinds of things in preparation for the phone, there is a phone there is a spring one that is a counterpart as the weather start getting nicer again, what are the things that I want to prepare to, to have that you mentioned something important to mention note all checklists are daily or weekly or that consistent that said, Eat really change your life to have the packing for traveling. It’s one of those. I don’t you know with the pandemic, I may have not used it in a while. But it’s still if I’m traveling tomorrow, I will pull my list and everything will be there and I my trip will be completely completely different experience.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:01

Yeah, and I have different checklists for different types of travel, if I’m doing air travel versus driving, I have different checklists for those travel lists, you know, travel lists, because I can carry more stuff if I’m driving. But I can’t carry on to the airport because TSA won’t let me through, you know, like, I usually have a Leatherman, you know, that I that I carry, I can’t do that if I’m getting on the plane because it has a knife in it, and they’re not gonna let me through airport security. So I have to make sure that my my travel checklist on my flight checklist actually says make sure to take off your Leatherman because they’re gonna take it from you and make you throw out yet another Leatherman. I’ve been through many of them because of that. It’s very frustrating. So you know, those kinds of things are very, very helpful to know what to bring and what not to bring, depending upon the context of what you need to get done. And I’ll note that the the only other thing that I would add to this whole checklist discussion is that I use Google Calendar for certain items, and just tracking quick checklists of things that need to be done in a given day. Sometimes I don’t need to track stack and maintain them in a task manager, like a Remember The Milk or a to do list or anything else like that. Because there are things that are coming up over the course of the day. And I want to just be able to quickly track and maintain those items. And so what I’ll do is I’ll actually, in the calendar, say after lunch, there’s these three or four things that need to be captured to be done. And so I’ll just create a quick checklist in the day. It’s not repeatable, it’s not a recurring kind of thing. It’s kind of like a mini task list. But it’s, you know, I talked to so and so at 11am. By one o’clock, I want to be able to answer these kinds of things. And I’ll just put an anchor in the sand anchor in the calendar for 1pm. When I get back from lunch, I’m going to do these three things. And that helps me deal with those particular items. I also have a Google calendar that it has a dedicated what I call day reset. If you’ve not listened to that episode on pod pod, you can go to pod pod and listen to listen to that. But the idea is that your day goes off the rails want to get back on the rails, actually the calendar dedicated to it. Normally it’s hidden. But when it does go off the rails, I just turn on that calendar, I can see that quick checklist of things that I can do to get myself back emotionally centered, and then organized again to say, okay, these things need to be contextually moved to Sunday, maybe these things need to be moved to another day. And these things are the things that I can actually accomplish today. That really helps me deal with that. That, you know, perspective when I feel like the day hasn’t gone quite the way I wanted to. And so having having a checklist, even in a calendar format to be able to handle those types of things can be really useful. And so, Agusta had mentioned this already, but you know, my book recommendation today was going to be The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. Dr. Yeah, being a doctor and talking about how checklists save lives is obviously a good thing. But it’s actually really useful and practical for everybody else in that sense. So with a little bit conversation out of the way regarding checklists, and in honor of checklists day, let’s move on to the stories of the week. The first part of the show, we do headlines from the productivity, blogosphere, productivity, blogosphere, podcast, space, whatever. And then we go on after the break to covering the technology articles, our productivity resources of the week and our featured story of the week. And so Agusta, what is our first productivity article this week?

Augusto Pinaud 13:22

So our first productivity articles come from Scott John, and his goal, the project driven life. And you know, as we were talking about checklists, he talks about projects and how his life is all project based. And he make a distinction at the beginning of the article between goals and projects. And he said, you know, goal, for me is the desired outcome, while the project is the action and I thought that was really interesting discussion, but then he goes more into Okay, life is a series of project and the cycle of life of project and then he mentioned integration, then action, completion. And then that gave according to him, you know, there’s those projects, leaf life, death, and it comes related to his new book called Ultra learning, and how he explained that in more detail into the book, but I really liked the article, because recently I moved to to do is 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, I live my OmniFocus most to do list, and recently, I noticed that the to do is do not let you really create a project list. You can have the projects that they have that definition, but it’s not easy to pull it that was not a problem until I break the magical number. I don’t know what was the magical number, but I break it and as soon as I break that number I could not work into projects, because was really hard for me to pull a list of product when the list was sure, yeah, the the bar on the left was enough. As soon as I break that numb, again, the magical number, I don’t know what the number was, but I start having issues. And he was on a discussion, somebody that says, Where is your project list, and it suddenly hit me, I don’t have a project list anymore. Because only focus will give you a great project list while to do is give you these projects on the left. So I went into spend the time to add all these projects now. So I can create project list inside of Todoist as fast as I was doing it before in Germany. So I signed to this idea of the project driven life and and I have experienced first time the power on both sides, The Power of Habit, and the power of losing that and not really noticing that you know that you lose that

Frank Buck, EdD 16:05

I found the the article interesting to me, though, yeah, he makes a distinction between goals and projects that that may be, to me, at least I read it is you have tasks that lead into projects that lead to goals. For me, I’ve used the two terms more interchangeably, but I prefer the word goals. Because to me, that almost makes you expound more on it. If, okay, we want to build a tree house for the kids. What’s the project? Well, it’s the tree house project. Okay, what’s the goal, the goal is to have a tree house in the backyard where the kids can go and feel like to have a place of their own, it sort of makes you stretch that out and describe what done looks like, as David Atwood might say, You know what,

Augusto Pinaud 17:01

I think but I think a goal, in many cases is form from many projects. For example, given the article, you know, example, lose 15 pounds, that’s example close to home for me lose 15 pounds, it’s a project that has multiple projects inside, it’s not only Okay, what I’m going to do with the way I eat, but the way I exercise and all the things learn French is another example he put in the article, same thing, you know, as a person who came to the United States to learn English, and use English as a second language. Learning English was not the project that was the goal, the project was a series of a small things that bring me to that goal abroad meeting that goal and to make that goal, a reality or somehow have a reality.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:55

I found the article generally interesting, I didn’t necessarily feel like it was something that was that spoke to me as much, you know, again, I’m fairly steeped in the GTD world. And my perspective on definition of a project is different. And I have many different terms that I’ve created. Remember that not remember, but for those of you who are unaware, I consider literally every horizon above actions, a type of project, it just happens to be on a different timescale. And so if you think about goals as projects, vision, mission, all of those things are just projects, they’re just different lengths, you might take your mission, and it’s 40 or 50 years of your life, you take goals, and they may be multiple years of your life, a specific project in the GTD world is just anything that has more than one step to complete it. And so any given project might take a shorter or longer amount of time, but roughly under a year’s worth of time. And so I created programs, which are basically evergreen projects, I’ve created milestones, which are specific types of projects that connect one project to the next. So that you have a moment in order to, you know, basically stop and plan and iterate on the ongoing, you know, destination toward the end of a metal project, which of course, is a project that contains other projects. And so I’ve created all of these terms out of need for myself to be able to have a list of the things that are happening and the way in which they’re happening. So for me, I’m not particularly bothered by a long to do list or any of those other things, which we’ll get into the other article because I’m, I’ve centralized those into their own filtered views for me to be able to control what effect is my life, right my life are my are those projects, all of those things that I noted in terms of terminology, are all just projects, they’re just different types of projects for me to be able to see, okay, well, what are my programs in life? Those are the things that are going to populate, they’re going to be generative of other projects, but they’re not necessarily containing those projects because they may be cross contextual. That means that I might do a project that lives between multiple programs or might have multiple Metal projects associated with them. And so I’ve created these different strata for me just to be able to, for myself control all the very fast various facets of my life. And we all have to recognize the fact that might be nonsense to someone who has a more simplified system, it may just be too much manufacturing, for those needs. And I think we should all take heart to the fact that just because I like the way that I do, it doesn’t necessarily mean that, you know, you’re gonna like the way that I do it. And your mileage may vary in doing these things. It’s a very personal and personal productivity. It’s very personal process. And so I don’t dismiss Scott H, Young’s perspective here, I think it’s really good that he has this sense of certainty and stability in his system. And I wish that for everybody. So onward to our next article Gousto, what’s our next article in our lineup today?

Augusto Pinaud 20:49

So our next article came from totally geeking in productivity flourishing. And if you have trouble moving project folder forward, and he has been famous for talking, you should focus every month on five projects, and no more, and he’s stolen the story, how he helped his neighbor into defining those five projects, he’s been famous for saying, hey, instead of trying to move 20 things, while you don’t focus on five things, move it forward, then pick five more and move forward.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:23

And this is a monthly cadence, right? He talks about the five project rules, more of like a monthly

Frank Buck, EdD 21:30

read in there. Yeah.

Augusto Pinaud 21:33

Yeah, he goes every month into picking five and then, you know, what are the five? What are the five that are really important, you know, and get everything else on a secondary level? Again, it’s an approach, but, but I thought it was good. Because if you agree with the first article, and I tried to link them into what we do, so if you see the power of that project driven life, well, then how you’re going to move them forward. It’s going to be something important.

Frank Buck, EdD 22:04

Mm hmm. Yeah. And I think that sounds good on the surface. Let’s just take five, let’s push those all the way to the finish line, then the second another five, and really well, okay. So if one of yours is I want to lose the 15 pounds, or there’s one goal. Okay, your your child needs some help with math, we only use math to one of our projects is math to get better. All right. There’s already a second one right there. I think realistically, when we look at our lives, and if a project is anything that is more than one action, we got a bunch of projects going on at the same time. So I’ve, I think what will happen is, if we say we’re only doing the five, then so many other things just go back up in our head, and they still have to get done. So yeah, I can’t I think it’s kind of like to do the work issue. Yeah, deep work. That sounds great. That sounds great. But somebody needs to empty the dishwasher, somebody needs to mow the lawn, somebody needs to check the mail, somebody needs to feel the dogs water bowls,

Augusto Pinaud 23:11

you mean. So I mean, life also happened while you do the life happens,

Frank Buck, EdD 23:15

you can’t just sit there and just think the deep thoughts and so much. So it ultimately, it really does go back to being able to keep a lot of balls in the air. And just like the juggler, he knows how many he has, he knows the position of each one that gives each one a little bit of attention at the right time.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:39

And there’s muscle memory. So the more you do it, the better you get at it. And I think that for many people who start out, you know, you start out juggling one ball, right, and you just throw the ball up and you catch it and you throw the ball up and you catch it. And then you add it a second one. And again, it’s just one and then two, and then one and then two, you learn the cadence, but you’re also learning soft skills, you’re learning these technical skills, you’re learning technological skills, you’re learning all of these things along the way that once you start becoming a proficient juggler, and I can only juggle three balls at a time, although I can juggle many more projects at a time. You know, the the fact of the matter is, is that the more you learn to do those things, the more you learn to create efficiencies through doing some of the more, let’s call it mundane stuff to use David Allen lingo, but really much of the repetitive things like you know, making the kids breakfast in the morning and get them getting their lunch together. That’s going to be a little bit simpler for you. Because if you go through shop at the same time every week, and you know what you’re going to be getting for them, then preparing and getting them out the door becomes more efficient, the more you do it, but building the treehouse. Well, the Heck, I’ve never built a treehouse before. So let’s get to take a little bit more energy and time in terms of project management. And what I think that that Charlie Gilkey is talking about here are, you know, for me lends more to those kinds of projects. Whereas I would think about what I would maybe call major projects and say that queue needs to be created so that you can defer other major projects to later. And that if you don’t have a full list of your complete list of projects, right, for that consistent, cohesive perspective that David Allen talks about, in the Getting Things Done practice, you’re really ultimately going to struggle, you’re going to have more problems, if you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing at any given time, related to not the immediate actions, but the other things that are going on in your in your sphere of influence, and your sphere of control. So final thoughts of bestow?

Augusto Pinaud 25:32

Yeah, and that’s where I think this, this, I agree with you, the five projects are great, and they’re important focus important, but not understand that those are the only five products, it’s more of what you said, these are the five products, the main five products, that assistive Young was saying, you know, you define those, because those are the ones that you think are going to create the bigger impact towards the future. While Do you still need to do the real life, once you still need to the back, you’re gonna still need to do this wash.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:01

Yeah, and that part I fully agree with, I mean, you need to be able to focus and focusing your energy on bigger items, you know, maybe what they’ve called slow burn or otherwise types of projects, there is some necessity to that if you tried to do a bunch of really huge projects all at once, you’re likely going to do a really piss poor job across the board, right, and potentially not have any of them be done. And, you know, we’ve all faced that in some way, shape, or form in our life, where we try to take on just a little too much, and you start to feel the cracks, you know, the kinks in the dike, and you’re like, Okay, it’s time to start sealing up the chunks. And let’s focus on one thing at a time. And that helps to, to, you know, build cadence and pace, and then you can speed up again. So just remember that when you do new things, you slow down before you speed up. It’s frequently when I tell clients about hiring their first staff members, you hire someone, guess what you’re going to slow down before you speed up. Because you have to onboard that person, they need to learn the culture, they need to be able to understand how to take and take delegated tasks, learn how to do their role, learn the technology in the company, all of those things slow you down in the initial stages, that doesn’t mean it’s bad, you should never not hire anyone, because because it’s gonna slow you down in the short term, it’s about the long term gains. And I think that’s the same case with projects, there is an acceleration and deceleration phase for every project, you need to buffer those in as you make your way forward. All right, on to our next and third productivity article.

Augusto Pinaud 27:27

So the next one came from Leo about that, and it’s called create a place for everything that matters. And if we’re talking about projects, you know, you need that place, you know, you talks about here, our fiscal house, and but also he talks about task of a recurring task while doing their finances about, you know, focus, you have 1000s of browser windows open, you know, you have 1000s of messages in 10 apps, where are the things you know, and put up place for everything, and everything is placed and how this is important. And when I was thinking about projects, I thought about that again, so I share, you know, my project list, crash and burn recently. So all this is, you know, relevant, maybe in a selfish way to me because it’s okay, I need to come back to rebuild those places where I can go and look at the projects and look at the high end view of the things and where things are, there are certain things that have an incredible routine in my life, this piece needs to be readjusted so you can get back to that. And that’s something that sort of gives you a good idea of it really enjoy reading it.

Frank Buck, EdD 28:45

Yeah, looking at it, you know, a place for tasks, a place for appointments, your calendar, a place for notes that has in it, things to read and watch ideas to consider research notes and links. This was interesting, a daily and weekly finance routine. See, I think, mostly I would not have listed that one personally. But I think for a lot of people that may be important. A regular ritual to check and reply to messages, wherever those messages may live. Okay, that’s, I need to check email, I need to check. voicemail, I need to check telegram I need to check my SMS messages. It’s okay that they come in different places, if I know how many places there are, and I have a routine to check and handle everything there in each one of those.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:46

I really enjoyed the article. And it just goes to reinforce the consistency of the way in which we handle physical objects and psychological artifacts. And it’s just it’s a really good thing for us to remember that just because we Think of things in our brain not taking up space, they are taking up space. They’re taking up emotional, and energetic space. And we need to be able to organize those things just because or just similar to organizing your desk, you show up to a desk that’s organized, you’re going to feel good about starting your day and feeling that sense of organization. And if you organize your brain, and what’s going on up there, then you’re going to feel good about approaching on a regular basis. Yeah,

Frank Buck, EdD 30:26

I think when everything’s in its place, so many things are just on autopilot. You know, if my desk is a mess, then before I walk out the door eats. Let me make sure I didn’t forget, did I take this to the effect this, I’m saying. But when your desk is clear, except for the things that you needed to take with you, then it’s anything is laying on the desk needs to go with me it it almost does it for you.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:53

Absolutely. And so with that we’ve covered the productivity articles of the week. And so with that, we’re going to take a quick break. For a word from our sponsor this week, co working space by personal productivity club. When we get back we’re going to cover productivity resources of the week, we’re going to cover our technology stories of the week, and then our productivity resources of the week. Then we’ll talk about new tools. And I’m sorry, that is our productivity resources of the week, where where’s my head, we’re going to cover the featured story of the week. Then we’ll do announcements and close out my my head is swirling with all kinds of thoughts today. Alright, so we will see you after the break.

Sponsor Voice Over 31:27

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 enthusiast so you can find people who use methods and tools you do too. Again, head over to anything but idle.com forward slash co working to see how co working space can help you be more productive. And now back to our show.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:35

Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith joined with Augusta pinout. And of course, our special guest, Dr. Frank Buck for this show. And we’re going to continue on with our technology articles this week. Okay, so what’s our first tech story of the week? You’re muted,

Augusto Pinaud 32:54

sorry, another computer for your list of our word to review that you may need get. So the new Asus Chromebook CX. It’s finally on the Asus website. And basically Asus is coming with a really high end. Chromebook. This is not for the faint heart. This is not your kid on the dollar. Chromebook. This is a really powerful machine 16 gigabytes of RAM Core i Seven, you know it is really well. well built, you know it’s 1000 bucks toy. But

Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:31

no, no, no. So this is the core i Five. So it’s not the i Seven, the i Seven is 1149. What they’re talking about is the CX nine in the core ifI version. So this is an 11th Gen Core i Five, and it’s 16 gigabytes of RAM, you still get the same graphics card, you get the same GPU, and it’s coming in under 1000 bucks. So you’re getting it for just under 1000 bucks. I think this is phenomenal. I am so excited about this laptop. It’s a premium laptop. It’s really good build nice aluminum body. And if you’re in the in the market for a premium Chromebook, which I am, I am just really excited to see the CX nine come out. I didn’t anticipate it because they did bring out the ice seven version. And you know, it’s pricey. It’s 1149, you know, USD. But you know, you’re not going to get that much of a difference in terms of processing power between the i Five and the i seven. And it’s really the ram and the GPU that really makes us a rock solid device for everybody. I’m just really excited about and I think it’s not it’s on the list. I don’t I’m still you know that HP Chromebase you know that I’ve been I’ve been doing googoo gaga over the HP Chromebase and that just is a beautiful, beautiful device. And really my Chromebooks don’t go very many places they tend to stay at home with me in the home office or on I’m moving around with them, but not many places. And I think that I potentially would, would be more suited for the HP Chromebase. But you know, I may get both.

Augusto Pinaud 35:10

So our next news is the first look from good ereader of the Kindle Paperwhite. Five. And when thinner was interested in 6.8 inches, you know, ink, but the Kindle Paperwhite, four had five LED lights, well, this one has 17 LED lights, that’s a no little improvement is a massive improvement. So you will be able to really get an effect on that screen to make the device even better to read, they are mentioned that is protected. For a with a layer of glass that may or may not do reflect when you’re reading outside. But for returning side, it’s an incredible, an incredible screen.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:00

Yeah, I’m really excited about the new Paperwhite. Five, I mean, the fact that it just has an incredible amount of storage. And the I mean, just everything about it is I think, you know, really premium and so, yeah, I, I have the older Paperwhite and I’m really, I’m inclined to make this upgrade, purely because of the, you know, I mean, like, why wouldn’t you want that much? harddrive space? Why wouldn’t you want the additional, you know, real estate, the additional brightness for low light reading. I don’t know, I just feel like it’s a really nice, clean upgrade for Amazon to have made.

Augusto Pinaud 36:41

Yeah, I need up Amazon to release one who will have a pencil and will allow me to do ink and greeting notes, I will buy that thing immediately. Or make my paper whitelist qualities of excused to update it. I don’t have anybody else to hand more paper way devices, please.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:02

You’re good to go. You’re gonna have to go to one of those non Amazon readers to get nice styli you’re just not going to get it out of them. But there

Augusto Pinaud 37:11

is no one that will read their Amazon Kindle. That’s the issue. Yeah, the Amazon Kindle and the handwriting. So for the iPad is the only thing you can do that. But I don’t need another iPad in my life. At least that’s what my wife will say.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:28

All right, onward to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 37:31

YouTube reveals who will leading the podcast initiative, the future of Google podcast is uncertain. In Canada, finally, YouTube is giving you the ability to do background listening, just took them. If you’re in Canada, you can if you’re in the US, you still cannot. It’s still there, there is discussions about what is going to happen with Google podcast. And if is YouTube is going to absorb them or not. I hope not. But still, the news is really that you can start doing the background and how YouTube is trying to go to the next level to go and attack now that podcast world direction.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:15

So to be clear here, this is within the YouTube app and the mobile application. Up until now you had to be a YouTube Music subscriber a premium subscriber or have YouTube premium, generally, which gave you YouTube Music premium in order to be able to have music playing the background, or to download music, download video videos, and generally, and some other features within the YouTube premium space. So YouTube music is giving only Canadians right now the ability to do that Background music playing, which is kind of nice. It is also something that would be useful in the podcast space because many people do listen to I know that I don’t and I know that many people don’t. But I still recommend to everybody to put YouTube videos up of your podcasts because people do people listen to music and they listen to podcasts on YouTube. They just listen to it in the background while they’re at work or whatever. And it doesn’t require them to have another application. It’s a it’s just a convenience factor and many people do it fine. I think this is a little too much conjecture here. We don’t know what YouTube music is doing. We don’t know what alphabet wants of YouTube. In terms of the podcast space. The new podcast lead is Chi Chuck. And we don’t know what you know, that podcast lead wants in Google podcasts. I think that Google podcasts is a strong platform with an entirely different slice of the web. You know, think about it from the perspective that the blog RSS feed and the podcast RSS feed are there. They’re portions of Google search. They’re not really built for YouTube music. YouTube doesn’t have an RSS feed. It’s not the same type of thing here. So I think that there’s maybe a little bit of jumping across. I understand that that this particular outlets that is publishing the story wants to kind of give some thought in terms of what could should happen in that space. But I’m in the same boat, I do not want Google podcasts integrated into, into YouTube music, I think that it would be a terrible mistake. And I really love what Google has done with Google podcasts, they’ve made a competent podcast application, they have made an incredibly easy way for people to be able to syndicate podcasts to Google podcasts, if you have a secure RSS 2.0 Feed. That is one that includes immediate closure. That’s it, you’re a part of Google podcasts. It’s simple, simple, easy, and makes so much sense. And there’s no reason to go ahead and muck it up by bringing YouTube music into the into the fray. And that’s my, that’s my two cents on it.

Augusto Pinaud 40:50

I also think that you know that you want to be a premium Google subscriber, whatever that thing is called, he’s the only thing that you have rejected more than that is the people calling you ask him to extend your extended warranty.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:06

Although I’ve been a YouTube Premium Member for many years, and I actually really, I really like YouTube premium, it gets rid of your your commercials. And so you don’t watch any advertising on the platform, and it’s still played pays the creators. So I feel very comfortable with the fact that I’m, you know, that revenue is generated to pay those creators, and you get access to the YouTube originals content. So that YouTube studio that produces original content, you get access to downloading on mobile, so like, for example, I’m about to go on a trip, I’m going to be able to download into the YouTube applications, lots of content offline, so I don’t have to worry about internet connectivity. If I’m sitting in the hotel, and I want to be able to watch something. It’s all local, with my Netflix and my YouTube, and everything is on there. And those are just conveniences I really I really like. So you know, there’s a there’s a value to all of this, that YouTube is trying to provide, I wish they would make this a little bit cohesive across the entire alphabet soup, which is, you know, Google phi. If you have a google pixel in the Google Store, Google one program, which is their storage platform, Google Voice, and Google workspace, if you brought all these under one umbrella for me in terms of an omnibus plan, I would be more likely to give you my money to provide that in this cohesive space. So I didn’t have to give you a little bit of money there and a little bit of money there. Now I’ve got to play pay for play pass here. And then pixel pass there. It’s like, come on, people just make it easy for me, right? If you make it easy for me, I’ll be more likely to buy into all of those things with a small discount. All right. On to our final tech story.

Augusto Pinaud 42:42

Our final topic story is Google has now outer generated captions available for free. And I think this came first on Microsoft team so that you could do it as part of having teams to get this caption. But now with Google, you will be able to go and enable the ability to get those captions for free. That is really fantastic.

Frank Buck, EdD 43:05

Google or Zoom soon to says okay,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 43:08

yeah. so and so. So this is actually part of a, like a triumvirate of teams zoom and Google meet. They’re all working on bringing captioning to the space, Google meet already has kept closed captioning or auto captioning, I wouldn’t call it closed captioning. But it has that ability to provide captions for video. I will also note for anybody who’s interested, there is now a an official, and I believe it’s chrome 94, there’s an official option under Accessibility for you to turn on video captioning, and audio captioning for that matter. Basically, anytime you have a Chrome tab open on either on your Windows, Mac iOS, or Chrome OS, for that matter, really any of the OSS that support Chrome, when you have it on, for example, like we launched up this broadcasting studio. And just because I’m in Chrome, it automatically started showing me the audio coming from it captions for it. It’s really sophisticated. And it’s really, really nice to be able to have that auto captioning on screen. And it’s doing it live right here in the browser. So it doesn’t matter where you’re watching, it’s always going to give you text. And so this is not just for folks with disabilities, this is just for all of us who want to be able to understand, maybe you don’t understand an accent, you know, or you’re just, you know, not really with it at that moment. You could do this in a webinar, you can do this all kinds of places, but zoom bringing this to the free accounts. This was available in the paid zoom accounts. Now it’s coming to the free options where you can just enable live transcription. Note though, that that live transcription then creates a txt file that can be downloaded by anybody who attends the meeting. So just not that that’s a problem. But you do want to make sure that you you are aware that it is creating this file that has a transcript that can be downloaded by anybody in the meeting. I think maybe you have some security settings to be able to stop But just be mindful that once you turn it on, then it’s available to everybody. And once it’s available, everybody, they can download it. It’s kind of like the chat, once the chat is open, you can turn on and off the ability for people to be able to save that chat for offline use. And I usually do, because, you know, people are saving all kinds of fun things in the chat, and they want to potentially read it afterward. But not every company or business may want that to be the case. So but I think this is great for productivity, especially when you know, like, say you miss a minute, you know, you step away from the bathroom, you turn your camera off, you run to the restroom, you do a little bio break, you come back, you can like scroll back through the transcript and make sure you didn’t miss anything. And, and you’re not having to watch a replay of anything, you can really catch up to the meeting, even when you take a small break away from things. Plus, I’m using them now as meeting minutes for a lot of my nonprofit work. So if I sit down at a board meeting or something else like that, instead of having to take these copious notes for all of these things, it’s like, you know, we’ve taken down the the substantial, you know, substantive items that need to be done, but everything else has been in the transcript, and we can actually now add it as an exhibit to it. And so, you know, taking detailed hours long, meticulous Note taking is no longer necessary, because you could just jump back to the transcript for those kinds of details. So there can be a lot of time savings in utilizing this feature if you are in zoom. All right, that takes us to the end of our technology articles for the week, and on to our productivity resources of the week. And so of course, every week of gusto, and I call the interwebs, for all the various personal productivity, both articles, podcast episodes and technology articles that we bring to you. And so in this segment, productivity resources of the week, we each bring you tools, apps or services that we found along our productivity journeys that we think you might like. And so first up is an application called routine. This is fairly new to me. But I found this to be fascinating. So they, they call themselves routine. And they, they, they introduced themselves as a productivity operating system for busy people, and they incorporate tasks, Notes, Calendar, and people all in a single application environment. And so think of this as a competitor to say, Outlook, you’re you know, you’re really, you’re really seeing new competition come to the to the for saving, if it will actually play the video, there you go. So the idea here is that wherever you are, you’re now able to convert email into tasks. And that will suck it into routine. And you’ll be able to then interact and engage with calendar events in that same way. And so therefore, you can say I want to do a task at a specific day, and then identify when that time is, and just from your inbox, you’ll be able to very quickly and seamlessly add those things to the calendar so that it goes there in that in that space. And then once you’re at your calendar, you now see all the things you need to do in your calendar, alongside meetings and other appointments that you have. And you’re able to actually see the people associated with those things and engage with them as necessary. So you can say, Okay, well, these are the things we need to talk about in the meeting, these are the things that need to be done as actions out of that meeting is all tracked in the centralized space inside of routine. So again, if you don’t already have a centralized system in which you want to be able to work, routine sounds like a pretty nice option, it’s new. So of course, you have to be mindful of the fact that when anything is new, it could go away. But it seems fairly solid to me in a lot of ways. And I’ve, I’ve enjoyed playing around with it. In my testing, you know, there’s a lot of keyboard friendliness to it. And, and I like the very clean interface and the connectivity between the tools.

Augusto Pinaud 48:46

That’s what I was gonna say the less interesting for me was the connectivity connects already with a center with Trello with notion. So I hope he gets to connect with others soon. But I was interesting, we been able to do all that. So it was a good, good app.

Frank Buck, EdD 49:05

And now I was wondering, does it connect with Google Calendar?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 49:09

Yes, absolutely. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So so it’s connecting to Google Calendar. So your your, all of those tasks are being those all those calendars are being pulled in from Google Calendar, technically. Okay, you can so you can manage it in in those spaces and see them across your various systems. And so I don’t know which calendars it currently supports, but I believe it currently supports Google Calendar. And I’m not sure if it supports any, any others at the present moment. I would have to look that up. But I think it supports Google Calendar, currently only

Frank Buck, EdD 49:42

to me that that would be the main thing because, you know, I guess if someone was using Outlook calendar, they’re going to use Outlook. The rest of the suite is well. Yeah, yes. Yeah.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 49:54

Yeah. And so it works on Mac, iOS and web currently. So it is a bit MAC ish in that sense. You can use it in the web. And as it notes here at the top, it is Google only. So it says Google accounts only, which means that it’s supporting Google Calendar specifically only right now. And you can integrate with notion Trello and Asana. So pretty, pretty interesting application. Alright. Okay. So once you’re

Augusto Pinaud 50:16

there, it will integrate with Outlook calendar as well as calendar.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 50:21

Oh, interesting. So why does it say Google accounts only at the top there, I’m curious, but

Augusto Pinaud 50:27

allows you to integrate Google Calendar according to the documentation,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 50:31

good to know, good to know. All right, on to your productivity resources we could do so productivity

Augusto Pinaud 50:35

is nothing new. Parallels, it’s been this diversion 17. So it’s not a new toy in the market. That’s they have been coming into a series of interesting things with with this new version. One of them is the ability to run chromo as the other one is the ability to run Windows 11. So if you are into that paradigm, where you need to use different operating systems, this is an incredible solution for you to be able to run on your high end Chromebooks, some Windows apps, or IndyMac. To run Windows, and have, instead of trying to have multiple devices, multiple devices, you have one device

Raymond Sidney-Smith 51:22

antastic. So you don’t need to reboot, you can load up a Windows environment. And on your even your apple and one Mac or MacBook, you can go ahead and run full fledged version of Windows. And even it sounds like Windows 11. That’s fine. Yeah.

Augusto Pinaud 51:36

And even you can play to us, this is a virtual desktop, or you can do what they call coherence, where they Hi, everything that is not. So you will open the windows and will act as any other Macron app.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 51:52

Fantastic. Wonderful. Wonderful. All right. Dr. Buck, what is your productivity resource this week?

Frank Buck, EdD 51:57

Okay, you know, sometimes a little thing can be a big thing, if it’s something that you use every day. And I don’t know how long this has been around. But Chrome tab search that I just ran across a couple a couple of weeks ago. For all of us listening to this, think of how many times you’ve got all kinds of tabs open, and you don’t want to close them, because you might need to come back to them later. And you got all these windows, you got all these tabs. You, you you got so much open, you’re just confused. And we talked about podcast earlier. This happened to me all the time. I’m listening to a podcast and it’s in some tab and then the phone rings. And I’m trying to figure out, where is that podcast playing, I’m trying to find the tab it’s in so that I can pause it. So up in the upper right hand corner where we’ve always had the little X to close the window or maximize or minimize, there’s one little thing that little V, and you just click on it. And there’s a list of all of your open tabs. So then you can do so now you’re just looking at the list, click the one you want, and bam, it’s there in front of you from the same list. You can close a window. And then there’s a third thing. How many times have you closed a window by mistake? And it’s like, oh, no, I didn’t mean to do that. And then you don’t even know what URL it was you don’t even know how to get back to that will let you know there’s a keyboard shortcut. What,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 53:30

Shift Ctrl ctrl T Shift Command T on the Mac. Yeah.

Frank Buck, EdD 53:34

And so I’ve told people that all the time. It’s a huge that one is a huge lifesaver. But now you don’t even need that because one of the things in the list is the tabs that you have recently closed, and you can just go back to any of them. So to me, this thing is just a game changer. And it’s so easy. It’s no keyboard shortcut is nothing that you have to add. It’s just right there for you upper right hand corner, the little V. No,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 54:03

I’m sorry. Well, I’m sorry, it wasn’t showing on screen. But I was pressing on it. But for some reason the screen sharing wasn’t showing it. But when you click on it, as as Dr. Buck was noting you click on that little disclosure arrow and you get a search field you get you get the open browser tabs. And then your recent recently closed tabs right below it. Really fantastic, great resource, Dr. Buck. And so with that, that brings us on to our featured story this week. And so each week we pick kind of a featured story we want to cover and this week, it’s all about Google Contacts. Okay, so what have we learned about Google Contacts this week?

Augusto Pinaud 54:40

I know this is incredible news for startups, small businesses, Google begin evolving and even for larger but especially for for small business thing. Google is starting to evolve their context and really becoming more like a CRM where you are going to be able to to see not only the contact, but the interactions that you have with that contact, Hey, what are the kind of documents, the stuff the calendar invites us that you are sharing. So you, if you have Google workspace, you are going to start seeing a lot more about the context. If you are in the same organization, you will see who they report to. And all that in a similar way as Outlook or in exchange have done it for many years. But now you will be able to do it in your Google see all the things I don’t know, it was really, really exciting for me to see Google finally, taking that to a more CRM like, because for a lot of people, it’s now okay, let me try to connect this Unmaker into a CRM. But as Google continued to position them into the solid, new business option to get in this, I think this is a tool that startups a new business will get so much out of it.

Frank Buck, EdD 56:01

Yeah. Yeah, because they’ve always had the the email exchange that you’ve had with the other people, which, which is helpful to see at a glance, all the emails I’ve sent to or received from this other person. But now I have all this other stuff. That’s great.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 56:18

Yeah, so you so what you’re what you’re talking about Dr. Buck, is that in any Google account, and most people don’t know this already, in any Google account, Google contacts already has quite a number of really nice features to it. One, you have labels, and you have the ability to organize contacts by label similar to Gmail. So Gmail has labels, not folders. And so those labels help you organize your Gmail messages. Same thing in Google Contacts, you can organize your contacts by having labels. And so one contact can have multiple labels. So you can say like, oh, well, if you’re in business with your husband, wife, or spouse, you can then have a label that says family. And you could also have a label that says, your business or business name or whatever it might be. And now, that contact will show up in both of those places. And you now also have, and this has been around for quite some time, recent interactions. So you have a multiple calendar events, you’ll see the calendar events where you both were attendees to those meetings, you’ll see messages that have been in, you both have been in the to or CC fields of those of those Gmail messages. And so that kind of information was already surfacing in Google Contacts. And what Google workspace is now doing is surfacing even more information to give working hours, their timezone, so that you know what time it is in their local time, and just all kinds of other really rich information so that you know more about the person with whom you’re in contact. And this isn’t a CRM and I know that we want to kind of jump to that conclusion that somehow Google is going to all of a sudden turn Google contacts into a CRM, it’s really not a CRM, but it really does give you this rich, contact based situation. And for years, I’ve used Google Contacts as kind of a light dossier, where I’ve been able to in the notes section of Google Contacts, just keep all kinds of information, you know, like, Dr. bucks, young, little dog brandy, right? Like, I know, Brandon’s name, because it’s in my Google Contacts note, I have that in there for him. And so it’s just like a place where when I get a phone call from someone, I can go ahead and look at those kinds of contact information pieces. And, you know, like, I’m a brain like a sieve. So, you know, wanting to remember details like that, I don’t need to I have an external mind, I have this extended mind, so to speak, by virtue of using Google Contacts and Evernote to some greater extent, but your contacts is really powerful there,

Frank Buck, EdD 58:42

you know, take something that’s a weakness and make the weakness irrelevant. You know, how many people you talk to them twice a year, and you can never remember their children’s names, or the spouses name? Well, you know, put it in, you know, I like to do it in Evernote, but you have same thing here. You can do it in Google Contacts. And then when you know, the person calls, you just pull it up. And there’s, you know, there’s the information about what she what she talked about last, so that she can follow up, you know, how’s your how’s your wrist? Yo, I know, last time we talked, you just have an operation on it. It hasn’t let go. I don’t remember all that stuff. Yeah,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 59:22

exactly, exactly. It’s so it’s so helpful. And like Google Contacts has a whole bunch of other features. And we can go on all day. But I will know that the other really great feature that it has is deduplication. It’s called merging fix in the most recent addition. But if you have lots and lots of contacts, like I do, you know, I have 1000s of contacts and Google Contacts. All I have to do is click on merge and fix it will go through all of the contacts, identify people who are the same individuals or likely the same individuals, and it will present them to me and say, hey, we’d like to just get rid of some of these duplicates, and then it merges all those details together so that you have one contact for each individual, as opposed to having five and six with the world. Email here and a phone number there and a personal email there and, and a home number there just gets it all together into one place. And the thing is, is that you don’t have to live in Google Contacts to use it, you can just import your contacts into Google Contacts, do the merge and fix and then export those bad babies, Bad boys, bad girls, whatever all of them to whatever contact system you use. So you can just use it for temporal deduplication as well as a backup. So that say that you’re in the Apple ecosystem, you just want a backup of your contacts, every six months, once a year, whatever, just take them all, export that to a CSV, import them into Google Contacts, and now you have them all there for you. In that sense, I like doing that the opposite direction. But you know, however you do it, I like to just download a contact database, so that I have it just in case something were to happen in the future, all to say that Google Contacts is becoming more and more powerful. And of all things in our lives, our contacts are really a representation of our of our Inter personal our social worlds. And so Google Contacts has been a central portion, part of my own personal productivity system. And it’s great to see that now on the workspace side, they’re giving some love to it and giving it more attention in that way.

Augusto Pinaud 1:01:13

You know, and it is important to mention for people, you know, it is a great place to search information, you know, if you’re a parent, you have kids, okay, and, you know, you don’t know then the name of your parents, the parents of your kids, friends, okay, sorry, you know, the kid, okay. And so this is a great time to put on those notes, the name of the school, in my case, my daughter swim. So when it’s contexts that are related to the swim, I put the name of the team so that way, when, okay, she went to the house off, and my brain goes blank, and I cannot remember the parents and kids, or anything, I can go in now, okay, type the name of the school or the name of the swimming team. And that will now give me a much shorter list to remember that and even when I put, you know, so and so I put in parenthesis, you know, so and so mom, so so that, so I can remember who they are. So not only you can get really critical information for work, really critical information for relationships, but also information that are going to make your life way easier.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:02:19

Okay, you just opened up Pandora’s box there. So another thing that I’ve done for years and Google Contacts is that Google Contacts pulls profile pictures from people’s Google accounts. So this is so helpful when you have people that you have not met before in real life, you know, and you just don’t know what they look like. And so you’re just like, who am I going to meet? Many times, their profile image will pull in if they have one published, and it’s so helpful, because you’re like, I don’t know who I’m going to meet. And then you look at the Google account, and it shows their profile image, you’re like, who now when I walk into the cafe, or to the restaurant, I’m not walking up to this potential business client without knowing what they look like. And so it’s a, it’s saved me on several occasions, where I’m just like, looking around the room, and I’m like, wait a second, this person doesn’t look like the name, I presume they’re supposed to look like, whatever, then you know, you know, presumption is or assumption is, and so I’ll open up my Google Contacts and open up the Google contact, and then look to see if it pulls in a Google contact image. And I’m like, oh, that’s the person who, uh, you know, sitting at the bar waiting in the lobby. And it’s helped me on so many occasions. So Google Contacts has that additional benefit that I think, you know, across the board, you have all these little things that make up something that is very, very powerful. That, I think is just it makes it a must have application for me in my world. Any final thoughts about Google Contacts? And its recent updates? Nope. Good. All right, that closes out our featured story. This week, Agusta, we at least have one announcement we wanted to let folks know about

Augusto Pinaud 1:03:50

Yes, we click up just got a valuation of $4 billion after they raise a 400 million round. And it is exciting to see how many now productivity applications are getting into this valuations are getting into these big games. Because for many years of personalise follow productivity, we are now seeing how productivity is getting an important place in these portfolios. And in this investments, and I think it’s something really incredible.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:04:26

Yeah, it’s been part of ecosystems, you know, Apple, Google, Microsoft have really commanded productivity software. And now we’re seeing independent companies starting to get as many different variations of seed round funding Series A, you know, reggae, you know, loans as well as a series a funding rounds. And that’s really exciting to see. And I think that’s something that we’d like to cover more. So if you come across any stories of that kind of, you know, nature, the financial side of productivity, we’re starting to see the industry mature in a way that I think is very powerful, you know, click up 10 years ago would have never been able to muster a $4 billion valuation notion, same thing. You know, it’s it’s raised a considerable amount of money now. And this is in the kind of wake of the forebears, you know, Evernote was really that first unicorn status startup. From there we had asana and Trello Trello was a part of the larger, you know, kind of conglomeration of Atlassian. So it really was underneath that umbrella and Asana being the next step out now a publicly traded company. So I’m really just curious to see, as we cover more of these stories, what the what the maturity of the personal productivity software space is going to look like. And I I’m just, it makes me feel good, because it makes me know that there are solid businesses out there that are capable of doing good for your personal productivity, and also doing good for profitability. And that means I’ll be around a while. And it just, you know, it’s terrible when, you know, any major company kills off a product just because it’s just a line item to them, they don’t particularly care. But when you have a company like Asana or Trello, or otherwise, and it’s their heart soul in the application and profitability means they can continue to support you and your personal productivity into the into the future. I think that’s just a really strong statement for the world of our world, and a really good for you. So with that, let’s go ahead and close out Dr. Buck. I really appreciate you joining us as always on always,

Frank Buck, EdD 1:06:34

always a pleasure to be here guys.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:06:37

Where Can folks keep up to date with you and what you’re doing out there in the world?

Frank Buck, EdD 1:06:42

All right, come over to Frank Buck dot o RG not calm but Frank Buck dot o RG do new piece of content every week. So new blog posted is also a little short podcast, YouTube video. When you come over, hop on my email list, so that you keep up with what I’m doing since a couple of free gifts. And stay tuned at the end of this year. You know, I think it’s December 28. We’re coming out with a new book called Get Organized digitally. The educators oh gosh, what is the subtitle of my own book The the educators guide to time management. But don’t let the title fool you. You don’t have to be an education. If you’re handling email if you’re handling task if you’re handling all this digital stuff. This book is for you. It’s it’s the real nitty gritty. It’s the kind of things like that we’ve been talking on this show about the the little things that you don’t every day just skyrocket your productivity. So absolutely. Like I say, Please, December 20. But come over to the website. We’ll keep you informed. Thanks so much for having me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:07:54

Absolutely. You can find Dr. Buck at on Twitter and Instagram at Dr. Frank Buck. So he’s on Twitter and Instagram at Dr. Frank Buck. Stay tuned for the December 28 launch of his new book really excited. Get organized digitally. Thanks as always Dr. Buck for joining us here on Anything But Idle. Alright Gousto we have made it to the end of episode 90. And with that we’ve covered the productivity and related technology news this week. Thanks to you Augusto for putting together the show this and every week. And we’ll see you next week. Thank you very much. Okay, on anything but idle.com. That is our website, you’ll find our show notes with links to all the stories that we cover today, tools of the week, our productivity resources of the week, some extra stories we didn’t cover, because we just don’t have the time. We have text transcripts that are readable on the page, you can click on the Read More link and it’ll expand it, you can read it right there while you listen or watch the show. You can also download it as a PDF. There’s a link below that Read More link, you can download the PDF, take it offline, and go ahead and read it and listen while you’re away from your desk or computer or the Internet. After serving our show notes, please let us know if we’ve missed a story. Because it does happen, you can go ahead and leave a comment. You can also tweet our DMS at Anything But Idle on Twitter. And you can use our contact form on the website. So go to anything but idle.com click on contact and go ahead and shoot us a message and let us know if there is anything else that you wanted to comment or ask us about. You can also join us in personal productivity club. That’s the digital community dedicated to personal productivity enthusiast technologists, creators, all of you folks doing personal productivity stuff in the world. We have a specific group dedicated to Anything But Idle there. So if you want to, you can head over to anything but idle.com forward slash community and you’ll be able to be taken sign up immediately right there and join the community and join the Anything But Idle group that is in there for that. Alright, if this is your first time watching the live stream, hit the subscribe button next to our name that’ll go ahead and get you noticed Find when we do go live weekly. And if you’re listening to the podcast, feel free to add us to your favorite podcast app that really helps us grow it helps you to get the podcast episodes downloaded for free every week when we do put those out. If you’ve enjoyed spending time with us, or listening to us today, feel free to leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts or Stitcher click the thumbs up icon on YouTube. Go ahead and rate or review us in the podcast app of your choice if it allows you. Your compliments help us reach more of the personal productivity community. And so thank you for doing that. Thank you for the ratings we’ve received thank you for the feedback and all with that we will see you all next time on Anything But Idle. Here’s to your productive life.

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

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