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Each week, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud review and provide commentary on the week’s news in the world of personal productivity and related technologies. This week, our featured story was an article, What Beats a Four-Day Workweek?, that took a (European) twist on work schedules with a 10-month work calendar, and Ray and Augusto discuss the practicalities of it.

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In this Cast | What Beats a Four-Day Workweek?

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Headlines & Show Notes | What Beats a Four-Day Workweek?

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

Business & Finance Segment

New Tool 1 (Ray)

Kanbanote

New Tool 2 (Augusto)

Unsplash for iOS — Internet’s source of freely-usable images on your phone

Bonus

Volley – asynchronous video app (Thanks, Michelle!)

Featured Story of the Week

What Beats a 4-Day Workweek? A 10-Month Year | Inc.com

Announcements

Samsung Galaxy S22 Unpacked event date is now official

Other News

Raw Text Transcript

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

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00
Hello, personal productivity 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 95. It is January 31 2022. And our episode is entitled today, what beats a four day workweek. And of course, the productivity and technology news this week is covered each week by us, we read and review the headlines of the week. And to get us started, we actually cover the things that show up in the productivity blogosphere and the podcast space. And so Gousto what is our first article this week?

Augusto Pinaud 0:43
So our first article this week comes from the podcast actually lead to win with Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt. And they discuss in the podcast about the great race of men and you know, from their great resignations, to the great renovation. And I really like that the podcast and when they were discussing, you know why the great resignation is here to stay and why the perspective shift that people experience during this pandemic is going to stay here you know, the advantage of the hybrid work model and how company culture plays into the growth on health of the team. But what I liked the most was it is one of the first I know when we talk about the great resignation, there is a lot of negativity around it. And I have always seen it as something great. Okay. And this is the first time I see another products going into the grade. You know what? No, it’s not about the grades resignation. It’s about school degree renovation. Yeah. Energy will move, people will move. Companies will grow because of that. Yes, some companies will disappear. I get it. But it’s also part of the evolution. It’s part of what happened I was discussing weeks prior with somebody talking about GE, General Electric and General Electric 20 years ago. Was this still a monster that today? I’m not saying it’s not a monster, but it’s not a monster in the news?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:13
Right? Absolutely. All right, on to our next article this week.

Augusto Pinaud 2:18
So our next article is from the our friends on their product, or our friend productivist. And he says six personal factors that impact productivity. And Mike Vardy talks about sleep issues, how you start your day, but he called the Social vise, personal problems, your home and your mental estate. And I really liked the article was really well done. Mike Vardy writes very well so but anyways, it is important to look and to have those check six checks point mark, you know, what are you how is your sleep working? How was your day studying? What is the routine, you know, he talks about, hey, plan the day before and wake up early. So you could do this planning, and which one of those to work for you. You know, you have personal problems, your home, your mental state, how is your mental state and I’m lucky to have people that I can check during the day as my mental state flow, open them. You know, I’m human at the end of the day, and that happened. And I’m it’s I’m really lucky to have people that I can tell them a quick message, you know, to to bring me back that perspective in my case.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:33
Yeah, absolutely. All right on to our next article this week, all about relaxation as a skill.

Augusto Pinaud 3:40
I love that article. Okay. i It was almost the first new and I was going to vote for feature of the week because the article came from life hacker and his title, why you should think relaxing as a skill, not a reward. And there are two people close in my life who don’t know how to relax, okay, one of them thinks is being lazy. Okay, don’t relax because he’s been lazy. And it’s been many years. Struggling with that because for me, relaxing is a skill. taking time off taking take care of myself is a skill. It’s not a skill that I had all my life, but it’s a skill that I acquire it you know, I look on depending how my stress is on my mental level is and all that I started looking at spaces on my calendar, to block to do relaxing to do self care to grab a book without guilt and go and eat something while I’m reading before pandemic at least. Now I cook and go somewhere else and eat but you know, but even even during this pandemic that I don’t go out as much. If I block lunch for me for isa isa reading lunches, I blocked them in the column. Okay, I don’t eat them in the kitchen. Because I what that lunch means to me. So I’m going to grab a book, and I’m going to eat my meal, as I say, read, and I need something that is really relaxing for me. So I really, like I agree 100% We need to start approaching this relaxation and self care is a skill, not us. reward that you get for do or not do.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:25
Yeah, most most of the time, many of the articles that we read and review, I tend to see as refreshers of things that I already knew. And this was definitely novel to me. And I think that if anyone has not read on this topic before, even though this is not like the end all be all treatise on it, it is an introduction to a concept that I have, I have not seen before, and I really appreciated this week is that when when I typically think of relaxing, I, I separate those, I have like what I call my biological fitnesses, right, the various areas in which you need to be fit in order to be able to be productive, and rest and rejuvenation are two different things. And here, what they’re talking about when they’re talking about relaxation, in my sense, falls into that rejuvenative activity state. And I’m just I’m really pleased by the concept that you should be practicing, relaxing, just like you would be practicing rejuvenation, which kind of encompasses relaxing, because rejuvenation is actually you know, exerting energy towards something that’s not toward a work or other productive activity that is not like required a view. And the idea of it being a reward, it always, that’s how people tend to talk about that, especially in the personal productivity space, right in the time management space is like, Oh, you can relax once you’ve done enough, when in reality, if you can do it from the perspective that you’re practicing a skill, just like you would practice getting things done skills or any of those others, they really, it really makes me think about it in a very, very different way. And that was that was very intriguing to me. And I’m going to continue to dwell on that I’m probably going to journal a bit about it about it, because I think it’s something that more of us need to think about when it comes to things that are good for us. And like sleep is a is a complex set of skills, right? It’s knowing how to turn off at a particular time in the day following a routine that gets you better sleep, if we start thinking about sleep, not as a reward, or you know, they as they some people cheekily say, you know, I’ll sleep when I’m dead kind of thing. You know, we need to start thinking about these things, as skills that we’re practicing to be better at so that we can actually live fulfilled lives. a productive life is a life you’ve directed, like consider a liberal life, right? One wishes, you have freedom to make choices about things. And so this definitely resonated very well with me, and I appreciate it. All right, on to our next story this week.

Augusto Pinaud 7:51
So our next story this week is from Steven Pressfield. And it’s titled The fear of success, anonymous fossa. And interestingly enough, when I didn’t know that sharing them the article that he was joined an organization called fear of success animals, aka fossa. And what is more funny about this is that the group got so popular that needed to this man. But But then, you know, he he discussed and Pressfield, you know, has talked about what he called resistance. And it was really interesting, because then he is, close the article saying the answer again, can be no can be nothing other than will somehow we have to teach yourself to jam ourselves shut. So suddenly, in a deep breath, and you jump off the cliff, and somebody on the responses, was saying, Yeah, Ray Burberry Bradbury used to say, jump off the cliff and build the wings on the way down. And, you know, as the article says, So success cannot allow you to go anywhere, by definition can never succeed. So, breathe, hold air, and jump.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 9:10
And this is this is very interesting to me. And again, another one of those thought provoking articles that I think requires some some dwelling on as it relates to what you think and perceive about fear of success, but also fear of failure. And, you know, the, the, what I frequently talk to people about is the fact that their fear of success is actually the fear of failure beyond success, right? It’s that you set a standard for yourself. And once you achieve that level of success, then you feel like you’re gonna fail thereafter. And therefore, it’s kind of House of Cards. You know, everything kind of crumbles down very easily, when in reality, that’s not how it should work and not certainly shouldn’t be certainly shouldn’t be how you perceive that for yourself. And so, you know, this, this always resonates a lot of different thoughts for me, emotionally and otherwise when it comes to the fear of success in that sense. All right onto our end. next article this week

Augusto Pinaud 10:01
from leadership Frick, that Dan Rockwell writes about seven reasons why returning to the office is a good idea. Currently, according to the article, at least 85% of the current remote workforce is enjoying working remotely remote work and is here to stay, but 55% of those current remote working, will like to return to their office as soon as it’s safe, as far in at least what I’ve been reading on other articles, as you can keep a hybrid model. And I don’t think most of us 85 85% Or even that 55%. You know, it’s looking forward to go back to five days a week in the office. So the question is going to be the full remote or the hybrid, and it seems to be like the hybrid is here to stay even that he pinpoints you know, seven reasons to return collaboration. And I another seven, you know, collaboration, I respectfully disagree. I’ve been doing collaboration online, you know, from everything, call it mind maps, online collaboration cameras, I don’t think so creativity, same thing, productivity, no. Culture building is one in which I may be unwilling to concede us the it’s easier, especially when you have different generations in the organization to build a culture that is fully remote mentoring, again, I disagree, reduced that tech fatigue. No, I don’t see any difference on the tech fatigue, if I’m going to the office, or I’m going to stay 100% remote. And the seven one that he mentioned his career opportunities. And this is something that was 100%. True before pandemic. I wonder how much of that is true when a still many of the organizations are now getting promotions growing? It’s been two years of this, and how critical is in many of these organizations to look at this and say, Okay, we’re only going to promote now people who are in the office, well, nobody’s in the office. So how that’s going to work? I don’t know. That’s it, it was a good article, I just not necessarily agree with the seven points that he had, I think the career opportunity, the the cultural building, maybe, but the career opportunities, it is really a matter of the organization. And as we were talking at the beginning, that’s where these big renovation is coming. You know, these people saying, Okay, if you’re going to make me go back, but you’re not going to give me the opportunities to grow. I leave.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:49
I think I think this goes back to many of the other. Yeah, many of the things we’ve discussed before, I agree with you that that culture may be an issue for some companies, I think the more important reason to return to an office are those companies and those staff positions that require physical in person reality, right? That’s absolutely necessitating otherwise, the reasons for returning to the office all here, lack of imagination, from the part of leadership from the part of managers and the part of, of co workers, if we if we use our imaginations, it’s like when you read a book versus when you watch the movie adaptation, right? Like, it’s just the reality that when you read the book, it’s always going to be better, because you got to construct the world, in your mind’s eye. And when we talk about culture, culture is something that’s not real. But it is something that is that is imagined by the people who are who collectively create that culture. Right. And, and culture is the organizations that habits are to individuals, they are slow to develop. But once they have developed, they are they are slow to change. And so we want to be able to really thoughtfully think through how do we want culture to move. And that means that after the last two years, you know, of people being in a place where they have had to move slowly away from an existing culture, and adapt and adopt to a new paradigm. That means leaders also need to think about how they lead in that environment that has mentorship that is support that is making sure that you’re giving people all of the things they need career opportunities, and otherwise, these can all be fixed. I’m not saying this, that technology should fix all of these things. For example, I’m really thinking that at least a few times a year, staff should get together in person for some kind of team building and other kinds of work, that it’s just nice to be in person and do those things together. And, you know, like you can you can, you can work around these things in smaller ways that doesn’t require everyone to take an hour to two hours a day in commute time and waste that when they could do that in a remote work environment and even to the effect that like for me, I can’t wait to go back to an office, just not my office. because that happens to be three and a half hours drive from here, right? Like, I don’t want to do it. So I can, I can work remotely, but it’ll be in an office environment that’s convenient and close to me. And I think that everybody has to kind of come to terms with the fact that work is going to be done in this separated distributed fashion. And again, I go back to what Matt Mullenweg, who’s the, the progenitor of the WordPress project, he talks about the idea of distributed work, as opposed to remote hybrid or otherwise, we’re talking about how to get work done in a distributed fashion, no matter where people are located. And once we start getting our head wrapped around those fundamentals, we get a much richer picture picture of how productivity happens, how business productivity can happen. All right, on to our next

Augusto Pinaud 15:45
on our last article for today is from Inc and is how to boost productivity at work by 73%. Well, let’s Ben meetings three days a week, I don’t know if we can ban in most organizations meetings three days a week, but I’ve been seen more and more meetings ban on Friday, or at least on Friday afternoon. And I think that’s a movement in the right direction, you know, there is no matter if they’re in person or remote. It’s it’s the number of meetings is the number of meetings that you have, and everyone has a limit. And I think the more organizations limit the times that you can have such meeting, for example, saying, hey, there is no more meetings after 3pm, great, then now people will be able to get to their office at 3pm and do work or be a scrambled eggs by then. But but the article talks about how Facebook now matter, it’s doing that, and it’s blocking the days. And again, I think it is a good proposition. And I think the more organizations come into reducing the time allowed by this means the better productivity will be.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:03
Yeah, I like the I like the notion of it, I think the 73% more productive part I disagree with just because, you know, that’s that’s an amorphous you know, study that was done. But the the idea here that we can limit meetings, for me is like, we flip it on its head, which is like, only have meetings that matter. Right, like only have meetings that are that require people to be there and only invite the people who who need to be at the meetings to be there. And, you know, like the end result is, if you if you choose to have people show up to a meeting who don’t need to be there want to be there, that’s very different than requiring all hands meetings for meetings that don’t need to be all hands. Right. And so like, my world revolves around meetings with my clients, I you know, that’s how I how I handle things, right? Like I need to meet with them in order to be able to work with them. And so like, it’s a little bit different for me than, say, in a large corporate environment where meetings can be the bane of some people’s existence whereby for for others, especially some managers, meetings are there are literally their days, right, like go from one meeting to the next to the next. And that’s how they, they manage they manage by virtue of doing these things. And it requires potentially, and I don’t, I’m not saying that this is right, but like potentially looking at ways in which you manage differently, whereby you don’t go ahead and do this. And I don’t know if you have this in the in the Episode Notes for today, Augusto, but Michelle had had had suggested that application volley, from Twitter, and I’ve been playing around with it, and it’s an remarkably interesting asynchronous video based communication platform. We’ll get to it, we

Augusto Pinaud 18:48
will get to it because it is on the show notes today. And I also been playing with it. So we will we will get to that we’ll get to that when we talk about the tools.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:57
Well, like this is this is where like, the last article also kind of blends in for me, which is that we keep thinking about things as being, oh, remote work is so difficult, and you know, we’re getting fatigued, Zoom fatigue and other things like that. And it’s like, no, we can actually use technology in a way that actually forces us to use to have a right relationship as the Episcopalian say, right, like having a right relationship with the technology and with ourselves. So that we’re not, as David Allen would say, being inappropriately engaged with things, you know, and so like being we just, we have a tendency in the meeting world to think that, okay, meetings are bad because we have so many of them, but it’s just because of the volume based stress that it provides. And for a lot of people it then becomes the quality of the meetings are also mismanaged. So if we can have high quality meetings and not have meetings that aren’t necessary, then the right number of meetings will happen. And that means developing better leaders and managers and making sure that we’re using technology to actually, you know, do what it’s supposed to do which is to facilitate greater work. And I think those are all pieces that I feel like these articles tend to just, you know, rub me just the wrong way in that sense because we can, we can do better without vilifying meetings per se, per se or vilifying people, either because I don’t think the managers or leaders are bad or wrong or, you know, evil people, right. Like, as a manager, myself, and as a leader myself, you know, I mean, I’m not I’m not trying to harm people by having meetings, I just know that they’re necessary. And therefore, I want to make sure the necessary ones happen in the right ways. And so with that, we’ve talked about the productivity articles for the week. And we’re going to take a break for a word from our sponsor this week, which is co working space by personal productivity club. And then when we get back, we will continue on with our Tech News. This week, our featured story of the week, our productivity resources of the week, and otherwise, and so we will see you after the break. Well, working

Sponsor Voice Over 20:56
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 a 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.com 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 to, 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 22:06
Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle and Ray Sidney-Smith joined, of course with Augusta pinout. And so we are going to get into our technology articles for the week, what’s our first article Agusta

Augusto Pinaud 22:16
so how to reinstall Windows 11 without deleting happens, and Windows general reinstall Windows that people I have known to need to reinstall them. It’s also something that requires some cursing and some crying. And sometimes both of those together. And Windows Microsoft is trying to make that better. And now this article for to make use of will show you three or four ways to reinstall Windows, but we sow deleting everything with Windows 11. Specifically, I’m talking, okay, and how you can go and follow instructions, you know if but I think finally, this is something on the right direction is something I’ve been able to do on the Mac for many years. But in the Windows world, a little bit more delicate.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:03
Yeah, I mean, the Unix based operating system has always been just a different animal, which is what Mac OS is built on top of the Macintosh system since days immemorial have been built on Unix. So, you know, it’s just a different beast. I think this is a really remarkable achievement with Windows 11. So I do give Windows, Microsoft credit for what they’re doing here. And I hope I hope that going forward, they’ll be able to retro actively do some of this for Windows 10. I doubt they will do it. I would like have zero feeling that they will do this. But I would I wish that because so many people are going to stay on Windows 10 For so many years forward, if they could do this with with Windows 10, since really windows 10 and 11. And the difference is very, very minimal. So, you know, the idea of doing this retro actively for Windows 10 would actually help a lot of people but I don’t think they’re going to do it. But I still give them credit for setting this up. It’s I will

Augusto Pinaud 23:53
give them credit for the 11th I will not burn a candle of hope.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:59
Neither will I neither will I’m just it’s a it’s a hope, hope and a prayer. Okay, next up

Augusto Pinaud 24:04
iOS 11 Sorry, 15.3 is out for iPhone owners as an iPad os 15.3 is out. It fix some some of the safari bugs that it is really, really good. So if you have an iOS device, please make sure. Go and update. And now the next article we have is great, because now I can use big G name and follow by the word stop. And then instead of tormenting our listeners that will make things to stop. So the Google Assistant will now see stalking when you simply say stop. So that’s also Yeah, socially for the people like us.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:58
So stepping back to iOS 15 Point Is that the one that introduced the bug on Apple Watch? There’s a there’s a watch iOS bug that folks were having with it not synchronizing some data. Is, is that something that we’re Is that is that with the introduction of 15.3? So if anybody is just aware, if you if for some reason your Apple Watch stops synchronizing, I believe they’re working on a bug that is introduced by 15.3. I think it’s 15.32. Yeah, yeah. So so just be mindful, I’m sure they’ll push up, push it out of out of watch out of, you know, out of band update, you know, very quickly to update it. But it is something that people have been noticing is that they’re, they’re watching us something on the watchlist stopped synchronizing because of that. So just be mindful, these things happen. Yeah, but going forward to the Google Assistant, I really, really like this. And I immediately started using it because there’s just so much verbosity, in its responses sometimes. And I like the responses, because I like to know, like, if I set a timer for if I’m in the kitchen, and I set a timer, I want to know that the right amount of time has been set. So it’s always nice. But sometimes it just goes on and on about like Wikipedia entries. And you’re like, I was just asking a very basic question. I got the answer. I didn’t need all the other stuff. So now just being able to say stop is a really, really nice feature I liked I liked that a lot. Okay, on to our next.

Augusto Pinaud 26:22
So the next one, it’s for the people have to do it, or the users have to do is to do is to came, you know, it’s a new page. Sorry for their filters. But more interesting, they came now with a filter query generator. To do this is really powerful. But the query can get tricky and can get confusing, you know, on personal productivity club, that was one of the nice things on the to do is mastermind is common, talk about our queries and getting people to bring it Yes. How to solve that because, well, we are not developers. So we insist and do it in a certain way. So now you can come and put Okay, which tasks would you like to filter type, and it will help you to create a filter. If that doesn’t work, then you can go to the other part of the help article with many more ideas of how to make your things work.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:18
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Yeah, but the fun thing is, I love the I love the tools whereby you can use the advanced search, you know, dropdowns, build it, and then it shows you the syntax, you know, written out, so you can see the search and vice versa, kind of interpret those. Remember, the milk has had it for years, and I’ve always appreciated its ability to like, once I do all the drop down with the advanced search, it then shows me what it would be. So I start to learn the language. And I can tell I don’t have to leave the keyboard, I can just type it and get to that search faster. Same thing with Evernote, you know, being able to type in those advanced searches and then see what the outcome is, has been so helpful to be able to build out strong search functions. And again, you know, filtering is very different than search to me. But I get I get the point of what they’re trying to create here. And I like it. I like it. Alright, on to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 28:09
Finally, well, I should let me be more Kinder Apple appears to have fixed the ongoing outlook iCloud server issue that was causing some apps that have implemented like Cloud support that they kind of force it to fail

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:23
seeing properly. Interesting.

Augusto Pinaud 28:27
And it been really annoying, because I don’t know exactly what broke it. But then they won good notes on many others that I use daily, and I trust, I was grabbing the other device sync failed error 503. And it was kind of a pain to get them synchronized again, apparently, is fixed and his work. And I can say I have not seen any more issues since this was announced. So if you are not, if you continue having this request, the read request fail with HTTP status code 503. So if you’re still getting those errors, check for an update. But it should be fixed for any application that use iCloud for sync issues.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:19
That’s so interesting. I use good notes. Also, thanks to you. And I had not seen any of these synchronization issues. So I’m thankful that I kind of dodged that bullet, because that would have been very frustrating. So this is this is this is good that it’s

Augusto Pinaud 29:33
that it’s fixed. Yeah, it’s been extremely annoying.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:36
On to our next story,

Augusto Pinaud 29:38
Google ducks users can now insert text or image watermark to protect their work. This is really exciting. I have not use water marks a lot in documents or my career in general, but, but I always find that interesting. You know that you can do it and I think it’s good for Google docs to continue pushing the features to make Google doc more powerful.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:05
Well, as I said to you, when when we first pulled this story, welcome to work 95. Just even, I’m so glad Google Docs has this I do, I’m really, really glad that there’s a lot of really good use cases, right for this. But it just like word 95 had this, you know, that. So that people have an understanding to be able to do this kind of layered approach does create is a very, very sophisticated and complex feature set built into HTML using, you know, a web based application to do what they’re doing. It’s just very unique and very interesting, it was probably very low priority also, for them to put this into, into the tool. But I’m really, really glad that they that they put this in there. And so yeah, I’m glad I’m glad to have it. And most people should have it, you know, within the normal scheduled release schedule for Google workspace. And so we’ll see that rolling out across the Google workspace world, very soon over the next probably two weeks or so, so good on them.

Augusto Pinaud 31:11
So in our last article, for this week, at least from this section on the big tech, small tech, is microwaves, Monterey, sharply universal control, and other new features are finally out. So you will be able to play and via FaceTime calls. So now I can call my parents and we can watch a movie together in FaceTime. Or I can start using universal control where I can use the keyboard in my iPad to work on my iMac and to work or vice versa. That is coming. The article talks about the universal control talk about what are the requirements that Apple establish how they’re going to work, Safari, and more, but I thought it was important to have it and now even finally airplay, it’s going to work to the Mac just took them a long time.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:05
Interesting. Yeah, I’m very curious about this whole universal control perspective, it’s similar to the way in which the apple air pods had the ability to detect which device you were looking at. And therefore what you would hear from you need the latest devices, and you need all the sensors on. And that seems to me to be a very heavy battery drain. So just be mindful of the fact that you know, this is going to require much more than than just a simple setup. But once it gets set up, there may be a lot of really great benefits to your productivity, one having one keyboard and capable of working on multiple devices. I’ve done that for years with KVM, switches and wireless keyboards to my devices. So that I don’t have, you know, six computers in front of me, I want to have two keyboards, not six keyboards. So there’s some value to all of that. So

Augusto Pinaud 32:55
one for me in particular is interesting because I record the show in a Chromebook. But that means if I can start doing that, then I can put the Mac where the Chromebook is, and now retire the Chromebook maybe and use the Mac to do the podcast machine. I just switch users and be good with that as I can then don’t need to try to work in there. I can work in the iPad. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:19
yeah, very, very cool. I’m really excited to see shortcuts, come to the back. That’s a like, I know that I know that Apple is planning on releasing, I think the M one Pro and the M one pro max or the M one max for the Mac Minis. And I’m thinking Hmm, that would be really interesting to have a device that does shortcuts on the desktop, because I’ve played around with shortcuts on on the iPad, and the automation functional effects and functionality is very powerful, but I would really love the desktop to to have that functionality. So that that’s something that would that would pull me in to upgrade my aging, you know, MacBook to being a to being either a Mac Mini or an iMac I just I don’t think I have enough disk space.

Augusto Pinaud 34:05
The recommendation directly from David is to go to the 17 inch screen and you have not take the thing that

Raymond Sidney-Smith 34:11
he did he did tell us that both of our faces, so we haven’t recorded we haven’t recorded so very good stuff there. Okay, so those are tech stories this week. Let’s move on to our business and finance segment. We have some news there.

Augusto Pinaud 34:26
The first is Apple report. His first quarter was modest 11% for a whole record. It’s amazing. It is amazing what they are doing and the second use that we have that really tied up with this is for the first time. Apple become the tops Mark phone brand in China. Now this is the first time in six years that they accomplish that and no be the top 10 the top in, in China A lot of phones.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 35:02
Yeah, well, and I’m a little concerned because that means Apple needs to be deferential to the Chinese government, which has an authoritarian bent. So I’m a little bit concerned for them. You know, I will, I will, I’m not the biggest Apple fan, I do, I do want them to continue doing well. And I don’t want them to get put into a position where they’re where they’re, you know, beholden to the Chinese government. And so I hope that they they dance that line? Well, I think Tim Cook is a pretty good CEO in that regard. He he’s, he’s, uh, he’s cutthroat enough to know how to deal with China and how to how to deal with US regulators. Equally. So hopefully, it won’t be an issue. But he seems to have gotten on the wrong side of the Dutch.

Augusto Pinaud 35:45
Yeah, yeah, he’s on the wrong side of the Dodge, Apple got fined 5 million euros on a dispute over a dating app. And in spite of the allowing, you know, others other build platforms, you know, you need to the Dutch government, the Dutch organization, ACM is asking apple that they need to allow their apps to be other forms of payments other than Apple Pay. And they did not respond apparently on time, or they did not do it to the organization. requirement and organization decide to find them for 5 million euros.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:26
Yeah, this, this didn’t actually make it into the list. But I’ll note it here, which I think is really interesting, which is that Apple is going to be releasing an option for an unlisted app in the App Store. So that that app developers will be able to apply to Apple to basically have an app that is not in the App Store, but only provided via a direct link. And with the announcement of that, that really is quite interesting to the whole like that whole world. So for example, if I wanted to build an app, and I only want to give it to people who pay me off Apple, right, so the app would be free to install. But in order to get access to it, I would have to provide you with a link very different than say testflight today where that’s a whole different process. This would this would not show up in the App Store at all, it would not show up anywhere else. And that’s really like that’s the first step toward being able to work around this problem. But Apple is under under the heat right now to give an option for be able people to be able to pay, even though it’s not through Apple Pay or Apple’s payment protocol payment processing system. And so very, very interesting. I don’t know where we’re going to go with that, will Google be required to do the same thing? Right now Google really lets you do whatever you want, for the most part, you know, minus a few of the kerfuffles. They’ve had with some of the developers, they’ve mostly been flexible in that regard. So we’ll see. We’ll see how that goes.

Augusto Pinaud 37:53
On next article, one plus one password plans to get companies to actually use one bathroom. And what they mean was done is one password officially decide, right? Or to compete with others like chocolate, let’s supplement each other. Let’s work together as a team. Let’s find a standard that is stronger together. And you know, we have bring one password into this finance, business and finance segment before for money that they have given this is the kind of things that I believe will continue having one password into this segment, as not only they are getting cash, but they’re I think they’re trying to do the right things.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:36
Yeah, this makes total sense. I have clients who use both one password and Okta. And they’re in an enterprise environment. And Okta is a pain in the rear to say the very least, and you know, you have to constantly re authenticate yourself. And it causes all kinds of problems. And so if one password and other password managers for that matter, LastPass, and Dashlane, and the rest can interoperate, then I think this is all better for us, I want to be able to get into my tools safely. But I don’t want all of that friction. And you know, I think Apple has done some of the best job here, Android has been catching up here. But having that seamless process of being able to get a text message and being able to automatically put in put those pieces together as you’re logging into things has been really nice in the Apple ecosystem. I hope that we can have more of this third party password manager type interoperability to make it better for all of us. So all right, on to our next one.

Augusto Pinaud 39:30
scratchpad is a productivity workspace for Salesforce raise 33 million and cloud app, another platform raise 9.3 millions to enhance works for productivity. So seems like you know, we have more and more. It has been interesting since we launched this segment, it seems like I don’t know, obviously, because we have now putting the tension in here but more and more of this productivity Insane Things are coming. And our last news for this is plate and played has been working into finding themselves guilty or not guilty, but it seems like they’re going to go at least tried to do a settlement of I think it’s 58 million bucks for collecting too much information from bank plates was an application that helped connect Venmo, Robin Hood and even many banks, you know, with their own platforms, and they have found guilty of collecting too much information. So they are trying to figure out how that’s going to happen, I think the settlement is going to be approved or not by May 12. And if it’s not approved, court will define something new.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:49
Fantastic. All right, that moves us from the business and finance segment and on to our productivity resources of the week. So as you know, a goose Joe and I scour the interwebs for all the various stories and articles and podcast episodes that make up our show. And of course, throughout that we’ve come across a lot of apps and services and tools and so forth, that, you know, we’d like to share with you. So in the segment, productivity resources liquid each bring you one that we think you’ll like, they could be old ones that could be new ones, they could be ones in between. and So this week, the first one that we have is, for me, this one is the Kanban note and Kanban note is one that I am frequently recommending lately to clients who are looking to basically turn their Evernote notes into a kanban style or a personal Kanban style board. And so if anyone knows what Trello is Trello is a traditional Kanban style, you know, task and project manager, I think it’s more Project Management Project Manager than it is Task Manager. But you know, it’s it’s project manager first task manager behind it, and it can do both of those things. And in this particular case, this is and allows you to choose particular notebooks. And then and then source those notebooks into different lists on boards. And so if you’re looking for a visual way to be able to represent work, and or just, you know, thinking through particular, you know, reference items, you can do that using Kanban. Note. And so it’s basically bringing those Evernote notes into the Kanban world. And they specifically talk about utilizing the secret weapon. Some people know ts, ts W, I have a tendency to believe it’s a little bit over manufacturing of the GTD system. So I’m not particularly that fond of it. But I like what it’s trying to do. And so they actually talk about implementing that utilizing this particular tool. It integrates with IFFT. And with Zapier, and so just a really interesting flavor here, it said, it also allows you to be able to integrate with Gmail, I didn’t know that until I just looked at that just now. So I have to opt to see what that’s all about. But either way, it works very, very fluidly. I’ve actually played around with it quite a bit. And I’ve been very impressed with it. It’s just a very easy Kanban style view of your notes. And it doesn’t try to do more than that you can you have, you know, the ability to select which notebooks and then which notes go where and then you can move them around. And yeah, I’d like it so far. I think that it’s a it’s a really good interesting Kanban board style integration with Evernote. So if that’s what you’re looking for, then maybe Kanban will work for you. Because then what’s your productivity

Augusto Pinaud 43:41
application is an application called or Splash is an app on the iPad, and they claim to have over 3 million free high resolution images to download the image or the app then you can use their images, you know without getting yourself into trouble and for free. So it’s something that I’ve been using the image some of the images are incredible. So it’s been something that I’ve been using quite a while when I need images.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 44:08
Fantastic. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing

Augusto Pinaud 44:11
that this week. We have something that normally we don’t do. And normally is your tool. My tool we have a guest we have a third one but we have a one of our listeners, Michelle who write us and say hey, have you thought of you look volley so we decided to give her the special new tool of the week by Michelle and volley was a really interesting app. I opened it I wasn’t familiar with it. But I love the fact that now I can send I wouldn’t say I dislike voice messages. Okay when i i get voice messages for people’s like why texted okay, it feels lazy to me. Okay, and I don’t like them. Volley instead difference because what it does is record a video I said, your face doing the message. And it feels a lot more personal. I did not mind a couple of volleys I got, I did not mind creating the couple of bullies I sent. While again, I don’t enjoy doing any. Any voice message? So it was interesting. Thank you, Michelle.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 45:28
Yeah, no, I think this is a really interesting tool for being able to do this kind of asynchronous video communication with folks. And so yeah, I’m looking forward to playing with it more. And and then, you know, the other side that I really like is that, you know, someone is recording a message to me in an asynchronous environment, just like with podcasts, I can then speed it up so that I’m not listening to it in 1x. But I can be listening to it in multiple, multiple axes. And that really increases the speed at which I can digest things. And I can also play it back. So if I didn’t understand something, I can go ahead and do that. And it becomes going back to kind of your point of view. So we talked about during the, the meeting articles, you know, like, if you want to shorten the number of meetings in a week, and you know, even shorter shortening work weeks, you know, like one way to do that is to do this type of technological intervention, which is to invest in technology that’s going to be and give people the the ways in which we can communicate and collaborate without having to be in in real time with each other. Think about the number of meetings you and I are in where we think, gosh, you know, I could have, I could have been doing so many other better things with my time if I didn’t have to be here in real time. And I could have time shifted the the pieces of that meeting. And that would have actually been more useful. Because I could have paused, I could have gotten what I needed in terms of information, and then sat down and responded more effectively. And I think that’s the kind of technology that we need to start thinking through.

Augusto Pinaud 46:59
Yeah, and I said review was reviewing this application or went to the webpage. And I thought about you when just volley is not for you, if you don’t mind listening to people at once, and one next speed. And I thought about you because you’re the only person I know who listened podcast, or have ridiculous speed I jet still can do. But I thought about you when when that came? Yeah,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 47:22
it my standards 2.5x. If you have, if you have an accent, I’ve got to bring you down to two. And if you speak slow, I better put you up to 3x. So yeah, but I do listen to everything at a fairly high speed. And, and so it’s just, it’s just the way in which my brain works. I appreciate that. The one point about volley that, I think is of note is that they’re currently free. So there is there is no cost to the application, because they’re still developing it. And they have noted here that whatever you get right now with volley will stay free. They’re just going to add more premium features on top of that, and then that becomes what becomes payable. So it seems like a no brainer to try out. And so I just want to thank Michelle Johnson for the

Augusto Pinaud 48:05
iPad application, the iPhone application, I really it has a Mac, I think it has a Google a Google too, I’m not sure.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 48:13
It’s got all all the major platforms, it’s got. It’s got applications for all of them. And so far in what I’ve seen, it’s been seamless. I mean, I haven’t had any major issues. So good stuff there. All right, on to our featured story of the week,

Augusto Pinaud 48:29
what beats a four day work week,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 48:33
oh, become a European

Augusto Pinaud 48:39
then month a year, but you know, but it was a really interesting article. And it is true when they said you know, the for for all Americans. You know, things don’t sound but I remember much early in my career, my first job on the European company, and we Americans did not have vacation. Okay, we have our two week, let’s clarify, but our counterpart on the other side, okay, they disappear for a month at a time. Okay. And it was really challenging for us on the American side to deal with that and to reconcile with that. form. And, and same thing, you know, I think I’ve shared this story many, many times. But you know, when I wrote I but only book with microflow winsky. Yeah, he did this yesterday. And he’s like, no, no, we are in the middle of writing. Nope, siesta time. So, we need to understand that people work differently. One of the good things is yes, we are getting to understand that for some people this four day work week works better for some people that 10 months a year. You know, and for others what work is to be able to pack all your gear and go and work, continue working somewhere else. That’s why I don’t, I don’t necessarily want to 10 months a year, but I will love to have two months a year what I don’t work in this office, when I pack my stuff, and I work, you know, for weeks at a time somewhere else,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 50:19
I think we’re actually driving closer toward something that is actually a combination of a four day work week and a 10 month year, in the sense that even if we move to a four day workweek, we’re not going to get rid of vacations for people, right? We’re not going to say, Okay, we moved to a four day workweek, so you don’t get any vacations. And, you know, like, very back in the day when in my my, my Google is talking to me, for some reason, I stopped. I didn’t want to yell into the microphone. So the but the idea here is that if we if we move to something that’s closer to akin to a four day workweek, and say, you know, no meetings on Mondays and Fridays or Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays, right, that employers are not going to get away with then saying, Oh, by the way, you won’t be able to take a vacation anymore, right. And I remember very early on in my career, as I was saying earlier that, you know, I would have friends come into into when I lived in Washington, DC, they come to Washington, DC and be like, oh, yeah, I’m going to be taking a month and traveling around the United States. And I’d be like, how, how, where did you get all this? Like, oh, yeah, well, I took off the time from work. And it’s just like, they get that naturally in their system, I thought to myself, Okay, I want to get to a point in my own career where two months off is not that big of a deal. And I’ve tried it over several portions of my life and haven’t been as successful at it. But I do like the idea of taking, you know, basically, two week vacations, and then December off, basically taking off the month of December. And the reason for that is that basically between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, you know, like no work is really happening in and with my clients, right, there’s just, there’s not much happening, that not used to not be the case in my prior worlds. That wasn’t the case. But right now, in my world, that just seems to be how it works. And so I feel like it could work I really do. But it’s just a matter of getting all of the pieces put together. And then if you infuse something like the four day workweek into all of this, at least for me, it seems like a three day, meeting week seems more advantageous to me where I would have two days of no meetings, so I can do focus work, and I can do flow work. And then three days where I am meeting more intensely with clients and work is happening around those meetings. I think that’s the ideal for me. And I think this is where all of this discussion kind of comes down to distributed work means that we work where we are best going to get the job done with the team that we’re given with the resources that we have. And if we can get to the outcomes, if we can get to the deliverables, let’s do that. And then let’s then decide on what our work schedule is going to be based on the needs of society. Right, which is that if we don’t need people to be working five, and most people six days out of the week, most people work a six day work week, and they don’t realize it right. And, and so if we can figure out all of those pieces, then maybe, you know, a 10 month year isn’t so bad. You know, the Europeans have been doing it for years with without any problem. So the Russians, I believe, I think Russia pretty much has the same level of time off, you know, the Asiatic countries have a little bit different work culture. And so we just have to, you know, figure those pieces out. And of course, happy new year to those who are who are celebrating the Chinese New Year, and the whole, you know, kind of Lunar New Year festival, it starts well, if you’re listening to the podcast, it is already started. Yeah, yes. So yeah. But um, so that’s kind of where that goes. I’ve already gotten my, my new year’s cards out to my family. So I, I got it out the door this year in time. So that’s, that’s a good thing there. But I just Yeah, I just think that it’s an interesting thing to start thinking about for yourself, which is like, How much work do you need to do? And how do you do that work best? Where do you do that work best? Right? So if you don’t want to take the two months off of us, don’t you want to be someplace then then that becomes a work location right where you’re going someplace and and working there versus a staycation where you’re not working but you’re staying home? The word Keishon is where you go someplace and you work on to invest in August

Augusto Pinaud 54:37
vacations are exhausted, that thing doesn’t work.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 54:41
That’s because you have kids and the whole other there’s a there’s a what for me, actually, when I staycation it ends up being like, oh, all the things that I could be doing. Like Oh, I gotta clean that thing and I got to you know, fix that thing. So I totally get that as well. But I think this is a good time to be thinking about this because we are In a state where we’re going to start seeing the hopefully going into an endemic state with regard to this COVID-19 issue. And, you know, once it’s no longer a pandemic, and it just becomes endemic, we then need to think through, how do we get back to a state of, of normative normalcy, whatever we want to call it, whatever the new state of being is. And yeah, I think it’s just an interesting thought experiment to think through, like, how do you work best? How can you work best in your work environment, and especially with a great resignation? And as as Michael Hyatt and the rest, were talking about the great renovation, like how do you think through to make this better for all of us going forward? And I think that that’s a that’s a good thing to be thinking about. All right, well, another,

Augusto Pinaud 55:49
we have one announcement, oh, Samsung Galaxy S 22. On pack event date is official February nine. So we will be covering this hopefully with art Gelwicks, our normal expert under things. But February 9, you can mark your calendars, the Galaxy S 22 Unpack event will be

Raymond Sidney-Smith 56:14
fantastic. And with that we’ve covered the productivity and related technology news this week, thanks to Augusto Pinaud, for putting together this show, and really every week show, and so thank you. Alright, on anything but idle.com, you’ll find our show notes with links to all the stories, the tools of the week, or the productivity resources of the week that we share any of our extra stories we don’t cover and didn’t cover. And we also have text transcripts that you can read and also download from anything but idle.com. So after serving our show notes, let us know if we missed any stories. Sometimes, you know, there’s a story that we may not have covered that we may not have put into the extra stories, feel free to let us know if those stories and we can then cover them either in a future episode or post them as links on the episode page. So people know about them. So we can kind of fill in the blanks there. So feel free to do that. As well. If you want to you can also leave questions and comments on any of the episode pages. So you can do that there there as well. And just so that everybody knows you we have a channel a basically a group inside a personal productivity Club, which is where co working space lives. And many of the other programs that to do is mastermind that Agusta mentioned earlier, all of that lives inside of personal productivity club. And so we have one for Anything But Idle. And you can join us in there by going to anything, but idle.com forward slash community. And that will take you right in there to sign up and join the community and join the group at the same time. This is your first time watching the live stream, feel free to click the thumbs up icon. Go ahead and subscribe to the to the channel as well. That’ll go ahead and notify you when we do go live weekly, we record these live, it’s for the podcast. But for those of you who want to join us live and interact, feel free to join us. And we’re here live when we do record. If you’re listening to the podcast, you can of course subscribe or follow us on your favorite podcast app of choice, just go to anything but idle.com. Click on the Subscribe page and you’ll find the links to all of the various podcast apps that are available. If there isn’t one available, you can always grab the RSS feed and subscribe directly to the RSS feed that is there on the website. I’ve actually recently added also an email function so you can actually go in and put in your email and then whenever we put out a new episode, you’ll get an email notification of the new episode to be able to listen to it there as well. So some people like to be notified by email. And so with that, I want to thank you all for joining us this week, and we will see you next time. And so that’s the end of Anything But Idle for this week. Here’s to your productive life everybody

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