What Dr. Seuss Can Teach You About Productivity?

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One fish. Two fish. Red fish. Blue fish. We all know Theodor Seuss “Ted” Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, for his more than 60 children’s books that he both wrote and illustrated. With such a prolific and storied life, Ray and Augusto discussed for his birthday (March 2nd) what Dr. Seuss can teach you about productivity. Enjoy!

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In this Cast | What Dr. Seuss Can Teach You About Productivity?

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Headlines & Show Notes | What Dr. Seuss Can Teach You About Productivity?

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New Tools of the Week

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

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:30
Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community Welcome to Anything But Idle, the productivity news podcast. Today’s show is brought to you by productivity voice. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 1:46
I am Augusto Pinaud

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:47
And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. I think it is Episode 46 what Dr. Seuss can teach you about productivity. And we’re recording this on March 1 2021. And as you can see, Augusto is currently in transit. Maybe just moving along there while we have our conversation, so I’m going to I’m going to be having him focus on the road as opposed to on us, but we’re gonna make our way through the show notwithstanding. So, each week, we review and discuss the productivity and technology news headlines of the week. And this week, we have our theme, which is Dr. Seuss, and productivity. And it turns out that Dr. Seuss was actually a really prolific person just generally. And because it is going to be Dr. Seuss’s birthday, I think tomorrow, I thought we would have a little conversation around Dr. Seuss and his work. And it’s really quite interesting, because Dr. Seuss himself was quite a bit of an activist he had, he had a lot of political thoughts, and he wanted to share those thoughts. And I just thought it was a he’s a, he’s a very interesting character, generally. So do you have any thoughts about Dr. Seuss that you wanted to share? And and I’ll let you, I’ll let you figure out your audio situation. And I’ll kind of start with my thoughts, which are that he just generally had all of these various thoughts about how he was going to produce content. And I thought it was really quite interesting, the ways in which he kind of espoused these thoughts. And so he actually worked through a wide variety of different types of

I don’t want to call them hacks, because they’re, they’re these little tricks and techniques around things. But his, for me, the most important thing that he really espoused was this idea of working within restraint. And he liked to think about this from the perspective of how do you how do you restrain How do you constrain your world and, and so he basically said, Let me take a certain certain set of words, and let me do everything I need to do with those certain set of words. And that’s really how Green Eggs and Ham was written, he constrained himself to, I think it was like 50 words or something like that, and work through the writing of that entire piece. By doing so. And I think this is one of those cases where, because he’s working in three different modalities, right, it’s writing, illustration, and it’s kind of narrative if you want to consider it that but he’s, he’s basically putting those three pieces that story, putting together the various words in, in, in basically poet, you know, poetic phrases. And he is also illustrating all these pieces, he decided to constrain himself in one particular category in order to do that. And I think in our own productive world, we have to remember that when we are trying to get things done. We’re always doing them in, in sight of some kind of constraint. And we forget that constraint exists. And therefore, we just think the sky’s the limit. And this is Parkinson’s Law, right? So work will expand to the space and time you give it. So why not constrain things. And I actually take it a step further, which is that we can actually make this more for lack of a better word fun, by engaging in some time constraint, that gives us a time constraint that gives us the ability to go ahead and say, Okay, this thing has to get done. And it may seem se mundane to do it. But if I give myself a shortened timeframe, then I can actually increase the the fun to do that thing. By virtue of saying, I’m going to constrain myself to this now, Dr. Seuss, he gives it 50 words to create greens and green eggs and ham, I’m basically saying use time as that constraint to be able to increase your productivity. So if you say, Okay, I need to make these five phone calls. And typically, each of these phone calls takes me roughly five minutes apiece, five phone calls, 15 minutes, you know, times five is 25 minutes, well, could you do those calls in 20 minutes, and shave off five minutes? That’s a challenge. And we as humans are motivated by challenge. So we are engaged in the process of challenge. So could you do that, in that in that same, those same five phone calls in 20 minutes, that’s the kind of restraint that then gamified the process, and really increases your chances of greater success. What was otherwise mundane, now is kind of a race against the clock. And that can be fun and interesting, and allows you to be able to do that. Now, of course, you’re always keeping in mind quality, and keeping that quality control at you know, kind of in its highest form. And going from there a good start, what are your thoughts related to Dr. Seuss? and productivity?

Augusto Pinaud 7:00
No, Dr. Seuss is an interesting character. I didn’t discover Dr. Seuss gracing the state. And I really discovered Dr. Seuss with my kids, when, you know, when, when it was time for my kids to start reading books, that’s when I started getting the books. And it started learning about that, that you described by the constraints and the productivity. But that, that said, it was really interesting how he, in a certain way, get gamified you know, that productivity aspect, you know, when the editors told him, oh, that cannot be done, what you mean that cannot be willing to 22nd the next book, as he did with the books and but at the same time, it’s his show, and prove that even with the limited resources, you can work on produce, you know, work of art, and you can be more effective. So, we tend to think of all the resources that we need, instead of thinking, what can we do better, with the less or with less resources or with the resources that we have? I think that’s one of the biggest teachings of Dr. Seuss.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:23
So James clear, actually wrote a very interesting article on this whole concept of restraint, the story behind it, and, and kind of the bet that was made between Dr. Seuss and his friend at Random House. And so I will put a link to that in the show notes. I just think it’s a very interesting story that kind of solidifies what we were talking about. And in closing out this part of the conversation, I thought I would read just a couple of things from life. hack.org, there was an article called 11 important life lessons from Dr. Seuss. And not all of them, but some of them are really unique and interesting. And one, of course, is on choosing your own life direction. And these are just some quotes from Dr. Seuss’s work. And it says you have brains in your head, you have feet in your shoes, you can steer yourself any direction you choose, you’re on your own, and you know what you know, and you are the guy who decides where to go, and guy or gal or other. You decide where you go. And so that’s just, you know, like, all of these various phrases and the ways in which he puts together his, you know, rhymes and everything else are just so interesting and unique. And he really has a way of saying the right thing and the right way to elicit, you know, a message. He also goes on to say on reading and learning. The more that you read, the more things you will know, the more that you learn, the more places you’ll go. And he has another one, which is it’s better to know how to learn than to know. And that is also so true, right? You know, learning is such a one, a good one, he goes, everything stinks till it’s finished. That’s on procrastination, right. So you know, the idea of Just getting over the most simple things, he has another one here, I’ve heard there are troubles of more than one kind, some come from a head and some come from behind. But I’ve brought a big bat and I’m already You see, now my troubles are going to have troubles with me. And so he just has this really great way of putting together all of these various phrases. And so I just love making my way through Dr. Seuss’s work. And, and actually, with my, my most recent niece, you know, I had been reading some of those pieces to her. And it has been just a lot of fun to reenact some of the stories from my own childhood. And, and sharing that with her. There was recently a new version, I guess, a new book that was put out after his his passing, that was about the solar system. And I had actually recorded that for her to be able to listen to on her own. And so that was a lot of fun to do as well. So anyway, happy birthday to Dr. Seuss. And hopefully, you can take some of his inspiration for your own productivity. And so with that, that takes us along to our stories of the week. And so let’s get into our first part of our stories. First up is that Chrome is getting an upgrade to catch up with the Mac books and the PCs according to Tom’s guide. And so, in essence, what’s coming is screen recording on Chrome OS. So Chromebooks are going to be getting screen recording. And and I think this is really great. I think this is one of those things where leveling up the capabilities of Chrome OS are going to be really important. And the second kind of update out of Android police is that Chrome is also going to get the ability for you to access your emoji. Right now, in order to be able to type emoji, you have to either launch the the on screen keyboard and click the you know, the little, you know, smiley face emoji to be able to launch it. The other is that you have to right click inside of Chrome, not inside of anywhere else, you have to kind of right clicks inside of Chrome, there’s an emoji option, and you can then go ahead and insert an emoji. But otherwise, you really don’t have the capability of launching emoji. And so Chrome OS will now soon have an emoji picker picker that will show up in line from the search box so that you’re able to go ahead and, and and launch that. So I’m looking forward to seeing this. I think it’s really important. I wish there was a keyboard shortcut. I really do wish there was a keyboard shortcut to be able to do that. Those of you who are on on Windows, it is windows and then the semi colon. So windows semi colon will launch the emoji picker. And then if you were on the Mac, if I if I remember my my keyboards correctly, it’s Ctrl command spacebar? I think so. Or you can you can check it out within the apple System Preferences. But I think it’s Ctrl command spacebar, and that will launch the emoji picker picker. So I’m hoping hoping that Chrome goes ahead and gives us a an option to be able to launch that via keyboard. Okay, next up, we have Google Chat is potentially coming

to the to the web with a new redesign. And so according to Chrome unboxed, they’re talking about Google Chat, basically getting a a redesign, that will allow for, you know, just basically a better view for people to be able to interact with it in that sidebar, with a little bit more. I don’t know Gmail style, you know, interaction. Now, I’ve already seen the the Google Chat pop up in my own Gmail interface as its own chat bot as its own little chat box. And so perhaps that’s what I’m seeing. And I’m not sure if that’s something that is just unique to me as they’re testing. I’m one of those people who have seen the test or not. But I’ve already seen it as its own little chat box. So I’m not quite sure whether that’s what they’re talking about or something else. But I am, I’m seeing more and more people coming on to Google Chat because of Google deprecating Hangouts. And so we’ll see as you know, more people come online to Google Chat, whether or not Google decides to get more and more of the interface more friendly. I just don’t think it’s very consumer friendly. So it just needs more work in that category. All right. There’s also an article here about how to get more space in your Google Storage. And it’s nothing Earth shaking, you know, world shaking, in essence, but in essence, it’s just giving some instructions on how to on how to go through your Google account systematically, and says, you know, just like, you know, in a structured approach to say, these are the things that take up space inside of my Google account, and therefore reduce the storage limits. So check out that verge story, we’ll put that link in the show notes for you so that you’re capable of checking it out. A couple other Google items. Go ahead.

Augusto Pinaud 15:27
The next one, there. Thank you. It’s nothing earth shattering. But I I notice a lot of people struggle with this. And that’s the reason I like that article. Because there is a lot of people who’ve done the dumb one is Harley to Google, whatever is the annual fee, or the monthly fee for for having more storage once to understand where their storage is gone. And this article will show you a systematic way to understand what you are using for storage, and how can you better move forward?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 16:00
Yes, and so just a couple other Google stories. Google is now bringing Google recorder as a web app soon. And supposedly that web app will bring pixel users. So Google recorder is I think, still currently only available on Google Pixel phones, and the newest versions of those. And, and so Google recorder is an audio recording app that also transcribes as you are speaking. So it’s a real time transcript, transcription service right there on the phone itself. So it’s not going up to the cloud in order to do its work. And the and so if it’s coming to a web app, that’s even better. That’s amazing. And the idea of audio backups is also great, because all of that audio is being stored natively on the device locally on the device. And so if we can get that to go up to the cloud, in some way, shape, or form, I think that’s going to be positive. Again, you know, this always increases a security risk. But I think Google knows how to keep your data safe. So I’m pretty comfortable with them being able to back that up via that and, and so since I’m on all Google Pixel devices, I like the idea of having the capability of audio transcribing. You know, just as I’m talking things out, or those kinds of things, just being able to capture my own thoughts in audio, and seeing it also represented in text. And, and then, last, but not least, in the Google side of things, Google’s adding a new badge for unread comments in Google Docs. So in essence, right now, when you are looking at your comments within a Google Docs, you’re not really capable of knowing how many comments are in there. Now, they’re going to be adding a badge to be able to tell you how many are unread comments. So if you have a voluminous number of comments in a document, like I’m working on the draft of a book, and so there is a wide number of comments in the sidebar. And it’s just nice to know how many are unread. So I can go through those and figure them out and take them off one by one.

Augusto Pinaud 17:55
So that we are working on a book and dad when I saw that I jumped into happiness because of that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:07
Okay, moving right along to some apple news in the apple side of things. iPhone 12 is getting a magsafe compatible battery pack from anchor. So anchor, the the electronics manufacturer has basically leapfrogged Apple to the market with this magsafe compatible battery pack. So, in essence, you can take this battery pack and just stick it to the back of your iPhone 12. And it will go ahead and just like any other charging, you know, battery pack, charge it but now it doesn’t require a physical connection other than that magnetic connection to it. It seems like some hackers are targeting Apple’s m one max already with some malware. The way that I read the article was that this is incredibly difficult to pull off. And so and it ends up being just adware for the most part. So it doesn’t seem to be that much of a a large risk. But just so that people are aware that, you know, security researchers are paying attention to these new m one Max and that they are are new. So they are kind of you know, it’s chum in the water. And so the sharks are of course going to start swimming around it. And I really think that Apple will do their due diligence and make sure that they are protecting people security wise. So I’m not particularly worried about these new adware, you know, potential hacks, and I’m sure that Apple is already aware and closing up the holes for folks out there.

Augusto Pinaud 19:39
Yeah, there is one one more thing on that anchor history story. Sorry about the battery. There is a couple of things that the battery has. And one of them is that he’s also going to work with an old charter. So if you have a phone that he’s acts on, going Nah, you will be able to get that With a case even though your device is not, you have a device that is I put 12, iPhone 12 or below, that has the charger on the bag that the induction charger, you will be able to get a case with the magnets and use these batteries, that’s one of the wonderful thing that they have is that it is the first accessory that comes even though it’s designed to your iPhone 12 that is going to be backward compatible with any device who have that standard of charging, you know, without without plugging. So that is really exciting because a person who has an iPhone 11, or any of those variations, we’ll be able to use this accessory to

tidy.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 20:52
Alright, next up is that Microsoft garage, which is Microsoft’s in the Google World project 120 kind of their laboratory for being able to, you know, push out these, you know, moonshot type, you know, projects has come up with something called journal, which is a new ink first notetaking application. And the idea here is that journal will allow you to use a tool like your Microsoft Surface or other convergence devices that are that are basically ink focused, you know, what do you call it stylus focused, and, and then you’re able to go ahead and utilize it. Now, it uses a little bit of AI to be able to make this happen. And I’m really quite curious how this is all going to work. So I have not had a chance to play with it, I was actually commenting to gousto, that back in my office, I have a surface sitting there Surface Pro. But since I haven’t been to my office, in you know more than a year, because of the pandemic, that surface is just sitting there. And I really want to go ahead and get it. Of course, my office is many, many hundreds of miles away from where I am. So I’m not going to make a trip, especially for that. But we’ll wait for gousto to join us. We’re not going to wait. But I mean, what gousto is, is switching locations. And so when he switches location, so he’ll be joining us. Anyway, moving along in the news, there is an E ink and basically he and Sony have have developed a new he notes. device. In essence, this is a new tablet. And and so the the tablets will come in two different displays. So it’s a 10.3 and a 13.3 inch display. These are really nice thin tablets. And I’m really looking forward to seeing those come to the market. Not much more is I’m not going to say much more about it until it’s out in the market. But the reality is, is that it’s currently in Japan, and we’ll see if it makes its way into the United States. But you know, clearly Sony and others are seeing the success of things like the remarkable two and other tablets and are looking to see whether or not they can make some inroads in that market as well. There is also a review of the way comm one stylist we talked about this, probably a month or so ago. But the way calm one stylist is a is a pen with a style. It’s a stylist. And, and so good reader good ereader did a really good review on it. And there’s a video as well. And you know, it’s $70 and it provides you with a really nice stylus and so I’m looking forward to actually maybe getting one and dusting it out. But But I just I think it’s good for people to know that there are some really nice stylists styli that are coming onto the market. And it’s important for us all to remember that we are now moving into this world where we are seeing more and more

convergence between the the screen and different types of input. You know, we just don’t have the keyboard, we don’t just have the mouse. We now have touchpads like I have an external touchpad that’s connected to my Windows 10 machine that allows me to interact with the computer just like I would with my laptops, just like I would with my Chromebooks and how I would with my normal MacBooks. So this really gives me that same level of of continuity in experience on all of the devices. And I think the stylus is probably that next tool also that I want to see connected to my ecosystem. I want to be able to write on the surface of my screens. I want to be able to write on this on the displays of my computer’s as well. And so if I’m capable of doing that with something like the way comm one that really cleans up the problem of going from one device Where I’m really happy, and you know, writing along than having to switch devices, and then losing that capability of inputting by hand, giving that that fluidity of being able to say, you know, what I want to be able to draw on the screen in a tool like Evernote or, you know, for others that might be one note or otherwise, you want to be able to have that same continuity of input. And being able to jump from one device to another, with the right set of tools is really important. So I’m looking forward to it. I’m looking forward to seeing how the way Come one works. And for 70 bucks, it’s trivial in terms of adding to you know, I think I paid $100 for the Apple Pencil, and that doesn’t have nearly the the capabilities of something like the way comp one on a desktop machine. So I’m looking forward to I guess that’s not probably true. Somebody will somebody can correct me maybe Cousteau can correct me on that. But for some reason, I think that the way

Augusto Pinaud 25:55
insanity show.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:00
All right, so that has brought us to the to the midpoint of our stories. And so with that, we’re gonna take a break. For a word from our sponsors. When we’re back, we’re going to cover more stories of the week, we’ve got a lot more headlines to cover. And we’re going to do our new tools of the week this week. And and then we are going to do our story of the week this week, which we’re going to be talking about Microsoft and their big announcement regarding office 2021. So stick with us and we will see after the break.

Sponsor Voice Over 26:35
Are you feeling that you need help implementing a personal productivity system a goal or a habit like the weekly review? Do you need help making your current system more robust? Do you want a quick checkup of your current systems to ensure they’re the best solutions for you? With more than 20 years of experience in technology, personal productivity and GTD productivity voice can help you review, renew, create or fine tune your system and your personal productivity, visit productivity voice.com forward slash Anything But Idle for a free 30 minute consultation. Let’s achieve more enjoy more and feel more wins in the game of being productive. Head over to productivity voice.com forward slash Anything But Idle today. And now back to the show.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:27
Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. I’m joined with Augusto Pinaud, for our second half of the show where we will be covering more headlines and our story of the week and our new tools. And so let’s get into our second half of the headline to do so.

Augusto Pinaud 27:43
Hopefully, it was less craziness. Oh, the first story, the first story we have is how to create a schedule to a daily schedule to organize your day. And it’s an article from life hacking. You know, it is interesting, because as we talk about Dr. Seuss, and all the constraints, and everything else comes the schedule as a question of is the lack of train or not, or we see it as a constraint. And and, and a lot of people see it that way. So there is a lot of similarities with what we’re discussing at the beginning of the show. And this, you know, the the article talks about, you know, picking your priorities include the morning routines, you know, delegate designate, sorry, those, the most important task is scheduled time for things I’ve normally distracted. Include breaks, and I will take time to think. But it’s interesting that when you look at this article on the theme that we have this week, you know, you could see the similarities between what we were discussing early the Dr. Seuss did with this article and how important are to blog though things you know, it’s I don’t remember where, where or who said, you know, it’s not that you don’t have times that you are not making the time and and this happened, you know, with with their routines was the things you want to do with the things are important. And yes, a lot of things happen during the day. But the reality is, if you are not making the time, none of them will happen.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:28
Yeah, I think it’s a good reminder for all of us that we have to be able to set up our world in order to be able to be more focused and something that I’ve always talked about is the fact that habits are not as useful as routines and I know I sound like the great outlier in productivity for saying that but when we focus on habits, we don’t create as many habits we just create more frustration and stress. When in reality the the the latticework of our lives are founded on routines. They are the things that we do regularly all the time. And we’re capable of hooking on to those routines much more easily and with greater efficacy than we do by trying to force ourselves to develop habits, habits are automatic, because we already doing them. And routines are things we already doing. So why not tie those those things that are to our routines that we want to do, and that creates greater chance that we’re going to do them and stop worrying about building habits. If those things are important and good enough for you, then you will start doing them. And maybe they’ll become automatic, but we’re not worried about the automaticity, the building of a habit, we’re worried, we’re concerned with developing the routines that are going to be most effective. And when we follow those routines, which can be a checklist or calendar, or what have you structure in your day, you’re capable of having greater success. And so structuring your day, I think is far more important and effective than habit development. And I know, you know, I sound like the great, you know, devil’s advocate here when it comes to habits all the time. And it’s not that I’m against habits, I just, I’ve seen the literature, and it’s clear that habits are difficult, and routines already exist. So why don’t you just do the things that are already happening and working well for you and attaching things to them? So All right, moving right along to more time blocking. You are muted, sir.

Augusto Pinaud 31:33
I did pretty well, for a long part of the show. With all the constraints of the day, I think I’m doing pretty well. In the week of the time management and time blocking seminar, we will talk more about that on announcements. You know, it is interesting time blocking, not working, try these a productivity course, eight things instead, you know, just they talk about the Pomodoro Technique. And we have talked about the Pomodoro Technique in the past, focus on your top 20%. And that’s the Pareto principle, you know, 20% of your efforts will produce 80% of your result. But there was one that was interesting, that was have a relaxing routine. And we talked last week or the show the show before we talk about that self punishment that people do you know, at the end of the day, when you’re really tired, you’re supposed to go to bed, he’s like, No, I want no time for me. And instead of that, you know, you overstayed the night. And instead, if you have in the same way you should plan that morning routine, you should have that shutdown routine, what are you going to do to disconnect and relax, you know, batch smaller tasks together. And, you know, for our listeners who are familiar with they’re getting things done, that’s what a context is, you know, batch them small things together. So the more you can work on the same context, the more efficient you’re going to be maximize your downtime. I have said for many years that we all need a plan B, if we go to a meeting, okay. And the meeting is going to start 15 minutes later, what’s your plan B. And when you fail to think on that plan B what happened is you waste those five minutes or those hours or whatever it is, because you don’t have what’s going to happen when this thing goes late. And the next thing is star single tasking and single tasking, you know, it is something so, so important, you need to understand what you can do. Most of us has multiple devices. You know, we have phones and tablets and computers and everything else figured it out which task should work on anything on which device. Not every device is a perfect device for tasks, that’s one but to now try to do one task in that device instead of trying to do them all. At the same time. Your brain cannot do multitasking can do packet switching that is different. And the other one is remember the five minute rule you know if you don’t want to do the task, find, tell yourself you just need to do it for five minutes and for five minutes. You’re not engaged with this you can walk away and most of the times you will discover that those five minutes were all that you needed to be able to break that initial resistance. The last advice they give is enjoy theme days. I don’t do scene days. I have never understood it. So but there is people you know the article quote from Mike Vardy, I know he’s big on theme days and he do admin one day and write on another day. Great if that works for you better be my guest you know Dan Sullivan talks about focus buffer and free days you know, buffer helps you to prepare for your Focus days so that way Your days are maximized on production and then free days you don’t touch work. So it’s not about how you split the thing. There’s people for which that work incredibly well.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 35:12
Yeah, I think I think the idea of theming days is a powerful technique for those who are our content context specific in their roles, like their roles contain lots of individual actions that when grouped together, makes it clear for them what they should be working on. And it’s not hyper time sensitive. So if you, you know, if you do all of your accounting on one day, and you have to do all of your, you know, compliance stuff on one day, if you can group those things, even if it’s into three or four hours, three or four hour blocks, that’s, that’s really useful. And I actually use some of that in my own world. I actually liked the idea of theming days for content, so that and so this ends up being, you know, like a week, and determining this particular week has this content associated with it this week has this content associated with in that way, you’re capable of saying, okay, on Tuesday, I’m going to be writing or recording or what have you around this specific topic, because you have themed that particular week. So everything kind of falls in line with something like that. So you can theme in so many different ways, and really help to focus your energy and your work in that sense. Okay, next up, we have an article regarding what do we have next? I think, Oh, it was the the minimalists, we’re going to skip a couple items to the minimalist one of gousto. So the minimalists podcast is a podcast by Joshua fields, Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, and we can we can put these other two prior two items of gousto into the announcements. And so I don’t know what you thought about this. But I thought this is really quite interesting. Now, some of you may not know this, but I am not the biggest fan of minimalism. So we’re not going to get into that right now. But the the minimalist podcast, though is, is, you know, again, these two gentlemen have been doing, you know, quite a lot of work in this space, and have been talking about it for quite a long time. And of course, Cal Newport has written a whole book called Digital minimalism. And, and so, and I, and I just, you know, I disagree with the very premise of minimalism. So let’s take a step back, though, to this particular podcast episode, Episode Number 276, what’s called the unfollowing. And in essence, they talk about how to unsubscribe and unfollow people how to deal with the notion of creating more tranquility and well being by virtue of unfollowing. Did you get any thoughts out of the blue? Still? I know, I know, I did.

Augusto Pinaud 37:44
Well, so let me tell you a little bit of story, you know, I’m not a minimalist in any way, shape, or form. Okay. And there’s four screens surrounding me right now, that disqualify me immediately. But there is a thing that is interesting from you know, from them, they, they talk about, they took me or used to talk or continue talking about, if you are interested in this, do a party, bring your friends to help you to do this. And then following what’s really interesting because not necessarily wanting to go into minimalism, I have a task on on my system that is going purge, by RSS feed, go and purge, you know, my, where I have my articles keep, because we don’t notice this, but we start following, hey, we got to start talking about something and now we follow that page, and you start filling it with noise. And for me that unfollowing Yeah, it is good. I don’t know if it helped you and other denticle talk about tranquility and healthcare next life. I don’t know about that. But I know that the more I follow, the more meaningful I want. And if I have time to take the weeds out of that, you know, like I do in the back door of my house, the good and I think this is good, you know, go instead of with the question of is what can i unfollow you know, instead of what I’m following and what I what can you unfollow out of this list when you are reading that? You don’t have the pleasure anymore? You know, and and there are many podcasts that many feats that over the years, they were also when I stopped reading them, I’m sorry, we grow apart. You know, it’s no, it’s no damage me. Okay, but at the end of the day, I want to unfollow them.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 39:36
Yeah, I think I think there was something very interesting because I had an experience recently where I switched phones and where all of my PI I subscribed, I think to probably 200 plus podcasts, and I don’t listen to all of them, but I subscribe to them because I want to know, you know, I kind of scroll through the list of new podcast episodes when they come out and I’ll selectively choose those for when I’m going for a long run or if I’m if I want to go Do some some work around the house. I’ll listen to them while I’m doing those. And I realized that when I transferred phones that all of the auto downloads cease to exist. And so, you know, to my heart, I had to go back through and look at all 200 podcasts and decide which ones were going to auto download which ones I was going to listen to. And I realized that my routine allowed me to see Oh, you know what, when I go walk the dog in the morning, I listened to these two podcasts because they’re short, succinct, and I do that, when I’m having my breakfast in the morning, after I work out, I listened to this podcast in the morning. And it really gave me a clear sense of the the podcast I wanted to listen to, and the ones that I could not follow again, because they were all unfollowed unceremoniously, and, you know, they’re not serving me as much anymore. And you know, there were several that I listened to, because I feel like I have to. And that seems like a weird thing to say. But it was one of those things I listened out of obligation. They are either colleagues or, you know, friends in, you know, many different fields. And so I would listen to them, just so that I kept up to date. And I just decided, you know what, I can listen to them. Whenever I see them in the feed, I can, you know, I scroll through about once a week and I look at the various ones, I load them up. And then during my weekly review, I like GTD, I will then delete them as a part of the process. It’s one of the things on my checklist in my weekly review checklist. I’ll just delete them if I haven’t listened to them already. And no harm no foul. And it gives them a download, I guess so. So it’s good for that. But the the idea, though, is that that unfollowing is not a slight, I’m not, you know, not set with them, I’m you know, I don’t have they don’t have to be upset with me. It’s just a fact of life. And I think that goes across the board. I mean, so often, we get so wrapped up in numbers and having so many phone, so many friends and having so many followers, it seems to be a popularity contest more than it is having a vibrant, efficacious life. And I want to feel fulfilled in the connections that I have. And so I don’t particularly care how many people follow me, I don’t care how many people are connected to me. And it also keeps me humble. I mean, you know, I actually gustado having this conversation offline. And I was talking about the fact that I tend to try to keep a humble view of myself. And, and I think the whole concept of both being unfollowed by people who just don’t find what I have to say useful to them anymore. And also the process of unfollowing others is is not a slight against, I mean, maybe someone unfollowing me was upset by something I said or whatever. But you know, there’s nothing I can do without them letting me know that. And so I would say, you know, if you are you should reach out to me and let me know, because that is good. But the reality is, is that I don’t have any I don’t have any ill will toward people who unfollow or unsubscribe from my newsletter and he those kinds of things. Because it’s just a fact of, of cleaning up is the fact of cleaning up your life in general. You know, Marie Kondo comes from who you know, created the konmari method. She comes from the Shinto world, and they just believe, you know, their religious beliefs are around this idea of, you know, deconstruction and reconstruction, that whole concept of renewal I always think of the Shinto beliefs being somewhat like the Phoenix, right, you burn everything down to ashes, and then it reconstructs into this beautiful creature. And, and so it does, it does Harken to some of that. And I really enjoyed this episode, again, notwithstanding the fact that you will never hear me say that I am a minimalist. I still found it to be quite an interesting episode. And I found it to be a useful practice to think about what can you get rid of in your life? What can you shed in your life that’s no longer serving you. And so with a little bit of minimalism, let’s move on over to unfortunately zoom fatigue and maybe minimizing our zoom fatigue

Augusto Pinaud 43:51
Well, the next article, he said is, you know, how you overcome that silver tea and and obviously, it doesn’t apply to assume apply to assume apply to teams apply to Google meet and, and, you know, I’m sure a couple of times here and some other places that it is interesting, because a year and a half ago 2019 you know, before that thing called pandemic, okay, you said let’s do a video call a video conference and let’s assume it lets a lot of people were no No, no, no comment. The phone is really quick. And now we are having exactly the opposite problem. Okay, for anything even if it’s something really quick people’s like, Well, yeah, let’s make a small call. No, no, no, no, take a lot more time than what a quick phone call or even a couple of texts will do. That is a problem because now we are jumping into this video confirms all the time for everything that it’s appropriate and for everything that could be sold in others in other ways, and For a lot of people, it’s really hard to read the nonverbal signals, being on videoconference and seeing the person from the neck up, doesn’t help to try to read the person as will help if you are sitting on the same room, same conference room. So that is hard heart and tires, you know, the, the eyes of the people or some people gets tired looking at the bright of the screen, we we don’t think of this but yeah, get your screen the brightness of your screen, lower, you know, think that not moving. It’s hard on a lot of people you know, sitting here six, seven hours without moving because you are on assuming the next few months the next summer, then assume it’s really taking a toll in a lot of people. I i Jeff Segal who has been here in the show, you know, between great thing you know, put on alarm every 30 minutes I do anyways, I report every 30 minutes what I was planning to do what is actually happening. And every what I do that I tried to stretch, you know, my neck tried to stretch my back. And that has helped me significantly with this fatigue. And you know that I get the lower of the screen, I put this some of the screens, I remove the colors so that way they’re black and white screen on the iPad, it’s really easy to do you get the color filters done on a Chromebook not so much. But in the iPad is really easy to do. They are extensions that you can use on Chromebooks, as well as the Mac, the Mac also has a color filters but as Chromebook and iPad. And on the put on the Chromebooks there is extension that you can use to make to black and white. So you can get all your coals in soon in black and white. That way, the impact or the negative impact that will have on your eyes is significantly less, I don’t know, what is the solution, if you’re not using Chrome as a browser on a Windows machine, but if you’re using if you’re using a if you’re using a Windows, I don’t know, but but again, on a Chromebook if you are using you can get it into black and white. And that helps significantly with your eyes, if you’re not looking at data that requires color, it’s completely worth it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 47:22
Yeah, and I you know, there’s so many other pieces, you know, people who have gotten ring lights, you know, like I have a ring light that’s, that’s on me. And, you know, if you’re in lots of meetings, and you’re using a ring light that’s more, you know, light that is shining directly in your eyes, also moving away from having windows right behind your, your computer, because that high amount of light all the time is not great for you. So, you know, just like things of that nature, I mean, I’ve taken to actually closing all of the blinds in the first part of the day, just so that I can have a little bit of controlled lighting, so it’s not as much light shining in on me, because it’s not zoom fatiguing me, it’s the fact that I’m staring, you know, at a screen with a whole bunch of other light that is basically bombarding your, your sensory systems. And, you know, I think that it’s really good that the suggestions they made, which is you know, dealing with eye contact and just basically moving yourself out of sight. For example, I, you know, for many months, what into the pandemic, I was keeping, you know, myself the same size as who was I who I was talking to on screen, and then I just decided to change it to Speaker view, and, and pin the person with whom I was talking so that I showed up as either small or non existent depending upon the video technology. And that really increased my ability to engage with the person and not worry about what I look like. And that that’s just a really great player. And again, it’s just, it’s just a matter of figuring out what you need to do in order to be able to feel comfortable and overcome those pieces. You know, I’m not in the category of like, oh, everybody should turn off their cameras. I don’t mind if people are not on camera, and I’m fine with that. That’s, that’s okay, if you can’t be on screen or you don’t want to be, you know, I know that some clients meet with me, and they have their kids with them. And so they they don’t want the kids you know, like running around and being distracting. So they keep their camera off. That’s fine. I don’t think it’s a problem. If you if you want to be able to do that. It’s just a matter of making sure that you do what you need to to stay together when you are in meetings, being prepared for meetings, also, I think is one of those things that really causes a lot of stress for people. If you’re prepared for meetings, then the meetings are less stressful. And if you’re not prepared for meetings, the meetings are more stressful. And especially when you’re on camera, and you are in essence feeling like you’re being recorded most of the time when people are on camera, they think of being recorded. And so it has that additional unconscious stress that you think about when you are on camera. So just keep those things in mind. Moving right along, we’re gonna give a hat tip, a nod to Art Gelwicks and the idea pump. He wrote an article about something he called the S to R method. And Augusto, what did you think about the str method, and I’ll start off with the fact that str is basically a nap. But art basically re coined it as the str nap str for stage to rest in a way to recoin the concept of the power nap in that many corporate environments, many businesses think about napping, and there’s a negative connotation to it. But if we had a term for it, that was a little bit more, you know, corporate a little bit more, you know, scientifically sounding, that it would be more acceptable. And it’s kind of interesting, right, that that naming has a way of making something seem more official more businesslike. And so he, he gave two examples, stage two rest, cycling, or short duration mental refresh. But I like this concept of str, I think I think we all need to remember that the concept of napping is and has been shown from study after study how powerful it can be short naps, not long naps, hours of naps over an hour, certainly have been recently shown to be very detrimental to our health. But the idea of short naps, 20 minutes there abouts. Most people talk about the idea of of doing caffeine nap, you have your cup of coffee, and then you lay down to be able to or you know, however you nap, whatever position you’re in, you put yourself in a position to nap and then you go ahead and take that nap. And because the caffeine takes roughly about 20 minutes to kick into your system, that’s just about the right amount of time before your body then reawakens and is raring to run raring to go because you have gotten that caffeine buzz to run in there. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of that only because caffeine has a tendency to spike, and then you have a crash. And I don’t want that. That cat crash. So you know, just depends on how you want to make it all work for you. But I like the concept.

Augusto Pinaud 51:57
That caffeine will spike me so

Raymond Sidney-Smith 52:00
I just think you’re tolerating the caffeine from too much of it. I think that’s

Augusto Pinaud 52:04
I don’t know nothing about that. I’m not going to recognize that not even if you bring the lawyer, but I don’t know not being if you have that that ability, I don’t think everybody have that ability of the 20 minutes. Now, if you have that ability, yes, no question about it, do it because it really make a difference. 20 minutes usually doesn’t, you know, I take longer. So what I have done, instead of go for an official nap is I have found guided meditation that takes around that time between 15 and 20 minutes. Nope, no more than that. So I don’t do the nap. But I but the meditation, the disconnecting helped me significantly to do that. And in a certain way I do the shot of coffee and then go for the meditation. So it works really, really well for me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 53:04
Great, wonderful. All right, well, we have just powered through our headlines this week. And so with that, that takes us to our new tools of the week. So it used to and I you know, scour the interwebs. Every week in pursuit of all the various headlines that we bring to you. We call that down into our shortlist of, of topics to discuss. But in amongst, in and amongst that we come across many personal productivity tools and services. And so we take this time in new tools of the week to share with you some tools that we think are useful to you. And so this actually comes in line with a recent announcement. So LastPass has recently announced that as of March, I believe 15th. Their plan is to, in essence charge people for use of any non mobile devices for their free plan. And so that means that if you have all mobile devices, you will be able to still use LastPass as the free option. But the moment you want to connect it to a desktop device, you will now have to upgrade to a last at least the LastPass premium or LastPass family. Now, from my perspective, LastPass is extremely affordable. It is also really important for you to have Password Manager. So it is both reasonable, affordable and logical for you to continue with LastPass if you were on it. However, there are those of us in the world who are wanting to have a free LastPass a free Password Manager and want to stay with free they don’t want to pay for another service or another subscription. And so there has been a movement toward leaving LastPass and so they have in this verge article provided some instructions on how to export your your LastPass passwords to CSV or XML file, therefore allowing you to go ahead and you know That to another surface. There are other services out there. And so Augusto and I are going to share with you some of our other services that we recommend. And so starting off with my choice this week is the one that I’ve been the free version that I have been recommending to a lot of my clients that want to leave LastPass. That gives you an option of a free version, that will also give you desktop and mobile password management. And as well as a Chrome extension, a browser extension. And that is bit warden. It turns out that bit Warden is also a free open source product. And so there’s that you There are also other versions of of bit Warden so that if you do want to level up to a higher level plan, or even a business plan, you can go ahead and do that. So there are personal plans and business plans for the premium account beyond the free version. So the free version gives you access to your vault, you can synchronize your passwords across all of your devices, and you get a secure password generator and your self hosting. So it’s synchronizing those passwords around your items. But it is not it doesn’t have a web version web portal for that. Well, you upgrade to the premium. And you get that that web portal, you get a one time password generator, you get up to 100 gigabytes of encrypted file storage, you can also use a second factor key like a yubikey. I have a Google I have Google Titan keys, for example u2f and duo type things. And you also get a health report that will alert you when there are problems with your account. Like you know, you have used duplicate passwords across the system, as well as emergency access. So you can give someone else access to your account in an emergency situation. And then of course, you can upgrade to a family version, which gives you six members. Now the LastPass account, I think for four bucks a month also gives you the same thing on the family level. So you’re talking minimal savings per month. But you know, still it is a savings per month on the bitwarden plan for $3.33 per month, if you pay annually, then there are business plans. So, you know, I think bid Warden is a great tool, I’m going to stick with LastPass and you know, continue using LastPass in the premium side and in the business side for my business passwords. But if you’re going for a free plan and you want to stick with a free version, bit Warden i think is a really great tool. Okay, so what is your pick of the week?

Augusto Pinaud 57:27
Well, I did another one for free and and i will tell you why. I had people that I close that has been compromised passwords that has gone into significant amount of problems. And that day will now after they went into that expensive problem happily pay whatever you know any company charge them to protect their password. I have been using a password manager since the days of the soft fork, cola splash ID I don’t know if they exist anymore or not. But I move at some point to one password and I’ve been handling with one password since the days of the day. So one password you know on the personal side is $3 a month if you bill it annually it’s $5 a month if you make it your family and I tell this story when clients asked me well why they want to pay $5 a month I tell the story of my grandma my grandma had a cookie jar in her kitchen where she hides okay securely money. Okay and grandkids were able to securely access that money. Okay. And she knew that the grandkids access her money let’s be clear, I don’t know cheap but it wants to hear Okay, according to her but the reality is anybody has access. Yeah, we we asked her and she was generous and give us the money of the jar. But that is exactly what happened. When everybody knows there is money in the jar, okay, everybody can open the jar and take a bill. And you don’t know who is taking that bill with the amount of time and live and digital world in which we leave. I believe that having a good place a good company who is searching who can alert you when there are breaches who can alert you when you’re repeating passwords with who can alert you when your password. It’s been breached. It is really, really important. So as I understand that I tell my clients to stop drinking one Starbucks for a month and pay for the password manager that will give you tranquility to non stop For the rest of the year.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:00:02
I also note that one password in a recent security audit by some, some security researchers identified one password as the only Password Manager out there that had zero trackers associated with it. LastPass is owned by LogMeIn, if you didn’t know. And they found them with the most as having seven data trackers associated with them. And things like Google Analytics and some other tracking tools, nothing that was accessing your passwords or otherwise. But the security researchers saw that as a point of contention, that these tools should not be tracking any data for privacy purposes and potential security risks if it can identify you. I’m not as I guess, you know, draconian as it comes to that, in my opinion, I think that these trackers are themselves, not necessarily capable of it like i’d, while they found Google Analytics associated with that Google Analytics has the ability to anonymize. So was it anonymized tracking? Or was it non anonymized tracking? So I don’t know. And that’s, so that’s a question in my mind, but either way LastPass had the most dashlane is another one of those competitors, I think it had four, you know, something like that. So other trackers are found in these tools. And that helps them understand who’s using the tool, how they’re using it, that kind of thing. But one password was the only one in that list that had zero, even bit Warden had to I think it was so it’s it’s a it’s a pretty solid tool, and you’re paying for privacy, you’re really truly paying for that level of security and privacy when it comes to your account. But there are some really good password managers out there. Like I said, there’s dashlane, there’s keeper. And remarkably, gousto slash ID is still around. And they have slash ID Pro has applications for your entire ecosystem, including edge and extension for agents and so forth. So yeah, good luck in in terms of

Augusto Pinaud 1:01:56
move one from a splash ID to one password. And that was such a painful process, not because of a splash ID because I do need to move reorganize that I

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:02:07
will. And that isn’t that it’s so interesting, you know how difficult it is to think about moving passwords today. Thankfully, you know, like with LastPass. And these other tools, now you export a file, you import a file. And it’s pretty simple how how the whole process works. And so even even to the effect that if you want to export all of your passwords and create more security, export all of your passwords out of your prop browser and into your password manager and then delete them from your browser. And so your password manager now has control in an encrypted blob, what we call a blob, right? Because you can’t read what’s inside the blob. And this gives you a greater level of security, not because your browsers are inherently insecure, but because your browsers are basically your new operating system, you have so many things that you’re doing in your browser, that it becomes a really, you know, like Augusto said, If you know that there’s money in the cookie jar, you’re gonna go after the cookie jar. And so many people see browsers as the new cookie jar. And so you don’t want to put passwords in your in your browser. So get them out of there, put them in your put them in your password manager, and you’ll be more secure in your Mac

Augusto Pinaud 1:03:13
as well as Chromebooks as well as your iPads and iOS devices. You can we find that the iOS should use that password manager as default instead of the other options in the browser and everything else.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:03:27
Yeah, on Android and iOS. That’s a real sense. I have it set to LastPass on all of them. And it’s brilliant, it pops

Augusto Pinaud 1:03:33
up. By having the one password it works incredibly well.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:03:39
Alright, so those are our new tools of the week. And that brings us on to our story of the week. What is our story of the week, this week, the gousto, some, some Microsoft, Microsoft

Augusto Pinaud 1:03:48
announced that office 2021 will be available for Windows and Mac OS next year. And they talk about Windows and Mac OS. Interestingly enough, they are coming back to the old model. So we went all 365 now we’re coming back to that, let’s install it buy the license even though we’re talking about having a license where you come by, and don’t pay the fees anymore, for until you use it. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:04:24
and this also includes the the LTS C, which is the long term service contract version of Office. So you’re so for enterprise or if you’re a small business and you you just know that you can’t update your machines all that often. For cost or whatever purposes, you can install that office version, the LTS c version, and then call it a day for the next, you know, say five years. And so I think it’s quite brilliant on Microsoft’s part, it’s, it’s it’s throwing, it’s throwing a little loop for folks who are used to 365 and I bet you that Microsoft believes that they made as much money as they can currently off of the off of the market for subscriptions, service based Microsoft 365 users. And so they’ve already got enough people in that that market, they’re already the leader in that space. And they now want to throw a little, you know, I don’t know, what do you call life preserving raft to those businesses who are really coming up against the end of their prior ltsc, you know, versions of office, and they’re just giving them the ability to do that, plus, there’s probably a small community of enterprise, that’s going to buy a lot of volume for the office 2021 and the office ltsc. And that’s going to be a good book of business for them. So

Augusto Pinaud 1:05:42
yeah, so that’s, that’s, that’s interesting, there is no word yet, or what is going to happen on the mobile side on Android or iOS. But it’s still interesting that,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:05:52
I bet you they’re not going to give them access to that, it’s just going to be a matter of the desktop only versions, so that people who have you know, their devices, they have to have them either locked down for security purposes. And they have to have official versions of the office platform. That’s, that’s what this is for. And I think that in the productivity space, you know, your your, if you’re running in a in a secure environment, on desktop, office is the dominant tool, it’s really the only tool outside of say Libre Office, if if your organization even allows for free open source software to be to be running on the system. And I can’t imagine a lot of enterprise that that would be the case. So you know, it’s going to be office. And this gives those kinds of lockdown, secure environments, the ability to do that. And, you know, their businesses like mine, I’ve chosen to use Google workspace and put everything into the cloud, in that secure environment. And others have chosen that the opposite side is what they want, which is to put everything into local machines and synchronize those documents to say some centralized server. So that’s, that’s what they’ve done. And I think it’s, it’s an interesting move, I’m curious to see how the difference between 2021 windows and 2021 Mac will will look and feel they have been working slowly but surely to bring those into parity. But say outlook on Mac, still is lagging behind outlook on Windows. And so they’re just certain features that aren’t available. I really hope that in 2021, this office 2021 that that Microsoft brings those at least in closer parity, so that Mac and Windows have the same features when you’re using the same office products.

Augusto Pinaud 1:07:33
I think there is a long people a long list of people wishing the same.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:07:38
I know, I know. All right. So that was our story of the week. And that brings us to our announcements. We have quite a few announcements this week. Go Go figure. First up is actually a video from Francis Wade, about the upcoming task management and time blocking summit that’s coming up on this Thursday. And actually Augusto and myself are both leading sessions, as well as moderating some panel discussions this weekend, you know, Thursday through Saturday. And, and so Francis is actually going to be starting a new segment on the show about task management apps. And so we thought he would pop in and tell us a little bit about the task management and time blocking Summit 2021, as well as the task management app, discussions he’ll be doing going forward.

Francis Wade 1:08:25
Hi, this is Francis Wade over here at the task management and time blocking virtual summit 2021. Starting this week, one of the questions that we’re going to be asking and answering is what are the rules of auto schedulers and what are they? Well, an auto Scheduler. If you’ve ever tried time, blocking takes away all the pain of redoing your schedule when things change, and you need to all of a sudden rejigger your entire calendar just because there was a disruption today. Now, if you ever tried time blocking, you know that that’s the worst part time blocking starts off fairly easy. And as you add more tasks, it becomes devilishly difficult just to keep up with all the overhead. But other schedules are meant to follow an automatic hand that reaches into your calendar, moves all the tasks around, keeps the appointments in place, and then presents you with an optimized suggestion of kind of the ideal schedule for you to follow for the next few days. So coming soon to you there’ll be an auto scheduler, it’ll make its way probably to your laptop or your smartphone. But for sure in the next few years, other schedulers are going to be embedded in all kinds of devices, calendars, all kinds of places in our world, and they should make our lives a lot easier. At the moment there are about eight to 10 of them that are up to date and are actively being used and we’re going to feature them at the summit coming up. And that’s it signing out from the summit. This is Francis Wade, take care and all the best

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:10:03
All right, thank you to Francis Wade. As I said, he’s gonna be bringing us a new segment. And that will be all about updates relating to task managers on the market. And of course, he’ll be keeping us up to date on all the auto schedules that are being built into time management and task management software today. And actually, tomorrow, in while we’re in announcements Tomorrow, I will be hosting a special session tomorrow inside a personal productivity club. So if you are not in personal productivity club, join us over there at WWW dot personal productivity club. And Francis and I will be in conversation about the future of automated time blocking technologies. And so we’re gonna just do a quick conversation tomorrow evening about that. And so feel free to join us. What are our other announcements this week at gousto?

Augusto Pinaud 1:10:49
Oh, there is a new podcast in Spotify. Where is featuring Bruce Springsteen and President Obama, if you have not a chance to watch it, it’s really refund, I at least, enjoy it. The other two is Cosmo time, this week announced the integration with Asana. So if you guys want time, it’s a great application, talking about time blocking and copying about all that, it is a really important thing. So if you want to if you use Asana, this is a great time to play with cosmic time and see where a Santa can help you.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:11:33
Fantastic. Also, applications have opened for Apple’s entrepreneur camp for female developers. This is an upcoming entrepreneur camp. And it’s there to provide support and resources for female developers and founders. And so of course, in furtherance of Apple’s desire to increase diversity and inclusion in their developer community. They are hosting these events aimed at a wide variety of demographics that are considered underrepresented in the industry. And so Apple announced the inaugural entrepreneur camp. This was for black developers and founders, of course, in Black History Month, and now they are doing this for female developers. And so this is a continuation of that process. There’s a a application form, and it’s all on the link in the show notes so you can get access to that. And I think it’s a great opportunity, if you are, or no, a female developer, or female founder, please send this along to them and have them join if they’re interested in developing in the apple ecosystem. I think that it’s just so important that we have more, you know, young women in STEM, and that we support our female developers and founders. And so I’m just really excited to see that Apple is doing this. And I know that Google has some work to do in that space as well. So I’m just looking forward to seeing all of the big tech support and bringing these underrepresented communities to light. With that we have another item, which is that Jason freed noted of notable for his work at Basecamp or 37 signals turn Basecamp and now hey.com email service with Daniel Heinemeier Hansson, is that correct? Yeah. DHH I think. And so, I now have to look up his I want to make sure I get his name, right. But David, David, I’m sorry. So it’s David Heinemeier Hansson, sorry, I don’t know why I thought his name is Daniel. But either way, they have now co wrote co written a book called A world without email. And this is interesting to say the least. But more importantly is that politics and prose, which is a bookstore, I am, have been noted to wander around many years of my life, I have wild away hours and hours in that bookstore in Washington, DC. They’re hosting a live virtual conversation with Cal Newport and Jason freed the co authors of a world without email that will be at 6pm on March 8, at 6pm. eastern US on March 4, tickets are free, but you have to register in advance to attend. And cow is basically offering a little thing basically, he said, If you preorder the book and you send along your receipt, you will then be able to get a an excerpt basically from the book along XRP will send along to you and access to his email Academy video series. So if you’re interested in getting access to that stuff, preorder the book, follow up, follow the registration form that he’s provided in the link in the show notes. And voila, you get access to this email Academy. And you get kind of a long excerpt from the book ahead of schedule, which is kind of nice. So those pieces are there. I’m looking forward to reading and probably eviscerating the argument of a world without email but with great respect to both of them,

Augusto Pinaud 1:14:52
am I still waiting for that paperless world that they offered to me in 1980 something

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:14:58
I’m still looking forward to To the the, the minimalist world that everybody keeps talking about. And so we’ll see we’ll see what happens when that happens. But either way, that brings us to the end of our show. And so thank you Augusto for helping us get ready and prepared every week for Anything But Idle.

Augusto Pinaud 1:15:18
It is fun. It’s my pleasure.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:15:21
All right. Please let us know if there’s a story we missed by using our contact form on Anything But Idle. Feel free to tweet or dm us at Anything But Idle on Twitter. If you have questions or comment again, head on over to Anything But idle.com on the episode page, you can leave a comment or a question. While you’re on Anything But Idle you’ll find our show notes with links to all the stories or tools of the week. any extra stories that we didn’t cover today that we couldn’t cover because of time the text transcripts that are readable on the page and as well as available to Download as PDF and then you can learn how to subscribe on the page you know follow us for free you know if you just basically click on subscribe but it will give you instructions on how to follow us in your favorite podcast app. And otherwise, click the thumbs up if you are watching us live. Feel free to leave us a rating a review if you are listening to the podcast. And thank you all for joining us for this Anything But Idle. With that. We’ll see you next time. 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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