Productivity and Luck, and Top 10 Female Productivity, Organization & Technology Experts (Part 2)

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We’re continuing our Women’s History Month celebration, by announcing the results of our poll this past week, with the top 10 female productivity, organization and technology experts! Also, we’re joined again by Julie Bestry and Deb Lee joins us for the first time. Enjoy!

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In this Cast | Productivity and Luck, and Top 10 Female Productivity, Organization & Technology Experts (Part 2)

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Julie Bestry 

Julie Bestry, Certified Professional Organizer and Evernote Certified Consultant in Chattanooga, TN.

Deb Lee

Deb Lee is a Digital Productivity Coach and Evernote Certified Consultant in the DC Metro area.

Headlines & Show Notes | Productivity and Luck, and Top 10 Female Productivity, Organization & Technology Experts (Part 2)

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

Additional Nominees

New Tools of the Week

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

Featured Story of the Week

Productivity and Luck, and Top 10 Female Productivity, Organization & Technology Experts — Survey Result.

  1. Grace Marshall
  2. Penny Zenker
  3. Stacey Harmon
  4. Deb Lee
  5. Julie Bestry
  6. Julie Morgenstern
  7. Mel Robbins
  8. Judith Kolberg
  9. Barbara Hemphill
  10. Lisa Woodruff
  11. Laura Stack
  12. Michelle Gunn
  13. Gretchen Rubin
  14. Laura McClellan
  15. Claire L. Evans
  16. Ciara Conlon

Announcements

Raw Text Transcript | Productivity and Luck, and Top 10 Female Productivity, Organization & Technology Experts (Part 2)

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 0:05
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. And I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:17
and I am Augusto Pinaud

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. We are continuing Women’s History Month and so happy Women’s History Month. This is Episode 47. And we’re gonna be talking about productivity and luck. And we’re actually going to be announcing the top female productivity organization and technology experts today, based on our poll that has been running for the past week, Today is March 15 2021. And each week, we review and discuss the productivity and technology news headlines of the week. And to do that this week, we’ve invited Julie Besty and Deb Allison Lee Debbie to join us both are certified professional organizers. And I’m just so excited that both of them are also actually Evernote certified consultants. And so let’s go ahead and bring them up one by one. So like I said, Julie bestiary, you know her from last week on the show when we were talking about International Women’s Day, as well as Women’s History Month. But Julie bestiary is, as I said, a Certified Professional Organizer, as well as Evernote certified consultant based out of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Welcome to Anything But Idle, Julie.

Julie Bestry 1:24
Hi, guys.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:25
Welcome, welcome. Great to have you back.

Julie Bestry 1:29
Thank you for having that. That’s a good sign.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:33
And as I said, we have Deb Lee. She’s a digital productivity coach, and an Evernote certified consultant who’s based in the Washington DC metro area, a place I know and love. And so welcome to Anything But Idle Deb.

Deb Lee 1:45
Hi, thanks for having me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:48
Great to have you as well. This is a first time for you. And so you’ll be gentle. We’ll be gentle. Well, easy. And so as I noted at the top of the show, Augusto and I decided that we would talk today about luck. And the reason why we’re talking about luck today is because in just a couple days time, it will be March 17, which some people know colloquially as St. Patrick’s Day. And as I am part Irish, my great grandmother was Irish, I always consider St. Patrick’s day, a day when I am fully Irish, I am fully of Irish descent on on St. Patty’s Day. And so I wanted to talk with you all about how luck really plays into personal productivity, how it plays into us all being productive. And so let’s start off the conversation with that topic. How does luck factor into your own personal productivity?

Deb Lee 2:41
Hmm, I think I. I don’t think look factors in at all. whatsoever. I am, as really knows, pretty, pretty prepared about many things. I like having a plan, even if that plan has to change minutely, constantly, hopefully not. I really like having a set of guidelines. thing, I don’t fall into things. Generally things don’t fall into my lap. They I’m usually prepared. I’m preparing I am. I’m investigating, I’m discovering I’m trying, I’m testing, I don’t think I allow luck to enter into the equation, maybe I should. But I tend to be the one that will over prepare, and then adjust as I go along. So for me personally, luck has nothing to do with it zero.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:36
So I’ll give I’ll give a kind of different perspective on here, which is I think that I create my luck, which I think I’m saying the same thing you are, which is that I like to be prepared. Yeah, and and so I always say that I I make luck, possible. And by being prepared by doing all of those things, maybe luck is the thing that kind of pushes it over the threshold. But But I’ve I’ve done I’ve done the work, that luck has a better chance. It’s like flipping, it’s flipping the script on it. Right? I always want to make sure that I’m doing as much as I can to be prepared. And then kind of letting the universe decide at that point. Whether or not success is going to happen. Much of life really is at the end of the day left to chance. We don’t actually have a lot of control over our world. And yet we tend to believe that we do and there are systems within systems that that determine much of the courses of our lives. And you know, I always joke you know, I was I was a preemie so as a as a preemie, I was born ahead of schedule, and that that stuck. I always wanted to be ahead of schedule. But you know, there’s a reality factor that the luck of surviving as a premature child today has a lot to do with the technology, the medical technology of the prior, you know, hundreds of years. And maybe part in to the women’s liberation movement. A lot of me being alive today has to do with all of that kind of before me, right. And we have to keep, we have to keep in mind that luck is is created, it’s kind of generated from that perspective. And that’s kind of where my mind comes in when it comes to thinking about luck. How about you, Julie?

Julie Bestry 5:23
Well, I hate I hate to disagree with Deb on anything, because I loved it.

Augusto Pinaud 5:29
But

Julie Bestry 5:30
I think I agree with both of you. But I agree more with you. Right, I think that it’s about systems, I think luck is, is situations, combined with preparation. So luck is very much determined by your socio economic status, it’s determined by the fact that you were born in the late 20th, or even early 21st century versus, you know, the 19th, or the 18th. century, luck. Luck determines whether you are healthy in so many ways, so you have your circumstances, and then you have your preparation for it. I think for me, personally, so much of the, the situation, I have started with the luck of the luck of the circumstances of to whom I was born, my mother, before there was a title for it, my mother was a project manager, and I grew up watching her make lists and figure out, Okay, this is this needs to be done by this date. And it’s going to take x number of days plus buffer time, and counting back. So when I was like three or four or five, I had a front row seat at domestic project management. And I think that that, for me was really lucky, because it helped create, how I viewed all of the ways that I was going to be productive. So I absolutely believe that the circumstances through which that we have no control over determine our luck. But how what how we take that forward is determined by our preparations, the things that we do in terms of like Deb said, being ultra prepared, because if you are ultra prepared for every eventuality, I would say in organizing organizing doesn’t prevent a catastrophe necessarily, but it makes the catastrophe less catastrophic. So that’s my thought on it.

Augusto Pinaud 7:38
So I think we are all on the same page. For me, I love that Seneca quote that says Luke’s lock is what happened when preparation meets opportunity. And I agree with you that the circumstances help. And but that doesn’t mean that you cannot work with the circumstances good or bad, or that just make your path a little bit harder or a little bit longer or a little bit more challenging than others. But I think is that preparation, that consistent preparation, I said often that productivity is a gift you give to your future self. And I believe this preparation we are talking is that and yes looks help. Because you know, loving the event is coming to happen no matter what if we get a little abstract in here, and it’s going to find who is ready for it? And is that preparation that is going to make you ready for it. So.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:45
So I’m curious how you perceive luck in other people’s worlds. So if we don’t apply this to ourselves, all of us here, you know, on the panel tonight, see our clients see our customers see our loved ones experiencing the world potentially well, because they know what good preparation means. And maybe not so well, because they’re either coming to us for help, because they have lacked that obstruction organization. How did they talk about and how do you help them deal with the concept of happenstance and the way in which they see you?

Julie Bestry 9:25
I think it has a lot to do with anything. We talked about this a little, maybe maybe after, after the show last week about a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. If you think that you have mastery or control over at least some element of your life, you are going to work harder to make changes. So I know people who have had, you know, you know, a lifelike job, just like be the set and be fallen with with all sorts of things that that nobody would want but because They still believe that they can, that they can make changes that they can move, move forward on their own, they may not be able to change the circumstance, but they may be able to work within that circumstance to find someone or something that’s going to help move them forward. It’s very powerful. And then there are other people, we see this with our clients, I’m sure dad would agree that, that there’s that fixed mindset that I’m unlucky, bad things always happened to me, I can, I can’t, you know, you know, I can’t get better, nothing, nothing can help me. And that’s, that’s painful, because it’s hard to help somebody who doesn’t believe truly, that they can be helped, and be a little luckier.

Deb Lee 10:47
Yeah, I would agree that there are some clients who feel that they’ve tried and tried. And each time that trying, has ended up in failing or failure. And they’re not sure they’re taking sort of that last stab at it, they call me or they call Julie, and they say you, you know, you’re my last hope. You’re it. And it is a bit defeatist, it’s a little sad. Because we can change, it may take longer, it may take a really long time to affect those changes, but we can and sometimes those really incremental, small changes are what adds up to the bigger, better results, but it takes a while to sort of string them together at the right time. I, you know, I guess I struggle a little bit with the notion of luck and my perception of luck. It sounds sort of like you wait for it to find you. And I’m more of a, I want an opportunity to find me and I want to be ready for that opportunity. And I want my clients to be ready for that opportunity, whatever that might be, whether it’s growing, or maybe not growing, but staying where they are, and just fine tuning and really polishing those systems and getting them right. So I, you know, I don’t know that people see themselves as unlucky or lucky. But they do see themselves as having tried to not reach the mark that they were trying to reach falling short. And my job, hopefully is to help them see that they can indeed, you know, walk the path that they’re trying to carve out and end up where they want to be perhaps it’s more Securitas than they thought at first. But they can actually get there. So I’m hoping that we change their luck, dare I say, with the work that we do together?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:40
gradually,

Julie Bestry 12:42
I wonder if luck is kind of like privilege that most people who have it don’t see that they have it, there’s that expression being born on third hitting a single and thinking you hit a home run. And so I think maybe a lot of people who haven’t had advantages feel like they’re unlucky. But I think even more people who have had a lot of advantages. Don’t don’t necessarily see it as luck or see privilege, something like that. I could be extending the metaphor a little too far. I

Deb Lee 13:14
don’t know why I do. I do see your point there, though. And oftentimes, you know, you know, we’re looking for that thing that that magic wand, that thing that’s going to turn things around and we don’t realize it’s right in front of us all along. We’ve always had it. We just didn’t use it in the way that perhaps we needed to. So I I see where you’re going. I think there’s a distinction between luck and privilege. But perhaps there there are some intersection as well.

Augusto Pinaud 13:38
Yeah. And I think it’s also a perspective thing. You know, I I remember on on my first book, when he published there is somebody who left a review in Amazon saying, Well, obviously the author English is not his first language and I don’t remember now who was a Russian writer. He quoted me but but but uh, you know, he was not excited. It was a really awesome Russian writer when I was jumping on my two star review. Somebody was asking me what up I say, look, look, there’s hoping here. But what most people don’t know is I was 26 when I moved to this country and I could not say May I use the restroom was not an option in my vocabulary. So for me, that review said so much on how much progress I think though things happen coming from a different country. I have here friends and people I know and even clients saying, well the discrimination and yes, the discrimination is there. Okay. There is no discussion about their existence. But also, when you are more sensible to eat, you also see it on more places than necessarily the actual places that They are on. Yes, there is, again, there is no discussion that exists. But also, sometimes some people are more sensible to it and see it really in places where may not have been that the intention of the of the other person, anything luck is similar in that sense, you know, and you things happen, and you can look them from the negative perspective, or you can look at maybe for a recent

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:30
what Deb was talking about? Yeah, so what that was talking about earlier reminded me of a research study that I had to go and find, to talk about this, which is that there was a research experimental psychologist, Richard Wiseman, who actually did a study where he placed ads in the newspaper, and told people that they won money. And this ends up being an issue of self selection bias, that is people who are, who believe in luck, who feel more more optimistic about them, being able to find luck, of course, as you know, return the ad, right responded to the ad, by and large, and people who did not believe they were going to win, therefore, didn’t respond to the ad. And this is probably a bit of discussion on optimism versus pessimism or otherwise, I think it’s a little bit more nuanced than that, though, because those of us who like you, I believe that I have some level of control and can actually increase the level of control over the course of my life with small study interventions. And people who feel both out of control of their life, but also believe in luck, are willing to say play the lottery, they’re willing to do those kinds of things. And that’s totally fine. And then there are those who feel like they are lack control, but are pessimists, and therefore will not respond to those things. So there is this much more nuanced perspective, on on the on the one hand, what I think about this as like, a general mechanism is that life is suffering. If you are thinking about it from the Buddhist perspective, right? We, there there is this understanding of that, and at the same time, we can lean in to the positive, we can lean into the productive, we can look at the bright side of things, not because we’re delusional, in the classic psychological definition, but that we can delude ourselves pleasantly into just thinking the best of people, we can also believe the best that will happen. And by virtue of doing that, with preparation, we can actually increase the chance that we’re going to have positive outcomes. And so I think we can, I think we can create our own luck in that way. If I’m, if I’m so bold to say that, but at the same time, I think that even if you strike out the first 50 times, a sense of optimism allows you to be able to pick yourself back up off the ground, and go up with that that’s the first time and that may be when you hit the Grand Slam, right. And as someone who is not very good with sports analogies, I am going to I’m going to go ahead and hope that my analogy was good for everybody.

Julie Bestry 18:07
So that’s two baseball analogies to baseball metaphors. In the course of maybe five minutes from two people who pay no attention to sports. I think that’s pretty good.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:16
Well, you know what, I was a huge baseball fan. When I was a kid. The baseball cards in the whole nine yards, my brother and I just collected every baseball card that was out there. He kept it up. I picked up reading and baseball and sports fell away. I just felt like I was far more engaged in as Cousteau was noting earlier, probably Nabokov and dusty offski and, and so and so forth. I was far more interested in those words than I were in people hitting balls over fences.

Deb Lee 18:45
So then would would the luck be on that 51st try standing in the right position links angled perfectly right stands holding the bat at the braid angle, your hand eye coordination being on point in that moment that the ball heads towards you and you strike it and that is that luck? Would that be luck? Or would all those other things be preparation for that moment? When it actually does happen? you’ve practiced and tried 50 times before? And now it’s your time or is it luck? Because if everything lining up the way it should?

Julie Bestry 19:28
Either or? I’m curious. I mean, if you had parents who never took you to the the ballpark Park and never had the games on and didn’t buy you the cleats and then didn’t throw a ball with you in the backyard. I mean, that’s the that’s the part that’s not in your control. So right now, if you didn’t have any of those things, and you still kept going at it and the 51st try, then you could say, yeah, there’s not a lot of luck there. That’s all talent and perseverance. But I think I think for most things, it’s probably that combination of lucky circumstance. And, and perseverance

Deb Lee 20:15
where you could be putting yourself in this circumstance, like putting yourself in a position that would be beneficial to you at some point. I’m not trying to be antagonistic, I just sort of I’m, yeah, so I’ll leave it at that.

Augusto Pinaud 20:33
That person who, who came into the 51 time, yes, it’s true is perseverance, what got them to that 51 time, but it could be 51 or 67. It’s look that it was 51. And the only reason this person is experiencing that look, is because they had that other elements, it’s not that that person is luckier, it is that that person had a lot more personalized than the other one who may have quit at 50.

Julie Bestry 21:05
I think this is the most philosophical episode of Anything But Idle that I’ve ever watched.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:13
Think I think it’s a yes. And I think you’re all right, in some way, shape or form, there going to be circumstances where, you know, I, you could, you could step out into the street and find $100 bill on on on the ground. And that could be considered luck. But you could also dedicate your time and world to doing something. And if you didn’t do that, it’s not like you’re going to show up to a marathon and win it. You need to practice to some extent in order to be able to get even to the starting line, and, and even plan to place. So there are these two different competing elements here where there’s some parts of your life where you could just have random luck, you know, and that can be a part of it, or random chance that can provide you with what you perceive as luck. And then there are things where you need to prepare and you can, you can perceive the situation as being unlucky if you lose and give up. But you can also perceive the situation as you having luck, eventually, and working toward it. And as we’re always focused on productivity, I’m focused on what are the things that are going to help motivate someone to do more, be more and continually want to be better. And so I’m always looking for those little edge pieces. And I think that we can all lean into being a little delusional, toward happiness, a little delusional, toward being lucky. And we’re all going to be better off for it. And so thank you all for this wonderful opening conversation. We’re just getting started. We have so much more to talk about today. And because Did you have a little thing that you wanted to add? I

Augusto Pinaud 22:43
think it’s important that I leave the disclaimer here for for our panelists, our people. Listen, if you guys see me running, and I pass you around, there is something following us. I don’t do that naturally, please run faster. Something is

Julie Bestry 22:59
not training for a marathon. If we see you running, we should never, you should

Augusto Pinaud 23:04
be no longer for me ever.

Julie Bestry 23:07
You see me following the ice cream truck

Augusto Pinaud 23:10
that I may do.

Deb Lee 23:12
running after coffee. So yeah,

Augusto Pinaud 23:15
you’re here.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:18
So this week, what we thought we would do is instead of our normal news, like we normally do, and in deference to our topic, and the goal of being able to cover news that was timely and relevant, we thought it’s Women’s History Month, we are looking at all of the various panelists that all the various experts in in productivity, organization and technology. And so what it used to when I did was we actually looked at all the various folks who were included in the list, and we look to find stories that they have recently put out. And so tonight’s episode, today’s episode is going to be all stuff from those who were nominees in the list. And so before we get to the quote unquote winners, everybody’s a winner tonight on the list, but for those of you for those who were on a nominated on the list, we thought we would go through the articles and cover some of those pieces. And so Augusto, do you want to kick us off with our first item?

Augusto Pinaud 24:24
Of course, except that I lost my tab. So the first the first article that we have to do in June sorry. Okay, my links are failing on me. It’s an article from realtor.com called the insider secret for organizing on your overflying book collection and it’s talking about Barbara help. I’m going to miss Barnhill Barbara, lady, thank you very much and it’s Quoting her and talking, and it was funny because Julie said, Oh, we can also use this one I was too late for to permit to change it. But, but I, as a person who used to have books, I don’t have books anymore, I have digitized my life because we have moved 617 times in the last 18 years. So the first time we move, I discovered that there was no data, we need much money, so we can carry those books. So my life has started going from carrying a lot of books to, to go digital. But I used to have a lot of books. And I really went when I there is a picture on the article for the people who is listening. And please go and click on the link that talks about organize the books into colors. And I’m going to go to the most non deep version of this. But I need to admit that when I saw that picture, I said, Oh, I made books, the Kindle. So for the Amazon, people who should be listening to us, we need to get some better way to organize our Kindle books into that way. But it actually talks about the article talks about different ways to organize the books, you know, leftovers using the decor or having an offline shelf, I now have so many little books that I can use a couple of those and and have them I think are our biggest number of books at this time in our house are our cooking books, because it’s what my wife is still like to have. Everything else I think is digital, but maybe someday somebody will make a cheapest screen that I can put on the walls, and it will reflect the back of my Kindle books.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:56
Well, I’m gonna I’m gonna probably I’m gonna just poke in just to say that I adore Barbara, she is She is such a lovely person, I’m going to disagree with her. And that is to say that she talks about the idea of books being there. She said they said it says Get rid of, Oh, she actually didn’t say that. I’m sorry, Barbara, you’re you’re you’re off the hook. She said the first step is in decluttering books is determine how much space you’re willing to a lot to books to decide whether to keep a book, ask yourself, what’s the worst thing that would happen if I got rid of this book and then wanted it? And if you can live with your answer, donate or toss it, what I what I read quickly in in preparation for today was the the next person who I’m not gonna name her, but but she said, while some books might be obvious keepers, you’ll you’ll likely end up with a good site, a good size pile of books that she calls maybes, basically getting rid of ugly or old books. And I take personal insult to the idea that there are such a thing as an ugly or old book, there’s no such thing in my world, I will keep every book I own until the day I pass from this earth. I love my books and and let them you know, they always say like, Oh, you know, there’s people who are, who have difficulty with, you know, disorganization and clutter, and so on so forth. And you know, like, somehow they’re going to harm themselves by books falling on them and you know, being harmed and injured and dying. That would be a noble way for me to go for. If If I die from the weight of books crushing me to death that will be that will be the way I want to go in life if if I have to die a horrible death. So

Julie Bestry 28:31
right, I did the same thing that you did when I first opened the article, I was just sort of skimming along and when I got to get rid of ugly or old books I’m like, ever said that? No, that’s not possible. But she did say in the first part where she’s quoted something that she’s very famous for saying clutter is postponed decisions. And she says it’s true of book clutter as well. And I think we very rarely think of book clutter when we think about clutter. Because for the same reason you and I don’t believe that there are ugly or old books that you can get rid of. Because books are not about aesthetics. We don’t keep books because they look good on the shelf. We keep books because books are our friends, books, books are our connections to all the other worlds real and fantastical that we haven’t visited. But Barbara does make this great notion that the first step to decluttering books if we’re willing to acknowledge it. Okay, that textbook for math from like, sophomore year of high school, that might be something that that we can let go of. And the first step is you have to decide to look at your books and be willing to make these choices and say, okay, what’s the worst thing that she says? What’s the worst thing that could happen if I didn’t have this book? And I guarantee you if I didn’t have my math book from sophomore year of high school, which I do not, life goes on and just fine.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:58
Agreed.

Deb Lee 29:59
Yeah, I Don’t think all the books are old books, I think they have character. I, they may have notches and torn pages, but that that means you’ve been reading them and picking them up and soaking in all that goodness, whatever that might be. Unfortunately, books don’t love me because when I start reading them, I start to fall asleep. Like the real hard like, two pages in and I’m done. So I have to listen to books now. But I still have a collection that I love picking up and I’ll read a page because that’s as far as I can get without falling on the floor. So yeah, books can’t be too old. They can’t be ugly at all. I don’t care how tattered they are, they’re just even the way a book smells just contribute to the experience. So yeah,

Augusto Pinaud 30:42
yeah, and I agree. And when even when, when I made the decision to get rid of most of my books, it wasn’t easy it was because I, I don’t see their ugly or I and what we was going to pick two to go with with us and what you know, and every and every time we move, I look at them and say, Okay, which one are the first decision for me was what is what I need? I need the book, or I need the paper that year, the paper book or I need the world and the inside world. But that provides for me What’s about the inside world and I discovered that anyways, I was buying them paper and digital and don’t ask me my because that’s what I was doing. Okay, let’s say well, I can stop buying one of them. That then now means I can buy more of the digital. Okay, that was the justification, okay, at some point, and it works. i. So,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:49
go ahead. Okay, I just wanted to poke in with to two items that before we close out on this story, which is one, what I’m hearing, just in summary is that there is there are useful books to us. And that there are non useful books to us and keeping books around just for the sake of it, I think is is is a travesty. There are people who can use those books and love those books. And they don’t have to be living in your home in order to do that. And so I agree in on that on that premise. The second is that organized book collections are productive book collections. And I have a friend who says that she doesn’t need to read a book for it to be useful on her shelf, because she will potentially run through the index or run through the table of contents and extract what she needs at the time she needs it with many don’t just like a dictionary, you don’t read a dictionary unless you’re Me and 12 years old. And, and so don’t don’t don’t count me out in that sense. But really, I loved the dictionary when I was at age. And so the idea though, is that some books are not necessarily on your shelf, because you want to read it cover to cover, there are books that you want to be able to reference. Even if the book is meant to be a narrative, you may just want it for the purpose of reference. So being organized doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be as beautiful as the image in that article. But it certainly needs to be structured in a way that you can find what you need to when you need to. And so very much believe in having those functions of it being useful to you and it being organized.

Julie Bestry 33:17
Right, you’re talking to professional organizers. And we always say the aesthetics are nice, but it’s something has to be functional. Because if it’s beautiful, but dysfunctional, you’re going to be unhappy. But if it’s if it’s functional, it’ll be beautiful to you.

Deb Lee 33:36
Yeah, I am, I probably would be the person that would attempt to do the color coding of the books. I don’t know how well I could keep up with it. So I would probably not do that after a while. But I think forming function it just whether it’s books or other things, they kind of go together. Obviously, if you’re tripping over your books, even if they’re available valuable to you, and you read them all the time, but you are they’re precariously perched you are knocking into them, you may need to come up with a different solution. If they’re harming you know, harmful in some way blocking war, you know, those are the kinds of things I would be concerned about how it looks and care about that. That’s part of the character.

Augusto Pinaud 34:19
So now this is the moment that I opened my mouth in front of three Evernote certified organizer and then I said what I should not but that is exactly for me in particular the only good use or incredible use Evernote have in my world and is that I can take screenshots of books that I highlight forward the image to Evernote, Evernote will index and now I have that work of the library. All the books that I have all the covers everything indexed by Evernote and I can come and search inbox and He will give me every book I have read that I have at least hide writers that has the word inbox and that is my only use of Evernote that the only reason I pay for Evernote, but I No, no, no, I said I was going to get in trouble in front of the in front of this certified, but it’s the only use I have. And I love it because even though I don’t have a beautiful bookcase that I can come and see the books, every book that I have in PDF, or Kindle or anything digital can be found in there and can be found my notes, and I can retrieve them in a second.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 35:37
I don’t I don’t have any.

Deb Lee 35:39
Sorry. Go ahead. If that’s how he wishes to use Evernote and it is working for him. I think Go for it. If that’s the only use even though it can do a whole lot more than that. I just want to say that for the record. But if that’s how it works for you, and it makes you happy, then I’m all for it. I’m here for that. Absolutely.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:03
Yeah, I don’t actually have any problem with you choosing a single use or a single purpose for Evernote where it it has that function and it does what you want it to do. So I don’t think you’re going to get an argument from the certified consultants on the panel tonight on that one. I know you you wanted the conflict or gousto i i know i know that. Okay, let’s move on from Barbara Hemphill to Kira conlan, our author of productivity for dummies and other books and Kira. Thank you for one not hating me for mispronouncing your name last show. But then I looked it up and I and I’ve got it and happens to be by my niece’s name is Kara just spelled differently. And so I was even more mortified because I I pronounced her but it is Kira and so my my great grandmother who is hopefully not rolling around in a grave, forgives me for the mispronunciation. But Kira wrote this article how my positive morning routine completely changed my life. What were your thoughts there any anything that stood out for you in that article from Kira?

Julie Bestry 37:14
Well, I have a funny anecdote from that because she was talking about, you know, rise before the bowl, and it came into that whole idea of negative chatter. But at the end, she talked about how she has embraced the notion of taking an icy cold shower to wake her up. And that’s her way of facing the morning and like, like, like she explained, I am also not a morning person. But last week between the last time I saw you and now my water heater died, and before they could replace it last Tuesday and Wednesday, I had no hot water and I took cold showers and I can tell you, it did not have the effect that it has for her for me. I had my adrenaline rise, and then go splat. And I felt exhausted both of those days. So I think the idea of the cold shower, like the idea of being a lark or a night owl is very specific to the individual as to whether that’s going to work. But I did like what she had to say about self talk.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:19
Yes, so I’m Go ahead.

Deb Lee 38:21
I didn’t read this article. But just hearing the words Cold Shower made me cold. So I know like I just started shivering. And I’m really happy that that works for her. And for anyone else out there who thinks that should be a part of their morning or evening or midday routine. I tip my hat to you. Because I if I had to stay clean by taking a clean by taking a cold shower, I would be dirty all the time. I would not be doing it, though I would be an early riser, just not one that would be taking a cold shower. So I tip my hat to those of you who like that

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:59
No secure covers a couple of really important pieces in this article that I think are worth noting. One is routine. And she’s choosing morning routine. But as I am want to do on my soapbox, is to explain to people that your day is set on a scaffolding, your day is structured by virtue of routines. And if you can master these routines, that is where real productivity gains happen. They happen in these margins, this, these transition points between one routine and the next. And so her mastering her her morning routine, and really coming to some positive. You know, outlook on it, I think is really, really powerful for all of us who want to be more productive. The way you start your day is the way in which the rest of your day will likely follow. And as well unless you somehow capable of warping space time. And then let’s talk let’s talk because I really I really want to know how you’re doing that. Second though, is the idea here of the of the Wim Hof Method, which is this notion of taking cold showers and activating different parts of your system. This is in essence trying to strengthen our resilience and dealing with our Vegas nerves. And so the idea here is that the cold shower elicits your, your biological, you know, responses that will over time, kind of deaden, but lessen your immediate fight or flight syndrome. And by doing that over and over and over again, your body is capable of being more resilient. Now, I say that with full understanding that like Deb, if I am forced to take a cold shower, I better have a gun pointed at my head. Because it’s just not happening. But there’s good science out there that talks about this method. They’re they’re great practitioners of the Wim Hof Method. And I salute you.

Julie Bestry 40:54
Yes, this is being chased by something in order to run you’re having a gun pointed at you in order to take a cold shower,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:02
by dying under a dying under a pile of

Julie Bestry 41:05
dying under a pot. This is what we need, we need. One of the words I learned in studying Italian is pericolo. So which means dangerous. It’s like, I think I think this podcast episode needs needs a pericolo. So, Warren didn’t pronounce that with much of an Italian accent. But I think we need a warning sign on this podcast.

Deb Lee 41:27
I love morning routine idea though I think that is definitely on point. Anything that you can do to prepare for your day and set the tone for the day I think is a good way to start. Meditation for me is that thing, I actually do it before I get out of the bed. So nautical showers, you know never, that will never happen. Not even once will never happen but meditating in the morning. I have done it religiously every morning without stopping for probably a month now. But in the past, I’ve tried you know sort of hemmed and hawed stopped and started. But this was my good college try. And it has helped my day, start my day the way that I wanted to and the way I feel the world needs to receive Deb Lee, when she first you know, puts her feet on the floor once getting up out of the bed. So I highly recommend it.

Julie Bestry 42:21
I can say that Deb and I have roomed together at naipo conference. And she is perfect and fully formed from the minute she gets out. I have one eye open and the other one, I’m like, my hair is sticking up. And she just bounces out of out of the bed perfect and ready to start the day like, like, but I remember, like one of the little like, like, like one of the little creatures in Cinderella, Snow White, she’s just cheerful and perfect.

Deb Lee 42:55
Because I’m a morning person. So all of my brain cells are firing. So I’m ready to go. Talk to me at like six or seven notes. 645 right now, talk to me in about, you know, 15 minutes. And let’s see how that goes. So, but thank you.

Augusto Pinaud 43:11
I want to add a couple of things to the morning routine. And I This was my own experience. I was a proud member of the owl club. And as I begin to look my membership of the hell clump in around 2012. I discovered that yes, did I stay proudly until three or four in the morning working? Yes, but I get home dinner, follow around and waste a significant amount of time so I could disconnect from what I was doing. So I could get into the mood to really, you know, being able to get that hour to have cellular productivity or productivity. And what I did was to change it to the morning. You know, why am I wasting all this time? Let me go to sleep and try to wake up early and I tell the story of the first week are we going to have a guy wake up at 40 in the morning like this? Okay, like what? really what’s this crap? Okay, so no hair because there is nothing I can do in there. Okay, but other than that, okay, one out here when I there, okay. And I spent a week thinking, this makes no sense. I’m getting less productivity than what I was having when I was fooling around until midnight. But eventually what happened is the brain decide, okay, just this is what you’re going to do punish us this way. Let’s get it and are in routines in the morning. Meditation is one of them. For me, and I struggle with meditation for many years until I decide to start tracking on my watch. And the moment I don’t know why I don’t know if we can go into why but as soon as I begin tracking that thing on the watch every day it’s And I feel, I feel like Oh, I didn’t meditate this morning, I better find time on the calendar to watch. So,

Deb Lee 45:10
so you like streaks, then you like seeing a streak of days, right? It’s very motivating, it gets me to do the meditation do. And Julie probably is tracking steps and other things in her life to imagine seeing that street kind of keeps you encouraged and motivated to keep it going. You don’t

Julie Bestry 45:29
have to compete with someone else. If you’re competing with yourself, what I love about the Fitbit, is I have you know, when when you see the number of steps and the number of miles per day, and then you see that progress now my I have always been a night person I, you know, in school, I had to get up in the morning, in, I worked in television, so I had to be up early in the morning, to to be there. And I was always as I was, my game was the best it could be for me in the morning. But if I needed to have a good meeting, I scheduled that meeting in the afternoon because as the day goes on, it’s it’s like it’s like the room gets lighter and lighter as the sunlight comes in. Well, my inner sunlight beams out as the day goes on. So, you know, 6am to noon may as well not exist for me, but 6pm to midnight, and even midnight and beyond. So I think it’s kind of like the luck. It’s like you, you can make yourself you can make yourself Do whatever you have to do I used when I first started my business, I was lucky enough to have a gig on the local TV station, talking on the news about organizing and productivity. And I had to be at the TV station at 5am. So there were times where I really strongly considered just not going to bed the night before, because staying up and being alert at 5am was a much better proposition than trying to fall asleep and staring at the clock until two and three and getting like an hour of sleep. So I think all of the people who are pro mourning rituals, I think that’s fine. Unless you can do your ritual in the evening, I set up everything the night before, so that the only if I’m leaving the house, literally the only thing I’m having to cope with is grooming and eating. Because that’s about all I’m good for, for the first hour and a half after I wake up.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 47:50
And this is really important for people to really understand which is to work with your biology, not against it. And I adhere to Dr. Michael Bruce’s concepts of chronotypes, which are mammals as opposed to birds. So I don’t use the bird analogies. But from the Yeah, from the lion, to the bear, to the wolf and to the dolphin. I recognize in Dr. Bruce’s work that I was a dolphin. And that is a shocker to me because I for most of my all of my life, I can’t really imagine a time when I didn’t, I am always up very early in the morning. And yet, when I take all the tests, including the temperature test where he has you take your temperature throughout the course of an evening to see when your body metabolism resides. I have confirmed that I am a dolphin meaning that there are wolves at night. And then there are people who are after that which are dolphins. And in essence, dolphins don’t sleep very well. They actually keep one part of their brain on an active at any given time. And so they actually have poor sleep, it was a remarkable relief for me to recognize that I was a dolphin and that I would always struggle with sleep. And that sleep is not doesn’t define the work I’ve put in to getting good sleep, right like getting good sleep is no longer on my radar. Like it’s not a thing, I do everything I can possibly do to have good sleep. But knowing that I’m not going to necessarily sleep the way that other people do was a huge relief for me. And what it allowed me to do is to actually structure my routines akin to what you’re talking about, Julie, which is to say, you know what, these are times that I’m going to be able to do things throughout my day to better organize myself. And that way I’m working with my biology as opposed to against it. And so I highly recommend if you have not done it yet go to the power of when quiz calm. Take the take the power of one quiz, it’s free. And it helps to with pretty high accuracy identify which of those chronotypes now it is a it is not a traditional Chrono typing because it does use personality as part of that metric. So there’s a little bit of goofiness going on there. But I actually upon reading it and understanding it. I really understand why Dr. Bruce utilizes this form of social chronotype thing, because so much of our biology is dictated by our social sphere, right? If you have a family, if you have a particular type of job, all of those social pressures really do impact your ability to sleep or not sleep at particular times. And so I can’t but recommend folks to check out the power of one by Dr. Michael Bruce, b, r. e. u. s, I believe it’s how he, how he spells his last name. And so with that, let’s make our way into our next article written by none other than our inimitable deadly. And you write here, Deb, about the top five work from home productivity tips, and you give some, some really good foundational pieces. And this was written back in September of 2020. So we’ve had a pretty good, you know, almost six months now of, of time between when you wrote the article, and now, what do you feel like you learned since that time of having written the article, and then we can kind of jump in and get further thoughts on it.

Deb Lee 51:08
I don’t think that I learned anything new per se, I think that things are exactly as I anticipated back then. We were diving in headfirst without a plan, and maybe hoping we’d get lucky with it. You know, we didn’t have a dedicated workspace, we’re working at the kitchen table, or on the sofa, or wherever we could find a corner. We were working all the time. Because it was easy, we didn’t have a computer anymore. For those of us who are lucky enough or privileged enough to have a position where we could work from home, we were always on we are always zooming. We’re always just going going going, um, you know, we wake up in PJs, and we work in PJs. And then we go to bed and PJ’s. And there was no clear demarcation between beginning of the day and end of the day. And so all of those things are still true, I think maybe we might be a little bit better about having a dedicated workspace. Still tricky, though, especially for those who have families or now your partner is home, and that person wasn’t home before. Now they’re in your resume space. I have a client who has a different workspace, depending on who’s in the house with her. Because when they’re in the house, she has to go someplace else to get set, get ready for her zoom meetings, and they have their own zoom meeting. So things change. There’s, there is a unease. I think that’s still there. I think we perhaps are maybe getting used to it a little bit. But I would recommend that we really look at ways to just separate work from personal stuff, you know, whether that means, you know, you have your morning routine of cold showers and brushing your teeth. And then changing out of those PJs and getting into work clothes. And workloads could just be a T shirt and jeans, just not your PJs that signify sleep and rest and relaxation or your yoga pants, you know, for those of us who like yoga pants, and then really sort of setting up your day for success. Whether you’re morning or evening, I think now that you’re work from home, you probably have a little bit more control about when you work, and how you accomplish those things. And then when it’s time to end the day, get out of the work clothes and get into the yoga pants or go walk the dog and then sort of signified work has now ended. I think that’s probably one of the hardest things is knowing when to turn off. So I don’t think that there’s been much of a change. Other than we’re probably just tired of being home all the time.

Julie Bestry 53:52
I love that you pick this post of Deb’s because it It signifies exactly what was true before the pandemic for all of us who worked from home. Every every one of these five elements is still true. And it’s a yes and sort of situation. So everybody has been joking all year about how they’re they’ve been living in sweats or leggings or yoga pants. And my thing was even though I have been working from home for 20 years, except when I’m working physically with a client because the clutter is at their place and not my place. But I learned early on and it really revisited me over and over as we saw what was going on during the pandemic. I kept wearing blue jeans every day. Sometimes other kinds of jeans, but I know that if I got into comfy sweats or yoga pants, then I would eat all the things and I would I would be now a year into it. And you would just sort of roll me out of my apartment for me. It’s not one of those people who checks the scale every day, I check how my clothes feel. And if I were wearing something that were just all lycra and elastic, and it made it really easy to expand, I might do that. So I don’t know that what I wear is any more formal than what any more office worthy than what I was wearing on non client days, two years ago, but every single thing that Deb hit on about having a comfy workspace, we’re getting your work life balance the dressing for work, I wrote dress for work, ha,

Augusto Pinaud 55:41
next point,

Julie Bestry 55:42
I’m looking at meetings a different way, was the one thing that I think Deb brought up, that I have friends who work in the corporate environment where literally all they did before a year ago was go to meetings all day long. And meetings have had to be different by virtue of the fact that you really cannot stare at at the screen, you cannot stare at zoom for eight hours every day. But before you’re going to have to triage people for the Luba problem. And so I think that, you know, Deb talks about Slack, I think any way that people can communicate other than going into a meeting that could have been an email is, is going to be a benefit. So I agree with that. Almost everything about that post is still valid now. Only more so.

Unknown Speaker 56:43
Good job, Deb.

Augusto Pinaud 56:46
Yeah, I really enjoy enjoy the article. And I agree that and, and I love that the ways written is create a comfortable, dedicated workspace. And unlike like you I have a couple of clients who have come to discover, yeah, their office changed from corner to corner dependent. And we’ll figure it out, what are the things that you need to do to make a competent, and I have a client who his problem was he lost his boards, okay, he used to have big conference room with boards. And he was really suffering by it at the beginning that a year ago. And then I were talking, because he was really troubling to say, Oh, you have you’re next to a window, why you don’t go on by, you know, window markers and clean them up in the afternoon. And it was, I mean, is the first time he wrote into Windows, I think his wife almost killed him until he explained that they were going to delete and she was going to be fine. And he promised that he was going to clean them up every morning, I think the wife was like, we’re not going to live in her house was your window full of your workbooks. But that make him really comfortable back to being really comfortable. So that is really, really, really important. And, and I agree with you guys wouldn’t the dress to work, I’m the worst of this. Because I wear shorts on my eye, they were shorts, if I don’t need to be a mirror client, I will wear shorts, all year long. And my kids when they start going into their, into the school and remote and all that, you know, they need to use a uniform to go to school. And then the first day they went on uniform, the second layer, they wear your uniform waist up and then shoot different pants. And my wife look at them and say, Where is the uniform? There, it’s assuming that we are going to go like that from the waist up. So no, I said that. But from the waist up, I think everybody should rest at work.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 58:57
I have to say that, you know, the the pandemic was a and I only talked about this, you know, last year when when I when we kind of debriefed on all of this on Anything But Idle. And it was a huge shock to my own system. You know, I spent 80 to 85% of my time on the road, and being forced to work at home. While I had done that in the past. I did that in between, you know projects, I did that in between my normal travel throughout the month, it was still just a huge shock to my system and dressing for work was great until the summer. And then well so so kind of snapped back the stories that we we bought a house at the at the end of last year. And so we moved only a mile away, but we still moved and so now we were a new house and we have a roof deck. And so it was like you know, I want to work on the roof. And you know do you know so it was like one of those things, but I didn’t feel I felt weird being like in you know, stuffy, you know, clothing working on the roof. So I decided to kind of relax that for that context. That is what I’m going to work on. I’m going to, I’m going to do that. And when I have client meetings, I’m going to grab a dress shirt, and I’m going to have it, you know, sitting on the chair next to me, I can put on the dress shirt, meet with clients, and then toss it off when, when I’m done. And, you know, it really worked. I mean, it just helped me find a bit of balance and solace in everything that was going on. You know, I am, I’m empathetic. And so just, I feel that the the depth of all of these people in and around the pandemic, and just having everything that could allow me to just reduce that that high alert distress that I was feeling from all of these families being, you know, kind of ripped away from their loved ones who had to die in hospitals alone, all it was on my shoulders, you know, it was just, I was feeling it. And so, especially during the summer, I felt a little bit more like, Oh, I can take a breather, I did. And so I really hope for everybody to remember that we are dealing with a global pandemic, and there’s a lot of, you know, economic, you know, disaster and economic recovery that needs to happen. And you know, all of those things are going on. So as much as you can do to both feel formal and showing up to work, which is important. Also try to do what you can do to to calm the nerves, especially for those of us high on the anxiety scale.

Deb Lee 1:01:17
Yeah, I think that’s a really great point. We’re not just working from home, right? We are some of us, as you said, forced to work from home under the veil of a pandemic, which is stressful in so many different ways. And for someone who loves being home, I don’t need to go anywhere, I am comfortable, good, eats good coffee, perfect. But when the option to not go out, arose, I was uncomfortable with that. And I recognize that that’s a really minor discomfort compared to what others may be dealing with. But not being able to get up and go as I would if I wanted to. That was a little stressful. But then again, I’m in a, you know, home that I like, it’s comfortable, I have everything I need, there are people who still have to get up physically and put on a uniform or work clothes and go out and do stuff. You know, we are and we are absolutely, you know, bus drivers can’t work from home, that person at the checkout can’t work from home. You know, maybe a few doctors can but most of them are not. You know, so yeah. And nurses, you know, I have many family members who are nurses, and I took my hat to them. So I recognize my own fortune, I guess, in being able to work from home and the minor discomfort that I feel, I think is nothing compared to what others might be dealing with. So just understand that you are working under a pandemic, a very distressing very, not nice time. So. So yeah, just keep that in mind. And yes, bring in the comfort wherever you can.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:02:59
And agree more. And so with that we have reached our halfway point, I’m gonna consider this our halfway point in the show. And so we’re gonna take a quick break from our sponsor this week. And then we’re going to come back and we’re going to continue our stories of the week and then we are going to announce our top 10 female productivity organization and technology experts from our poll this past week, and and then we’re gonna do new tools, and then we’re gonna close out so with that, I will see you all after the break. 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 are 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 comm 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 comm forward slash Anything But Idle today. And now back to the show. Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud. And today we have on the panel a deadly and Julie bestiary and so hopefully you all have gotten a glass of water and sip of your coffee. Let’s get into the second part of our show and continue down our stories this week. Our next story Augusto is from grace Marshall. And what was our story from grace.

Augusto Pinaud 1:04:49
So the story the story is titled personal productivity. The conversation is a blog post from actually a year ago. Great Day March 18. is a great day to book took To post things, I think, sorry. Um, so

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:05:06
somebody’s birthday is March 18. That’s why

Augusto Pinaud 1:05:10
that’s the date. So fantastic day. It was good. I was an article that I that I particularly enjoy. It’s a short, short, short article, but it talks about arrestor saying, you know, who amaze me how many people tried to solve the productivity puzzle on their own and, and I was one of those By the way, I that’s how I start in the war in this in this productivity world. And I remember the first time I asked for help. And I went and asked somebody if they could help me with actually the assumption actually, in the worlds of getting things done 20 years ago, and he was really, really interesting. how fast it’s, can you do it on your own? Maybe? See, if you read study enough, yes. What the experience has given me and what the article refers to is how fast can you do it with help? And, and the help with others? And if I may brag, I will. And, you know, we have somebody in the panel who was mentioning Oh, well, you know, this may be a struggle. And this happened recently on Francis, our summit, time management time blocking summit. And I, Julie, bring in an issue and I had seen the solution. Okay. And I sent her the text here is the solution for for the problems she was having. Could she have find the solution? Yes, she will have find it. Okay, I have no doubt, there is no credit to me for finding this solution. The credit is on how much time she saved to solve that problem. Okay, that’s what I was lucky ci when bring it up, and I had to buy Glock, find a solution. This is the same issue on personal productivity, you want to be productive. Don’t try to figure it out, get to the productivity experts get to their professional organizers get to you want to do Evernote, don’t do it on your own, get the people that already suffer all that all those issues, and then make it really quick for you. I wish I will have when I was reading this. I was like, yeah, that was me. Oh, yeah, this is me. I wish I will have read and understand understood this article. Many, many, many years ago, I not sure I will have understood it. When I start reading. I’m studying personal productivity, but I wish I had.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:07:58
So grace actually asks a really important question. And this comes down to something that I’ve overtime called the diamond rule. Others have called it the Platinum rule. And she says, if you could tell me one thing about yourself that would help me to understand how you best work and how we can work together, work better together, what would it be, and this just goes to that very fundamental component, that is the the golden rule is selfish. And, and it is self serving in so many ways, which is, Do unto others, as as I would have done unto myself is different than do unto others as they would have done unto me. And in essence, what you should be asking people is how do you best work? And how do I best work with you, and just inverting that relationship so that you can work with others better is like, I know, it seems like a no brainer, but everybody just presumes that I like email. So therefore, Deb likes email. And that may not be true. And, and so if we can just learn how other people best work, we can then learn how to do that. And we can do that with everybody, right? We can’t possibly ask everybody their individual personalized needs, but say the closest 20 people in your world, if you just sat down and ask them what grace is asking you to ask them, you get this compound benefit of so many things. One, that people know that you appreciate them because they’re willing to actually do as they best work. And, and helping facilitate that supporting them in that, too, is that when you work with people the way that they want to be want to work, they’re much more likely to follow their own routines, their own patterns, and therefore get the work done faster, you know, better, what have you. And now you can learn how to actually structure your own work to match the way in which they work. So before it was probably conflict oriented, you know, if I called Julie and left a voicemail message, then Julie would email me back and that’s not the way in which I wanted to be responded to and then it was just all of this conflict orientation when I could say to Julie, hey, Julie, how do you best like for me to communicate with you and if you He said, Hey, you know, what, if you just, you know, send me a DM on Twitter, I’m good. And then I’m like, Oh, you know what, I love Twitter. Also, I’ve been following this, you know, formality of making phone calls and playing phone tag with you. Now we can just actually have a conversation the way in which we need to. People just have this sense that they need to, you know, do things their way, instead of working with people. And I think that if we just follow the diamond rule a little bit more, we’d all be more productive.

Julie Bestry 1:10:27
I think you’re right, I think the conceit of the golden rule is that you intend kindness, that what is, you know, treat others with the kindness that you would want to be treated. But the actual specifics aren’t necessarily kind. Deb knows that if she calls me at 8am to ask me a question. She’s not going to get anything intelligible from me. I know that I shouldn’t call her at 10 o’clock at night to ask a question. We, we joked earlier this week, because a couple weeks ago, I called her at like, 630 in the evening, and she didn’t even say hello, she just answered the phone. She’s like, Is everything okay? Because she knows that I don’t normally reach out to her in that way. So I love the idea of trying to verify with someone especially, you know, we might not think to do it in an initial circumstance. But if we’re having trouble getting on the same page with someone, this question, this this notion of, you know, I want to understand how can I help you be more productive so that we can be more productive? I think we tend to work in silos, it goes back to what Augusto said about just turning to someone and asking for help, you know, sure, do do the work on your own, you know, don’t expect everybody to just hand you something on a silver platter. But sometimes you just are blocked, you can’t figure something out, because it, I guess this is I would have found the solution myself, that particular thing that he’s talking about, it might never have occurred to me that there was a low tech low cost solution. And I probably would have just kept we’re working on a workaround. But by mentioning the problem, and and opening myself up in that way. So I think working with other people means being willing to be a little vulnerable and saying, I am not perfect, and I do not have all the answers and being vulnerable is is actually powerful. Benjamin Franklin said that one of the best ways to get somebody to like you, to be disposed toward you is actually to ask them for help in solving a problem. And it’s an intriguing idea. Usually we don’t want to be beholden to someone else, but it actually makes you closer to somebody, I think when you’re willing to show that level of vulnerability that you can’t do it all on your own and, and you respect the other person enough to to ask for their opinions and their thoughts.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:13:16
I would I would just put a nod in here to Dr. Bernie brown and her research into vulnerability and the importance and power of vulnerability in so many areas of life. And so absolutely, definitely underscoring that. And the other thoughts for grace Marshall’s article, and then we will move our way along to the next article by Gretchen Rubin, which is actually a podcast episode. Okay, so Gretchen Rubin hosts a podcast with her sister. And I always get her name wrong, so someone can correct me. Elizabeth, thank you. I don’t know why I want her name to be different. But so so happier with Gretchen Rubin and Elizabeth. They did an episode called a little happier the memory of a delicious night of sleep 400 years later. And so what did you get out of this particular episode and let’s get into it.

Julie Bestry 1:14:19
I got the reminder that it Samuel peeps and that Pepys the way it spelled because I

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:14:27
absolutely. So. So this is a diary entry, or a diary from this person who talks about his sleep. And they they quote, a passage in the entry to the to the art to be a podcast episode, and I’ll read it just so folks can kind of get an idea here. It says, quote, and I still believe it. I still remember it that of all the nights that I’ve ever slept in my life. I never did pass a night with more epicureanism of sleep. There being now and then noise of people stirring that waked me. And then it was a very rainy night. And then I was a little wary that what between waking and sleeping again, one after another, one after another, I never had so much content in all my life. And so my wife says it was with her. And so the idea here is that, like, sleep state is a is something to appreciate to enjoy in that sense. And the only thing I could take away from that article is, I don’t know what that’s like. And that is wonderful that you all know what that’s like, but I’m a dolphin and we do not have that sleep state. So it was it was like I was actually like I was I’m odd I’m actually like I’m fully on my brother is a very good sleeper he loves sleep he’s he sleeps well he enjoys he relishes in sleep akin to, to this gentleman, and I don’t appreciate sleep that way. And only because I haven’t experienced it, you know, I know what a good night’s sleep is. But I don’t know what that is. And I am i was i was really, I really enjoyed it. And because I have to live vicariously through others in order to in order to enjoy that level of sleep that people people have. So that’s what I took away from it.

Deb Lee 1:16:17
I have actually have a question for you about how sleep does or does not impact how productive you think you can be on any given day. Does that bear have any bearing on your day?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:16:33
Yes, so so I need a regular night’s sleep like anybody else, but the amount and quality of my sleep is just different than others. So as a dolphin, as most dolphins are, and this is of course, gross, you know, estimation because every one is different. But in terms of my biology, when when I sleep, I am easily aroused. Like I’m easily awoken. I’m capable, if you walk up to me at any given time of night, and say, Hey, Ray, what’s the square root of nine, I’ll be like, three, and we’re gonna go, you know, this, like, nature, it’s the nature of, of my, my ongoing world. And, and so because, you know, the, at least what Dr. Bruce says, you know, since one part of you is always semi conscious, you are, you’re always on high alert, right? And, and so this, this level of high alertness is just there for me at all times. Now, I have chosen to do a couple of things to mediate that one is, when possible, I try to take a short, usually 15 minute nap midday, to allow me to, in essence, buffer not, it’s not about deep sleep, it’s not about getting into deep sleep, it’s actually about reducing anxiety. And so it’s like, it’s like, the My days are very active. And they’re, I would say hyperactive. And so this idea of just giving myself time to not go to sleep necessarily like when I say nap, it’s really a brief meditation. In essence, as you’re giving yourself some time to just step away from the hecticness of the world. When I do sleep, and I have a very restful night asleep. It is a it’s a weird feeling. It really is for me, because I wake up with a sense of nothing having happened, which when I sleep, I never remember my dreams. So others of you in the world out there, you may remember your dreams. And that’s great. That’s a normal, healthy mind. For me, I do not remember anything that happens. But I know things happened. And so this is always clouded set of things going on in my world. And that’s because I’m taking in stimuli while I’m sleeping. And so I have this half remembrance of things going on in my world. And the few times that I have actually remembered sleep, they’re traumatic. And so they’re like, recurring, like recurring dreams, where the same thing is happening over and over again. And it’s very, very disturbing. And, and so that’s the, that’s the difference between I think, the dolphin mind, and and I’m not, I’m not necessarily the only kind of dolphin mind. So others may have very happy dreams, and they just repeat all the time. But that tends to be my experience of sleep. And so it’s just like, it I’m not like this is by no means like, you know, I’m not sad about it. I’m not glad about it, it just is. But what Dr. Bruce did was it, he gave me the permission to understand my brain a little bit more than someone who loves neuroscience, just understanding that component that I was trying, I mean, I was spending a lot of time and a lot of money on all kinds of therapies to be able to try and sleep in a way that other minds sleep, and I’m just never gonna have that sleep. And so it was really nice for me to be able to just like, you know what I can appreciate how you sleep and appreciate that, you know, there’s some people who like they only sleep five hours a night and they’re great. My mother’s a dolphin also And so clearly I, I get that Now, not all i, there are six of us and I’m, I’m siblings, and and so not all of us are dolphins, I just happen to have gotten the same dolphin mind that my mother did. And you bet any time of night, you just walk in and say, Hey, Mom, you know, where’s the where’s the flower in the cupboard, she will, she’ll be like, oh, second shelf, you know, second one from the bottom. And, you know, she’s just, she’s awake, you think she’s awake, she’s really, you know, not, she’s half asleep, just like I would be. But that’s just how our brains work. And it’s just, you know, you just kind of get get used to that notion. But, you know, we all have to be aware of our biology. And that is one of the things that we have to really be conscious of,

Julie Bestry 1:20:39
I’m just imagining somebody turning on the podcast in the middle and hearing you say, my mother is a dolphin.

Augusto Pinaud 1:20:48
But you see, there is no perfect on that one, because I can sleep anywhere, deeply. Okay, I mean, I, for years, I travel and I was out, okay, before they I buckle up and put my hand and I was out. And my daughter, before COVID did competitive swimming, that means you need to wake up, you know, at four or five in the morning. So you drive to wherever the competition is. And I could sit on those benches and get in there. And it’s normally sleep delicious. Okay, no, no issues at all. But then I need to be really conscious of that. Because I can be if I’m not paying attention and I get relaxed, I can fall asleep, I can go put my head in the backup of the of this set again, and I will be out in two minutes. Okay, and I will miss the rest of the show. So he’s not perfect either. For those of us who are really lucky and can’t sleep anywhere and in any way, then we have the problem that we need to be over aware because otherwise I will cross my arms in here. Do like this, you can make all the noise you want out there is nothing.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:22:13
Alright, so I’m going to be picking and choosing as we make our way through the next several articles, just for time purposes. And so our next article, I’m actually going to pick out our, our our one and only Julie bestiary. She wrote an article called flow and FFO accountability, productivity focused and Alex Tabak. Julie Do you want to go ahead and give us a little quick summary of your article and what you covered and then we can hop into it. You’re muted.

Julie Bestry 1:22:47
You got to do it once per Hey,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:22:50
everybody, it happens to everybody.

Julie Bestry 1:22:52
The prior week, I had done a blog post about the five different types of accountability. And I had at the summit at the at the task management and time blocking summit that we all attended. A little over a week ago, I had gotten into some conversations about the fact that many of those methods required people to deal with other people. And both the introverts I spoke with and also some of the extroverts who didn’t want to have a camera on or just didn’t want to deal with other human beings. Were looking for some other solution. And I thought about some other Pope posts that I had written in the past, and came up with the idea of foe accountability, which was a way to sort of countermand all this zoom weariness, that zoom fatigue that we’ve been experiencing. And talked about how all the different ways that we can be distracted in our attempt to get accountability. You know, we don’t feel comfortable feeling observed, we feel like we have to be social with the other person. I should say that Deb Bran went to one of her great action days last Friday where we did this sort of group accountability thing. And she runs these so well, that whatever obstacles someone may have, she’s able to counterman them so that this works for everyone. But my notion was that if we were going to get get accountability, and we were going to get into flow, then we were going to need some sort of foe accountability. And I went through a number of solutions. There their webs primarily websites with a few apps, coffee activity and hipster sound and noiseless cafe restaurant. these various services where you could have a sort of auditory experience. Feels like being in accountability. So it sounds like you’re in an office or It sounds like you are in a coffee house, or one of the ones that was really popular because you know, Hemingway said, write drunk edit sober is you could go to a website called I missed my bar and listen to bar sounds. And I ended at the Alex Trebek part in honor of him as someone created an Alex Trebek affirmation page, where you get all the way from 400 to 2000. there’s a there’s a Daily Double, all of that. And you get to click on any one of those things in any one of those categories. And you get the sound of Alex Trebek giving you affirmation. So you have had full accountability and you have gotten into flow. That’s where the flow and flow comes in. And then you get Alex Trebek telling you you did a good job. And sometimes you just need that that pat on the back. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:26:01
absolutely, yeah, you bring up some really interesting stuff here, which is that I have long talked about accountability, you know, that I am, but it’s one of my my booty call them soap boxes, it’s one of my soap boxes, I absolutely believe that accountability is one of the foundations to us being more productive. And I think about them in different way than the five now kind of six that you’ve created here, which is really unique and interesting. And so just so that people are on the same page, the way in which I see accountability is we start from self accountability. And what you’re really talking about is using behavioral interventions and a self accountability perspective. And so Gretchen Rubin, she would consider that in the four tendencies, someone who’s an upholder, and someone who tends to use self accountability, to great effect, we then step it up a level to paired accountability or one to one accountability, this could be in a paid or unpaid environment, right, you can ask a friend, hey, meet me at the gym, when we go back to the gym, and we’re back out there in the real world, hey, meet me at the gym, or meet me at the corner of you know, fifth in Maine, and we’re going to go for a run in the morning, that’s one to one accountability, you can also have a coach like gousto, who comes and helps you do that, or with the both of you, right, a professional organizer, who comes and helps you and uses that pair accountability to be able to make good on some goal or aspiration that you might have, we then step up to group accountability. And then public accountability. Group accountability is, in essence, more than one person, basically, the group is holding each other accountable to that point. And then finally, public accountability is when you make those kinds of public statements, I’m going to go run a marathon and you post that all over Facebook, and you tell people, you know, I’m raising money for you know, breast cancer, or for, you know, March of Dimes, or something like that. And I’m going to go ahead and raise funds and do that kind of thing. And, and so we have these different leavers within those layers of accountability that allow us to be able to create greater momentum. And I really think about this not so much as So, accountability falls inside of of motivation as an umbrella because it is a motivational factor. But really, I consider it momentum. accountability is all about creating and sustaining momentum. And so I of course, love the article. I think anything that talks about accountability, and people becoming more aware of accountability is so important and really imperative to what I call getting more done, right? This is this notion of being able to be more productive. And it’s easy to structure, organization and all do all those kinds of things. But if you’re not actually capable of getting more done, then you always feel the sense of being held back accountability is a great factor in all of that.

Julie Bestry 1:28:37
And if you’re in a blind, you’re like, you talked about being a Gretchen Rubin, upholder. I’m an obliger I am much more likely to to accomplish something if I know that someone else is waiting for it. So yes, I know that the accountability partner doesn’t really really care if I get my blog post written. But there’s there’s that sense that that they care. For me, an action day like working with them is going to work better than just being able to get in the flow. I don’t really feel accountability from those apps that make it sound like I’m in an in an office. But it’s it does help with the flow, but not so much with with the accountability. If you’re a rebel, if you’re one of her rebels, I’m not sure what works to motivate you and keep you going.

Augusto Pinaud 1:29:30
You know what’s interesting when I look at your other article, because for me when this started I’ve been working at home for for a while when this story, I now gain three roommates and three of his co workers who are way louder than what we had before. And you know, when people talk about the music’s and hear the noise, and it produced me such a level of anxiety because I want quiet quiet My struggle this year has been quiet people I need to think and I cannot think that many noise, but it but it’s important again, as we were saying earlier about your routine, your morning routine or your afternoon routine, or you are an early person or not to know what it is, and what is the level of noise or distraction, that you need to work really well with others. I mean, mine is silence but, but that’s mine. And, and and I’m going to say, if you are in my team of silence, you know, it is much easier to be on the team of people who can raise the level of different noises and find concentration that way. But I love that I have not seen the Alex truck thing until I read your article. And I actually sent that to a couple of people who are fans of throwback, and they were really, really excited.

Deb Lee 1:30:57
Yeah, I’m not sure that hearing office sounds would help. But they might because you know when so like I go through I like pin drop silence. I want to know sounds, don’t interrupt me, don’t talk to me, don’t walk by me, I don’t want to see in my peripheral vision just go away. That’s me. But I also love going to coffee shops, one for coffee, right? And Good Eats. But also there is I hear chatter. There’s a hum, it’s not too loud. I can’t hear what people are saying, but I hear them. And there is a collective vibe I am feeding off of that fuels me and I love that. But it has to be that or silence can’t be anything in between. and like Julie, if I have to report into someone, or if I know someone is waiting for, for something from me, I am more likely to get it done. So having just the audio by itself probably wouldn’t do it. But knowing that there is another body, another mind who has an high expectation as high as I have for myself. That would definitely motivate me to get going and get stuff done. So an Action Day worked well for me. as Julie knows, I was having trouble writing a blog post. And I actually saw her there. And I think of Julia as an excellent writer. So I channeled my inner Julie and and put some words on or I guess put some words on my laptop. I don’t think I was as you know, proficient as she is. But it was motivating and knowing that I would have to report back to this group. I mean, first of all, I’m hosting the group, right. And if I were to report back to your group that I’m hoping that I got nothing done and I didn’t do my blog post, I don’t know how good I would feel about that. So so there is something to be said for accountability and how motivating it can be and how much it can get the momentum moving in the direction that you want it to go. And

Julie Bestry 1:33:02
I think it’s interesting that we all work from home, I mean, Ray was out on the road, but then for last year, but for people who liked going to work, a yo I like it quiet or I like white noise you know, I let I love working while while the washer dryer is on or the air conditioning is on. When I tested out all of those apps, I learned that I had to completely turn off that I think was the one I missed my colleagues, I turned off the barking dog completely. But the sound of typing in the background. It was it was that very steady, relaxing, sort of typing the coffee house one, I had to get rid of like the noise of the clinking the clinking cups, but that low hum of the people in the room. I think if you miss your office, if you miss working around other people, you know Augusto, you have three new co workers and two of them are are not adults. And that makes that makes a difference for for those people who went from having that busy home of every day to maybe a silent home. I think apps like these can help replicate what helped them be productive when they were being productive at work. And again, this all comes to everything we’ve been saying all day that productivity is specific to the individual and to the individual circumstance. If I am filing, I want more noise than if I’m trying to write.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:34:48
Absolutely. All right. So for time purposes of gousto we’re going to have one more story selected from our list of winners here

Augusto Pinaud 1:34:56
before you go there. You know I need to say this you know We don’t know if in whenever pandemic ends and we can go back to normal life food, you know, I, we may see this application, but you will be able to pick the kids and the voice of the kids so they call that that that dad or mum mum mum.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:35:17
As long as it’s not my dog barking I don’t I’m okay. I am. I am done with that. I am really done with that. I love him. I really do love the dog. But I yeah, I can I could deal without it. Alright, one more story is that what is our final story this week before we go into our new tools of the week?

I thought you I thought you had said that you had a final story. So I’m going to go ahead and

Augusto Pinaud 1:35:48
pick that final story. Sure. Let’s

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:35:50
go with Mel Robbins, productivity hacks to jumpstart your dreams. Did anyone have any thoughts about Mel Robbins article here about the the idea of changing process so that you can be more productive and start making some goal oriented decisions or going gorila goal oriented movement in your world?

Everybody’s going to find the article.

Julie Bestry 1:36:23
I had notes on everything. And did you change the order because I am missing metals.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:36:32
I in the order I just skipped I just skipped a couple items. Or Yeah, like five items. So if you go down five,

Julie Bestry 1:36:40
I’ll have to open it to see what it was because I’m not seeing my notes on that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:36:45
So So Mel Robbins is very famous for the five second rule, which is that if you have an impulse to do something, and if you decide to do or do that thing, in five seconds or less, you’re likely to do that thing. And so there’s pretty good research on the idea that the faster you make the trigger internal and start making action, the more likely you are to do something. And she talks in the article about different ways in which you can create environmental triggers. And while I tend to be not so bullish on the idea of habits, she uses the the notion of using environmental triggers and visualization for being able to move forward on these things. And I can, I can get around that. And she talks about a couple of other acts that she uses any that stand out for you. In that sense.

Julie Bestry 1:37:37
As an organizer, I thought what was interesting is the idea of having vision boards or even tattoos, visual things as triggers. Because so often I find that people become clutter blind, and don’t notice the things that they have put up as reminders. And I’ll admit that if I put something up visually I am. I am a verbal person, but not a visual person. And if it’s not on a screen, I tend not to notice it if I’m in my own space. So I like what she had to say. She was talking about David Goggins mental cookie jar. And the idea that you sort of have this mental collection of all the places in your mind, where all of the anecdotes all of the stories are. And then she says, whenever you’re facing a challenge in your life, you can go back to your cookie jar, and pick a relevant lesson. And I think I think that works for me the idea, because I know I will be in a situation and a quote from the West Wing will pop up, and I will find a way to make that relevant to my life. Or I’ve always said, if something bad happens to you, and you make it through the other side, then it becomes a cocktail party anecdote. And then it’s a good thing. So anything bad that you survive, becomes a story you can tell. And that story becomes useful to yourself and to others. So I like that cookie jar metaphor, it seemed more workable for my odd little brain, as opposed to the bracelets, and I’m never getting a tattoo.

Deb Lee 1:39:18
Yeah, I know tattoo here. Not a fan of pain. And you know, I enjoy seeing them, but not on me. visualization, I think is amazing. And I use it fairly often. Especially when I have to do something that I think is hard. It may not be hard at all, but I think it is. And so I walk myself into the future. And I picture myself doing that thing, like a rock star, whatever that may be. And sometimes it’s being on camera, like no, sometimes it’s a big project or a proposal that I need to prepare and I think, Oh gosh, they’re not gonna like this, you know, or they’re gonna say no or whatever. Until I visualize myself just knocking it out of the park, and the feel. And then I sit with those feelings, I let that those feelings of just amazing success. It hasn’t happened yet. But I, I know what that’s going to feel like to me if I get what I want to get done. And I sit with those for a while. And then I walk myself walk back in time to present day and I say, okay, what’s my first step, I’m just going to do that one thing, because the next one is going to lead me all the way to that great feeling. And it’s the feeling. Now James clear, likes to talk about emotions, and how the feelings of pleasure will motivate you to not only do something, but to keep doing that something, right. And so that feeling of amazement of just knocking it out of the park and feeling like a rock star is what gets me to keep going. So I would absolutely, I can definitely get behind visualization. Absolutely. 100%

Augusto Pinaud 1:40:59
interesting for me was the IF THEN planning, I have a vast collection of poor habits that I’ve been finding most of my life. And I have used that if then, so much, you know, I tell a lot. The pizza example, you know, I have pizza is my comfort food, give me a stress and I want pizza. And every time my brain says pizza, I need to stop and really, you know, have a negotiation, there was a ball? And is this pizza because we’re stressed, then let’s do something else. Or it is pizza just because I really like pizza. But like that, there are so many things in my particular life that that I do this if then and I have learned to mark two as flags that, hey, if this thing we need to stop and analyze what it is we cannot act out of them. Because otherwise, I will go to the poor choice every time. So that if then it’s really, really, really useful and learn. What are those triggers and what they mean? And how can you find a solution to fight them? You know, is the P if I did I win every time over pizza? No, but I win now every day I win more. And that’s what it is. But an important to remember those things.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:42:29
Yeah. So if anybody wants to learn more about the FN perspective, look up implementation intentions by Dr. Peter Gollwitzer, and Gail, Oregon, Dr. gonnigan. And go with her, have studied this quite extensively and have written on the concept of implementation intentions. And they are very powerful. All right, that brings us to the end of the stories, because there are more of them, what we will do is we will place those all into the show notes, so everybody can see all of the great work that is being put out there by all of these female productivity organization and technology experts, including our two here on the panel. But for time purposes, let’s move into our new tools of the week. And so every week, Augusto and I scour the web for all kinds of stories we did for this week also, and we’re gonna pump them all to next week. So you’re gonna get a whole bunch of stories. And the extra is both this week and next week, because we did cover a lot of stuff this week that we could not talk about in the show. And so those will be in there. But we come across a lot of tools. And we’d like to share those tools with you. And so in new tools of the week, we invite our panelists also to share tools that they enjoy using or know about and want to share with folks. So this week, I thought, because of a little bit of news coming out of Google with the Chromebooks, I am going to be talking about a tool that is actually kicked into the Google Store. And this is the Chromebook tool that allows you to be able to choose which Chromebook would be best for you. And so the way in which you do this is you just go to google.com, forward slash Chromebook. And then if you click on the Find yours, you will then be taken to the shop. And what it does is it helps you go ahead and decide which Chromebook would be best for you. And of course, Google Chromebooks run using the Google Chrome OS, the operating system, Chrome OS, and so you could just go ahead and select the various pieces here that you’re looking for. And it will go ahead and help you choose the right Chromebook for you. So you can say okay, well, I’m looking for a premium Chromebook. And I want these particular features. I want to have a convertible screen, I want to be able to have a fairly large screen size. And lo and behold, it then gives you a filtered list of the various Chromebooks that are out there. It’s a very handy tool. It’s looking at the entire ecosystem of Chromebooks that are out there. And lo and behold, if you want a large screen and these are the various options that are out there, this is pretty close to what I would I would recommend to most people, I think we should put this spin 514 a little bit higher on the list. But, but it gives it gives you a pretty good, you know, reduction in terms of filtering out what are all the options for Chromebooks and giving you a subset that will really work for you. And Chromebooks are becoming more and more powerful each month, with each iteration of new models coming out on the market, there are a lot of them. And now you’re capable of kind of just filtering it down to the ones that are useful to you. Alright, with that, Augusto, what is your new tool this week,

Augusto Pinaud 1:45:34
my new tool that week is an application called sorted and sorted, basically do a couple of things. One allows you to have your task for the day and allows you to what they call hyper scheduled those. But more interestingly, and that is really interesting and useful. But also it turn every item on your calendar as a task. So every at the end of the meeting, you can cross the meeting as done, and it will disappear from the list. So not only you can schedule your task, mark them down and see empty at some point, the same thing happened to your calendar events. And it is something really, really interesting way interesting approach. But I haven’t seen before that looks into Yeah, all those appointments, or the end of the day is a task that I need to do. But I can mark it done. I already have the meaning out of my view that the calendar will always keep it there. So it gives you as the day progressed, a shorter list that are they give you at least that feeling or give me that feeling that I’m winning this game instead of losing sometimes happen.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:46:52
Fantastic. All right. Next up is Julie, Julie, what is your new tool this week?

Julie Bestry 1:46:57
Okay, my new tool is an old tool that keeps being a new tool for me, I have been a Mac girl since 1985. And every time I get a new Mac. The fonts aren’t right, the crazy animations that are going across the skirt the screen bother me and there’s so many things that I had I found that you can’t adjust in preferences. And I was delighted A while back to find that this tool by free were created by this this German guy who has given us access to additional preferences that that Apple settings that Apple has built into the OS, but they’re hidden you can’t get to them unless you use terminal and I am not the type of person who’s going to open up terminal and try and figure out the right command and risk obliterating my old computer. So you can adjust things like the default font for each icon on your desktop, you can adjust things for how the dark menu bar and the dark background at dock work. And the neat thing is that it is designed to be backwards compatible. It’s not an app, it’s actual separate software for each iOS iteration. So you could still be using Puma or El Capitan, or or High Sierra or all the way to Big Sur, and there’s a version that will work for you so and it’s completely reversible. So if you do something that you don’t like, it is literally as easy as clicking a box to get things where you want to go. And if you just want to reset everything to Apple specs, there’s one thing to click. And that’s it. And I like things that are both easy and reversible in case you make a boo boo.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:48:59
This is fantastic. It’s like the system preferences that should have been wonderful. Thank you, Julie. And Deb, what is your new tool this week.

Deb Lee 1:49:10
So my new tool really isn’t a new tool per se, but I have been using it quite a bit it’s base camp. So it is amazing for teams. It can have a help a team leader see what the team is working on. There is a section called what’s on your plate or what’s on my plate. So instead of calling or texting, you can actually just go to that person’s plate and see what they’re working on. So there’s I don’t see it as micromanaging. I just see it as sort of checking in and seeing how things are going so you can figure out what your next steps might be. I also love the list feature. And every time you put a check on something that you’ve done, so it’s a to do list. Every time you check it off. It sort of drops it down off of your main view down below and it shows as completed or done and I I am the sort of person that if I were writing a to do list on paper, I would write it and then cross it off or put a checkmark. And so that really works well with my brain. So I love that a lot. So really perfect for teams. And also, if you’re using it on your own, you can see what’s outstanding for yourself. So you can look at your, your stuff, there’s a section called my stuff. Once you’re in there, you see all of your meetings, you see all of the things that have due dates, you see things that you’ve worked on you, you can communicate with others, and you can tag you can use emojis, which I love using, of course. So I’m really loving, loving Basecamp these days, a lot.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:50:37
Fantastic. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. So I know the of the folks at base camp. And so thank you everybody for those of the week. And of course, that brings us to our highlight of the show, which is our nominee, or nominees being selected for our top 10 female productivity organization and technology experts of 2021. let’s let’s let’s just plan on doing it again next year, why not? So what we did last week was we had people nominate, and we had roughly about 2425 entries into it. And we’re just cutting it off at 10. But really, the reality is, is in the episode, you’ll see us list everybody, and links to everyone. So by all means, check out all of the people here on this list. They are all doing wonderful things in the world of productivity, organization and technology. And so with that, I’m going to just rank order from 10 to one in terms of the winners and I’m gonna place them on screen just so we can, we can see them together. So those of you who are watching along it’s not going to be as suspenseful as those of you who are listening. But let’s go from the bottom up. So in 10th place, the winner of the 10th play slot is Laura Vander kam. She came in attempt and that was in, I guess, too tense to play spots. But you know, Barbara Hemphill came in for that. That spot as well 77.29% for Barbara Hemphill and for Laura Vander cam and so Barbara Hemphill I’m going to consider her nice place. I don’t know ninth and 10th I don’t know how you do that in the in the ranking order, but they’re the in the two spots there for ninth and 10th. Just above them is Judith Kohlberg. And actually, Julie, I believe you were the one who nominated Judith Kohlberg originally, and she got quite a number of votes and is in the eighth spot. Next up is Mel Robbins, she put in 10%. We have a lot of of like exactly numbers of people who like they got the same percentages. But either way, Mel Robbins and then Julie Morgenstern rank as eight. Sorry, 10 9876. Is that right? Yeah. So six and seven, there. And so Julie Morgenstern and Mel Robbins fall into that. And then right above them are our two panelists tonight, congratulations. But doubly and desarae rank as our fourth and fifth place winners today. And then above them is Stacy Harmon, another fellow fellow Evernote certified consultant, and also my fellow Evernote regional leader for North America. And so congratulations to Stacey, hope you’re out there. Hearing this. And then Penny zenker comes in second place, and drum roll first place. Like someone I didn’t actually know existed until like two weeks ago. Are we we can half ago is Grace Marshall. Grace marsel comes in at 36.2% as our top female productivity organization and technology expert of 2021. And so congratulations.

Julie Bestry 1:53:53
I’m tickled to death. And I tied I think, I think that’s perfect. I’m sure dev would agree it’s an honor to be nominated. Indeed, indeed it is. And we didn’t have to put on Spanx to walk the red carpet that’s really happy about that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:54:12
You know, our goal, our goal here was really just to elevate the voices of people doing really wonderful things out there in the world. And I know that so many times, people are not getting the kind of billing and it doesn’t matter what gender you know, most of the people doing the real hard work, the good work of working one to one with people and in small group environments, all over the world. They’re not getting the attention they need. And I know that it’s even that much more difficult in the female world, right? When we, when we talk about the top tier in productivity, for example, it tends to be male oriented world and so the idea of just giving a greater voice and a platform for them in even our small way, you know, that leads to an I can do. I’m just very excited to be able to do that and it Is my mission to just continue elevating the voices of people who are doing great work and not being heard as best as and as much as they should be. And so I’m just glad that some folks who are not New York Times bestselling authors and not, you know, big ticket people ended up on the list, especially the two of you who are really out there doing wonderful work, and I appreciate the work you’re doing with people helping them be more organized and be more productive. Really, the work you’re doing is so wonderful and useful to people. So thank you for doing the work that you do.

Deb Lee 1:55:31
Well, thank you.

Unknown Speaker 1:55:32
Thank you.

Augusto Pinaud 1:55:34
Thank you. Thank you very much. I need to I agree with that. And the only thing I will disagree is that is your mission instead of our mission. But in everything else, I agree with you.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:55:45
Yes. Well, it’s our mission on this show. It is my mission in life. So I, I take I take rank choice, top billing there for that very reason. But I’m just really tickled pink that we were able to do this. And I appreciate everybody who voted everybody who nominated people in and for this, I just enjoy the engagement in the community. And I know that I speak on His behalf as well, and just thanking everyone for everybody’s engagement there. So with that, we have reached the top of our show our time together is short. And I just wanted to give everybody an opportunity to get to know Julie and Deb a little more. Now, one of our top 10 female productivity organization and technology experts losing out, Julie, how can people keep up to date with you and the work that you’re doing? Where should they check you out?

Julie Bestry 1:56:41
Just follow my name, Julie bestiary.com. That’s the easiest way and from there, you can get to the blog, and read and see everything, including me talking about how much I love the three of you.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:56:55
With that, thank you very much really for joining us both last week, and this week and all of your help in getting ready for this top female productivity organization technology experts of 2021

Unknown Speaker 1:57:06
Thank you for having me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:57:08
Okay, wonderful. And, Deb, how can folks keep up to date with the work you were doing and find you out there in the in the world?

Deb Lee 1:57:17
Well, I can be found at D Allison li.com. And everywhere on social at D Allison lane D Alison leads actually my name Those are my initials. So it would be for Debbie and Alison Lee middle name last name Lee. So yeah, de la familia calm.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:57:34
Thank you so much. This is this was your first time on the show. I hope it’s not your last time on the show. Take care. Thanks so much.

Augusto Pinaud 1:57:44
Thanks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:57:46
Already gousto. And then there were two.

Augusto Pinaud 1:57:49
Then there were two famous Agatha Christie.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:57:53
Alright, thank you so much, as always, for helping us get ready for Anything But Idle each week.

Augusto Pinaud 1:57:59
My pleasure.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:58:00
All right. With that everyone, we have lots of stuff that is kicked into the show notes, we had a lot to cover, and we couldn’t cover everything in the show. So like always, if there’s something that we did miss, first, check out the show notes. So if you go to Anything But Idle comm forward slash 048. That will take you to the episode for today. there on that page, you will find all the show notes with links to all the stories tools of the week, all of the extra stories we didn’t get to cover today. It will also include a text transcript that’s both readable on the page, just click on that Read More link and it’ll expand it you’ll be able to read there. You can also download it in PDF that way you can read it say on your tablet while listening to the show as well. But if there is something that we missed if there’s a story we missed, by all means head over to our contact page at Anything But Idle. So if you go to Anything But Idle comm, you can click on contact and go ahead and send us a message. You can also tweet or dm us using our Twitter handle for the show at Anything But Idle. And so just find us on Twitter and go ahead and do that. If you have a question or comment again, go right back to Anything But Idle comm go to the episode page, you can leave a comment on that particular episode page for us. If this is your first time watching the live stream, if you click that subscribe button, it’ll give you a bell icon to be able to notify you about our show that goes live weekly. And if you’re listening to the podcast show after the fact Feel free to consider adding us to your favorite podcast, podcast app, it might say subscribe or follow in your podcast app of choice. But it’s just basically your ability to add our podcast to the app and it’s free and you just get the downloaded episodes each week once we put them out on usually Tuesday mornings, but the following day of the show. If you’ve enjoyed spending time with us, feel free to go ahead and click the thumbs up icon on YouTube. If you’re listening to the podcast after the fact Feel free to leave a rating or review in your preferred podcast app if it allows you to. So with that, thank you all for leaving those reviews. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening and see you all next time on Anything But Idle. Here’s your active life

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

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