How Stress Affects Your Personal Productivity

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This week, Augusto Pinaud and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss the importance of managing stress (and more importantly, distress) regarding your personal productivity. Then, they cover the productivity and technology news this week! And, Happy 10th Birthday, Goodnotes! Enjoy!

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In this Cast | How Stress Affects Your Personal Productivity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00

Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community Welcome to Anything But Idle the productivity news podcast. Today’s show is brought to you by co working space by personal productivity club. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:12

And I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:14

And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. This is Episode 54 how stress affects your personal productivity. And we’re recording this on April 19 2021. Each week we review and discuss the productivity and technology news headlines of the week. And this week, our theme is how stress affects your personal productivity. And so what I wanted to do was for us to start off the conversation with just a little bit of discussion on how stress works. And so so I think I’m hearing a little bit of feedback if you want to just turn. And so I wanted to just kind of talk a little bit about the way in which stress affects personal productivity. And so that we have kind of an idea or an understanding as we go forward in the way in which we have the discussion. So first, stress is both a category of thing right which we have stressors in the world. And so we can have things that are stressors that are positive and negative stressors, we call those us stressors being positive stress, and distress or negative stressors. And then we of course, have the concept of volume based stress. And so stress can actually attack us on two ends. Because if you have a negative stressor, something that is a something that is a dis stressor, that can be of course, a negative impact on you can have some kind of thing like an immediate moment where you lose your job, that’s a stressor. But the fact of the matter is that you could also have categorical or volume based distress, meaning little tiny things like you have an argument with a friend, but then you have another argument with another friend. And then you have another argument with another friend all in the same day, week, month. And those things categorically I mean by volume become a problem for you, then you can have very positive stressors, like you know, you get a really great project at work. But now all of a sudden, you get a bunch of new duties. Because say a pandemic comes along and you have to, you know, remote school, your children, and do all of these other things that are going on in your world, right. So positive things can actually contribute to stress and then ultimately become a de stressor because of that. So we have volume based and categorical based stress. And those of course can impact our personal productivity. Agusta when you think about stress in your own personal productivity system? How do you how do you work to overcome that issue? Like how do you de stress so to speak, when it comes to personal productivity so you can have kind of the right amount of stress in your life?

Augusto Pinaud 2:53

Well, I don’t know about the right amount of stress in my life. I don’t I don’t know about that. But what I what I know is one of the things so there are two things one is my my routines and there are certain you know, this stressing routine that I really need to pay attention, one of them is reading. One of them is eating, you know, I eat the same amount every day. And part of that is a stress issue. So I meditate those are some of the basic things I do. And and I say to clients, it doesn’t matter what do you do? It doesn’t matter if you work outside, I know people who work it’s irrelevant what you decide to do or what works for your stress level there is people who take showers in the middle of the great what is important is understand what is the effect for me it’s a matter of of a speed and I always remember that quote from getting things done book has tense muscles a slow one. And that’s what happened to me I get stressed out and stressed out and freaked out and then I’m really ineffective, I cannot make the same decisions or decisions with the same ease that when I am relaxed. So there is a couple of things that you know, I’m I have on my Apple Watch, there is an application called brief and it is really useful for me to get that nudge in my wrist saying hey, you know you should breathe right now. So things like that things like hey, let me get you know I have gone from I have guided meditations that lasts nine minutes. And he says the shortest version I have. And I sometimes when the stress is high I start looking for when I’m going to block those 10 minutes I do that keep the stress, because the other thing that I discover is if I manage days of highest stress during the day, I don’t crash and burn at the end of the day, when I don’t, eventually what happens is I crash and then they, and then there is nothing that I can do to bounce back.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:25

Yeah, for me, I think you the same issues around self care really come to the fore when it comes to managing stress. That should be an ongoing, habitual regular aspect of your world, you should always be working to make sure that you are buffering against stress by doing the things that you know, are going to de stress you throughout the day. Something that people frequently forget is rejuvenative activities. And these are activities that actually expend energy that you’re highly passionate about, or at least interested in doing, that do not relate to work or really doing things for others. Think about it from the perspective that you like reading, reading is a personal interest of yours, something that you enjoy doing, it happens to be something that we share as a as a self care activity. I am a voracious reader. And anytime you see me not doing something in purpose of taking care of the household, or doing work, I’m usually reading. And that’s just my my natural state of being, and that rejuvenate that is a rejuvenative activity. For me, it’s something that is done in purpose of nothing else than myself. And so many people forget about doing those kinds of things, especially those of us who are personal productivity minded. So keep that in mind. And then the other side is, I’m always paying attention to how stress affects my personal productivity by virtue of the quality of my work, if all of a sudden the the amount to which I am being responsive to clients to the amount of volume of work that I’m outputting those things are telling me that some level of stress and anxiety is affecting my personal productivity system. And those are signs that I should start figuring out what behavioral interventions I can put into place, whether that be self care or otherwise to be able to mitigate what is going on in my world, because there’s probably some level of stress that’s happening. If for some reason I am in a state of reducing my output. Or if I have some level of feeling that my standard of excellence is being compromised in some way, shape or form, it’s usually stress related. If one of those things are all of a sudden cropping up, they’re, they’re kind of surfacing as something that I should be paying attention to. So those are kind of my thoughts on stress. Any any final thoughts for folks regarding stress and productivity? You

Augusto Pinaud 7:49

know, there are two things that has been useful for me and may not be useful for anybody else, but useful for me one is, learn the symptoms of that and let the Learn the cravings that you get with stress because not only stress, that you have produced tension, you may get a stress out but don’t get that tension in the neck in the muscles in the back, but still you are stressed out. So one of the things is identify those I for example, have share multiple times that is pizza, okay, every time I my brain says, oh, pizza sounds good. I need to be really really careful. Is this pizza sounds good because I love pizza or pizza Sounds good? Because there is an ulterior motive. And like that there are two or three things that I come immediately were that are identifying that way that are basically his stress that I that produce for me, so I need to really pay attention to those things. So that way, I gone. I keep it at bay and I keep it in control.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 9:00

pizzas always because I love pizza. alright with that, let’s get into our headlines this week. A gusto. What’s our first headline in the news this week?

Augusto Pinaud 9:14

So our first mess if our first headline on the news I’m sorry, is following fiddly finally made it official that you can follow Reddit on fiddly you technically could because at the end of the day is a URL way longer than but now they made it so it works much better than what it used to. You know now you can put the content directly and you can search and you can do other things that again, you could do it technically before is just that now they are integrating those two things I need works much better. So you can now go directly and undo it that way. And that is a great news. I think if you Reed Ridley is agreed, agreed news.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:03

Yeah, so I’ve been long following Reddit subreddits within Feedly. And I was also kind of like, wait, what is the what’s the difference here. And so I went in and I connected my Reddit account. And it seems a little bit more fluid, it seems like what you can do is see each individual subreddit or community so to speak, and in essence, have that particular item, you can follow that particular item a little bit more cleanly in the system, I really haven’t had a problem following it in the old way. I like the sense that you’re capable of now searching for those items inside of Feedly directly. And kind of going from there, it has a little jump out button. So you can jump out to view a conversation and interact and engage with that conversation. And I do like the fact that Leo, which is a Feedly pro feature, now can filter and sort those Reddit conversations topics, and bring them up to the top for you as well. So again, something that I didn’t think Leo wasn’t doing before. So I’m not sure I missed it. But now Leo can prioritize topics, companies or business events. And you can also mute particular Reddit posts so that if it keeps popping up in your system, you can go ahead and suppress it, so it doesn’t show up in the system. So it’s a nice additional feature. I’m a big fan of Feedly. And enjoy using it. So any new feature advanced there is great in my book. What’s our next story? acquisto?

Augusto Pinaud 11:36

Well, there, Gordon, there is a report saying that Twitter consider buying clubhouse for for billions. And I could throw that mic on the floor here. I don’t understand. I don’t understand it. I have. That’s all that I’m going to say about this.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:55

Yeah, so so for context, for those who are maybe unaware clubhouse is a social audio network or an audio social network, I’m not sure which one modifies which. But the idea behind clubhouse is that it is currently in a well funded Silicon Valley, venture capital backed social network, and it’s focused on audio only, you have these rooms that you can join. And again, audio only, there’s no recording. And you can interact and engage with folks in that in that audio space. It is iOS and iPad OS only invite only. And it is currently in this beta state. It supposedly has an Android app that’s coming out soon. And so far my experiences in clubhouse have been met. I mean, you know, that hasn’t really been all that exciting. However, every other platform from LinkedIn to Facebook to Instagram, or Facebook owned Instagram to all of the others are contemplating how they’re going to create clubhouse versions, or at least a feature set in the system. Reddit actually has one coming out, discord has one. And twitter twitter spaces is actually just shot is in beta testing right now and should be releasing. So we have all of these kind of club housie features coming to platforms, including telegram, which is my favorite one, because you can you can do telegram channels. And that’s a much more accessible tool because you’re not having to install and download a whole nother social network application in order to be able to use it. clubhouse, of course, is a femoral since you can’t record. Whereas in other platforms, you’re able to record. So I was thinking about this from a podcasting perspective, you know, being able to host a live podcast like we’re doing here, we’re doing this live on video in front of you all, and the audio goes out to the podcast later. And that’s nice. It’s interesting to be able to interact and engage live with the audience. And like I said, Not that I have said this before, but if you’re here with us live now feel free to engage Hi, how’s it going. And so when you comment and engage with us, we’re capable of doing that in a live setting, it’s basically giving that capability in an audio only format. And so that’s great. It shows that that there’s obviously a need and value for creators, content creators and influencers to be able to do this. But it’s also great for like family type stuff, you know, where you just want to engage with family or have friends get together in a private chat and be able to engage with each other. So I feel like there’s a lot of potential for greater productivity gains here in the workspace. Because in the workspace, you’re actually able to engage with people in on, you just don’t have to be on camera all the time. And especially with zoom fatigue, really being a thing now for people, it’s really helpful for people to be able to interact and engage in a way that everybody can do it equitably. And not everybody has, you know, the best camera and the best lighting and the best home environment to be able to work from home or work from anywhere for that matter, which we’re going to talk about later in the show. And maybe these social audio networks are going to give us more features that allow us to be able to do that and Also making it comfortable that people actually be off camera on zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google meet WebEx, blue jeans or otherwise, because that’s also kind of a cultural problem that we’re we’re facing, with people wanting to always be on camera. I know I enjoy it. And I appreciate being on camera with people. But it can also be fatiguing to people to always be on and always seeing themselves on camera. So a little bit off topic of the story itself. But I feel like that’s what it triggers for me when we talk about that. All right, onward to the FCC, and then wanting to know how fast your internet is.

Augusto Pinaud 15:35

See, and this is that we are having issues today with a news because I don’t know how I feel about sharing my internet speed with the FCC, can they find it? I’m sure they can. I’m sure they know, then if you know what you’re asking me. And my question to this and is based on what we have seen on the last years, five years or so, is this information going to use in favor or against people? And that’s hold me again, I’m sorry, this is not I don’t I, I think this is going to come and hurt more than what he’s going to help.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 16:27

I’m going to take the contrarian view here, I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m gonna trust the FCC here, in the sense that what they’re really trying to do is to gather information as to whether or not what telecommunications providers what internet service providers are, are telling them is actually true. When I connect to my ISP, your internet service provider, and they say, oh, you’re gonna get 30 megabytes per second download and 32nd megabytes per second upload, are you going to get 50 or 100, or 300? Or a gigabit? Nobody has any ability to really track that on an ongoing basis on on a regular basis across the entire ecosystem. With the FCC, here’s I think trying to do is to be able to figure out whether or not across the United States really, what are the mobile broadband speeds are people clocking in at five megabytes per second, or for, you know, one megabyte less than a megabyte per second? are most people really clocking in around 20 megabytes per second in terms of up and down speeds, them getting some level of information across the board here, I think it’d be useful for them to be able to go back to the telecoms, go back to the ISP and saying, Hey, this is the speed that people are saying they’re getting, especially on mobile, which these are both mobile applications as the FCC has provided us. And that will give them greater, you know, information, greater data to be able to say, you know what, we have a real problem in rural America. And we do, and I really believe that. Since I work with predominantly small businesses, I believe that businesses should have a fundamental right and access to the internet to broadband speed internet, I believe that humans, individual citizens of our country, and honestly, global citizens should have an right to access to the internet, they don’t have to have blazing speeds, but they do and should have access to the internet in some way, shape, or form. And we are fundamentally handicapping the human race by virtue of not providing that infrastructure. And so anything the FCC can do to to collect that data. Ultimately, that is the citizens data. Remember when the FCC collects that data that ends up being data that the the American people should have access to, and so therefore, it becomes public data. And that’s where I’m really actually quite fond of this idea, which is that if we get more and more mapping of how good or bad the speeds are around the country, we then are armed with organizations that can look at that data, do the data crunching, and go back to the FCC and say, Hey, you tracking all this data, and it shows that it’s really bad in these particular areas. Why is that is this disparity based on race is this disparity based on income levels, and starting to push back at them to be able to provide that infrastructure and support we can’t depend upon the benevolent tech companies to provide stable high speed broadband internet connections to our, to the American people, we have to be fairly forthright and demand that we get access to that. And I think it’s only through that, that we’ll be able to actually have a better country. You know, because internet connectivity is so often the difference between access to healthcare, to education, to proper employment, all of those things are really founded today on having digital access. So I am, I am really fully for this. So the article talks about the fact that the FCC has basically provided these two broadband speed testing applications, one on Android and one on iOS. You can go out there install it, you can just basically run the application and then send that data up to the FCC. Again, they’re just collecting the location and speed data so they can start to map out how speeds are working. And let’s hope I mean, you know, it’s this is all hope. I mean, this conjecture that this will actually help the American people. I mean, I have great broadband access and great broadband speeds, but not everybody does. And I really hope that this helps push that forward. All right,

Augusto Pinaud 20:13

onward. Yeah, good point. And then and. And I hope that you are completely right on that one. But let’s get to exciting news. Now, Google Chrome will soon lead you quick, fine. And restore close tabs. And it’s not a secret. If you use Google Chrome, you start opening tabs, and suddenly, they crash or you close them or you’re like me, and then colorful words come on your mind or your mouth. Because you close too early before you find and I or you lost the tap. So I am particularly excited about it. Because I have seen many people going into that and then trying to rebuild that. And here’s a function that Safari has had for for a while. So on my personal browsing doesn’t happen. But on my professional browsing, it has happened and either too fast, you know, command W and any short command q instead of command W and I, you know, get in trouble. So I am particularly excited about this new feature coming out.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:20

Yes. So everybody should know you, you currently have this ability to be able to resurrect and restore tabs or even windows within Google Chrome currently, it’s just kind of buried in the interface. So if you are trying to restore something, if you hold down Shift, and then tap Ctrl T, or Command T on the Mac, you will be able to then resurrect a restored tab or a series of tabs safe a whole window closed, it’ll restore those 510 1550 tabs that you have had open before that window closed. So you have always had that functionality built in. And you can even go and find in the in the history, the ability to resurrect them. Now they’re just basically bringing that into the forefront where you’re now in the new chrome in Chrome Canary, which is their alpha, you know, developer channel, they have now built out the the facility for you to be able to just click on that down arrow, that disclosure arrow that’s now kind of a prominent piece of the new Chrome, and you will be able to see your history and see those recent tabs and resurrect them from the grave without having to, you know, find the buried gold within history. So that’s the Update, I’m really glad to see this happen. There are many times when I you know, accidentally close things out, or I need to quickly update the system because I want to do something and then I go, oh, shoot, I didn’t mean to do that before I save my tabs most of the time, Chrome automatically reopens those, and it’s all great. But it’s nice to be able to go back and see that it’s captured it and it has it there and available to me to to pull back up from from the dead. So Alright, some more Google News.

Augusto Pinaud 23:02

Well, the next google news google assistant, and he will he can now find ring Simon’s iPhones as duplexes, panning, do you have been able to find Android, even if they are silence, you have been a and you have even been able to tell their big to find your iPhone. But what it does is it make a phone call. So if your phone is on Do Not Disturb or the ring is turned on, it will just vibrate harder to find. And what Google is doing now is if you install the Google Home app on your iPhone, the app now has the ability on the settings that you can say ignore, if I’m using the big g my Do Not Disturb or markers or what they call a critical alert, you need to set it up. But now when you are looking with your iPhone or your iPhone with big G, even if isn’t those two conditions, it will find it. But it was interesting for me is as far as I know, that’s not available if you use anything else. So so that was really, really interesting.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:09

That’s great. I think it’s I mean, just finding phones generally when they’re lost, this is a fantastic feature to be able to add to the to the toolkit. And next up we have some news from Asana.

Augusto Pinaud 24:24

So the next news is center now is allowing you to organize better, and it’s an update that we is going to be rolling out so it may not be available for everybody. But as I said over the next few months,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:41

it’s gonna be a while. I haven’t seen it yet in my system.

Augusto Pinaud 24:45

It’s not in my system either. But my task is now you’re going to be able to do more views and move the things and add roles and customize certain sections. So it should give you a better way to manage all those tasks and Hopefully allows you to work better, you will be able to create sections, add rules. And the idea is to be able for them to, I’m guessing make your work better inside of a center that I’m not a big user of a center. And the projects that are that I manage there honestly synchronize to my task of choice, because I don’t go there. I so, but if you are an Asana person, this may be really, really interesting, you will be able to do to filter in different ways away by workbooks or by date, and many other things. So if you are an ascending, heavy user, please go and check you will find it interesting.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:43

Yeah, you know that I have been struggling with Asana for quite some time purely because my system is separated. And I want everything to be coming out of Asana and into remember the milk for me. And this new change is actually quite remarkable. The ability for me to be able to organize the My Tasks view across many projects into one singular view is phenomenal. And I’m really looking forward to seeing whether or not this maybe solves for that problem, because being able to create sections means that in a GTD lingo, I can create context based lists. And I can go ahead and see what’s going on in my world and making sure that those things are together. And even if it’s just a check on making sure that what I have pulling from Asana and putting it in, remember the milk via connected integrations, like Zapier an ifft, that they’re just doing them properly, because it’s that trust in the system that I want to be able to have. And I want to be able to have that consistency. And so far, I haven’t had that. So it makes me have to toggle back and forth between Asana and remember the milk and when in doubt, I don’t. So it has been a real challenge with Asana and just going to it and making sure that I’m careful and conscientious about what’s in there so that I can just, you know, update people checking on status of projects, that kind of thing when it comes to work projects. So I’m really looking forward to seeing what tasks does in this category. And so with that, that brings us to our halfway point. And that means a word from our sponsor this week, co working space by personal productivity club, we will see you after the break. For more news this week.

Sponsor Voice Over 27:20

Well, working in person may be normal for you. It’s unlikely your co workers are as interested in being productive as you are, or working remotely or from home can be isolating. And there’s something powerful about being with productive people, even virtually that helps you be more engaged. If a flavor of these sounds familiar, co working space by personal productivity club is for you. co working space is a virtual work community designed to help members be more effective and efficient in their work and personal lives. At its core. We provide goal tracking and host focused action sessions throughout the week for accountability and camaraderie, visit Anything But Idle comm forward slash co working to learn more CO working space lives inside personal productivity club, a digital community for personal productivity enthusiasts. So you can find people who use methods and tools you do too. Again, head over to Anything But Idle comm forward slash co working to see how co working space can help you be more productive. And now back to our show.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:30

Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle on Ray Sidney-Smith with a gousto pinout. And we before the break, we’re covering our headlines this week. And so we’re going to continue with our headlines. Augusto what’s our next headline this week

Augusto Pinaud 28:46

moving from work from home to work anywhere and setting up the future of work as a success. And it’s an article in Forbes a really interesting article based on a story by a company called toluna. And when they went into, you know what’s going to happen and what are what are going to be the statistics you know, right now people say well they get the vaccines is they get a social distancing. And they have the percentage of the people who answer it is the regular testing, you know, and why people wants to come back, you know, the sharing that the atmosphere, the small talk, these kind of things and the motivation, the team building, you know, but at the end of the day, as the article says the future is hybrid. And I we don’t know, again, as you mentioned last week, it is good that this is in the front that we are talking this that we are discussing this and the different options and we are putting it out. I think that was something that really helped my perspective last week and Understand that what we know, is going to change. What we knew from before is not anymore. And it’s something new, we don’t know what it is, nobody knows. We guess that is going to be a hybrid model where you are going to go some days and they stay behind others or some combination of that. But the reality is nobody knows that said, and I know and I am thankful for you for for that, for that explanation you did last week on Anything But Idle because it opened my eyes, I was getting annoyed by all these people discussing this. And we say, Well, this is the reason it’s important. It really change. Even the way I’m reading the article. So let’s see if we find something new and original. But right now, well, it is interesting to see that, as they say, only 25% say they want to return to work in five days to help us. And now, I’m not surprised, um, I think I think this pandemic for good or for bad change, everybody, you know, not only change you, as you were saying at the beginning of the show today, it changed the way you work, the way you interact with things, the way you interact with technology, but also changes in at least for a while, in the way we will do things, you know, we I don’t think people is in a hurry to run to what was before, I think it’s going to be something different. And it will be really interesting.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:38

Yeah, I think that it’s important for us to recognize that we are in a space where we are consistently bombarded by these articles, because we’re paying attention. But for people who are not paying attention, it’s really important for us to be opening up this dialogue with people so that everybody gets an opportunity to have a conversation. It’s about having that sense of, of equity in the conversation. And we’re bringing everybody to the table, I really enjoyed the Yogesh Gupta, who is the CEO of progress, a global software company, he was quoted in the article several times. And he’s quoted here at the end of the article, saying, again, quote, conventional wisdom is that productivity has gone up during this pandemic. And that’s likely true for personal productivity, work you can do by yourself. But I also believe that collaborative productivity has suffered, and quote, and so, you know, I know that you will just have been talking about this idea of organizational productivity. And I think it’s probably akin to what he’s talking about in terms of collaborative productivity. And this is really at core needs to be solved. While we keep talking about the fact that personal productivity is up. Yeah, that’s because people are, you know, they don’t have commutes. And the people who are probably single, who live in a good environment, you know, where they can work from home, they can be productive, but it’s really difficult for some other people. And we have to start building up some support for those people. It’s not about like, Oh, well, you just pull the proverbial wrong straw. And so therefore, you should not have a job and not be able to be productive, we should be able to make this work for everybody who wants to work and, and we need to figure out the organizational productivity or the collaborative productivity components, so that we can all reduce all of the problems and the friction that we all are facing, when it comes to this me with time zones, I think we should get rid of time zones. But that’s just me. But I, I fundamentally believe and stand by my statement last month, which is that last week, which is that we really need to be paying attention to this conversation, by virtue of the fact that there are so many people who are not paying attention to this, and the more that you all you all watching and listening are hearing the conversation going out there and just bringing it up and having that dialogue with others, I think is going to be a really important aspect to how we change from, you know, going from, you know, working, you know, all the time, you know, some some people work seven day work weeks before, and, and then six day work weeks. And then ultimately, we landed on just about the five day work week here in the modern world. And now we can push this forward to potentially working from anywhere and having a shortened workweek, because we don’t need to be working 24 seven, and certainly we don’t need to be working, you know, the nine to five, five days a week, we can really truly be working other hours. And this is the time while we’re in this state of change, we might as well make the transition transition now to something that can be better and more useful for all of us. So I’m really looking forward to this. Alright, from work from home to more work from home. I’m just gonna I’m going to cover this in just a couple of words, which is that there was a work from home expert Nicholas Blum, who was quoted on Business Insider talking about the future of work and in essence, in summation, the article really talked about the fact that we are in this middle ground where it’s going to be messy, we’re just going to see a lot of turmoil and chaos as we make this transition. And it just goes to my prior point that we were talking about, which is that we don’t know what’s going to happen. As Augusto said, when we also know this is the time to be making that change. So this is the time to be having conversations with our employers and managers, as well as our co workers and colleagues, and even direct reports to figure out what’s working and what doesn’t work so that we can figure out what the future looks like, if we don’t have those conversations, then we sweep this under the rug, and we don’t see change. And what we ultimately do is we prolong the change, that’s going to happen, because the future of work is is digital, and the future of work is hybrid, if not fully remote for many people on this planet. And if we prolong that change, it’s going to be protracted and it’s going to be painful. And so let’s try and shorten that by a couple of decades and make that a little bit easier for transition. Meaning that it’s going to take a couple of decades for this change to happen. There’s no question. But let’s over over that timeframe. Let’s not make it 40 years, let’s make it maybe 2015 or 10 years in terms of the transition. And I think we’ll all be better off humanity wise in that in that way. So with that, on to the next story of Cousteau, which is this article from the ladders.com ladder

Augusto Pinaud 36:18

is an article 30 daily routines of healthy productive people and and i love this this article, I really enjoyed reading it. But more importantly, I love how it titles was what we begin talking at the beginning How is trust affect your personal productivity? Because in my particular case, are these routines that allows me to keep that stress at bay are these routines what allow me to work better with this. So some of the some of the routines they have is wake up everyday at the same time, make your bed exercise, meditate, take a shower, eat breakfast, drink a glass of water, take your vitamins, read the news, and you can go into the list. But I think it’s really important to not only have these routines, but also revise them. You know, once in a while you don’t need to revise them every week. But you should revise them at least every 90 and see what is still is working. What it’s what needs to be adjusted or improved things change, jaunt routines change, hey, we have people we are now we are now in the point where, you know, we’re starting to get vaccinated, we are already vaccinated. So okay, now we are going to start going to the office one day a week, okay? How old that is going to go, you know, kids, I live in New Jersey, New Jersey saying that kids are going to go to school next year, no virtual school, okay, how that is going to adjust all those routines. Because at the end of the day, for over a year and a half, okay, by the time they go back is going to be almost two years, my kids has no uniform or they weren’t in a uniform from the waist up. Okay, that is what you can see in the camera. But now these, they’re going to need to do that they’re going to you know, there is a different routine, there is no snag every time you get into the kitchen. So it is important, as is going to be important for them to review those, it’s going to be important for you to review your stool because as those things change, yours are going to change as people change your routines, how that’s going to affect yours. So, again, I think it’s a really, really important article to, to read, and, more importantly, to evaluate what are the routines, what is working, and what is not.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:48

So I enjoyed the article, I think, you know, reading through them is really powerful and important because it gives you a check on whether or not you’re doing any of them and how you can do more of them that are that can be powerful and productive for your own day. Remember that routines are what you already do. And so you can add things into your routine. And that could be a positive. And so I want people to stop worrying so much about habits and start worrying more about the scaffolding that’s already existing in their days. And you know, whatever has happened in the past year, year and a half, almost, you know that your routines have changed. And that’s just a fact of the of the reality of things. And so what are those things that you can actually infuse into your day, adding to your routines that can actually help either speed up things make for better relations with family and friends and co workers and what things can be removed from those routines that maybe not serving you as well anymore. And as you noted a gousto in any transition point, this is a good time to review routines and to figure out how to transition from one set of routines to another better. And that takes us along to a Ryan Holiday article life is about what we can do for each other and what Was that article all about?

Augusto Pinaud 40:02

No. It was a it was that I love the title I, I have a difficult relationship with Ryan Holiday there. Because I love to have a gray area with him. There are certain things he has written that I really adore. And there are things that he has written everything. Why did you wrote this article, I’m happy to say when to the opposite side to the one that I like. And you know, he opened the article, obviously was a question that let’s it’s good to say if you’re not familiar with Rand, wholly he’s stoic writer. And he writes a lot from that. He writes on from that perspective, period. But he is start with a question the article, why are we here? And is that it’s an impossible question to answer, I suppose. And I don’t know if it’s an impossible answer to two question. But what I really like about the article is in a time, where we’re seeing a lot of mee, mee, mee, mee, mee thinking, on what is going to how this is going to affect me and all this? Well, you know? How about you follow? You know, you had a quote on that article from Marcus Aurelius, where he said, a good character is an act from the common good, and we are common good has been put to the test on the last 1214 possible going to be 1820 months. And there is people who has passed this test with glorious notes, and there’s people who have failed this test was, again, going to that black and white the economy, and maybe we need to find a little bit more gray. And that was really what, what came for me, it was a really long, but enjoyable article that, again, it’s a love hate relationship, in this case are things he write that I really adore and thinking this one was on the I really enjoy reading this article completely, and I will recommend it to anybody.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 42:16

Yeah, so so the quotation from Marcus Aurelius is, the fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good. And quote, and so the the notion that he’s writing the kind of the, the thread that he’s trying to write about here is that for us to have a good life, quote, unquote, kind of the Socratic concept, or the platonic concept of the good life, we need to really focus on how we are both nurturing ourselves. And part of that nurturing of ourselves is nurturing others, and I just couldn’t not support that concept. And I think that the more that we are all out there doing more to help each other in our own ways, right, you know, not everybody is capable, or even emotionally competent to be able to help everyone in every possible way. And that’s not the point. The point is really for us to be able to figure out ways in which we can, that’s one of the reasons Augusto and I are here doing this show, right? We, we don’t need to spend, you know, an hour or two every week alive on this show, talking to folks about personal productivity, but it’s something that we’re both passionate about, but we also know the help and the support that it provides to people by virtue of doing this. And so the the goal is to do what you can do best in the way that you can do it. And for a lot of this self centered world that we’re living in, by virtue of whether that’s technology and how social networks have created this, this filter bubble in which we are insistently stoked to be able to create content that is about ourselves. And so therefore, we kind of curate a world that looks very different than, than what it really is, all of those things aside, we need to remember that we are on this planet, as humans and humans are collaborative creatures. They are, you know, we are we are better because we do things together. And and that’s just a really important powerful message. And I think we should always be reminded of that, as we make our way through this journey called life together. And if we don’t remember those things, then I think we live a less useful, less productive and certainly less enjoyable life. And it’s just good to have that message heard and kind of resonated throughout things. And so from from stoicism to a little bit more. We got a rap tatooed article about the ancient art of using time. Well, what did you think about this article?

Augusto Pinaud 44:40

I did not use this time well, because as I’m opening this, I noticed I did not read this article. So I’m going to say why. Because on the third paragraph says my lifelong difficulty of getting everything every day getting things done, and he’s a link to a different article and I clicked that and that brought me to a About the trail, and I never read the original article so I can talk about the rabbit trail happily. But

Raymond Sidney-Smith 45:08

the The really interesting thing about this article was that this, this author, I believe, it’s David, who writes for aptitude or, or is the writer behind raw aptitude, he talks about this idea of basically being kind of stoic, adjacent, really paying attention to the concepts of the stoics. And he likes the idea of stoicism for the premise behind it, which is that if you’re going to do something, be fully invested in the thing that you’re doing, enjoy the thing that you’re doing. So if you’re chopping vegetables, really thoroughly enjoy chopping your best vegetables. And I think we’ve talked about this before where I’ve talked about the street sweeper speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and he talks about the idea that whatever role you have in society, do that role to the best of your ability. Because if you fully invest in that role, you know that it’s important and valuable, and doing meaningful work, of course, provides and creates a meaningful life back to what we just talked about in the past article. And so the idea here is that if we take this down to the individual task level, if whatever you’re doing, you are fully invested in that thing, you’re doing what the stoics are really, you know, professing here, and while I’m not a stoic, I tend to disagree with Ryan Holiday and the the fundamental notion of stoicism, leaning into logic more than they lean into emotion. I think that goes counter to our current understanding and psychology. And that doesn’t mean that stoicism doesn’t have value. There is a true value to being able to step away from oneself and have kind of an objective third party perspective about your own self, right, this this concept of creating emotional distance, and being able to do that I don’t think that’s what stoicism says. And it’s not about whether or not stoicism is right. I think stoicism principles provide some value there. I just don’t think that I’m a stoic. And I’m still very interested in the material. And I pay a lot of a lot of attention to what really is and Seneca and xeno. And many of the others have said about stoicism. But on this point that David is making here, I’m really and profoundly enjoying this concept of, of being fully engaged in the moment, Julie bestiary, hey, Julie, how’s it going? She’s saying there’s an aspect of mindfulness in making meaning. Yes. And I think the answer is yes. And the reality is,

Augusto Pinaud 47:33

the three of us agree on that. Yeah, I

Raymond Sidney-Smith 47:35

think I think that if we want to think about mindfulness as present mindedness, so that we’re not using jargon here, present mindedness in the sense that if I’m present about what I’m doing, then I will, in some way, shape or form remove much of the suffering that exists in the world. For me, right, from this kind of self centered perspective, it’s not going to remove suffering generally from the world. And that’s why the prior article, the idea of being able to do goods for do good for the common good, is really important. And, but but really, if we can, if I can focus on what I’m doing right now, and fully immerse myself in doing that thing, and then switch and fully immerse myself in doing that next thing, then the notion of excellence comes or some sort of some sense of standard of what is good for you, becomes a part of a part at play. And that’s the real important part for me, which is if I’m going to, if I’m going to spend my time, as David talks about this in the article, if I’m going to spend my time doing something, basically waste some precious point of my time, before I am food for the daisies. Why should I do that poorly, whether that’s opening the refrigerator and pulling out a beer, or mowing the lawn or writing the next great American novel, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing, if I’m going to do it, I should do it well, and and i think that that’s a really important message for us all to kind of take heart too, which is that sometimes we feel challenged by the mundane, when really, in reality, myself included, we should involve ourselves fully in what we’re doing. If we’ve committed to doing it, we might as well enjoy the heck out of it. And, and so that was his message in the article. And I think it’s a really good one that we should all dwell on. Because many times we get wrapped up in our, let’s say, I get wrapped up in the anxiety of what I’m doing, and whether it’s the right thing to be doing in this very moment. I do a lot of work ahead of time, so that the work that I’m doing, I do really feel is the most meaningful work for me to be doing in the moment. And when we step away from ourselves and start to think about anything else other than the thing we’re doing, we’re ultimately doing poor work for it, the quality of our work is going to be diminished. And he’s saying carry yourself fully into it as the stoics talk about and you will be you’ll be a little bit more joyful in the work that you’re doing. So I’m all for it in and within reason within moderation. I think stoicism here it can provide us some good stuff there. So with that, those are the headlines. We chose for this week. And that takes us into the new tools of the week, Augusto and I come across whole bunches of personal productivity tools and services and apps each week. And so in new tools of the week, we tried to bring you tools that we found and we think you might like. And so this week, we have two tools, one from each of us. And our first tool, I’m going to bring up his hand mirror. And so let me bring it up on screen here for you to see. One second, I lost my my window here, hold on one second, let’s see how

Augusto Pinaud 50:34

do you look for your window, that if you are interested in learning what was my rabid my rabbit trail that I went for a long time, instead of reading the original article, I’m more than happy to share that. Yeah.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 50:48

Throw that in, throw that in the in the comment for for folks to be able to read. We could put it in the show notes. Okay, so I finally found my place here, I apologize. So my choice this week is a tool that I came across quite a while ago, but it’s called hand mirror. And in essence, it’s a Mac application. And you can actually test it in the browser itself. But there’s a back application. And what it allows you to do is to do a camera check. So this is kind of like a greenroom for the modern age. So before you hop into the next zoom meeting, you know teams meeting or whatever it might be, this little tool just sits up in your taskbar in the Mac, and allows you to be able to just check yourself in the mirror to make sure that you don’t have some, you know, spinach stuck in your teeth or something like that. And so you can see it down here, it just basically, you press the little button, it shows you what you’re gonna see in your camera. And that way you can go ahead and enter the situation. So you can just hop right into the meeting confidently as opposed to, you know, the bringing up this, this little meme with the the what is an international, you know, expert, you know, and his children, his children come running in the background behind him as he’s talking about it during, during a national intelligence, internationally televised show or whatever. So hanmer is just a great tool for being able to do that. So there is a version for Mac OS, Catalina or later and then there is an older one for older Mac’s as well. So it does support older Macs for that, for that purpose. So worth checking out. If you want something that just gives you a one click camera check. And you can go ahead and jump into meetings. Because what is your new tool,

Augusto Pinaud 52:39

genius scan 6.0. This is not the first scanner I bring. This is just a new version. And what allows you is to take the pictures, it will recognize the paper it will remove the background. So there is a lot of people taking pictures with the camera instead of scanning, but then you have the background and not everybody has the ability to clean it up. So applications like this will do that will allows you to combine those things. So instead of sending up JPEG, you’re sending a PDF, you can password protect those PDF, you can annotate on those PDF. So it’s really an incredible application in the past we have talked about other called scanner Pro, that is that I have used or that I use consistently. And if you take pictures to send to people, you know, that’s the way to do it as you as Ray’s highlighted on the screen. It’s a 4.9 out of five. So amazing. Not a bad and not bad at all. And really this kind of applications, turn your iPhone into a full fledge and really powerful scanner.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 53:48

That was a version for iOS and iPad it looks like and look Yeah, it’s a fantastic app. I can’t Yeah, 4.9 out of five is pretty, pretty snazzy for any application. So great. Those are our new tools this week. Hopefully those interests you and you can go ahead and check them out. And that brings us along to our story of the week this week. We are bringing you What’s our story this week, because

Augusto Pinaud 54:12

we are celebrating together with good notes. 10 years. Good notes is an application for iOS and Mac to do handwritten notes and, and PDFs and it’s my application is my notebook of choice right now. I really love the application. It’s synchronized with all my mic environment. And I can create notebooks and I can handwrite on I can add a pen and modify. And I was actually surprised that it was a 10 year old application. I was really happy. So today congratulations to the team of good notes for really such an accomplishment in years. It’s an accomplishment.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 54:53

Yeah, it really goes to show the the advancements in handwriting technology. Over the course of this time, some people don’t know this but the one of the founders of Evernote was a very influential person in optical character recognition, recognition, stuff on patch off. And and so, you know, the idea here is that now we are so far removed from that technology in terms of, we just expected to work that we’re able to write on screen that we’re able to find content within, you know, you talked about the genius scanner Pro, and it just lifts the handwritten text out of the document and the typewritten text out of the document, we really don’t think about it anymore. And it really just goes to show how we’ve arrived. And I use good notes myself, I use multiple, actually handwriting technologies, and writing software on various mobile devices, as well as my phones. And I’m just really pleased with good notes, I really enjoy using the tool, you actually encouraged me to install it way back in the day. And I said, Alright, fine, I’ll give it a try. And with goodnotes, five, I’ve been really, really pleased with all of the features that it’s provided, including your ability to circle a set of words, and then just turn that into typable text and copy and paste that into other documents. And now with iOS, his latest abilities to use scribble, you know, you’re really powered up in terms of being able to use handwriting across the ecosystem, but it doesn’t solve for what goodnotes is really doing, which is giving you this fluid environment to be able to just handwrite and and use creative functions. And then of course, I like to export everything to Evernote because I want to centralize my information. And it provides me that capability very easily. Actually, all the note taking note taking applications I use on on mobile tablets Give me that capability. I’ve been really pleased with with good notes in that sense. So good on them. Congratulations. And with that we’ve got a couple of quick announcements. We have a copy. You want to run through those?

Augusto Pinaud 56:53

Yes, tomorrow. If you’re watching live today, if you’re listening to the recording, so April 22,021 10am. Pacific time, ju will Apple is has her new event spring forward and supposedly we don’t know what is going to be announced. So if you don’t know I’m not going to be the one breaking the surprise. But next week on a on Wednesday, April 28. Samsung is doing another event the galaxy on pack. It’s going to be 10am Eastern Time and the both episodes we will have the next day and a special episode of Anything But Idle on the apple event. We are going to have on Wednesday at noon, Eastern Time. Michaels Lewinsky from NUS be joining us for the discussion. And on Thursday, April 29. At 7:30am eastern time, we are going to have Art Gelwicks come in and talk to us about galaxy unpack and the event and what we want. And the last announcement we have well may not be good. But Charles guess Chuck? Chuck, his name was Charles technical. Yeah,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 58:07

yeah. But he goes, he went by Chuck. Chuck gasca. Yeah, he passed away

Augusto Pinaud 58:11

one of the founders of Adobe, and one of the developers of the PDF, he passed at the ripe age of pay the one

Raymond Sidney-Smith 58:20

that we have, we have him to thank for the PDF for for all of its, you know, good and ills. It really did fundamentally, you know, foster the digital age in so many different ways, allowing us to be able to create a postscript document format, and that’s just so phenomenal. And, and so yeah, so I’m the portable document format that ultimately arose, which is what PDF stands for portable document format is.

Unknown 58:47

Yeah,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 58:48

so yeah, this is the it’s remarkable to think that that much time has passed, right? It just kind of makes me feel a little bit old. But at the same time, it really, you know, it, we should we should be honoring people who have done these really phenomenal, you know, pieces of technology, in this case software that has fostered a huge part of how we experience and use the web today. And so, yeah, so our, our I’ll pour one out for Chuck desk. And and yeah, and honor him in that way. So with that, Augusto, we have reached the end of this show. And so thank you to Augusto Pinaud for joining me each week and helping to put together Anything But Idle. Thank you, sir.

Augusto Pinaud 59:32

Pleasure, always.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 59:35

And with that, let’s move on with a couple of closing comments. If we missed a story, if there’s something we missed, feel free to head over to Anything But Idle to the episode page because it might be in our extra stories section. But if we did miss a story, feel free to go to Anything But Idle and click on the Contact page, you can go ahead and shoot us a message and we can include that maybe in the following week. You can also tweet or DMS on Anything But Idle on Twitter. So at Anything But Idle On Twitter, we have our DMS open. You can also tweet at one of us individually on Twitter as well. If a question or a comment about anything we discussed, feel free to head over to Anything But Idle comm and go to the episode page, you can go ahead and leave a comment or question there. While you’re on that page, you can check out our show notes. Our show notes include links to all the stories we discussed, it includes our mutuals of the week. And it also includes our extra stories, any of the stories that we collected, we thought were interesting, but we couldn’t discuss during our time on the show. It also includes a text transcript, both a readable one click on the Read More link, and it’ll expand it for you to read while you’re listening along or watching along in the embedded YouTube video. Or you can go ahead and download it in PDF format. And that way, you can send it off to good notes, for example, and annotate while you’re listening to the show as well. So it’s available in that PDF download as well. If this is your first time watching the live stream live stream, feel free to click that subscribe button. It’ll go ahead and get you notified when we go live weekly or when we even have these special commentary episodes, like for Apple’s special event, as well as Samsung Galaxy unpacked events. And if you’re listening to the podcast show that is listening asynchronously from us feel free to add us to your favorite podcast app and or leave us a rating review that really helps apple and the other podcast directories know that we’re doing content that you want to hear. And that will surface us to more people out there in the productivity community. And so thank you for doing that. With that. We will see you all next time on Anything But Idle. Here’s to your productive life bye Julie

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

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