Artificial intelligence is steadily moving from being a single tool you open on demand to becoming a growing collection of tools, systems, assistants, and semi-autonomous agents that can help you get work done across your personal and professional life.

Up to this point in this series, I have written about several distinct ways AI is already changing personal productivity. I discussed AI as an assistant that helps reduce administrative friction and shadow work. I explored AI as an assistant, researcher, learning partner, and coach. Then I looked at how AI is being embedded inside the tools we already use, and how AI coding companions are lowering the barrier to building bespoke tools and workflows for ourselves. The next question is what happens when all of those capabilities begin to accumulate around us. What happens when you are not using one AI tool, but many? What happens when one system is helping you research, another is helping you write, another is building slides, another is generating diagrams, another is producing audio, and yet another is browsing the web or carrying out multi-step digital tasks on your behalf?

At that point, the productivity challenge changes. The issue is no longer simply whether AI can help with a task. The new challenge becomes whether you can coordinate a growing virtual workforce of AI systems well enough that they actually improve your productivity rather than increase your confusion. That is where I think many of us are headed.

A great deal of the current conversation around so-called agentic AI implies that we are on the verge of delegating work to a highly capable digital worker who will simply take instructions and return completed outcomes with minimal oversight. I think that framing is often too simplistic. In practice, what most people will encounter first is not one magical autonomous agent, but a disaggregated ecosystem of many different AI tools with different strengths, interfaces, permissions, risks, and limitations. You may use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini as conversational thinking partners. You may use NotebookLM to synthesize source materials. You may use tools like Napkin.ai to create diagrams, ElevenLabs to create voice output, or AI features embedded in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace to transform content where your work already lives. You may also begin experimenting with agentic browsers, coding agents, and orchestration tools that can carry out increasingly complex digital tasks.

That future does not reduce the need for human management. It increases it. If anything, I think the next major skill in personal productivity will not simply be prompting, but coordinating. We will need to become better at selecting the right tools, defining their roles, setting permissions and boundaries, auditing their work, maintaining their usefulness over time, and knowing when to step in because the system is no longer behaving in a trustworthy or productive way. In other words, many of us are going to need to become managers of a virtual, personal workforce.

That requires a different mindset because this is not merely a technology story; this is also a management story. Just as I argued in my prior article that it is increasingly important to learn programming fundamentals so that we better understand the structure of software, I think it is becoming increasingly important to learn some basic management fundamentals so that we can direct AI systems more effectively. You do not need to become a corporate executive, and you do not need to run a large team. But if you want to work effectively with multiple AI systems, you do need to understand something about role clarity, delegation, feedback, boundaries, review cadences, and performance improvement.

That is what this article is about. I want to offer a framework for thinking about how to set up, orchestrate, maintain, troubleshoot, and improve a virtual AI workforce for your personal productivity. Much of this can also extend into your work life, but I want to keep the focus here on the personal side of the equation, because that is often where experimentation starts and where many of us first develop the habits that later shape how we work professionally.

The First Mistake: Thinking Agentic AI Will Simply “Do the Work”

One of the most common misconceptions people have about AI coordination is the belief that they will install a tool, give it a goal, and it will more or less complete the work with full volition and minimal supervision. That is an understandable assumption given the way many of these tools are marketed, but I think it is often unrealistic. What most people discover very quickly is that delegation to AI requires far more preparation than they expected.

You need to write or articulate specifications. You need to explain what success looks like. You need to clarify what the tool should do, what it should not do, and how it should make decisions when conditions change. You often need to connect multiple systems together. You need to grant permissions, manage credentials, and determine the boundaries of access. Those boundaries matter because AI systems can only operate in the digital environments to which they have access. Even when they can trigger real-world services, such as arranging transportation, ordering food, or making purchases, they are still only acting through digital systems. That means authentication, authorization, permissions, payment limits, and security controls become part of the productivity conversation.

If a human employee needs credentials, training, and guardrails before you trust them with certain kinds of work, why would you expect anything different from a digital worker? This is one reason I think management is the right analogy. If you hire a new employee, you do not simply say, “Go do whatever seems best,” and then disappear. A competent manager assesses what that employee can actually do, defines the scope of the role, explains standards, gives them access to the systems they need, and limits their authority where appropriate. They do not hand over the bank account, the master passwords, and the company credit card without process or oversight.

The same principle applies here. In that sense, the arrival of AI agents does not eliminate management. It makes management newly personal. For years, many people have been individual contributors who did not need to think of themselves as managers because they did not supervise other people. But if you begin to coordinate multiple AI systems around your work, you are managing. You are assigning tasks, monitoring output, creating feedback loops, and improving performance over time. That role deserves to be taken seriously.

Start With Roles, Boundaries, and a Tool Selection Logic

If the goal is to manage a virtual workforce effectively, then one of the first steps is deciding who does what. That sounds obvious, but it is where many people begin to lose the thread. They accumulate tools because each tool appears impressive in isolation. One creates slides. Another produces diagrams. Another summarizes documents. Another researches. Another codes. Another browses. Another automates. Another integrates into email, notes, spreadsheets, or calendar systems. Before long, the user has a shelf full of AI capabilities but no coherent logic for when each one should be used.

This creates friction instead of reducing it. The first problem is tool selection. What is the best tool for the job? The second problem follows immediately after. Once you choose a tool, how do you use it well enough to get the right outcome? And the third problem is orchestration. How do you centralize your instructions and decision-making so that your growing collection of tools does not become a chaotic assortment of disconnected experiments?

I think this is where people need some kind of control center. That control center does not have to look the same for everyone. For some people, it may be a dashboard. For others, it may be a custom GPT, Gemini Gem, Claude Project, or another master AI assistant that functions like a chief of staff. For others, it may be a flowchart, a decision tree, or a structured checklist that helps them determine which tool should handle which type of work. The format matters less than the function.

You need a repeatable way to answer questions like these:

• Is this a research task, a writing task, a diagram task, a voice task, a planning task, or a coding task?

• Does this work belong inside one of my existing platforms, such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Evernote, or my task manager?

• Does this require a conversational model, a source-grounded model, a design tool, or an autonomous agent?

• Does this task require internet access, file access, financial access, or other sensitive permissions?

• Is the goal simply to generate a work product, or to carry out a sequence of actions?

When you can answer those questions quickly, you reduce decision fatigue and increase consistency. I can imagine many readers creating a kind of “AI routing” prompt or flowchart for themselves. You describe the work that needs to be done, and the system helps direct you toward the right tool or combination of tools. That could be as simple as a one-page decision tree or as advanced as a chief-of-staff assistant that interviews you about your needs and then recommends a workflow. Either way, the principle is the same. Before you can coordinate well, you need role clarity. In management terms, that means defining which tool is responsible for what, under which conditions, and with which limitations.

This also helps reduce a subtle but growing problem in the AI era: redundant overlap. When three different tools can each perform 70% of the same task, the temptation is to keep experimenting indefinitely. Sometimes that is useful. Often it is just another form of procrastination. A well-managed AI workforce does not require the newest tool for every possible category of work. It requires a coherent set of tools that you understand well enough to use with confidence.

Build Your AI Control Center Around Your Actual Workflow

Once roles are defined, the next challenge is orchestration. How do you actually keep these systems coordinated? I do not think there is a single correct answer, because different people work differently and have different tolerances for complexity. But I do think most people will need some practical way to centralize how they direct this growing AI ecosystem.

For some, the best answer may be a lightweight dashboard or launchpad that lists their core AI tools by role and links directly to each one. That kind of system reduces friction by making the workforce visible and accessible. For others, the better answer may be process rather than interface. You might use a project management tool, notes application, or digital workspace as a kind of AI operations board. You track which tools are involved in which workflows, where outputs live, which prompts or templates you use regularly, and where human review needs to happen. In that model, the coordination layer lives inside your broader system rather than as a separate dashboard.

For others still, the most useful control center may be a conversational one. You create or configure a master assistant that acts as a tool chooser or chief of staff. You explain the outcome you want, and it helps decide which tools should be involved, in what order, and what instructions should be given to each. I find that model especially interesting because it mirrors what good coordination often looks like in human organizations. A strong chief of staff does not do all the work personally. Instead, they help direct the right work to the right people, gather the outputs, and keep the system aligned with the larger objective.

There is also a simpler option that should not be overlooked, and that is routines. Some people may not need a sophisticated interface at all. You may simply need a habit of asking, before you begin a task, “Which AI system is best suited for this?” and “Where should this work live when it is done?” Over time, that kind of automatic behavior creates its own operational discipline.

Whatever the structure, the deeper issue is that your AI workforce must fit your workflow rather than the other way around. If the coordination layer is too complex, too fragile, or too demanding to maintain, it will become another productivity hobby instead of a productivity system. That distinction matters. One of the great risks in this moment is that people become so fascinated by AI tooling that they spend more time manipulating systems than doing meaningful work. The purpose of an AI control center is not to create a beautiful map of your tools. The purpose is to reduce friction in real life.

That means your coordination layer should help you answer practical questions quickly, move work forward, and maintain trust in the process. It should also account for permissions and authority. Not every tool should have the same level of access; follow the security principle of least privilege. Some systems may be allowed to summarize or transform content. Others may be allowed to interact with files or draft messages. A much smaller number should be permitted to act in ways that carry financial, reputational, or security consequences. A good manager does not merely assign work. A good manager also calibrates access. I think that principle will become increasingly important as AI tools become more capable of acting on our behalf.

Auditing, Feedback, and the Need to Teach Your Decision Logic

Even with good setup and coordination, things will go wrong. Outputs will be inaccurate. Tasks will be misunderstood. Systems will make poor assumptions. Some tools will perform beautifully one week and strangely the next. Others will regress because the context was incomplete (or too exhaustive!), the instructions were ambiguous, or the tool made a bad inference that looked polished enough to slip past your attention. That is why auditing matters.

When people hear the word audit, they often imagine something formal, tedious, or punitive. I think of auditing more simply as checking whether the system is actually doing the work the way it should, and whether the output is good enough to trust. That requires two things: review and feedback. The review component is straightforward. You inspect the work. You compare the result against the goal. You notice where it performed well and where it deviated. The feedback component is where most people need to become more intentional.

With human workers, good managers do not only point out what went wrong, they also reinforce what was done correctly and provide specific coaching on where to improve. I think a similar principle applies when working with AI systems. You should tell the tool what it did well, identify the part that failed, and provide corrective examples or more precise criteria.

In practical terms, that might mean saying to the AI directly the errors in its output:

• that the summary captured the major themes correctly but missed the decision points,

• that the visual layout is strong but the diagram needs to reflect the sequence more clearly,

• that the tone is close but a section sounds too promotional, or

• that the action steps are reasonable but do not reflect how you prioritize in that type of situation.

That last point is especially important because, as AI systems become more involved in coordination and decision support, it is not enough for them to generate outputs. Your AI systems increasingly need to understand something about how you make decisions. That means one of the most valuable things you can do is teach them your logic criteria.

If you would normally decide between options based on cost, time, risk, energy level, strategic value, stakeholder sensitivity, or another set of factors, you need to explain that. If you tend to process tradeoffs in a particular way, walk the system through that logic. If there are categories of decision where you always want caution, conservatism, or escalation to human review, say so explicitly.

In effect, you are delegating not just tasks, but elements of your decision algorithm. That sounds technical, but it is often simple in practice. You explain how you tend to think. In these circumstances, I would choose the lower-risk option. If the task affects money, privacy, or public reputation, I suggest a review checkpoint. If there is ambiguity, direct your AI to ask you clarifying questions instead of guessing. If two options seem equally good, prioritize the one that creates less downstream maintenance. Those kinds of instructions are management instructions. They help the system approximate not only what you want produced, but how you want judgment exercised within the limits of the task.

This is one reason I think the AI coordinator role will matter so much. As these tools become more capable, the real differentiator may not be who has access to the most tools, but who has taught their tools to operate in a way that aligns with their standards, preferences, and priorities.

Manage the Relationship Over Time: Check-Ins, Maintenance, and Change Control

Once a human employee is onboarded, you do not usually supervise them in exactly the same way forever. Early in the relationship, there are more frequent touchpoints. You review more often. You clarify more often. You inspect more often. Over time, if the person becomes reliable, those check-ins become less frequent and more strategic. I think many AI workflows will benefit from a similar tempo.

In the beginning, frequent review is appropriate. You are still defining the task boundaries, refining prompts, calibrating expectations, imbuing your decision algorithms, and correcting errors. This is the stage where the tool often needs something close to micromanagement. It is the onboarding process.

Over time, if the system is working well, you can step back from that level of intensity. The reviews may become monthly, quarterly, or otherwise tied to a regular performance cadence. At that point, you are reviewing the quality of outcomes, the usefulness of the workflow, and whether any changes in the tool or your work require recalibration.

This matters for two reasons. First, it prevents drift. Left unattended, even a previously useful AI workflow can begin producing mediocre results because the surrounding conditions changed. Your work changed. The input sources changed. The tool changed. Your expectations changed. Periodic review helps catch that, especially if it’s involved in an automated workflow.

Second, it prevents overreaction. When a system suddenly produces an unexpected outcome, our natural instinct is often to scrap the entire process or lose faith in the technology altogether. It can be deeply frustrating to see a tool you’ve come to rely on fail to meet the moment. However, regular check-ins allow you to see these hiccups for what they truly are: minor misalignments rather than fundamental failures. By approaching these shifts with a sense of curiosity rather than panic, you can make precise adjustments that restore efficiency without the stress of starting from scratch.

Ultimately, maintaining an AI workflow is less about technical perfection and more about staying in sync with your evolving needs, but overreaction from disappointment or excitement can be detrimental. One of the easiest ways to become less productive in the current AI environment is to rebuild your workflow every time a new feature is released. If you change your system every week because one tool added a feature, another changed its interface, and a third introduced a new model, you may end up spending all your time reorganizing your productivity stack instead of actually producing quality work. That is why I think some form of change control is essential.

You should certainly stay aware of what your tools can now do. But you do not need to reengineer your system every time the market twitches. A better approach, in my view, is to use your existing review cadence as an opportunity to assess whether changes in the tools would create a meaningful gain in your workflow. Every three or six months, you can ask what has changed in the tools you already use, whether there is a new capability that meaningfully improves an existing workflow, whether adopting that change would reduce friction enough to justify the disruption, and what should stay stable because it already works.

That kind of disciplined review is not anti-innovation; it is pro-productivity. You are not trying to win a contest for most experimental workflow. You are trying to build a system that remains useful over time.

The Human Skill Beneath All of This: Learning to Manage Well

Underneath all of this sits a more human question: are you actually a good manager? That may sound a little sharp, but I think it is worth asking oneself honestly. If someone tends to be a poor manager of people, they may find that many of the same tendencies show up when trying to coordinate AI systems. If they have never managed anyone before, they may discover that this new role still requires the same kinds of capabilities: setting expectations, giving useful feedback, calibrating oversight, documenting process, and knowing when to intervene.

That is not meant to discourage you. (Quite the opposite.) It is meant to help you recognize that effective AI coordination is not only about tool fluency. It is also about leadership, judgment, and process design. I also think it is worth remembering that management experience can come from more places than formal employment. If you have raised children, coordinated a household, organized volunteers, led community initiatives, or shepherded a project through multiple moving parts, you likely have already practiced some version of management. You may have more intuition for this than you think.

At the same time, many people have had poor models of management in their lives. They have been micromanaged, under-supported, poorly trained, or left to guess at expectations. Those experiences can shape how they approach AI systems too. That is why I think some people may need to deliberately improve their management skills as part of improving their AI skills.

Fortunately, this does not require an MBA or years in formal management before you can begin. There are excellent resources available now, some free and some paid, that can help you build practical skills in people management, feedback, coaching, delegation, and team leadership. If you want to get better at coordinating AI systems, I think it is worth studying how good managers learn to direct people, because many of those best practices translate surprisingly well.

Here are a few resources I think are worth exploring:

• Google People Management Essentials (Coursera): A beginner-friendly specialization from Google Career Certificates focused on building high-performing teams, setting clear goals, coaching, communication, and manager effectiveness.

• The Manager’s Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Managing People at Work (Coursera): A practical course from the University of London that covers interviewing, motivation, performance appraisal, conflict management, and day-to-day people leadership.

• Managing and Managing People (OpenLearn / The Open University): A free course that introduces what managers do, the skills they need, and how managerial effectiveness develops over time.

• Organizational Leadership and Change (MIT OpenCourseWare): A more academic but still very useful open course for readers who want to think more deeply about leadership, organizational dynamics, and change.

• Google re:Work, especially the Manager Effectiveness and Developing Great Managers materials: A strong collection of research-backed guides and tools from Google on manager development, team effectiveness, and people-first leadership practices.

• Manager Tools Basics: A long-running, practical management training resource focused on core habits such as one-on-ones, feedback, coaching, and delegation.

• Google People Management Essentials on YouTube: A YouTube course version that can be useful if you prefer learning in a more video-native format before deciding whether to go deeper in a platform like Coursera.

• The New Manager Playbook with Lia Garvin (YouTube): A practical playlist for first-time or developing managers that focuses on the real-world transition from individual contributor to manager.

The point here is not to turn yourself into a textbook manager. It is to improve your ability to set expectations clearly, delegate thoughtfully, review performance consistently, and coach for better outcomes. Those are management skills with people, but they are increasingly translate to AI coordination skills as well.

There is a paradox here. In the early stages, AI often does need a high degree of guidance. It needs more explicit instruction than many humans would. In that sense, micromanagement is not entirely the wrong instinct at the start. But if you never move beyond that stage, the system becomes exhausting to use and may end up creating more friction than it removes.

So the goal is not permanent micromanagement. The goal is to front-load enough thinking, setup, and training that the system can become more useful with less intervention over time. That is very close to what good management looks like in many other environments. You do more work upfront so that the work later flows more smoothly.

I also think patience matters here. The analogy I often use is that working with AI is a bit like having a million interns available to assist you. That image helps because it captures both the extraordinary potential and the obvious limitations. Interns may be bright. They may be energetic and motivated to help and impress you. They may know a great deal, in theory. But they usually lack real-world experience. They have not lived through the subtle, contextual, messy situations that shape human judgment.

AI is similar in that respect. It may possess enormous amounts of knowledge. It may generate impressive output very quickly. But it does not have lived experience. It does not know what it feels like to navigate a tense meeting, a fragile client relationship, an overloaded week, a family crisis, or the consequences of a poor decision landing at the wrong moment. That real-world context is still your contribution.

So when the system underperforms, it can be helpful to remember that your role is not only to use the tool. Your role is to bring the human experience, the judgment, the standards, and the situated understanding that the tool does not have. That can make frustration easier to manage. You are not working with a magical replacement for judgment. You are directing a highly capable but inexperienced army of virtual interns.

In Conclusion: The Future Belongs to Coordinators, Not Just Users

I do not think the future of AI and personal productivity will belong only to the people who use a single chatbot well. I think it will increasingly belong to the people who can coordinate multiple AI systems with clarity, restraint, and good judgment. That does not mean chasing every tool. It does not mean handing over your agency. And it does not mean waiting for one perfect agent to arrive and solve everything. More likely, it means building a coherent virtual workforce over time.

You select the tools. You define the roles. You create the boundaries. You determine the review cadence. You teach the system how you make decisions. You audit the outputs. You improve the workflow gradually. And you keep the entire arrangement grounded in the actual work and life you are trying to support. That is AI coordination.

In many ways, this is a natural extension of the themes running throughout this series. First, we learned to think of AI as an assistant, researcher, learning partner, and/or coach. Then we saw it appear inside the platforms and tools we already use. Then we saw how AI coding companions lower the cost of building bespoke software around our own workflows. The next step is learning how to direct all of that intelligently.

Agentic AI may well become more capable than many of us currently imagine. But I suspect it will also be less magical and more managerial than people expect. The people who benefit most may not be those who merely adopt these tools first, but those who learn how to manage them well. That is why I think the AI coordinator is becoming such an important role. Not because AI replaces the human, but because it requires the human to become more deliberate about how work is designed, delegated, reviewed, and improved.

That may sound like more responsibility, and it is. But it is also a new form of leverage. If you can learn to coordinate your virtual, personal workforce with skill, you are not simply using AI. You are building a more capable productivity system around the way you actually live and work. And in the years ahead, I think that may become one of the most valuable personal productivity skills we can develop.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly changing not only how we work, but also how we build the systems that support our work.

Up to this point, much of the conversation around Generative AI and personal productivity has focused on using AI as a chatbot that produces text, images and videos. Those are practical and important. AI can help us capture faster, summarize better, organize information more effectively, and reduce a great deal of administrative friction. Then, as I discussed in my previous article, AI began showing up directly inside the tools we already use every day, from task managers and notes applications to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.

Another shift is now underway: the next major leap in personal productivity is not just using AI inside existing tools, but using AI to help you build the bespoke tools, workflows, and interfaces your work actually requires.

That could take the form of a personal web app, a mobile utility, a browser extension, a plug-in, or a desktop tool, each designed not for mass distribution, but to augment and improve your own productivity.

What I discuss here should be read as building inside your existing platforms, browsers, and apps, where practical. This is not about creating commercial software to package and sell. (And this LinkedIn post encapsulates why I don’t advocate commercial software be vibe-coded.) It is about building internal or personal tools that augment and improve the way you want to work.

And that opportunity is now available not only to professional developers, but also to non-coders and power users who can think clearly, describe what they want, and iteratively direct AI toward a useful result.

Most people still think of software as something they must browse, compare, and adapt themselves to. You search an app marketplace, compare pricing tables, read reviews, and then try to squeeze your workflow into whatever the tool happens to support. If it is close enough, you live with the compromises. If it is too far off, you start hunting again.

AI coding companions are beginning to invert that relationship.

Instead of only choosing from what the marketplace has already made, we can increasingly describe what we need and have software generated around our own workflows. Not every piece of software will be created this way, and not every person will want to do this. But for people interested in personal productivity, this change opens an entirely new frontier.

There are myriad reasons I refer to time management as personal productivity, usually modifying productivity with personal. But one of the most vital reasons is that we must tailor what we’re learning to what our circumstances require. Take frameworks and methodologies such as Getting Things Done, Personal Kanban, PARA, Bullet Journal, or time blocking, the actual day-to-day reality of managing our work is deeply shaped by our own context, responsibilities, tools, preferences, and constraints. Off-the-shelf software is broad by necessity. Your workflow is not.

That is where AI coding companions become so interesting. They lower the barrier between identifying friction and building a solution.

I find it helpful to think about this shift across three levels of AI coding companionship, and which persona you are.

Designer

Non-coders who do not see themselves as developers. Their main skill is learning to describe what they want with enough precision to direct the AI. They are defining the shape and function of the desired tool.

Integrator

Power users who are comfortable experimenting, managing configuration files (like CSV, JSON and XML), and generating lightweight, functional software artifacts. Their focus is on accelerating the customization and maintenance of their personal productivity ecosystem.

Engineer

Coders. They use AI to dramatically shorten the distance between an idea and a working prototype (MVP). Their advanced role involves inspecting the engine, refactoring the generated code, and focusing on sound architecture and quality.

In each case, the opportunity is real. And in each case, the human still matters.

Before Anything Else: Learn the Fundamentals of How Software Thinks

Before going further, I think there is an important point that applies to everyone in this discussion, from the non-coder to the power user to the experienced developer.

You should learn programming fundamentals. I do not mean that you need to become a professional programmer. I do not mean that you need to memorize a programming language, build applications from scratch by hand, or pursue software engineering as a vocation either.

I mean that in the age of AI, it is increasingly valuable to understand the basic structure and nature of software.

That may sound like extra work, especially when AI can now generate so much code for us. But I think the opposite is true. The more capable these tools become, the more important it is for us to understand the shape of the thing we are directing.

If you want to work effectively with AI as a coding companion, it helps immensely to understand some foundational concepts: inputs and outputs, variables, conditionals, loops, functions, data structures, files, APIs, databases, and the general logic of how software systems are assembled. You do not need to master all of this at an advanced level. But you do need enough familiarity to understand how software is structured and how it behaves.

Why does that matter? Because even though we are interacting with AI in natural language, we are still directing software to produce software.

Fundamentally, AI is software, code. It’s not thinking; it’s running algorithm after algorithm on high-capacity computing infrastructure most of us can’t really fathom. It won’t ever be sentient. That’s counter to the very concept of how we intuit sentience as humans. They may be able to mimic sentience, but that’s not the same thing. I’m open to changing my mind on this, but it takes us to the nature of how AI communicates with us.

The AI may speak to us conversationally, but underneath that conversation it is still operating within the logic of systems, structure, and code. If we have no mental model for how software is organized, it becomes much harder to describe what we want with enough precision to get good results.

Put differently, learning programming fundamentals is about learning how software thinks so that you can instruct AI more effectively.

That is why I think computer science education is becoming more important, not less. That may not mean more software developers, but scientists thinking deeply about how to build new and varied, efficient and purpose-built forms of AI.

Fortunately, this does not require an expensive degree program. There are many excellent resources available for free or at low cost. Harvard’s CS50 and CS50x are the most widely recommended introductions and available for free online. MIT has excellent open course materials. YouTube is full of programming fundamentals courses. And if you prefer more structured commercial learning, platforms like LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, and Coursera all offer introductory programming and computer science courses.

Again, the goal here is not to turn every one of you into a developer. I want to help you understand enough about the grammar of software that you can think more clearly about what you are asking the AI to do. Once you understand a bit more about how software is structured, natural language prompting becomes much more powerful because your instructions become more precise, more realistic, and more architecturally aware.

In many ways, this is similar to learning the basics of how writing works before becoming a better editor, or learning the fundamentals of design before giving good feedback on a visual layout. You do not need to become the expert practitioner in order to benefit from understanding the medium.

That is exactly how I think about programming fundamentals here. They are not a detour from AI productivity. They are part of becoming more effective with it.

For the Designer (Non-Coder): Three Ways AI Already Lowers the Barrier to Building Useful Tools

For those who (self-determined above from the chart) that you’re non-coders (which I imagine are a great many of you), you need to get better at thinking in structure.

That may sound more harsh than I intend it to, but the point stands. Most non-coders know roughly what they want. They can explain their frustration and point to what is broken. They can even tell you what they wish a tool would do differently. What they often struggle to do is communicate those needs in a way that can be translated into a reproducible system.

AI helps with that, but only if we meet it halfway.

Markdown as a Bridge between Thought and Instruction

One of the easiest on-ramps for non-coders is learning to write with basic Markdown. (The most common of which is known as CommonMark.)

At first glance, Markdown looks like a formatting system. And it is. It helps you create headings, lists, emphasis, links, and other structural elements without needing a full visual editor. But in the context of AI, Markdown is useful for a deeper reason: it teaches you how to separate and organize your thinking.

When you write a long, messy paragraph into a chatbot, you are often mixing together the problem, the context, the constraints, the desired output, the examples, and the emotional frustration all at once. Humans are often pretty good at untangling that kind of communication because we are used to reading through ambiguity. AI can sometimes manage it, too, but the results are far better when your thoughts are organized.

Markdown encourages that structure.

You begin separating ideas into sections. You create headings. You organize lists of requirements. You put examples under one heading and constraints under another. You distinguish between background information and actual instructions.

That might seem like a small habit, but it matters a great deal.

For non-coders, Markdown becomes a bridge between natural language and more formal systems thinking. It is one of the simplest ways to begin thinking like a builder without yet writing code.

In practical terms, this might mean organizing a prompt with sections like these (per my last article):

# Role

[Who should the AI act as?] :

# Objective

[What are you trying to accomplish?] :

# Context

[What background information does it need?] :

# Constraints

[What should it avoid or stay within?] :

# Output Requirements

[What should the final result look like?] :

That level of structure helps the AI understand not only what you want, but how to assemble the response in a way that is actually useful. Further, if you use the (unofficial) comment markdown (i.e., “ [comment goes here] : “), you can provide hints to yourself about what/why you create a master prompt a certain way when you look back at it a few months, or years, from now.

And, it helps you think more clearly, too. That is an essential element in all of this. AI is not just here to help you produce more output. For those who use it well, it is helping you sharpen your own thinking enough to produce a better output.

Extracting Structure From Images, Audio, and Video

Another major shift is that AI can increasingly take unstructured media and turn it into structured, editable information.

This is a bigger deal than I think many people realize.

A Designer may not know what a CSV, JSON or XML file is, or how to build one from scratch. But they are capable of taking a screenshot, recording a short voice explanation, uploading a video walkthrough, or providing an image of an interface and using the prompt, “Extract the structure from this and give it to me in a form (like JSON, XML, YAML, or CSV) I can work with.”

• Table Extraction for Spreadsheets (CSV): A Designer finds a financial table in an image or a PDF scan of a book’s appendix. Instead of manually entering hundreds of data points, they upload the image to an AI and ask it to “Extract all data from this table and format it as a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file.” The result is a clean, editable spreadsheet ready for analysis in Google Sheets or Excel. These CSV files are also best for giving to AI and transferring data sets between different AI tools and chats.

• Granular Image Editing (JSON): An AI can generate an image, but making precise, isolated changes is difficult with natural language alone. A user can tell the AI to “Extract all the information from this image in JSON”. Once the detailed JSON file is produced, the user can inspect it and only change the specific part of the JSON related to the element they want to modify (e.g., change the color of a background or a single word of text). When the user re-prompts the AI with the edited JSON, it will recreate the image, changing only the exact thing referenced in that file part, ensuring accurate and contained changes.

• Audio/Video Metadata Generation (XML): A user records a 45-minute webinar and needs to turn it into structured assets. They upload the video file to an AI and request: “Generate an XML file containing the transcript, speakers, and a timestamped summary of key topics.” The AI can output a file structured with XML tags for speaker, start_time, topic_heading, and summary_text. This XML asset can then be used to automate the creation of a table of contents or a search index for the video.

That is where these tools begin to feel truly enabling.

You can ask an AI system to look at an image, listen to an explanation, or interpret a screen recording and then extract from that media a structured representation of what it sees. That structured data can then be edited, refined, and reused.

Why does that matter for productivity? Because so much of productivity friction comes from having to repeatedly reinvent the same idea. When you can convert a spoken explanation, visual example, or rough sketch into something more formal and granular, you gain the ability to make reproducible changes. You are no longer starting from scratch every time. You are building an editable asset.

That movement from unstructured to structured is one of the quiet superpowers of AI-assisted creation, especially as a Designer.

Talking Your Way Into Lightweight Web Tools and Interfaces

The third Designer (a/k/a non-coder) opportunity is even more immediately exciting.

In some AI environments, you can now talk your way into a simple website, utility, or web tool without writing code directly yourself.

That does not mean the code disappears. It simply means the code is generated for you in response to a structured conversation.

The real skill here is not memorizing syntax. The real skill is articulating purpose.

• What is the tool supposed to do?

• Who is it for?

• What problem is it solving?

• What should happen when the user clicks this button?

• What information needs to be stored or displayed?

• What does success look like?

• How should data be collected? And, does it need to be securely stored for some amount of time?

Those are design questions, not coding questions. And AI is becoming remarkably good at interviewing you through those design questions so that the system can then generate the software artifact. AI can help build the prompt that builds the product.

Many people fail with AI not because they lack ideas, but because they do not yet know how to turn those ideas into clear instructions. If the AI can help interview you, clarify the problem, and construct the prompt that ultimately generates the tool, then even a Designer is no longer limited to consuming software made by other people.

For some readers, that alone will open an entirely new world of experimentation.

But there is another group of people who sit one step further down the path. They are not necessarily developers. They may never call themselves coders. But they are willing to install tools, experiment with settings, manage files, and tinker with their systems. Those are the power users (or, Integrators), and for them, AI gets even more interesting.

For the Power Users: Vibe Coding Your Own Utilities and Integrating the Workflow Layers

For the Integrator, the “recurring annoyance” is no longer a dead end; it is a development prompt. Historically, if a software vendor didn’t prioritize your specific edge-case friction, you were stuck between accepting the inefficiency or committing to a steep learning curve in systems administration or scripting. AI has fundamentally broken that binary. As a power user, you can now leverage your understanding of logic and configuration to “vibe code” functional utilities through iterative dialogue. By identifying a precise pain point and directing an AI to architect the solution, you move from being a consumer of rigid tools to a curator of a bespoke, automated ecosystem that fits your exact workflow requirements.

Extension Organizer: Controlling Browser Chaos With AI-Assisted Design

One example is a small tool I created for myself called Extension Organizer, designed to combat the browser chaos of accumulated Chrome extensions. Like many people, I had dozens of utilities, client-specific tools, and noisy gremlins like coupon and shopping extensions that constantly interrupted my work. My original workaround was tedious, manually disabling them and hunting through the extension dashboard in Chrome to turn them back on when needed. I eventually realized I didn’t just need a toggle; I needed a way to categorize extensions, activate them in groups, and surface favorites based on my current context.

To solve this, I used Google Gemini to help write the specifications by asking it to interview me about every aspect of the tool, from UX to security. This process moved the idea from a vague annoyance to a structured design brief, which I then used to generate a comprehensive prompt. By invoking Canvas inside Gemini, the AI moved from interviewer to code generator, producing the actual files I needed to install the extension. This is the essence of vibe coding: directing a process with enough specificity that the system builds a bespoke, useful artifact for your unique environment.

That is the kind of opportunity I think many tech-curious people are going to find unexpectedly empowering.

Espanso and Antigravity: AI-Assisted Configuration for a Local-First Productivity System

Another example involves my use of Espanso, a local-first, cross-platform text expansion tool that allows me to maintain a portable system under my own control. While Espanso provides the ideal architecture, manually formatting complex YAML structures inside configuration files is a high-friction task. I used Antigravity, Google’s AI coding environment, to bridge this gap by supplying it with Espanso’s documentation and my desired shortcuts. The AI took over the syntactical burden, correctly formatting the YAML and allowing me to update my system instantly without the risk of formatting errors.

For the power user, the primary value of AI lies in accelerating the customization and maintenance of a personal productivity ecosystem. While I could have performed these updates by hand, the AI removed the tedious syntax burden while leaving me in full control of the logic and outcome. This acceleration changes the economics of building and maintaining tools, allowing enthusiasts to focus on their actual work rather than wrestling with the underlying code.

An additional benefit of managing this inside Antigravity is that every few weeks, I ask it to produce a legend of all the existing triggers and their purposes. I then copy that into an Evernote note which I have available so I can review to make sure I’m using the full catalog of Espanso, or adding any new text or AI prompts I’m using regularly. Antigravity is acting as a maintenance utility using conversation with the Espanso database file.

But for coders, or for people who have enough development experience to think architecturally about software, AI changes not only maintenance and configuration, but the economics of building an application from scratch.

For the Coder: From Blank Page to MVP at Unprecedented Speed

For more than twenty years, David Allen has talked in one form or another about the dream of the ultimate Getting Things Done^® (GTD^®) app. If you know the GTD ecosystem well, you know exactly what that means. Most task managers can hold lists, represent projects, contexts, due dates, and priorities; some are elegant or feature-rich, but most are still general-purpose containers. They do not guide the user through the logic of GTD in a way that actually helps develop the skills of thinking and working that the methodology requires.

That distinction matters to me. I did not want merely another task list manager; I wanted to see whether I could vibe code an opinionated GTD application; one that would not just store work but help teach and reinforce the methodology itself.

What Traditional Development Would Have Looked Like

In an earlier era, I know exactly how I would have approached something like this. I likely would have used WordPress as the shell for its infrastructure and built on top of the REST API using JavaScript and AJAX, perhaps using Capacitor or ElectronJS for mobile and desktop delivery. While that could have worked, it would have taken significant time and engineering effort just to get to a credible MVP. That is what AI changes.

Using AI to Interrogate the Idea Until it Becomes a Product Brief

Rather than starting with code, I started with interrogation. In ChatGPT, I asked the system (on a long car ride to visit family) to interview me through every major aspect of the application to pull the specifications out of my head the way a skilled product strategist might. We went through branding, UX/UI, functionality, GTD logic, and security in a process that took hours but was worth every minute. What emerged was not merely a good prompt, but a master brief.

That is a critical distinction that I think more people need to understand: the real work was not yet code generation, but forcing clarity. Each time the system produced a summary, I would push it further to identify missed assumptions, edge cases, and opinionated logic. That iterative interrogation mattered because instructions are always incomplete the first time; you have to keep refining until the vision and architecture become visible.

From Master Brief to Master Prompt to Working Prototype

At that point, I moved into the next stage, asking ChatGPT to turn the master brief into a highly detailed generation prompt section by section. Then I took that prompt into Google AI Studio and let it loose. What happened next would have sounded absurd only a few years ago: the system built the application. Not the final production-ready version, but a working vision that was recognizably what I had described.

Inside the preview, I could already see the product logic reflected in the app itself with payment tiers and GTD workflows present. In a matter of hours, I had moved from concept to MVP, representing a staggering shift in the economics of product development. While I could push it into production immediately, I believe the next step is to pull the code out and refactor it to ensure the architecture is sound and the logic is tightened.

That is what differentiates the coder’s use of AI from the power user’s: the coder wants to inspect the engine. Still, the productivity gain is undeniable. AI does not eliminate the need for a capable builder, but it dramatically shortens the distance between imagination and a usable artifact.

Instead of spending weeks crawling toward an MVP, you can often get to a meaningful prototype in a single concentrated session and spend your energy improving what exists. That is not a small acceleration; it changes the kinds of things you are willing to attempt.

Human in the Loop: Why Taste, Judgment, and Real-World Context Still Matter

At this point, it is tempting to drift into hype, but I think that would be a mistake. AI may be capable of producing the vast majority of code and assembly, but a human in the loop (HITL) is still necessary now and for the foreseeable future, in a much deeper sense than simply reviewing for launch.

Human beings bring things to the design and development process that AI simply does not possess, starting with taste. You cannot teach or delegate taste; while AI can identify patterns and imitate style, subjective judgment about what feels elegant, humane, or valuable in context remains stubbornly human.

Taste is not merely aesthetic; in productivity software, it often shows up as restraint. It is knowing what not to include and whether a feature supports focus or adds distraction. AI can assist with those decisions, but it cannot own them in the way a person can.

Instructions Are Inherently Lossy

The second reason the human still matters is that instructions are inherently lossy. AI only knows what you are looking for through what you provide, and there is always some loss, in translation and transmission, between intent and inference. We experience this with people all the time; the gap with AI can just be harder to detect because the output looks so polished.

That is why iteration matters and why builders must keep checking the result against the real objective. If you do not, you may end up with software that looks correct and compiles cleanly, yet fails the actual use case you cared about.

AI Does Not Have Real-World Experience

The third issue is even more fundamental: AI does not have real-world experience. It is not navigating an overstuffed calendar, managing a team, or feeling the stress of deadline pressure; it is processing patterns in data rather than living a human experience with the emotional pressures of our world. It lacks thinking and feeling and therefore it collects data, but I would argue it cannot truly be called experience.

That distinction matters because personal productivity is about lived constraints, emotion, and context. A system that looks perfect in abstraction may fail when it collides with the messiness of human work, which is why the human understands the consequences and nuance in a way AI cannot replace.

The Right Model Is Directed Collaboration, Not Autonomous Replacement

This is why the best way to understand AI coding companions is as directed collaborators rather than autonomous replacements. For every persona—from non-coders to engineers—AI expands capabilities and shortens the path to creation, but the human remains responsible for utility, judgment, and fit. That is not a disappointment; that is the opportunity.

For the Designer (non-coder), AI acts as a bridge that expands what they are capable of creating by translating natural language and structured thought into functional artifacts. For the Integrator (power user), these companions accelerate the customization, maintenance, and experimentation of a personal productivity ecosystem, removing the tedious burden of manual syntax. For the Engineer (coder), the collaboration compresses the path from initial idea to a working MVP, allowing them to redirect their focus toward higher-level architecture, refactoring, and overall quality.

Ultimately, the HITL ensures that the software produced actually solves the intended problem within the messy, emotional, and lived constraints of the real world; context that an AI processing patterns in data cannot truly experience or fully replicate.

In Conclusion: Designing Your Bespoke Productivity Universe

For a long time, one of the hidden frustrations in personal productivity has been that our systems are always partly borrowed. We adopt tools made for general markets. We adapt workflows designed for average use cases. We compromise around feature sets that were shaped by someone else’s product roadmap. And then we do our best to make all of that feel personal. What AI coding companions change is not human nature, and not the need for good judgment; instead it dramatically lowers the cost of customization..

As those costs drop, the distance between “I wish my system did this” and “I built a small tool that does exactly that” is shrinking. This is true for the non-coder who structures prompts with Markdown, the power user who generates design briefs for personal utilities, and the coder who moves from a long-imagined concept to a working MVP in hours instead of months. Many more people can now shape software around the way they actually work.

In my view, this is one of the most important shifts happening in the personal productivity landscape right now. The future of personal productivity may belong less to the people who can write every line of code by hand and more to the people who can clearly describe what matters, direct intelligent tools well, and keep human judgment firmly in the loop. AI-assisted coding simply expands who gets to build and get things done.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly showing up inside the tools we already use every day. Most people interact with AI by opening a separate application such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. (As an aside, if you’ve used Google Maps in the prior nearly 20 years of its existence, you are a beneficiary of the AI (i.e., machine learning) being used under the hood.) The workflow looks something like this: leave the tool you are using, open a chatbot in another window, ask a question or generate some content, then copy and paste the result back into the system where your work actually lives.

That pattern is already beginning to change. Instead of existing as a separate destination, Generative AI is steadily becoming a feature embedded inside the software where knowledge work actually happens. Task managers are gaining AI capture capabilities. Notes applications are introducing AI search and synthesis. Office suites are embedding assistants directly into documents, spreadsheets, and email. Automation platforms are beginning to use AI to determine how workflows should operate instead of relying entirely on rigid rules.

For people interested in personal productivity, this shift matters. The biggest productivity gains from AI will not necessarily come from brand new tools. I would argue that most of them are time wasters, not time savers. Productivity gains will come from smarter versions of the tools and major tech platforms such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace that we already rely on.

And that shift is subtle. It does not feel like you’re adopting something entirely new. It will hopefully fit into your existing routines and habits of your workflows. It should feel like your existing tools are getting better at helping you capture, decide, and execute.

Task Managers: Faster Capture Without Losing Cognitive Agency

One of the first places many people encounter AI inside their productivity stack is in task management software.

Task capture has always been central to effective productivity systems. Whether you follow Getting Things Done, Personal Kanban, PARA, Bullet Journal, or a simple to-do list approach, the ability to quickly capture what has your attention is essential.

Tools such as Todoist have begun experimenting with AI features that allow users to speak tasks out loud or enter them in natural language while the system converts those thoughts into structured actions.

I think Todoist is one of the first tools to really come out of the gate with the ability to speak out loud within the task system. You can essentially talk through what you’re thinking, and the system converts that into clear next-actions.

This capability may seem small at first glance, but it touches on one of the most common friction points in personal productivity: translating the vague things occupying your mind into crystalized actions inside your trusted system.

It helps us get our thoughts out faster and capture into our system. But it’s also doing some of the cognitive work that I think is really important for us to do ourselves.

That point deserves some attention. Whenever new automation appears, there is a temptation to hand the thinking over to the system entirely. But productivity tools work best when they support human judgment rather than replacing it.

I don’t think we should relinquish our cognitive agency completely to AI. If you’re cognitively overloaded, tired, or overwhelmed, this gives you the ability to capture what you need quickly and let the system help organize those thoughts into an action.

In other words, AI-assisted capture works best as a support mechanism. It accelerates the early stages of organizing work, but the human still reviews and confirms what should actually happen.

You need to review the output to make sure it’s actually the action you want. In an ideal circumstance, you would have the tool review the organized output with you, ask you questions about the judgments it made so you can correct course on its wayward choices, and then have it produce a final, human-directed output. When you’re doing this work correctly, your mind is exercising and retaining its agency, you’ll catch errors upstream (which means time savings later), and your system will work much better. This is where this becomes more than just a feature; it becomes a question of how we design our productivity systems.

From a productivity methodology perspective, the real leverage shows up in the transition between capture and clarification.

If we think about it from a Getting Things Done perspective, moving from capture to clarification is often the hardest work. AI can help with some of those pieces by turning a verbal mind sweep into possible actions.

That capability alone can dramatically reduce friction for many people. When the barrier to capture is low, the likelihood that you will actually use your productivity system increases.

It also introduces an important shift in behavior. Instead of needing to stop what you are doing and carefully structure your thoughts, you can capture them in a more natural, conversational way and refine them later. That alone can increase system adoption, which is often the real bottleneck in personal productivity.

Personal Knowledge Management: Turning Notes Into Thinking Partners

Task management is only one piece of the productivity landscape. A large portion of knowledge work revolves around organizing, retrieving, and synthesizing information.

This is where AI integration inside notes applications such as Evernote and Notion becomes particularly interesting.

For many professionals, a notes system functions as an extended mind, a place where ideas, research, meeting notes, and reference materials accumulate over time outside our brain or body.

Evernote acts as a large part of my extended mind. Because of that, I can now analyze and synthesize information directly inside my notes without leaving the system. Evernote definitely has a ways to go in terms of improving the Evernote AI assistant for being able to do this kind of analysis and synthesis of my notes. But for the first time in a long time I’m excited that I don’t have to take my notes out of Evernote to be able to do this kind of processing and ideation with my own personal knowledge management data set.

Recent AI integrations inside these tools are beginning to reshape how I interact with my stored knowledge, and I think they will start changing your behaviors too.

Search

One of the biggest changes is search. Google has AI Overviews at the top of search engine results pages. OpenAI has “Web search” features now embedded within ChatGPT. And now Evernote (and many other note apps) includes semantic search with natural language queries. For all these features, it means you can type a question or describe what you’re thinking and let the system search across your notes to find what you are seeking.

Instead of remembering exact keywords, users can ask questions in plain language and allow the system to interpret the intent. However, this shift introduces an interesting tension between traditional software behavior and AI-driven results. When AI gets integrated into tools, there is a potential to lose certain qualities of the software that were originally opinionated (software that makes clear, constrained choices about how it should be used, rather than leaving everything open-ended) in ways that made people productive.

Traditional search systems rely on deterministic rules. If you run the same search query twice, you expect the same results each time.

AI systems, by contrast, often produce fuzzy outcomes. If I ask the same question three different ways, I may get three different answers, however subtle they may be.

For everyday users, that fuzziness can actually be helpful because it pulls more content into the search results. But for power users who know exactly what they want, the traditional search syntax is still incredibly valuable. (It’s one of the reasons why I believe advanced search operators in Google, Gmail, Outlook, Evernote and more are still so important.)

In practice, the most effective systems will likely combine both approaches: structured search for precision and AI search for discovery.

Editing and Content Transformation

Another area where AI is appearing is inside note apps for content editing and transformation. The AI allows you to take notes you’ve written and quickly summarize them or clean them up to be better organized, turn them into a blog or microblog post, or reshape the content in different ways (even transforming notes into images, audio and video).

For professionals who frequently repurpose ideas across different formats (e.g., reports, presentations, articles, social media posts), this capability reduces the amount of manual rewriting required.

Conversational AI Inside Notes

Perhaps the most transformative feature is the ability to interact with notes conversationally. Again, because of my personal usage of Evernote, I’m most familiar with the Evernote AI Assistant, which allows you to have a conversation with your notes and produce work products directly from the information already inside Evernote. Other tools like Notion, Obsidian, Capacities and Heptabase are making great strides with AI as well.

The key advantage here is context. Instead of leaving the tool and going somewhere else to run a prompt and get an output only to have to copy back into my note-taking software, I’m working directly inside the place where most of my extended mind lives.

This eliminates a common workflow problem associated with standalone AI tools. You can generate output in the assistant and insert it directly into the note you’re working on. That removes an enormous amount of friction compared to copying and pasting between systems. I’m really excited to see the Evernote AI Assistant and similar features in other PKM software mature.

Over time, this kind of embedded intelligence may fundamentally change how we interact with personal knowledge management systems.

Meeting Capture and Analysis

AI is also transforming how meetings and conversations are documented.

Tools like Granola.ai and Fireflies.ai can now record meetings, transcribe them with AI, and generate a summary automatically. That takes a simple audio recording feature and enhances it with summarization, structure and analysis.

For professionals who attend multiple meetings each week (or day), this kind of automation reduces the administrative burden associated with note-taking and follow-up documentation. Taken together, these features represent a significant evolution in how note apps function and become integral in our personal productivity.

This is the biggest shift I’ve seen in my own meeting note-taking, allowing me to be more present and engaged. And, it fundamentally changes how I work with my notes now that they are vastly more detailed and organized without more work by me.

AI Inside Platforms: Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace

Beyond individual tools, some of the most meaningful changes are happening at the platform level. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are not single applications. They are ecosystems where documents (and deeper reference data and cross-referenced metadata), communication, scheduling, and collaboration all intersect. When AI is embedded at this lower (foundational) level, it begins to influence entire workflows rather than isolated tasks.

In Microsoft 365, Copilot can draft emails in Outlook, summarize meetings in Teams, generate presentations in PowerPoint, and analyze data in Excel. The key is not any one feature. The flywheel effect is that these capabilities exist across the same environment where your work already lives, creating small, consistent improvements compounding into disproportionately large productivity gains over time.

In Google Workspace, similar capabilities are emerging. You can draft documents in Google Docs, summarize threads in Gmail, generate content in Slides, and interact with your data in Sheets. With AppSheet and AppScript, you have the ability to create bespoke systems for a business at an unparalleled speed and affordability. Again, the value is not an individual feature. It is continuity across platforms.

This reduces one of the most common productivity drains: context switching. Instead of jumping between tools, copying information, and reconstructing context, the system begins to carry context forward for you.

That continuity is where the gains start, but the next step is when these tools stop just carrying context and start coordinating work across them.

The Next Stage of Integration: When AI Systems Talk to Each Other

While embedded AI features are already improving individual tools, the next major shift may occur when AI begins coordinating across multiple platforms.

Historically, cross-tool automation required explicit rules. With workflow automation tools, like Zapier, IFTTT or Power Automate, you had to explicitly define every step of the automation. Every trigger, action, and conditional branch had to be manually specified. This works well for predictable workflows, but it requires upfront design and ongoing maintenance.

Recent developments such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), introduced by Anthropic, and made an open standard for all to use, point toward a different future. MCP allows different AIs to talk to one another across tools.

Instead of building rigid workflows, AI systems can begin exchanging context and coordinating actions more fluidly. This creates a much more fluid logic where tools can exchange information and coordinate actions more intelligently.

Imagine a productivity environment where multiple tools retain their specialized roles but communicate continuously. Think of it as a kind of hive mind. Evernote, Notion, Asana, Trello. Each tool still has its role, but they can communicate back and forth. When systems understand how data relates across these environments, new forms of automation become possible.

When the software can understand the relationships between these different data silos, it can begin organizing, planning, and even executing some work on your behalf. This is where automation begins to shift from rule-based systems to reasoning-based systems. Instead of telling the system exactly what to do, you begin describing outcomes. The system determines how to move information between tools to achieve those outcomes.

I’m still bullish on the importance of rule-based systems while we remain in this AI infancy. Tools like OpenClaw, NemoClaw, agentic browsers, and Claude Cowork and more all fundamentally hold too much risk from privacy and security flaws inherent in AI have autonomy, agency and coordination with the outside world. We need to create workflow automations that strategically place a “human in the loop” to quality-control and be a stop gap for poor AI logic, privacy and security. We can mix Zapier and ChatGPT and myriad other tools to create amazing automations that far surpass what once was possible.

That is a fundamental change in how productivity systems are designed.

A Practical Way to Start Using AI Features Today

For many people, the rapid pace of AI development can feel overwhelming. New tools appear constantly, and it can be difficult to know where to begin.

Fortunately, experimenting with AI inside existing tools does not require a dramatic change to your workflow.

The easiest way to start is to choose one of the four AI personas I described in my previous article.

In that earlier discussion, I outlined four roles where AI is currently most useful:

• Assistant

• Researcher

• Learning partner

• Coach

These roles provide a non-exhaustive but practical framework for experimenting with AI features inside your current productivity stack.

Look at your existing toolset and see which AI models are integrated into the tools you already use.

Most of these tools integrate models from companies like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or Microsoft. If you’re already familiar with one of those models, that gives you a head start.

Once you identify an AI-enabled tool in your workflow, try running a short experiment. Choose one persona and experiment with it for about a week to ten days.

Use the system intentionally during that period. Ask questions, test workflows, and observe where it accelerates your work and where it introduces friction.

Create some master prompts that help you expedite your workflows, then save those prompts in a template notebook in your note-taking software (or text expander app).

## Role

**You are [Insert Persona]**

> *Tip: Define the AI’s identity. Use specific titles (e.g., “Senior DevOps Engineer” or “Creative Writing Coach”) and include the tone or personality traits you want it to exhibit.*

## Objective

> *Tip: State exactly what you want to achieve in one or two sentences. Focus on the end goal, what does “success” look like for this specific task?*

## Context

> *Tip: Provide the background information. Who is the target audience? Why is this task being done? What has happened leading up to this request? The more “why,” the better the “what.”*

## Constraints

> *Tip: Set the guardrails. Mention things like word counts, formatting (e.g., “no jargon”), what to avoid, or specific tools/languages that must be used.*

## Inputs / Sources

> *Tip: List the data or references the AI should use. This could be “The attached PDF,” “The text provided below,” or “Use your internal knowledge of Python 3.12.”*

## Output Requirements

> *Tip: Define the structure of the final response. Do you want a bulleted list, a Markdown table, a JSON object, or a 5-paragraph essay? Specify the exact format here.*

That experiment should help you understand the primary productivity gains you can realistically expect from the tool.

You do not need to overhaul your entire system. You only need to identify where AI can remove friction in the system you already trust.

In Conclusion: AI as an Embedded Capability

The most important shift happening in the productivity landscape today is not the existence of AI itself. It is the gradual embedding of AI inside the software environments where work already happens.

Task managers are becoming smarter about capturing and organizing actions. Notes applications are evolving into thinking partners capable of analyzing stored knowledge. Office platforms are integrating assistants directly into documents and communication tools. Automation systems are beginning to incorporate reasoning into workflows.

Altogether, these changes point toward a future where AI is less visible as a separate product and more present as a capability woven throughout the digital tools we use every day.

For professionals interested in improving personal productivity (and keeping a competitive edge in the workforce), the opportunity is not to chase every new AI application that appears. The opportunity is to understand how AI is quietly enhancing the systems you already rely on.

And more importantly, to learn how to work alongside those capabilities without giving up the judgment and thinking that make your work valuable.

The next part in this series, I’ll explore another emerging dimension of this shift: how AI coding assistants are enabling individuals to design and build their own tailored productivity systems (and I’ll show you mine!).

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World-renowned future forecaster, game designer, and New York Times bestselling author Jane McGonigal gives us the tools to imagine the future without fear. 

“An accessible, optimistic field guide to the future.”—San Francisco Chronicle 

“Reading this book is like sitting down with a creative, optimistic friend—and getting up as a new version of yourself.”—Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of When 

The COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly frequent climate disasters, a new war—events we might have called “unimaginable” or “unthinkable” in the past are now reality. Today it feels more challenging than ever to feel unafraid, hopeful, and equipped to face the future with optimism. How do we map out our lives when it seems impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or next decade? What we need now are strategies to help us recover our confidence and creativity in facing uncertain futures.

In Imaginable, Jane McGonigal draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our minds to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. She invites us to play with the provocative thought experiments and future simulations she’s designed exclusively for this book, with the goal to: 

1. Build our collective imagination so that we can dive into the future and envision, in surprising detail, what our lives will look like ten years from now

2. Develop the courage and vision to solve problems creatively

3. Take actions and make decisions that will help shape the future we desire

4. Access “urgent optimism,” an unstoppable force within each of us that activates our sense of agency

Imaginable teaches us to be fearless, resilient, and bold in realizing a world with possibilities we cannot yet imagine—until reading this transformative, inspiring, and necessary book.

Our next reading selection is:

Show Notes:

(Please listen to understand the context of the resources provided. If we missed something, please comment on the episode and let us know!)

Episodic Future Thinking
The group got into the discussion with this concept called “episodic future thinking” from Jane McGonigal’s book “Imaginable.” It’s all about mentally prepping yourself for challenges, setting goals, and building resilience when things change. Raymond compared it to Gabriele Oettingen’s “WOOP” strategy for anticipating obstacles when pursuing goals.

Creating Future Scenarios
They explored McGonigal’s idea of creating simulations or scenarios to envision potential future outcomes. Raymond related it to mental practice in sports, where purposefully picturing different drills can improve game performance.

Overall Reflections
Overall, the crew liked the future scenarios McGonigal explored, reflecting on their own experiences with forecasting and how tech is reshaping society.

Future Forecasting
Raymond emphasized considering future changes when tackling work or life projects, stressing the need for creative thinking and tangible outcomes to feel satisfied. He suggested printing out a client’s digital report to have that physical sense of accomplishment. Quoting from the book, he encouraged being playful when brainstorming future possibilities and preparing for seemingly unthinkable changes.

Adapting to Technological Changes
He illustrated how tech has transformed daily activities like grocery shopping, driving home the point that people need to anticipate and embrace these kinds of changes. He used the evolution of payment methods at checkout as an example of remarkable tech-driven progress.

Scenario Planning
The group explored scenario planning using the premise of an asteroid headed for Earth as an example. Raymond emphasized looking at potentially catastrophic events that could impact families, highlighting major life milestones as opportunities for bonding and collaboration.

Social Implications of Cash Payments
When discussing a scenario where people receive $2000 but have to give away half, it sparked thoughts about the societal implications surrounding cash payments and fostering a sense of community beyond one’s immediate circle by helping others.

Science Fiction & Future Thinking
The convo expanded into how science fiction inspires future thinking, with references to Star Trek’s ideas like handheld communicators connecting distant places or voice-controlled computer assistants providing info.

Adapting to Change
He discussed the concept of identifying “signals of change” or clues about impending changes to spark curiosity and enable proactive forecasting. Raymond related this to his own use of productivity tools like Notion Calendar as indicators for optimizing scheduling efficiency.

Future Forces Planning
Expanding on one of McGonigal’s principle of “future forces,” Raymond emphasized identifying external forces expected to impact lives over the next decade – both exciting positive developments and potential risks to prepare for.

Practicing Hard Empathy
The discussion turned to “hard empathy” and applying it individually, similar to GTD practices. Raymond suggested tapping into empathetic qualities could boost performance. He reflected on book scenarios addressing population growth and environmental challenges, expressing interest in creating local mechanisms to welcome new residents into his neighborhood and tackle these global issues locally.

Please visit ProductivityBookGroup.org and find out the details and the schedule for upcoming book discussion calls. If you plan to read ahead or read a little more slowly, please visit ProductivityBookGroup.org and check out the schedule on the “Upcoming Books” page.

Please feel free to visit Apple Podcasts, Spotify or whichever podcast directory or app you prefer to access Productivity Book Group…and feel free to give the episode or show a rating or review! This helps expand our readership and bring new discussion callers into the fold. Thank you.

Also, all podcast episodes are archived at ProductivityBookGroup.org under “Episodes” so if you missed a call and want to review it, feel free to head over and give them a listen.

Finally, we have a digital community where we can discuss the productivity books we’re reading. You can access it on the Web, as well as via Android and iOS apps, and we’re very excited to have you join us there. Please visit https://productivitybookgroup.org/community and you will be taken to the new digital community to join. See you there!

And with that, thanks, everyone for listening to Productivity Book Group.

I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. Here’s to your productive life!

Note: All registered service marks, trademarks and other copyrighted materials mentioned on the podcast are that of their respective owners. This group is not affiliated with or officially endorsed by those copyright owners.

FTC Disclosure: We may earn money or credits from the companies mentioned in this post by clicking on links for items or services you purchase.

Anything But Idle is currently on hiatus but Ray Sidney-Smith ( https://twominuterule.com) and Augusto Pinaud ( https://productivityvoice.com/) are occasionally doing episodes for commentary on major news/events in the world of personal productivity and related technologies.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://anythingbutidle.com for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you’d like to continue discussing any news from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Commentary on Samsung Galaxy Unpacked January 2024

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Art Gelwicks, a productivity and collaboration consultant, blogger at Gelwicks Tech, and host of the Being Productive podcast, CrossPlatform podcast, as well as a collaborator on ProductivityCast Podcast.

Headlines & Show Notes | Commentary on Samsung Galaxy Unpacked January 2024

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

Summary (Auto-Generated)

• Samsung Galaxy Unpacked initial impressions.

  • Art Gelwicks felt the Samsung Galaxy unpacked show had an “awkward” start but improved with a live audience.

  • Art Gelwicks found the presentation to be lacking in energy and enthusiasm, with a few notable exceptions.

  • Ray Sidney-Smith contrasted the pre-recorded and live elements of the presentation, finding the latter to be less engaging.

• Samsung’s commitment to security updates and AI-powered call features. (4:25)

  • Ray Sidney-Smith: Samsung’s commitment to 7 years of security updates and 7 operating system updates for flagship devices shows their dedication to customer satisfaction.

  • Art Gelwicks: Samsung’s decision to make updates backward compatible for 7 years highlights the power and longevity of their hardware.

  • Art Gelwicks highlights the on-device AI component in Samsung’s new phones, which processes language translation and live calls without relying on the cloud.

• AI-powered real-time language translation technology. (9:14)

  • Art Gelwicks and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss the benefits of real-time language translation technology, including smooth and accurate translations, and the ability to choose between speaking and listening to translations in different languages.

  • Art Gelwicks and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss the potential of AI in making communication more efficient, with examples of language translation features in Samsung Keyboard app.

  • The speakers highlight the benefits of seeing both languages side by side during conversations, rather than relying on post-typing translations.

• Samsung’s AI-powered note-taking features. (13:35)

  • Art Gelwicks: Samsung notes getting AI functionality, handwriting realignment, and note summarization.

  • Gelwicks: Samsung’s focus on making phone the “do all be all” for productivity and photo editing.

  • Art Gelwicks and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss the limitations of Samsung Notes, a feature that uses AI to clean up handwriting and typing.

  • They agree that while the feature is useful for some users, it’s not a practical solution for most people due to the limitations of the Samsung ecosystem and the inefficiency of using the app on a phone.

• AI-powered note-taking features on Samsung devices. (19:20)

  • Ray Sidney-Smith: Photomoji capabilities in Google Messages are powerful and seamless, but RCS availability is crucial for full functionality.

  • Art Gelwicks: RCS standardization across backends makes this feature more useful, but personal interest is low due to limited use case.

  • Samsung Notes is designed to be a competitor to Apple Notes or Google Keep, not OneNote, with S Pen integration for handwriting recognition and text conversion.

• AI-powered features in Samsung phones and Google partnership. (23:55)

  • Art Gelwicks highlights the usefulness of Android Auto’s one-button reroute feature and ability to send an ETA with a single button press.

  • Ray Sidney-Smith agrees, emphasizing the importance of keeping eyes on the road and facilitating a seamless driving experience.

  • Art Gelwicks and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss the Voice Recorder app on Samsung phones, which can transcribe speech in real-time and synchronize with the recording.

  • Samsung partners with Google on “circle to search” feature, allowing users to quickly search for objects circled on the screen using Google Search/Lens.

• Google’s new visual search feature. (29:00)

  • Ray Sidney-Smith highlights the potential of Google’s new visual search feature, Circle to Search, to improve search experiences and solidify Google’s position in the future.

  • Art Gelwicks notes the privacy and security benefits of the feature, which only sends the specific part of the image being searched, rather than the entire image.

  • Art Gelwicks and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss the new visual search feature on Android devices, which can identify objects in images and provide related information.

  • They praise Google for continuing to improve search functionality and make it more accessible, especially through voice search and visual search on mobile devices.

• Android’s quick share feature and its potential impact on file sharing. (33:42)

  • Google and Samsung are standardizing Quick Share for Android devices, making it a universal transfer tool.

  • Ray Sidney-Smith: Samsung and Google’s collaboration on quick share flattens the playing field for Android, providing an olive branch to Microsoft and an opportunity to improve file sharing across ecosystems.

  • Art Gelwicks: Quick Share will likely come in the form of multiple third-party apps tying together all the pieces, providing a more seamless experience for users.

• Samsung’s new Galaxy S24 series with AI-powered photo editing capabilities. (38:09)

  • Art Gelwicks and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss Samsung’s new AI-powered photo editing capabilities, including the ability to remove unwanted objects or reflections from images and the addition of watermarks to indicate AI editing.

  • Ray Sidney-Smith likens the AI editing watermark to Microsoft’s CoPilot logo, with two small stars representing that AI was involved.

  • Ray Sidney-Smith and Art Gelwicks discuss the design of Samsung’s new phones, including their similarity to Apple’s iPhone.

  • Ray and Art praise the flat design of the S 24 Ultra and the use of titanium edges, but note that the curved screen of former models with the S Pen was a mistake.

• Samsung Galaxy S23 camera features and improvements. (43:37)

  • Ray Sidney-Smith: Sizes of screens increase from 6.2 to 6.8 inches, with battery sizes also increasing.

  • Art Gelwicks: Improved glass technology reduces screen reflections by up to 75%, and AI processing is used to optimize battery usage.

  • Ray Sidney-Smith explains that Samsung has optimized their camera system for the average user, dropping the 10x telephoto lens in favor of a 5x 50 megapixel lens for better image quality.

  • Art Gelwicks agrees, highlighting how the camera’s ability to switch between lenses based on the user’s distance from the subject creates a more seamless and high-quality zoom experience.

• Samsung’s new phones, including specs and pricing. (49:31)

  • Ray Sidney-Smith highlights Samsung’s focus on user feedback and improvements in camera capabilities, while Art Gelwicks notes the significant differences between the standard and ultra models, including storage and RAM.

  • Ray Sidney-Smith: Samsung’s Knox Matrix offers synchronized, encrypted data across devices, while Knox provides separate, encrypted partitions on individual devices.

  • Art Gelwicks: Knox Matrix synchronizes encrypted data to the cloud and to other devices, while Nox requires separate authentication for each device.

• Samsung’s Knox security platform and health features. (54:54)

  • Art Gelwicks highlights Knox Matrix’s potential to securely store sensitive information across multiple devices without risk of breach.

  • Ray Sidney-Smith and Art Gelwicks discuss Samsung health and its new AI capabilities, with Art expressing reservations about the My Vitality score but hoping for improved insight and learning.

  • Samsung health users like Art Gelwicks use the app daily, with potential benefits including better data analysis and new sensor sets for feeding data.

• Samsung’s upcoming health tracking device, the Galaxy ring. (1:00:14)

  • Ray Sidney-Smith: Samsung Galaxy ring is a competitor to the Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch, tracking health data and feeding it into Samsung Health.

  • Ray Sidney-Smith: The ring navigates the small place between non-watch wearables, solving a problem for those not compatible with the aura ring or brand.

  • Ray Sidney-Smith mentions the ring’s ability to capture data without needing to charge the watch, which solves the problem of waking up with an indentation on the face from sleeping on the watch.

  • Art Gelwicks suggests that the ring could be improved by adding a temperature sensor and EKG reading capabilities, and if it could measure blood sugar, it would be a game-changer.

• Samsung’s new Galaxy ring and its potential features. (1:06:35)

  • Ray Sidney-Smith and Art Gelwicks discuss the potential of smart rings for measuring health data, including heart rate, sleep apnea, and blood oxygen levels.

  • They speculate that smart rings could be a complementary device to watches or other wearables, rather than a competitor, and may be used intermittently for specific purposes.

Raw Text Transcript

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

[read more=”Read the raw text transcript” less=”Close the raw text transcript”]

Ray Sidney-Smith 0:00
Hello, personal productivity enthusiast and community Welcome to Anything But Idle the productivity news podcast. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. And unfortunately, Agusta pronounced is not joining us today as he normally would. He’s dealing with some family issues. And so I’m going to be solo today for hosting purposes. But either way, this is episode 124. And we’re recording this on January 17 2024. Today was Samsung Galaxy unpacked. And they announced the new Samsung S 24. Series phones. So we’re doing this special episode, mostly because we wanted to geek out about all the technology and possibly productivity embedded in these new devices. Also, I have on the show today, art Gelwicks, our Samsung aficionado and our blogger podcaster. extraordinaire, over at Gelwicks tech. Welcome to the end, but idle art.

Art Gelwicks 0:52
Hey, thanks, Greg, I appreciate you for having me on. For this. As always, I’d love to talk Samsung. So

Ray Sidney-Smith 0:59
absolutely. And I just love to talk productivity in tech. So this is a really great opportunity for us to bring this special episode of Anything But Idle online. And so hopefully folks who are inside of personal productivity club and those of you who are watching on YouTube will join along with us as we get into our first kind of impressions of Galaxy unpacked here as we start 2024. What did you think about the show itself?

Art Gelwicks 1:25
It started off with that big stadium feel. I mean, definitely back in front of a live audience, that kind of thing. They’ve been building back to that since post pandemic that had a good opening. But the overall show itself. It felt I want to say awkward at times, not negatively. It just it didn’t feel like it had the positive energy. That other you know, big hardware releases, we’ve got this thing that everybody’s crazy stoked about. It just had this underlying feel that they know they have something that I hate to use the phrase game changer, they know they have something that is a game changer. They’re just not quite sure how to convince everybody else to that fact yet. And you could see it to me, you could see it in the handoffs between people, you could hear it in their voices. They were trying really hard, but sometimes almost a little too hard to get that message across. But from if I had to give it an A rating, you know, we normally give it like a grading, I’d give it a solid B, I’d probably give it a solid B. They did well, they did a little extra effort, but certainly nothing to put them at the top of the class of their other presentations.

Ray Sidney-Smith 2:56
I really found the pre recorded material against the live speaking pieces of it very contrasted. And that created a real, I don’t know, it just it created the deleterious effect for me that I felt that the whole model of Galaxy unpacked seems stayed at this point, it seems a little bit boring. And the the big screen actually, quite honestly, it was the most thing I was interested most in the curved, you know, display they had on on the stage. That was the most interesting thing I found about really the presentation.

Art Gelwicks 3:28
There was a point where I actually found myself going, I missed the pandemic presentations, I missed the pandemic unpacked, because you know, they were put together a little bit differently. They had an opportunity to mess it up and come back and things like that. I did have to chuckle a little bit though, I watched the entire presentation live off of Samsung site. And they had closed captioning running. Their closed captioning was I struggled a little bit with some of the people they didn’t feed it the script, they they let it go off of the audio. And there’s a couple of them where the accents were just like, yeah, that’s not quite what he was saying. Or she was saying but you know, all in all, like I said, I’ll give them a good solid B. And they started the whole thing off, which with I think is probably the biggest thing across the entire line. And that’s the updates.

Ray Sidney-Smith 4:24
Right? So seven OS seven operating generations and seven years of security updates, starting with the S 24 series will be supported now. And I feel like that that’s a fantastic way to kick off the show and a real testament to Samsung standing behind their products for especially their flagship product. So yeah, that was a great, that was a great start to the show.

Art Gelwicks 4:49
That just floored me because I had to think how many people are actually holding on to their device for seven years. You are they are literal We committing to you being secure on your device and having the operating system updates for the life of your ownership of the device. Because honestly, nobody keeps it that long, unless it’s a flip phone, and my mom still has it. Nobody else is keeping their devices that long. So to me, that’s a, that’s a spectacular commitment. But it’s also, I think there’s a little bit of a different or a deeper layer to that to what they’re recognizing is that all of their updates coming forward for that next seven year period, have to be backward compatible on those previous devices. So I think it’s a great indicator that the hardware has gotten so powerful, that it is worth using for up to that period of time, it will support it, it will continue to run, you’re not going to be looking at diminishing returns on hardware. B just because you can’t get a software update. So I thought that was a great way for them to start. I was revved up at that point. I’m like, Oh, this

Ray Sidney-Smith 6:04
is great. Yeah, the cynic in me, of course, understands that people typically in especially in these flagship phones are keeping their phones for 18, you know, longest, probably 24 months. And so they know that people are already doing that. But that means that these phones are being handed down a second hand devices to, you know, whether that be spouses, partners, sisters, siblings, and of course, children. And so these devices need to live longer, because they are being passed down to other folks. And this gives a little bit more longevity to those devices. And I think you’re right, the hardware is good enough that especially with these new SOC s, that are really stellar, even after they burn for you know, several years, they’re still going to have enough oomph left in them that it’s going to be good enough for, you know, your daughter or son or otherwise, to kind of use for a couple more years before you have to kind of turn it in and hand it along. Alright, so that

Art Gelwicks 6:58
that hand, that’s a great point, I jumped in there that the hand me down factor, I didn’t even think about that. But that’s now you’ve got a device that is worth handing down. Okay.

Ray Sidney-Smith 7:11
Yeah. And, of course, I’m very much concerned about giving a hand me down, that’s not going to get security updates, right. And that kept being the prime. Right. So I don’t even care about the OS generation updates, I really care about the security updates. And but I’m really glad to have the seven and seven, so that you really have strong support there. Alright. So I mean,

Art Gelwicks 7:32
this is just to jump in there. This is a this is a kind of an underpinning of multiple times throughout the entire event, security was raised, security was raised as a feature as a factor and as a requirement, which again, made me feel pretty good.

Ray Sidney-Smith 7:46
Absolutely. So they kind of segue us into really the the flashiest piece of the of the show. You know, I think, and that is, you know, all of these new call functions that allow to to utilize AI on the device, so that you’re able to do things like live calls where you have real time translation happening. They call it call assist, there are 13 languages that it currently supports out of the box. And they also provide text translations using the Samsung keyboard. So what did you think about the live call demo that they did on screen?

Art Gelwicks 8:25
I think that the demo is a great indication of where AI will make its difference in these devices. For a couple of factors. One, the demonstration itself was, it was interesting, but it’s similar to other demonstrations we’ve seen, such as when Google initially released their earbuds, you know, it’s that live transact or translation back and forth. That’s great. But there are some factors in this that I think really differentiate one. All of that is being done on device. It’s using Gemini nano from Google to do that AI component within the device itself, which means that only one device in the equation needs to be able to do that language processing. So and as they called out, it’ll work even all the way if the other person is using a landline, which makes perfect sense. The second thing is it looks very smooth. Previous translation mechanisms have been kind of jerky, you know, a little Herky jerky, there’s delay. You weren’t totally sure. This gave you a sense of confidence that the translation was happening. And it was accurate. So I have to say I do like it. I don’t really have an opportunity to use it. But I I really can see for somebody who needs this kind of functionality. This could be a significant feature for them. Yeah,

Ray Sidney-Smith 9:56
I’m currently using this feature inside of Google. it’ll translate in meetings currently. And, and so it’s very similar except that that’s all happening on the chip. It’s happening, you know, in this kind of sandbox environment. And as you said, you don’t have that latency issue of having to worry about translation, going up to the cloud being translated coming back down from the cloud, and then being spoken. But the idea is, is that you have the choice of speaking, it then does the translation and speaks it to the person on the other side, or turning off your voice and their voice altogether. And all you hear is the translations between the two. So they’re hearing the translation in the language of their preference, and you’re hearing the language in your preference. And so it gives you a real powerful capability, there even remembers which languages you used with that person in the past. So when you call them back, it basically picks up where you left off.

Art Gelwicks 10:54
Those are the little things that I think make a huge difference with this kind of thing, when that when they start to tie that to a contact record, so that the system knows when you start talking to that person, or you call that person, it needs to do that translation in real time from that language. That’s huge, because it becomes more transparent. And I think, across the board, that’s our expectation, or should be our expectation of AI. Not that it’s going to stand up in the middle of everything. But it’s the grease on the wheels, it’s what makes everything just kind of happen. And I think this is a perfect example of how that can function.

Ray Sidney-Smith 11:33
Right. And I know that right now, everything is going to have the word AI in it. Once upon a time we called AI, programming languages, we called it code. So it’s just basically a new iteration, utilizing some of these large language models and other other models that are coming online. It’s just code. And so we are we are seeing a lot of this being done because it can process such a large amount of data, and also start to do some interpretation that is novel in a lot of ways. And so I liked the idea of being able to transact in multiple languages, I really enjoy the text translation features built into Samsung keyboard. So you can type in one language, you see it in your native language below it, and you’re just typing, you know, and you’re just having that conversation. Again, I use something similar currently in the Google keyboard. So folks who don’t don’t know, if you’re using G board, which is an application you can install on Android and iOS, the G board application itself has a Google translate function built into it, you just click on the little, you know, on the little bar icon, there’s a little for widget icon, and then you’ll see the little translate button, you click on it type in whatever language you’d like. And then you type in it automatically translated, translates into the language that you want to. But what I liked about the Samsung keyboard demonstration was that they had that kind of layer, right, so you’re seeing both languages side by side, kind of the way in which Facebook and other social networks have applied that level of like clicking on a button and you can see the translation, and then you just are kind of continuing the conversation without really a lot of, of slowing down of things. Whereas with this, you’re you’re you’re only seeing the translation, you just typed in not both your language and there’s so you have to remember what you typed, which can be difficult if you’re typing in a language that you’re not comfortable in like it for me that’s Russian or, or you know, Japanese or something like that you’re typing to somebody and you don’t know what you just typed, because you typed it in English. And now it’s only showing you the kanji. You know, that’s a real problem. Exactly.

Art Gelwicks 13:34
I was just thinking about that with English to Korean. I mean, you’ve got a language there that doesn’t use the same letter structure. So you have no context whatsoever, you don’t have that feedback. So yeah, it’s it’s definitely worthwhile, I think. And you’re right, I liked the fact that they called out that it’s now built into the Samsung keyboard. That’s not the only time that Samsung pushed one of their own apps as part of this presentation, which I thought was interesting, because as of late, they haven’t really done that they haven’t really showcased their own stuff. They’ve always been showcasing everybody else’s. But there were two other times that they took apps that are just built in and kind of elevated them to a higher platform. And I’m like, Well, okay, that’s good. Yeah.

Ray Sidney-Smith 14:21
I’m going to skip to one of those, which was when they talked about speech to text, and also their note assist capabilities, because they really talked about the flavor of Samsung notes and how it really shines. Now. Talk to me about what you thought were kind of the key points of them talking about the speech to text and the note assist capabilities. So

Art Gelwicks 14:39
I have to admit, I was watching the opening rolling graphic that they always have, you know, in the like the hour before, and you’re always looking for those little visual cues as the giveaways and part of the image was the Samsung notes logo and I’m like, No, they’re not going to talk about stuff. No Yeah, sure enough they brought up. And what they brought up about Samsung notes is the fact that one, it can do handwriting realignment, it can summarize the notes that you’ve taken. It’s, they’re building that functionality into this tool. And I think that’s fascinating. Because they’ve been so much the last time we went around, they were touting about how we’re integrated into one note, and, you know, we have this, they’ve never really given Samsung notes, its own place on the stage. And now it’s one of the first apps to get this kind of AI functionality. And I think it, it’ll be interesting to see if this just happens to be an app that had a use case, or are they planning to make it bigger and better and more important as part of this overall platform equation, and there was an undertone within the presentation about how your phone should almost be able to be considered the do all be all for all things, you should be able to do everything there, do your photo editing, do your productivity, that should be the center of your world, because for most people it is. So it was interesting to see that I do like the handwriting cleanup. I know a lot of people struggle with that. Even with the new S Pen configurations, no, that’s still still an iffy thing. The note assist, I liked the functionality, I like its capability. Unfortunately, it happens to be one of those showcase features, that doesn’t offset some of the other weaknesses of the application. So I think they’re gonna have to kind of kick the application in his pants to really bring it up. But I think this was a good place for them to be able to take this and showcase functionality. So yeah, it’s a harmless app if they don’t do it. Yeah.

Ray Sidney-Smith 16:53
And I always take it from the perspective that I mean, I still use Notepad for taking some notes in meetings, right, and then it’s a copy and paste into my my note taking application of choice, right. So whereas I believe Samsung would have probably showcased to OneNote, in the past, maybe even a partnership with Evernote, while many, many moons ago, you know, those things are going to happen. Now, like you said they had a use case, I think that the the, the real concern for me with regard to the AI in in the note cleanup sense, is just like with with Evernote note, Ai no cleanup tool, it’s useless to me, right. And if I take really good notes, I know how to structure notes, I know how to, you know what I mean? So it’s like, it seems kind of like, okay, if you’re really, really bad at capturing notes, then then great this, this helps you. But the the flip side to it is that I can see the genesis of something really powerful in the future, right, where this can actually do a lot more in the future. This is this is a building, this is a foundation for something that’s going to come that will be much more powerful in the future.

Art Gelwicks 18:02
Yeah. And this may be one of the cases where Samsung notes actually doesn’t do themselves a benefit. But for Samsung doesn’t do themselves a service by using Samsung notes as the case for this. Because I really can’t imagine anybody taking lengthy notes on Samsung notes, using anything around the shape of a phone, it would just take forever to type the keyboard interface. It’s just, it’s not a good experience. I’ll admit that. However, Samsung notes if you’re in the ecosystem, and they’ve made it, so it’s only in the ecosystem, you can get the notes on your tablet and on your Samsung laptop. So you do have that cross compatibility, but it’s still it’s still not perfect. So I think this is one of those cases where for people who maybe aren’t efficient at keeping notes, or maybe just capturing things on the fly during a discussion, or a better example is what they talked about with voice recorder. That is a good use of this functionality. I just think that it was a neat thing to see. But it was more of just an illustration of functionality than a practical solution.

Ray Sidney-Smith 19:15
Yeah, and I felt the same way with the speech to text functionalities. And it being able to provide summaries. These are things that we’ve seen now in chat GPT and Google Bard. We’ve seen that in anthropic Claude, and many other you know, kind of chatbot focused AI tools today. And one thing I wanted to step back and as they actually showed in the, in the demo, their photo Moji capabilities and again, this is just bringing that flavor of AI and and how they’re handling, photo editing and video editing and so on so forth. We’ll talk about that in a bit. But the idea was that you can now take kind of a, a section of a photo and turn it into a is a kind of a MIMO G style image that you can then post into the chat, utilizing Google messages is a really, really powerful tool takes a lot of work under the hood to make it happen. And it looks pretty seamless. And so I’m really looking forward to seeing folks with Samsung devices utilizing that and seeing how it works across device, whether it’s only going to be within the ecosystem, that it actually looks good. If it’s if it’s just going to text message be an image, you know, or is it going to actually give me any other flavor of what’s going on under the hood. On the other side, within Google messages I’ll be I’ll be curious how that will all work.

Art Gelwicks 20:37
This is a feature that could be very strongly supported by the RCS availability, through messaging. Without that, it’s going to be kind of useless. It’s just a flat image. But the fact that RCS is now standard across the back, that makes a huge difference for this kind of feature. I personally, I don’t see a lot of use for it, because I don’t really use that kind of capability of it. But I know a lot of people who would just live for that, I mean that every other thing would be that kind of thing coming through. And again, RCS is going to make that that really powerful.

Ray Sidney-Smith 21:14
Yeah, it’s not going to be supported by SMS or MMS. Anyway, it’s going to be supported by the RCS protocol. And I think that it would be really good. But I just wanted to make note of that, because I know, I know, it was kind of interesting how they pointed that out, back onto the note assist piece and taking notes by hand, I know that you and I would never do that it’s not a comfortable experience to do that on your phone. That is taking lengthy notes or, or, or copious amounts of notes on there. But I will say that there are a lot of people who do, and there are a lot of people who are of a younger generation where that is the only device they’re utilizing. And so therefore they are doing it there, I see it all the time in seminars, and I I’m baffled because I see them, you know, to fingering, like notes and, and it hurts my heart to watch them doing it. I’ll say this though, the the idea behind a something that can fundamentally capture audio, capture the various photos to say, you know, someone pulls up their camera takes a photograph of a slide that I’ve done, I might have up on screen, and is also taking some lightweight notes. This is the part that I think from a productivity perspective can be really powerful, because it can, it can, it knows all those three pieces of data have come into the phone in that time signature in that time period. And so it can then go ahead and bring those those pieces together and potentially provide me with more rich information than before. And I think that’s the real thing that I hope Samsung does.

Art Gelwicks 22:45
And if we keep Samsung notes in its proper context, it is not designed to be an Evernote, it’s not designed to be a OneNote. It’s not designed to be a notion or anything else. It is a very powerful competitor to like an apple notes or a Google Keep. And it’s designed. Remember, for the S Pen, that’s what they want you to use it with. That’s its base structure. So when you go to type with it typings. Okay, but that’s actually not the fastest way to enter information into Samsung notes. So when you start to see it doing things like cleaning up your handwriting, well, what they didn’t mention is when they clean up your handwriting, there’s a tap button that converts that handwriting from handwritten to text. And we’ll do it right on the page, and then you move on. Well, that’s a single tap. And that’s exists now. So if you’re able to have cleaner handwriting, you get better text or handwriting to text conversion. So this naturally dovetails into this process, what you do with that text, that’s completely up to you. It’s a good Passover tool, though. And I think it’s a good dynamic tool at the platform level. So I’m

Ray Sidney-Smith 24:02
just gonna make mention of this because they talked about it, Android Auto got some updates within the Samsung ecosystem, you know, they’re providing some message summaries, replies and some smart actions within the within the car ecosystem. I

Art Gelwicks 24:14
have to say as as an Android Auto user, I actually installed a third party heads up display in my in my car to connect to Android Auto, them showing the one button reroute based on a new address gets sent to you through a text message. That’s a nice feature. Being able to one button send your ETA. That’s a nice feature. Those are the kinds of things that when we talk about AI in quotes, that’s the type of artificial intelligence that is useful, because it’s just enhancing the experience. It’s not trying to out think me, it’s assisting me and that’s a perfect opportunity to have that as well. that and they didn’t they talked about it, but they didn’t show it, I want to see it the way to get a summary of a group chat. Okay. Now, as a person who has like seven people in his family in one group chat and can’t follow any of it, if you give me a feature that will give me a summary of that at any given app, just take my money, right there. So I like that idea. Yeah,

Ray Sidney-Smith 25:24
I think anything, keeping your your eyes up on the road and, and being able to facilitate a more seamless driving experience is really fantastic. And I appreciate both what Apple is doing and what Android Auto is doing. So CarPlay and Android Auto are both really doing great jobs there. It’s good to see Samsung, kind of add these new features. And I hope when it comes to across the board to all of the Android Auto vehicles. So before

Art Gelwicks 25:50
we move forward, I do want to highlight one thing they talked about with the voice recorder app, its ability using AI, to pick up different voices during a recording and create a text summary based on the different voices. So if you imagine having a meeting and you’re sitting there with five people, you can take the phone, hit record, throw it in the center of the desk, and at the end, get a summary from everybody, based on who was talking. That’s like zoom level functionality. That’s the kind of thing we expect through virtual meetings. But now you can have that in the meat space that you’re operating in, that I want to play with, I think I’m sure it’s gonna have some issues. It’s all based on mic quality and ambient sound and things like that. But just having that as an option. That’s a big step. Yeah,

Ray Sidney-Smith 26:44
be curious if you can, I’m not sure if on your Samsung Galaxy phone right now, you can sideload, the Google Recorder app. But basically, the Google Recorder app does exactly that. And I’ve had it for several years now. And it’s phenomenal. So if this voice recorder app is anything like what Google has already created, where it just it knows who the speakers are automatically, it’s, it’s Trent, it’s transcribing in real time. And then of course, it’s, it’s then synchronized to recorder.google.com within your account, so used to authenticate into your Google account. And now you have those synchronized, you can download the source file, you could download the transcript. And so the Google Recorder app is basically what Samsung has caught up to. And I was really glad to see them bring that to the Samsung S 24 series. And hopefully it becomes legacy compatible for prior S series phones. Because it is, as you said, it’s such a benefit to be able to take your mind off of notetaking so that you capturing every word and every concept, and you can just experience something and still capture what was being said. There’s something to be said about that. And I really find that to be useful. Oh, absolutely. So so moving right forward to what I thought was kind of the most important and most interesting piece was Samsung’s partnership with Google, kind of in two parts. So we have circle to search. And then we had the quick share for Android partnership. So obviously, Samsung and Google have partnered on many things over over over time, this one seemed to be fairly special to Samsung, they spent a lot of time and brought Google on stage to talk about it. And so circle to search just for everybody’s edification here is the idea that anywhere on the screen, you are now able to basically twit a small gesture from the bottom of the screen, trigger your Google lens, basically, you circle something on screen, and then it automatically and I mean, just you have to watch the video, the speed at which it is doing this is phenomenal. And of course that’s you know, internet connectivity, and you know, all kinds of other things going on. But but it was really fluid, you circled a pair of glasses, you circled a dress, you circled a car, and Google lens comes right up. And the Google search shows you what you searched by just circling the image. And so I can think of all of the the times in applications where this will just speed up the search experience for people and solidify, I think solidify Google’s place in search in the future. This is a really powerful piece.

Art Gelwicks 29:20
This is one of those fascinating things because we’ve talked about multiple times in the past. How does Google transition from text search to visual search primarily, or voice search primarily, because we’re moving away from heavy text search? I mean, we’ve got a device in our pockets that is eyeball based. So when you look at something like Google search or circle to search, this to me is fascinating because one it works with anything that is displayed on your phone, whether it’s a live image, whether it’s a video image that you paused, whether it’s a photo that you took now or in the past, doesn’t matter. And it’s a granular part of that image. And they stress this. From a privacy and security standpoint, if let’s say you have a family picture, and in that family picture, there’s an antique table, and you want to know more about that table, so you draw a little circle around that table or you scribble over it, you know, they’ve got like, four different gestures for it. Only that image of that table is sent for the search, it doesn’t send the whole image, it only uses what it absolutely has to as part of the security component. So it’s one of those things that I think, yes, it is an extremely interesting feature. It’s not limited to S Pen, because we say circle the search, we think, okay, maybe it requires the stylus know, if you watch some of the, because everything that was on waiting for the release, all the YouTubers have released all their stuff, and everybody’s demonstrating with their their finger finger searches. No, I just liked the fact that it doesn’t care what you’re searching for. Sometimes we’ve had the ones that are like product searches, like it’ll indentify the products in an image, or they know that I saw demonstrations today where somebody had vacation photos, and they were trying to identify a store in the vacation photo. So they circled it and it went and it looked it up and it found it, that would be arduous, trying to do it manually. Here, it’s almost second nature. So everything now becomes a link to more information, which is really where it needs to be.

Ray Sidney-Smith 31:40
That’s,

Art Gelwicks 31:41
that’s huge.

Ray Sidney-Smith 31:42
Yeah, I think I think the, the, the stage before, this was the ability for you to hum lyrics into Google and for it to go ahead and identify that and tell you the song, that kind of thing. Or tell you the you know, you recite a couple of lines of a particular book, it’s going to tell you the book. Now being able to add this to visual search in such a fluid way. I think it’s really, really the next generation of that kind of being able to search everything right. And if Google’s ultimate mission, right is to organize the world’s information and make it usable, and accessible. The idea here is to is to continue and extend with partners to make sure that happens, certainly on the Android brand devices. And I think this is a fantastic moment of Google doing that. And I don’t spend enough time lauding Google for things, you know, being a Google fan, right? Well told, but I criticize them more than I do anything else, because I want them to be better. And and this is one of those cases where I saw this demonstration, I saw what Samsung and Google did together. And circle, the search is a fantastic tool, I’m really pleased with them. It looks like it works. It works out of the box, it doesn’t seem like it requires you to really think too much about how to do it. And it just does its job. And and that’s what you want from search, you want search to get out of the way and give you what you are trying to navigate toward. And and so I’m looking forward to seeing more of that, especially in a home assistant search, where you might say, Hey, Big G, you know, and do a search and just a lot more fluid with regard to navigating between the mobile device and voice search. And then of course, visual search on top of that. So I can take a photograph of something, and for it to automatically just do what I need it to do without. And this is where AI can really be powerful here to make sure that we’re we’re getting moving forward on those pieces. All right, there’s

Art Gelwicks 33:42
there’s no question. You were talking about? The other one quick share.

Ray Sidney-Smith 33:47
Yeah, let’s do it.

Art Gelwicks 33:49
Google AirDrop. Yeah, that’s what it is. Okay, so let me let me just clarify to anybody who isn’t familiar with what quick share is, and I just kind of gave it away there. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, there’s a thing called AirDrop where you can send whatever a file media image over to another phone device, another iPad. Samsung has had quick share for a while. And you can share between Samsung devices. And I use it a lot. I use it quite a bit. And it works really well. It is consistent. It’s bulletproof. There isn’t a lot of configuration or anything. It just kind of works. In the middle of this. Microsoft tried to do something and it’s still doing something with a drop function in their Edge browser. So it’s like, oh, okay, wait, we have something now. That’s a second one. Well, Google and Samsung, supporting quick share as the standard for all Android devices, that meaning that Google is saying that we will use this to allow any Android to send to any other Android. That’s huge that gets rid of this whole issue. You Don’t have to text people images anymore, you don’t have to email the images anymore, you can use a tool that is basically bullet proof for that transfer. And it’s about time, but to see that kind of throwing behind it, honestly, did not see that one coming did not see that quick share would be one of those big things, but as an advocate, and as a user for it. Oh, that’s fantastic. That’s great that they’re doing that.

Ray Sidney-Smith 35:27
So it sounds to me and clarify me if I’m wrong there, they’re bringing, they’re bringing the nearby share features of Android underneath quick share, and quick shares, basically, coming to the all all encompassing tool for all of the pieces. Fantastic. Yeah, like, a lot of times, you’re just like, I just want to give you this file. Right. And, and all of the rigmarole that is required for you to be able to do so this really flattens the, the playing field on the Android side. And so I think, again, this goes to Samsung and Google understanding their competition, they understand the need for them to be able to continually collaborate, and it kind of is a it’s an olive branch, I’m, I might be reading too much into this, but it’s a it’s an olive branch to Microsoft. In a lot of ways, it’s Microsoft an opportunity now to embrace quick share, and kind of get rid of some of their legacy, you know, features on the windows 10. side. And, and, and Windows 11. side. So I’m hoping I’m hoping that they they see this as an opportunity to really help the entire ecosystem outside of the Mac OS, and iOS and iPad OS, to really have a strong function for being able to share files, again, securely, conveniently. And, and just seamlessly, right, you want it to be a seamless experience for people. So

Art Gelwicks 36:59
and here’s, here’s where I think the game changes significantly as because it’s not going to take long for somebody over on the Apple side of the fence to write an app that will allow you to receive and send based on this quick share. I don’t want to call it a protocol, but quick share standard, because you don’t have to follow the apple rules of sending and receiving through AirDrop. Now it’s basically like a messaging app. So I would expect in fairly short order to see somebody or multiple apps over on the Apple side, to start to tie all these pieces together. Now, to be able to send things through all of this now, there’s still, you know, there’s security and controls and file sizes and things like that. But just to give you a practical example, over the summer, I shot a video that was close to a gig, used quick share to send it to my tablet, edit it and send it back to my phone for then publishing out. It just never had to go to the cloud. Net didn’t have to worry about Wi Fi connectivity or anything else all happened locally. It is absolutely a great way to handle this kind of interchange. So yeah, it made me really happy to see that.

Ray Sidney-Smith 38:11
Yeah. And so I alluded to this earlier, when I talked about the photo emoji, but the whole idea now is that the Galaxy line of phones is bringing online in the s 24 series, photo editing and video editing, editing capabilities that are supposed to be professional level. And again, high level processing being done right there locally on the device. So that you can really have great images and great, you know, moving images video produced right there on the phone, akin to, again, you know, they’re competing with Apple’s notion of using your iPhone as a cinematic camera, in a lot of way, they want to really help bolster their opinion there. So they’re giving us new a quote unquote AI, photo editing capabilities, right, they showed that wonderful, you know, option of being able to circle a person and drag them up closer to the, to the basketball hoop, which again, is an outright lie. Clearly they weren’t that high. But you know, whatever. They’re making fake images. But you know, but but the actual the example that I liked was where the person was in the image, and they had kind of their own reflection behind them and you kind of wanted to get the reflection. And and it was really well done just that that’s a great example of just like you want to clean your image. You don’t need that reflection of the person behind them. And they kind of clean that image up and I think more of that is going to be really powerful and impressive. The two

Art Gelwicks 39:46
things that were interesting about that particular example is one the system who made the recommendation, do you want me to remove this it recognize that that was a clutter aspect of the photo. The second part is is something they mentioned across the board. At any time AI monkey’s around with an image, they are putting a watermark on the image. And they are putting a mark in the metadata of the image that it was aI edited. So, deep fakes are not going to be as easily accomplishable tampering with images, you know, is an image believable, well, it’s been retouched. And here at least there’s some clarity and they recognize upfront, we need to be honest about this. So I was happy to see that they were doing that it’s not perfect by any stretch, but at least it’s an effort. Now

Ray Sidney-Smith 40:33
I felt I felt like it was the right choice to be to apply it looks like two little stars, you know, larger star in a small kind of feels to me like Microsoft co pilots logo a little bit. And so that little superimposed image in the in any anything that has been AI altered, is is the right choice, I think it makes a lot of sense that they that they watermark it in that sense, and it just gives everybody a greater greater just feeling and feeling a sense of security there. With regard to what is real and what is not. Let’s let’s talk a little bit about the hardware itself, they have come out with a number of so they have three models of phone so that everybody is aware. So the s 24 line comes out with the s 24. The s 24 Plus, and the s 24. Ultra. And man, the s 24. And the s 24. Plus, they just they look familiar.

Art Gelwicks 41:31
Like I look familiar.

Ray Sidney-Smith 41:34
They, yeah, they’re basically iPhone bodies with.

Art Gelwicks 41:40
So there they are, there’s, there’s no, there’s no subtle way to state that there’s no way to hide that. I mean, they are identical in look and feel to the the Apple phones and honestly, I’m okay with that. I don’t have an issue with that. Because if that were a bad design choice on Apple side, and then Samsung imitated it, then yeah, I’d have a problem with it. But it’s a good design, it’s a solid design they’re using, if I recall correctly, those ones are using an aluminum outer border, it’s only the Ultra, that is using a titanium border as reinforcement, which again for that one make sense because the ultra doesn’t look like an apple, it is clearly the wreck. It is the monolith yet again. And it is a flat monolith, they’re finally getting rid of that lovely curved edge. And honestly, as a S Pen user, they can’t do that soon enough, because that just drives me nuts.

Ray Sidney-Smith 42:50
I don’t know why they ever have the curved screen with the S pen, it didn’t make much sense. I think it was just and so I’m glad to see it gone. I’m glad to see the flat design, I’m glad that the s 24 Ultra at that price point has the titanium edges, right, you’re going to have a little bit Jeopardy with the device, especially if you’re going to want to have that again just live on a little bit longer to have the the corners of your device be able to take a little bit of a beating that the corners of the s 24 and the S 24 Plus are not going to hold up up to as well. But you can clearly see Apple you know design elements in that we’re talking about a Snapdragon eighth Gen three processor inside of it. That’s across all three of them. The sizes of the screens go from 6.2 inch FHD to 6.7 Q HD, and then 6.8 Q HD on the Ultra. So we’re incrementing up in terms of the screen size, battery sizes are going from 4k Milla ampere hours to 40 905,000. So you’re not getting that much more battery out of the the plus to the Ultra. But hopefully there’s some

Art Gelwicks 44:04
Well, they did call out. Yeah, they did call out the fact that they’re going to leverage their AI processing to help optimize battery usage. So I would expect a bit more. I also expect a bit more of a drain on the battery because they’re talking about these displays going up to 2600 nits, we’d have crazy if they did that brightness in a dark room. You could read by the freakin thing. I mean, that’s just crazy brightness. But supposedly it’s smart enough through not only visual sensors, but three different tier layers of visual response to provide the correct display intensity in any given environment. So I’ll be curious to see what the real world battery life estimates are. I run an S 23 Ultra. And honestly, I’ve never had an issue with its battery. I mean, I can go full day and a half two days without having a problem and I live on the thing so I don’t think there’s really gonna be a problem. I did want to touch on little bit though on the glass, they highlighted an improvement in the glass on the ESP 23 Ultra, what they’re calling Corning Gorilla armor. It’s it’s an upgraded version of the gorilla glass that supposedly, and these are their estimates, it’s three times better than the latest version of the Gorilla Glass. And it has four times more scratch resistance, which I think is great. But the thing that they called out that I don’t remember them ever calling up before, is it’s supposed to reduce screen reflection, by up to 75%. That, to me is a big thing when you’re talking about, you know, again, the black slab of glass reflections around you are what really take away from it from that experience. But if it if it loses that reflectivity, now, it makes that screen look that much brighter, that much darker that much contrast here. So that’s to me, that’s a good thing. Yeah, I

Ray Sidney-Smith 45:55
think, you know, we saw this in at CES, you know, where they were, they were really touting the idea of having a glare free, you know, displays. So in the television space. So I think using the same kind of technology to be able to reduce glare is always going to be powerful. Let’s talk about these cameras. So they okay, they decided to go to a 12 mix a 12 megapixel ultra wide effect 50 pixel wide 10 mix, megapixel 3x telephoto and a 12 Mega megapixel front camera. So that’s standard across the s 24. And the s 24. Plus, when we when we move over to the s 24. Ultra, we get the extra 5x 50 mega pixel telephoto lens. And so somewhere along the way, they figured out that people weren’t using your your camera your phone has what’s your I think yours is 10x telephoto, and so they dropped.

Art Gelwicks 46:55
Well, and but they have a rationale for what they did. And this, this is the rationale. And it makes perfect sense when you play around with the zooms on these, that changed to a 5x 50 megapixel. What that allows them to do is to do a full zoom in at 50 megapixels, and then pull into just the center down to 12 megapixels without losing any image quality. So you pick up the equivalent of that 10x Zoom, without having that digital rendering version of the zoom. So that combination of lenses, combined with the system being smart enough to use the right lens at the right time. I think that’s an excellent combination. And they justify it, they said look, that mid range of people zooming into about 5x is usually where they’ll zoom into 10x, you got to be pretty far away from something to justify using 10x. A lot of times, what you would do is you would do a 5x and then, you know, pinch and expand. And that breaks up the image quality. But if you’re doing that five exit 50 megapixels rather than 12. Well, now I can instead of pinching to expand, I can crop to reduce and pull that forward, back to the 12 megapixels with what I had before. And I have a great quality of the image itself. So I think I mean, the s 23 Ultra and the S 23 line, their resume is just mind boggling. I’ve played with it in various locations. And it just floors me how good it is. And they use the obligatory Kpop concert demonstration to show how good it is. But they’re not kidding. I mean that is a that is a quality piece and they were focused around this is This is that kind of iterative growth of putting out the lenses putting out that functionality in the camera. And then listening to the user base and observing how the user base is using it and then modifying the camera structures in the hardware accordingly. Not trying to create this incredibly new different thing pop up lens, whatever. No, it’s just that iteration that makes it that much better. So I think this is an excellent step in the right direction for them. But if somebody is expecting to get like a 500 megapixel 30 times optical zoom on the back, yeah, that’s not there because 99.9% of the population doesn’t need that.

Ray Sidney-Smith 49:31
Yeah, I think I think I was just gonna underscore the thing that you said which is that they are paying attention to their users. And that’s really important for Samsung to both showcase. It’s good for people to be aware of the one change in the ultra from the other specs is that their megapixel, their their wide lens is 200 megapixel over the 50 megapixel wide lens is on the 24 and the 24 plus. So there you’re getting definitely a bump up in terms of capabilities on the number of of line CES and the megapixel density on those on that wide lens. And I think, you know, it’ll time will tell us whether or not that makes sense. But I think it makes sense that they paid attention. And they and they really watch what was happening on users devices and made those adjustments. Items. I

Art Gelwicks 50:19
think, just one last thing to call out, if you take the three devices and put them side by side. This is clearly another statement of Samsung saying s 23 s 23 plus s 23 Effies, s 24 s 24. Plus, those are the general population devices. The Ultras are just that those are the pro devices. Those are the high ends, we’re putting the big guns in there, putting the heavy duty stuff in there. And visually, they look like completely different phones. Functionally, they look like they’re different phones, even though they work the same. So to me, I think, again, as a longtime note user, and since I killed the note line, this again is another statement of saying, Hey, this is the big boy on the block. And everything else learns from this. So yeah,

Ray Sidney-Smith 51:12
so memory and storage wise, they’re starting out at 128 gigabytes going up to 256. It’s eight gigabytes in terms of of RAM on the devices. Curious on the s 20. Fours. What what that means, but I’m guessing that a lot of this is being pushed down to the different chips, and so doesn’t need as much on the primary. I’m not sure they’re

Art Gelwicks 51:39
the eight, the eight gig of RAM. I don’t think it’s an issue. I can’t see anybody who’s getting an ultra getting 128 gig of storage. If they do, they’re just asking for aggravation. If you’re gonna if you’re gonna buy the big, big joy, give him space to play. So

Ray Sidney-Smith 51:57
yeah, it starts at 256 for the plus and the end the ultra so they don’t even give you 128 there Yeah, you gotta go with the big 612 gigabytes of of of memory on the 24 Plus, and the ultra going up to a terabyte on the ultra half, half a terabyte on the plus. So you’re given quite a bit of storage space. Obviously you have the the KNOX cloud they’re calling it Noxon, Citrix. Now, let’s talk a little bit about I’ll actually cover pricing. So pricing, preorder started today, January 17 2024. It’ll be available June 31 2024. And that is across all of the three phones that they announced today. And of course, we’re going up in increments. So the es 23. Fe is coming out at 600. The s 23 is now 700, the s 2424 Plus and ultra 800 1013 $100 starting out, so it gives you lots of good reasons to enter the market. And I feel like for their flagship phones, this makes a lot of sense. And so And

Art Gelwicks 53:03
since we’re talking about things you could keep for seven years now, if you spread that price out, okay, you’re talking if you take an $800 phone, and I can make it run for seven years, well, technically, it’s $100 year phone, now we’ve got a different conversation. Right,

Ray Sidney-Smith 53:18
exactly that that s 24 you’re starting out on the baseline, that’s 800 you can spread that out, it’s 110 ish dollars over the course of that timeframe. So very, very reasonable people to be able to get a really nice phone that works for them. The I’m going to I’m gonna let’s let’s talk about Knox matrix, privacy and security dashboard issues. Because I think that’s for us to kind of circle back to then we could talk about this announcement around Samsung health, because I’m very skeptical. Let’s let’s talk about the KNOX matrix. Oh,

Art Gelwicks 53:56
did you so I’m, I’m a NOx user I have. And just to explain what NOx is. Nox isn’t a separate encrypted partition. I’m not going to do this justice. You can google for the details. But it’s a separate encrypted separate encrypted partition on your phone that allows you to store applications data, whatever and it requires separate authentication on the device to be able to access that now. Knox matrix, if I’m understanding this correctly, takes that encrypted data, synchronizes it to the cloud and then allows it to synchronize down to other devices. So for example, s 23 Ultra that I have and I’ve got an S eight or s eight plus tablet. Right now if I have Knox running on the two devices, if I put something in Knox on one, it’s not available on the other with not Knox matrix. It is. So think about a highly secured, encrypt Did storage that replicates across your devices? That’s really useful that takes Knox to the next level of making it a viable use platform, especially on these mobile things that can disappear that easily. I mean, it’s it’s a very simple thing with something like NOCs, if you take a picture of a receipt, you take a lot of times people like, for example, medical cards, or insurance cards or social security card, you don’t want to leave that in your gallery photo gallery. You don’t want to stored as a file, you don’t want to park it in Google Drive, you don’t want to. So where are you going to put it? Well, if you park it in something like Knox, in the device that you’re keeping, at this point, if you lose that device that’s gone. Because it’s a single device solution, Knox matrix makes it no longer a single device solution allows you to span across your devices. So I think it’s a it’s a good logical growth of how Knox works as a tool and as a platform. And I think, when we talk about these, this could be what kind of finally kicks knocks to the mainstream to get people to start using it and start using it more effectively. Because I really think they should. I mean, it’s a much better solution. I’ve started migrating a lot of the private information that I would park in secure cloud based services over to this, because you see how those secure cloud based services are struggling so much with breaches and things like that. There has never been to my knowledge, and please comment if I’m wrong, but there’s never been a Knox breach that I know of.

Ray Sidney-Smith 56:47
That’s fantastic. And hopefully there won’t be. Because, you know, really, Samsung’s reputation is on the line here as to their capabilities of security on the platform. And I do trust Samsung to be able to make that work. So, so that’s NOx matrix and this whole piece, and it’s just a kind of, unless you wanted to talk about anything else, they talked about Samsung health. And I wanted to close out the show, because they announced a new product, very vaguely. But they they talked about some interesting pieces about utilizing Galaxy AI on and with the Samsung health. And so I’m a former, you know, Galaxy watch where and I, of course, the pixel watch line, because I have a Pixel phone. And so it was interesting to see how Samsung kind of had their flavor of Samsung health. What are your thoughts being a Samsung health user? With these new features? I, I

Art Gelwicks 57:52
use Samsung health every day, all day long. I have it on my watch. I use it constantly. I do things like checking EKG, checking, heart rate, checking stress, water, all the all the things, check all the boxes. So does this help? I like the idea that AI in quotation marks will help with the interpretation and aggregation of that data. I like the fact that they’re talking about doing things like monitoring heart rate while you sleep, because currently it doesn’t do that. And that that’s a really useful thing. And they they brought up the point of sleep apnea and, and stress how much of a thing like yeah, good use good use case, they talked about a medication tracker, a reminder of, oh, that’s fine. That’s an app. And then they brought out this thing called My vitality score. Okay. I appreciate the fact of coming up with something like this, but unless you’re gonna have some really thick transparency on what this score is, how it’s composed, what it’s based out of what it impacts how you react to it, it’s just going to be another made up medical number. So I’m not sure how that’s going to come across. But I highly want to reserve judgment until I see this stuff in place in inaction. Samsung health seems to run just up to the edge of being useful. And then kind of trips over and over and over again, gets brutally close, but it’s not quite there. And they talked about things like booster cards with tips on better health. Okay, guys, you’re just filling in air now. If they are able to start using the AI capabilities in this to provide some better insight and some better learning, then it’s worthwhile, then I think it’s gonna be good. And again, I’m running a galaxy watch for the six has better sensors in it if they continue to build on those sensors, and we start to see new sensor sets for feeding data. And that’s really where all this, this benefits, more data we feed it, the more it has to work with. And then they highlighted the device and turn up the lights.

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:00:14
Yeah, so they announced the Galaxy ring, which is basically a competitor, competitor to the aura, potentially even competitor to the whoop band that some app competitive athletes wear. And so this is a health tracking device, akin to the Apple Watch, or to your Samsung Galaxy, watch four or the pixel watch where it’s tracking health data is tracking metrics. And it’s capable of then feeding that into Samsung health. They gave virtually no information on its round.

Art Gelwicks 1:00:50
It’s round, it’s got a hole in the middle. I was always said, that

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:00:55
was baffled. They don’t tell us when it’s going to be released. They don’t tell us any details about what it’s going to what the what number of sensors are going to be in there, what it’s going to track. I’m, I’m almost, you know, convinced that they have a 5050 chance of putting the product out. Like it could it could happen. So,

Art Gelwicks 1:01:13
so I so I got a question. And in the pre show, I was chatting back and forth with a Gousto. And he goes, Why would you have a ring? If you have a galaxy watch? And it’s a very valid question, if you have the watch. Why? What would the ring provide for you not knowing anything about the sensors that are on the ring or anything like that it’s life anything like that? That’s what we have to find out? What where does the Venn diagram of the watch and the ring intersect? Because remember, with the ring, you can’t have things like oh, I don’t know, a display. There are only certain sensors that you can have available. So Now granted, it’s all the time consistent recording. So there’s a lot more data you can aggregate. And if you can move some of the data capture from the watch to the ring, so that it’s not an duplication, but they’re, they’re compatible. Now you may be able to provide a much better set and I know people who who can’t sleep with a watch on they don’t you know, they don’t do that I do. But I do for the sleep tracking. If I didn’t have to do that, well, maybe that’s not a bad thing. But since we only know it’s a round piece of jewelry, this is all speculation we have no idea timeline or anything else. I think this may be I think it’s gonna come out. And I think maybe 12 People will buy it. And I’m not gonna be one of them. Because I got the other stuff.

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:02:49
I think I think this does this navigates the the very, very small place between non watch wares, right? If you’re, if you’re not a watch where then this solves that problem. And I can very much see this being a solution for those folks that are that are not aura ring, you know, compatible just because they don’t know, or a brand. Samsung is well known, they’re trusted. And it’s going to work, hopefully, both across Android and iOS, just utilizing an app, it’s probably not going to be as strong in terms of data collection. But really, the ring will still capture the data based on the sensors that it has, which means that it can do some really good stuff there. You’re right, there are opportunities where I’d like to take my watch off and go to sleep and wearing the ring for that problem. Also, it means that you know, some mornings I wake up and I have you know, kind of a watch shaped indent in part of my face. Because I will sleep on the wristband or I’ll sleep on the watch face that will drain the battery. And and Google has done really a good job of stopping as actually protects against that for the most part. But I still doesn’t stop me from having you know, sometimes an imprint of a face when I wake up and it takes it takes a little while for that to disappear. So you can’t really roll out of bed into it into a Zoom meeting with a with an imprint on your face. So I think that the ring solves for that problem, especially if you need to charge your watch overnight. Right? So there’s there’s that issue where oh gosh, I didn’t charge the watch, it’s not going to go ahead and capture the data. If you have the ring on, then it solves that problem because it’s going to last you over in that sense.

Art Gelwicks 1:04:38
And I would I would agree with you if it took that long to charge the watch. But thing is you can charge the watch in 45 minutes, not even you can get it back to 50% from almost dead and the time it takes to you know, shower, shave and brush your teeth done move on. So it’s not a difficult reason or it’s not a good act. Do you say, Well, you know, I can’t have it for an extended period of time. Like I said, some people just can’t wear watches. Some people haven’t, you know, there, there is an audience for the thing. I can’t help but think, though that they would be better served, releasing a device like their old Samsung Gear, fitness trackers, then putting in cars that you know, this thing is going to hit like a $299 price point, it probably, you know, I’ll speculate that I don’t know what an aura ring goes for. But I’m sure it’s, it’s in that neck of the woods. So now I got a device that is much easier to lose physically, then a watch, and it is much lower functionality. So I now here’s where I would like to see it do. And this is again, this is me just totally speculating. One, put a temperature sensor. And that actually works to have your O to sensor and three, have your EKG be able to do your EKG reading on it. If you can do those basic ones. Now you’ve got something that makes a lot of sense. Oh, and the one thing that none of them can do yet, when they figure out how to make it measure blood sugar gameover, if they can, if they can make that ring, measure blood sugar, and get FDA approval for it. Yeah, they’ll they’ll sell those things faster, and they can make them because that’s one of the perfect reasons to have it on all the time. Yeah, that’ll be heavier,

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:06:35
that’ll be Galaxy ring version 10,

Unknown Speaker 1:06:37
they can’t, it’s got to be a while,

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:06:40
you’d have to have very big ring to hold the battery to be able to do some of those to be able to power those sensors. That’s,

Art Gelwicks 1:06:48
that’s what I wonder. And again, somebody somebody who either has an aura, I don’t know, if you have an aura ring. I know somebody who actually just got one. So I’m going to talk to her about what her experiences with it. I have never worn one or used one. But I just can’t I can’t help but think it’s such a limited piece. So

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:07:09
yeah, don’t have an aura ring. I have contemplated it many times. But I’ve always felt as though my watch was capturing all the data that I needed to. And it was capturing more limited data, and therefore just didn’t really fit my use case. So but they’re getting better. I mean, the newest or rings are more and I’m hoping the Galaxy ring does well I honestly do, I hope that it does actually start to capture more data, if it can pull an HRV. If it can pull an SPO. Two, at the very least, then you’re given quite a bit of good information. You know, these devices are struggling to do continuous heart rate monitoring out the box, right. So this is this is a real problem, just because of battery life. So if we can figure out the battery problem, then we get a real opportunity to go ahead and expand upon the sensors and the capabilities of those pieces.

Art Gelwicks 1:08:04
So just out of curiosity, here I’m looking at. Let’s see, looking at the patent related to it. Supposed to, yeah, everything we talked about sleep apnea, blood, oxygen changes, maintaining heart rate, those are kind of nice things for for a ring type device. Because you could go if that’s all it’s going to measure, then yeah, it makes perfect sense. And it doesn’t have to be we think about a ring as something you’re wearing all the time. It may be an intermittent, intermittent device, it may be the thing you put on when you go to bed. Exactly, that’s and that does that measuring set, well, now you’ll have the watch to deal with or anything else. It’s like, okay, that may be and then you can let the watch sit in charge overnight. So it may be a very good, complementary device, rather than competing. So let’s

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:09:01
say so I also like complementary in the sense that like, if you get a weird reading on the watch, because there’s a malfunction, the ring can also reading and tell you, Hey, you’re not having a heart attack, you’re just working out. Right. You know, it’s, you know, there have been circumstances where people get weird readings from from a watch. And so having that other device to basically say, hey, no, that’s actually not the case. You know, that can be really, I think, comforting for people, especially, you know, you don’t want to distress somebody, you know that they’re having a medical event, even though it’s not ice telling you that you’re having some kind of medical event when you’re not. So it, I think there’s I think there’s a space here for this.

Art Gelwicks 1:09:38
And the more I think about it, it can actually be an extension set of sensors too. So if we think about for example, if you’re wearing the ring on your right hand, you had the watch on your left hand, well now you have a separation where you can do the body mass calculation without having to stand there with your two fingers on the watch. You can just say measure it, and it can measure it On its own, you can spread out the heart rate measure, and it can, you know, do water calculations, I think because it has an extra set of sensors to work with. And maybe that’s what this becomes, again, is an extension of the sensor set, rather than just a dedicated piece. I’d be curious to see.

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:10:19
Yeah, we’ll only see once they get it out into the world, and we actually see it being used in a large scale population among the 12 people who buy it. So

Art Gelwicks 1:10:30
alright, we’re about that one.

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:10:31
I know I know. We are coming to a close for this commentary on the Samsung Galaxy unpacked January 2024. event. Thank you art for joining us here for my pleasure. Thank you very much. All right, everybody, we are going to close out. As you all know, you can follow us on socials. If you’re inside personal productivity club, you’re where you need to be, feel free to follow along with us there. We’re currently not putting out new episodes on a regular basis. But I think this is kind of fun for a Gousto. And I want to do so when I are available. And these large scale events are happening to kind of poke in and do these special episodes. We’re going to do that for now until we’re able to come back and have enough time to do Anything But Idle justice in a full time perspective. So you can follow us on social you can see the links and so on and so forth in the show notes once those are out, but either way, I want to thank you for listening and watching along for the Anything But Idle productivity news podcast. Until next time, here’s to your productive life.

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

How to Start a New Job With a 30-60-90 Day Plan and the Productivity and Technology News of the Week.

Each week, Ray Sidney-Smith ( https://twominuterule.com) and Augusto Pinaud ( https://productivityvoice.com/) review and provide commentary on the week’s news in the world of personal productivity and related technologies.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://anythingbutidle.com for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you’d like to continue discussing any news from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Start a New Job With a 30-60-90 Day Plan

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Headlines & Show Notes | How to Start a New Job With a 30-60-90 Day Plan

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

Headlines Part A

• Work stress: Strategies to deal with burnout and work-related stress

• How to Better Manage Your Time

• Lab #26: How to Create that Winning Feeling Every Single Day

• The Power of Music: Transforming Mood and Performance

• Productivity Habits Trusted By The World’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs

Headlines, Part B

• Shiny Frog Releases Bear 2.0

• Apple Pulls iOS 16.5.1 and macOS 13.4.1 Rapid Security Response Updates Due to Safari Bug 

• Apple re-releases Rapid Security Response iOS 16.5.1 to patch security exploit

• Apple releases iOS 16.6

• Gmail brings in Calendly-style availability sharing from Google Calendar | TechCrunch

• Google Calendar now allows users to take paid appointments

• Google’s AI-powered notes app is now called NotebookLM, and it’s launching today

• 9to5Google: Google One VPN switching from broad to local IP addresses

• WhatsApp vs. Telegram: Which Is the Better Messaging App?

• First look at the Onyx Boox Tab Mini C

Tool of the Week

• Scrivener for iOS

Featured Story of The Week

• How to Start a New Job With a 30-60-90 Day Plan

Announcements

• Evernote layoffs announced after sale of company; relocates to Europe 

  • Evernote undergoes major layoffs, shifts operations to Europe

• Fifteen Years of OmniFocus for iPhone and the iPhone App Store

  • Celebrating 15 Productive Years of OmniFocus 

• Amazon is going to have a hardware event in September

Notes

• How to Support Employees with Anxiety and Depression | Corporate Wellness | Employee Well-Being

• Jobs will be transformed by A.I. through productivity boost, says Harvard professor Tsedal Neeley

• Open Offices: Collaboration Heaven or Productivity Hell

• What Is Productivity Anxiety? 5 Strategies to Overcome It

• Employers wake up to the power of a staff nap

• How to Manage Performance Issues | Corporate Wellness | Employee Well-Being

• Combat hustle culture before it takes a toll of your work productivity 

• Is your team engaging in productivity theatre? Warning signs and what to do about it 

• Five-minute rest all it takes to kick-start attention

• Harvard psychologist shares 9 toxic phrases ‘gaslighters’ always use—and how to respond

• 10 Things You Should Almost Always Buy Used

• 5 Signs You Are Sabotaging Your Inner Peace

• Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 174 With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements 

• All the Reasons You Might Not Want to Join Threads

• Best Office Monitors 2023: for enhanced productivity 

Raw Text Transcript | How to Start a New Job With a 30-60-90 Day Plan

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).

[read more=”Read the raw text transcript” less=”Close the raw text transcript”]

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00
Hello, hello, personal productivity enthusiast and community Welcome to Anything But Idle. The Productivity news podcast. Today’s show is brought to you by co working space by personal productivity club. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:11
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:13
And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. This is Episode 123, how to start a new job with a 30-60-90 day plan. And we’re recording this on July 24 2023. Each week of this year, I cover the productivity and related technology news headlines of the week. So you know what’s going on in the world of productivity. And so with that, let’s get into our headlines of Augusto. What’s our first story this week,

Augusto Pinaud 0:37
on the first story come from the economic times. And he says strategies to deal with burn out and work related stress. And so it’s a good article talks about the hustle culture talk about things that I don’t do, but I understand and work for people, you know, like said, clear boundaries, I I don’t do that I have never done that I have never understood that part of the work life balance, I havea balance. But at the same time, the article talks about self care. And that’s something that is for me part of that balance. And I’m very clear on that part. And maybe that’s a reason why I’ve been so lucky into not needed, you know, that coming back and forward life balance. But and then in the conclusion, or then it talks a little bit about, you know, a survey from the Society of Human Resources Management that revealed that 89% of employees consider work life balance, an important factor into reducing that burnout. So what do you thought about the article?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:53
Well, as we’ve talked about, many times, in the past, I like the concept of life work integration, as opposed to the term work life balance, life work, and integration, gives me the sense that life is first and work is second. You know, and and then integration is better than balance, because it’s not about work being equal in terms of life. But the fact that we’re integrating our life and work together in a way that works for us. And that’s what creates sustainability and helps to to not just reduce burnout, but alleviate burnout altogether, right, we want to be able to to stop a burnout before it becomes a problem in our in our world, work related stress is necessary. And it’s only a problem when it becomes distress. And so we need to figure out whether categorically or volume wise, we have too much or too many negative stressors. So, again, this article is helpful for you, if you are feeling that sense of overwhelm that sense of, you know, low mood, whatever the things are, that that trigger you to know that you’re under stress, and you know, ways in which you can kind of mitigate that so I thought was really good article that for those who are may may be feeling this pressure at work, this is a good article to review to see maybe what things you might want to put into place to overcome it onto our next Article.

Augusto Pinaud 3:21
Article come from enjoying your mind, and some I was pleased to six minutes really feels a lot longer than that, but it’s called how to better manage your time and it’s from exploring your mind. And, you know, it’s it talks about, you know, a little bit of a journal or a study published on the Journal of Psychology and talks about the positive influence on perception and reduction of his trust and then talks about set clear goals, plan your days pricing, your to do’s and eliminate distractions, use time management techniques, we have talked about them in many podcasts ProductivityCast and others, and delegate whatever is possible. And that was when I started laughing, because normally, he said different kinds of stress, distress that that people need to have, but it doesn’t take to be with the stress you are referring to people cannot delegate it’s usually the people who is stuck with this kind of delegation. And remember, remind me when I start working in David David on getting things done, you know, 20 years ago, and they say delegate and I remember Yeah, the problem is my list is delegated to me and waiting for me to do it didn’t work very well. But now that does change a little on I do you now have access to things like TaskRabbit Sandow things that 20 years ago didn’t exist and they help but the still, for most other people who I feel this article is erected to delegate is most likely not possible. Anyways, they talk about that organize your workspace, it’s a good checklist to go and check what they what they have.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:12
Yeah, now, I will say this about delegation, most people think that they’re not able to delegate work down. But it’s not about always delegating down. Sometimes it’s delegating up. And so many times you have to say to your superiors or to your, to your, whatever, you know, the titles that are equal to you at your level, that, that some of that work needs to be done by them. And this comes to just like an understanding about your work culture, your hierarchy, all of those kinds of things. But if a, if an employer or a manager or supervisor comes to you and just keeps piling on you, going back to the prior article about burnout, right, that’s a recipe for burnout, right? If they keep thinking that you’re the most productive person on the team, and they just keep piling work on you, that’s not fair to you, right. And so you need to be able to, like number seven on the list, say, No, right, learning to say no, but stepping back and saying, Well, if you can do this part of the work, then I can actually focus on the priorities that you gave me yesterday, last week, the week before that I’m working on for this particular project, that’s more important. And then we’re still moving forward. And then I can take on the rest, once I’ve made X, Y, and Z kind of moved forward as well. So sometimes you do need to delegate up and out, in order to be able to do that. The other is in your personal world. I always feel like you know, having kids is, is sometimes helpful, because you can delegate down to the little ones, to do some things that’s that they listen, and I can see your face. But you know, you could delegate down, you can delegate just to a spouse or partner, you can also choose a friend, you know, I’ve talked about this many times, you know, if you have a friend who loves cleaning, and you love doing laundry, you can you can basically task swap, right and so therefore, you can drop off your laundry at his or her place at their place. And then you can go over and they can come over to your place clean, you can do their lawn, whatever, you figure out what’s appropriate for each other. And what you’re willing to do, you know, like, Maybe you love folding laundry, but you really hate washing the load, or you maybe hate folding laundry, yeah, hate folding laundry, but you don’t mind washing the load, maybe I’m just inviting them over. For to watch like, you know, your favorite show you that you and your friend loved watching together, and they’ll be willing to fold the laundry with you or their presence there just a presence helps to make the the, the experience a little bit more pleasurable. So think through these processes of how you can delegate and or task swap, so that you can share responsibilities with people that are not necessarily inside of your, you know, typical family structure, but are in within your sphere. And it can be mutually beneficial, right? Maybe you love grocery shopping, they don’t love grocery shopping. So you can kind of be their Instacart, right, and they could do your laundry and maybe clean your house. And that’s, that’s equal weight to them, right? They they hate it so much. All right, that they’re willing to do these extra things for you, as as replacement for you doing this one thing that’s really difficult for them. So you can kind of barter in essence, these kinds of delegated tasks. So give that some thought and let us know how it works. Onward very,

Augusto Pinaud 8:29
very interesting. Somebody wants to clean my office, let me know I do productivity coaching. Anyway, the next article comes the savannah post, and it’s called How to create a winning feeling every single day. And, you know, the article from this reading is started saying I am a progressive a professional procrastinator, when it comes to writer is this thing that I must want to do. Jet, I seem to never run out of ideas or inventions to distract myself from Guilty as charged. And I think we all have that thing in which it’s something that we really like, and we procrastinate on it and you know, we get it imagine the work work or get things I remember writing. Specifically when somebody asked me how long is the window that you need for right? And I look at this person and said, What do you mean, I want to have at least three hours. And this person started laughing at me in the call. So while you’re laughing and say how many three hours blocks are in their calendar. I said, Well, that’s exactly my whole and what we work was into how to make those writing blogs half an hour and how to make them very effective. So I can Both those into 30 minutes. And that one of the things that when you discovered some of the things that you are a professional procrastinator, you can start getting that winning feeling every day actually say it is about progress. It is about if you think is too big of a problem, collagen is smaller pieces. And if it’s still overwhelming, that piece start too big, because it is the process is what you do consistently, that will give you that success. And I don’t remember when this came probably a couple of years ago around pandemic time. Jeff Segal, who has been in personal productivity club, create a program that was called commit to sit if my memory serves me, well 30 days, okay, and he drives you to meditation. And he drives you to Darwaza commit to sit commit to sit and meditate and start from some short guided meditations to a much longer. And it was a particular time because it was a pandemic time. But that thing was very useful for me to really take my practice of meditation to a different level. And what make it was exactly that I was going to go there, and the minute meditation was already created, and it was already ready to go. And I didn’t need to do or invent or create anything, everything was there. So look for tools like that said, you can specify the process that what is what it is the purpose, and the 15, under sorry, call that I really enjoy. And it was write a failure statement. And we used to create this statements on our mind of how things are going to go wrong, I’m very, very good at those. And the reality is when you write them down, you may discover that, that in your mind is a complete disaster in paper. It’s not that. So that may allows you to continue moving forward.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:23
All right, on to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 12:27
Our next story comes from your story.com and is the power of music, transforming mood, and performance. And I will let you talk because this is a topic and an article that I not only really enjoy, but that I apply consistently. And I want to talk a little bit about it. So I’m going to let you go first, this

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:52
now I thought it was a really interesting article. And I think that anybody who is interested in how your mood and performance is affected by sound should definitely read. And as you know, we still I’ve been a huge fan of brain.fm for many, many years, and I’ve used many other types of I’ve used binaural beats, I’ve used all kinds of different technologies to be able to basically get your brain in particular wave states in order to be productive. And so, you know, this is definitely well within the kind of range of information that I really love. Because it it it’s an area where like you don’t have to really do anything to get get the productivity boost, right, like you just have to hit play and, and listen to music while you’re doing stuff, right. So it’s a really, really cool concept there. But of course, the more you focus on some of these things can also be really useful. So like not being just ambient music playing in the background, but then sitting and focusing on that particular music. Allah say meditating and listening to the sound of, you know, waves or the sound of rain and using that as a focal point for your mind can also be really useful in a lot of ways. So what were your thoughts regarding this whole article?

Augusto Pinaud 14:13
No, no, it’s exactly what you said. And you know, why don’t you just live examples I have said for many years, I do my quick review to batavi Nine symphony and have been doing it for now 20 years. So when the double NINE Symphony start my brain automatically start flicking or switch when review time. And I tell story that is very funny. Somebody knew that I really love Beethoven Ninth Symphony, and I was traveling in Mexico and they invited me to see the Mexican orchestra nine symphony. So we went there and a star and as soon as I started start getting this itch, I get what he needs. What do we suddenly what like, Oh, I’m getting ready for week review, but I haven’t been least appropriate place compiled out or i for i don’t remember it was the technology of the time it came out. And I did the quick review, I say enjoy the live concerts, because that was what the brain wants. That’s the power that it has. I use it, as you said, depending the kind of work, I have music, I have a specific playlist for writing for writing certain kinds of things and playlists for writing others, meditation concentration. So if you believe in this power of music, and I do look into that, and it’s been very fun to teach this to my kids, because they now especially my daughter was older, depending on her mood, you will pay if you pay attention, you will see the kind of music that she’s hearing. And it’s exactly that and for my son, it’s for for sleeping it there is a particular meditation that we use every night. And when we listen to that meditation, he asleep much better than when we don’t. And and what I said much better, is most of the times yeah, no nine words do not end up in our head. So it’s a win win in that case. So read that and if you like, enjoy it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 16:25
Yeah, and just one other point here is, is that the choice of music that you listen to is important. Alright, so this is not just like any, any old music will do. As I said, I listened to break down FM and that’s a specific type of music for for specific productivity purposes. That might be sleep, napping, having focus, those kinds of things. But at the same time, that’s not my personal music. And there have been studies done that show that when you get to choose your own music and listen to your own music, you can have a better and or different expectations of yourself while you’re working. And therefore have that beneficial mood lift beneficial productivity. So just kind of give that some consideration because what it might mean is that you’re listening to your own music, let’s say binaural beats generated underneath the music, that is you’re playing two different types of music in your ears at the same time, that can be out of the same device, it’s just you’re playing the binaural beats underneath the music that’s yours, or you’re listening to this pre created music that may not be yours, and may not also be your style of music, and therefore not may not be, you know, useful for you up tempo music is going to be a little bit more peppy and, and upbeat and happy. So you’re gonna get a little bit more of those feelings, if you listen to a fugue is gonna be a little bit more, you know, slow and kind of melancholy. And so you’re gonna start to feel that those levels of of sadness. So be mindful that, you know, if you really like sad music, and you try to be productive, maybe that’s not going to work for you. So just kind of keeping those things in mind as you as you choose your music selection, and also where you might be working, right. So if you have a coffee shop, and they’re playing music, that’s going to be caustic, because they don’t want you to be there. Right? That’s gonna be very different and difficult for you to work there. If their music is designed to irritate you and make sure that you leave because they want to turn over turn over tables. So and that is something that coffee shops, do cafes will play music that’s that’s a little bit more, you know, frustrating, so that, you know, you’ll you’ll have your coffee and move along as opposed to stay there and working. So just keep that in mind. All right, onward to our final productivity. Focus Article of the week.

Augusto Pinaud 18:41
This is where they they agreed with the article and because the article came from Microsoft from I was saying the pursue passive income and says productivity habits trusted by the world’s most successful and trip annoyed and the first one is get a birdie and let me clarify. I am a big proponent of wake up early. If that works for you. Warren Buffett have haggin das for breakfast every day on Hiplife and k is his breakfast. So if you go for what well would you follow that then it started at 345 in the morning with Tim Cook having Haagen Dazs ice cream, okay, if I have a Haagen Dazs every morning, I will roll to the office again there were no need for me to use a vehicle and but it works great for other people. So what I have said over the years about these articles is now this benefit these people there is people who works great from 11am or 11pm. Sorry, to five in the morning and that Easter time think not necessarily on what is working for Tim Cook on or others but what is working for you okay, When they say, outsource, and delegate, don’t fear, failure, learn to say now, again, all this requires you to build a system, it’s very easy for a person at that level, when they are the CEO of General Motors, the CEO, or the president of MIT, to have a whole system behind already created, they’re not creating the system, they are getting into the system, they may improve it, but they are not most people is not in those conditions. So it’s not that you cannot outsource and delegate. And and you mentioned early today, Instacart, I do Instacart. And when people asked me, he’s about a little bit more expensive, yes, it is a little bit more expensive. But the relationship, a little bit of cost versus me not spending an hour in the groceries is worth it. So things like that, when there is a couple of things that I do with my kids that require me basically to drive three hours around to drop them and then drive back to pick up the kid dropping them different plays. Okay, and when that happened, I get an Uber, okay, because Uber drive me, Okay, we just stopped here, he jump in, keep jump down, we drive, and then those three hours I can be working on the phone or writing or doing whatever I want. So that’s a way to outsource and delegate. But don’t think that unless you are at that level, or do you have built that structure, you’re going to be able to delegate and outsource us, these people do.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:39
Yeah, I just underscoring your statement there, which is that many times, if you are an elite, CEO of some major corporation, you’re dealing with a very different set of resources. And, and so your mileage may vary. So, you know, I think some of the statements here are very generic and useful, you know, just like the prior articles about learning to say no, and so on and so forth. learning to say no, for Jeff Bezos is going to be very different than learning to say no, for you in your corporate environment. So just kind of keeping that in mind, you know, checking the reality factor there, that these these folks are, you know, very well resourced. And, and if you are, well, that’s fantastic. I laud you for being in that space. But for most of us, the rest of us, we’re not quite in that space. And it can be frustrating when we think that oh, well, I should be able to do what these other folks are doing. And that’s not really possible, because they have, you know, umpteen assistants, they have people who are who are working, you know, to make sure they’re every waking moment is productive. So they are doing all of these, this externalized, they’re externalizing, all of this work on to other people. And that’s, that’s what allows them to get up at four 3am Because they can go to bed at 9pm. Because they’re there, they’re sleeping on the plane on the way to Singapore, right? Like it’s they get the opportunity to basically do those kinds of things that we we can’t do, you know, I can’t constantly be in a mode of transportation going to different places, and sleeping in those in those places, and making up for the loss of time by virtual flying across time zones, right. Like there are people who do that, right that that that actually play the time zone game, so that they get more sleep across various time zones as they’re as they’re making their way throughout their workweek. Good for them. But that’s not for everybody. So with that, that ends our headlines and kind of part A of the show. And the first part of the show which our productivity headlines are we’re going to now take a word from our sponsor this week, and then we’ll be back to do the technology articles for this week, we’ll see after the break.

Sponsor Voice Over 23:41
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Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:51
Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith Joined by of course good to pan out for a second half of our show. And so we’re going to talk about Our technology headlines now a Gousto what’s our first technology headline this week,

Augusto Pinaud 25:05
or first one is shiny frog release, Bear 2.0. And I’m not a user of bear, but I know a couple of my friends who swear by this publication, burr is basically a note taking on asteroids, you can do tables, you can do sections that hide footnotes, nested textiles, this Kachin really was, you know, an AI note taken in this an asteroids, you know, on on the way or it’s similar to to the limitations to obsidian or, or Rome or craft or notions. That’s what they tried to do. And they recode beer for the 2.0 version, and it’s now available on the Apple store.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:55
Yeah, I think I think bear came onto onto the market as being an apple focused notetaking application that was very friendly to those who wanted markdown. And so it gives folks who who write in Markdown that capability and they’ve done really well. Still small user base, but I think a very strong product. And I think that, you know, if you are interested in trying out a different notetaking application, check out bear, you know, have they have they released one that goes cross platform? Or is it all still apple? I believe it’s all still Apple

Speaker 2 26:29
things still old? Apple? Yeah, yeah. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:33
just kind of keep that in mind that it is an apple centric product. All right, on to our next technology article Augusto

Augusto Pinaud 26:39
are mixed article is about Apple, and they release product security update, took it down because of about release it again. Well, I think is a great thing that they can pull this rapid security responses, and the first release an issue had, so they pull it out, they release it last week. And then now this week, today, actually, they release Apple, see iOS 16.6 and the equivalent for the Mac and the iOS. And so if you have an Apple device, click the Update button, because there is update waiting free.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:23
Fantastic. Onward.

Augusto Pinaud 27:26
Now our next is Gmail is bringing Calendly like Calendly, it’s an application or service that you can pay and then integrate with your calendar. And then it will tell you, you know what, what availability you have, and they are even going to allow you to take paid appointments, that is one of the things that Kalyn Lee do. So those two news are very interesting for small businesses, especially those who already are in Google, because it will allow them one to use the service to eliminate maybe the extra service and integrate everything in one place. So again, I think this will be very, very interesting. I don’t know if they are already available for everybody. To be honest with you, I don’t know, it

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:23
should be available for almost everyone I’d be I’d be curious if anyone still has not gotten access to it. So just to give you an idea of kind of describing through what’s going to what you’re going to experience. Now when you are in in a Gmail compose window, you are going to see a new drop down menu or you’re going to see an icon that looks like a little calendar icon within the compose window. When you click on the drop down the three dots to give you more options, you’re then going to see an option that basically says create a calendar event, that’s going to be on an email itself. So you’re going to you’re going to basically take the subject of the email. And that’s going to give you the ability to create a calendar event from that particular email. And then, and then the other option will basically pop out a little calendar on the side, you’ll be able to select the times you’re available, and then it will place those into the email. And then you will be able to send that email to folks, when they click on the time they’re also available. It will then create the event and place it into your into both of your calendars. That’s that’s the fluidity of what you’re what you should be experiencing with regard to this particular item. So it’s a it’s a it’s really powerful. I’m I’m I’m really looking forward to seeing more of this come from Google. This is going to this is going to obviously be a huge challenger to Calendly and to many other tools that are like this once hub schedule once all of those various tools that are out there that are that are doing this process. So I mean should be rolling out to me everybody I’m trying to look at to see who doesn’t have it yet. But you’ll, you’ll have it soon enough, it should be rolling out pretty quickly within the systems. But this is this is Google’s goal to centralize power within Gmail and Google Calendar. And they have the power to be able to do so they have the user base to be able to do so. And I’m really pleased to see them doing this, especially the paid option, you know, getting getting this, this whole freelancer, problem solved for people just being right in your email, I think is going to be really great. They currently have the ability within Google workspace. So if you have a business, Google account, where you’re where you have your own email, you know, your name, your business name.com, you know, set up in your system, you have the ability to set up an appointment schedule, so you can share a link, and someone can directly book into your calendar, but it doesn’t integrate with external tools, right, so you have the option of either Google meet or choosing an option later in person, but you don’t have the ability to say I want to integrate with Zoom. And so therefore, you know, every time someone schedules is going to create a zoom link, and put you in a Zoom meeting. So there are some limitations there. In that sense, I hope that as Google moves forward, it gives you those external integration partners so that you can, you can have that capability. Alright, on to our next story Gousto.

Augusto Pinaud 31:21
Our next story is Google’s AI powered Notes app is now called notebook L. M, and it lounge last week. So the app formerly known as tailwind give you you know, more AI model. And you can now use it as notebook help him have you play with notebook LM, or you’re on the waiting list. As I am, I haven’t,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:48
I’m on the waiting list. I’ve not I’ve not gained access to this, I’m not sure who has gained access to this, I thought it was only being released to a very, very small number of, of testers. And but I’m very much looking forward to gaining access to it when it does come out. You know, this is again, in in the long, slow march toward some kind of artificial intelligence baked into every tool in the world, we’re seeing, you know, just different options of this, what we should really call a lot of this is automation, right, we should just call this not artificial intelligence, we should just call this automation. And this is just a new form of automation. There is some intelligence baked into it by machine learning. And, and then of course, a large language model. But this is not artificial intelligence in the way in which we typically think about artificial intelligence. So using AI with it, kind of is cloak and dagger for a lot of this. So this is a mixture of machine learning, natural language processing, and a large language model that allows us to be able to put these these technologies together to be able to use this in a notebook environment. I think this is going to be very powerful. And quite honestly, I’m I’m curious how tools like Evernote and OneNote. And bear for example, notion craft, you name all of them, how they’re really going to be able to challenge a company like Google that has the chops. Sometimes it lacks the the the fortitude to say with these products, right. So that might be the only reason why someone won’t invest in a Google notebook LM because, you know, Google might say in three years, whatever, I’ll get rid of this now. Right? They did that with Google notebook. By the way, Google used to have something called Google notebook. Before Google notebook, LM, there was Google notebook. And it was a notetaking application. And then they killed it. Right. And so it went to the Google graveyard. And so you know, we’ll see what happens here. I think this is a very interesting concept. And and so we’ll, we’ll see what happens again, this is this is using generative AI to basically help you structure your, your process of notetaking. So we’ll see we’ll see what happens. I’m, I’m pretty curious about how this is all going to kind of work together between Bard, you know, which is the the open AI chat GPT equivalent under Google, if you go to bard.google.com. You can you can play with Bard itself. Then you have the built in functions within Google workspace. So if you’re in a Google Doc, you’ll you can sign up and then you will see a little magic pen pencil kind of icon that will hover next to your text, and then you can start using generative AI within that space. And then you know, of course Microsoft has copilot and all these. So we’re seeing lots and lots of different ways in which we’re seeing you know, advanced automation right advanced automation is really what this is as opposed to you know, artificial intelligence so to speak, but the the the advanced automation of all of these various pools is going to keep getting baked into all of the things that we’re touching. So we’re gonna hear about AI for the next four or five years, you know, just new things being implemented in all of these various ways, until they basically like, just settle into the background. And then we just say, hey, it’s a new feature, right? Like, this is a new feature of this particular tool, which is where we should really be, I feel like in the dialog right now, he says, Okay, this is a new feature. But you know, all these new quote unquote, products, like notebook LM, it’s gonna get kicked into something, right? No book, LM is not going to be its own thing forever, it’s just going to become a piece of Google Drive, or it’s going to become a piece of Google Docs, you know, it’s not going to be its own thing forever, it’s gonna get bundled into something. So I’m really curious how and where it ultimately gets stored. Maybe it’s Google Keep, maybe it’ll just get caked into Google Keep in some way, shape, or form, or it will take over? What is Google Keep, right, so we have to kind of keep some thought there in terms of where it’s all going. Okay, on which our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 35:59
In our next story is Google one BPM switching from broad to more local IP addresses. And basically, what they’re trying is to use the IP addresses to instead of being generic United States, more local, nothing. But it’s important. If you’re using VPN, now, you will be able to address your needs more explicitly than before.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:23
Right. So if you are a Google one subscriber, meaning that you have a plan with Google Drive, that gives you access to Google one, Google one has its own, quote, unquote, free, it’s one of the benefits of being a Google one member, which is this VPN tool, you can turn it on on your phone, you can turn it on on your various desktops, and the Google one VPN will then give you a VPN, before it was a much larger geographic region. And now you’re getting the more localized IP addresses so that you’re not getting blocked from things by accident, or, you know, in many cases, your own device is thinking that you’re, you know, somewhere else. And therefore, when he tries to connect to a website, it’ll block you from doing those kinds of things. And, you know, much bigger systems like ExpressVPN, and others, try very hard not for that to happen. And that still happens when you’re using those tools. And you have to kind of like turn off the VPN, access your system and then turn it back on. Google was trying to eliminate that problem, to a great extent, onward to our next story of Gousto.

Augusto Pinaud 37:25
Our next one is what we will call a box. And the title for make use of is WhatsApp versus telegram. Waiting order is better.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:39
These are fighting words against Oh, geez,

Augusto Pinaud 37:43
I know green stone need to admit for our listeners, that he put this article into the theme only because he knew the reaction of his co host. And he needs to admit that he’s been laughing for over a week about this article.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:01
Oh, man. So So I actually didn’t a chance to read through this article because I I didn’t see it. So what did they what did they come up with with as being kind of the better tool? I’m very curious.

Augusto Pinaud 38:16
They come and they have you know, the texting quality. They compare the texting quality in which telegram seems to win your organization as a text messages. They seem to be giving a lot to telegram. The reality is, I like telegram a lot more. And for me, there is a big reason why I like telegram. Okay, Telegram works everywhere. Okay, I use WhatsApp. I have clients, friends who live outside of the United States, where WhatsApp is the main adoption thing. That’s the reality. You know, I I made like, Apple. But the reality is, I am some Venezuela my parents have iPhones because otherwise I don’t do tech support. Otherwise, they will have androids because that’s the common device. Same thing in Mexico, where my in laws are. So what is better or what is worse? It also depends on that and take that into an equation. And I have found that the WhatsApp it’s very, very big among people who have international ties. So if you have tight with people outside of the United States, you tend to use whatsapp more than anything else. When you have more or you’re tight or internal. You tend to use more telegram. That’s what I have found. How scientific that is. I don’t know which one is better. Well, I believe anything outside of metta and Zuckerberg is better. But that’s again, it comes to my personal opinions, not necessarily a technicality even that I use both.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 39:58
Yeah, I will say that my experience As with WhatsApp is not bad. It’s not it’s not a, it’s not something where I feel like I’m ever dealing with, you know, what’s happening in a frustrated sense. The only time that is particularly the case is with WhatsApp on the desktop. Because whatsapp on the desktop, I, I’m not sure what I’m using, I think I’m using the desktop application, I don’t think oh, no, I guess I’m using the PWA. And so I’m not sure actually, if there is a fully fledged WhatsApp desktop application, I’m not sure

Augusto Pinaud 40:33
is there the problem was a PWA is I have more than one device. And then when I tried to use it and disconnect, it works great. You have one phone, one device, as soon as you start adding devices to that equation, it break. And it’s very frustrating for me, therefore, again, I tried to push people to telegram because telegram works great. I can throw any rise, any brand, any system, any model. And that didn’t work.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:02
But and that’s really that’s where I was going with this is that when you install Telegram, whether using the web app, whether you’re using the progressive Progressive Web App, whether you’re using the desktop application, the mobile applications, the iPad app, they all just work seamlessly across all of them. And you get a what I feel like is a richer experience, right? There’s something about the details of the telegram application, their UX is just very, very well done. Everything about it just has these nice features, including the animated emoji, when you respond to emoji, even on the mobile advice on mobile devices. It’s a delight. It’s really just a very, very nice experience for you. So I feel like Telegram for me just wins across the board. I will note that of course, telegrams, security is, uh, you know, supposed to be a little less, you know, than WhatsApp because telegram requires you to activate a separate secret chat. If you want to have end to end encryption. I am not sure how WhatsApp does their encryption, except knowing that they use the signal application protocol as their mechanism mechanism for end to end encryption. But it’s meta. So, you know, I, I don’t know. It’s just one of those things where I have this on on a biased, very, very biased perspective that, you know, really, are they really, really doing it all

Augusto Pinaud 42:25
Yar, I believe firmly the I encrypt in between Mara. And you and Mara and the other person that mean

Raymond Sidney-Smith 42:35
Correct. Correct. Like if you lose your whatsapp credentials, and you need to get back into WhatsApp, true end to end encryption would mean that would break so that they’re holding any of the keys then then it’s not truly e to e. So so that that part always bothers me because I’m like no, that’s not actually true. But But anyway, I don’t know that to be absolutely 100% Sure. So I’m not going to say that but whatever. Anyway, I feel like just across the board I have a better experience with with telegram and I find the video messaging worse the circles as just like just cute it’s just a nice feature about telegram is really nice again I don’t have any major qualms with WhatsApp I’ve always found it to be more limiting but now that they’ve allowed multi device and will tie you know one account having multiple devices you can still use it I don’t use it that much. I use it with all of maybe three or four people again as you said it’s because they’re out of the country or that’s their primary tool so we use it it’s fine but I’m not I’m not bothered too much by it because I’m I’m always in telegram alright on to our next

Augusto Pinaud 43:46
goal and this is the first look at the Onyx Books tab ministry in the ministry is the update of have talked about this device and it’s not shine but it is the Onyx Nova see, and this is basically the update of the Nova see Nova, she has been cobbled in years. It’s a color ink, it’s you know, it’s an interesting device. I bought it because he was eating I needed to replace my Kindle and I thought Great, I can replace my Kindle with colors, skin, it works for what it do. It’s an Android that allows you to install certain applications. It’s going to replace my Kindle ever. It’s not but it’s not processor wise. We have discussed many times in this show and others the processor can compete with the processor on my iPad is not designed for that. That set for the to compete with. I can go he needs um, my experience was a Kindle Fire tablets that the battery didn’t last long, the Sony Reader so I can charge and forget about that thing, charging into forever. But at the same time, I have the ability to install applications that I do not have, at least on the Kindles, readers that I have. So you get the it’s like sitting in the middle, you get some of the capabilities, and the slowness of the fire and tablets. But you get the e reader is the eating experience of the readers. And that’s exactly the reason I liked it. It’s not very powerful. It’s not very big. But he’s has a USBC, you can connect a pen drives as you want to it to have more capability, they offered you a books cloud, that you can store some devices, it comes with a pen, and it works. My only frustration currently is that they announced a tap mini C and they change some of the UI or user interface in this one, and they have not brought it to the last one. So now you get like the iPad or the tablets, you know, the Favorites application on the bottoms, but that you only get on this model, they have not yet brought it back to the old hardware. And I let my frustration with email.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 46:15
All right, with that, we have reached the the end of our technology headlines, or we’re now moving into our new tools of the week. And so with that, each week, as you know, gusten I come across many personal development, time tasks, project management tools, and and services. And so some of them we use some of them we just noticed and they stand out from the pack and therefore we go ahead and select a tool each week to share with you and let you know about them. And so, this week, I am pulling up my tool here to describe it to you hold on one second here. Okay, so we’ll go ahead and talk about Scrivener, then I’ll circle back and talk about plot.

Augusto Pinaud 46:58
So my tool is a Scrivener. In my case for iOS, I’m a writer, I write a books, and I write white papers in a red light or write long articles. And for none of them I have found anything better than Scrivener. I recommend obviously the one on the the iPad because I leave on the iPad, but Scrivener do the Mac as Scrivener do more than the iPad. So they do that they Sorry, I’m looking at it download because of course I know they do windows for sure they do Mac for sure. Yeah, Mac windows on iOS said you can access them wolfed with them on a windows when a Mac on iOS, they synchronize that you can put your files in Dropbox or that way you can open them in multiple devices, you cannot as far as this current release, you cannot work simultaneously more more than one person into the same document. But for organizing things, and moving things around and pieces of content as you are working, I have not found anything best than that. I use a different piece of software for short touristiques like like articles and blog posts. But for longer things, I can speak better things about Scrivener, I have not found anything that do other things that they do is they can compile so you can make it later into an ePub or, or an Amazon books and now that that format is leaving, but you can make them to an ePub or a PDF. So it’s really incredible. I’d recommend it to anybody who said I wish I ever write a book than Lotus Griffin

Raymond Sidney-Smith 48:54
antastic. So what I wanted to do was talk about a tool that’s currently on Kickstarter until like August 16, or something like that August 6 16, something like that. So you have a week or two before it leaves. I think it’s been funded way beyond its needs. But so it’s a tool called plod note like applaud without the first AP so PLA UD but plug note is a physical tool. And it is based on open a eyes whisper and chat GPT functions. So what you are capable of doing is it’s there’s an app connected to it. But it is a physical device that you use. You record your audio and then that recorder that is basically connected to chat JpT is going to go ahead and transcribe and summarize the conversations that you’re having. It’s MagSafe so it can clip right onto your iPhone if you are you if you have an iPhone. And so you get this tool that allows you 30 hours of continuous recording. It’s got 64 gigabytes of storage and the app location, of course comes with the device itself. So if you’re in a lecture, if you’re on a phone call with someone, just toss it on, you know, what do you call it speakerphone. You can take voice memos if you’re, you know, alone by yourself. And you can, you know, generate Mind Maps, you can do all kinds of fun fun things with the plug note itself. Like I said, it’s, it’s a Kickstarter, so I’ve not played with this yet. But I’m really curious about it. And, and I’m curious if any of you will be interested in doing that. It says it can do iPhone call recording that it supports Android as well, I’m not sure how that works. So I’m really curious to see how that kind of comes together. It is a very thin, it’s like, you know, point 117 inches thick. So it’s basically, you know, the thickness of a few credit cards. And so it’s just this device that gives you high quality audio recording with all the noise cancellation built into the AI. So it can clean out the that using Whisper it’s personal. It’s the data itself is encrypted. So you have all you know, encryption on the device, so you’re not going to lose. If you lose it physically, you’re not going to you know, to be be left in a situation. I’m, I’m really curious about it. I’m, I’m interested in seeing how it all works. With a physical product. I like sometimes having a physical product for that kind of thing. I am concerned about its limited use in that sense. So we’ll see what happens when it comes out onto the market. It’s I don’t know the company, the company is Isaac, Isaac, I don’t know something like that. But it is it is raised 600 $700,000 of the $5,000. It was trying to raise as its goal. So it has far exceeded its interest level, the product itself is roughly about 100 bucks, it’s going to be retailed at about $160 USD. But you can grab it right now for $100 comes to three colors. And yeah, and it’s MagSafe, as I said, really, really interesting. You know, thought there, so it can hold up to 480 hours of recording. But of course you can you can record 30 hours on a single charge. So something to kind of consider if you’re if you’re looking for a physical recording device. And you’re kind of interested in playing around with plod, and the app as well as plot AI which does the transcription and connects it to to the chat GBT functionality so it can do more and better things for you. So that is my tool this week. Already Gousto. From there, onward to our announcements who have any announcements?

Augusto Pinaud 52:48
Well, yeah, we have we have the story of the week. That was how to start a new job on 30-60 and 90 day plan. And then we have announcements. But

Raymond Sidney-Smith 52:58
but what story of the weekend then.

Augusto Pinaud 53:01
So story of the week is how to make a new job right 30-60-90 day plan. And you know, there is a lot of things that have happened since pandemic and now that seems like some of the dust is settling people is starting to look into new jobs. And how do you make it right? And this article from life hacker Lindsey go into the details will talk to your hiring manager figured out what is 30? What is 60? What is 90? And, you know, all this is fine and dandy. But most of what this article share may not necessarily apply to our listeners in the sense that the people listen to us, our productivity enthusiast, they most likely will pass over water those 30-60-90 day plan. And one of the things that I was discussing recently with somebody is you need to be careful into getting into the unit job and blowing everybody out of the water because you’re very productive. And the reason is, you would not be you may not be doing it in a mean way. But you are the new one in the house. And people don’t understand Inbox Zero. People don’t understand that you can organize label or do agendas. And I tell a couple of stories. I had a boss once back, you know, in my back into the cubicle and he saw my Outlook open with no emails. And he sure I was on the phone and as soon as I hang up he walked around and scare me What happened to your computer and I’m looking at him like I don’t even know what you’re talking about. You have no emails yet processing. Okay, and he was looking at me like I have two ads on one of them was read Okay, that happened to me. And many years later or some years later, I was in a meeting. And I begin, it was a large meeting. So I begin creating an agenda that I update before this bi weekly meeting. And someday, a very senior person in the organization join the call, and said, I’m so grateful that you update this agenda every week, because it is the first time that I know what is happening. And I’m looking at this guy like, but you’re very senior in the organization, you could have asked somebody to produce this. And these things that are very see and of use for productivity, and to share some productivity people are not necessarily for the rest of the organization. So as you as for your 3060, or 90 plan, take also into consideration, don’t put the jet in full trope, again, to store some little bit less of the power of

Raymond Sidney-Smith 56:02
Yeah, I think it can be, it can be perceived poorly, if you are so much more productive than your peers, and that pressures them to have to do so much more work than is necessary. So I think I think there is a kind of realism there, especially if it’s a huge change to the working order, or the culture of that particular business department, team or otherwise, you know, I’m of the opinion that if there are people who are just kind of skating along and not, and not pulling their weight, that shouldn’t make you slow yourself down to their pace. But I can, I can see where you’re coming from a Gousto, which is that, you know, a little bit of a little bit of competence sometimes goes too far. And so, and that will then not only make you enemies, right, that ends up being a social problem for you within the company, it may also be something that limits your growth, because if your manager thinks they’re more that you’re more competent than them, that can force you to be held down, because they don’t want you to surpass them in a way. So just being mindful of the politics of an environment, I will say that it is helpful to think about the, the way in which you onboard into a new company, and it could be just a new role as well. So, you know, if you change positions, and you’re promoted, was just I think the, the, the unfortunate circumstance of of companies is that, instead of just paying you more for what you’re already good at, they tend to put you in higher and higher positions of authority that pay you more, but make you change from the skills that you’re really good at, right. So they keep putting you up in higher and higher roles that takes you away from what you’re good at, and more what you’re probably not designed to do. And so it can be difficult. And so 30-60-90 days, it gives you an opportunity to be able to figure out what the things are. So 30 days into a new role. If you’re new to the company, you’re you’re learning culture, the roles and responsibilities, technology, onboarding, and such. If you are not new to the company, then you’re still learning in a way what’s required of you within the company. But culture and on technology, onboarding and whatnot are probably not as much of an issue, which means that changes your 3060 90 day plan. So just kind of keep giving that some some thought as you make your way through. The goal then though, for 30-60-90, is to set goals for those 3060 and 90 days, whether or not you share them with your hiring manager, you are going to be setting these goals for yourself. So you know what you’re going to be able to get to, and of course, documenting that so that when you do get to some particular point, you do have the opportunity to sit down with your supervisor, your manager, whoever is whoever’s higher up the new, and having that conversation about what’s working and what’s not working within the role. So that you can both, you know, exist with some form of life work integration, right? If you’re working 1617 hours a day, that’s not tenable, and certainly not sustainable. And you need to figure out why this is happening, and figure out how to overcome those pieces. So it’s a matter of of determining those pieces. And then going on from there. I think 90 is the most difficult part, because there’s a full quarter away from where you started. And so really determining those 90 Day goals is something that perhaps you should talk to a senior person in the company, maybe not your particular supervisor if you don’t feel comfortable with that. But other folks who have been there a long while who maybe share your same role in the company, or at least have been there long enough to know what those roles look like, and asking them, hey, at 90 days, what do you feel like is and what should I be doing in that particular regard? To make sure that I’m on track, you know, to staying safe solidly successful in my role. So just something to kind of kick the tires on, in that sense. Anything else Augusto about the 30-60- 90 day plan when you so

Augusto Pinaud 1:00:10
I think that’s it, so we ever go over announcements. One is, in the last couple of weeks Evernote announced that they are doing some layouts on the company, they are moving to Europe, some employees are planning to move to Europe, some employees decide not to move, and we’re let go. I don’t know if you want to comment, anything additional to that?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:00:38
No, I’ll just I’ll say, I’ll say this, you know, a shock to all of us, you know, to see the US-based Evernote staff, let you know, let go. You know, they were, you know, many, many people I knew. And so it’s just unfortunate, but it’s the way of company purchases, you know, the company bending spoons is based out of Italy. They wanted to centralize their development team and their management, inside bending spoon in Italy, inside Europe. And that’s what they’ve done. So Evernote, the product suite is not changing. I literally just spoke to someone today about some new development on the application itself, and things that they’re trying to move forward with on the roadmap. So that part I’m not fearful about Evernote is going to be around, it’s perfectly fine. A lot of people thought that because of the layoff that it was that it was somehow the end of Evernote and that is not the case, the Evernote, the product suite is just fine. It’s going to keep running and doing what it’s always been doing. This is not like Twitter, or now known as x. You know, this is not a CEO who’s not paying their bills or arguing with people or causing fights in public forums. This is just a company that purchased another and is going through the process of centralizing and creating efficiencies. And so while it’s sad, you know, I feel for the people who are who were let go, they got a great severance package and I hope that they land on their feet. And but otherwise, Evernote is going to continue to grow, continue to put out updates and new features. And we’ll see where things go from there under bending spoons leadership.

Augusto Pinaud 1:02:19
So on our last newsletter was last week, Omni focus rich his 15 years. So happy birthday, Omni focus for iPhone. It was 15 years ago when it was announced on the Apple Store. And there’s an article there from the Omni group and showing you that what you may not remember the original iPhone was original I came in when you see those strings, you want to cry, but that at the time was the edge of technology. So happy birthday OmniFocus. And our last news is he’s been making noise and they have doing something unusual. And the NFL, we are having a hard word event in September. It’s not that they didn’t do it. They do their hardware announcements. They do the echoes on their tablets on their Kindles. But this is the first time that they announced it was that much time. So the rumor of the expectation is that is something fun coming and something big coming. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:03:26
yeah. And it’s funny because they’re there. This is kind of in line with the fact that they launched HQ two, which is in Arlington, Virginia, which is where my company was based for many years. And and so it’s it’s funny to kind of think about all of the really major things happening at Amazon right now. And you know, they haven’t said anything about what they’re going to announce at this event. So it’s kind of interesting. They’re they’re kind of putting a little bit of mystery into all of this by announcing an event so early without telling anyone basically context. And of course, now the rumor mill will start. But you know, still interesting for Amazon to go ahead and do that. All right. And with that, we have covered the productivity and related technology news this week, thanks to Augusto for putting together the show this and every week. And so thank you guys. So we’ll see you next week.

Augusto Pinaud 1:04:17
It is my pleasure. See you next week.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:04:20
All right, everybody on anything but idle.com, you’ll find our show notes of those include links to all the stories we’ve discussed the tools of the week, our extra stories that we couldn’t cover during the episode and text transcripts that you can read and download from the site, or just read directly on the page while you’re listening along. If you’ve looked at the show notes, if there’s something we missed, which can happen, feel free to go ahead and leave a comment you can tweet at us. You can also direct message us using our now x profile at Anything But Idle, Twitter. If you didn’t know rebranded today to be x, I’m not quite sure how we’re going to use that. lexicon now but it’s still tweet I think so. But either way you can post or tweet at us, whatever, it’s still Twitter to me in my head. So our Twitter profile or our X profile is at Anything But Idle, you can use our contact form on the website and use that to be able to go ahead and message us. The best way I think, to interact with Augusto and I is to come to personal productivity club. It is our free digital community for personal productivity enthusiast, and you must be because you’re listening to this show. So we have a group dedicated to Anything But Idle, the podcast, we have a whole section of our podcasts and the different groups for those podcasts. If you go to anything, but idle.com forward slash community, it’ll take you right to a signup page, and you’ll be automatically added to the group when you sign up for personal productivity club. As I said, it’s free, and it’s easy to then interact with us in that space. This is your first time watching the live stream. Welcome, feel free to subscribe to the YouTube channel. And therefore you’ll get notified when we do go live weekly or any of our special shows. If you’re listening to the podcast in your podcast app, and it’s this is your first time feel free to add us by subscribing or following following the instructions inside your favorite podcast app. And that way you’ll get a free download whenever we put out an episode. And with that, we will see you all next time on Anything But Idle. Here’s to your productive life.

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Correction: Ray said “weekly review” at the start of the episode when he actually meant “mid-year review.”

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In this Cast | How to Conduct a Mid-Year Review

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | How to Conduct a Mid-Year Review

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

Reticular activating system (RAS)

The biggest myths about emotions, debunked | Lisa Feldman Barrett

Antifragility

Raw Text Transcript

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

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:18
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I’m Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:22
I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24
I’m Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:26
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. Today, on ProductivityCast, we’re going to be talking about stepping away from getting things done for a bit, so we can review and reflect. And what I mean by that is that we’re halfway through the year. And this is a really good time for us to discuss the mid year review. A mid year review is a practice like any other reflection activity, where we take time to look over our progress, reevaluate our goals, and really recalibrate our personal productivity systems. It’s a moment to pause the back and gain clarity, gain perspective on where we stand in relationship to our aspirations, and how we can make the most of the second half of our calendar year. So let’s talk today about what the [mid-year] review is to each of us on because it may be different. We’ll then talk a little bit about why why someone should do a mid year review. And perhaps why not, I mean, there may be some folks who don’t do it, and therefore giving some perspective there. And then we’ll talk about some of the elements of our own media reviews. And perhaps how you can get started developing your own video review. If you haven’t done one before, we’re just kicking the tires, and making your mid year review better. So let’s talk first about what is a mid year review. I kind of gave a definition in our preamble. But if you want to give some further color to it, what do you think the video review is to you?

Augusto Pinaud 1:53
Okay, we all have, you know, our reticular system activated by the means is our brain is like a scanner. And he’s paying attention to what we what we do what we are down, we want to know what direction we’re taking. If you don’t set that scanner in any direction, well, it doesn’t matter, it will scan something, but is that Samsung? What do you want. One of the things that I believe is important is to track that word did you want to go on it is still something that is valid that is interesting is there is nothing wrong in to change the direction. What is wrong is to in my perspective, is to walk aimlessly and just moving and seeing what is happening. So I have been personally on truck and off truck for both. And in my experience on truck is way more fun. So that’s part of the reason why I conduct this MC gear reviews and why I work with my clients, the clients that I have coached in to do this review and why I believe is very, very important. It is very simple to lose track. But it’s also easy to get back on it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:14
As a sidestep just to clarify for some folks, what Lisa was talking about was the reticular activating system. And so this is a neural network in in our brain, right we have a neural network. And the RAS is responsible for a wide variety of things. And some of those things, of course, are our ability to identify patterns of things. It also regulates our wakefulness, it regulates our ability to basically have a consciousness, motivation, all kinds of other things. It’s also the thing that identifies our fight or flight response or flight flight freeze response. And it’s really how we perceive the world. So a lot of that RAS is activated, those network of neurons are really activated when we’re trying to identify patterns of things. So you know, when we see something that shaped like a lion, moving toward us, whether it’s a lion or not, our RAS kicks in, and we start to respond from a biological perspective, right, we prepare for fight or flight, because of our mind, surfacing those stimuli, we get activated for preparation for whatever that thing is. So just want to make sure folks are kind of on the same page when when we talk about the RAS,

Art Gelwicks 4:22
the mid year review, in my estimation is one of those things that becomes a necessary evil for many people because that they get so involved in the work and doing the work, that they haven’t got a running time period, they may not even do weekly reviews of going through and determining where they stand and where things are. I also think it’s a bigger review though. It’s the it’s the review that determines Are you on course, it’s not for minor course adjustments, but is your destination the correct destination. So for me, it’s always a matter of not only of determining Are you making progress on the goals that you’ve set Get out. But it’s an opportunity to say, okay, based on where the world stands right now, where my world stands right now, are those the right goals? Are those the opportunities that I want to be pursuing are those the objectives that I need to have at this point in time. That’s not something you want to do on a weekly basis, because you’ll never get out of the analysis mode. But this is very much in my mind, the opportunity to do a strategic analysis of what your goals and objectives are.

Francis Wade 5:30
And I’d be the contrarian here, or the devil’s advocate. For a change,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:36
surprise, surprise,

Art Gelwicks 5:39
that’s my job.

Francis Wade 5:40
I’m taking art putting on our chat for a while, I don’t do a video review. And I know that the logical that I should do one. But here’s why. I have three kinds of interests in the in our business. And we cover three web three conferences per year, one in productivity, the other one in strategy and another one in Caribbean HR. And they they go from March, March, June, and September. And we have our strategic plan for each one. And we gotten into the practice of updating the strategic plan after each conference. So we’re, we don’t quite review them because they don’t follow the calendar. But we do three rounds of strategic planning each year, to focus on each business. Invariably, for example, the strategic planning conference is coming up this week, probably next week, or the week after, we’ll do a review, or we’ll do a new plan for the next year. But we’ll also review the other plans. So we don’t really have a media review. receipts, not a not, not the way that you traditionally think of it, we we do forward planning for each each of the three businesses, so to speak, or interests. And in that we tend to cover the wall cannibal overlook, look over the wall, all three are doing. So not really. But in a way, I guess something similar gets done. This doesn’t follow the calendar, that’s for sure,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:21
I’ll offer a different perspective here, which is not counter to what Francis is talking about. But more from, from my perspective, I am a natural planner. So I could plan all the time, all the all the ways and do nothing, right? That would be my natural state of being. And I recognize that very early on in my life. And I realized that I just love planning, I love the idea of pulling out a Gantt chart, I love sitting down with a mind map and just planning all day long. And that’s not how things get done, right. So you have to step away from that planning activity or, or, if you’re like me, you have to step away from that to be able to get things done. But that also means that you need to reward yourself for doing the things. And for me having these reviews, both the weekly review and larger reviews gives me the opportunity to it’s kind of a reward for doing the work, because my natural desire is to actually just do the planning, right, I want to do the planning, and I want to hand it off to somebody else to be like, You go handle those details, right. But because I’ve done the work, now I get to sit back and actually do the planning. And that’s my reward. So the mid year review specifically, is typically if I’m having a good year, and things are going the way they should be. And then the media review is is really this rewarding space. For me. It’s a place where I can enjoy the fruits of what I’ve worked on. And so often, those of you who are listening, don’t give yourself enough credit for the work that you’re doing. And we need to step back and just give ourselves a little bit of credit for what we’re doing. And I feel like the midterm review is one of those things like throw yourself a little party and have a great time with it because you’ve worked hard for six months. And I know you’re working hard. And if you aren’t working hard, this is a really good opportunity to kind of set yourself up for the next six months to work really hard so that you when you get to the next mid year review or the end of your review so to speak, you can you can celebrate, right this gives you that anchor in the sand to be able to to know that you’ve had a chunk of time, whether you’re following the 12 week year and you’re going based on those kinds of sprints, or you’re doing some larger sprints like I am I do I do pretty much the the 12 week 13 week year kind of concept. I call them sprints and I like those kinds of reviews where I’m I have that timeframe set aside to basically pause, reflect, appreciate the work that I’ve done and planned for the future. The mid year review is that next level of of celebration in a way it’s a milestone for me and my year and it really does help me as a plant Enter, sit back and feel good in some way, shape or form, it’s actually a, it’s a, it’s a rewarding practice for me. And it may be for you as well. Let’s talk about why different than Francis, where you have a cadence, where you’re where your year is structured in such a way that allows you to plan along the way, why should someone do a mid year review? Why should someone not do a mid year review. And I will start off with the with the primary type of person who probably doesn’t need a mid year review. And those are folks who have highly structured calendar years. And so this ends up being something where you have a structured set of reviews that are that are forced upon you. And therefore adding another personal review may be just a little bit too much. If you are doing quarterly reviews. And in essence, your mid year review falls on obviously a quarter, you’re just basically doing double the work. So if you feel comfortable with the fact that your quarterly review is basically standing in for your mid year review, then you don’t need to do a separate mid year review from the quarterly review, necessarily, right. And that’s going to differ per person. So you know, your results may vary here, but I just don’t think that I have clients who will come and say, Okay, well, I’ve done my Quarterly Review, now I’m going to do my video review. And I feel like this should be one in the same, I don’t feel like you should try to force yourself to do just a quarter and then also a mid year at the same time. That is you can do them at the same time, you can just bring those together. For folks where this may be overwhelming that you’re looking at too much material at once. This can, this can be something that’s just very overwhelming to the system. And therefore you would avoid it and therefore not do as well a review that may be a problem for some folks. So you may want to break that review up into into separate constituent parts by life domain, so that it’s not as onerous for you as as as it as it can be.

Francis Wade 12:02
But for the ones that I do, it’s it’s, well, as I said, don’t quite do them. But But whenever I sit down to do a, I wouldn’t call it a review. And I think this is one of the things that I I recommend to people when they when that comes out of there come from GTD and come from the world of doing a weekly review and have that as their background. There is no planning step in the weekly review, which is to me is a huge, huge missing. The point of sitting down is not just to look back, it’s to look forward. So a big part of the review, so to speak, is to readjust, make new plans, set new targets, incorporate lessons learned into what you’re doing going forward. And to me that’s the point is what’s coming next The point is not what just happened. The main point is what’s coming next. So the orientation really is towards what do I need to fix, change, adjust. Add in takeouts where my were my goals are unrealistic. Where do they need to be? Or where were they not ambitious enough where they need to scale up? So it’s a it’s a phase change, you’re looking to see do I do I make a phase change at this point, based on my understanding of where I am, versus where I thought I wanted to be or where I wanted to be. So for me, it’s looking forward, that’s a huge part of the activity. And for me,

Art Gelwicks 13:36
situations change. And a lot of times the change is not under your control. It’s an external influence that has come into the equation. And the major media review is the opportunity to look at those changes that affect multiple parts of whatever you’re doing. A lot of times we’ll be looking at, okay, how does this affect this project? How does this affect that project? But it could be how does this affect me as a whole? How does this affect my availability? My my approach to my work? Could it be that significant of a change. And when you’re dealing with things at that altitude, it’s sometimes it’s difficult to look at them, or to not look at them at the individual project level, because then you start to solve the problem right away. I think mid year review is one of those opportunities to not solve problems, but identify problems to to recognize, as you mentioned earlier, recognize the successful things that you’ve done and say can I do them again? Can I reproduce this or improve my other operations? But even more so to be able to go through and say, Okay, this is a potential issue. Maybe this is an issue that is coming, rather than has already been here. And now it’s starting to show up on the horizon. If you wait to a yearly review, to address those kinds of things. That’s often too late. You have not given yourself the opportunity to do Gaston, I always have this mental image of the captain of the Titanic. The equivalency of that yearly review would be seeing the iceberg and actually being able to avoid it. So knowing that you have an opportunity to say, oh, there’s an iceberg, maybe we should change direction, rather than waiting until it’s too late. And sometimes there aren’t. And you go through and you have that validation to say, yep, everything’s on course. Everything’s headed the direction it should be. I’m making the progress I should be, all’s right with the world and continue on. But this is this is that checkpoint? And I don’t think we do ourselves a favor, by not having, at a minimum this mid year. But having frequent checkpoints to say, okay, am I on target, get your head out of the work and look around and make sure you’re driving in the right direction.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:57
One thing that I think comes up as a thought, from what you’re talking about art is the importance of making decisions from a place of call it abundance from a place of calm and collected temperament. The reality is, is that when you come across a problem, like what you’re talking about, right, like something’s off course, there’s an iceberg, and you’re, you know, you’re very close to it. Maybe you know, the impact is imminent, setting aside some, like safe space for yourself, to think that through like, in the right circumstance, where there wasn’t this problem, how would I respond? If I had all the resources in the world? How would I respond, and then kind of working toward reality, as opposed to being in that? Oh, my gosh, I’ve got the last dollar in the bank, what do I do now? Right? The, that’s not the best place to make decisions from, right. And it kind of goes back to my, whenever I have a new business that I’m dealing with, I always educate the small business owner, that they should get a home equity line, they should get a credit line with their bank, they should do all of the stuff for getting good credit available, when they don’t need it, right? Because that’s when your credit score is going to be your best. It’s when the business doesn’t have any debt. It’s when the business is got the mess, most energy, right, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re starting your business, you’re excited, everybody is excited about the business, then you set that line of credit aside, right, and you have it for a rainy day. Right. That’s why you you do this stuff up front. And that’s the kind of expansive abundance position that you want to be in when you’re doing your mid year review. And I feel like that’s the kind of space and place where you want to make good decisions so that when stuff hits the fan, you’re able to step back and say, You know what, I had a plan in place. Right? And this is that was the ideal, right? Now, let’s work from that ideal to what is reality. But we’re making better decisions, because we’re not looking at it purely from crisis mode. And the bottom of the barrel, right? We’re looking at it from some some better perspective, some some better positioning,

Augusto Pinaud 18:02
really was was was what you said, I think that’s what it needs. If you think right now, okay, we’re going to be driving from the south to the north of your country, doesn’t matter. What is your country? Okay? Unless you will have done that drive every week. Do you need a map? Do you need to check? Hey, are we really interactive? We missed the exit. And it’s exactly the same thing you asked. Francis was saying, okay, hey, we drive this in this order. So we always drive in this order that may require a different Chuck, but I instead maybe have been every six months, probably what happened on what was Francis was describing is that at the end of every of this conference comes an evaluation period, what we did, right, why we did wrong, what we need to change or evolve for the next one, and what we can add for the next one. So it’s not that he’s not doing the review is doing a review in a different way. In this case, in the case of the people who should do this review, as you were saying, Ray, you do it every 12 week for 12 weeks, that works perfectly fine. Okay, that you go every quarter. That’s what 13 weeks is, in case you’re not aware of that is every 13 weeks, it’s a quarter that works fine. If you think on corporations, many corporations go and do that quarterly review where we are. What we tend not to do is to do it in our personal life. And because of that, sometimes we make big things that change. So my kids, I have two little kids still so they just finished school. And well. Can we go business usual? Technically yes. Except that my daughter is now going to high school. My son, it’s going now to fifth grade. That Technically for us is the same. But for him, it’s not now he’s going to be treated as a bigger kid. He’s going to get a Chromebook that he needs to be responsible. He and ultimately, I will be responsible. Let’s be honest. So that means great. Is his backpack. Okay to carry a Chromebook? And the answer is no by well, because his backpack to keep backpack? So do we need to consider those things or as hardware sitting or wait until that iceberg hit us again, and we need to use the insurance write a check for the new Chromebook, whatever it is, either way, is fine. I, I always said you don’t do productivity for the press and you. You do productivity for the future. You you do all these reviews, not for the new right now that you’re in right now is where it is. You are doing these six months review? What are the review? For that future self? What can you do today, evaluate today, and review today that will make the life of that future do better, or easier, or more complete. And data for me is the recent of these reviews, doesn’t matter if you do them mid year, or you do them every quarter, this thing is you need at some point to disconnect. Okay, go to somewhere that is not your office and look into all these aspects forward. Because if you don’t, then you’re always on reactive mode, you’re always responding to fire, you’re always responding to the emergencies instead of work into avoiding them to happen. And that, for me is a big power of all these things.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:02
Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to sit down and watch a few YouTube videos that were in my watch later list. And it’s voluminous, I don’t consider it an injury, I just collect them in there and watch the whenever I have time. And one of the things that I came across was this interesting video, and I’ll put it I’ll put this in the show notes. If I if I find it. The idea was it was talking about emotions and some of the myths about emotions. And one of the key elements that came out of this particular psychologists perspective was that a we curate the present moment, for our ability to have future emotions that resonate with us in a positive way, I may be mischaracterizing her in just a little bit. But the essence of what I got from it was that, you know, our, our history, or maybe childhood trauma, our childhood experiences, our the relations that we had, as as children, those inform our current and present day emotional landscape. And we can change that by virtue of the by the present moment for our future self. And so we have to consistently think about how we keep well how we curate the present moment, how we curate our present emotional life, so that our future emotional life is better, we would hope and what Augusto is talking about here really touches on that that point a lot, which is that we are benefiting our future self by by basically taking this time now to birth this, this future reality, right, we don’t have very much control over the future. We have control maybe over the next few minutes of our lives. And we what we do in the next few minutes determines what happens in the next few hours. And the next few days, the next few months, and the next few years. So what can we do right now to curate a good life. Right, the good life so to speak, in and for the future. And I think I think that really is an important note here to make when we think about something like a media review. Alright, let’s talk about how we might manifest our media reviews or how what elements of our own media reviews are really key or core components of it.

Francis Wade 24:09
I want my media reviews to be like a my weekly cup of coffee. My my most productive Fun Day is at my desk. Our Saturdays when I have my weepy cup. And as a non coffee drinker and apparently I’m and I’m sensitive to coffee eight. By virtue of that, we want to have that cup. I can work until about 8:30pm 9pm and not feel a thing. You know, I could I could just go go go might take a little nap during the day but I you know, it’s a long day, but it doesn’t feel like feels great. As someone who likes to accomplish a whole lot. I like the feeling of getting a lot accomplished because I’m focused. I don’t have interruptions. The copy goes whatever it does, and I feel good all day. I write up the teleport where I hit the hit the sack, I’m feeling like, wow, that was a great day, I would want my weekly review to be like that. It’s not, it’s not the word review kind of puts me to sleep a little bit. For me, it will be more of an acceleration, my semi annual review. But my my review had wanted to be like a, like a cup of coffee in the sense that it accelerates the rest of the year. So I’m not doing it for the review, I’m doing it for the acceleration, the Jumpstart. So I would, I would, if I were to do one on a regular basis, I would rename it the the acceleration meeting or the the propeller meeting or something that would give me you know, indicate that really what I’m looking for is what Augustus talked about, which is, I’m looking to bring something into the future that if I don’t have this meeting that I couldn’t bring, so part of that includes the review, but the review is not the point. Hence, my wanting to rename it to something more, more, more accurate or more compelling in terms of the actual outcome, because you could really, you know, you could very well review the the last six months and come away with nothing except either a feeling of accomplishment, a feeling of failure, you could just stop in a review and stop if you thought that was the point. But I prefer to think of the point as this next level of accomplishment, this is exciting, something that’s about to start. And the six month, six months review is kind of like the what is kind of like the point where this second start, second half of the year starts. And where I bring all this new stuff into it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:46
I think terminology for purposes of it being both motivating and exciting is important. I think that you know if you need to call it the. So I’ve I have a dear friend who she didn’t like the term weekly review. And so she just calls it the weekly view. Right. And so she she wants to look ahead, and so she calls it the weekly view, I think I think that makes a lot of sense. And so if you want to call this your mid year planning session, you know, mid year acceleration session, whatever you want to call it, I think that makes a lot of sense to make it what you want. Now, of course, I consider any review something that is looking at the past in order to inform my future, I embrace the term review. That doesn’t mean that you do and that’s okay. So I very much hear what Francis is talking about, name it, whatever you need to name it, in order for you to know that it’s the right thing for you.

Augusto Pinaud 27:34
What is important is that it’s done, not what you call it, I agree,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:38
what are some other core elements of the Week, the weekly, the mid year review, and we can we can go from there. So I’ll I’ll just name some of the big elements. For me. I always try to make sure that my my video review contains some level of a goals evaluation. And so I want to look at each of the goals and determine that the goals are still the goals that they should be. So just thinking through, what are the goals that I have set out for this year? Or the next few years, right? Because I’m looking at it on a higher horizon here when we’re talking about goals. But then I’m looking at my projects, and those are going to be within the year to two years. And so I’m looking at both my projects and my goals. And I’m just doing that kind of kicking the tires on touching base with each of these things, do they need to be changed? Right? Do I need to reevaluate whether or not I’m going to reach one of those goals? And something that I’m not as good at? And I would like to get better at is not? When I when I reevaluate those goals to communicate that to stakeholders, right? It’s just making sure that folks know that I’ve, I’ve re evaluated, I’ve chosen not to do it. And many times, I’m not sharing that with other people, or whatever that might be, you know, just feelings of, of not being as productive as I want it to be in that particular year, or whatever it might be. And I’ll just like set it aside. And I think it’s better for us to just like in a good GTD practice for those of you who are GTD practitioners, right? It’s your need to renegotiate and then communicate, right? So you need to make sure that if you’re going to renegotiate a commitment that you’re going to let people know about that. I think that happens on the higher horizons as well happening on the projects. And the bowls level, I think really does help, especially if you have a spouse or partner, and you want to make sure that they’re on the same page as it relates to like, Okay, you gotta buy the house next year. And then you decided, well, no, I’m not going to, that’s probably something you should talk about with your spouse or partner, if you’ve made that internal decision, and you haven’t quite shared. So things of that nature. I like to look at performance metrics. And so these performance metrics can be as simple or as complex as you’d like them to be. I take things like the number of captures that I since I can actually track the number of captures I make throughout the year. I then track how many actions I complete. And while those are not the same thing, right? The number of things that come in, many of those get deleted, but the number of actions I complete are also a unit EAC metric. And so I look at those in comparison. So if I’m capturing 100 things a week, and I’m completing 15 to 20 of those next actions on my list, is that the right balance, and then I can look at that kind of on a broader level, on the mid year level, that semi annual review, I can say, Okay, well, I’ve collected 3000 items in the course of six months, that’s not unusual for me, I’m capturing throughout the day, and I’ve completed roughly about six or 700 next actions than I can, I can understand that I’m on track, like, that’s a good, that’s a good ratio for me to know that I’m moving toward the things that need to get done in my world, even not knowing the substance of the items, just the numbers can tell me that I’m on track. And that’s, that’s an important thing for me, you need to figure out what that is for you. Right? It could be the number of projects completed, it could be the number of events that you’ve hosted, or the number of meetings that you’ve attended, or reducing that number of meetings you’ve attended, which will then increase your discretionary time, and therefore, your productivity, right, like we need to, we need to understand some of these numbers. And we have the data now we have what it’s like all there, you know, unless you are completely bullet journaling on paper, and you keep a calendar in the bullet journal, and you have no data whatsoever, somebody else probably has that data systems about you. And therefore you could probably get that data and understand yourself better. So some level of performance metrics can be really useful. This is not all of them. But I’ll close on my whole section with just it’s, this is a really good time. Just like how David Allen talks about in your weekly review, this is a time to to look at your various tools and make sure they’re in good working order, I have a tendency to not do that during my weekly review, because I think it’s just too often that you’re that you’re tweaking and trying to play around with your different tools. And so I like to do during my semi annual review, or the mid year review, is this notion of looking at my systems, my daily routine and my tools and spending that time to hone them, right, like, Okay, I have this new webcam, and it’s just I’m constantly frustrated by a couple things about it, right? So how do I, how do I optimize my usage of it, you know, like, Okay, I need to make sure that I maybe get another webcam, or maybe I just need to do some tweaking of this webcam so that it’s consistently in the right place, and whatever, I need to maybe learn how to use the webcam better, right? Those, there’s a lot of moving parts to this webcam. And so I just need to learn how to how to learn, you know, this becomes a project, right, I’m gonna capture that, and it’s going to become a project, learn how to use the webcam better. And now now that I knew all the features, now my system is going to be better, because I’m going to be more, I’m going to be less fragile, right, I’m going to be more anti fragile when it comes to operating the webcam in the heat of my day. And so these are the times where we can look at it and say, you know, what, actually, I’ve been, you know, trying to, you know, do these things in my morning routine, and they just don’t flow together, how can I just swap a few things around so that I do them in a better order, and therefore it creates a little less friction for me, and a little less friction, maybe for spouse, partner, the dog, cat, whatever. And so everybody can kind of have a more, you know, fluid day, because, you know, those kinds of just changing, like when you brush your teeth in the morning can be a huge change to your routine, but it can also be a huge benefit. Because it’s like, okay, you’re taking that, you know, five, six minutes in the bathroom, when your spouse is actually trying to go to the bathroom. And so, you know, it’s like, okay, well, if I just move it to a different time, then that person is not frustrated that much in the morning, and little things like that can actually like save a marriage. So, you know, like, think think through these, these these moments, and figure out what you can do to change just little things in your daily routine that can actually give you a great deal of reward. Right? It may be that, you know, like you brush your teeth before you kiss your spouse in the morning. And like little things like that, that can just be a huge, you know, like you think you don’t think about those things, because you’re just trying to get things done. But a little bit of foresight really goes a long way. So I feel like this is this is the time to think about those things. Because you can say you know what, you know, so and so just complains all the time about x and y, you know that I leave the rubbish, you know, bag by the side of the door in the evenings. You know what I could take that out before I go to bed as opposed to right before the garbage people come? And that’s going to make the spouse or partner that means happier that the rubbish isn’t sitting there overnight. Right? Who cares? Whether it is or not, right? It’s about the fact that you care about your spouse, spouse or partner not being frustrated by this tiny element. And of course you could change it right? So unless there’s a really good reason for you not doing it, like the raccoons get it every day every night, you know, you know, like maybe then you get a garbage can you put it in the garbage can, you know, like, you can figure these things out, but this is the time to think about it right. All the things frustrate you and frustrate the people around you. cuz of the way you live, your idiosyncrasies really affect the bolts, right? And, and so this is the time to really improve those things. And it makes your life easier when other people like being around you. So just something to think about.

Art Gelwicks 35:15
I think this is one of those opportunities when you’re looking at your medeor view to decide things to kill off. That’s something we don’t typically give ourselves permission to do. We’ll commit to things, we’ll put something on our roadmap, and we let it linger. We hope it’ll go away on its own. But there are certain times you just need to say, look, this is not going to happen, I’m not going to do this situation has changed. This is that, that chance to say, look, I’m going to start pruning this list down. And if you want to use that analogy, think about it like a hedge or a tree or something, you’re going to go out and you’re going to prune it. Why do you do that? Well, one, it makes prettier, but two, it’s for the health of that thing. And it’s the same thing here, these lingering items, these lingering projects that you have, for some reason decided are no longer going to be part of your mix, need to be pruned off, or else No, you will impact your overall mental health, and the health of your other projects that are going on. I think

Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:11
it’s really important to do, and set aside time, whether that be at the beginning or at the end of your media review for basically, pure reflection. And this can be expansive, creative thinking, and just gives you the the opportunity to capture new things. I have a frequent phrase that I use with people, I don’t typically say it to their face, but I think it when they say it, which is that when they’re like, Oh, I’m bored, I always think that’s because you’re boring. And while it’s not the nicest thing to think it is just a reality, which is that you have been given the opportunity to live in this day and time, and you have all the opportunities available to you in and on the planet. Especially if you’re listening to this podcast, right? You’re you’re you’re really given a great opportunity to just live a verdant life, you know, like plant the seeds and, and do do the work and cultivate a life that’s worth living. So if you are bored, that’s you’re not trying hard enough, right? There are so many things to do in the world and on the planet today. And so take them into your review, and capture those things. Like this is the time to think you know, like, if you want to take up a new hobby, if you want to be able to do a thing, there are so many things that you can do, you can fill your time, I know I can, I can fill my time all day with everything but work, right? So there are so many interesting things in the world. I’m constantly fascinated by those things. And so during my semi annual review, I get that opportunity to capture those things. And while I may never do them, right, they they’re all going on to that maybe list. The goal is to be able to figure out when you want something new to do you want to have a little bit of, of spice in your life, this is the time to go to that list and look at those things and excise them and see whether or not that’s something that you could you could do. Case in point I have recently decided that I am in like a little bit of a fitness kick in my life right now. And I’ve always been fit, but I you know, I’ve just taken it up a notch. But at the same time, I also recognize that at some point in my life, I will want to do things that are a little bit more sedentary. So I’ve decided to take up birding and birdwatching is the easiest sport in the planet. Just literally just park yourself somewhere and stare. And so, you know, there’s all kinds of things that birders do. And I’m sure there’s some people who listening that are that are up in arms right now, you know, with all the various you know, they hike and they do great good on you. But for me birding will be finding a spot and parking myself there. And, and just watching what nature brings to me. And the and so, you know, I’ve been I’ve been in this process of learning about birding not because I’m going to be doing it immediately. But because over the next, you know, probably 1015 years, I will spend more and more time traveling and doing more in nature, and I want to be able to be prepared for that. And so, you know, a semi annual review is really the right time for you to be able to to start thinking through, well, what does the next few years of my life look like? What did the next, you know, maybe five or 10 years gonna look like? And what can I do now? That can be interesting, that’s going to set me up for that type of success. Right? And so I got all the equipment, I got the books, you know, I got all the bonds, you know, book of all the North American birds, you know, and now it’s a challenge for me to go ahead and start, you know, checking off the birds I’ve already seen in life, you know, the common ones, and then thinking through Well, what are the birds that I want to go see and where are they located? Right, and what time of year are they going to be there and what I want to travel to that area in order to see them, right. This gives me a little bit of structure to my year now because I’m like, Okay, well, you know what, I want to be there in October. Wilbur, I want to be there in January, I want to, I want to think about where I want to be traveling. So I can see these particular species, there’s something really positive about being able to have something to look forward to. That’s not It’s not grand. But it’s certainly not boring. And so you know, don’t be bored. Because it really doesn’t make you boring. It makes you less, you know, it makes you less desirous to be around. And I think this is something just to, like, do in any review, whatever it might be, is to think through your levels of gratitude to things. What are you grateful for in life right now. And I think it’s a good way to, to end any session to close a particular session, is to just think through what what are you grateful for? What do you appreciate in in about your life, and this is, again, that curating your emotional world for the future. If you think gratitude today, you will have greater emotional regulation tomorrow and the next day and the next day. So really think about what you’re grateful for. And you’d be surprised force yourself to do this, like you really think through like, I want to write down 10 things I’m grateful for, at the end of a semiannual review, you’d be surprised at the number of things that you can come up with, that could be very simple, or they could be much larger items. If you do this practice on a semi regular basis, you will feel better about the things you have versus the things that you don’t. And if you can want more of what you have and less of what you don’t, you’re just going to be happier in life. And I’m by no means a minimalist. So I’m not talking about this from a physical goods perspective. But I really mean it from a perspective of just wanting what you have in life and being happy about it, because you never know when you’re not going to have it anymore. And that loss aversion will really increase your eudaimonia. And so I could just leave you all with that, with that thought

Francis Wade 41:49
Bond valuable to think in terms of projects, and wherever possible to productize. Commitment, like the one one that you just mentioned to the bird watching, you know, my wife and I have a similar one. No, we both picked up Duolingo. We talked about on a previous episode, there were both Duolingo ing. But so it kind of wasn’t started off as a bit of a lark to kind of see what this thing was like. But now we actually have a project, we hope to go to Panama in October. No, it may or may not happen for whatever reason, but it’s at least a project. You know, so both of us are sticking to it because we don’t want to get there and embarrass ourselves we think so you know, it puts some skin in the game and makes a commitment real. So that’s very different than just doing a bunch of Duolingo never ending and just kind of having an unreal project around it does add a certain level of urgency and accountability and gives you a structure and gives you a due date to get things done by when I used to do triathlons, it was the same it was a tremendous forcing function did the same did the same job. They mean, wherever, wherever possible, turn the thing into a project with it, which has to do data as some kind of event which is, I guess what our conferences are for us in our business at the free conferences I mentioned earlier, they cap a year of activity, so to speak. But it comes to a definite sort of a hit as a summit. But it comes to a definite kind of endpoint or a point of accomplishment where something either will happen or won’t happen. And that clarifies everything that comes before it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 43:41
This has been a great conversation. Thank you, gentlemen, we always have to think about how the world works around us. And the media review is a really good time for us to be able to do that. It’s just think about the world around us as opposed to being in the moment and living in the world. We can kind of take that view and look at it from a little bit from the outside and help make it just better, you know paving a better path for ourselves, or at least filling in the potholes. While we are at the end of our discussion. The conversation doesn’t stop here. If you have a question or comment about what we’ve discussed during this cast, please visit our episode page on productivity cast dotnet there on the podcast website at the bottom of the page. Feel free to leave a comment or question. We read and respond to comments and questions there. as well. You’re invited to join our listeners group inside personal productivity club, a digital community for personal productivity enthusiast that I host where you can interact with V ProductivityCast team directly to join for free visit ProductivityCast dotnet forward slash community and you can get started there. I want to express my thanks to Augusto Pinaud Francis Wade, and art Gelwicks for joining me here on ProductivityCast Each week, you can learn more about them and their work by visiting productivitycast.net and visiting the about page. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. And on behalf of all of us here at productivity Cast here’s to your productive life

Voiceover Artist 45:02
And that’s it for this ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things productivity, with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

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

How Productive is Joining Instagram Threads, and the Productivity and Technology News This Week

Each week, Ray Sidney-Smith ( https://twominuterule.com) and Augusto Pinaud ( https://productivityvoice.com/) review and provide commentary on the week’s news in the world of personal productivity and related technologies.

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In this Cast | Joining Instagram Threads

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Headlines & Show Notes | Joining Instagram Threads

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

Headlines, Part A

• 49 Life Lessons In 49 Years Of Living – Productivityist

• When In Doubt, Change Everything

• Change The Way You See Yourself 

• Why A Positive Attitude Attracts Success

Headlines, Part B

• Wish List: Keep apps from being offloaded

• This iPhone trick will make sure you never miss your morning alarm again

• What’s the best To-do list app?

• A Tour Of My New OneNote Book Journal 

• Samsung will unveil its new foldables on July 26th 

• Google Calendar is getting a big upgrade that will save you time

• Google Calendars redesign for tablets and Chromebooks finally rolling out widely

• How to Convert Images to Editable Text in Microsoft Word

• How to Make Your Own Printable Calendar Using Canva

• How to migrate your Facebook post and media to Google Docs and Google Photos

• Early Prime Day Deals: Kindle Paperwhite Kids Edition Kindle Scribe Fire HD 8 discounted

• New Updates to Amazon Kindle Scribe Make It Peoples Favorite

New Tools of the Week

• Sidekick

• Dictation. Google Keyboard add-on for iPhone, Siri.

• Nuance Dragon Anywhere for iOS

Featured Story of the Week

• Threads now available to download: Meta’s microblogging alternative to Twitter

• How to add and manage multiple accounts in Threads Meta’s new Twitter rival

• Twitter warns it could sue Meta over copycat Threads app

What I am Reading and Enjoying

• Canadian judge rules the thumbs up emoji counts as a contract agreement

• Leonardo da Vinci: Inside a genius mind

Notes

• Why You’re So Unhappy

• TestFlight Now Supports visionOS Apps 

• Vision Pro accessories from CASETiFY will let you personalize and protect your device

• iPad keyboard maker Brydge revived under new ownership; details on unpaid salaries and unfulfilled orders unknown 

• Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 173 With Safari 17 Features

• Facing the Sirens of Flow & Breaking Hyperfocus 

• How to Better Manage Your Time 

• Scientific Daily Routine Everyone Should Do

• The relationship between homeworking during COVID-19 and both, mental health, and productivity: a systematic review

• 5 Mental Health Rewards Of Embracing Minimalism, According To A Psychologist

• Five Strategies for Being More Productive

• What is the TikTok 5-to-9 trend and how does it increase productivity?

• Creating A Cosy And Functional Employee Area – Boosting Staff Productivity And Satisfaction

• What to Do When You Can’t Fall Asleep May Surprise You

• How Susceptible Are You to Misinformation? There’s a Test You Can Take

• Minimalism vs. Consumerism: The Benefits of Choosing a Simple Life

• Why Do We Still Work While on Vacation? 

• Toxic Productivity

• How to Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Proper Aim of Education

• Sleep Deprivation Sometimes Relieves Depression. A New Study May Show Why

• Write More in Less Time. 6 Strategies To Increase Your Output

• Onboarding vs orientation: Your questions answered | Trello

Raw Text Transcript | Joining Instagram Threads

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

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00
Hello personal productivity 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. I’m Augusto Pinaud. And we’re hosts for Anything But Idle. This is episode 122, How productive is joining Instagram threads. And we’re recording this on July 10 2023. Each week Augusto and I cover the productivity news headlines of the week so you know what’s going on in the world of personal productivity and its related technologies. And so with that, Augusto, let’s get into our productivity headlines. What’s our first productivity headline this week?

Augusto Pinaud 0:39
Well, our first article is 49 life lessons in 14 years of living. So happy birthday, Mike guardi. And it is it is a short list. short list of 4090 minutes depending apparently as you get older 49 doesn’t seem that long. But it is up 49 themes dad, Mike Vardy has learned over like and was very interesting to hear read and to remember, and to Luke, one of the notes, some or some of the clubs, regardless if you agree or disagree. And you remember to put some of these things into perspective, you know, Joe’s going to read a couple, you know, always keep a book next to your TV remembered. And I in my case was good. And I always had a Kindle for four years. And now that I have kids, one of the best investments I have done as a parent is a Kindle, because they have it there. And is the only device that they are allowed to take too bad. Not only that I make this deal, that any book that they finish, I buy a new book without question, they don’t even need to have to go anywhere, they don’t need to need to do anything, they just need to go and get. So that make that be read really a lot, and a lot more than what they will read otherwise. So that’s one of them, you know, don’t forget to step back into nature. And that is one buddy applies to me. And that I need to remember because I like what I do. And I don’t mind a stain in the office. So I kind of stay indoors forever. You know, it’s one of those things that Don criticized her parents for what they do, she will do the same guilty of charge. And the only one I’m going to mention is the number 30. Take ownership of your devices for day one, be the master, not the other way around. And this is something that I love to do with people and I love to work with people with into, I understand not everybody has the time the patient, the inclination to learn all the different intricacies of the devices that they use, even that I believe they should. But if you don’t then hire somebody who can sit with you and do that process, and help you figure it out how to do those things, how to get those things really that work for you or not for others. And finally, verse 34. Journaling is an underappreciated productivity practice. And I cannot agree with even more, I’ve been using day one for the longest time as my journal app. And I’m very grateful to all the insight that is in there that I have never read. And the ones that I have marked, to revisit again.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:03
I’ll say that for me, number 18 really struck a chord, which is about having a day when you don’t have meetings on your schedule. So you can use that for flow work for deep generative, creative problem solving type work. And I know that when when I did that, it really opened up the floodgates for me in terms of my ability to get more done in a week, when I just recognized that there was there were days of my week when I should just not have meetings because I need to get actual work done. And it depends on how and what your manifested world looks like. But mine is one in which people can schedule directly into my calendar, which are clients and and then of course, I have colleagues who also can schedule into my calendar. And so I need to basically basically block out the time ahead of schedule so that they don’t get filled with time for me to be able to do that kind of flow work. That of course for me is generative, creative problem solving type work, and I want to be able to have that A time, you know, kind of cordoned off from others. And, and I just, you know, that one definitely struck a chord for me. And I think that it would help a lot of people to just know that that time is set aside for the work that needs to be done. All right, onward to our again, happy birthday, Mike, and so, on to our next article this week.

Augusto Pinaud 5:21
Our next article is from The Art of Nonconformity. And it’s called Winning doubt, change everything. I thought article radius chord for me, because I believe into this, Hey, it’s good to like your location. Whoo. In general, like your office would decorate, if you don’t, like, fill in the blanks do and he talks about his travel and he said, You know what, I went to the city medulla. Okay. So I went to Croatia, but unlike most of the Ghana, right, and I understand this, UK’s for people, like an auction, but I remember two things early, early in life, that Mark muesli that one was teaching again, from lavender, who said, If you don’t like a book, and one of his rules in life is if you don’t like a book passed, I don’t remember his percentage, it may have been 20%. Stop reading, there’s so many good books to waste time when a bad one. But that’s really, you know, stay with me. And the second one was actually David Allen, when in an interview, god knows how long with Eric back, where Eric Max said, you know, one of the things that always impressed me of David Allen is that he could buy a gadget or a piece of technology. And as soon as he identified that, it doesn’t work. Dumping regardless how much it goes. And those are two things that I have take as part of my life, if I buy more gear, and junk than I’m willing to recognize and buy a counter to appreciate bullet is that if it doesn’t work, I don’t, I don’t have if we go someplace, and we don’t like it, we go, walk away, make sure that whatever you do, whatever you all are, is where you want to be. And as he said in the article, this skill is so important, the ledger job, change it, you can change it from the inside, you can move to a different company doesn’t matter. But change it. You know, one of the things that I love, when I do coaching sometimes is help that help uncover that intrapreneur as I called it is not necessarily that people say you know what, no, I have 10 years, 20 years in this company at a one point if the company, but I’m done, I’m done with this job and help them really work into reinventing that. And that, again, I believe, I love the article, and was a very fun week.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:00
antastic. All right on to our next article this week.

Augusto Pinaud 8:06
So the next article is for me to read the review. It’s vital, change the way you see yourself. And very important to understand what is on your world and how you see yourself. And because we don’t notice it, we don’t we think that’s normal. And one of the things I recommend people is sometimes have those self conversations loudly. Don’t do it on your mind. That’s how you’re used to start talking loud. That’s how you understand you people seem flattered by yourself. They will think you’re crazy. But it’s really worth it to do because you will discover how they really talk to yourself and how you see yourself on some install.

So this, this was a very, very interesting, very interesting article. I don’t know what what what have you done to change the way you see because you see yourself because over the years, we’ve seen ourselves in certain things very high and uncertain things very low. And obviously we don’t change the high change the low. But what have you done to change though thing?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 9:35
Yeah, for me, I think much of what I have done is using journaling, as you were talking about earlier with regard to one of Mike’s suggestions. You know, using journaling as a as a mechanism for identifying patterns of places where I don’t feel fulfilled, seeing places where I feel like I am not living up to my own standards of excellence. So not necessarily every day, you know, in the in the kind of Hellenistic, you know, Greco Roman, you know, Greco, Greek philosopher, Greek philosophical perspective, you know, which is more virtue or excellence in the moralistic perspective, but I do have my own standards of excellence. And so I’ve, I’ve enumerated those, or I’ve listed those for myself, and they fit in each of my life domains in life categories. And that’s been incredibly helpful. And the article talks about this concept of, you know, hiring, basically, external accountability, right, and so I’ve peer support. So you know, we talked about accountability in a self accountability steps up a level to individual one to one accountability and then to group and then to say, you know, larger group or you know, kind of public accountability, you want to call it that, and, and so at that, at that one to one accountability, you can hire a coach, life coach, you know, you can hire an executive coach, you can hire any number of coaches to help you through particular things, and digital coach, you know, all kinds of coaches, obviously, having a therapist or a counselor or mental health professional, who can go ahead and help you and provide you that kind of guidance is also really helpful. I’ve done that and been I’ve, I’ve benefited greatly from having a therapist, just kind of walking through like, Okay, this is something I want to I want to tackle in my life, how do I how do I approach those things. And then, of course, having a wide variety, a number of coaches, but also having having that peer accountability, you know, you, for example, you know, just being able to talk with you as a friend, and as a colleague, that, you know, that’s really helpful to me to be able to understand where I’m, I’m having deficits and where I can grow. And just talking those things out for me, as you are well aware, really helps me kind of understand where I am and where I need to go in the future. And that really helps with all of those kinds of self self perception issues. So very, very useful practice. And I enjoyed the article for that, for that reason, as well. All right, on to our next article about a positive attitude and success.

Augusto Pinaud 12:04
You know, the article, the article was a good article, it covers why understanding the power of that positive attitude, understanding, you know, the connection and the possibility of success. How that positive attitude help you overcomes obstacles. But more importantly, it’s unimportant. It wasn’t very good with an article, but what I want to share is my own experience on this, I did not grow up as a person with a positive attitude, I needed a very negative one, you know, I grew up in an environment where, you know, the glass was empty, liter matter how much what slump and how many things like that. So, having the learn to change the rate, or change my reticular system to look for these positive things, to change that attitude, to have a positive attitude, has really make a difference in in my life, and has really allowed me to attract things that it will have been impossible, not for other reason that nobody wants to be with their black cloud guy and you know, work with a black cloud around all the time, people prefer to be with a guy who has a sunny outcoming life when I didn’t understood that early in my life. Again, it the normal thing was a black cloud. So it was a pattern that needed to be broken. For me to change and start paying attention to the good things and to the positive things. And it was, you know, now it’s normal, but it was not. So I want to invite anyone who is listening to us to have you know, feels that they’re adding to this not always this positive to encourage that you can retrain yourself in to change that radar from that negativity to a more positive attitude.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:13
Now, that’s, that’s great experiential learning that you’re sharing, which is that, you know, if you keep a growth mindset, and you know, you and I both have an affinity for Dr. Carol Dweck and her work around growth mindset, the the the hope for you is to be able to understand that it’s the journey, not the destination. And so if you find yourself at a point where you feel like you are a particular way and need to move in a positive direction, all your attitude, you’re you’re not fixed in that place, you can change and if you if you believe it, then you can then you can do it in a lot of ways. That’s not always the case in a lot of other categories of life. But in this particular one It very much is if you can think positively The and continue to think positively you’re retraining your brain, in essence, to do that. And so I just highly recommend that folks kind of consider that as they move their life forward is to think, okay, if I’m, if I’m stuck in a rut, if I am, if I’m in a place where I’m thinking a lot of negative thoughts, it’s like, when you’re driving and you hit a patch of ice, your car will go where you are looking, you know, your hands and your feet, all of those things that engage the vehicle will guide the car are paying at the oncome your hands are going to turn you that way, and everything’s going to happen in that wrong direction. But you’re much much likelier to steer out of the way of oncoming traffic, and to get yourself onto the side of the side of the road and safe and so on so forth, if you are looking in the direction in which you want to go. And so if you’re looking down, you got to look up and start thinking I remember, this is sort of funny, just this is a memory that comes back and I was I’m tall. And so I’ve always just kind of looked down, it’s just the been the nature of my world. You know, I think my mom’s about five, three. So, you know, from the moment I hit here not not metaphorically, like literally draw I found was, was that it actually made me feel bad because I would walk around then like around town. And you know, this, I grew up in New York City. And so I would walk around the city and I would always have my head down. Mostly because I was worried I would trip on people and hit people or what you coming gangly, tall guy. And so I realized one day that I should just like hold my head up, I would feel better if I held my head up and kind of put my chest up a little bit. And, you know, remarkably, it changed my entire outlook on life, how just one little thing like that really changed the way in which I thought about myself thought about how I carried myself in the world. And it brought a level of confidence that I think is really important. And so that that positive attitude, really had a lot to do with my ability to stand at a room and say something confidently, you know, I ultimately became a professional trainer, you know, and I’m in this world, where I’m capable of standing in front of large audiences. And I’m never really feel, you know, any sense of of fear or anxiety. I think has a lot to do with just that little thing like don’t love debt. And any think I think it goes to show how powerful something like that can be. All right. So we have reached the, not the midpoint, but we have reached the end of our productivity articles. For this week, we’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsor, and then we’ll come back and G articles articles for the week and then

Sponsor Voice Over 17:48
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Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:59
Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle. Who’s been outed myself, Ray Sidney-Smith. We’re gonna get into our technology articles this week. With that Augusto, what is our first tech article this week?

Augusto Pinaud 19:13
Oh, the first articles dedicated to you good Mykonian are in the earlier last week asking for do some of your apps been offloaded and why you had some space on your iPad that was on claim and is part of the cost of loading. So for our listeners in iOS, what they did was they offload or uninstall the application to reduce the space when you get to a certain dress or the app is not used. When I started on time. What their system does is uninstall the app, but leave all the contents of the app so that way you can install it and be exactly where you were. That is great. It’s great allowed you to save some space, but at the same time you don’t need to read couldn’t figure it out, you need to download it. That said, it will be all seven is what this article is a wish list from Jason Snell than Marlin for six colors is I really wish I could mark certain apps as this app should not be of load no matter what. And this was one of those cases for you. But I saw the article. And, you know, I just wanted to not the only one who have this on your wish list.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 20:32
Yeah, and there’s an important piece about this, which is that, for example, I had decided to offload my password manager, because my password manager was not, I wasn’t opening it, I was using it, right. But I was using it in other applications. And so since I hadn’t opened it in a long time, it just decided that it was going to go ahead and offload it. And then I couldn’t get any intensive applications. And I was like, What’s going on here? This is this is not right. So it would be nice to be able to kind of whitelist some applications and say, these are off limits. Don’t offload them that way. So I appreciate that. That wish list. All right, onto our next article this week.

Augusto Pinaud 21:12
You know, this is a question that I get, I have get multiple times Hey, how can I not? Because the morning law. We are we’re basically use the automation to create an alarm when you turn off your alarm. So basically, you can go give you the instruction built in shortcuts on iOS, the gate, tap accommodation, and you can say, hey, let’s create an alarm. And this time, every time I shut off the alarm, so that way, if you turn it off and say, Okay, I’m ready to wake up in two minutes. And in you know, 45 know that that has happened to any of us ever, then this is a way as the article said, they can go through the ration that even if you wake up, it will create this backup alarm. You know, there are other ways to do it. That is to have already, wherever the backup alarm created. That’s another way to do it and create multiple alarms. But this is a fantastic way in you want to have that backup plan. And again, it’s something that people have asked multiple times, I thought it was good to have it here on there.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:26
Yeah, and there are other applications out there in things like sleep cycle and others that allow you to basically have an alarm that forces you to do say a math puzzle or requires you to do other things. So that you’re you can’t just easily say that your opposite really requires you to stay up for a little while. So by the time you’ve finished whatever the puzzle is, you’re like, Okay, well, I just basically did Sudoku, I might as well as well get up. And you know, I have I’ve taken at one point in my life, I don’t do this now. But at one point, I set the phone across the room, so I have to get up in order to be able to turn off the alarm. Unfortunately, on the latest version of Android, this is my iOS, but the latest version of Android, you can say the word stop out loud, and it will stop the alarm. And I do not like that. Because now you can just say stop, and then it stops the alarm. And you know, like, I could do that. And I could do that half awake, you know what I mean? Like I could potentially and accidentally

Augusto Pinaud 23:27
let completely sleep when you need to wait.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:33
Right? Right. It’s dangerous, it’s dangerous. So I’m sure there’s gotta be a way to turn that off, though you really shouldn’t be a feature there. But yeah, so there are so many different applications that are out there that give you some of those additional capabilities. So maybe look around the app store and look at some of those, I’m pretty sure sleep cycle does this. And it also will choose the right time to wake up so that you don’t wake up in the middle of one of your, you know, phases of sleep that will cause you to be groggy and that kind of thing. That’s really helpful when you’re taking naps, or just when you’re waking up in the morning because it’s going to wake you up in the right in the right period so that you’re waking up and you’re not going to go back to sleep very easily. All right on to what’s the best to do list app. Oh my gosh fisticuffs.

Augusto Pinaud 24:16
This is the Pleexy team. And obviously they compare the three apps that they connected. Okay, that is Microsoft to do Google Cast and Todoist and they went and did a comparison. You know, it was reasonably fair. At the end of the article before the completion they have a comparison table and you could see you know up to wills what level you know they do the same and then Microsoft to do is still can do comments and attachment where Google task cannot and then labels until Percy something that only to do is do. I think you need premium. But I know that’s not true. You can do filters and even on the free version. So Yeah, that was a great comparison. You know, I, I add to that comparison. Now Springwell, because I am, you know, part of their expert, church fi expert group, and you could do also was a premium version, you know, everything that it’s mentioned. And to do it. The reason lex giggsy, you know, put the streets because they are the treating that they want Plexi will do fantastically well is will integrate these three Santa’s with Trello with many others. So it will allow you to integrate the inputs. So in my case are certain projects that I worked with external company that are living in Trello, or asana and I can now pull them out and integrate them into my own platform, make the changes and everything gets reflected everywhere, without me needing to necessarily go and work into the other platforms. So it’s an interesting article, if you have been curious, we have to do is use a group in personal productivity club. And so if you’re interested in learn more, come leave us a question and a comment and interact with your Todoist. I don’t, there is currently not a Google task for Microsoft to do user group. But if you are a user of those two, and you’re interested, please contact us because we will help set you up. So there is others that can benefit from your knowledge.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:42
Yeah, and just like to give context for folks, the reason you would want to do this is say that you’re like Gousto. And we work with a number of different people in a number of different environments. And so they may be in Asana or Trello, or another tool, but you still want to track and maintain your tasks in your own system. This is why Plexi would be of use to you, right. So if you have a client who’s using Asana, and they’re gonna assign you things in Asana, but you’re not going to check into Asana every day, then Plexi can grab those and keep them synchronized in your Todoist system. And therefore you’re not losing or dropping the ball on these kinds of things. So I just think it’s a remarkable tool. I think that and I wish that more tools integrated. Our had integrations like this, I hope that Pixi and their competitor Unito, continues to expand the tools that they integrate with, because it’s very different than say, Zapier or ft, or others, I’ve said this before, but you know, that’s a step based, you know, tool, right? It’s a workflow. So it’s moving in one direction, only, it’s not synchronizing, and the beauty of, of Plexi and Unito, is that as a synchronization, the data is flowing back and forth, in near real time, so that you’re not losing that kind of fluidity in the application. But to get to this point, absolutely. If you if we’re if you’re looking for a Microsoft, you know, group or something like that in in personal productivity club, let us know, we can, we can probably figure out a way to support that, that group in the system, and I definitely have plans to to create a Google group. So we will we will ultimately have a Google user group where we could talk about all the workspace productivity things in there, so not yet there. But we can certainly create that we will certainly be creating that in the future. Alright Augusto, next up

Augusto Pinaud 28:33
on chirinos is video you know from motor, Laura Arabist and she’s talking about how she create one note book, Georgia she said that she reads a lot of books six to 15 books a month and she wants to keep track of that, you know what read what you know, and that’s happened you know, I don’t read as many but I read you know, also a significant number I’m sometimes you know, you want to go back and you remember it Okay, where is wood that I read this thing? And one of the things I tend to do is to take screenshots and send them to Evernote. Okay, because then in Evernote because of the indexing, I can type on Productivity Book Group, it will bring me all the books I liked nice avant that has the word productivity. So she her approach to this is using one note and she raised one note for this and she Do you know the books what was her qualification and then she go and make a little abstract of what her reading was. So she can refer to that later and having those kinds of rustlings are very, very, very powerful. It doesn’t matter get a need to get there. I’ve said this many times. You don’t need to get every detail from the book, but it’s important that you’re a We’ll do recall and find those that were very critical because you may not apply it today. But he will come on time and you say, Okay, I’ve heard this in a book where, and there is nothing more frustrating than he made when I’m able to get that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:18
I have definitely been there. And so a few Evernote certified experts, including inclusive of myself at one point created a template for book summaries within Evernote. And so if it’s not in the Evernote templates, gallery, feel free to reach out and I can send you a link to it. But it basically is a structured template that walks you through putting in notes into it. I also use clippings.io, which is a connection between Amazon Kindle, and in my case, Evernote, I think it works with other tools as well. And so when I highlight and make annotations of things on my Kindle, it automatically grabs those annotations and grabs those, those, you know, highlights and plops them into a pre formatted note in Evernote, which is super helpful for me. So it’s doing that on automated automated basis. And then what I do is I go, you know, once a month, I go through and everything that I’ve read, I basically copied into my own book, summary note, so that it’s in line with all of my other notes that I’ve taken in that in that space, because I like Hugo. So I will typically like you know, to take a screenshot or use my phone and take a photograph. And then I might mark it up on by hand, throw it into good notes, probably, you know, write some things on it on all of that ultimately, in the same note in Evernote. Now, if I’ve read the complete book in the Kindle, and I’ve done all my highlighting and annotations on the Kindle, then all I need to do is grab the, the clippings note and copied into my book summary. And I’m pretty much good to go. So, you know, there, there are different ways in which you can manifest that. But it’s, it’s helpful for me to have that all centralized in my own reading notebook. So that I can go back and reference like you, you know, man, it really frustrates me when I can remember where I read something and trying to share it with someone or though you know, especially it’s like really good quotations that I’ve I’ve counted how epilogue over time. I’m like, Ah, this is this is the perfect quotation for this article and writing or whatever it might be, and wanting to find that. So definitely worth doing if you’re if you’re doing a lot of that work. Okay, on which my next article?

Augusto Pinaud 32:30
Well, our next Galaxy unpack July 26, apparently, it’s going to be very focused on going and you’re coming again, with more devices. I’m surprised that by now they have not leak more, more of them. But but but they at least leak they haven’t. So if you’re a Samsung are looking into a flip phone, or that technology percent July 26, we will be and we will cover the news on the show, you know, after the event.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:07
Fantastic. Okay, onward to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 33:10
Our next two articles are about Google Calendar. Google Calendar is getting big Oh, great. That will for for tablets for Google Calendar. So I don’t use Google Calendar. On my tablets, I use just a regular calendar app, but you use Google Calendar quite often. So maybe you can share more of the advantages of this too. I didn’t see anything, you know, I mean, the fact that I can share each year in events was one of them. But again, I don’t use it very much. So I, I didn’t see any any major things other than that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:51
And major upgrade in terms of features is that you’re going to be able to take an individual event link and share that, which is I mean, it’s very powerful, right, if you think about it. To date, if you wanted to share an event, you had to invite the person via an email address. And and sometimes you’re in a chat, like you’re in a whatsapp chat with the person or your telegram. Now, you can just literally copy the link, share it via Telegram, and now they are opening up a calendar event. And now they have the ability to download the ICS you know, add themselves to the event, see the details of the event. This happens many times when people are like, I’m supposed to be going to this event, but I don’t know where I’m supposed to be going because he didn’t send me the address. And so you can just like literally copy your own event link and now text it to them, they can open it up and they see the address and kind of go from there. So that’s that’s the thing that I think is probably the most powerful piece that allows you to be able to go ahead and utilize the tool. Some of the other pieces are just kind of like dealing with the process of sharing within calendar events is being upgraded. That will be really nice. And we’re gonna see more of the material. You know, you perspective You’ve bought into the application over time as well. So we’ll see, we’ll see how that all kind of plays out as they as they make it more available. But I think just the inviting people part, to events not being as clunky at all. And, folks, I mean, how they’re inviting people and whether they’ve invited people. So that’s going to be cleaned up in the new version, plus, we’re going to see a whole new redesign of the tablets and Chromebooks apps. So everything seen in Google Calendar, you’re gonna see basically, it updated, and you know, where you’re on the mobile apps today. And so it’s, it’s gonna be it’s gonna definitely be an I think, interview, where you’re actually capable of seeing a little bit more data. And, and just seeing it in a two panel prospective, cleaner, I think the panel’s view is going to be cleaner, and you’re going to have the options with being scheduled day, week and month, so that you can just open up those sidebars and see those things without having too much of an issue. So I think it’s gonna be a nice refresh of the app, and soaps are gonna like it. Okay, on to our next article, this.

Augusto Pinaud 36:16
So our next article this week is not another how to it’s how to convert editable text using Microsoft Word, if you get an image, okay, let’s say a book, you can put it into Microsoft Word, you will follow the instructions converted into a PDF, and then open that PDF into directly from PDF into Word and the Word sorry, and that will make them an editable image and the text and everything else you will be able to grab. So it is an interesting workaround to convert images with the tools that you have on hand. So it is very easy to do and very interesting. So if you are looking to lose some of those, that’s, you know, a good way to, to do it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:08
Yeah, I think it’s fantastic that the features are available. And I didn’t actually even know that this was available. And so I’m really glad to know that it is. Alright, well, we’re gonna start where I

Augusto Pinaud 37:20
don’t use, I don’t use Microsoft Word that much. But yes, so our next release, again, another indestructible, okay, make their own printable calendar using candle. And there is people who would like that, so that they did you know, the calendars, the printable calendar color into, especially for big rocks, you know, you don’t need to have the detail. But you know, those big things. Hey, I mean, I remember when I used to travel a lot, I wanted to know, you know, when I was in Los Angeles, and when I was not in Los Angeles. And that was very important. And I needed to know that and I, since my life happened, basically, on four cities, it was very easy to have four colors, I could look at the wall and see that I know the colors that I knew were where I was, but it was very useful to have that and just refresh the page and print it again. So you can use Canva to print that, follow the instructions. And you will be able to, to get that very, very easily.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:24
And just so folks know, there’s an additional facility that you can actually have things pushed to print on demand by Canva. So it’s another opportunity for you to be able to give them money, in essence. But the idea here is that if you don’t want to deal with the printing of the calendar yourself, you want it to be printed and bound and whatever else, they have a whole printing service. So if you have like an annual report you put together and you want to have it printed, you know, well and shipped to you, they can do that for you, which is pretty brilliant, that it’s just kind of built into the platform. And so if you need printed materials, you can kind of have it printed on demand through the system.

Augusto Pinaud 39:03
Yeah, there is a bunch of services that do that, and I’m going to sidetrack in here, but they want to do the same thing. You know, as we’re talking about journaling much earlier, would you consider a print my 2022 journal, and then he will bounce it for you and send you now, a paper copy of all your journal entries of 2020 tubes.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 39:24
Does it does the the does it include the images as well that you might embed inside adults? Oh, that’s nice.

Augusto Pinaud 39:32
So I know people who put the images in there with the notes and stuff that they want to remember. And because you can depending on the plan you have, you can create different journals, then they have you know, journals for those purposes, and they bring those journals instead of every

Raymond Sidney-Smith 39:51
now that’s fantastic. I know Google Photos, has the ability for you to print on demand photo books like that as well. And I’ve done that for a couple of vacations where I wanted to just have a photo book to give, to to mount that time the in laws. And, and so it was nice to just be able to say, Okay, this, this album charted into a into a photo book and that it’s a printed nicely, you know bound item that you can just give away as a gift. So easy, easy gifts, when you have the photographs in in one space. Okay, on to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 40:24
So our next is how to like great, I will say, say, post your Facebook posts and media to Google Docs and Google Photo. And you know, it’s interesting, because there is this is, with a lot of things that are happening with Facebook and Mara, there is a lot of people looking, wondering solely to the polls, but to the pictures, because there was a time where people upload pictures, you know, and there is a lot of memories in Facebook that now are only in Facebook. So this instructable will give you are showing you how to strike those media into Google Photos. So you can save them for the posterity.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:06
Yes, and so folks have an awareness, you can transfer photos to just several major platforms, Google Photos is one of them, drop boxes and other and they have a couple of other platforms where you can export your your photos and videos to those specific platforms. And so I’ve already done that I’ve taken all of my Google Photos and just exported them to Facebook, just so that I have a backup because you know, whatever happens to meta happens to meta, I want to make sure that I still have those memories saved to my system. Now, most of them are duplicated. Because, you know, I saw when I took the photograph in Facebook, I took the photograph, usually on my phone or in a camera and then I’ve uploaded it to Facebook, but it was still nice having the backup there as an as an additional backup in that sense. But you can do it, which is really nice. All right onto our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 41:57
So our next one is talking about early prime days or prime days is coming. You know, obviously the Kindles will come the Kindle eight now, the Kindle Fire HD A is going to be discontinued and our son is going to try to build whatever inventory they have. It doesn’t making a decent Kindle tablet. For I think it was $59. I mean that is is I think it’s your it is so cheap, really on the hook for what the download is, I understand it’s not a powerful download, I get it, okay. But for a color Kindle, where you can watch prime and Netflix and all that you’re not going to buy a cheaper TV. So what they also have some offers into the paper, the Kindle Paperwhite kits, editions and other stuff. So if you are looking, you know, to excuse to get out other gear, new Kindle, this may be a great time toward that. Yeah, so

Raymond Sidney-Smith 42:58
just for folks who are unaware of Prime Day runs from July 11 to July 12. So if you’re listening to the podcast after this today, for example, if your once the podcast goes out in the field, it’ll it’ll be July 11. So Prime Day will be in full swing. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t have early deals. And if you’re listening to this in real time here on July 10 Target has already put out circle week, you know sales to get ahead of the game, I’m sure that Walmart and the others are trying to do their own thing as well to kind of get ahead of it. But there are some early prime deals across the board. So I would highly recommend going to the New York Times to wire cutter and look at the URL Prime Day deals. Because if you’re if you’re going to buy something anyway not don’t buy it because it’s a deal. Right that’s that’s not a deal. That’s that’s a waste of money. But if you are going to buy something anyway, and it’s and it’s here on the on the list, a lot of the Amazon and Amazon owned companies are going to have Amazon products, product lines are going to have really good deals. But there’s some really interesting deals outside of that. Now there are a couple of air purifier deals on here. So if you wanted to get an air purifier, there’s some mattresses, all kinds of fun things that are that are out there. If you love Legos, there are some Lego deals. So there’s some really good deals out there if you’re if you’re going to buy these things in the first place. But you know, Prime Day is a pretty good sales day, if you were already going to buy those things. Okay, on to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 44:24
I need you need a temptation to buy a Kindle describe this next article may be that the rotation that you were needed say there is a new update for it. Now you can do pen style sticky note on page writing, lasso contrast slider and subfolder. So that will allow you to do folder inside of the folder. And, you know, again, I said this was Amazon analysis described, I thought it was going to be a very, very interesting device because he’s going to make notes into the hands or digital notes into the hands of them. Everybody, and so far, Amazon has not disappoint. He has they have made this device, Amazon style, it doesn’t do everything. But whatever he’s doing, and they’ve been adding little by little and making this thing more and more powerful. And it’s a matter of time that I don’t need to be into my arsenal of the license,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 45:22
I have to say I own an Kindle scribe, and I use it every day. Now, it has become definitely a daily driver for reading, for being able to just take quick notes, I keep it here on the side of my table side of my desk. And it’s there for just taking a quick jot of, of capture items that I can’t do. Because I’m in a meeting with a client and you know, whatever’s going on, I want to still just be able to capture it. It’s a single click button. And with a stylus, I could just quickly jot it down, you know, I leave that page open. So that I could do that I just click a single button screen comes on, I take down what is the open loop, and I capture it into the system. And I know after the meeting to go ahead and process those items, sometimes I’ll sit down and I’ll actually take notes in the scribe and and then after the meeting, I’ll look at the the notes that I’ve taken and then type them into Evernote so that they’re in the final note as well. But the ability to go ahead and just open up any book and write on the on the actual Kindle book is incredibly helpful for being able to do that kind of annotation live, I just find to be just incredible. Like this is so helpful. I really like it. And so Amazon has really I think knocked it out of the park with a Kindle scribe, because it’s not super powerful, right? It’s not something that I want to start doing computing on. But it is all the things that I want a tablet to do in that very dumb sense, right? Like, I don’t want it to be good notes, right? I don’t want it to be converting text into an, you know, handwritten text into typewritten text. I’m not trying to do anything sophisticated with it, I just want it to be kind of like one of those boogie boards, but a little smarter, right? It’s like, it just got just enough feature. So it’s like, it’s just feature rich enough that it’s going to remember what I just wrote in it and not delete it like the boogie board would. So it’s got it’s got just that little extra oomph that I really like and enjoy. Okay, on to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 47:20
And this is our older article. So now we’re going to tool something

Raymond Sidney-Smith 47:25
else. Okay, fantastic. So, as you all know, in new tools of the week of Busan, I come across many personal productivity apps and tools and services. We each bring you, you might wait till you bringing a competitor to the a prior tool that I talked about back in June. But I’ve been playing around with all of these various browsers. So this particular browser, and I hope I haven’t talked about it before, but if I have all well, it’ll, it’s just as good. So the browser is called sidekick. And you can go to meet sidekick.com. And sidekick is a it’s a, it’s a web browser. And that’s, that’s its core functionality, except that it’s provided this additional overlay, just like wave these productivity. So in, you have a left hand sidebar.

Or back then. So you have the left hand sidebar, and you have all of your apps, and whether it’s notion and Gmail, and you know, all of the other various tools, you’re capable of having all of those in there. Now, the, the idea is that you can open up your own sidebar, or a set of a full size weapon. Now, there’s two killer features that I really liked here. One is that Kenji wait box, you can use Chrome extensions. So because it’s chromium based in its chrome base, you’re capable of adding extensions in there. So you’re utilizing those applications, kind of in a web browser, but you’re also extending the applications that you can’t do if you installed notion on the desktop or slack on your desktop, you’re not gonna be able to utilize those Chrome extensions on those on those applications. So you can extend the power of slack directly there inside, it’s fine. The other piece is that those the sidebar gives you quick access to so you have to do as well, you can have your to do side panel, and now you have your tasks right there in next tear your Gmail. And now you’re capable of seeing both of those things. So as you’re reading an email, you can capture an action that needs to be taken care of right there in the sidebar. So it gives you a pretty powerful ability to kind of toggle between those items. But the thing that I like most about five six so far and I’ve been playing around with a lot of these tools recently is the ability to go into focus mode. And so focus mode basically allows you to go in and say hey, I don’t want to deal with Have these things right now. And you can just go into focus mode and whatever, whatever tool or app, you’re in, kind of Gray’s out everything else, and limits the notifications being sent to you around all of the other apps that you’re in. So you’re, you’re kind of drawn in to laser focused on the thing that you’re working on, as opposed to all the other things that can bring ending and distract you from what you’ve been working on. So I, I like sidekick. So far, there is a free version, as you can use that free version forever. And, and it’s, you know, that you can upgrade to pro and whatever else. But it’s available cross platform, so you can get them on all the various platforms. And you can go ahead and create recalled sessions. So sessions kind of grouped together all of the things oh, one of the other features that I really love about it is, it has a universal search. So you can go ahead and just, you know, whatever it is Command or Control F. And it’ll open up kind of like spotlight on the Mac OS operating system, or iOS operating system to have you kind of open up spotlight, and you can search across all of your apps. So you can search, you know, across those that all. So it gives you that kind of centralized search capability that is really, really helpful, which I really like. So you can search across LinkedIn, and telegram and you know, all of the all of the different applications that are that are connected inside of phytic. So it’s pretty strong and powerful way to search across your apps as documents or workspaces. So, something you might want to check out in terms of if you’re looking for a productivity browser, specifically for work. This can be really useful, at least what is your

Augusto Pinaud 51:41
so I will start with a story before I go to my to my tool. And the story is a client of mine who getting old, okay has happened to many, and his main device is the phone and is starting to get to the point where typing on the phone. You know, he cannot do it as fast as you wish. So that was part of the reason of the consultation with me. And we found ways to get dictation get to him to work. But the dictation works great, you know, musical keyboard or Siri, if you’re doing something short, and you are doing a ray called me by date, those things were great. When you now want to go and do a much longer dictation when you want to write on a document. Those not necessarily are the best tool. And this was the issue here was you know, that’s the main device that made the right cell phone. And he would need it to be again, that productive, he is losing that productivity. So we play do many other things with new ones Dragon Anywhere new ones. It’s been doing transcription software for years of years of years. And they’re up there, their version for the iOS, they’re powerful, you can do it on device and go and basically dictate will do the translation right there. And it works great. Another option is otter, you record the audio or date an otter will do it for you. But in this case, no one’s Dragon Anywhere was the choice that this client picked. And it was fantastic to see him go back to that productivity on the phone. The issue was again, he cannot I used to be able to type for hours on this phone, I cannot I cannot see properly. Instead, he can put the phone in there, get his urban dictate the rest of his life and be very, very happy. So that’s the tool of the week. No one’s really going anywhere for iOS works on the phone. And they are

Raymond Sidney-Smith 53:52
fantastic. And moving on from new tools of the week. We are now going to head into our featured story this week, which is that Instagram has launched a competitor to Twitter called threads. And so what do you think about threads of Gousto?

Augusto Pinaud 54:10
Well, if you don’t care about privacy, and you don’t care, you don’t care about privacy is a great tool. I haven’t played with it because I like my privacy. And when an application starts saying we will need you know the privacy laws in Europe are way more strict than the United States. We know that and when man on threat said oh well. It’s going to be some months for us to get to UAE because of the privacy issues. That was another red flag for me to say. Not tested. So but but it’s still it is the application I get there is so many people still living on Facebook that are okay. Was their private See them the way Facebook handle itself. It’s an alternative to Twitter. You know, sadly, Twitter was a great platform. And lately, it’s been imploding, and by their own management, so we don’t know what’s going to happen with Twitter, you know, one of the articles we have in their Twitter warms, that they’re going to sue them no matter how great do it on, I don’t, I don’t know what it’s going to be out of that. That concept of that kind of communication, as threads as Twitter is something that really gets my attention. But I also want to make sure that if we are doing microblogging, we do it in a way that is, okay. It’s there is some privacy issues there that I want to ask, you know, microblogging to just give more content to Mr. Zuckerberg. It’s not something that is on my interest. And that’s all that I’m going to say on my soapbox.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 56:05
Yeah, so So I just want to talk through a couple of things here. One, threads is, is embedded with Instagram. So folks who are not on Instagram, you’re going to be forced onto Instagram in order to be able to create a threads account, it is bound to your threads account. This may be kind of hidden, but you can have multiple accounts in the same threads app. And there’s a link in the articles I’m pretty sure we put in there, that leads you to how to set up multiple accounts, if you have multiple Instagram accounts that you want to have in threads, you can do that. And, and so there are some privacy issues with regard to threads, it is trying to collect more data than before. But that’s a reality factor. And, and so I have joined threads just to see what it’s all about. And, and I think that it’s still nascent. But I will also say there’s two things that are really important here. And then we’ll talk about the productivity implications, which is really where we should be focusing. But one is that threads is the fastest growing social network in history. It’s at 100 million users after five days. That is remarkable. And it’s it’s a testament to obviously meta and its power of attracting people. And, you know, Twitter would love it have that kind of growth in their on their platform. And I hope that I hope it is sending a message, I don’t care one way or another about Elon Musk. But I hope it’s sending a message to the Twitter leadership team, including musk, that the way in which Twitter is going is not the right way that obviously, so many people are flocking to threads in this way to is that they are embracing the open source activity pub protocol, which means that you don’t need to join threads, as soon as threads is actively integrating with activity pub, you can join any part of the fediverse that also is activity pub, and you will be able to have an account that interacts with those threads. So that is just you know, you may not capture the scope of it, but it’s very, very powerful that it is integrating with an open source platform. And I give great credit. I can’t believe I’m saying this, I give great credit to Mehta for for choosing to do this it may be Instagram specifically right, you know, because Instagram does run, you know, somewhat independently in terms of its decisions. And this is an Instagram app, it’s not a solid Facebook app, it’s and so on so forth. Right? This is an Instagram app that the idea to but but tying to an open source platform, like activity pub, the protocol really does extend its abilities in a lot of ways. And that’s what gives me solace in some way shape or form to the privacy issues. Because once we’re kind of available on the activity pub protocol, I don’t see myself really using threads as much as I see myself using my existing Mastodon as well as I’m on multiple other, you know, Mastodon servers, I’m probably gonna go to those, and then I can interact with threads, threads there, you know, and without the concerns about what threads is collecting about me in some way, shape or form. So flipping forward then to the social network issue, right, which is that you want to be utilizing social networking for productive purposes in your life that could be entertainment, there’s an entertainment value, right? That’s, that’s a productive use of your time. There is connecting with family and friends in a particular way. You might be promoting yourself through your business or otherwise, utilizing social networks and putting out social media. So utilizing a microblogging platform like threads is akin to using Twitter and quite honestly, I continue to use Twitter in a lot of ways now Uh, you know, even though it’s a dumpster fire for other folks, you know, I’ve curated over the last, I’ve been on Twitter for probably, you know, since 2009, something like that. So I’ve been on there a long time, I’ve curated a group of people that I enjoy interacting with, most of that happens behind the scenes, you know, I’m sending messages back and for the folks behind the public sphere, and, and so I appreciate Twitter on that, on that level. And until Twitter dies, I will probably still be involved on in on Twitter on some level in some way, shape or form. I’ve been playing with threads, it still lacks some features. But the more features it gets, the more appealing it looks to me. In terms of things, I think the interface is clunky, the fact that I can’t, you know, use the the threads environment on the desktop is just out the gate unproductive for me, I like to be basically have a full keyboard, and the ability to be able to do work on my desktop, and for it to flow onto mobile. So there’s that limitation as well. But back to the point, which is like,

Augusto Pinaud 1:01:02
Instagram playing Instagram has been like that forever, too.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:01:06
Yeah, but they’ve now I mean, you can do almost everything on the desktop now that you could do on Instagram, either through the meta business suite or directly on instagram.com. So you’ve very, there are very few limitations. Now to being able to post to Instagram on the desktop, I felt like they should have had threads, embrace that with a PWA or something else like that, from the start. And I feel like they will get there, especially considering the activity pub, and the fediverse connection. So I’m hoping I’m very hopeful that they’ll go in that direction, especially if they plan to overtake meta, I’m sorry, if they plan to overtake Twitter, in that, in that sense. And in that space and place. That being the case, you use a social network for purpose, don’t just jump on the bandwagon and start using threads. without a purpose, think about why you’re going to be using threads. If you didn’t use Twitter, why would you use threads, you know, stay where you’re at currently on your social network. That’s where I come at this from a productivity perspective, you really don’t get any true benefit from joining threads. Unless you’re looking for a new community of people to interact and engage with. I don’t quite yet understand how you do that. Because they’re there, I hashtag things, they’re not really hashtags. And you can tag people but you can’t hashtag things, it doesn’t seem like you can look for patterns of things other than by searching. And the search seems fairly, like just very broad, right? You’re like, you want to be able to have kind of like an Instagram or Facebook or anyplace else like that you kind of have an Explorer tab and Twitter, where you can kind of see different topics, different communities of people coming together. don’t quite have that in threads yet. I’m pretty sure they’ll get there. But right now, it seems just a little bit whatever i i created a few quote unquote threads, you know, one message after another after another trying to create a thread and it didn’t look like a thread may look like I had written two messages, and then a reply to another. And I was like, No, it was supposed to be three messages in a row. Come on, get it right Instagram, right. So there’s some some limitations in terms of how the platform is really operating. And I think that it’ll take a while for them to get those pieces up and running in that in that in that way. So anyway, that’s my thoughts on threads. Any additional thoughts good, too. And then I have just one announcement before we get on to our the rest of our items.

Augusto Pinaud 1:03:24
No, that’s okay. So yeah, I

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:03:27
do want to just make a quick note that and I’ll put a link to the to the article in in the announcements for everybody. But Evernote did lay off the rest of their American staff that’s inclusive of most of their developers, that didn’t move to Italy. But in essence, bending spoons which purchased Evernote earlier this year, has decided to, you know, centralize all of their operations in Europe. And and so they decided to just get rid of the folks who were left, you know, the probably just about 100 folks who are who are developers and otherwise in the States, and so this is just part of the consolidation. I am never an uncertified expert. I am saddened to see those people go. But this happens in you know, in business, it’s just business. Nothing is happening to Evernote, the product, right Evernote is going and as a software is going to continue to grow, continue to be developed, all of those things are going to be fine. pushing for, you know, updates and all of those kinds of things to all the things that we want Evernote to do. But I just wanted to make a note there that I’m sure many of you have heard perhaps through the grapevine through the Reddit vine that Evernote had this round of layoffs, but but I would say don’t fear jumping ship from Evernote or anything like that. For that reason, you could leave Evernote for any other reason, but I wouldn’t leave it just because they’ve consolidated their staff in Europe that has that’s a business decision and not a bad business decision. It’s a good business decision for bending spoons. It just happens to be a bad decision for the employees who are working in the States. And then launches over the over the years, but it is what it is. They can’t fire me because I’m a volunteer. As far as part of the deal there, so, but I just wanted to let everybody know about that onto what you’ve been reading and enjoying a usto. So there’s

Augusto Pinaud 1:05:31
a couple of things. One is Canadian judge and rolls rules that thumbs up emoji count as a contract agreement. And there is a farmer in Canada, who in Spain really bid over $6,000, Canadian, for agreed on a contract with emoji. And it is interesting, because it is the signs of time going up digital signature on this thing are going to come. So it is an interesting, interesting reading. Especially if you, you know, when you can see there how currently, sometimes we respond to things on the digital world. And the last thing is an article I just want to share.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:06:19
Now one thing he here, it states, President Clinton signed the global ESign Act. And so just be very, very mindful of the fact that just because this is a Canadian judge here in the States, I don’t know about anywhere else, but at least here in the States. It is well understood that if you agree to something via any digital means text, message, email, ie, you know, sign, you can sign by email, in essence, and that doesn’t mean you have to put a signature on paper, you can say I agree to something via an email response. And that will count, you know, as a contractual agreement of some kind, talk to your will, or your own legal counsel. But what will ESign Act, piece of ledge just gives you the ability to accept contracts. So just be very, very mindful of that reality. Okay, onto your other articles now.

Augusto Pinaud 1:07:17
So our next article is from Google Arts and Culture they have on built inside the genius mind of Leonardo da Vinci with, you know, participation or collaboration of 28 institutions. If you have time, and you really want to be fascinated this is it’s not a quick view, it is not going to take you a couple of minutes, it takes the article read, I think what they do rabbit holes takes a little bit longer, very fast.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:07:50
Fantastic. All right. And with that, we have reached the end of our time together, we’ve covered the productivity and related technology news this week. Thank you, Augusto, for curating our list of articles every week, and putting it together for us to be able to do the show. All right, on anything but idle.com, you’ll find our show notes. Those include the links to all our stories, the tools of the week, the new equity, the extra stories that we didn’t have time to cover, it also includes a text transcript for you to read and download offline if you need to. So you can click on the read more, it’ll expand right there on the page, or you can click on the PDF, it’ll download it. And you can of course, read along. As you listen, watch the replay. If you look at the show notes, and you want to contribute in some way, shape, or form, give feedback or otherwise, you can head over to anything but idle.com You know, go to the episode page. And you can go ahead and leave a comment right there on the page. If you want to interact with us and you know, talk to us about things. Or you can go ahead and join personal productivity club by going to www dot personal productivity dot club, go ahead and join the community and there isn’t Anything But Idle community in the system. And go ahead there is actually if you go to anything but idle.com forward slash community. It’ll take you directly to the signup page to join Anything But Idle group. So in there, you can go ahead and interact with us share stories, talk about all those things together with us in the community. And that’s the primary place for a goose stone I can integrate with you and interact with you. Feel free to if this is your first time listening to the podcast feel free to subscribe so you get the notification and automatic downloads of the new podcasts that subscribe or follow us on your favorite podcast app. But otherwise, with that we will see you all next time on Anything But Idle. Here’s to your productive life.

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

Remembering Your Notes, and the Productivity and Technology News of the Week

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In this Cast | Remembering Your Notes

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Headlines & Show Notes | Remembering Your Notes

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

Headlines, Part A

• The forced return to the office is the definition of insanity

• Business Insider: In the age of remote work, employers are quiet-quitting on employees

• Fortune: Forget ‘quiet quitting’. Now frustrated employees are ‘loud quitting’—and the resignation trend is even worse for business leaders

Headlines, Part B

• Unboxing Amazon Fire Max 11: Review

• Onyx launches compact pocket PC with eye-friendly color ePaper screen

• Android Police: Android is changing its brand identity once again

• Introduction to reminders (Todoist)

• 12 Week Year in Todoist

• Oculus cofounder sees the future in Apple Vision Pro

• Apple Glasses won’t face competition from Google Iris smart glasses

• How to manage your notes with OneNote & Google Tasks

• How to add notes to site passwords saved in Google Chrome

Tools of the Week

• Glasp / Hypothesis

• A Trusted Productivity System for Life

  • Nozbe

 FEATURED STORY OF THE WEEK

• How to Remember What You Type With Digital Note-Taking

WHAT I AM READING AND ENJOYING

• How to Do Great Work

Notes

• Dr. Julie Gurner (Part 1): Caring Deeply, Challenging Directly [The Knowledge Project Ep. #169]

• What To Do About Busy Work?

• The Real Reason You Feel Stuck

• Leveraging Fear

• Apple increases iCloud storage prices in the UK and other markets

• Cron launches Notion integration

• Reddit will remove mods of private communities unless they reopen

• Google Chat is getting new tools to help you reply to messages faster better express yourself

• Evernote – why I love(d) it, how it almost acquired Nozbe and what’s next for your “external brain”? 

• The Business 2023

Raw Text Transcript | Remembering Your Notes

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).

[read more=”Read the raw text transcript” less=”Close the raw text transcript”]

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
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:13
And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. This is episode 121. Remembering your notes, and the productivity and technology news this week, we’re recording this on July 5 2023. I hope you all in the states enjoyed a Happy Independence Day weekend, hence the late recording date. But of course, each week, we cover the productivity news headlines of the week. So you know what’s going on in the world of personal productivity and its related technologies. And so with that, I’m going to have Augusto lead us into our first headline this week. Augusto,

Augusto Pinaud 0:44
the first article came from 14th. And this is going to be a short section today covered by three articles. The first one is the forced Return of the office is the definition of insanity. And being a person who don’t want to go to an office ever again. Since 2004. Okay. I agree. Okay, there is a myth that people work better in the office that there is something that the office will provide, other than distraction and bad coffee. So that’s what the article goes talk about the roadblocks of productivity, and how CEOs are founding this hard balance into let’s try to go back and really what productivity is doing with those.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:35
Yeah, so So this article is, is very well in line with the next two articles that we’re going to be discussing. So I’ll kind of put my piece here and then we’ll go on to the next article and how it kind of leads into it. But I have a lot of thoughts regarding this forced return to the office, I think the article author makes some really salient points here. And this is a this is a fortune article, it’s written by Dr. Gleb Tsipursk, hopefully got that name, right. But this is a is a person who helps tech and finance industry executives drive collaboration, innovation and retention in hybrid work, according to the little bio that’s there. And so this consultant is kind of in that space. And for me, it seems pretty intuitive, that this would be the problem that we see when there is any forced culture change. So we had this in impressed upon us, right, we were we were forced into a cultural change by virtue of the combination of the COVID 19 pandemic and many other issues as we came out of it. And so people were in this hybrid and remote environment. And here we are now on the other side of that with people who are who are basically overworking to a great extent, we saw a lot of people during the pandemic worried about their job. And so they were, they were working many more hours than they probably needed to they were overworking this high level of productivity. And of course, that couldn’t, wasn’t sustainable. And so we’re coming out of that. And of course, I think, you know, managers who just believe that they have to have people in person are causing this kind of problem. What I really liked was how the author talked about this Gallup study, and, and how coming out of the pandemic, the this Gallup work this the state of global workplace 2023 report, and it talks about what people really are feeling and needing in light of this, this whole new perspective. But one of the things that I found really kind of interesting about this, is that the author talks very clearly about the hidden roadblocks to productivity. And how if, if employers and F folks are managers generally or at large, are not doing the right collaboration, the right socializing the right mentoring, and giving people those opportunities, then they’re really going to be up a creek because those people are ultimately going to burn out and or be less engaged and leave. And so they actually also talked about this recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Harvard University in the University of Iowa, where they had software engineers located in different buildings on the campus. And what they what they posited from the study was that while you have higher productivity, clearly higher productivity when people are distributed, you have less mentorship. And you and I’ve talked about this consistently, which is that, you know, we need to have different and better ways of being able to elevate and to mentor and to guide new members of the workforce, right, we need to be able to help them in some way shape or form. There are ways to do that remotely, and we are

Augusto Pinaud 4:44
you know, one of the problems is we are assuming that these people want to be mentoring this way that we were mentored many years ago and these people is different you know, I I don’t do as many coaching on business as I do with families, and one of the things that I laugh very often with my clients is how do you communicate with your kids? What do you mean, I call them and I want them to pick up the phone. So you understand that concept. Application your kid do not understand his phone has is capable of, they understand text, they understand snap, they understand other things. Phone call, they don’t video call, maybe phone call, they don’t. So when you call and inspect that callback, as a parent, that is not going to happen, why the client doesn’t understand it, the kid can relate if I call my kids 11 and 15. Okay, sorry, they understand video calls, they understand your FaceTime in that, if I dial the phone, okay, it’s annoying for them. They don’t understand why even you want to call without seeing why do you didn’t text and it is the same thing for many of these people entering the workforce, they work in a different way. No good, no bad, different. And the mentoring to be effective, really need to be adapted to that this is people who use technology, and are much more comfortable with technology than many of the people who are doing that mentoring.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:22
Absolutely. So you know, as this article notes, when you force people back into the office, employee engagement is the thing that suffers, especially those people who want to continue working remotely. And so we can have structured mentoring, that is in a hybrid model, where you’re not forcing people to come back into the office all the time. And, again, this is all fairly new, we still have a lot of culture to shake out shake, you know, culture is to is to organizations, as habits are to individuals, they are slow to be creative. And once they’re created, they’re tough to break. So it really takes time for people to be able to get used to some of these things. And so I think that this preliminary research, and I think these studies are very interesting to watch, because it gives us some sense of it. And again, a lot of this is really intuitive, that productivity would increase as people are not forced into, you know, having to have their time taken up by chit chat and other kinds of things happening around them. People are generally self directed in their positions. And the other side is that, you know, employee engagement is going to obviously, be lower, because they’re not consistently interacting with each other. That’s probably where the productivity increases are coming from. But we also have to force we have to structure that that level of mentorship of that employee engagement so that we do have a culture that is retained by virtue of this remote or distributed work environment. And with that, let’s continue on the subject of remote work in our next article. Okay, step Oh,

Augusto Pinaud 7:49
since Doom, probably mispronounced our first article, I’m going to say that the second article is right, written by Aki Ito. So I get the responsibility of butcher the second one, but his Business Insider, and he’s in the war of remote work. Companies are turning full time jobs into low paying gigs. And, you know, yeah, we can argue about how these corporations are getting more temp people and more outsource people for do these jobs and more of, you know, independent contractors. And there are a couple of myths that are are good to dispel. One is independent contractors are more expensive than full time employees. In most organizations, they are not cheaper. The advantage that gives to the organization is flexibility. That’s it. It’s not a cost issue, it’s a flexibility issue, when you are your employee, if you need to replace that person, there is a complex process an independent contractor, you can end up a contract right there. So people need to understand these things. Yes, there is a hidden reaction to remote work as the article said part time employees independent contractors, but also we are ignoring in this case that there is not everybody who wants to do the full time employee who is fine into the independent contractor work into the temp into their, you know, being able to work now with a company that is in Europe, okay, being here from the United States or the other way around. So one of the things that all these things did was that all these things that were happening underground, hey, independent contractors, outsourcing, okay, offshoring that was happening before the pandemic, but he was hearing nobody was talking about it. Now that all came to light and there is many companies and many people shocked by the realities. Now there is not I don’t think companies Returning full time jobs into low paying gigs. Companies are evolving jobs, some of them are going to be smaller things that they’re going to pay less. And some of those are going to be things that can be done in a better way. The question is, how are you ready to evolve to use your skills and translate that into the way you want to work? And leave? You know, that point of the article says, well, people is losing the benefits of the W two? Well, most likely the benefits of the W two are dead anyways, it’s a matter of when not a matter of if so many of these people may be ahead of the curve and figure it out how they can make it differently.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:49
Yeah, I come out with come out with a slightly different perspective for folks to kind of consider. And I agree with everything that Cousteau said. And the the other perspective is for the small business entrepreneur, who is a service based business that is providing these kinds of services to others, right, they now have greater competition. And because more and more basically, gig workers side hustlers are coming onto the market, because they have that capability, plus FTEs, full time employees are now being shifted into this gig work and or this gig of fied economy. That creates a number of problems here in the United States and probably globally, but I’ll focus on the state’s issues, which is that we here in the United States have a bunch of benefits that are tied to our primary employment. One is our tax bases, right? Our tax base is tied to our full time employment status as a W two employee, when we’re 1099. Contractor, we’re we’re being taxed higher. Because we’re you know, the employer in essence is paying part of that payroll tax to the federal government on your behalf. There’s also things like retirement benefits, those are usually strictly tied to them, you’re usually getting benefits from the employer, whether that’s a 401 K, or some kind of SEP IRA program, or something like that you’re paying as a small business entrepreneur into your own IRA, or you’re paying on behalf of your employees. And then of course, healthcare. Healthcare is usually directly tied to your FTE status. And you’re a part of that group benefit policy, sometimes you’re also getting long term disability short term disability policies, so that if you do go into some kind of, you know, incapable state, right physically or mentally, you are covered by some kind of policy, depending upon where you are in the food chain in the organization, all of those things go away when you’re when you’re a gig worker. And, and we need to figure out as a, as a global workforce, how to deal with those issues. People need some kind of safety net, this is not the Wild Wild West, it’s 2023. And so there is this reality here that we all have to kind of come to terms with, do we want a traditional work environment? Or do we have a government that’s going to step in and provide some of those things, whether at cost or otherwise, to be able to provide those things? That is a political and a public policy problem that is seemingly intractable right now, but it’s something that we have to deal with. And it’s going to start affecting productivity? Because if people I mean, we talked, what was it last week or the week before it goes to about how financial stress impacted people’s productivity, if people are constantly worried about their health care about their retirement, about, you know, bringing in the next contract, because now, the company could let you go at any moment, and you have no, there’s no unemployment insurance for a 1099 contractor, you’re just done. When all of those financial stresses start to compound on people, even when someone is getting a lot of contracts all the time, there’s still that financial stress involved, because you’re basically a self employed individual, that financial stress is going to compound and ultimately hurt productivity across the entire labor market. So just be mindful of that as we move forward. If you are in a position of leadership, if you’re an executive, start thinking about how you’re going to handle employer based health insurance for your folks, especially if you’re a small business, and all of a sudden you go say you had eight employees, and then you go to three because you decided that you could save some money. Well guess what? Your group health insurance policy may or may not want to cover only three people, right? So you may need a requisite number of people to even have a group policy. So all of these things are kind of intermixed, and and then of course, you have less control over that individual right. You can’t ask them to work overtime or otherwise, they have the ability and right under the IRS regulations, right. IRS has a checklist of things they say this makes someone an employee and the moment you start checking more and more of those less and less of those boxes, the more likely they are an employee and therefore deserve the the Employee Benefits rights of a regular employee. So just kind of keep that all kind of rolling around in your ecosystem, as you’re thinking about all of the things around job security for the people who are working for you, and the benefits that are provided to them traditionally, you know, I, I consistently say this, you know, an organization’s most precious asset are its people. And so treating them like a disposable commodity is not going to get you the best performance of those people. And I think that’s something that we all have to kind of keep in, keep in mind as we move forward in this very tenuous, you know, back and forth between that which is the gig economy and the traditional work economy. With that onto our next and final article in our productivity headlines related to this whole remote work world,

Augusto Pinaud 15:50
as we have discussed multiple times during the show, you know, about a phenomenon called Quiet quitting, where people are stopping, you know, doing the minimum to stay the job and keep the salary now, what they’re describing is that frustrated employees are loud, weary. That, you know, I was a little confused, because loud quitting, I thought was what people used to quit before. But okay, let’s call it something new. You know, as they said, everything gets recycled and new. But, um, they’re talking about, you know, that this resignation trend is even worse for the business leaders. But he’s exactly what you said it’s not about location is not about remote is not about the office. It’s about what these employers are feeling. What are you letting your team feel? Are your team feeling a we are part of this, are we moving forward together, or we’re not it doesn’t matter if you are a gig, an independent contractor or a W two, what matter really is how they feel when people feel fair, contributing, and moving forward, there is no quiet or loud, quitting, loud and quiet quitting happen when something on the organization broke. And normally what it broke is that is people stop pushing to make sure these employers or employees are well and are taken care of. And more importantly, they feel taken care of.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:31
Yep, all all of those things. And I this, I’m not quite sure if I’m I miss, read the first article and whether that was also part of gallops 2023 state of the global workforce report. But this article also covers that report and talks about it in this other in this other vein, and I just want to underscore something of the article notes about the report. Specifically, it says, quote, but management is largely to blame with 70% of team engagement attributable to the manager, according to the report and quote, and, you know, we I’ve said it many times, and I will keep saying it, when we have these arguments over. And I think they’re legitimate rhetoric, right? This is all good conversation to have when we have these arguments over remote work versus in person or in office work, when we have these arguments over, you know, quiet, quitting, or loud, quitting, or otherwise, many times where we’re forced into this idea of the moral culpability of the individual who is who is doing it. And there’s, there are examples of that, obviously, there are some bad employees out there, there are bad apples. However, by and large, by and large, this is management’s responsibility, and is typically men and management’s fault, and not creating an environment in an ecosystem that supports their workers. And this comes all the way down to you know, salary and benefits, all the way through to creating a team culture and, and fostering an environment that is supportive of those people. And I just like it seems so on its face, simple to understand to me, yet, it seems to be such a difficult thing for most organizations to recognize, which is that it’s not the employees that are disengaged, or, you know, purposefully, it’s not like they’re just wanting to be disengaged from their jobs, they want to get paid, they want to do their work, and they want to do their work well, they want to they want to have meaning associated with their work. And so often trust is the thing that is so marred between management and employees, that that’s why they disengage and then loud quitting, you know, causing this harm to the organization by going out there and lambasting their their employer. They recognize, I mean, you have to have a really, really difficult situation to go out there and ruin of a future recommendation, right, you’re not going to get a recommendation from a company that you basically you know, out loud fire, you know, in that sense, and that you leave and kind of a huff but these people are compelled to do this because of their this lack of time. Justin, this, this breakdown in engagement with their managers. It’s not the organization, it’s not like, oh, this big, you know, conglomerate hates me, it’s that this person, this person is causing me problems. And so often than not, I really feel like we’re not taking advantage of elevating the knowledge set and the skill set of our managers. And we’re not dealing with a mental health stress the the absolute distress that managers have, when they are managing teams, both in person and remote, right, we need to be able to give professional development managers because bad managers create bad teams. But also as a high level of stress with managing people, I know it, I got the gray hair to prove it. And so we want to make sure that we are we are helping to kind of, you know, have a stopgap measure some way to defuse the stress associated with managing people. And it’s tough people management is tough. And we’re not giving enough of credit to managers in a lot of ways for the for the tough people work that they’re doing. So I just I really enjoyed the series of articles because it gives us time to really reflect on how difficult it is to create a an environment that is fostering productivity, and that we have an opportunity here to do that. And so with that, we’ve covered the productivity headlines for the week, when we get back, we’re going to go ahead and head into our technology headlines. And so with that, we’re going to take a word from our sponsor this week. And then when we get back, we will head into our technology headlines. As I said, See after the break.

Sponsor Voice Over 21:32
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Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:42
And we’re back welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle with acoustic bonauto myself Ray Sidney-Smith. And so we are going to go on to our technology headlines. Augusto what’s the next Headline?

Augusto Pinaud 22:54
Headline is a review from good e readers on the Amazon Fire Max, they call them a decent tablet. And I it’s a good review. Okay, and they talk Hey, some of the you know the displays are good display the performance, you know, the battery is good. And you know, they make the accessories are cool. You know, they say they love and display the price, the fingerprint sensor for unlocking the device, the number of speakers so you give good, decent sound quality. And they complain they found three things. One is the lockscreen has ads Well, Amazon hat and higher version you can buy without the ads, the lack of Google Play store that has been a standard on any Fire tablet since 2012. And if you’re a vendor enough, you can figure it out on the web how to how to fix that. And then thank you and then this screen ratio. And I wanted to bring it because this is the kind of reviews that people read and say, Oh well, great. It’s a $250. Let me buy it. And there are two things that are important to remember. Yes, this is a $250. But it’s a device that is designed to be upgraded consistently. This is not a device that you’re going to buy and keep it three or four years. Amazon has no interest into this they will come 24 or 25 with the next 11 inch and they want you need to upgrade and they make it in that way. And I’m not criticizing Amazon. That is their model their model is, is they bring a very cheap tablet that you can consistently upgrade and buy a new one and buying products through them. So be aware of that as you read these reviews and consider this tablet. Is this tablet decent. Yes. It’s going to last you three years. No so be Be aware of that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:03
Absolutely. All right on to our next particle.

Augusto Pinaud 25:07
Our next article is Onyx Onyx do a tablet call the books, the B O X. And they lounge, a new Pocket PC one that has the pencil very similar to the Nova Ersi that we have review and I have talked about it. It’s the specs are very, very similar, except that they add something on the bottom like the iPhone where you can put now some applications that I’m very, very, very jealous because mine do not do that. So, but this is another tablet. Another thing but remember, this is when people ask me how well do you use the tablet? No, no, this is an Kindle in asteroids. Okay. It’s better. It’s better than a Kindle. Yes. is faster than a Kindle? Yes. It allowed me to install applications. Yes, it has substitute for a tablet. Now. So if you are looking for a more powerful, then this is an option. If you are not, if you are looking for a tablet, this may not be the option you are looking for.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:18
Yeah, I think that again it the article actually tries to compare it to the Kindle scribe or the remarkable two tablets. I don’t think that that’s a an appropriate, I think in functionality, I suppose but certainly not in quality of the experience. This is This is in essence, it’s running Android. Right? This is an Android device. Yeah. So it’s running Android. You know, I think that it has a pretty good set of specs. I wasn’t actually dis disapproving of the specs. I do like the fact that it’s a color tool. And I think that it’s important for us all to kind of take heed to the fact that this is this is Onyx is entry into this space to compete with scribe and the remarkable to vertical to though is very high end technology, right? It’s a high end device. The Kindle Scribe is like any other Kindle quality build, right? It’s nice, but it’s also as you said, with the with the with the Macs, you know, it’s just something that you’re going to replace on a regular basis, it’s not going to last very long. Although I will say that I own every single one of my past candles,

Augusto Pinaud 27:27
the candles last but the timeless, the fire is a different story. The Kansas is a reader, they will last forever because they are indestructible apparently according to the ones I have at least. But the fires will not the batteries and the processors are not fast enough to continue lasting for a really long,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:48
right. Totally, totally understood. And so again, I’m I’m actually very interested in this from the color perspective, I like the the ability to be able to play in the color, I like access to the Google Play store here. And I like having the additional functionality for someone. This is not for me, because I do not want the additional functionality on any tablet that I’m using except on my iPad, right? So my iPad is that tablet that has that functionality, which is a full purpose computing device. Anything else must be must be context specific. Right? My Kindle is there for reading. The Kindle Scribe is there for taking notes and annotating documents, right? So it’s it’s all about giving the tool a purpose. And many times what we try to do is we try to say we want all of our devices to do all the things that’s not as productive as giving the tool a purpose, and then using it for that purpose effectively. Which also means that you don’t have to learn every feature of every every device, you’re learning the features of the device that that it works best for. Right. So, you know, like the Kindles have a browser built into it. And you can do all kinds of things on those devices. Why would you fight a browser built on a Kindle? To get things done, I get it, if it’s in a pinch, you need to be able to access blah, blah, blah, but it’s really not worth it in my book, to fight that uphill battle on a device that’s inferior to browsing for browsing the web. So just kind of keep those things in mind that this is doing some really sophisticated things. But it’s also a fairly, you know, overpowered you know, like, basically reader and and so yeah, it can do some extra things. And you got to keep that in mind. I do like the fact that it’s on Android 11. And so it’s pretty, pretty high up there and the androids, doing doing its thing. All right, on to our next article about Android getting a brand identity facelift.

Augusto Pinaud 29:42
And that’s all yours. The Android is changing their brand identity once again, and I don’t understand this game from Google. But

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:55
I think it’s I think it’s like well worth an effort to tell appears through. So Android for a very long period of time has been in this lowercase older view with a very two dimensional Android head. So kind of the head of the robot has been, has been very two dimensional, this rebranding, which I started noticing some time ago, but I’m guessing it’s like kind of official now, which is that they have now capitalized the A and Android. And they have kind of three deified the, the head of the Android robot. So now we are seeing just a little bit more kind of just updated, modern look to the Android logo. And honestly, I like it, I like everything that I’ve seen about it. So far, it looks crisp, it looks modern, and it was just looking a little dated. And I think they recognize that and this was an opportunity for us to be able to do that. I think there’s probably some more refinement to come as, as Android continues to grow. But I think, you know, as we kind of move with the cheese, in terms of brand identity, you know, just modern trends and brand identity, especially with material, you, this is just a good opportunity for us to be able to see Android make that that upward, you know, movement in the brand identity. All right, onward to the introduction to reminders on Todoist. And I will say I didn’t know that Todoist didn’t have this feature already. So I was little

Augusto Pinaud 31:26
Todoist had its has our version of this future, what they did was they really, really expanded so you could do reminders before but he was a little challenging and not very intuitive. So as a coach have to do is I have helped people set up reminders and use them, what they really did was when explain it better classify who have access, so you need to have a pro or a business account. But third, they really extend what they can do. So one of the things that to do is do that is very nice, is you can type I want to call re Monday at 12pm. And this belongs to this project and this tags or categories, okay, you could type all that or verbally do it. Reminders require you to do two or three clicks before now you can even do it on that syntaxes that improvement is fantastic, you can now set them to be automatic. So saying, Hey, I have a deadline at 4pm. So for example, this show has a deadline every week, I need to finish the agenda. So under a certain time. So that in my to do is has okay agenda for Anything But Idle. Okay, on a time. Now I can say to you know what, remind me of this two hours early. So I get a reminder that, you know, I have two more hours to submit this agenda before I get in trouble. So that’s very, very useful. And again, what they did was make it very, very easy. And that helps significantly for the heavy user of two dudes.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:14
antastic. Great, great on them. All right, on to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 33:18
Our next article, it’s on the Reddit. And it’s more to share. Okay, somebody’s implementing two week gear in Todoist. And they went into the detail, what is a 12 week gear, what is and why to do is and how they have done it successfully. I thought it was very worth it, to spend the time reading this and really understanding you know, how you could do do this many people is looking for more productivity ways to be more productive, you know, we’re talking early I we’re going to do more? Well, this is this may be something that you will be interested in in to look at a study.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 34:03
Fantastic and just know that we do run a 12 week year group here in personal productivity club. So if anybody’s interested in the 12 week year, you can hop into that 12 week year group. It’s an under channels currently. And you can kind of ask folks how they set up their 12 week year how they set it up in Todoist. I’m sure that their Todoist users in the 12 week year group. And so that’s all kinds of fun there. Wonderful. All right on to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 34:31
Interesting thing on this article and we have mentioned when we talk about the Apple vision pro how exciting that is, and there is a new podcast in which the co founder of Oculus Oculus is one of those VR headsets is sharing how excited he is how this can change things and how much you know he’s excited about the price. Everything about it you know and even he’s he said on the on the interview and I think if Apple will have tried to go after the low end of the market that will have been a mistake. And I share my opinion of this apple is going to go on apply this same strategy they have done already twice very successful. That was iPad and Apple Watch, they lounge those devices, underperforming, expense expensive. They conquer, discover what the market was really going to use with these devices, how they were going to use it and then change the product for the third or fourth generation to make it mass push. And I think they are going to do exactly the same this time.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 35:38
So for folks, just to have background on this Oculus is the company that was bought by Mehta. So as the Oculus quest, it’s now the meta quest. And so the Oculus co founder, he’s speaking I’m presuming not on behalf of any longer of meta in terms of your so. So just keep that in mind that this is not someone who’s speaking on behalf of meta and so the you know, it’s just interesting to hear someone who has left that environment and is talking about how Apple is really doing well here to step into this new market with the vision Pro. And so we’ll see once it’s in people’s hands, and in the next six to nine months. And and what people are really feeling about it, these are predominately going to be developers and folks who have had the vision pro in kind of an embargoed state, as journalists or YouTubers, or whatever else they are. And so it’s gonna be very interesting to watch that whole, you know, kind of market unfold, and what Apple really has envisioned for vision Pro, ultimately, because Penultimately, they have been talking about productivity, right, and really focusing on productivity. All of the other headsets have been focused on entertainment, specifically, in the gaming field. So how are they going to navigate those waters? And will they shift to gaming? Because that’s going to be somewhere that they can find immediate traction? Or will it be both right and go apple arcade have arcade available, plus these productivity applications as well. So it’s gonna be pretty interesting to watch this develop and, and go from there. All right, on to our next story of Gousto

Augusto Pinaud 37:25
hobbled Apple glasses, according to nine to five Mac and Android Central is not going to face competition right now for Google Google House announced that they’re canceling the iris smart glasses. And I’m sad about it, because I really want to see competition. And I was hoping Samsung or Google will be that competition. But it may be later Windows.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:51
Yeah, so Google Glass obviously didn’t make a huge Google Glass made a huge impact, I think on on on on the industry in the sense that it came too soon, people rejected the notion of being recorded in some way, shape, or form. And, and that was, that was really difficult. However, while Google abandoned the consumer side of Google Glass, it actually was embraced by an enterprise. So Google Glass lives on in the enterprise space. And, you know, think about, you know, we talked about this actually, way back in the day, you know, the idea of having a heads up display, while you’re on say, you know, you’re a cable runner, you know, you’re you’re a cherry picker up there really high, you need instructions, or you need overlay of kinds of instructions, that kind of thing, the enterprise world is, you know, pretty good. And, and then, of course, Google decided to get rid of the Enterprise Edition, as well. And so, you know, I think that Google Glass will live on in some way, shape, or form in the vestiges of the technology in something new, I will be curious to see how this, this whole environment of having a heads up display, especially for the augmented reality space continues to develop, there’s, um, was it Sony, that was collaborating with either Snapchat, or it was it was Ray Ban that was collaborating with Mehta with the Facebook glasses. So, you know, everyone is kind of trying these different things out, and it’s just going to be a matter of time before we find a an effective set of glasses that people can wear. And that ties to the computing system. This was being done in the 80s folks, so it’s not a new thing. It’s just a matter of of getting it into a small form factor, right. This is all about battery power for the most part right because if you put a pair of glasses on, you have to be able to have enough battery power to be running such high processing power plus heat conduction, you know, heat dissipation that is so that you’re not having your glasses. burn your face. So you know, there’s just a lot going on in this whole thing. You know, Apple glasses is an interesting concept where you can have, you know, a pair of glasses you put them on, and they give you an augmented view of the world. I think that we have seen already some of this, you know, Bose and others have put out glasses that play music, Amazon had a pair of glasses that had music as well, they were typically sunglasses, you know, you go to the beach, you put your sunglasses on, you listen to your music, some of them use bone conduction, or otherwise. But this is the future. I mean, until we get contact lenses, where the contact lenses have the superimposed lens, and so on and so forth. Google has been playing around this with regard to glucose monitoring, in their in their health project. And so I see that I see that movement in the direction of now a display, you know, on glasses that you can put on, and it gives you just like you’re walking around town, you’d like to be able to see directions, you know, right now, if I have my Google Pixel watch on and I’m running, you know, around the block, you know, I can turn on directions, if I get lost, which happens, I can go ahead and say, I need directions back home. And now it can go ahead and just show it to me on my watch, it’d be much nicer find my sunglasses on. And it just showed me the directions in which I should be going. And now that can facilitate my getting home safely. So those kinds of things are, are just have to it’s the natural progression of where people can go, you know, if you’re not a watch, wear or if you’re not sunglasses wear, then you’re not going to probably lean into this as quickly and readily. But for those of us like myself, who was always a watch were having a smartwatch was the next logical thing for me, I wear sunglasses. So I’m going to naturally want a pair of glasses to be able to have that heads up display and apply that augmented reality. So I see lots of opportunity here. It’s just getting all of the companies together to make this work together, just like the matter protocol for IoT for Internet of Things, technology protocols, that that matter, protocol. While you know, I’ve heard you no good and bad about it. If Apple and Google and otherwise can have an interoperable wearable, and they can at least protocol regarding those wearables. Because if I buy Apple glasses, and I can’t use them with my, my Google Pixel phone, it’s dead on arrival, right? But if I can, if I can use it across the system, yeah, sure. It’s not gonna be as good, right? As it might be, if I were pairing with an iPhone, fine. But I should be able to use 80 to 90% of its functionality just the same way. And then it becomes powerful enough for anyone to buy those that kind of heads up display, and put it on and use it. So I see all of the productivity benefit benefits of this kind of technology. And I really hope that they, they just set aside their differences for the future of a huge market. I mean, there’s a huge market here for those who can make it work. All right on to managing your notes with OneNote and Google Tasks.

Augusto Pinaud 42:57
Comes from Flexi I use Flexi personally, it’s a great application. And they have come to work, how to integrate, you know, these things that supposed to be universal how to integrate all the things and they’re not. And now they are talking in this article, how to integrate your OneNote with the Google task and how to make them work together. It’s a short article. But if you use those two products, or you use products that we love to have integrated, I will recommend you to go and check out flex.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 43:34
Yeah, and it’s Plexi, right. It’s p l e x y, right. So for anybody who may be confused by the weird spelling, there are two E’s in the name, I don’t know how they actually pronounce their name, I’m gonna go with Plexi. But either way, they have the ability to synchronize between many different tools. So Microsoft to do to do list and Google Tasks are kind of like the Mainstays and then they are capable of then integrating with other tools across the system. So you can you can synchronize to Trello and asana and JIRA, and Evernote, base camp, you name it, all of those can kind of synchronize back and forth, which gives you that much more power to be able to work in the tool you want to, while still integrating with potentially the tools you have to use for work or otherwise. So this is just a really, really great tool. It’s, it’s akin to the tool I use, which is Unito, Yuen Ito, that allows me to fully synchronize between asana and Trello as well as many other tools and and so you can kind of use these tools and this is different than say, Zapier or a Microsoft Power automate or if because those tools are like step based tools, right? If you do this, then you get this particular result. Please see as well as unito are synchronizing those tools are staying in a near real time synchronization between those things. So as you’re making changes between one or the other, those things are going back and forth and making them it synchronous, would that that’s the power of these things, and I please see is, is much more affordable. So that’s the thing about Plexi, unito was just a bit more expensive. But, you know, by a bit more, I mean, a lot more expensive. But you know, that’s what it is. So I think that it’s great that they’re adding more tools to make the integration, synchronization more robust. Okay, on to our next and final

Augusto Pinaud 45:32
activity, technological is now you can add notes to cite password, save it on Google Chrome. So in the latest version, you can go to Chrome, you know, go to Settings, Password Manager, open your password, and add notes, Hey, you want to give things I will help you to find a search faster and things that you may want to remember. So I think this is something in the right direction from Google passwords.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 46:00
Yes. So the reason why you would want to take notes are things like if your username and password are not your email address, but you want to know what email address is tied to that particular account, you know, you can go ahead and put that in the notes. It’s not going to compromise, necessarily your security that much. And it gives you the ability to go ahead and know what those things are, I see that all the time, you know, you’ll have to you have a username and a password. But you need to know what email address it’s tied to because you do a password reset, and you have no idea what email address it went to. And so you’re just stuck there, you know, going from email to email to kind of figure that out. But there are also things like just having a pin associated with your passwords and knowing what that pin might be, you might want to put those into the notes as well as again, being mindful of that security risk, you can go ahead and play some of those pieces in there. You might even put in a hint as it relates to your password. So you can remember say if you have a mnemonic for your passwords, you can put a in the note that particular mnemonic and you don’t need to actually expose the the the actual password, you could just look at it. So if you’re in a group environment, the mnemonic will help you know what the password is it okay, and now you can go ahead and type that into another device, especially if you’re not, you know, the password manager is there. So it will automatically put it in as on the device. But if you’re trying to put it in on your phone, and you don’t have access to your Chrome browser, say it’s a brand new install, you can use that mnemonic to go ahead and remember the password and Sound Support. So you have lots of really good options for that. All right, that closes out our productivity technology headlines for this week, and moves us into new tools of the week. I guess when I of course come across many personal development time tasks, project management and productivity, collaboration tools and services each week. Some of them we use, some of them just stand out because they’re interesting. And so here in new tools of the week, we each bring you a tool we think you might like and so this week, I am going to talk about two different tools, but in a different way. So the tool I’m recommending primarily is called Glass. And glass is a tool that I’ve been looking for for a very long time. glass glass is basically a highlighting tool and an annotation tool for the web. And this is in line with another tool that I have been using for quite some time, called hypothesis. And there are kind of two pieces to hypothesis that I really like. But let me talk about glass first. So what glass allows you to do is you install a Chrome extension. Unfortunately, this is not a desktop application. I really, really wish this was the desktop application, but it’s not. So it’s it’s fixed into the web browser, whether that be any chromium based browser or Apple Safari. And what you do now is you can go ahead and highlight any text that appears in a web page, you can highlight it a specific color, and they give you a selection of colors. And you can also add notes to that highlighted text. So think how you have a Kindle, right, you highlight a part of the Kindle, you go ahead and add a color if you’re using a Kindle app, as opposed to one of the Kindles that are black and white. And you can go ahead and apply color, you can also apply a note you can comment on that particular item. And then you can go ahead and export those, copy those highlights. So say for example, I go through an article for today’s Anything But Idle, I will then be able to see all my highlights within the article, exhume them right extract them from the document the webpage immediately from the article and copy them into their own note in Evernote, or OneNote or wherever I want to. And now it’s in that space, it’s inside that note, and it’s just the highlighted things plus my comments associated with it and sourcing back to each of those items. So I’m capable of clicking on a link being taken directly back to that thing. You can create a portal where you have all of your various comments, highlights and notes, and you can share them with other people. So glass is a really really powerful tool that allows you to do this with YouTube videos, you can do this in many, many other tools. So you can kind of do that it has a direct injury integration also with read wise, which is kind of like the the ability to synchronize all of your various notes when you’re reading across different environments like Kindle or otherwise. So I just am I’m really pleased with Glasgow so far. And I’ll just add a side note to this, which is the reason why like hypothesis hypothesis allows you to basically implement this kind of highlighting. So if you know medium, and how medium.com you go to medium, you can highlight something and just apply an annotation directly in line within the text hypothesis has a function for adding that to your website, if you have a WordPress website, so you could just install that WordPress plugin. And now someone can visit your website, they can highlight text and leave a comment directly on the text that they’ve highlighted, which is really freaking cool. And so it just gives you that ability to have that level of inline conversation with people and knowing the parts of your your content that are actually relevant to the reader, right? Because if they’re highlighting that specific text, you know a lot more about what they’re talking about than them going down to the bottom of the page and typing a comment that is maybe quoting maybe not quoting the text that you are that’s relevant to their to their comments. So glaspie and hypothesis, I’ll put links to those in the show notes, of course, so you’ll be able to access them. But the the hypothesis plugin that you can implement on your website, is this really powerful as well. Okay, so what is your tool this week?

Augusto Pinaud 51:37
Oh, my tool is weak, it may not be a new tool. It’s not me. And the productivity tool. I’m one of their certified experts. So I spend a lot of time talking about nursery but the reason this became was because Michael publish an article talking about the article step titled nuts be a trusted productivity system for life. And regardless of the application, what I like to highlight is this article because as much as I believe nothing is great. Really, this is the article brings what I think most people should look into productivity, or you bring them or building a trusted productivity for life, or are you playing with the next app? And you know, I remember when I begin in the world of productivity some months ago, I remember people saying, well, when you find that system, you will not change it. And it’s true. My system, it’s been very, very stable. I begin OmniFocus. And I move into Todoist. And even as a certified expert, there are some things that listen, there may not be many things lives in Todoist. Today, nothing left in Omni, but I still teach the three of them. And what he, what I help people to do is to build that trusted system doesn’t matter, you can blow my thing. And I will be able to move my system to the next application and build it exactly the same way. And I think that’s one thing that nos B do incredibly, incredibly well. So my advice, go and read that article quickly and get a little more into what that means.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 53:37
Fantastic. And we’ll put a link to those be in the show notes as well. So with that, let’s go on to our featured story of the week. This week, we’re talking about how to remember what you type with digital note taking. So what’d you think about the article?

Augusto Pinaud 53:58
The article was very interesting. And we have talked about digital ink we have talked about things but you know, the reality is we still type more than what we write. I love good notes. I leave on good notes, but I understand I carry multiple devices most people carrying our device or things like OneNote it’s great when you are typing Evernote, great when you’re typing. The question is what is what you have to remember though things are you trusting search? Because if you’re trusting search, you may be in trouble if you use different terminologies. How are you going to remember what it is? Are you typing and processing? What is what you’re using? I thought it was a good article to remind people that is not only the content is not only captured and created, it’s also how you’re going to retrieve it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 54:58
So so the article actually walks through some techniques for being able to help you remember what you type. The first thing, though, that it recommends is the idea that you can go ahead and capture handwritten notes, digitally, right, just taking a photograph of your notes. And it uses Evernote as it’s a specific example. And obviously, you all know that I’m an evidence certified expert, but you could do this just on your phone, right, you could literally just, you know, take a photo photo with your phone, both Android and iOS have an ability to extract text from images. So you don’t need an exterior tool to basically lift the text from handwritten notes, which means that you then have the ability to move those that that OCR text to wherever you want to be able to place them. So you get the benefit of those things. Now, I have a working hypothesis, and is hypothesis not a theory, but working hypothesis that the whole reason why some of these social studies that have come out have shown that people, quote unquote, learn better or retain more from handwriting versus with typing is purely concentration right there. If you’re typing, you’re less engaged with the material, there’s less time being dwelled on what you’re writing, right, because you’re putting more effort into the writing process. However, I think that as new generations come onto onto technology, you’re gonna see more and more students who are dwelling on the material that they are typing. And therefore, you will get the same level of retention and capability. What What I’m really concerned about, though, is the fact that, you know, students can just like click a recorder, right, you turn on your voice memos app or Google recorder, and you can audio record and transcribe the entire lecture. Many times professors are already doing that and providing that in a portal. So kids are are less likely to take notes, and therefore they’re less likely to learn a very, very powerful skill, a skill set, really, that is necessary for being out there in the world and being successful as a professional. That being the case, if we can, if we can digitize our notes, we get a central source of truth, right. And we want to really get to that place where we have that central source of truth. And then the article basically walks us through different things we can do to better do that level of comprehension, retention, and then our ability to be able to not just retain, but then what do you call it, when you bring it to memory again, so, you know, recall, thank you, retention. And recall, I couldn’t recall the word for recall, that’s a bad sign. So being able to go ahead and recall at at will, those kinds of, of datum, or data that are that are living within our system. So I think that what we all need to do is we need to recognize that there are different modalities for taking notes, learn some some different modalities that work for you. And then going ahead and making sure that you are, you know, just like approaching the material on a regular basis that allows it to move from short term memory and working memory into long term memory so that you have better retention and recall. So that can include spaced repetition, where you use some space repetition applications, like Anki, or otherwise, that allow you to see the material over and over again, on a particular spaced repetition, pacing, so that you’re capable of remembering the things that you remember, and then being reinforced of the things that you don’t remember as you are making your way forward. And that gives you the ability to reinforce and and strengthen those neural neural pathways. So good article, I think it’s always important for us to think about the fact that we still have lots of digital notetaking, that is handwritten note taking, we have lots of note taking that is physically writing on paper, and that we have that capability, even if we don’t utilize it as much. And quite honestly, like, I like using my iPad and taking notes directly into Evernote. Using the digital tool. I use good notes as well, I use the Kindle scribe. So I take notes in handwriting in a lot of different environments for very differing reasons. All right. So if somebody is going to give me a document that I’m going to need to mark up and then show them, I’m likely going to use the Kindle scribe, not because the iPad or Evernote can do it. But because it’s a little less daunting for that individual. Right? If you put put an iPad in front of them, they think about all the other things they could do on that iPad, and all the other things that I could be doing on that iPad, but because it’s a very limited device, it’s just like, No, it’s just a document that happens to be digital. And we’re going to look at it together. And that really helps reduce some of that immediate kind of response that some people have to touching an overpowered device, a powerful device. So I think the dumber the device for the first purpose, the better and it just makes it for a much easier experience. And that just may be with an older audience. You may not have any of that response to a younger audience that’s much more used to a tablet, being in front of them and working in that in that environment. So Any final thoughts that you stow?

Augusto Pinaud 1:00:02
Yeah, no, I don’t have any more thoughts with our story of the week. The only thing I want to add is, there is an article in our notes, but it does what I read in an enjoin. It’s an article from Paul Graham, it’s a long article called how to do great work. And it’s something that I found last week, and I’ve been sending to a bunch of people, especially young people, because it’s a fantastic description of what we should have been, somebody shouldn’t have shared with us many years back. So I just want to leave the link in there. And if you have a time, go and enjoy.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:00:46
Yes, and when you do read it understand that Paul Graham is, is explicating an interesting perspective for being able to find how to do great work, he, he gives some, some recommendations, the one area where I feel like you may struggle is of course, where he talks about the idea of finding that thing that you may want to work on, right, that thing that you want to do great work about, and how difficult and challenging that particular task is. And the fact of the matter is, is that as he kind of underscores in the article, when you are younger, and you have to decide on that thing that you want to do great work about, you’re probably too young to know what that thing is in the future. So I kind of liken this to arranged marriages, for whether you like the idea or not arranged marriages typically work out, whether that’s because of the culture in which they typically are, you know, enforced, or otherwise, when we are given fewer choices, we have a tendency to just fall in line with those choices. And we thrive in those choices. So it’s not a bad thing, to be thrust into something. So one is really, anything is better than nothing, right? So, like we talked about in productivity, right? Many times action is always better than inaction. Right? Obviously, there are edge cases where, you know, inaction not walking off the cliff is better than walking off the cliff. But those are few and far between, especially when it comes to learning about what you want to do in in with your life. Right, you can always change course. But the other side to this is that many people in at least in the Western world, fall into this individualistic perspective that they have to love what they do, in order to start, when in reality is actually the flip of that, the more you do something, and the longer you do it, and the deeper you understand it, the more you you create a sense of motivation and, and passion about something, passion is earned. For most people, some people come to it, you know, they love baseball cards, they love baseball, they get into the baseball industry, and they have a wonderful, you know, fruitful career In, in baseball, fine. Good on them, pat them on the on the back. And, and kudos to them, for the rest of us how we have to create meaning and passion. And therefore, it is through doing something deeply for a long period of time, that actually creates that level of mastery, and therefore passion about that thing. So don’t get too hung up on the idea that, that what you’re doing is not something that you’re passionate about. Because the reality is, is that some small percentage of you will dislike that thing and need to move away from that career, but you will have learned something and that learning something is deeply learning about something, right. And now you can apply that to learning deeply about something else. And the other side is that for the vast majority of you, you will find passion by virtue of having been with it for an extended period of time. And so that’s the piece that I really focused in on in Graham’s work. And I felt everything else about it was interesting enough, from from a how to perspective. But that piece specifically I think, is really important for us all to really take to heart, especially if we’re young enough to have a first career or a second career or for many of you who are much younger, you’re going to have fourth and fifth careers, because folks are just moving between careers more and more and faster and faster throughout the generations. And so thank you, Gustavo. And with that we have covered the productivity and related technology news for this week. I want to thank you Augusto for putting together the show this and every week, and we will see you next week. All right, on to anything but idle.com Which is where you will find our show notes links to all the stories, the new tools of the week, and any extra materials that we have provided for this particular episode. That includes our text transcript, which you can read through Click on the page, just click on the Read More link. And then the Download PDF, which has the transcript which you can read offline and listen to along the way. If you go to anything, but idle.com, forward slash 121, which is this episode number, you will find the specific show notes. If you’re watching the live stream, you have to come back the next day. Because it’s not available right here and now during our live stream. But for those of you who are listening to the podcast episode, it is available of course, right now, after looking at the show notes, if there’s anything you want to discuss, if you feel like we missed a story, you can go ahead and leave a comment directly on the episode page. But you can also join our community and discuss it directly inside of our community. It is embedded within personal productivity clubs. So if you go to anything but idle.com forward slash community, you will be taken to a landing page to sign up or sign in. If you already are in personal productivity club. You’ll then join our group for Anything But Idle think go ahead and discuss with other listeners. But also ask us questions and interact with us in that space. So that’s the appropriate space to be able to do that. And so we always enjoy and appreciate the dialogue, and so on and so forth. Feel free to subscribe to the podcast or follow it in your podcast app of choice. It’s free. It’s available when it goes live. And we enjoy the ability to bring that to you each and every week. And so with that, we will see you all next time on Anything But Idle. Here’s to your productive life.

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

About Dan Charnas (Website)

Dan Charnas is an award-winning music and business journalist; producer of records and television; and professor. Recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Fellowship for Arts Journalism, he is the author of four books; was the co-creator and executive producer of the VH1 TV series The Breaks; and is an Associate Arts Professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University. 

Charnas’s upcoming book, Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, The Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (2022), is the product of four years of research and nearly 200 interviews. The book was an outgrowth of a course on J Dilla developed by Charnas at NYU in 2017, but its roots go back to Charnas’s time in the record business, when he first made the trip to Detroit to work with the producer then known as Jay Dee. In early praise for Dilla Time, the book has been called “one of the few hip-hop sagas to take the music as seriously as its maker,” by Publishers Weekly; and “detailed, well- researched, and passionate” by Booklist. For more information, visit the Dilla Time site at www.dillatimebook.com.

Dan’s first book, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (2010) was called “a classic of music-business dirt digging as well as a kind of pulp epic” by Rolling Stone. The Big Payback inspired the 2016 pilot for the VH1 series, The Breaks. He is also the author of Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-En-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind (2016), exploring what great chefs can teach the rest of us about their particular way of relating to time, space, motion, and resources. Work Clean arose from two years of research and over 100 interviews with culinary professionals. Charnas is the coauthor of Def Jam: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label (2011) with Bill Adler and Cey Adams. He has been a contributor to NPR, Billboard, and the Washington Post; and his writing has appeared in the Financial Times, the Chicago Tribune, Complex, Village Voice, Spin, and more. He has appeared as a guest on CNN, the BBC, PRI, and Bloomberg, and in a number of documentaries.

At the Clive Davis Institute, he teaches Creative Music Entrepreneurs, a history of the pop music business; Recycling Pop Music, exploring the relationship between creativity and copying; and topics courses on hip-hop and other artists and subjects. 

In the early 1990s, Dan Charnas was one of the first writers for The Source, becoming part of a generation of young writers who helped create hip-hop journalism. He penned cover stories, features, reviews and columns for a variety of publications on artists like L.L. Cool J, Ice Cube, A Tribe Called Quest, N.W.A. and Public Enemy. During this time, Charnas began his music business career in the mailroom of the seminal rap label Profile Records, eventually becoming Rap A&R and Promotion Manager — working on projects from Run-D.M.C., Dana Dane, Special Ed, Rob Base, Special Ed and DJ Quik. In 1991, he was recruited by Def Jam-founder Rick Rubin to run the rap department of his new Warner Bros. joint venture, American Recordings.  Charnas, as VP of A&R and Marketing, oversaw projects including Sir Mix-A-Lot’s double-platinum single “Baby Got Back” (the #2 Billboard Pop Single of 1992), DJ Kool’s gold anthem “Let Me Clear My Throat,” and Chino XL’s acclaimed “Here To Save You All,” which influenced emcees from Eminem to 50 Cent.

Charnas received his Master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He was born in New York City, and lives there with his wife, the poet and essayist Wendy S. Walters, and their son.

About the Book (Amazon)

The first organizational book inspired by the culinary world, taking mise-en-place outside the kitchen.

Every day, chefs across the globe churn out enormous amounts of high-quality work with efficiency using a system called mise-en-place—a French culinary term that means “putting in place” and signifies an entire lifestyle of readiness and engagement. In Work Clean, Dan Charnas reveals how to apply mise-en-place outside the kitchen, in any kind of work.

Culled from dozens of interviews with culinary professionals and executives, including world-renowned chefs like Thomas Keller and Alfred Portale, this essential guide offers a simple system to focus your actions and accomplish your work. Charnas spells out the 10 major principles of mise-en-place for chefs and non chefs alike: (1) planning is prime; (2) arranging spaces and perfecting movements; (3) cleaning as you go; (4) making first moves; (5) finishing actions; (6) slowing down to speed up; (7) call and callback; (8) open ears and eyes; (9) inspect and correct; (10) total utilization.

This journey into the world of chefs and cooks shows you how each principle works in the kitchen, office, home, and virtually any other setting.

This is an interview with the author by Tiago Forte!

Our next reading selection is:

Show Notes:

(Please listen to understand the context of the resources provided. If we missed something, please comment on the episode and let us know!)

Please visit ProductivityBookGroup.org and find out the details and the schedule for upcoming book discussion calls. If you plan to read ahead or read a little more slowly, please visit ProductivityBookGroup.org and check out the schedule on the “Upcoming Books” page.

Please feel free to visit Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or whichever podcast directory or app you prefer to access Productivity Book Group…and feel free to give the episode or show a rating or review! This helps expand our readership and bring new discussion callers into the fold. Thank you.

Also, all podcast episodes are archived at ProductivityBookGroup.org under “Episodes” so if you missed a call and want to review it, feel free to head over and give them a listen.

Finally, we have a digital community where we can discuss the productivity books we’re reading. You can access it on the Web, as well as via Android and iOS apps, and we’re very excited to have you join us there. Please visit https://productivitybookgroup.org/community and you will be taken to the new digital community to join. See you there!

And with that, thanks, everyone for listening to Productivity Book Group.

I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. Here’s to your productive life!

Note: All registered service marks, trademarks and other copyrighted materials mentioned on the podcast are that of their respective owners. This group is not affiliated with or officially endorsed by those copyright owners.

FTC Disclosure: We may earn money or credits from the companies mentioned in this post by clicking on links for items or services you purchase.

About Atul Gawande, MD (Wikipedia)

Atul Gawande is the author of three bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better, selected by Amazon.com as one of the ten best books of 2007; and The Checklist Manifesto. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1998, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won two National Magazine Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and been named one of the world’s hundred most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy and TIME. In his work as a public health researcher, he is Director of Ariadne Labs a joint center for health system innovation. And he is also co-founder and chairman of Lifebox, a global not-for-profit implementing systems and technologies to reduce surgical deaths globally. He and his wife have three children and live in Newton, Massachusetts.

You can find more at http://www.atulgawande.com.

About the Book (Amazon)

The New York Times-bestselling author of Being Mortal and Complications reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist.

We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies—neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third.

In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements. And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from disaster response to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds.

An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right.
(Source: Amazon)

Our next reading selection is:

Show Notes:

(Please listen to understand the context of the resources provided. If we missed something, please comment on the episode and let us know!)

Please visit ProductivityBookGroup.org and find out the details and the schedule for upcoming book discussion calls. If you plan to read ahead or read a little more slowly, please visit ProductivityBookGroup.org and check out the schedule on the “Upcoming Books” page.

Please feel free to visit Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or whichever podcast directory or app you prefer to access Productivity Book Group…and feel free to give the episode or show a rating or review! This helps expand our readership and bring new discussion callers into the fold. Thank you.

Also, all podcast episodes are archived at ProductivityBookGroup.org under “Episodes” so if you missed a call and want to review it, feel free to head over and give them a listen.

Finally, we have a digital community where we can discuss the productivity books we’re reading. You can access it on the Web, as well as via Android and iOS apps, and we’re very excited to have you join us there. Please visit https://productivitybookgroup.org/community and you will be taken to the new digital community to join. See you there!

And with that, thanks, everyone for listening to Productivity Book Group.

I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. Here’s to your productive life!

Note: All registered service marks, trademarks and other copyrighted materials mentioned on the podcast are that of their respective owners. This group is not affiliated with or officially endorsed by those copyright owners.

FTC Disclosure: We may earn money or credits from the companies mentioned in this post by clicking on links for items or services you purchase.

About Stephen R. Covey (Wikipedia)

Stephen R. Covey, PhD, was an American educator, author, businessman, and keynote speaker. His most popular book is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His other books include First Things First, Principle-Centered Leadership, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, The 8th Habit, and The Leader In Me: How Schools and Parents Around the World Are Inspiring Greatness, One Child at a Time. In 1996, Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential people. He was a professor at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University at the time of his death.

About the Book (Amazon)

From the author that brought you the New York Times bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People comes a guide to prioritizing your personal and professional goals.

I’m getting more done in less time, but where are the rich relationships, the inner peace, the balance, the confidence that I’m doing what matters most and doing it well?

Does this nagging question haunt you, even when you feel you are being your most efficient? If so, First Things First can help you understand why we so often prioritize things that are unimportant to both our larger goals and our inner happiness. From the author that brought you the New York Times bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People comes a guide to building your work on the principles of effectiveness so that your life can spent cultivating genuine relationships, investing in pursuits you enjoy, and achieving balance in both your personal and professional lives.

In First Things First, Stephen M. R. Covey advocates categorizing tasks by urgency and importance so that you can focus on what actually needs to be done in the limited amount of time that you have. Using personal examples and insight from years of business experience, he argues for a new way of looking at your “to-do” list. Rather than offering you another clock, First Things First provides you with a compass, because where you’re headed is more important than how fast you’re going.
(Source: Amazon)

Our next reading selection is:

Show Notes:

(Please listen to understand the context of the resources provided. If we missed something, please comment on the episode and let us know!)

The callers you hear in this episode are readers just like you, and you are more than welcome to join us on the live calls to discuss productivity books too! Please visit ProductivityBookGroup.org and find out the details and the schedule for upcoming book discussion calls. If you plan to read ahead or read a little more slowly, please visit ProductivityBookGroup.org and check out the schedule on the “Upcoming Books” page.

Please feel free to visit iTunes, Stitcher or whichever podcast directory or app you prefer to access Productivity Book Group…and feel free to review us there! This helps expand our readership and bring new discussion callers into the fold. Thank you.

Finally, all podcast episodes are archived at ProductivityBookGroup.org under “Episodes” so if you missed a call and want to review it, feel free to head over and give them a listen.

Note: All registered service marks, trademarks and other copyrighted materials mentioned on the podcast are that of their respective owners. This group is not affiliated with or officially endorsed by those copyright owners.

About Hayden Finch PhD (Amazon)

Part Lisa Ling, part Reese Witherspoon, and part Mary Poppins, Dr. Hayden Finch is a licensed clinical psychologist, behavior change expert, and dessert enthusiast originally hailing from North Carolina. Duke and Nebraska educated, she is a go-getter with a passion for translating research into practical coping skills. Dr. Finch treats clients at her Center for High Functioning Anxiety and is the CEO and founder of the educational platform Master Your Mental Health. Her goal is to equip people with the skills to master mental health, discover self-acceptance, and find meaning in a busy life through research-based strategies. Prior to launching her own businesses, she had adventures working with incarcerated juveniles, Veterans, and individuals who had been found not responsible for crimes by reason of insanity. In her personal life, Dr. Finch is a waterslide enthusiast, a musical theater aficionado, and an ice cream connoisseur.

About the Book (Amazon)

Understand your procrastination and break through to productivity

Many different factors can trigger procrastination. The good news is, you’re not lazy or undisciplined, and you can achieve real productivity. Discover the psychological factors that drive your procrastination habits and unlock the secrets to overcoming them. With this research-based approach, you can learn to stop procrastinating, finish projects, and accomplish your goals.

Begin by unpacking the common thought processes and emotional roadblocks that trap you in cycles of problematic behavior. Apply that awareness to each step of getting things done, using practical evidence-based techniques that address the root causes of procrastination and time management problems. When you are empowered to work along with your brain, rather than against it, you’ll be able to take control and create lasting change.

This empowering choice in psychology books helps you:

• Examine core issues―Look at possible mental health issues that often exacerbate procrastination, like low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, ADHD, and others.

• Succeed step-by-step―Work through procrastination one step at a time: prioritize, find motivation, overcome avoidance, get started, focus, follow through, and finish.

• Get perspective―Explore real-life anecdotes of people struggling with procrastination to gain insight into how it works in your life―and help you identify its causes.

Our next reading selections are:

Show Notes:

(Please listen to understand the context of the resources provided. If we missed something, please comment on the episode and let us know!)

• The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done by Piers Steel, PhD

• The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated by Timothy Ferriss

• Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

The callers you hear in this episode are readers just like you, and you are more than welcome to join us on the live calls to discuss productivity books too! Please visit ProductivityBookGroup.org and find out the details and the schedule for upcoming book discussion calls. If you plan to read ahead or read a little more slowly, please visit ProductivityBookGroup.org and check out the schedule on the “Upcoming Books” page.

Please feel free to visit iTunes, Stitcher or whichever podcast directory or app you prefer to access Productivity Book Group…and feel free to review us there! This helps expand our readership and bring new discussion callers into the fold. Thank you.

Finally, all podcast episodes are archived at ProductivityBookGroup.org under “Episodes” so if you missed a call and want to review it, feel free to head over and give them a listen.

Note: All registered service marks, trademarks and other copyrighted materials mentioned on the podcast are that of their respective owners. This group is not affiliated with or officially endorsed by those copyright owners.

Microsoft Makes a Big Update to OneNote on iOS and the Productivity and Technology News of the Week.

Each week, Ray Sidney-Smith ( https://twominuterule.com) and Augusto Pinaud ( https://productivityvoice.com/) review and provide commentary on the week’s news in the world of personal productivity and related technologies.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://anythingbutidle.com for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you’d like to continue discussing any news from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Microsoft Makes a Big Update to OneNote on iOS

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Headlines & Show Notes | Microsoft Makes a Big Update to OneNote on iOS

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

Headlines, Part A

• Transforming Your Home Office: Designing A Productive And Inspiring Workspace

• Overcoming Laziness: Applying The Kaizen Philosophy For Personal Growth

• When You Feel Overwhelmed Do Less Better

• Is Financial Stress A Threat To Productivity?

• Workation: Balancing Work And Vacation For Optimal Career Performance

Headlines, Part B

• This is Chromebook X: Googles new standard for ChromeOS

• Google’s Pixel Tablet is officially available

  • Google Pixel Tablet review: It’s all about the dock

• Google Domains is shutting down, and its assets are going to Squarespace

• iPadOS 17 will make your iPad Pro a Computer

• Omni Roadmap 2023 — Post-WWDC Update

• Amazon’s ‘Hey Disney!’ experience comes to all Echo devices

• How to Find and Replace Outdated Windows Drivers

Tools of the Week

• Sona

• Greenlight

Featured Story of the Week

• OneNote on iOS is about to get a big boost for organizing notes

Announcements

• Apple releases iOS 16.5.1, iPadOS 16.5.1, macOS Ventura 13.4.1, and watchOS 9.5.2 updates

Rumors

• Paul McCartney says AI helped finish one last Beatles song – here’s an update on what that means

• Generative A.I. Can Add $4.4 Trillion in Value to Global Economy, Study Says – The New York Times

Notes

• How to Manage the Work Time of Your Employees Effectively?

• How Our Minds Shape Reality

• Episode #212: Dave Edwards interviews David Allen

• Why I Quit Beast Mode and How I Traded Burnout for Peace and Balance

• How to Overcome Procrastination: A Neuroscience Based Approach to Get More Done

• 15 Books on Procrastination To Help You Start Taking Action

• How to be more productive at work

• Can You Be Productive Working Only 45% Of The Day?

• Smart drugs fall short as cognitive function enhancers

• Rethinking Smart: Cognitive Enhancers May Diminish Performance in Those Without ADHD

• How to Incorporate Zen to Done Productivity Method Into Your Everyday Life

• For companies sticking with remote work, the rules are becoming clear

• Podcast #905: Become a Morning Workout Person

• Start Optimizing Your Stress

• Stress Testing Your Productivity System: Three Tips for When Your Productivity System Fails You

• Time, Nature, and ADHD – a Podcast Discussion with Take Control ADHD

• Microsoft updates Windows 11 system requirements and CPU support list

• Apple Podcasts gets upgraded search functionality

• First Look at Early VisionOS Apps 

  • These Google AI apps are going to be amazing on Apple’s Vision Pro

• Apple Vision Upgrade Program would be the perfect option for this tech

  • Vision Pro: What features were killed and what could still be coming

• Apple patches two actively exploited security flaws with iOS 16.5.1 and more

• Apple Releases macOS Ventura 13.4.1 With Security Fixes

• Apple Releases iOS 16.5.1 With Fix for Lightning to USB Camera Adapter Bug

  • Apple releases iOS 16.5.1 with bug fixes for your iPhone  

• Google’s Duet AI can generate custom templates in Sheets 

• Logseq vs Obsidian: find the best note app for productivity needs

• Manage tasks in sprints – Notion Projects

• iOS 17 to Enable Recurring Apple Cash Payments for Kids Allowances and Other Shared Expenses

Raw Text Transcript | Microsoft Makes a Big Update to OneNote on iOS

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).

[read more=”Read the raw text transcript” less=”Close the raw text transcript”]

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00
Hello, 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
I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:15
And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. This is episode 120. Microsoft makes a big update to OneNote on iOS. And we’re recording this on June 26 2023. Each week, Augusto and I cover the productivity news headlines of the week. So you know what’s going on in the world of personal productivity and its related technology. And so with that Augusto. Let’s get into the headlines, what was our first headline of the week?

Augusto Pinaud 0:41
Oh, the first one headline is from publishers paper and his trim forming your home office designing a productive and inspiring workplace. And then I talk a little bit about furniture, lighting. And ironically, as we were fighting with lighting on a pre show organization and storage, solutions, personalization and branding, technology integration, and no, it is very interesting for me, because as the hybrid environment has come more and more and more, this ability to customize your environment is changing, you know, offices are now many offices are now using the concept of hotel and so you are not really decorating or customizing your environment because you are coming to a place where you are not going to be able to stay. But now you start having that option at home, in my case has always been a bag I I’ve been remote now for so long that you know like Hotelling, it was a bag and the bag had everything and the bag was important thing on that tool. But it is important to keep that for productivity and to really make you effective on what you’re doing. Working with better tool and better means that works best for you, it really gives you a competitive edge over the rest of the world.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:19
Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more on on all those points. And I, I also, as someone who for many years spent as a road warrior, I think that it’s important that your travel bag also contains some level of personalization that is good for you. You know, that might include like just having like a little digital frame, I’ve actually been thinking about that for myself, like buying one of those little you know, eight inch digital frames, that has kind of pre loaded or you know, synchronizes with your phone or whatever, with photos of your family. So you show up at the hotel, or if you’re hot desking or Hotelling at your office, you can kind of set up the little screen and it’s going to, it’s going to feel a little bit more like a place that you should, should be, you know, like, I think that these these Hotelling and hot desking environments and corporate environments can feel sterile and clinical and, and feel like you know, it’s not, it’s not where you’re supposed to be you feel kind of out of place in that sense. So anything that can make the environment more appealing to you. I would also say that, you know, to your point about home office and working from home, the ability to be able to make sure the colors in the space match your needs. Color Psychology is a huge component of our everyday lives. And making sure that the room is not a color that’s going to cause you more anxiety or just be caustic to your overall productivity is really important. It’s just you know, the cannon or to have paint and some time and you can you know, you can solve that problem. So just certainly keep color in mind when when it comes to that. Okay, onward to our next article from the economic times on kaizen.

Augusto Pinaud 3:51
Kaizen and how to overcome laziness and casein. It’s basically the definition of continuous but a small incremental changes and basically what the article refers to is how you can use this the first is recognize Okay, well, I may have some issues with my habits and then how to start identifying but don’t expect Okay, fine. I’m going to change them now overnight star as the article says, little things what are the little things that you can start implementing to change that? Those habits, tiny habits and atomic habits are two great books to talk about that where they really spend a lot of time working into the psychology of these habits, the good and the bad ones and how to little by little improve them, so you can really have solid ones.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:55
Yeah, I think that the the important piece here is that they’re talking about taking time and to reflect on your behavior routines and thought patterns, checking to see where they’re talking about this as laziness. I don’t I don’t think that any of you listening are lazy. So these are just areas of improvement so to speak. But the idea here is that, yeah, you know, the idea here is that if you feel like you are not living up to a standard of excellence for yourself, which is different than perfection, right, so when we talk about perfectionism, perfectionism is a is a an unachievable state of being, that that, ultimately causes you to procrastinate, to feel overwhelmed, to feel all of those various negative responses to that feeling. But the idea here is that if you can, if you can manifest a sense of what is happening in your world, you’re gonna get a much better idea of what can be broken down into small achievable, wins, and then use Kaizen for that process. Right? So what is that one little bit that I can do? I know a lot of people use the 1% rule, you know, if I’m, if I’m 1%, better every day, then in 365 days, I’m 365%. Better. That’s a, that’s a, just bad math, but it’s. But the point is understood, right? small, incremental changes, beget compound results over time. And that’s a really good, good thing for us to be considering over time. Now, the the, the piece that’s missing here from this article that everybody has to kind of take to heart is that you really do need to create a syllabus of a kind, right? Like it just like any good course or program that you’re going to go through, you have to create a plan. And you have to kind of map that out for yourself. Because the easier it is, at those small little levels, the easier it’s going to be for you to be able to adopt them, right. Because if you think you’re going to do, you know, some kind of continuous growth and be deciding today, what you’re going to do tomorrow, for that little incremental growth, you’re gonna get decision fatigue, and you’re not going to be able to make that change. So just remember to plan this out for yourself. Maybe it’s planning it out a month at a time or a few weeks at a time. But certainly don’t try to decide how am I going to be better tomorrow, and then write a list of what you’re going to do tomorrow. And then and so on, and so forth. Because it’s just going to, it’s just going to break you down, and you’re ultimately not going to be able to make much forward movement. All right, on to our next productivity article from leadership freak.

Augusto Pinaud 7:28
You know, the next article, quote, market rallies, and, you know, the Stoics and meditations for 24. It says, If you fear, overwhelm, do less. And now it’s a good article, good read an article and remind me of something I said in productivity, often, when your level of stress because of overwhelm, it’s high, that is the moment that you do more review, not less, because that’s the moment that you cannot make decisions that will make your waste time. So every step that you make, need to be right. And the only way to accomplish that is review, review, review and review again. And I think, for me, that’s the essence of this is not about do less better, or as they say on the article do less better, it is really about understanding. If you feel overwhelmed, the first thing you need to do is to stop and identify what’s going to take you out of that, okay, because just trying to do to do to do more to do faster, most likely is not going to do it. So it’s not only do less, as the article says do better. And in my experience that’s done through review, make sure Hey, make the list reviewed again, check it twice as a song set. Okay, and make sure that the steps that you are making are going to take you there.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 9:04
Yeah, I think that part of the kind of backdrop of all of this is that overwhelm is a is a is a feeling. And when we think about overwhelm, overwhelm is because we have literally overwhelmed our conscious mind, you know, it has too many things and it’s being overwhelmed by those things. Many times it’s anxiety or some other kind of welling up of that, those feelings. And so in order to reduce that, you literally have to do literally have to feel less, or at least distract your mind less so that you’re capable of opening up the floodgates again to actual action, actual forward movement. It’s kind of like you’ve, you’ve you’ve tossed a bunch of if you’ve ever you know like talks about flooding an engine right you if you flood an engine you basically put too much into the engine all at once, and so the the pistons can’t fire and properly create energy and So this whole concept of doing less than doing less better is a necessity, it’s absolutely necessary for you to be able to do that some, for some of you, it just means taking a moment, right, like just letting your body rest and relax into the fact that you have had this level of anxiety, and then going forward and making action. But it may also mean sitting down and saying, okay, these things can’t happen, I need these projects to set aside. And I need to just do this one thing. And I think you and I have had this conversation many times, because do about the fact that you have to slow down to speed up. And I think this is one of those cases where whenever there’s overwhelm you, you actually have to recognize that you’re doing less when you’re overwhelmed. Right, so the idea of doing less just means that you’re actually doing more focused work in one particular area, and you will then start to make your way forward. So on to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 10:57
Our next article, titled was this overwhelming, it is financial stress, a tread for productivity. And, you know, in a new survey, done by plan is saying that, you know, that the rising of the interest rate, the volatility of the market, you know, 92% of employer employees are stress about their financial situation. And honestly, I think that’s right. And we, as a society tend to forget that the good times had another side of that, that are the tough time. And yes, we come from a pandemic, and these things cause stress, and then we came to now this race, in volatility, and all the stuff are this affect your productivity? Well, it will depend, it will depend what is the level that is overwhelming, this has nothing to do with having or not having the income or the financial stress? In my experience, it is, there is a big part that is real, obviously, but there is a big part that is psychological. And I always tell people this, remember when you were a college student, okay, as a college student $20 was significant, or at least for me, were significant, okay. And as I begin going into my professional life, that number grow, from 40, to 60, to 82, whatever. So, you need to remember that because you may be stressing out about a number, that is your current reality, but it doesn’t mean, you may still have, in your mind, the stories that you will tell you at college, about the $20, when you are now worried about a $2,000 problem. So make sure that the story you’re telling, when you are getting financially stressed and is threatened, your productivity is actually updated, and you are not working on those. And that was something that happened to me. Years ago, I was getting the stress out of somebody who was coaching me, asked me What do you mean, what is the problem, and then we went on all my things. And most of those problems, most of those stress, were really at the level of college level, or the level of college income. And at the level I was is not that they were not others, but they were completely different. So it is important, as you see these kinds of things affect your productivity, to understand what is the story you are telling yourself, and what is the stress is real or it is self induced.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 13:54
And also note that this is an article coming out of Australia. So this is a country with a nationalized health care system. So if you are if you are hearing this in the States, or in a country that doesn’t have a public health care system, like Australia does, so they have Medicare and private hospitals in that sense. So you you if there’s free health care, in that sense, my paid by taxpayer so you know, when people say free health care or whatever. So to say that the the debt that they’re talking about is 48% of the reported folks had more debt than they could manage. And 35% said they had no savings or only enough to keep them afloat for two months. The reality is, is that if you take that to a United States perspective, I imagine that number is far worse. And so the the exacerbation of financial stress on productivity cannot be, you know, kind of under understated. It’s something that does affect your employees, and it may be affecting you. And I think to Chris’s point, this is a good time to kind of reframe how you see your finances to do that kind of, you know, back Could the napkin work and say, Okay, what can be done, because brushing this under the carpet is not going to solve the problem. And we always make better decisions, when we make it from a place of abundance from a place of strength and clarity, as opposed to when we’re distressed, we’ve lost a job, you know, we someone’s gotten sick. And now there’s a big bill, you know, all of those kinds of things that happen, we want to make those those choices about work and family and life generally, from a position of strength. So make those decisions now and set yourself on a proper footing. All right, onward to our next article, this week, it goes down,

Augusto Pinaud 15:36
let’s go to go for this section is workstation, some forms, balancing work and vacation for an ultimate career performance. And you know, it’s talking about is becoming more challenging to balance work and personal life, you know, we’re connected, most people feel that they need to be connected. And again, we keep a lot of these old things, as I was reading the article, it made me chuckle a couple of times, because some of the things that they are having in there are things that I have understood for many years, I, you know, the first thing I understood many years ago is I go on one, two weeks vacation, and get on one, because the issue for me is fine, you go the two weeks vacation, you have fun, but then you come that Monday after an even if you book time to recover and ramp up speed, the amount of work that gets to you, it ruined my two weeks vacation. That’s my experience. So I quit on that idea a long time ago, I prefer to have a small burst, I prefer to take a turn to send a Friday here on their Monday on a Friday here on there, whatever it is, and then do something that is enough for me to recharge, and it is not but it’s not enough to feel buried when I come back. So this and this is that concept, okay, being able to pack your office and say, we are going to go somewhere out of the X days we are going to spend there we are going to be working X number of days, you know, for the Fourth of July, we are doing something like that we’re going somewhere and out of the days, we’re going to be there most of the days I’m going to be working is just going to be working with watching the ocean instead of the house. So that concept really, for most people is enough to recharge to have that to feel that you get some of that balance between your personal and your professional life, and at the same time is enough to allow you to keep that performance. So the last thing I want to add that it’s not mentioned here in the article or but, you know, they talk about planning and time management. And one of the things that I teach when I do coaching is how long? What is the minimum recharging time unit that you need? For some people that’s an hour for some people that 30 minutes for some people is to the unit that you need is irrelevant. What is relevant is where is that? And when can you take that? If it’s a half an hour, and you feel you’re completely overwhelmed? Can you take a unit of that? And how fast can you rearrange your schedule to do it? And some people will tell you Well, I cannot that’s the reason I get overwhelmed and the reality is yes, you can you just need to be able to understand one what are those activities and create a list when you are in the heat of that overwhelm. You can think okay, it’s forget about it, you need to thought before and you need to have them one to 10 this is the best thing I can do. This is the worst thing I can do. But hey, sometimes it’s the one you can do. So that way you can really keep yourself on at optimal performance speed.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:24
Yeah, and I think that a lot of this has to do with whether or not you have kids, you know where the kids are in terms of their school year and many other things when it comes to the workstation concept. You know, I like a good staycation. I like the idea of you know, for the rest of the world I’m gone but for me I’m just home and I’m capable of just taking care of myself in that in that way. So I really do like a good staycation I wish that I took them but, but the but the workstation concept you know obviously this has been More and more prevalent because of the COVID 19 pandemic. And folks, you know, taking this time away and getting away and kind of working from wherever they are, and having the flexibility to do so. But the, you know, the core concepts that they talked about in the article, if this appeals to you, this kind of harkens back to the idea of Tim Ferriss mini retirements, which is to design a life where you don’t defer your entire retirement life to the end of your life, when you know, you can you could do some of these things. And I think the workstation concept gives you that kind of flexibility in order to do so there’s, there’s some good points in the article, and I highly recommend anybody who where this piques their interest to go ahead and check it out to kind of start thinking through what what that might mean for you. But for me, I think that this is definitely something that interests me, it’s something that I want to start exploring more and, and seeing, you know, what I can do about it, because my work is and starting to become much more flexible, even more flexible than it has been in the past for me to be able to work basically from anywhere. And as long as I have an intranet in a quiet space, you know, so I can’t go work in an airport lounge. But But the idea here is to is to be able to basically build yourself, these opportunities to be able to do things that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t work when you’re away. It just means that you have the flexibility of being in those places and toggling between those two. So with that we’re going to take a quick break for word from our sponsor, and then when we return back, we will head into our Technology News for the week.

Sponsor Voice Over 21:37
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Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:48
Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith With Augusta pinout. We are going to get into our technology articles for the week. Augusto, what’s our first article this week?

Augusto Pinaud 22:59
Oh, Chromebook is launching a new Chromebook, a new brand, the Chromebook X. And he’s trying to make that a new high standard. And it was talking to you offline about something that happened that I wasn’t aware of from my perspective, I have maybe not thorough enough but thought for a while. Chromebook is not more adopted, you know kids, known Chromebook. That’s what they breathe in, in many schools day in and day out. And it was now that my daughter is going to high school that we needed to buy a new computer and I asked her, you want a Chromebook. And I and I was looking for something equivalent to that Chromebook X, a high end Chromebook for her. And she looked at me and say, I don’t want a Chromebook. If that’s what you want to give me. That’s what I will deal with. But I prefer a Mac. And I, we had a conversation with Sid and asked why. And the cheap hardware that she used for three years, four years. And Kate was enough for her to say, Well, the problem is the Chromebook is fine, no operating system escape, but the computer there are cheap and unlike them. And you know, look at the difference between this and the iPad. Look at the difference between this and the MacBook. That’s what I want. And I couldn’t blame her. And I had not realized until that moment that that all that cheap Harward. What it does is ruin the experience for the potential user exactly the opposite of what Google is trying to do, you know, Google Docs and Sheets and all that they’re very, very powerful and very easy to be the standard. But if the experience is going to be that poor with a hard work, it’s going to stay being a software issue. She’s going to be late. Even on Chroma on Google Applications anyways as she goes to high school, but she don’t want to leave in a chrome harworth. Why? Because of that. So that all that story is to say that this is something very exciting. What I don’t know, if is a little bit too late. Why? Because when you go to Chromebooks, Chromebooks has been premium and plus options for a long time, you know, the Samsung, they consider that the premium they can do multitasking, advanced workloads, the plus, you know, our fastest move, etc. But that’s not what most people is getting access to. What most people is getting access to is $110 device. So is the chrome x going to be enough to divert people from that, or, sadly, is now something that it’s going to be very hard to change?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:58
That’s, that’s a question to be determined. I mean, you know, once upon a time, if you had a Hyundai, it wasn’t a great car today, they’ve completely redefined what a day is. And people love Honda’s. So you know, brands can change, and they can go through iterations that produce a better, more premium build. I think that what chromax Chromebook X does, the brand itself is a standard. So just so that everybody’s aware, Google’s not putting out another pixel book, you know, they put up the pixel tablet. And that’s really the end of that story. But Chromebook X is a set of hardware standards, that that then allows Chrome OS to be able to turn on features, because it knows it has the ability to do so. And so Google is going to basically say if these manufacturers use these hardware specs, then when you install Chrome OS on that device, and you boot it up, for the first time, when you open up your new Chromebook from these manufacturers, you’re gonna get additional features, features that wouldn’t otherwise be available in the $110, you know, Chromebook, but now that you’re in that 300 400 $500, you know, range, that you’re now going to get a more premium experience. Now, from my perspective, I think that the you’re right that Google could and should make for a much, much higher and Chrome OS run devices. I think that many of our tablets that are Android run should just be Chrome OS. And, and, and since it since androids already kicked into it, you just get a better experience, you get a desktop environment, and you get the Android experience inside of the criminalist experience. So I’d love to see Chromebook X, build upon that success. I really, I mean, you know, the probably the highest end one right now is the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook two, which is a very, very nice, you know, Chromebook, I’m presuming it is in that plus or premium Chromebook space already. I know it is. I’m not sure which one, but it’s going to probably get the Chromebook x whatever the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook three is, will probably get that level of it. So will the Acer spin seven Thirteen’s and similar ones like that? I’m, I’m really curious to see where and what Google wants to provide here in terms of the the additional features. So so far, you know, we’re hearing about additional sensors, we’ll have a better video camera, you’re gonna get some more video features, and live captioning of video calls, those kinds of things. But I would really love to see what other advanced features Google can provide on the Chromebook x side to make it worthwhile for even schools to spend a little bit more money on a Chromebook X model device, as opposed to the really cheap ones. Because you what you’re saying is true. You know, if kids grew up with a Chromebook, but they think about them as basically garbage, you know that the school was forced to, you know, use because it was the cheapest machine. That’s not a good brand for the future. Right? So they need to be able to give people an opportunity to enjoy and appreciate using it. All right, onward to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 29:13
Our next story, it’s all yours is the pixel Google Pixel tablet that is officially available with the dog. All yours.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:28
It’s so so Google has really officially released the Google Pixel tablet. It is a is a tablet plus a smart display. And so you have these bases. And the base is a magnetized surface. So that your your pixel tablet, which is Android based, I believe, it’s I don’t think it’s future based. I think it’s Android based, but it does have a tensor chip in it, which is pretty remarkable. And so you have this idea of you have like pogo pins on the back and you go ahead And you, in essence, can snap the display onto the base, and kinda looks like a really big nest hub, right next to Home Hub, or whatever they’re called nest hubs. And, and so it’s supposed to turn into a display when it’s not being utilized as a tablet. This is pretty interesting to me, except that all of the reviews I’ve heard so far from the very few people who have had their hands on them yet, is that the pixel tablet is far more tablet than it is display. So you’re getting a tablet experience, which makes sense. But it is, but it is not really doing the smart display very well. So I’m not sure why or how. But that is, that is where we’re at right now. I am, I am interested. But I’m just not motivated to get one of these purely because that whole form factor just doesn’t appeal to me, I just don’t have the need for a tablet that’s fixed in a location. And, and in this kind of just I don’t see the form factor working for me, I don’t see the I don’t see the reasoning for it. But but that’s that’s kind of where we’re at. I’m very curious whether or not like, what I would love to see is like if you had multiple bases around the house, and you could order the office or whatever, and you can like dock it to any base and just utilize it wherever it was, I believe that you can dock it to multiple bases, and they’re kind of hot swappable, but the it just I don’t know, it just seems like a weird device and weird concept. I’m looking forward to seeing more reviews on this, though, I think that that’s going to be really interesting. The the, I’m curious about how the stylus works, and how well the stylus works with the device. And, and you know, just an Android, and it’s an Android tablet, right? It’s an Android tablet that you can have fixed in a space, you can pull it off, you can use it, you can put it back on that space, I think that the primary thing that people have to remember is that you’re probably not going to get a first rate smart display, you’re going to get a pretty decent Android tablet experience. And so you know, this is going to be an Android tablet with with a little bit of smart display. And maybe if that fits your needs, then go for it. On to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 32:25
I’m going to go to our next door because this is a product that I have yet tried to understand. And I have failed miserably. So our next story is Google domains are getting sunset, and everything is moved out to Squarespace. So if you have a.com, or added something, hold it or hosted by Google, they are sold to Squarespace. And now you may need to work into that. And that includes, you know, around 10 million domains, according to this article that are part of Google workspace subscriptions are going to be challenging and interesting what is coming for the users, especially for those who are not technology savvy, that’s my understanding is that the customer service for Squarespace is pretty decent. So they should be able to help you move on and be good.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:31
Yeah, so this is a bit of a shock. But I think that it makes sense if Google is attempting to double down on focus, right, and they want to really serve a specific set of lines, service lines and product lines. Google Domains has always been ancillary to their, to their world. And it’s, you know, 10 million domains sounds like a lot, but it’s really actually not that many. But it does include all of the domains that were purchased at the same time or when people were signing up through Google workspace. So this is a huge shift for a lot of people. And so I just think that if you’re being pushed off to another registrar, like Squarespace, I would go out there and look for my own registrar and move my domain to a registrar that I was comfortable with that I knew. And so that would be my only recommendation to everybody is is that Squarespace is is a web development platform. You know, it’s there to be able to help you put out a website, an E commerce site, that kind of thing. It’s not a domain registrar in the in the specific sense. And, and so I would I would definitely not want my domain in Squarespace. And I’d want to move it elsewhere and and go go from there. And certainly if you were in Google workspace, and you had your domain registered through Google domains, and then all of a sudden was dragged over to Squarespace which is an ancillary company to your entire working world. I would also pull it to a registrar that was going to give you purpose driven just that capability, right. So going to a domain registrar that you you know, and trust. It’s sad, in a lot of ways, because it was an, it was an easy thing to do to direct people who, you know, needed that and weren’t going to be satisfied by my company or somebody else. And so I would just direct them directly to Google domains. And it was an easy, it was an easy referral, and I figured it was it was going to be safe and certain that they were going to get through the process easily. And they were. And now that’s not going to be the case, because I can only imagine that Squarespace is not the same an easy service that Google Domains was, even with great customer support, it’s it, you know, registering a domain should be a lickety split, you know, knock out of the park, easy process. And it’s not going to be with Squarespace, because they’re going to try and resell, you know, a website and other things, you know, they’ve got to make more money on on the domains than the 10 or 15 bucks, they’re charging you for domain so, so we will see what happens. Okay, on to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 36:10
The next story is iPad, os 17, some of the features that are going to make your iPad Pro even more a computer replacement, and iPad, iOS 16. So current version announced the door or lounge, what they call the stage manager on work on certain models. But stage manager basically allows you to you have an M Power Mac to connect to an external monitor and work with it. And they are now making that even more powerful, you can put even more windows and, and all that, like you do on your Mac on your PC. So we’re getting closer. But the two exciting things for me is the external webcam support, and the external microphone support. Right now we are recording this show to the MacBook because I cannot connect this microphone to it. If that change, then that mic potentially will disappear out of my world. And I will be excited to only have iPads in my office. So I don’t know if it’s going to be iOS 17 or iPad os 18. But he’s getting closer and closer for a person who has been in the iPad ecosystem for a while. This is getting very, very exciting. The other thing is the improvements on Notes app on our story today, it’s about OneNote. And we have cover Evernote here. But Apple has really make an emphasis in improving the Notes app and to make it more and more powerful and handwritten and the PDF and the indexing. So they again, for iOS 17, they are making a big, big, big push. So the next

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:08
really sure. This is really, really big for people. So something that I frequently have folks frustrated by is whether you’re when you’re on the iPad, being able to just quickly sign a document and send it back to someone. And just be aware now that notes is the app that I’m going to send you to, you know, you know, outside of markup, which is a little bit clunky to be able to do with a PDF, whatever, that using notes to just open up, import a PDF and then be able to sign it, save it and then send it off to someone this is going to be the new way that you probably do that, including filling in the form fields and everything else like that. So this is really really powerful. I’m really I’m really excited to see iPad OS get this kind of enhancement. Alright, onto our next.

Augusto Pinaud 38:55
Oh, our next story is the only the Omni roadmap the Omni is that company who make Omni focus OmniGraffle lumea ladder Omni plan. And every year at the time that the WWDC happened, they wait and then they come and talk about what is their plan. Very exciting to see not only they’re embracing as always the Mac and the iPad, but they are really trying to or they’re going to try to really embrace the vision OS for the vision Pro and they are going to try to bring you know their products. And you know, as they said on the article, imagine using OmniGraffle without the constraint of a physical screen. And yes, that is going to be pretty pretty awesome. I think. So you can read the article and but More things to come interesting from them. The next the next one is a non productivity one, Amazon activated a Disney Experience in most echo devices, you can activate it, I had a fee, but then now you can interact instead of with mme A, you can interact with Pixar movies, Star Wars, characters, and more. And then you can say, hey, this may, and that voice will come up, and we’ll respond to you and do certain features is around $6 per year. So it’s not really necessarily that expensive. And I think if you have the kids Plus plan, it’s included, it’s obviously not designed for us adults is designed for the kids. Anyways, that sounds if you want to have something different on your Amazon Alexa, that may be something to do. And last one is how to find and replace outdated Windows drivers. You know, your drivers in Windows 10, and 11 may be outdated that affect the performance of your machine. So make use of has an article where you can check, you go to Device Manager, check where they are, and see if you can keep your drivers updated. So you can have a better and more productive experience on your Windows machine.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:34
Yeah, and, like they give you several different ways in order to do that. But the primary way is just the Windows key plus x, which is the new Windows 11. This is on Windows 11, specifically, but Windows x gives you that new drawer that pops up and you can just click on Device Manager. And from there, you can actually check each of your device drivers to see if they do and need an update. So that’s that’s the built in way in which you can do that. And then the article walks you through several other ways in which you can do this from software are a couple other ways that you can do this through software, as well as using the command prompt to make these kinds of updates. Just remember that when you do these updates, you’re improving across the board security, adding features and stability of the device itself. So when when you let these things languish, you’re you’re opening yourself up to more potential, you know, security risks, but also the system just bogs down the system gets slower, the system is not getting the appropriate improvements. And there may actually be features that you like that you’re not going to get. Because you’re you’re not installing the right one. So with that we’ve covered our technology, productivity technology headlines, we’re going to now move into new tools of the week. And so of these two and I come across many different tools and resources throughout the week as we put together all of the articles that we cover during Anything But Idle. And so in new tools of the week, we each bring you a tool we think you might like and so this week, we’re going to talk about two different tools. And for me, I’m going to talk about a tool called Sona. Sona is a an FDA approved a sound app. This is really phenomenal in a lot of ways. So its primary feature that it talks about on the website is sleep. But for me, I saw it first because of this notion that it could help with anxiety that it could help reduce anxiety. So it does both of those things, it can both helps you fall asleep faster, have better sleep, and sleep for longer periods of time. But it also has the capabilities of helping you reduce anxiety by listening to the music. Now, the interesting thing about this is that you don’t necessarily have to wear headphones in order to be able to access the benefits of the of the technology, obviously, you’re going to have a better response if you are, okay, so this is really getting your body into what’s considered or your brain into a particular wave state, right. So the wavelengths that your brain is activated at is where you can actually start to have these kinds of calming or relaxing features, you can actually do it the opposite way you can actually increase anxiety increase, you know, awareness of things by driving different wavelengths of your mind. Anyway, you don’t need headphones, but I would still suggest them you’re going to have better results. And you just basically listen to Sona for at least they say at least 10 minutes for it to basically activate the appropriate response in your in your mind. And and you kind of go from there. Now it’s a premium app just like brain.fm or any of the others. You do have to pay for the app again. I think they have like a 14 day free trial or something like that. But this is you know, neuroscience based, FDA approved. It’s very, very interesting to see I highly record meant that you can go to sonar dot care, you can click on the link in the show notes. And they’re on their research page, you can see how they’ve built out the the information for what’s underlying the technology in this music. And it’s just, it’s fascinating. And it’s very similar. If you don’t know what bring dafont.fm is, or you haven’t heard us talk about brain FM, go to brain.fm and read about their particular technology as well, because they do something a little bit different. But it’s same underlying core concepts, right, we were working with brain wavelength, you know, therapy. And this really helps to change our brain states. And it’s, it’s kind of a strange concept, right? Because you’re playing music in order to change the way in which your mind is working. But it works. And this is how our brains, you know, kind of interpret different stimuli. So it’s very, very interesting to see how this works. So give it a try. Okay, so

Augusto Pinaud 45:52
we do some testing. Before we go to my total week, I want to add to this, one of the things they say it’s an FDA approved, and it it will, it will help you to go to the alpha, the federal levels, depending on what you find. So it will help you not only relax, but allow your body to get in the frequency in which he’d have the ability to start healing itself. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 46:18
yeah, and I mean, I’ve, I’ve used it, and it works. I mean, it’s really phenomenal. I’m obviously I’m one person, they’ve done actual studies, but like my personal experience has been that it has worked similar to bring down FM, and it may just be, you know, highly suggestible, whatever you know, to mean, you, to some extent you believe it’s going to work so that therefore, it does that kind of concept, but but, you know, I’ve, I’ve worn it, and I and I have, I have experienced the the kind of efficacy of the tool, and so I can’t, I can’t speak but good things about it. So

Augusto Pinaud 46:53
I says certified silver method instructor, I can tell that’s one of the things that we teach how to get to alpha to exactly that relax, and center yourself and all that and then how to get to deeper than that. So you can I start the self healing process. It’s been scientific, proven, and study for many, many decades now. So our MC thing is green light and green light, it is a financial technology company is not a bank, they are backing, the banking services happened by the Community Federal Savings Bank, that is a member of the FDIC, but green light, what allows you to do is basically show kids how to bank and invest. So I tell my story, I in my home, as I grew up, talking about banking, investment, and money was a taboo, okay, to this day, if you want to hang up with my parents quick, you, you mentioned money, and they will hang up, okay, and that continue working. But I don’t want or I did not want as a parent, as a dad, as a parent, that my kids have that experience, it took me a lot of effort and time and money, and wasted money. And in order to re educate myself on how to do it better. And what I wanted was to give them the advantage. on Episode 119, we talk about the iOS 17 is going to start enable parents to give recurring money as payment on allowance. That is great, it’s a great step. What I like about green light, is that they have that but I can decide how to teach them, hey, this percentage need to go to savings, this percentage need to go to charity, this percentage need to go to investments. And even inside of that, they can create different categories. So my 10 year old has been year and a half saving every penny he got so he could buy a tablet. Okay, great. That’s exactly what I want to teach him and being able to go and see there and he was going to save for a phone. And then we told him that after he gets a certain grade that he will get a phone. So he looked at me and say great, and that means I can change my savings goal. And now start saving for an Apple Watch. Great, we are creating a monster but at least he had a better concept. You know, they understand what he’s saving. They have a debit card that it’s connected to that and I can or we can deposit extra money if we decide to but it gives them complete control in big air quotes about their money and their investments. And they can even do things like Robin Hood do another of those, you know they can go and buy partial pieces of a stock so my kids has been able to save their money and buy some pieces of a stock and see how their stock goes up or goes down and being familiar with the car. concepts. So as they grow up is not foreign for them, it is something that it will be on their mind. So that’s my App of the Week.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 50:11
Fantastic. I had heard of what is it Henry or something like that, you know that that other application that that’s kind of an alternative to greenlight. But I think that, you know, having these tools available to kids to be able to learn how to manage finances is so personal finances, especially. So we’re at such a young age and just understanding that we live in an economic world. And if we don’t have a sense of rationalism, or just, you know, rational thought that is about how we manage money, then we manage it from emotions, and managing from emotions is probably not the best place.

Augusto Pinaud 50:46
I know. And so, you have heard the story, you know, when last year we went to this May, and we give money to the kids, okay, fine. Every parent did that. That’s normal, okay. But they already had the green light, and he was already saving for his tablet. And he came and asked me, okay, if I don’t spend the money in dismay, can I put it into my tablet fun? Okay, and then at that time, he was nine years old. Okay. I way more older than that. And as I said, I don’t know if I have that maturity, I have shared that publicly with many people, okay. And he went to this me with money in his pocket, okay, or in his car, and everything that he saw in the different stores and stuff, it really compared to the goal, say, really? Do I really want this toy? Or do I want to put that money against the tablet. And he, to my surprise, he did notice spend money in Disney, he saved all his money for what he wanted, what he really wants. And honestly, I wish I had that understanding at 20, not at 10, or 20. And I didn’t. So I think it’s a tool, a very, very tool that has had fantastic impact and influence in our family.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 52:10
Fantastic. All right, onward to our featured story of the week, which is that Microsoft has announced this pretty big update to OneNote. But on iOS.

Augusto Pinaud 52:26
Yeah, that’s very interesting. To me, they announced this, you are going to be able to create notes from the Home tab, you’re going to be able to organize them. And it is right now running on the insider running version. So this is a combination of a story of the weekend and a rumor in the sense that it’s not yet available for most people, you need to have Apple testify to be able to access and you need to be on the insider version that said, Microsoft is pushing OneNote heavily into the iPhone users. And we are seeing something that I’ve been seeing lately on many applications that the features come in first on the iPhone than other platforms. I don’t know why or the iOS than other platforms. And I don’t know why. But OneNote is making this big push and making the application or the categorization of the notes, the names the tags, way powerful, are way more powerful than what they were.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 53:30
Yeah, I I’m curious to see what this home tab really is all about. As many folks know, Evernote brought a home screen right so that now there’s Evernote home inside of Evernote. It is it is a flexible space with widgets, that allows you to basically put additional, you know, surface within Evernote to structure a dashboard, right. And so this whole concept of the Home tab, giving you new features to in essence, categorize your notes by notes by date or name doesn’t sound like the same thing as the concept within Evernote. So this is going to be very, very different than than Evernotes home. But one notes home is sounding like it’s it’s a way for you to be able to quickly create new notes. And so I’m just curious to see how it’ll operate. You know, I’ll certainly have it on an iOS device and playing with it as soon as that comes out in, you know, general availability and GA. And so that’ll be really interesting to see how they manifest this Home tab. So you can see your recent notes and so on and so forth. And whether or not they intend to kind of follow Evernotes suit and start to give more ways in which you can see your notes, follow widgets or something else like that because that could I think be really, really powerful for it to be able to do so. And like you I’m really impressed that Microsoft is pushing the Have their products on iOS in a way that is thoughtful and, you know, not this kind of backhanded way in which they used to do all this stuff, you know, where they would just kind of sort of give, you know, updates very much, you know, very haphazardly across the system. I think they’re really working to make sure that iOS and Android both support Microsoft apps. Well, and and I think that’s going to be a good thing for it across the board. I’ll be curious to see whether or not they bring some of these OneNote on iOS features over to Android faster or slower. Right, you know, just depends on how one can hope that is faster. Yeah, absolutely. All right. That brings us along to the end of our show, we have a couple of announcements and rumors.

Augusto Pinaud 55:48
So the announcement is the Apple release 16 point 5.1 for iOS and iPad OS Mac Ventura, 13.4, watch os 9.5 point two, especially the releases for iPad OS, MacOS and iOS. If you can do it as soon as possible. There is security updates in there. And there are two rules. One is AI has read or is going to replace John Lennon as The Beatles, they apparently, were able to get a AI to do the voice of Jay of John Lennon so that way, he come and sing for a last single of the Beatles. And now and then, at least that was what Paul McCartney announcement or announced. And then the last one is there is a story An article in there, where it says that you’re not a I can add 4.4 trillion in value to the global economy, according to this study comes out a call from the New York Times. That’s a big number. And that could be very, very interesting.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 57:04
Yeah, I’ll be I’ll be curious to kind of see what I haven’t yet dug into the McKinsey report here. But I really am interested to see how they sourced the numbers. And whether or not this is like, you know, one, one thing is to is to decrease costs, right, which is like squeezing the the worker more same time there is increasing the pie, and giving us more opportunity for economic growth. I really wish that it were the latter not the former. But I believe that it’s probably a quite a bit of both. And so I’m going to I’m going to, I’m going to read the report with with pretty, you know, interests with great interest to see how this, how they perceive the long term impact of generative AI. And note that generative AI is one one artificial intelligence concept among many, many others, right. And so we are we are in the age of AI. Even if we don’t necessarily see it today, we see a lot of artificial intelligence working on in the background. And so I’m very, very interested to read the, the the report, and kind of keep keep a keep a watch on all of that. And with that Augusto we’ve covered the productivity and related technology news for this week. Thank you for everything that you do to make the show happen every week. My pleasure. With that everybody on anythingbutidle.com, you’ll find our show notes that will include links to our stories, new tools of the week, the extra stories, anything else we didn’t cover, and it also contains text transcripts. So there’s a text transcript on the page, which has, you know, click on read more, it’ll expand and you can read it right there. Or you can go ahead and click the download button and download link. And we’ll go ahead and download a PDF for you to read offline. If there’s something that you wanted to tell us about, you can always leave a comment directly on the page. So anythingbutidle.com forward slash 120 would be the the show notes for this episode, or the episode page for this for this episode. And you can also join us inside of personal productivity Club, where we have a group dedicated to Anything But Idle. So if you go to anything, but idle.com forward slash community, you can go ahead and sign up and join us in the group it’s free. And then you can go ahead and interact with us in that space. If this is your first time watching, go ahead and subscribe or follow us in your favorite podcast app. And of course, feel free to tell your friends let them know about Anything But Idle. But either way with that we wish you the most productive week and I will see you all next time on Anything But Idle. Here’s your productive life.

[/read]

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

Paul Graham on Whether Remote Work Works and the Productivity and Technology News of the Week.

Each week, Ray Sidney-Smith ( https://twominuterule.com) and Augusto Pinaud ( https://productivityvoice.com/) review and provide commentary on the week’s news in the world of personal productivity and related technologies.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://anythingbutidle.com for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you’d like to continue discussing any news from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Paul Graham on Whether Remote Work Works

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Headlines & Show Notes | Paul Graham on Whether Remote Work Works

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

Headlines, Part A

• Boring To-Do Lists? Not If You Study Leonardo da Vinci

• Declare ‘Backlog Bankruptcy’

• Can You Be Productive Working Only 45% Of The Day?

• Your Expectations Dont Just Influence Your Destiny They Determine It

Headlines, Part B

• Amazon Fire Max 11 review: not the productivity tablet you’re looking for

• 15-inch MacBook Air hands-on: My dreams have finally come true

• iOS 17 will stop your Android friends from ruining your group texts with their green bubbles

  • The green bubble problem is about to get even worse

• Anker debuts new Soundcore Liberty 4 NC earbuds with 60-hour battery and $100 price tag

• How to use the awesome new Data Extraction Smart Canvas feature in Google Sheets

  • How to create a Gantt chart in Google Sheets with the new Smart Canvas Timeline view

• All the New Features Coming to Your Pixel Phone With the June 2023 Feature Drop

• Google Meet On-the-Go mode will automatically take away distractions if you’re not stationary

• Lenovo Smart Paper now available in the UK and the Netherlands

• Old Kindle Paperwhite turned into a WeatherBoard to display weather information

New Tools of the Week

• h264ify

• New! Automate Google Tasks With Pleexy

Featured Story of the Week

• Paul Graham says remote work ‘does work initially,’ which is why it ‘fooled’ leaders who have since ‘changed their minds’

Announcements

• iOS 17 to Enable Recurring Apple Cash Payments for Kids Allowances and Other Shared Expenses

• Microsoft no longer supports Windows 8 and soon neither will Google Drive

  • Google Drive is ending app support for Windows 8 and 8.1

Notes

• ‘Smart’ drugs may inhibit performance and productivity in users without ADHD

• Rethinking Smart: Cognitive Enhancers May Diminish Performance in Those Without ADHD

• Try ‘Task Batching’ for a More Productive Week

• How to be more productive at work

• Traffic congestion and the employee psyche – Jamaica Observer

• Brain Food: Big ambitions Low expectations and High Standards

• Generative A.I. Can Add $4.4 Trillion in Value to Global Economy, Study Says – The New York Times

• 3 key Vision Pro features that Apple rivals will have a hard time copying

• Best Buy Expands Upgrade+ Program to iPad Pro and Apple Watch Ultra

• Apple Card Monthly Installments Term for Apple Watch to Change From 24 Months to 12 Months

• Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 172 With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements

• Here’s How Web Apps Work in macOS Sonoma

• You can finally buy a Matter smart lock

• Chrome adding full Google Password Manager UI complete with desktop shortcut

• ChromeOS 114 brings some new goodies but Im here for the Emoji picker

• Oura Ring users can now share sleep scores with friends

• Google Photos on the web gets a huge photo editing boost

• Every smartphone should be a flip phone, starting right now

• Now that Im using Google Tasks a lot more I wish it had a Today view like its competitors

Raw Text Transcript | Paul Graham on Whether Remote Work Works

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).

[read more=”Read the raw text transcript” less=”Close the raw text transcript”]

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:04
Hello, personal productivity enthusiast and community Welcome to Anything But Idle the productivity news podcast. Today’s show is brought to you by co working space by personal productivity club. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:17
And I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:19
And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. This is episode 119. Paul Graham, on whether remote work works. We are recording this on June 19 2020. So those of you who celebrate here in the States happy Juneteenth happy Freedom Day. Of course, each week Augusto and I cover the productivity and technology headlines of the week. So you know what’s going on in the world of personal productivity and its related technologies. And so with that, Augusto take it away. What’s our first headline this week,

Augusto Pinaud 0:50
today, we’re going to start talking about boring to do list. And if you did not get bored by that, then the rest of the title is not if you study like Leonardo da Vinci. And nautical goes into a person looking into the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, another famous notebooks and he even make a list on the bottom saying things like well calculate the measurements of Milan and the suburbs. Find a book that treats of Milan and his churches and which one to be bad at the stationers on the way to produce here. Or, for example, oops, I lost the article, or, for example, as these people about, they told me to teach me this. And one of the things that the article was saying is what is the content of those, and we have talked about how important it is that, you know, when the task, the to do list, instead of bringing you in, repels you, you know, B because it’s boring, B because the task is not clear. B because, you know, it is overwhelming. What do you put, you know, you put solve parents state? Oh, well, this sounds beautiful, except that that’s not going to happen as a task. You know, it’s too overwhelming. So what are you doing with your task? What are you doing? With the things you do? What are you how can you make them better? I mean, again, this is a way find a verb, that it is going to be fun. And one of the things interesting, there was the verb, and, you know, in those lists, so

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:40
yeah, they also talked about drawing, you know, it’s fun to make a little doodle maybe, you know, having having things that are visually appealing to you can be really helpful. I think that’s one of the reasons why many people enjoy and appropriate into their own systems, the bullet journal method concept of using signifiers, because those are just really fun. You know, they’re, they’re fun to draw, it’s it’s iconography, and it’s an symbol, you know, recognition. So you’re being engaged in multiple ways, from your brain perspective. And the idea here is to really like think through how you’re capturing things and making them engage you from an enthusiasm, perspective, right? Engaging your your motivational factors, what’s going to be what’s going to be interesting to you about that thing that you are making resident within your task list. And I think that’s, that’s something that we can all do better at all the time. You know, it’s something that we can always refine, and it also is fun, you know, like, I always think about who can I involve in the task to make it more enjoyable for me, right, and I’m just, I grew up in a big family. So maybe that’s why but I love doing things with people. Even though I sometimes feel like I don’t want to generally I want to do things with other people. And so it’s nice to be able to look at my task list and think, Okay, well, can I do this with other folks, right? Whether that be in co working space inside personal productivity club, or, you know, we’re they’re not doing it with me, but they’re at least doing it and in a in a collaborative space. Or it might just be like, oh, you know what, I have to do this thing. And I know, I know that my friend also has to do this thing. Let’s go do it together. And that makes it just a little bit more interesting and intriguing. So I like the ways in which we can just turn our lists into more collaborative, more, creating more accountability and making them more interesting to us generally. So very cool there. Alright, on to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 4:29
Oh, before we go to the next article, one thing that I have been doing now, you mentioned that the drawing that I’ve been doing consistently for a while now is the tax or the context, depending how your software call it. I now use a lot of emojis on there, you know, so the errands is a little car. We may continue having the word Aaron but has a little car and some of the major areas of focus have emoji in the name so even that it’s It’s not drawing per se, it is still give, you know, the variety and the colors and the iconography and the iconography and everything else. So let’s go to the next one is declare the back log of bankruptcy. And yeah, the articles talks about a couple of recent games were released, you know, the Legends of Zelda, and the Jedi survivor, and he’s talking about how these games went from things that you could go and start and finish. And this person is saying on the or the time they published the article, he wrote the article, he’s saying, my 95 hour play true of this game. And I’m saying how is reading on the forums, how people feeling overwhelmed, because they’re playing this game, they’re all these all these other games, all these other opportunities coming out, and that one, that thing that he did was delete the backlog. But games may not be your thing. But then is books is YouTube’s is videos is tic TOCs is something, most people have something and pay attention to what they are and how this backlog is affecting you. If you can have the backlog in a separate place, Allah someday, maybe great, but if you feel that this backlog now is putting a weight on your shoulders, then it’s time to reevaluate what’s happening with it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:31
Yeah, I I’m, I’m right there with you, I think that there’s probably even a more aggressive perspective that some can take, I’m not recommending it necessarily to everyone. But there do and there does come a time, when you may just declare bankruptcy across a lot of different things that can be for mental health purposes, you may decide to say, cancel a week of meetings, right, and just reschedule them, especially if they’re not important meetings, redistribute them over the next five weeks, and and take the time you need in order to you know, reconstitute your mental emotional health, it may be email, bankruptcy, right? Where you just are like, okay, all of this email is, you know, just overwhelming, I need to, you know, delete all of it, and send an email to the most important people in your world and say, Listen, I’ve archived all of my email, if it was important enough, you know, be forwarded to me go to your Sent folder, and just read forwarded to me, and that way, I can catch up on what is most important and imperative to be moved forward. Or you go to your, your supervisor or boss or, or whomever and say, Hey, I, you know, I’ve got this overflowing inbox, I can’t, I can’t manage it, what were the things that you needed me to deal with, take those down, capture those into your capture tool, and deal with those and then get rid of all the other email and know that at least the important people are taken care of, and the important tasks are being dealt with. I like this idea of backlog that bankruptcy, I have an overwhelming I literally have hit the max in my YouTube account on the watch later list, right. And that’s because it’s not an inbox to me, right. It’s not an it’s not an in to me, I just kind of collect things there. And there are things that I like and appreciate. And on some of the applications, YouTube doesn’t have a very good way of removing a video once you’ve watched it off of that list. And I wish there was a better way to do that. But either way, you know, I just I don’t curate that list at all. And so I have created watch lists, watch later, to watch later. Three, I just keep filling the list. And, and that’s fine. And I’m very comfortable with just selecting all and at some point just deleting it all and being done with it. You know, that’s not it’s not for me, I don’t get an ick factor. Right. There’s no scars or barnacle problem that I have with that. So also recognize that maybe you don’t need to claim bankruptcy on some lists. But there are some places where you may need to do that. Think of Amazon wish lists or other kinds of areas where you have these, these, you know, just an overwhelming number of items listed. That could also be some projects lists, right some some context based projects, list, some context based actions lists, where you may decide those things are just no longer serving you and therefore you can just go ahead and delete them. And if it’s important enough, it’ll come back to you. You know, like, it’s that kind of kind of boomerang philosophy. All right. Onward to our next article, Agusta

Augusto Pinaud 9:21
are mixed article for Forbes. gicquel says the article says is title. Can you be productive working only 45% of the day. And you know what I didn’t. I’m gonna try not to be into a big soapbox in here. But for many people, you know, those meetings, those teams, those administrative work is their job. You know, it is completely inaccurate that can you be productive working only 45% of the day when you consider that the 55% that you are not calling me productive is because I am in meetings and doing this stuff that are related with my role. So I really had an issue with was the article because of that, because it is telling people, well, you are being effective, ineffective for doing the work that you’re supposed to do, or that is on your calendar and assumes that people can make a different decision. And in many cases, no, they cannot make an undefined decision you as a coach, I work with clients who have significant amount of control over the calendars, but most of my clients are exactly the other chi. Okay, the kind of people who comes to me, because their calendar do not belong to them. And they go and work six or seven hours a day. And at the end of all those meetings, they now have a ton metric of work. So according to the standard is articles written, these people know, they’re not effective 45% of the day, they were effective zero. And that is not fair. And that’s all that I’m going to say about this article.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:10
Well, I have I have more to say on your on your soapbox about this, which is that I fully agree with you, I think that this is a problem for middle management and upper management, not the employees themselves. You know, they’re not the ones who are being forced into all of these meetings, if somebody has that kind of problem, then it’s usually a culture problem, not an individual problem, you know, everyone probably feels the same way about being stuck in meeting after meeting after meeting, that’s usually a pervasive feeling, not necessarily an individual who feels that unless they’re in an executive role, and their job is literally to be in all of those meetings, right? You know, so it’s just one of those things where they may be ex officio, you know, in every committee within the organization, every department within the organization, and therefore, they need to be in attendance at those things as as requisite. The other part that I have a conflict with this about is the idea of low value tasks, this comes back to kind of shallow work and deep work, there needs to be a better distinguishing value to tasks. Now, they call things low value tasks, and distractions. This, this is probably closer to where I feel about things. But value is a subjective, you know, you know, item, right? It’s all subjective. So you need to figure out what is high value to you, versus what is low value to you. And many times a quick action can beget really large amounts of value. And so we have to be very thoughtful about telling people not to do low value tasks without explaining that a low value task does not mean that it is just something that is brief and quick and capable of being done in say, less than two minutes, right, in two minutes, I can get, I can get on the phone with someone and close a deal for a million dollars, right. Or I could call an order pizza, right? Like some of those things are low, one of those things is perhaps a low value task, unless you really love pizza like I do. And then it’s a really high value task. So it’s a subjective, it’s just so very subjective. It’s very difficult to tell people to do some value task. And therefore it’s going to be a cut and dry kind of situation, I think we need to get away from from talking about shallow and deep work or low value work in high value work. And understanding that there’s some work that is maintenance, some level that may be administrative, or other kinds of tasks, that may not be what someone considers high value or low value, but that we should respect the tasks that we’ve committed to and do them or decide not to do them by some other metric, right. And that may be a conversation with your supervisor or conversation with your team, or you turn taking your own internal litmus and determining that that thing is not value valuable to you. And that it won’t be get some kind of, of high value return. Outside of that, no one from the outside should really be dictating what tasks, you decide, you should be deciding what those tasks are, obviously, things that are distractions, and otherwise, can can also be dealt with, in some way, shape, or form. But that whole idea of low value, high value tasks or shallow work or deep work, I just continue continually have a problem with it because it provides a judgment from an external perspective. And that really requires a lot more understanding on an internal perspective. And I think that, you know, like, just get out of my Get out of my task list. Let me control my world. And the more we give agency to people, I think the better they are in being able to manage a productive workday. And the more that we impress upon them like meetings and telling them that their tasks are low value, the less likely they’re going to be able to be productive. All right, onward to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 14:40
Next article grown from leadership freak blog, and is your expectations don’t just influenced your destiny, they determined and it talks about how those influence external as well as internal, really influence where you’re going. And so I was reading this Article made me think about many, many years back where I had good say, a lack of knowledge about gratitude, that gratitude was not something that was built in me, that was something that was learned later in, in life. And it was very interesting when my life begin to get influenced by gratitude. It’s not that good things were not in my life is just that I was completely ignorant of their presence, because all my focus was on other things. But as the shift and the glasses and the lenses shift, it was very interesting how that influence really determined the changes, and, and my expectations now influenced that and have been continue to influence that event, I will say, to many people, in my particular experience, it’s been an exponential experience, not a linear experience, the more I have looked into this, the faster this change, and, you know, this new options has come into my life.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 16:20
Yeah, I think that what what he’s talking about here is really about the fact that we can, we can think the worst of people or we can think the best of people, we can think the worst of situations, we can think the best of situations. And those really end up determining our outcomes in so many ways. We get to curate our reality in this in this fashion. And he’s just saying, hey, you know, if you want to set your expectations low, you know, if you’re right, yeah, you you, you will go toward where you gaze. And so if you’re looking at the ground, that’s the fastest way to get there. And so if you want to be able to have good relationships, believe that people are trustworthy, he talks about, if you want to be able to think that hard work begets opportunity, then you’re going to you’re going to have those kinds of tough days, but they’re going to make you work harder, because you know that there’s something good on the other side, you know, there’s light at the end of the tunnel kind of thing. It’s just a matter of of having a proper outlook on life. And those expectations, I think really set a tone. Alright, they set a tone and attitude. It’s kind of like, you know, you and I have talked about this at at length, about the idea of a growth mindset. And how much you know, when someone has a growth mindset, the expectations are set very differently. And that even when you have a fixed mindset related to something, you can you can potentially grow beyond it if you if you challenge yourself about that fixed mindset. And this is, you know, this is the work of Dr. Carol Dweck and her teams. And I just I really, I really believe in that idea that your, your expectations as well as your attitude, in the sense of the mindset concept, really do play such a powerful part in the way in which you create your own personal culture, your own personal responsibility, and ultimately, how you create your own free life. Right, what is a liberal life? And and I think that’s really important to take to heart in a lot of ways. All right, so we’ve reached the top of our productivity articles for this week. We’re going to take a word from our sponsor this week, and then we’ll be back with our technology news, our tools of the week, our featured story and anything else that we have to cover in this week. So we will see you after the break. As soon as I find the video for the break. All right, we’ll see we’ll see after the break.

Sponsor Voice Over 18:32
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Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:43
Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and I’m joined here with Augusto Pinaud for the second half of our show talking about our technology articles now so Augusto what is our first tech article this week?

Augusto Pinaud 19:57
The first article gone from the verge last So, two weeks ago, we talked about the new fire Max, the Amazon, new tablet, 11 inch. And they did a fair review. You know, it said, hey, it may be the most refined Amazon tablet yet, but it’s still plagued with some of the same issues is a slow hard work, as we mentioned it is. So for the people who are thinking, Oh, I’m going to get this because it’s cheaper? Well, yes, it is. But also don’t expect the performance of other much more expensive hardware. So it’s a well written article, a point, you know, some of the good some of the bad. You know, one of the things that he was curious was how they say, hey, it hasn’t suprisingly decent stylus. So it has a stylus included and all that. Just take in mind, if this is the machine that you want, understand there is limits in this machine is not the high end, it is to introduce you to this world, but it may not be the high end you are looking for.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:09
I thought that I thought the review was extremely balanced and informative. None of it shocked me. Right? It’s, it’s a Kindle Fire, you know what I mean? Like you can add the word max to it all you want. That’s just for me a size, right? It is literally, you know, lower end affordable hardware, to be able to get you a product that can do the job, it’s just not going to be as powerful as certainly not as powerful as an iPad. That’s what it is. So I totally get that. All right from the Amazon Fire Max 11, onward to the apple 15 inch MacBook Air.

Augusto Pinaud 21:48
Well, there is another review, this one comes from nine to five Mac and they are talking about their hands on experience with the 15 inch. And we mentioned when we talk about the Apple event, how much this Mac was, in my opinion was based on what they sell directly to the PC market. And, you know, it’s a very interesting article, they’re talking about the difference they do, again, a very fair comparison between that and the Pro and the way, I think it was a very well written article, if you are considering that 15 inch, or you want to get some information into what this machine is and how it compared with the other hardware that there is, this will be a very good option.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:38
Yeah, I found the entire article to be just really compelling to me as someone who wants a new MacBook Air. And so I think the price point is is right, it provides you with basically an identical to a 13 inch m two MacBook Air, the price points a little higher, because you have a larger screen. But otherwise, you basically have the same device. And so larger screen, some more GPU cores, and and then the the USB port, the dual USB C port power adapter. So you’re getting, you’re getting basically the same configuration, you can obviously upgrade the configuration a little bit more to get some other cores, and some more memory and storage. But it’s seemingly a really nice device, the the weight comparison is not that much right, you’re going from like 2.7 pounds, which it clocks at 1.24 kilograms, goes up to 3.3 pounds, or one and a half kilograms. So you’re talking about a marginal increase in in weight, and you get the extra screen real estate. And I know you and I differ in terms of wanting the screen real estate or not. But I definitely want it and I love the idea that I can get that additional pixel, you know, screen coverage, you know, great pixel density, right, you’re going to get that same pixel density as any other MacBook, MacBook Air. And it’s going to it’s going to work well right you know, it’s good hardware, so just going to have good hardware so you can put Windows on it, you can put you can keep Mac OS on it, you can throw Linux on it, you can do whatever you want on this on this device, and it’s gonna run pretty well. And it’s gonna last a while. So I was really impressed with it. And this pretty much sells me on the 15 inch MacBook Air. I think that’s the next MacBook that I will probably be buying. So

Augusto Pinaud 24:33
yeah, I still like you know, it’s smaller screens. That’s not a my favorite machine is the iPad Mini. And I have multiple and that’s still the machine that I navigate to. I’m really waiting for Apple to release the new one I like those little screen and you know more than the little screen is the fact that I like the screen on portrait You know, I love really portrait mode. And not every good keyword allows you to, to do that on the laptop form per se, it is landscape. If you can find me a laptop with iOS who can do that, maybe I will consider that. Anyway, let’s go back to iOS 17. And now, you will be able to edit those green bubbles. So you have been able to edit the blue green bubbles when you send a text, but now when you send to those Android friends of yours, you will be able to do that, that says we’re sharing.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:42
So to clarify here, this is the messages that you send to other people that are green bubbles, and correct persons who sent it to you bubble. So so this is the outbound message that we’re trying

Augusto Pinaud 25:53
to keep the friendship with the person who received the message, it will not work well, if you correct every message that you receive, and some people will.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:03
But the other correction there is that because we’re on the Android side, we’re not seeing that corrected text only the people on inside of iMessage are still seeing that correct attack. Yes, that’s that’s my understanding. So so that is

Augusto Pinaud 26:16
correct. What I don’t know Jen doesn’t see the correction. Yeah, I don’t know jet. If you are going to see on an Apple device, the correction and then our Android people are going to receive more multiple texts as you correct them. That is not clear, I have not yet play with iOS 17. So I don’t know what is going to happen, really is that you

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:40
will still see the original that as the Android user, you will just see the original, at some point in the future, the best way to fix that problem is to send a second text, that would be a lot of extra texts I can only imagine. But that would be the only way without them supporting some some version of RCS and connecting, you know, keep iMessage intact. I mean, really, if we think about how Apple has created iMessage, it’s like a bandaid upon a bandaid upon a band aid. It’s, you know, it’s baling wire and duct tape held together, that really wouldn’t be that big of a deal for them to see the Android device and to connect to RCS and somehow interpret the RCS for the Android user. I know that would be a lot of server horsepower that would be required. Why do we still call things in horsepower, poor horses. But anyway, the idea here, though, would be that we would, we would have some type of interpretation between the RCS protocol and the iMessage, you know, bonds or whatever else, you know, Apple has working in the background, to handle those pieces, it could be done, you know, Apple could do it. And that would probably solve some of this, I just don’t think that Apple wants to be forced into doing it by Google. And so they’re going to continue to, you know, kind of buck the trend here and do as best as they can to make Android users you know, outsiders without being an stating it outright. Right. So I I totally, fully understand where Apple is coming from here, I really don’t have that much of a problem with it, except to say that at some point in the future, they will need to acquiesce to some kind of interoperability, whether it be the RCS protocol or something else. Right, you know, obviously, Google isn’t going to adapt to Apple’s private proprietary protocol. So Apple is going to need to go the opposite way. And and that means everyone will have to have to have some kind of unified protocol, that being the case, I like this as a step in the right direction, right for at least those folks who are inside the Apple ecosystem, they can edit those texts and make those you know, text edits as necessary. So

Augusto Pinaud 28:42
and to make my the worst on on that war discussion fight. Now with the Add of stickers, and basically the ability that Apple is going to give you to create any sticker that is going to be a nightmare on those charts. And I don’t use the stickers, but I see, you know, for the people who I have in WhatsApp and some of the groups that I’m on WhatsApp is the stickers the sticker the sticker sticker, I am particularly not looking forward to that part. But let’s see what happened. In our next article anchor with with soundcore Liberty four and see it’s $100 hetson. They said they have the ability to block 95.5% of the noise, but they’re also claiming a 60 hour battery. That’s a full day. I don’t know if that’s I don’t know what is the article sadly and there is not yet out there will be out at the end of the month. I don’t know what that means on a full day, but 60 hours may be very close to a full day of work.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:53
worth of work. Sorry. 60 hours is a full week’s worth of work.

Augusto Pinaud 29:58
I don’t know but I don’t think I don’t think it will, it will last 60 hours of use, I think will be 60 hours and extend by that, then we’ll make you around 20 hours of work,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:08
I meant that you had to put them in the case, and then it would recharge and give you another set of hours, and so on and so forth. So maybe you’re right during lunch, got pulled back out that kind of thing that because so I have the I’ve, these are, these are Anker, soundcore, Liberty air tos, and I’ve had them for quite some time, and I really liked them. And so this, this would be an appropriate upgrade for me to the next version that I’m ready for. And so I would be curious to see how these don’t have any noise cancellation built into them. They’re there. They’re just, you know, isolating sound by by the physical, you know, earbuds. But I would love to have, you know, noise cancellation built into the, into the soundcore liberty. And just like with my Google Pixel buds pro, you know, they provide a remarkable amount of sound conditioning. And that means that the ambient sound around me is just filtered out in a way that just makes it less caustic to me over the course of a day. And so I’d love to see these in action. I like the style. The the visuals of the new case are quite beautiful. I mean, I really like it, it’s kind of it’s like a cup the shell at a diagonal and like a 45.

Augusto Pinaud 31:21
Yeah, like did I want to enter, it looks very nice. Yeah, it looks

Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:25
sleek. And the idea that it can, it can reduce 98.5% of background noise. I’m presuming that’s obviously anything that bleeds through the seal of what’s sitting in your ear, you’re going to hear, but 98.5% is pretty good on in terms of of active noise cancellation, this doesn’t say active noise cancellation just just says noise cancellation. So I’m not quite sure if there’s a difference. But I’m guessing it’s it’s something based on just partially sitting in your ear, plus some other kind of microphone based sound conditioning. So it says the earbuds themselves hold 10 power 10 hours of juice on a single charge, and then the docking case, good luck, then in the charging case, and that gives you the extra 60. So that does give me what I thought it was right. So there’ll be a week’s worth of, of, of usage, you know, well, I mean, six days worth of usage, not seven, but you would have a full work weeks worth of of of usage, where you can wear them literally for 10 hours a day, juice them up, and then recharge for the next day and not have to charge again until Sunday. That’s pretty decent, you know, and that’s incredible. Yeah, and for a person like me who has multiple headsets, that’s not going to be a problem at all. So, you know, like, I’m going to have plenty of power for several weeks. And I liked that idea that I’m going to wear them not for 10 hours a day, I’m going to wear them probably for two to three hours a day, switch into other headsets, then switch into other headsets and I’m wearing these when I’m recording, you know, I’ve in broadcast in ear headsets for recording podcasts. So um, and while I’m in meetings, I typically have these in also. So I’m switching between different headsets. So this is going to actually last a really long time for me, because I’m not wearing them consistently the entire time throughout the day. So that’s a really good, that’s a really good deal for 100 bucks to get a really nice, you know, device like this, it’s supposed to be launching at the end of June. So we’re seeing that, you know, MSRP at $100. And presumably, they say that it’ll, it’ll probably cut down to around 80 bucks with some promotions, when it when it comes out at the end of June, maybe through July. So that’s a that’s a, that’s a really good deal. So really, really excited to see these come out. All right, on to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 33:41
The next article is how to use and how to you from Chrome boxes, how to use the new data extraction, as Mark Canvas in Google Sheet and, you know, Google Sheet is been working into, you know, get extraction out of cheats, and excels and documents and allows you to extract some of the information, you know, some of the the information from the files and all that very, what seems to be very easily and you know, very powerful. So,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 34:15
right, so some folks will not see this yet, because you don’t have access to it yet. But once you do have access to it. Sorry, that was me. Change the things over here in the broadcast studio. The the the idea here is that you rolling out in terms of Google workspace, so some folks will see it and have the Smart Canvas features, some will not. But the idea here is that if you have a document, so say you’re in Google Sheets, and you are in any particular cell, you can go ahead and type the at symbol and you will see a drop down menu or a drop up menu because mine always comes up to the top when I’m like near the bottom of the of the screen. And you can go ahead and insert all kinds of things. So I can go ahead and embed Add what is in essence a smart chip for, say, an another Excel or another Google Sheets workbook, that smart chip. Now, I can click on the the data option over in Google workbook. And it will now give me the option to go ahead and extract, I can right click that is on the smart chip and extend, then click extract and it will pull data from that existing document, Slides, Sheets, Docs, whatever, and pull it into the existing workbook, which means that if you have like, a huge email list that you want to be able to transfer over, or if you want to be able to create a mail merge, or if you want to be able to just look at the data in a way, and then Smart Filter with other data in this in the same space, Smart Canvas is giving you those capabilities here in a very fluid way. So this is going to speed up time to understanding information, business data, having that kind of BI at your fingertips, that business intelligence at your fingertips is going to be really, really powerful. I’m looking forward to I don’t yet have access to it, I typically do get access to these things pretty early. But I don’t have access yet to data extraction. But I’m looking forward to it, I think that it’ll be really, really great. You can create Gantt charts and all kinds of fun views, just utilizing it. And so if you all haven’t seen this also, if you’re in Google workspace, and you have the latest version of Google Sheets, if you have a full dataset sitting in front of you, you can now start to just click on any column and identify that column as what as a as a filtered column. And this, the whole system will do and kind of a a lightweight filtering of that particular field. And you can start to actually do that filter. And it’s like a temporary filter. And then you can just turn it off and set it back away. And it looks like I just got data extraction. Like it wasn’t, I didn’t see it earlier. And now I see data extraction. I’m like, Oh, my gosh, I have data extraction. It just turned on for me. Maybe it turned on earlier today, and I just didn’t notice. But yeah, so I just got I just got it. So that’s really, really cool and fun. Anyway, so. So yeah, so you’ll see it rollout just like I just saw it rollout. But you can, you’ll see data extraction, show up in your account, you’ll just basically be able to right click on on any field are clicking on the column, and you will see that data extraction option in the drop down menu, when you click on on the top of a column or right click on a smart chip. So just That’s how it’s all going to work. So stay tuned, because you know, you may not have access to it yet, but it’s coming. Alright, onto our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 37:43
Oh, our next articles aren’t going to be all yours is basically an article from all the futures coming to the big cell phone, that one that is, you know, the June 2023 feature drop. And apparently, you know, they’re going to improve car detection, they’re going to come with a bunch of new things for the Google Pixel. But since I don’t have Google Pixel, it’s all yours.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:09
Yeah, so as you said, the we’re gonna get. So if you have a pixel three or higher, you’re gonna get the updates for better car crash detection. And so it’ll automatically call emergency services and share that location with them. So that you’ll be able to get that kind of help. This is, of course, just a safety feature and really great. The limitations in terms of the existing Pixel phones, we’re talking about the pixel seven pro itself, well, is that it could never do a video when you’re in macro mode. Now, you’ll be able to take videos in macro mode. And I’ve had a very small handful of opportunities where that was something that really bothered me, because I couldn’t do it. And now they’re giving us that capability to match parody with the latest iPhones. The other thing that I really like is that so you, you set up your camera, and you set up the timer, and you want to be able to take a picture at a distance, you know, you and your family together, you could use your pixel watch, and then you have the the ability to, you know, press the shutter button from your watch. So you can you can do that from a distance. So you have remote access to your to your phone’s camera from your wrist. But if you don’t have a pixel watch, then you set the timer and you run really quickly up to where your family is. And then you hope that you made it within the three or 10 Second timeframe. Well pixel has solved that using I’m presuming that they’ve taken do remember flutter flutter was a Chrome extension I believe it was and flutter allows you to create or not create but it had hand gestures where you could control video from your webcam. So you could start a video you could stop it. You could pause it you can fast forward and rewind all from hand gestures and Google bought them. And I believe that they probably have used a lot of what they Learn from flutter in this new tool. So now you set up your your phone, you set up the timer, and now with a palm, you hold up a palm to the camera to the phone, the camera will then start the timer based on that palm gesture. So you’ll hold up your palm, it will recognize the palm and then it will start the timer and countdown to the photograph. So just a really helpful piece here for being able to take those kinds of group photographs. Or if you’re dressed up all fancy, and you want to take a selfie, you can go ahead and do that. And I think that’s really great. Those are coming to the pixel six and seven, series phones. There’s some stuff about emojis and cinematic wallpaper, but I really ignored those. So you’re gonna have to read the article, if you’re interested in that, I just don’t care. And then the the the other thing is that the the Pixel phones have a recorder built in, aptly called the Google recorder. And in this particular case, the phone will now not just give you the ability to so it already does this, like it does multiple speaker recording and transcription live using that tensor chip. So that’s the Google branded chip that that’s the SOC that they have built onto those devices. Fantastic with this machine learning and AI capabilities. Well, they take that to the next level now, because not only are they doing that multi speaker transcription, but now you’re capable of exporting that transcript to Google Docs automatically. So to date, I’d have to go to recorder.google.com, I’d have to open up that recording, and I can see the transcript, I can download the audio and the text of it. Now you can just share it directly to a Google Doc and it creates an automatic Google Doc. And there’s also now some capabilities I heard about like labeling the speakers and a video clip. And searching for those speakers, I don’t know much about that I have to play with it when it when it happens. The biggest thing to come out of all of these feature drops for June is on pixel watch. Now, when you’re sleeping, it will now activate the SPO two sensor. So you’re actually going to get that that those readings when you were sleeping, which is which is great, I’d love to have that activated at all times. But pixel watch will also be getting the high and low heart rate notifications. So if for some reason it sees that your heart rate has somehow plummeted for some reason, or elevates beyond what it considers safe, it will go ahead and prompt a notification so that you can determine what’s going on, it’s going to also going to be better at determining when you take a break during a workout. So say you’re running or biking, and you stop and huff and puff just to catch your breath, it will go ahead and know that you’ve done that, and it will go ahead and stop, stop that calculation and then restart it once you start running again. And so that’s that’s really all there is to it. Some good I mean some of these are really nice refinements Obviously there’s going to be a bunch of bug fixes and a bunch of of improvements in that sense. But I’m really looking forward to seeing that recorder technology picked up I’d love to see the SPF two data from from my sleep just become because I’m a you know, quantified self and enjoy seeing all of that kind of bio data being collected about me and displayed. So we’ll see what happens there. All right, onward to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 43:12
I mean show that that is although things that you’re mentioning are just coming to to the Google to the Google pills pixel I don’t know when we start taking pictures, but at least was 2021 I think iOS 15 him Okay, let’s go to the next news

Raymond Sidney-Smith 43:30
video as macro video was always taking it was always taking photographs so it would just wouldn’t do it in video.

Augusto Pinaud 43:37
Yes. Anyways, the Lenovo smart paper it’s now available in the UK and the Netherlands. That is the E Ink 10.3 brand smart paper brand from Lenovo apparently and um I’m assuming is an issue with copyrights and branding and etc. But apparently you can only buy right now in the UK and the Netherlands they’re only shipping UK and Netherlands so you cannot buy it. Any other any other one. So so that’s that’s our next article then it is Google meet on the go mode. And now Google meet when you are connected, I’m going to guess on a tablet or the phone. It will recognize if you are moving and then it will shut off the camera so you are paying attention to what you are doing. And people is not seeing all this random new from weird angles because you forgot to turn out the camera. That is a very good thing. That is a very interesting move from Google.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 44:49
Yeah, so so you don’t see them and they don’t see you when it goes into on the go mode. And it’s automatic and you can obviously override that setting if you want to, but I think it makes a lot of sense, you know if it detects you moving and in such a orientation that it makes sense for it not to display you or other people on screen, it not only is going to save battery, but it also is going to potentially save embarrassment for for some of the circumstances where people just don’t pay attention to what they’re doing sometimes. And then you’re like, Hey, want to turn off your camera. Because I don’t want to see whatever it is that you’re doing. And so this can be a really useful tool, I think, for a lot of folks. And I hope that zoom and Microsoft Teams and otherwise brings out some of these additional features as well, you know, Zoom has a feature already, if you swipe, I believe it’s if you swipe left from the main screen, you go into that driving mode. And that driving mode, of course, is just audio only, it shuts off everybody’s cameras, and you have to press the button in order to be heard. So it’s kind of like a It’s kind of like a walkie talkie almost, you know, but it would be nice if it just automatically did that when say I put the phone in my pocket, or you know, whether my breast pocket or my pants pocket and started walking, it should know that and then automatically go into, you know, some kind of mode, that that identifies that I’m not, I no longer need the camera on because it’s sitting in my pocket kind of thing. So that’s gonna be really useful. All right, on to

Augusto Pinaud 46:18
our last article in this section is how to use an old Kindle Paperwhite, turn it into a weather board to display the weather. And then it shows you how they use that with a browser. But, you know, I have a couple of them. And you know that over the years, and they’re not being really used. So that will be an interesting use to use this as you know, information centers for a couple of things. So that was very interesting to see. Just, you know, an article for a fun thing to do.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 46:59
Yeah, I’m, I’m very curious, I have a, I have several Kindles, but not an existing Paperwhite that I can utilize for this purpose. So I’m a little sad, because I actually still use this particular paper white. So I’m not going to do this. But I can very much see myself once this one ages out doing something like that. I mean, it just would be really, really fun to just kind of like, put it on the wall and just have it available or like, even install it on my desk somehow. So I can kind of see the weather. You know, I could buy one of those prefabbed weather devices. And I have thought about doing that. But I would like I kind of like the idea that if I have it around, if I have it sitting around, I’m going to use it for that purpose. Right. All right. So that takes us to the end of our tech articles this week, and on to our new tools of the week. So as you all know, of Gousto and I scoured the interwebs for all of the stories that we collect for you together each week. In addition to that, we come across a whole bunch of tools. And so we collect those tools together. And in new tools of the week, we’d like to share with you one of those tools that we think you might like. And so this week, I am going to bring up on screen a Gousto. Can you see my screen? No, not yet. All right, let’s see if this works. And we’ll go from there. Let’s see here. I think I need to do this. So so this is a is in the Chrome Web Store. This tool is called H 264 phi. And HT to H 264. Or phi is a tool that allows you to go ahead and convert all YouTube videos to H 264. And so what does that mean? It means that when you normally are watching a video on YouTube, YouTube typically shows it in what’s called V eight or v nine format, which means that your, your hardware like where acceleration is not kicked in, because that’s not supported under those formats, which means that your devices may start heating up the fans may come on, it’s going to be delivering more data than you need it to be delivering. And so the H dot 264 format stream format is just a lighter weight format video, you’re not going to see any difference in the video itself. But if you have any sense of your videos like sometimes stuttering or they’re buffering for long periods of time, or if you have any kind of audio drop out, it’s usually not the first thing that happens is usually video that happens that drops out or has some kind of pixelation or any of those kinds of things happening. H 264 Or five will fix that. So not totally like if you have really terrible Wi Fi or bandwidth on your internet connection and you’re obviously that’s a built in problem that needs to be fixed. But h 264, or fi will solve a lot of those problems for you. If you are having that stuttering and you have good internet, it’s just that the V eight v nine format is just causing all the all the problems. And so you can turn this on and it just sits in the background. You don’t have to futz with anything. It just does it for you. Every time you open up YouTube, it just automatically draws the stream from H dot 264. And you are good to go. And yeah, I mean, like, I had some issues with some devices. And now there are the h 264, or five is installed on all of my Chrome instances. And I rarely rarely have any problem watching a YouTube video now it just plays and I love it for that. Okay, so what is your new tool this week?

Augusto Pinaud 50:46
No, then the tool this week is Pleexy. Pleexy basically, it’s a tool that tries to help you manage tasks across multiple sources. So if you use for example, Google task and to do it under SP and Trello. Plexi helps you to manage all that and put it into one place. I love it, I think is incredibly powerful, incredibly powerful for what I do that, you know, fit that shoe. And one of the things they add now is you can even automate more things with Google tags with Flexi. So that’s the new that’s announcement. So and if you want to read more the article, it brings more into some of the features some of the things you want to do. But if you are one of those persons who use multiple and you want to integrate, you know, with Asana with Evernote with OneNote, with Monday, now you can integrate Google Tasks, which all of them

Raymond Sidney-Smith 51:51
fantastic, I will definitely be looking at that. Because I love to see ways to integrate Google Tasks into all kinds of things. Because I do I do like to have that context in my calendar of something that has to happen at a date and time and being able to place that right directly on the calendar through Google Tasks. And so that is very helpful. But being able to draw that from Flexi into my other tools would be would be really great. All right, on to our featured story of the week. This is all about Paul Graham, who is the co founder of Y Combinator talking about whether or not remote work works, and and he seems to think what Augusto

Augusto Pinaud 52:28
he thinks to feel that it worked. But we were full, and now leaders are changing their mind. And you know, I love Paul Graham and I respectfully disagree mostly was this article mostly was what he said, Because, yes, we all know their industries and specifics that are need to go back to their office, there is jobs that require that office, but I believe most jobs don’t require that. It’s, you know, it gives us an opportunity to really pull talent from anywhere and have talent accessible. And I think, you know, quoting Henry Ford, maybe inappropriately, if you ask the people what they need, they will want a faster horse. And I think this is what is happening in here. Yes, I understand. The United States is having a commercial real estate crisis. Because if people don’t come back to their offices, what are they going to do with all that space? I understand people at home impact small businesses impact restaurants impact the economy in very real ways. That said, also impact in the well being of the people in the happiness on the people in the quality life of people, as I understand for business. That seems like a secondary thing. The reality is a happy worker works better. A happy person works better. So all that even that may not be considered as important, you know, in certain corporations is key.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 54:19
Yeah, so one, I’ll narrow this down to the conversation being these are technology founders and technology executives who are saying this, and of course, Paul Graham is focused on that community. So in in some way, I can potentially agree with him, because I can see how there is a detriment to some organizations that lack good management that don’t have the ability to be able to run a remote work first environment. There are also folks who are junior in their experience. So they are new to the Due to the working environment, and it is, quote unquote, easier to help them on board, it’s easier to mentor them when they are in person. But those are, those are edge cases, I think, to having good management, and folks who embrace technologies in ways that can allow them to be able to foster and foster an environment culture that is remote work first. And then, and then, you know, empowering people to be in that environment and learn and grow and work collaboratively well together. So, as you said before, not every work environment is designed for remote work, you know, many environments are going to be hybrid in some way, shape, or form. In the future, I do not agree that most businesses are going to go back to mostly in person, I think there’s going to be just a healthy mix. And I think that in the technology space, the answer is probably yes, that most are going to go back to in person with some hybrid, you know, or, you know, you have to be in the office for three days, like like Google requires, you’re going to have some level of that. But the reason for that is very different in the technology sector than I think it is in many other spaces. There, there’s just that that whatever, there was just kind of like these ebbs and tides, where they are very pro worker and very anti worker. And, and those kinds of pendulum swings are happening. Now, what, what I, what I don’t understand about Paul Graham and the others who have spoken out against the idea of remote work is that we have many examples of, of really great technology companies that do use a distributed workforce, and are very successful at doing so. So and, and high tech, right. So we’re not talking about, you know, they just like produce software on the side kind of thing. You know, these are folks who are running large scale operations and doing a great job notwithstanding. So we know that it can work. We know that takes great, and or at least good management with the right facilitated culture. So I just, you know, again, is it right for you? Is it right for your organization? Maybe not, but I wouldn’t wipe out all hybrid work, I wouldn’t wipe out all distributed or remote work completely, just because it doesn’t work for a few large tech companies, or a few darling tech startups that are being venture backed by these folks. I do. I do appreciate what you talked about a Gousto. Regarding real estate, and the economic impact on small businesses who are supported by, you know, the concentration of an urban center, you know, having a downtown area that is that is basically not being utilized by, you know, 5060 70% of the commercial space that’s there. Of course, we have adjustments in those regards, right, you know, you know, you move with the cheese, Allah, Dr. Spencer Johnson, you need to make sure that if your business is no longer supposed to be doing what it’s doing in the place that it’s doing it, you move, you adapt the business, maybe you try different service lines, different product lines, so we have to have some kind of adaptation in these markets, some cities are just going to rebound and be fine, some are not. And we have to be conscious of that some are neighborhood by neighborhood, right. Like I’ve seen some neighborhoods come back completely. You know, I’m here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the downtown area is, is thriving again. It has a fairly strong cultural district and the cultural district has has continued to bring people downtown and, and being a vibrant space of many of the businesses have also commercial, you know, enterprise businesses have also brought people back in on some level, you know, whether 112 or three days of the week, and then the rest of the time remote. So we’re seeing different versions of a of a hybrid or distributed, you know, remote, you know, model. And and I think that we haven’t yet figured it out, I think we’re going to be in the state for quite some time. Right? It’s not going to be like they turn it off and everybody goes back to work. It’s going to be we’re going to test models, we’re going to see different people trying different things. And ultimately, everyone has to make a decision what’s going to be right for their business, their space, their place, their time. So I think that’s kind of where we are with it all. All right, got an announcement, and then we’re gonna close out the show.

Augusto Pinaud 59:25
Yeah, we have a couple of announcements. One is Apple announced that on iOS 17, they will start allowing, you know your kids to receive their allowance directly on their iOS devices. And the second announcement is that Microsoft is no longer going to support Windows eight and soon will Google Drive follow that so there are support for Windows eight and 8.1 will end up soon but even if you are using Windows eight today is A good time to upgrade as Microsoft will not longer support they will make your device vulnerable.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:00:10
Absolutely. All right. And with that, that brings us to the end of our show. Thank you Augusto for all the work you do to put the show together every week. If you would like you can join us in our community. If you go to anything but idle.com forward slash community. There you will be taken to personal productivity club and join the Anything But Idle community where you can comment on stories you can engage with us there. It’s just where we gather. And that’s where we do our stuff. So feel free to join us there comment on anything, if we missed a show a story, feel free to comment on it. If you want to share a tool of the week, you can go ahead and do that there as well. For all of you who are listening to the podcast and want to check out the show notes, you can go to anything but idle.com forward slash 119. Each episode is numbered and that episode number is also it’s redirecting slugs, so you can use that redirecting link that is and it’ll redirect you to the to the show notes for that particular episode. So you can go over there you can find all the states links to the stories, you can find our new tools of the week, you can find the extra stories and anything else there including the text transcripts that we produce. So we produce a readable one just click on that more. Read More link it will open up and it’s right there on the page. You can read the transcript of what we’re saying right now. And then you can also download it as a PDF and listen to it offline and have the PDF available to you there. Feel free to let friends and family know about Anything But Idle spread the good word. But otherwise, we will see you all next time here on Anything But Idle. Here’s to productive life.

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

Apple Announcements from WWDC and the Productivity and Technology News of the Week.

Each week, Ray Sidney-Smith ( https://twominuterule.com) and Augusto Pinaud ( https://productivityvoice.com/) review and provide commentary on the week’s news in the world of personal productivity and related technologies.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://anythingbutidle.com for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you’d like to continue discussing any news from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Apple Announcements from WWDC

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Headlines & Show Notes | Apple Announcements from WWDC

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

Headlines Part A

• If You’re Not Getting Better, You’re Getting Worse 

• There Is a Good Way To Make a To-Do List and There is a Better Way

• How to Address Productivity Paranoia

• Start Each Week With This Digital Decluttering Method

Headlines Part B

• Google can search for books in your local library

• Google Workspace gains passkey support

• Remarkable revises the PDF experience and a robust highlighting system

• The Best Magic Keyboard & Apple Pencil Alternative

• Hands-on: Are these budget iPad accessories viable alternatives to Apple’s own offerings?

• Apple bought the AR company behind the tech in Nintendo’s ‘Mario Kart’ ride

  • Apple Acquires AR Headset Firm Mira Behind Mario Kart Ride at Super Nintendo

• WhatsApp finally lets you fix typos in sent messages

• Create a Simple Wardrobe Catalog on Your iPhone 

• Motorola’s new Razr+ has me dreaming of a foldable iPhone 

Tools of the Week

• Greatness App

• DayOne

FEATURED STORY OF THE WEEK

• WWDC 2023 Recap: Everything Apple Announced Today

  • The features that didn’t get discussed onstage at WWDC

  • Miss the event? Replay the WWDC23 keynote right here

  • Apple Maps is finally getting offline navigation

    • iOS 17: How to download and use offline maps with Apple Maps 

  • Siri gets a bit smarter but Apple Home is still lagging behind

  • Journal is Apples new journaling app for iOS

    • Apple’s new ‘Journal’ app will help you kickstart a daily diary habit 

  • The Best New Features in macOS Sonoma

  • The evolution of Apple iOS from 1.0 to 17

  • With M2 Ultra Mac Pro, Apple Completes Apple Silicon Transition and No Longer Sells Intel-Based Macs 

  • iOS 17 Lets You Share AirTags With Others

  • System Requirements for iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10 and macOS Sonoma

  • Apple Announces New ‘NameDrop’ Contact Sharing Feature Coming in iOS 17

  • FaceTime is coming to Apple TV

    • tvOS 17 brings FaceTime and video conferencing to Apple TV 4K 

  • Apple Makes Developer Betas Free to Download and Install 

Announcements

• Learn OmniFocus Turns Nine

Notes

• Meta Announces Quest 3 Ahead of Apple’s Rumored AR/VR Headset

  • The Meta Quest 3 is a $499 mixed reality headset with full-color passthrough

• Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 171 With Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements  

• Oppo MR headset announced just days before Reality Pro – but only for developers

• Little Ape e-note can be the best learning aid your child can have

• Multitasking Is Making You Worse at Everything

• Low Goals: 7 Unexpected Advantages

• How to set realistic doable goals

• How to Improve Your Attention Span

• The latest threat to workplace productivity: Employee finances

• These Are the Signs You’re Overstepping at Work

• 20 Experts’ Smart, But Simple, Tech Tips For Everyday Users

• Productivity Dysmorphia

• The Robots Are Here: What Will It Mean for Job Security? 

• Is The 3-Drink Theory The Key To Productivity?

• Good Stress Is Still Stress

• Episode #209: Dave Edwards interviews David Allen

• The Ten Commandments Of Productivity 

• Mike Schmitz’s Must-Have Productivity Apps

• Anxiety Sucks, But It Taught Me These 7 Important Things 

• Hybrid work is so valuable for financial professionals that some would quit if asked to return to office

• Hitting the Books: How music chords hack your brain to elicit emotion 

• Searching Gmail on your phone is (hopefully) about to get way better

• Ive fallen in love with Google Docs all over again thanks to Pageless view and Smart Canvas

• Best MacBook trade-in values following the 15-inch MacBook Air launch

  • Apple introduces the 15-inch MacBook Air

• Google Chat now has Smart Compose to help you autocomplete your sentences

• Minecraft officially launches for Chromebooks

• Steam for Chromebook is being readied for prime time in the Stable Channel

• You Can Finally Share Your Screen in WhatsApp on Android

• Apple Vision Pro is Apples new $3499 AR headset

  • Apple Vision Pro: US-only at launch, some eye prescriptions not supported, age requirement, AR hardware preview 

• All the New Android Features Google Just Announced

Raw Text Transcript | Apple Announcements from WWDC

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).

[read more=”Read the raw text transcript” less=”Close the raw text transcript”]

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:03
Hello, personal productivity enthusiast and community Welcome to Anything But Idle the productivity news podcast. Today’s show is brought to you by co working space by personal productivity club. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:14
And I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:16
And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. This is episode 118 Apple’s announcements from WWDC 2023. And we’re recording this on June 12 2023. Each week of Augusto and I cover the productivity news headlines of the week. So you know what’s going on in relativity. And it’s really just related technologies. Augusto, let’s get into the headlines. What is our first headline of the week?

Augusto Pinaud 0:43
First headline of the week is from Chris Gila view. And it is if you’re not getting better, you’re not getting worst. And, you know, it’s always said, Sorry,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:54
it says you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.

Augusto Pinaud 0:59
And, you know, that’s, that’s in a certain way a reality and is a good thing to do a check of what you’re getting better what you’re getting worst. And if it’s okay, that you’re getting worse than that was, one of the things I love about the article is creasing Lee, I’m getting better at this, I’m getting better at this, I’m not getting better at this is how my business has changed. I don’t need to take care of that. And it was a good article to look at, what are we getting better, and what we are not getting better than we want, or we’re interested in to get better. So good. It was a very good read.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:39
Yeah, it’s one of those articles where you know, it is it is there’s a there’s a truth to it, but you don’t want it to be true. You know, you want you want to know that you’ve done something, and that it’s indelible. And so that skill or that particular body of knowledge, it’s just all there. But if you’re not using it, it’s kind of like a language, use it or lose it, if you’re not using that language, then you’re ultimately going to start having those things fade away. And that just goes with skills, and with all kinds of other things. And so it’s just good to get to know that we need to use our abilities on a regular basis to keep them sharp, onto our next article,

Augusto Pinaud 2:16
or next article comes from better humans and is there is a good way to make a to do list and there is a better way. And he said you know, not all to do lists are created the same. And, you know, he talks about embrace from the static list embrace, you know, the 8020 rule, the Pareto principle, you know, make sure that you are prioritizing, you know, instead as a somehow or to the rescue, because that’s where the matrix was. Can you know less is more intuition is keen, they do not do list and embrace change. And it was again, a very nice article, I have been talking for years about the do not do lists do not do list. And the first time I read about it, I read it from Michael Hyatt, and I thought it was brilliant. And I have a list and I review it often normally in my weekly review and pay attention. I have done any of this. And sometimes the answer is yes or no, it means I need to pay more attention, but also flexibility. You know, when I work with clients, they come with a 77 Items list. Okay? Well, we’re going to fail before the end of the day. So how about you work in a different way you work in a two or three, hey, if you get a three items list, and you need to do and repeat the process of finalizing three times a day, guess what, you’re going to feel successful three times a day. But if you get a 70 Items list and you accomplish the same nine items, it’s going to feel like a failure. So the other thing is that I was not on the article, but it’s something that I recommend is differentiate and be very clear, what are the must and what are the nice to have because it is a difference okay, this needs to happen and is a real need to happen. That is very different than it will be very nice if I get this to happen. And we tend to not establish that distinction that get us in trouble.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:28
Absolutely. On to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 4:32
So our next article come from psychology today’s how to address productivity paranoia. You know, measuring productivity helps managers identify struggle employees, you know, remote work, the challenges that that has bring, and, you know, the paranoia of this productivity that persist between the leaders and employees and the face to face interaction, and all that and I was laughing about this So as a client, we were in a meeting and on the meeting, it was said this will take two weeks. Okay. And at the end of the meeting, an email came from one of the persons who was on the meeting, say, so, can we have it at the end of the week? No, it will take two weeks. Okay. And but that is typical on many corporate environments, you know, where people is on the meeting, even agreed verbally in the meeting? And then a Dan, you know, was, let’s make it more productive? Let’s Well, you know, miracles take a little bit longer normally, that urgent things. So, and we have been trying to measure, you know, in the last three years, how we are more productive, more productive, more productive. And I have never thought about the idea of color, the productivity paranoia, but it is it is going a certain way, and what did you want to be productive for hours, you just want to check more boxes, or how we’re going to measure that actually,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:01
I know, this is harsh to say, but productivity paranoia, to me just sounds like poor management. And so the the idea of us, you know, labeling something as paranoia is, again, pathologizing, something that I don’t need need, that doesn’t need to be pathologized. Right, you know, like paranoia, being a symptom of some kind of mental disorder is, I don’t know, it just doesn’t rub me the right way. So what I feel like is that, yes, leaders do have anxiety about their employees and their their staff being productive when they cannot see them. That is not the right metric. And so they should look for the real data that shows that your employees and your staff are doing the right things. So, you know, the goal here is to look at, look at the right data to get the right result, and therefore, train yourself out of poor management. Right. And this is, again, it’s like, as you said, are we checking boxes, are we looking for results, are we looking for impact, and if we can continue to keep looking at the impact of our individual employees and as a team as a whole, we’ll also always know that we can rank order people as being most productive to least productive, and there’s always going to be a least productive person on the team, no matter how productive your team is. So that relativistic perspective doesn’t really help us understand the deficits of the team, and being able to understand how to shore up those pieces. Now, this particular article seems to be pushing for the idea that people should be hybrid workers, and that they should give some level of in person and remote work. In some measure, I don’t necessarily know that that’s true or works for every environment. You know, it doesn’t work in my company at all, we are distributed 100%. Heck, WordPress, runs on top of is run by a company called automatic they are 100% distributed team, and WordPress runs, you know, what 60% of the world’s websites. So the CMS itself is being developed in this distributed way with this distributed team. And they’re, they’re doing all the things right in that way to manage a company of that size. You know, so I don’t, I don’t buy it, that we need to have a hybrid work environment for every company. But that being the case, I think this is an argument for us, recognizing that if we are having any level of anxiety or fear related to our employees, or our staff being productive, it’s a conversation that we need to have with them, and determine what may be happening in their world, right? Like this is like, you know, compassion, not 101, if the COVID 19 pandemic should have taught us anything, it is to have a level of grace and compassion with regard to our people. And when we do that, it’s not that we can’t be tough, but we have to be tough on the problems not on the people. I mean, this comes from kind of the Harvard Negotiation, project and, and conflict resolution and otherwise, but this really works in this environment, because it’s just good management, if we can go ahead and we can say, Okay, this is why this person is not being productive, we can focus on solving that problem, I really feel that leaders are and managers are charged with making sure that we can get rid of the obstacles in the way of our people getting and being productive. So if we can do that, then we don’t have to be tough on them. We can be tough on the problem. And we can solve a lot more problems than blaming remote work are blaming a lack of face to face interactions or, you know, pathologizing anxiety and fear because of poor management skills in a new era, right? This is new for us, many of us, right, you know, managing in a modern remote environment is new for many supervisors and many managers and leaders. That’s okay. But we need to learn how to manage in that new paradigm. And we’re seeing a lot of mixing right some companies are going fully back to in person, some are are in hybrid, some are still Remote, some are aggressively staying remote. That’s all good, right, we’ll see how those companies fare in the long run. But we should understand that good management is just being dynamic in the face of these particular changing landscapes. All right on to our next article,

Augusto Pinaud 10:18
or our next article from life hacker is a start each week with this digital declaring methods. So well, you know, physical clutter is bad, you should do the digital and say, you know, go on declutter unit spend 15 minutes and clear, you know, your dekstop, your computer, your devices and all that, and I I agree on the practice. And I even recommend people look at the different devices and do something different every week. So, I have been saying for years, our Friday, you know, the second Friday of the month, the third Friday of the month, it depends on everybody’s work dynamic, but one of those normally worked well. And then take a couple of hours that Friday afternoon and flip your to do list, you know, and do the lowest priority of that, and you are going to end up that Friday, feeling king of the world because those things obviously are at the bottom of the list, because there have zero importance. But on your mind, there is no difference between that and the really important ones. Same thing with your RSS feed, pick a day can be the Sunday, that’s my day. So in the morning, I go and clean or tried to claim the RSS depending on the week that possible or not possible. And other weeks I cleaned and the deck stops and the files and the downloads. So don’t need to be everything every week, don’t make it heavy. But it helps to create a certain routine where you go and clean all your digital holes. You know, once every quarter, I go and I have a folder of ebooks and PDF and stuff. And I go and reorganize it and put it in the way I like it. Because a lot of times I get the PDF, you know, put it on the Kindle, put it on the iPad, and then dump the original file in there but didn’t put it in the name the way I like the way I will find it later there is the author and the title. So once a quarter, I go and do that work, have fixed those files. So everything is organized in the way I like.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:29
Yeah, I think that this is a good practice, I would obviously do this very differently myself. And I do because I do this all during my weekly review. So I have a way in which I am going through all of the various pieces of my world and organizing those things like throughout the week, I take a bunch of screenshots and I send them to either Evernote to my inbox for processing into my task management system, I capture screenshots and share them with colleagues and otherwise. So I’m doing a lot of that stuff links, you know, I’m sharing with people. And at the end of the week, I actually review all of those because I don’t need them cluttering my Google Photos, as I have to get rid of them because they all get backed up. And I do want them backed up in my system, just in case I want them. But that’s my opportunity to be able to kind of go through and if for some reason I missed something, it’s kind of a second pass at those items. So it’s not an inbox for me identified. But it is a way for me to shore up the rear guard and making sure that I haven’t lost something in this particular decluttering perspective, digital decluttering perspective, it’s a part of my resume plus, you know, back to the book work clean by Dan charnas, I really believe in the concept of having, you know, your yourself set up like a chef does, you know, in their kitchen, having all of the pieces cleaned and prepared and all of your ingredients ready to go. And this is what gives you that capability of doing that. And I confess, I once had that problem with, you know, the many, many tabs open problem. And now I have a system whereby I’m capturing all of those tabs and placing them into my inbox. So at the end of the week, you know, I do accumulate, it’s like barnacles on a ship, I just accumulate all of these tabs throughout the week. And so now I have them in my inbox. And I can go ahead and process them clean so that I can have that level of management. And you’d be surprised the number of people who complain about their browser being slow. And then I do a screen share. And I see that they have dozens and dozens of Chrome tabs open again, as I do, but I have a fairly robust machine in front of me that can have that many tabs open. And I use a tab extension that goes ahead and shuts down the the tabs down behind the scenes and actually if you’re using any chromium based browser, which includes Chrome, Microsoft, what’s Microsoft Edge, brave Vivaldi, you name it all of those various chromium based browsers actually can are now doing that in the background. They’re kind of shutting down the tabs and they’re not in use. So So save some some resources there. But my point is, is that I see lots of people with lots and lots of tabs open, and a bunch of detritus on their desktops, and, you know, downloads folders that are just voluminous, right? They’re just filling and filling and filling. And I made sure that I added that into my weekly, you know, checklist for my weekly review. And now I’m reviewing those items at the end of the week, so that those downloaded items are going where they they belong, they don’t belong in my downloads folder, they belong deleted, or they belong somewhere else where I can access and review them later. And so that’s a really, really good point. I also like to check my Sent folder in my email, it’s kind of tangential, but just remembering to look in these various places where we can kind of look and see, hey, did I miss something, do I send an email and someone didn’t respond to me, this is a good time to follow up with them and get get things going. One little trick there is, if I send an email I’m checking on Friday, I will reschedule that email, I’ll hit forward on it and schedule it out for Monday morning. So I’m not sending it on on a Friday afternoon to somebody who’s who’s going to obviously be getting ready for the weekend, I’m going to send it to them fresh at the top of their week. So they can go ahead and tackle that at you know, eight 9am whenever they get into the office on Monday morning. So keep that in mind that you want to you want to play to the strengths of the people in which you want responses from and doing this kind of digital decluttering can also set you up for a more productive next week. So great article in that perspective. Onto our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 16:29
Oh, this is what do we have a forum for article so we are gone now going to the break. And a word from our sponsors that this week is personal productivity

Raymond Sidney-Smith 16:42
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Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:55
Welcome back, everybody to Anything But Idle. We are going to head into our technology headlines for this week of Gousto. What is our first headline this week,

Augusto Pinaud 18:05
our first one is Google can search for books in your local library. And the article quotes Chloe ivyrose, who shows how she was looking for a book called electro the knife then, you know all the information, what you found, you know, release date, everything, including the option to see if it’s stuck on libraries, you know, at the bottom, you can put your zip code if you’re in the United States and check if the libraries are going to have. And that’s very cool. You know, one of the things I love about the libraries here, and we have discussed it here in the show, I have only one but I know you have multiple libraries on different places and rent the book that way.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:52
Yeah, so. So your mileage may vary on this one. So not everyone is going to see this functionality. So just be mindful of the fact that you’re not going to see it on the desktop, you’re only probably going to see this on mobile for most of you. Some of you might see it on desktop. And that’s just an experiment. Google is constantly experimenting with these things. So just be mindful that it’s available in some places, it’s not available and others. Some people claim that it’s always been there, some people claim that it’s never been there. So just be mindful of the fact that this is kind of hit or miss for you all. But on mobile, I believe you should be able to access this feature by by looking in the Google Play bookstore. When you’re in the Google Play bookstore, you should be able to search for a book and then see that ability to type in your zip code and do that. Now. If you do not and cannot find it for some reason, all you need to do is just go to WorldCat. So if you go to World cat.org That is the World Wide library catalog. And then you just basically type in your zip code and you can search any book anywhere, anytime. Now if you want or To get really sophisticated, you can use the library extension, the library extension is called fun enough library extension, just find it in the Web Store for the web extensions store for your particular browser. But library extension is amazing. It connects you both to your local library catalog, and it searches it right there in the page. So like, if you’re on Goodreads, if you’re on Amazon, if you’re on any of the various book sites, it will go ahead and search those sites. And then it will go ahead and automatically search your suggested library. So I have five or six different libraries that I have library cards from. And, and so it will search all of those including like a hoopla, and you know, your your ebook library and audio book libraries, portions, so it goes and searches all of those. So library extension is just like a must have for me in any browser as soon as I install it. So just good to keep in mind as you are kind of making your way through the the libraries in your maybe if you’re moved or whatever, you know, you can, you can quickly and easily get access to them through the library extension. Alright, on to more Google News.

Augusto Pinaud 21:10
Oh, the next one is Google works. Space gains passkey support. And I’m going to let you go into the whole explanation of that one.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:20
Yes. So a few weeks ago, we talked about the fact that Google had a had finally allowed Paschi support, meaning that it’s using your account embedded on any device that allows for passkey. Pass keys is just basically a device based login. So you just authenticate on the device. And you’ll then be logged into your Google account, wherever that might be. So say my phone, my phone acts as a past key. And so when I go to log into my Google account, it’ll literally just prompt me to do something on my phone. And by virtue of of doing that thing on my phone, it authenticates that it’s me trying to log in, because I physically have my phone in my hand, it knows it’s me, and not some hacker or some criminal. And it’ll let me in, that was not available within Google workspace. So only consumer Google users had access to past keys until this most most recent week and Google workspace now so if you have Google workspace for business, if you have Google workspace for enterprise for education, passkey support is now available there and you can go ahead and turn that on by going to my accounts.my account.google.com and going under that privacy and security section and turning on past keys onward to Gousto

Augusto Pinaud 22:34
are our next one remarkable the era tablet revise the PDF experience and the robust highlighting system and this is very cold, you know, they do a full it’s thinking you know, they’re setting a new view on the PDF keyboard navigations more precise searching and even smart highlighting and it is very cool because with the new announcements that the iPad did are the iOS 17 When it comes out at the end of November, October November, when it comes out. It’s Apple’s making a big effort into making your PDF experience much better. So it’s very good to see that companies like remarkable are also stepping up into the experience for PDFs

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:22
fantastic and so that was my ring light that just broke. So if I go off camera again at Gousto it’s because my ring light fell again. So just we’re gonna keep on going the show The show must go on

Augusto Pinaud 23:36
this show must go on.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:39
From the remarkable story on two alternatives for the magic keyboard and Apple Pencil. Last week

Augusto Pinaud 23:45
I talked about a cheaper version of the Apple Pencil and then I found this article on what nine to five called budget iPad accessories and alternatives. I wanted to share this for for people who wants the accessories but one, you know, a different version or more affordable version than what Apple sells. So that’s what this basically article is propose. Our next article after that is apple. We will discuss more about the vision Pro and what the Apple announced but they announced that they bought the same AR company that is behind the Mario Kart right. Los Angeles historical my rat that also do contracts with military and you know they they really have been working into this AR world. So seems like Apple is going all in today’s session. We will discuss way more when we get to the feature story of the week. And for the users of WhatsApp finally You may be able to fix your typos no need anymore to put the star and the word properly spell, they finally invented the edit button. We are very happy about that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:16
Now Now if Twitter would just I mean, unless Twitter is going to implode, I hope Twitter figures that that edit functionality out better than it currently has implemented it as well. And certainly not within the Twitter blue perspective, because that’s just an ungodly amount of money for using a social network. Okay, onward to creating a simple wardrobe catalog on your iPhone.

Augusto Pinaud 25:41
No, this this article was very interesting is another way to use you know how to create a simple catalog for what you have for the clothes that you have. A lot of people struggle with this. And you know, one of the things that is very interesting is at the time they struggle, that’s the morning, that’s when most people tend to be dressed up. And not everybody is a morning, people there is people who are night owls. And for those people, these kind of articles, these kind of techniques to inventory things and make the decision even before you wake up, it’s really make a significance and make an improvement. And you can then sort them into the formal going out cashflow workout, whatever it is, in my case, I pick whatever is on the morning, the night before and I have done it. I don’t know since one. But the reason is that I’ve denied I still think in in the morning I am running I that’s not a decision, I want to to make. I don’t have enough clothes to even a simple wardrobe catalog apparently. But for the people who have it, this will be a good option.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:56
Yeah, there are like Closet Organization apps that are out there and wardrobe apps that are specific to this tool that this this tool need. But I personally don’t have that need, i just i don’t i i Take out the next thing in the closet and I put it on. So I don’t particularly think about this, I’ve organized my closet in such a way that the algorithm is that, you know, as the next pair of pants and the next shirt are in line, that’s the next combination of things that are going to be worn together. And it everything is pretty much interchangeable. It’s very rare that I have to like skip a pair of pants because the dress shirt is just really so often color that it would be weird, I’d look like it was Christmas because I have a red shirt and a green pair of pants kind of thing, which happens a lot because I do wear a lot of red and green. And so and so I just I’m mindful of of basic things. But I’ve organized and purchased items for my closet so that everything is pretty much interchangeable, I have taken to doing something a little bit different, which is I do take a photograph every day of what I am wearing, so that I am aware of what I wore. So if I go back to the same group of people, you know, it could be that I meet with a group once a month. And I don’t want to wear the same thing every time. But it’s very possible because of my little closet algorithm that that will happen. So I do take a photograph of myself in the morning. And it’s not vanity. It’s literally just what am I wearing today. So I can go back if I need to look back at that at that moment. And I save all of that in Evernote. And so I just have a wardrobe notebook. And it just catalogs what I’ve worn. And there are occasions when I think you know what, I really liked that outfit. And then I will go back and scroll through those items and see which one of those those images, details, something that I appreciated. And I’ll usually annotate that. So I’ll write it in the note or annotate that in the in the in the title of the of the note in my wardrobe notebook. And then that way, it tells me kind of the like, oh, I wore this to this dinner or I wore this to this gala, I liked that outfit, I might want to wear that again. And so I can go ahead and do that I don’t even tag in the wardrobe, because it’s all date organized. So I could just scroll through the dates and see them in a chronological order. So I think it’s good for us to kind of keep that in mind that you know, the the way in which we look doesn’t have to be everything. But certainly it’s a component of how we present in the world. And we want to make sure that we look good to some extent. And there goes the arrows. The ring light again. But yeah, all right, I want to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 29:34
So our last story for this segment is another goal from BGR have the name escaping me by gate genius review page. Anyways, he’s saying Christmas he’s talking about how the new Motorola racer plus has driven him on a foldable phone iPhone and he’s cheering, you know, it would be very nice to have an iPhone that goes into this and remind me when I saw the Microsoft Surface foldable phone, because that’s what I want, I don’t want something that goes to half of the phone, I want something that goes double of the phone. So basically, I can go from having a phone to having an iPad Mini. That’s what I want. No, I don’t need more smaller, I need more more size but foldable so I can carry with me easier.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:31
I’ll have to say that I looked at the razor Plus Ultra, I think is it’s called not available in United States currently, that I’m aware of. But it is it harkens back to remember when the Motorola Moto rail razors were the were the the thing that de rigueur of the day, and oh my gosh, it just brought back all of those memories. And it’s also really nice looking phone, this is this is a phone that I would buy. And I would have as you know, I have two phones one for work one for personal. And and while I use my personal one a lot for work, I do like having that individual phone that I can kind of shut off. And and know that it’s turned off during that timeframe. It also gives me context switching, because phone calls don’t come through my personal phone for work, they only come through that work one. And so it just helps me have that bifurcation when I when I needed to. I think the razor plus would be really nice. You know, it kind of it reminds me the Samsung Z fold, right? The Z fold is that no, that is the flip the Z the Z flip the flip. And and so it kind of gives me that that feeling to it. I’d be worried about not having pure Android on the device, I think that I would probably go with the Z flip just for the for that purpose. But it looks like a beautiful phone. And if it came to the United States, I would definitely want to play with it to kind of see what it’s all about. And to give it some give it some love in that sense. So I’m curious if anybody out there who’s not in the in the states who might have that app, that phone to kind of let us know what what that’s all about. And kind of go from that

Augusto Pinaud 32:04
one. The other one that racer and the start tech startup was my fave. I regret eventually to the razor, but I hold as long as I could. I love that one.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:17
All right. So with that we have covered our productivity technology articles for this week. And that means onward to new tools of the week. Each week, Gustavo and I scour the web for all the various productivity and technology articles that you of course, hear us talking about. But But in that process, we come across many personal development time tasks, project management applications, and services. So in new tools of the week, we bring you each a tool we think you might like. And so my tool this week is a tool called the greatness app. And this is an interesting app to me, because what it is, it’s about building a personalized plan for investing in behaviors that bring you toward your life goals, is all supposedly backed by behavioral science. And so it’s really interesting to me in one particular way. So you can go ahead and go to greatness app.com, you fill out this quiz, and then it presents you with a set of things it thinks you might want to do. Now, the fact that the website has, you know, drinking water, right as the first primary thing, don’t get turned off by that. But it has like physical health, mental health, it has other kinds of goals that you can go ahead and put it in. But the idea here is that it’s it’s it focuses on routine, which is something that I am consistently trying to help people understand that habits are not the the goal here. Great routines are surfacing your routines to awareness. And then and then facilitating habitual behaviors, just basically behavioral interventions within your routine is how you make those kinds of long lasting changes. And so this is one of the few applications that I’ve seen doing it in such a way that I think could be really useful. So that’s the greatness app. I recommend you check it out and see if it’s something that can work for you. I like the little bit of machine learning that they’ve built into it to kind of facilitate a personalized plan for you and then help you achieve those goals throughout your weeks and months. Go. So what’s your tool this week?

Augusto Pinaud 34:21
Well, the tool this week is not only a tool is day one is a journal app. And the reason I bring it back and then we talked about this app before the reason I bring it back is because when Apple announced that they are going to be releasing a journal app for iOS. People was wondering, that was a good idea. Why have not thought about this before? Where can I go and they want I’ve been using it. I don’t know for a very long time. I can tell you that according to this. I have right into this more than 3271 Time Okay, so it’s been used. But he’s It is a fantastic application. And I don’t know, I don’t know what Apple is going to release or not. But if you don’t want to wait until iOS is out until the app is out, etc, that is a great app to check on. Maybe use.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 35:23
Right? So there’s an iOS version, there’s a Mac version, and there is an android version of the of the day one application, basic is free, that gives you one journal, one device, and one photo per entry. But then you can upgrade to the premium, which is about $3, just shy of $3 per month, or $35 per year. So it’s very nominal in terms of cost. And for all of the times I have heard you have Cousteau, talk about the value and the kind of the, the way in which you can customize and flexibly journal within day one. It sounds like a really, really great app. And so I have I have used many different apps over the over time. But I’ve I’ve consistently here heard you talk about how wonderful day one is. And so it’s a good reminder for everybody that there are solid apps out there like day one that have been around doing their thing, you know, consistently updating and doing the good work that is out there in the world. All right. With that we are on to our featured story this week. Let’s talk about WWDC 2023

Augusto Pinaud 36:26
Well, let’s notice star was the elephant less a star with a Mac. And you know, it was very interesting, because they announced the MacBook Air 15 inch that I know you will look into replaced the laptop I thought about you. They put an m two they did very well. But what was very interesting for me is how targeted that machine was, or at least on the marketing and announcements to the PC user. That was not a machine directed marketed to Apple users. It was really towards a PC market. That’s fine, he was completely fine. But that was very, very interesting for me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:13
Yeah, the MacBook Air 15 inch, the m two just sounds like the perfect Mac for me, you know, an MBA is the type of of tool that I can use in lots of different environments, it fits kind of my Chromebook need, right? The only lacking in this new MacBook Air, which we can argue to the cows come home is the lack of a touchscreen, you know, and it lacking that touchscreen is really, really a drawback. But it’s something it’s a device that I will probably get. It’s something that I can I can just slip in a bag and go. And it’s a large enough screen that I know that you like a smaller screen size than then 15 inches. But you know I’m sitting with talking to you right now on a 15 inch screen and I have a foldable monitor that travels with me that’s another 15.6 inches. So I love having that really nice widescreen. And to just have the idea of taking my MacBook Air having a 15 inch screen on it and taking my portable monitor plugging into the USBC and having, you know, basically 30 inches wide on in terms of view that just really appeals to me, just for the way in which I like to work right I like to be able to have those things, I’d love to have it stacked, I’d love to be able to take that monitor and put it on top of one another. But that will work so well in a cafe.

Augusto Pinaud 38:35
That doesn’t work well in a cafe even though I have seen pictures of people bringing their dekstop machine to the cafe. So you can do that and we can take pictures of you and make fun of you forever.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:46
I have witnessed someone carry a an iMac into the cafe, sit at a desk and work on it. And I thought to myself, why why would you why would you take you to like I would just be worried about you know, destroying the thing dropping it, you know, being knocked down those kinds of things in a public environment like that. But anyway, all right from the MacBook Air 15 inches from

Augusto Pinaud 39:10
the Metal Gear then they announced their new micro studio and they announced a monster I understand this is so they can show and they can brag what they can do. And is the m two ultra chips. Basically it’s a two m two chip put together so you can accomplish, you know, something outstanding, I’m going to assume because it’s I don’t I don’t unless you do video editing you know, they announced a MacBook Pro that now you can put it vertical horizontally. So they really went all in in to show that since they decide to do their own silica. They can really push very, very far from where the market is.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 39:57
Well, this is this is the MTL First chip is three times faster than the previous Mac Studio. I mean, like, this is a beast. And so if you’re processing a high level of video or doing huge amounts of of, basically, LLM processing, large language model processing, if you’re doing that kind of heavy duty database, you know, intensive work, this is the kind of chip you want to be able to utilize. Of course, it comes with a hefty price tag, you know, just starting at four grand USD. So, you know, if you want that ultra chip, you’re going to be starting out the gate at a pretty high price point, if you just want the m two Max chip, that’s roughly about 2000. But you want to get to the Ultra, and it starts at 4000 USD. But again, it’s this is a very, very powerful tool that’s capable of just displaying very rich visuals, and being able to process data very, very quickly. So for you know, there, there probably not that many people out there who need this, but for those folks who do, this is a great tool for it.

Augusto Pinaud 41:03
So then they let’s move to iOS 17 iPad, os 17, they announce, you know, Journal series improved, you know, they even said, now you will be able to stop docking people and using the appropriate word, okay, and they announce for the phone, the standby mode. So basically, you put on the charger and horizontal and they will show like a clock of the 1980s. And since God they’re going to allow you to modify that. upload some phones and stuff. That’s when they announced their standard, sorry, the journal app. The one thing that was very exciting for me was the sharing of the earth x and the earth X has been a great example the industry how much Google and Apple and others have been working together into just creating a product that is very nice, but also sharing together, you know, the security that comes with that technology. So it doesn’t cause trouble but really helps the fact that now I can share those are texts with people we have a couple in the house. And they are sent to my phone. So when when we are my wife and I together and the things that was up, then she started getting notifications you often earthtech following you Well, yes, we know it will be very nice to share with her so she don’t get those or for her to take those those things and don’t get the notification and don’t need to text me where is the thing because I can find it. So I’m very excited about that. Then they announce Mac OS, the new one. It was not Rancho Cucamonga. It’s been the joke for the last two or three years. But of course they did Sonoma. And the jokes were also came in for Sonoma. So apparently if you install a certain operating system, you will be able to accomplish on your Mac to have Sonoma and Gomorrah. So that was a joke and I don’t think Apple intended but we are going to be listening to that for many years to come. They announced watch os 10 TV OS and then they went into the show of the night that was the apple vision Pro. It’s not a cheap toy. It’s a $3,400 toy. But I was very excited about it. One because it remind me that the technology that it has is incredible. Okay, let’s say you put this on now you have an unlimited set of screens. That is incredible. Second, the Apple when to the business market, not the gaming market and the VR and headsets they have there they are in the business they’re very cool. But they have not really hit very very hard hitting the business market that may be very interesting you have a bunch of screens here in my office. And really if I need to upgrade all this gear, I will be very close to that number. So it makes sense to me to get rid of everything sell it and see so you start you watch Anything But Idle in the video and not only the audio, if when this product see you see different that’s because now we’re using the algorithm for this one. And it may happen but the other thing that is interesting is since like Apple found now a recipe that they start with the iPad, follow with the Apple Watch and now they’re bringing division Pro to this we remember those products the first iPad didn’t have a lot was expensive, expensive Earth and and it was by the third iPad regeneration, when that thing really was a very interesting, powerful thing before that, it was not. So if you look into the Apple Watch, it is the same thing. The first and second version of the Apple Watch, were not as powerful they were testing that was during that process that they discover, oh, the health part is what it’s getting people more interested. And then they push on that direction, making the third generation really now mass adopted or very close to, you know, or at least a mass level device. So they seem to be taking the same approach they seem to be taking, let’s test, let’s figure it out. Let’s go into business. Let’s give this to business people, I don’t travel anymore, or at least my travels are legible these days. But I’m thinking when the iPad came out many years back, that was so important for me, as a person who was a heavy traveler, this thing is no a no brainer for me if you travel any, because not only not now you can sit forget about how much space you have on that set, you will have all the screens, large screens, privacy, you don’t need to worry or put this the protector so the neighbor is seen what you seen or not seen. So I honestly think that there are two important things with this device. One is Apple, it’s really going to develop a new line of products. Okay, this, what we have seen from the business perspective. Yeah, I can put them on watch a movie, I can put them. But it’s nothing close to really be a tool where I can say, look, I will replace my iPad with this. Until now. Now I have a thing that I can think I can replace multiple iPads, as you said, when I’m here in my office, yeah, the monitors are all the stack. Also, when I’m out and about, that doesn’t happen. So if I can take now and say, I’m going to the cafe, and instead of bringing, you know, your multiple stack monitors or your dekstop, as we said at the beginning, I can take that thing, and have now two massive monitors to work sitting on the couch. I’m interested in hearing more about it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 47:38
Yeah, I’m going to reserve judgment until I see what they do with this device. I am, I’m interested in it as a consumption device, I think this is going to be something that I can sit down and watch, you know, a pretty large sized IMAX type movie and potentially even doing it in 3d, if you can, you know, if you could put prescription kind of, you know, filters in between, presumably you can also put in a 3d kind of rendering, you know, you know, where they have the different colors in each of the eyes. So you can you can see in 3d, I would love to be able to see that kind of large scale entertainment, right like think this this new avatar movie, being able to watch avatar to, you know, in that kind of IMAX experience. And you know, you put your earbuds in and you just have this immersive experience. I had that already with the with the Google Daydream VR headset, and I’m really sad that you will got rid deprecated and got rid of that program. Beyond that, what you’re talking about a Gousto in terms of of having a productivity tool that you are putting on your face, and and operating. It’s still science fiction, to me, I’m not gonna lie, I still don’t see this as being practical. For the vast majority of people, this isn’t practical. But for you and I, I can see us both wearing our VR headsets, and working very comfortably in that environment. On occasion, right, this is not going to be this is not going to be an everyday wear kind of thing. But there’s going to be opportunities where this would be really, really helpful to be able to do that kind of work. I can see in hosting our conferences, I can see in a lot of different environments where that might be very, very useful and practical. But it’s a limited set right now. They need to make this, you know, device at this price point so that it stays in developer’s hands and can can be built and so on so forth. I get that. The Apple vision Pro is currently as you said 3500 USD, and it’s going to not launch until early 2024. So developers not even gonna get their hands on this until early 2024. And at which point they’re going to start looking at how they can ideate right now their ideating how they’re going to be able to utilize this you know, they’re going to probably get the SDKs and start playing around and seeing how this tool can be utilized and what functions, what sensors are in and how this how this can really be workable with its limitations. Again, as you said, think about the first Apple Watch, think about the first air pods. Think about the comparison between them and today lightened day, you know, night and day. So he’s very good at that. Yes, yeah, absolutely. And again, you know, they’re not, they’re not inventing anything, they’re taking what exists in terms of have a vision for what a product can a product category can be. And they’re thinking about what services they can have people use on their platform, and Apple users are very loyal, right. So they’re going to be able to get that headset, and they’re going to be able to run an app ecosystem, Apple, TV, Apple, everything that they do in terms of Apple services within that, that that environment, I’m, you know, I’m, I’m going to hold as I said, I’m gonna hold reservation, or I’m gonna keep reservation to all of this, I’m gonna hold opinion about it until I see probably the the first consumer version, right, this is this is a developer version, I’m going to wait till the consumer version comes out, and they’ve solved the battery power issue, they solve some of these, some of these vision problem issues, you know, because a lot of people who put on VR or even AR glasses, will sometimes get nauseated from wearing them. There are all kinds of issues related to putting something that shielding your entire face. And so we’ll we’ll see how that how that makes us way forward. But Apple is one of the richest companies in the world, they have more cash than many, many, many, many countries in the world, just sitting on piles and piles of cash, they have the ability to invest in this technology and see it forward, I would like to actually see them make more inroads in artificial intelligence, to be quite honest, I’d like to see them doing more in that space. I know they have and they’ve got some some of that going on. But they are not like Google or Microsoft, or open AI and kind of proffering themselves as as doing AI. And I’d be interested to see what they’re doing thoughtfully in that space. Because I think it would be really useful for the industry to see a privacy focused company, at least in in, in all regards, we’ve seen Apple take a very strong stance in terms of privacy. And so taking this kind of approach with AI would be interesting. And utilizing that in this VR environment. In this kind of vision pro product, I think those two combined together, it’d be great to like have an assistant inside of your vision Pro, right. And now kind of all as Jarvis, you can now have this kind of ongoing fluid, you know, Apple Assistant, I’m not saying her name, but you know, the madam s so that you’re able to go ahead and have this kind of fluid conversation, because right now, you know, Madam s is not the brightest bulb, you know, it’s okay. It does the does the job most of the time. But it could be better, you know, I definitely use Amazon and Google to greater effect as voice assistants. And it would be great to have that facilitated in a much more thoughtful perspective, with the visuals associated with it, right, have audio and visual says, I feel like that’s the thing that is the combination of all those pieces, and it needs to fluidly work across all of your Apple devices. That’s where I think the key is, is because the the vision Pro is not going to be appropriate for everyday wear. And so once I take them off, I need to be able to have that same level of artificial intelligence and seamless experience transfer to my iPad screen transfer to my iPhone screen transferred to my watch OS, my my TV, os screen, and so on and so forth. Very, very thoughtfully.

Augusto Pinaud 53:44
Yeah. And I think that’s something where Apple has a very distant shut, because they control so much of the experience, that it is something that Google or Microsoft will have a much harder time developing not not for any than that. The options on hardware and software vary so much. That is an extra challenge to an already difficult one.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 54:13
Absolutely. All right. We’ve got an announcement and then we’re gonna close out.

Augusto Pinaud 54:16
So we have one announcement on Learn Omnifocus for with Tim stringer turns nine years, a couple of weeks ago, so congratulations, Tim. And if you’re OmniFocus user, this is an incredible place to find about OmniFocus and interviews and everything else.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 54:40
Fantastic. Congratulations again to Tim stringer from learn OmniFocus turning nine years old. And with that, okay, so we’ve covered the productivity and related technology news yet for another week. Thanks again. Augusto for all your help and work. Okay, everybody. Fantastic, okay on anything but idle.com homme, you can find our show notes those contain the links to all the stories tools of the week, extra stories that we don’t cover in the episode. And as well, we include a text transcript, both that you can read on the screen there, just click that little more button, or you can go ahead and download it off as a PDF and read it side by side as you’re listening to the episode. If for some reason you’re missing something from the show notes, we missed a story it’s gonna happen. Go ahead and feel free to join us inside of personal productivity club. If you go to anything but idle.com forward slash community, you will be taken to a sign up page. That is for personal productivity club, it’s free to join, go ahead and join it and then it’ll direct you into the Anything But Idle group. And then you can go ahead and interact with us you can comment on our various episodes, you can post stories that you think might be interesting for us to cover in a future episode, all of that fun stuff. Feel free. If you’re listening to this for the first time. Feel free to subscribe. Sometimes it’s called subscribe or follow inside of your podcast app of choice, but go ahead and subscribe and then you’ll be notified when we get our episodes released each week. And with that, we will see you all next time on Anything But Idle. Here’s to your productive life.

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