Welcome to our Productivity App-apalooza! Premiere Edition! Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art use and experiment with hundreds of apps per year in our productive lives. So, we've decided to these Productivity App-apalooza episodes every so often to cover software and services that we use and recommend to others. We hope you enjoy, and let us know the apps you're using that are helping you be more productive!

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In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes

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

Workflowy

OmniFocus 3

OmniFocus for Web (from OmniGroup)

WebFocus (third-party service of OmniFocus on the Web)

Skedpal

Remember the Milk

The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher

Todoist

Google Keep

Trello

OneNote

Evernote

ActivTrak

Raw Text Transcript

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

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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 0:17

Welcome everybody to productivity casts the weekly show about all things productivity, I'm recently Smith and I'm joined here with Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. And today is our first productivity. App-apalooza, the Premiere Edition. I'm very excited, we're going to be talking about a software applications that each of us either use or enjoy or recommend to people quite often. And we're going to make this a regular thing every every so often, we're going to do an apple Palooza. And the way it's going to be designed is we're going to have three rounds. We're going to turn the microphone over to each of us to talk a little bit about each application that we are recommending, and then we will continue round. Right, Robin. And so round one. Let's get started. Art your up? What's your first application.

Art Gelwicks 1:08

All right, since I drew the short straw to go first, by default of alphabetical name, which I think is the culprit here. Mine is and I'll put this out for all three of mine. I have a requirement around these apps that they not only have a mobile component, but also a web or desktop component, because I believe that you need to be more than just single platform for things to truly be functional. So my first one is an app and website called workflow workflow with a why it is a text centric outlining tool. But it's it has a unique approach to the outlining model. If you imagine each layer of the outline being a document, it allows you to drill down layer after layer after layer and create a unlimited numbers of well in the paid version in the in the free version, there's a cap Unlimited, a vast number of entries and text content, including striking out items as tasks that they're completed. Being able to share pages, which is probably the easiest way I found to share content with people, it's literally grab a link and send it to them. That's it not particularly difficult. And it is very clean and very fast. It is completely browser independent. And it works great with their mobile client, which they're actually in the process of updating on Android,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:40

but also on the desktop as well. And it has a lot of keyboard functionality. If I recall,

Art Gelwicks 2:45

it does if you are a keyboard shortcut kind of person, you can just live in workflow. It's amazing how fast you can crank out content and capture information, it doesn't do some things, it doesn't do image embedding, it struggles a little bit with links right now, which I know is something that they're working on. But for, for just organizing thoughts and gathering content together and sharing text centric content, I have yet to find anything that that is more robust and better handling of that pure content than workflow A this

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:20

is someone who had just been recently asking about how to do outlining in an application that was really slick. They were they they wanted more functionality than say Microsoft Word. And they wanted maybe some of the flexibility of visualizing using mind mapping. And I'd recommend it to them workflow because you're able to export into OPM L, which means that most of the you know mind mapping software is will import the HTML file and be able to produce a mind map from the file. So not everything, obviously, you know, it's all not going to all be relatively, not all of it is going to be interpreted perfectly. But I thought it was really cool.

Art Gelwicks 4:04

If I'm outlining an article I'm writing for my blog, often I'll write it now in workflow and then grab it and dump it into one note to clean up

Francis Wade 4:11

a question, what's the what's the benefit of going into one North off the Atlantic and workflow.

Art Gelwicks 4:17

For me, my my actual workflow for publishing is all structured within a series of one note notebooks and sections. So the raw text entry capability within workflow, he is very streamlined and allows me to focus on the actual writing process, I kind of cheat a little bit, because what I do is I do each line and each small paragraph as a section in the outline. That way, I can drag them around very easily. And quickly within the workflow outline. Once I have it all structured together, I can dump it over into one note, and walk it through the rest of my, my publishing workflow process, which includes my SEO checks, and you know, where it gets published to, and that I've been able to push content out social media updates and things like that. So workflow, we can do that you can create those structures in there, it just happens to be that I do the majority of my work on one note, so it's easy to make that leap over.

Francis Wade 5:12

Cool, thanks.

Augusto Pinaud 5:13

Well, my first doesn't follow any of the requirements that are hard for them that it was kind of funny that they are based on the focus I've been using only focus for longer than I'm going to admit. So basically, from the day they released.

And it's been solid, has always been a solid platform. And by the time this show come out, the problem is the version of how many folks I'm using today, it's going to be obsolete, because there is a new version coming out, they will have soon a component for web browser that I'm really excited about it. And they are changing a lot of things in this platform, including what for some people has been an issue that is a dependency on context. And now they are going to, they are going to also have the ability to do tags, and other things. So

So probably, I will bring this piece of software, again, into this conversation when the new version comes out. And I had a chance to really play with it a little bit.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:23

Yeah, I mean, one of the one of the things about Omni focus is that you know, when people and in this particular case, Omni focus to is when whenever I'm at any one of the GTD meetups, New York or DC, people pretty much use all kinds of other tools. And then there's a block there's, you know, this this group of people who are all Omni focus users, and and they all they all really love it, you know, they really enjoy using the software, and so on the focus, again, for my purposes don't doesn't fit some of the requirements art has mature are similar to mine, you know, in terms of having to be multi platform and having to have a web version, because I am sometimes on client site without access to my own devices. So I need to be able to access my world through sometimes very secure environments where I need to log into my software and sometimes even remote in and and I want to be able to access them through the web browser if I'd like to. So gusto, can you tell talk a little bit about some of the feature set of Omni focus in terms of its GTD inspired feature set

Augusto Pinaud 7:31

the version, the version two, it's really the version one and version two, there were both really GTD centric, and that was part of the reason I started using out of time I, the application came out I was really my work conditions, GTD fit really, really well on what I was doing. But he's a really robust piece of software, you know, and when I stop using most of the elements of the of the Getting Things Done methodology, I was easily able to tweak on the focus to really accomplish what I wanted to do even when you could not use things like task. Sorry, like, not task will will be really useful, useless to have a software for getting things done. If you cannot do task. What I mean with tax was a G on even though you couldn't reduce tax there was the pro version has one thing that they call perspective that it was awesome. It's a little geeky, but it but it was awesome. And you could do incredible things. I think the problems they have was it perspective, it was a little too geeky for most people,...