What a year 2020 has been! This week, the ProductivityCast team reminisces on four of our eight favorite episode topics this year (and all eight are embedded below for your listening pleasure), then we discuss thoughts on interests for next year. Happy, Productive New Year!

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If you'd like to continue discussing the year in review, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | A Year in Review & Preview

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

Top 3 listened-to episodes of the year

Episode 094 - How Mind Mapping Fits Your Productivity SystemEpisode 070 - On Getting Things Done with David AllenEpisode 066 - Working from Home in the Age of COVID-19

Art's Top 2

Episode 063 - Email (23:38 - 24:32)Episode 089 - Amateur vs Pro (14:09 - 15:12)

Augusto's Top 2

Episode 066 - Working from Home (47:16 - 47:49)Episode 070 - On GTD with David Allen (16:55 - 17:57)

Francis's Top 2

Episode 091 - Do what you love as a career (23:01 - 25:05)Episode 079 - Detecting and managing burnout (self-awareness that pre-empts burnout) (30:09 - 31:20)

Ray's Top 2

Episode 071 - Personal Outsourcing (12:13 - 13:35)Episode 087 - Automating Your Office (7:50 - 8:47)

Raw Text Transcript | A Year in Review & Preview

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 back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:22 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:25 And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to this final episode of 2020 for ProductivityCast. I can't believe it, but we have reached the end of 2020. Quite honestly, I think a lot of us are relieved that 2020 is over and looking forward to at least a better back three quarters of 2021 once we have a set of vaccines in order, and folks are starting to get back to a bit of normal life. And so with that, what I wanted to do today was for us to go through and talk about our most listened to episodes of the year, and then get into our favorite episodes of the year. Each of us has selected two episodes, we'll play the snippet, and then have a little discussion around why we chose it, whether it still stands, and then go round robin, for our picks. So let's let's discuss our top three listen to episodes of the year. And so if you are brand, new to ProductivityCast, this will be really good place to start in terms of listening to some episodes that have been most listened to in the year. And those end up being Episode 66 that is working from home in the age of COVID-19. Episode 70, we did an interview with David Allen, the progenitor of getting things done so on getting things done with David Allen, Episode 70. Then our number one, our top episode of of 2020 drumroll is Episode 94. How mind mapping fits your productivity system. And it kind of blows every all the other episodes out of the water. It just turns out that a lot of people were really interested in the mind mapping episode. And so yeah, check those three episodes out if you have not. And feel free to let us know your feedback. Like always, you can find our episodes through that three digit episode number. So 066070094. If you just type in ProductivityCast dotnet forward slash and that three digit number, it'll take you to the episode, you can go ahead and listen to it, download it or whatnot.

Art Gelwicks 2:34I think the mind mapping episode, while it's a little bit surprising is not actually all that surprising to me. Because mind mapping is one of those things that I know a lot of people struggle getting their head wrapped around as to what do you do with it? How do you make it work? It's it's intriguing when you see mind maps, that something is visually focused is what they are could be an input, significant productivity tool. But I still think a lot of people struggle with it. I know even I do. And I do mind maps all the time. But I making that translation from what we have traditionally thought about for note taking and planning into a much more organic visual focus can be difficult. So I'm not totally shocked that people wanted to learn more about that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:23Yeah, I'm really curious whether or not it's a bunch of students that were doing maybe research on different types of note taking techniques, or those kinds of things where mind mapping tends to surface, you know, brainstorming techniques, or or note taking techniques that mind mapping tends to come up in those conversations. And so maybe more students found it since they were doing more work online in 2020, than ever before. Yeah, I'm really curious why that ends up being such a big topic. And it's something that, you know, I've been doing for a long time, but I think maybe you're right art, you know, people sometimes have difficulty getting getting around the idea of mind mapping, you know, kind of kind of, quote unquote, how to do it correctly. And so maybe that is why it was so popular.

Art Gelwicks 4:11And just a second thought to that it could also be people are struggling to find new ways to tackle the problems that they feel a little overwhelmed with right now. They're taking notes, they're writing things down, they're using their normal tools, and it just doesn't seem to be cutting it. So they could be looking for a different direction. I be curious. I'd be curious to hear anybody who's who went out and listen to that show, to let us know why you listen to it. That'd be great to hear.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:39Definitely. Okay, so those are our top three listen to episodes this year. And I'm really excited to get into our favorite episodes of the year. And so let's go around the table and play the different snippets. First up, I'm going to have arts first choice, which was episode 63, which was about email,

Art Gelwicks 5:03it's just it boggles my mind. And I hear this all the time in collaboration spaces people like, Oh, yeah, email such a terrible thing. Email is such a terrible thing, no, emails, fine, you just suck at it. That's really what it comes down to. You have this inability, you being general, this inability to understand that when you send an email, you have no reasonable expectation that a response will come in short order, they will respond when they get it. That's why I go bonkers over this idea of read receipts, I'm going to send it Read Receipt. And that way, I'm going to know when they read it, and I should be able to know, all that is is a confirmation that they opened it, it's still an unreasonable expectation that they are going to respond as soon as they read it. If you want that immediate response. Guess what? We've got a technology for it. It's called chat. That's all chat is his email without the addresses.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:57All right. All right. Why did you choose that snippet, and you still stand by that statement?

Art Gelwicks 6:02Okay, apparently, that day, I was slightly over caffeinated, just to be clear, because anybody who listens to the show regularly knows that I do not get keyed up like that. So just just saying, there's an irony to that. I still stand by that. And I still believe that email is a very effective tool, it can be used extremely well, and it has a place. It is not the evil thing that so many people have made it out to be. That said, I think I would probably push further into the chat side of the conversation. The more I work with email recently, I have found email is actually being used less effectively than it was even before. Because people are now starting to use it as entire conversations. And that's just not what it's meant for. That's not what it's designed to do. And that it's not what it's good at. So I still stand by that. I don't know that I would quite jump up and down on the soapbox as much. But yeah, I'd probably jump a couple times.

Augusto Pinaud 7:11I agree on that there is not a conversation tool. But he's what he's been turned for many, many years into the de facto conversation tools. And interestingly enough, even with the text and the video conference, and all that, it is, sadly, what people understand as the conversation tool is what understand, okay, I need 20 people to give input, let's send an email. And yeah, I agree. And I agree with your comment on the return that return received reader receive same as a text message doesn't mean anything I may have read it. That doesn't mean I have the bandwidth to give you the proper answer right there. All that you know, is that you open or that I receive it at all.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:56And I do like that I like to see the I like to see that someone has read it or even opened it. The problem with that is that many of the email applica