ProductivityCast

We are in uncertain times, indeed. So, here are some strategies to consider when approaching working from home in the age of the novel coronavirus and COVID-19. We wish you all safety and health throughout this difficult period.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/066 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 managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Working From Home...

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Working From Home in the Age of the Novel Coronavirus and COVID-19

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

https://twitter.com/TodayInSports3/status/1241683087664263168

https://twitter.com/30SECVlDEOS/status/1241835148557115394

Time Blocking Summit 2020Zoom.usMicrosoft TeamsGoogle Meet (in G Suite)Brain.fmTrelloVPN (Ray uses PrivateTunnel)Chrome Remote Desktop

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

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:27 And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:28 Welcome, gentlemen. Welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. And we are in uncertain times, to say the least, we are in the midst of a global pandemic. And what we can do as a group as a team here is to help people in the best way we know possible, which is to help you all be more productive in this environment. We are all working either as an essential, professional and out there working. And so things are maybe a little bit more stressful, but for the rest of us who are working now remotely and working from home, the situation may be different or at least exaggerated in the sense that are focused in the sense that now we are working from home maybe all the time as opposed to maybe choosing to work from home on occasion. And what I wanted to do is for us to have a discussion about the the four kind of fundamental areas of working from anywhere, but primarily here today working from home, which is really mindset skills, strategies and tools, the technology that we all use to be more productive in this environment. So let's start off with a conversation about mindset. And we can we can get into the particulars of the rest as we make our way along. I wanted to start off with just a discussion about as you approach working from home, you may have been working from home for several weeks now. You may just have been forced to Start working from home, no matter where you are in the process, you need to consider environment as a as a fundamental component of how you will make yourself more productive. And so if your environment is not set up currently for you to be able to work well, then you will struggle so much more than if your environment was set up for working in as similar or maybe even better than your circumstance when you were in a an office environment or whatever type of environment you worked before.

Francis Wade 2:36

I think there's a number of people, a number of managers let's start there who are quaking in their boots because they know that there's certain there's certain people who work for them certain employees, who, in their minds are unable to manage themselves. And they've been, I hate to say carrying but they've been micromanaging them. For years, and the environment that they they've specially created an environment around some folks who are not productive and not self directed by giving them nudges and giving them their own cubicle and walking by every morning and walking by again at lunchtime and walking by again at five and sending them emails every or there's that subset of employees who aren't able to cope on their own and the managers know it. And they, I suspect, are quaking in their boots because as they go home, these employees, the managers realize that the carefully crafted environment they've created to have these people be minimally productive, is no going to go away. And it's going to be replaced by nothing. And ideally, if we had more time, the manager could, let's create a new word off board, they could off board the employee one step at a time. so that they could retain their productivity, it could take a year to train someone to be productive when they don't have all of these nudges around them. I, there's some managers I've met who tell me they love the open office environment because they can keep an eye on people, which implies that the off board someone like that we need to keep an eye on, that takes a while. And you gotta set up alternative ways of somehow nudging the person towards productivity. So I think this is this is going to be devastating for some managers and some employees, in terms of them being productive, they, they come to work to be productive, and they've never had played a hand in creating an environment in which they're productive. In other words, they weren't the ones who set up their own environment, somebody did it for them. And when that person and the environment both disappear, I suspect there are some people who are just going to simply flown though

Augusto Pinaud 4:59

it is You know, I, at this point after almost 15 years working from home, it is really easy to say, Well, you know, this is how my environment works. But the reality is that he took some time at the beginning of a lot of errors and failure and a lot of pressure, you know, there is going to be some pressure that are going to come with this process regarding getting things set up, understanding what needs to be set up understanding what you need, as Francis was saying, you know, you are at the office and this is what you get, and figure it out. Now that you are coming home, you may have the ability to add another component or you may have even less resources than what you had at the office. You know, we were laughing at the beginning of the pre show. As I was trying to print item print. My world is digital, and my kid is working He's, you know, he's doing homeschooling. So I needed to print some stuff. So there was some dusting that needed to be done to an old inkjet printer. Okay, well, that's going to happen to people, okay, there is not any more color lesser thing that will print those 52 pages to read. Now, you may need to read it into screen, and all those changes are coming. So it is important to keep in mind, in your mind in the top of your mind that there are two things that are going to change one how you do things, and you need to pay attention what it is in two senses. Number one is what's bothering you. Okay, out of the oldest situation, what is bothering you, there are things that you're going to be able to affect and change and there are things that you are not, so focus on the ones that you can, because if you can print on that, you know, 50 pages per second laser printer, then don't be both about it, don't be frustrated about it, there's nothing you can do until you can get back to the office. Okay, the other element is now you need to start looking how you're going to show performance. And one of the things when you are in the office is people kind of walk, see that you are working, see that you're BCC that you're on the phone. And now that you're working from home, nobody will walk into where you are. So you need to find a way to show that performance. You know, I've been recommending a couple managers get a one on one. Okay, five minutes at the end of the day, beginning of the day, five minutes at the end of the day and help people to get that show that performance Hey, we plan the day that they were going to do a B and C. At the end of the day we did ABC and D and that way you Samana your help to parts help people having that if they need that notch and second Give them at the end of the day a story of success. The third part is, if you were bothered by distractions at the office, and the distractions really break your concentration at work, if you have family, husband, wife, significant other at home family, all that distractions are going to tenfold. So you need to find quickly a way to get back into this. Years ago I recommend having a notepad so you write down when you get distracted, you know, what is what you were doing, because otherwise your day is going to go and disappear after 10 distractions.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:44

I think you're making some really great points here, gentlemen, and I think that there's there two pieces fundamentally here. One is how you do your work and and the environment in which you do it. And I just want to put a final point on this so that we're all kind of clear here. creating an environment that supports your productivity is very different when you are working from home for all of the reasons that were

Episode 065 | Ergonomics and Your Productivity With James Olander, The Roost Laptop Stand

For James, he found the right thing to work on by being very close to a problem that affected him personally and discovering an unsolved problem in that space.  He had been working at a laptop for years, hunched over, until it put him out of commission. RSI (repetitive stress injury), carpal tunnel, constant neck and back pain.

James started his career in aerospace engineering, worked on satellite and rockets, mainly on lightweight structures. When he came across the ergonomic crisis with his laptop, he found that no one made a compelling solution, something as portable as his laptop, that could help solve the bad posture laptops put us in.  He then decided to put his engineering background into practice and worked to develop a laptop stand that was indeed very portable. He put it on Kickstarter and they rest they say is history.

The Roost Stand is the resulting ergonomics-focused laptop stand. Today, we talk to James about his experience, his laptop stand and the future of ergonomics and your productivity.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/065 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 managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Ergonomics and Your Productivity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

The Roost Laptop Stand

James Olander, The Roost Laptop Stand

Raw Text Transcript | Ergonomics and Your Productivity

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

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 productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24And welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivitycast where we're going to be doing another interview, and this time, we have the founder of the roost. stand with us James Olander. Welcome to the show, James. Hello, thanks. Good to be here. Yeah, so a little bit about James he found the right thing to work on by being very close to a problem that affected him personally and discovering an unsolved problem in that particular space. He had been working at a laptop for years, hunched over until it put him out of commission. That is he got repetitive stress injury RSI, carpal tunnel, constant neck and back pain. James career started actually in aerospace engineering, he worked on satellites and rockets, mainly on lightweight structures. When he came across the ergonomic crisis with his laptop, he found that no one made a compelling solution, something as portable as his laptop that could help solve the bad posture laptops put us in. He then decided to put his engineering background into practice and worked to develop a laptop stand. That was indeed very portable. He put it on Kickstarter. And they, as they say, the rest is history. So it brought us the roost stand. James, give us a little bit of background in terms of what the stand is, and how it's different maybe then from some of the other products that were out there on the market at the time.

James Olander 1:41

Yeah, certainly. There's this idea that you only will use stuff if it's easy enough to use and it's not like a huge pain. Like no one no one wants to carry more stuff or, or fidget with with bad things and not that we can execute at this level but the you know, the apples might Try that, you know, it just works and, and how it's a pleasure to use it that is really important for, for us humans to actually use stuff. And so when I was looking around there wasn't a, there was nothing that was remotely close to something you'd actually want to take with you and was was not like a fidgety QG thing to set up and didn't look pretty obnoxious. The idea was that maybe there's a way to come up with a neat linkage and some mechanisms that allow this thing to collapse really small and it's easy and we can just get past that threshold where you'll actually use it. And then and then it'll solve that problem for you because now you don't have any excuses and and it's fun to use. So that's been really the focus this whole time on designing and then been working on this problem is, is how do you keep making it easier to use and solving this problem so that people actually actually use it like that's our that's our measure of success is that you buy the product and then you, you really do use it and it becomes like a daily part of your daily habit.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:08

And so tell me a little bit about your first design. I know we're in currently version 2.0. And what did you learn between the first version and the second version? As you were, as you've gone journey to developing an ergonomic portable land, you know, laptop stand? And what did you learn? What's new about the new one that was not in the last one?

James Olander 3:28

Yeah. So this was my first time really tackling an entrepreneurial endeavor since probably since like my own lawn business and in high school. And I started this when I was about 26 or 27. As you know, as we were saying before, when that's when the ergonomic and the RSI issues kind of caught up with me. That's something I tell people to they're like, well, I don't need this thing. And, and if they're under the age of 25, I just tell them to just wait like you body will, will eventually let you know when it's time to being the first entrepreneurial endeavor, trying to make this in a fail or like a, you know, fail quick and minimize, minimize, like the major production risks, where, if you haven't like a lot of Kickstarter is fail because they have this massive design and production challenge. And if it's your first time making something, you're probably going to fail pretty miserably when you try to scale it up to mass production. So now you start getting into injection molding, and you've got a third party manufacturer that's building stuff that you don't really know what the end product is going to be until it actually comes from them. So So did not want to be in that realm. And so the production of this v one was actually with a laser cutter. And so the same machine that I was doing my prototyping on, I could actually use that same machine to make Production parts. And when you're using a laser cutter, we you know, if you look at the first one, it's actually everything is a flat pattern piece of material. So everything's cut just in 2d and then we snap it all together. And that's pretty limiting in terms of in terms of like all the functionality we wanted to get in there. So we had to really like draw a line at what you know what's the bare minimum feature here are a couple features that we want that are that's going to convince people and want them to have to know that we want them to use the product with so Sophie one was kind of the bare minimum which was you know, super portable, and it gets your screen, way up off the desk. So when we say like I level that's about anywhere from like your screen moving up. So if the laptop your screens, like on the desk, but we want that screen up at least like eight to 12 inches apart. The desk so that your, the angle your heads making is really you're not looking down anymore, you're just looking horizontal. But that is the key component for ergonomics, at least in terms of the neck. So the first one did just that. And it was actually a fixed height. So you couldn't adjust it. And I'm kind of a taller guy. So I size it for myself. And turns out not everyone, you know, that didn't work for everyone. So the v2 is it adjustable. And the two also, though, is mass manufactured. So it's a whole new ballgame in terms of production challenges and so that it was good to have a bunch of history behind us in terms of, you know, we had a customer base that was sold on the concept and now we reintroduced a more useful version. And we could actually pull off the production without tank in the whole thing. second time around.

Augusto Pinaud 7:00

I'm an iPad only guy I work on my iPad for since the second iPad, okay? The first time but I still carry some of the laptop when the second iPad came, I stopped carrying a laptop. So I remember the first roost because I love the concept and I at that time was Karen, you know, computer when when you send us the the second ruse to play I was happily surprised how, you know how much went into into the engineering into the ability t

Indecision can be one of the powerful productivity inhibitors. It can be a powerful force against projects and actions that can help move your professional and/or personal life forward. We wanted this episode to help you make great decisions and provide you with strategies and techniques to combat indecision.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/064 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 managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Indecision's Last Stand

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | Indecision's Last Stand: How to Make Great Decisions

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

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, PhD

Systems 1 and 2 thinking processes and cognitive reflection testing in medical students

Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono, MD, PhD

We discussed Six Thinking Hats methodology more in Episode 053, Optimism Versus Pessimism.

Robust decisions

Uncertainty decision model

Pugh decision matrix

Sample Pugh decision matrix template (Google Sheets workbook)

(Note: Once you open the link above in your Web browser, use File > Download, or File > Make a Copy... to use this Google Sheets workbook as a template for your own decision-making.)

SWOT Analysis

Ego depletion (as explained in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumeister, PhD, and John Tierney)

Raw Text Transcript | Indecision's Last Stand

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

Hey there, productivity cast listeners. Before we jump into this week's episode, I wanted to make a small apology and a big announcement. First, you'll notice the delay in getting this week's episode out. Sorry about that. The reason why you'll notice as soon as the episode starts, the audio quality for my track is a bit wonky. I was on a cloud environment because of work travel, and had to record that way hoping the audio was usable. After a lot of internal debate. The audio is not ideal, but it's palatable. We always strive to give you as clean audio when we can as record across thousands of miles between us and time zones. So hopefully the content and audio over listening through this episode will be back to a quiet recording environment with next week's episode. Next, the big news. As some of you may know from being in my GTD meetups in Washington, DC in New York City, I'm hosting a live remote conference productivity summit on October 4, and fifth 2019. To learn more and register visit productivity summit.org. This is an idea I had about five years ago to bring together all the personal productivity experts and community I've met along my own personal productivity journey over these many years. Today, we have the technology to do that without having to travel but to our nearest desktop laptop, or mobile device, which you've already done if you're listening to me right now. So a few details about productivity summit, it will have four tracks track one is productivity, how to be more productive, using principles, strategies and techniques, track to his technology, what and how to use specific technologies to get things done. Track three is all about organization how to get your home or office more organized, and dealing with clutter and disorganization. Generally track for finally is our business development track, which is for those looking to build or grow their businesses more effectively and efficiently. I know many attending will be professionals, executives, coaches, consultants, authors, bloggers, podcasters, professional organizers, developers and creators who are looking to expand their businesses. So this is an online into growing your skills in that department. We also have ample opportunities to interact live with one another. We were planning networking opportunities during productivity summit. So it's about learning and building community, we're all more productive when we all know how to be more productive. We also have an area we're calling the game room, which is where we'll have some digital interactive, where you'll be able to actually take the lessons from your sessions, learnings and put them into immediate use productivity summit is free to attend. It's all accessible virtually through your web browser in my free community platform into which everyone who registers will be invited. The point of productivity summit is to bring us together in real time that life happens and we all won't be able to attend the summit live. We will provide replays of the sessions through Sunday evening, October six 2009 us eastern time, so you can catch Miss sessions or rewatch sessions you found especially helpful. Otherwise, you can buy access to the 2000 19 summit video replay library, which will be available after the summit closes. It's available now and early bird pricing. It goes up as we near the summit, and again after the summit replays end. So grab the replay package before the price increases, if you think you'll need it. All right. As you can imagine, I'm thoroughly excited to bring you productivity summit, and I'm going to get back to work on making that happen. I hope to see you all at productivity summit. Please share and spread the word about productivity summit to everyone you think maybe interested. The more the merrier. Again, you can learn more about the productivity technology organization and business experts from around the globe speaking at productivity summit, and register to attend at productivity summit dot work. We hope it's the most productive two days of your life. I know it will be for me.

Voiceover Artist 3:40 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 3:57 And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 4:08 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Art Gelwicks 4:10 And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:11

Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to the productivity cast listening community. Today we are going to be talking about ending indecision. That's what we're going to do today, we're going to conquer indecision. And we're going to talk actually, about what decision making is in the context of personal productivity and how indecision affects our personal productivity. And in the second part of the show, what I hope will do is to talk about some of the various ways in which people make decisions, some of the decision theories that are out there. And then we'll blend that into how to overcome indecision. And the third segment of the show was talking about really some of the, the heuristics and the methods that we have used and have helped others use in the process of being able to make good decisions when those decisions are difficult for us. So let's start off with defining decision making. And what is indecision? How do you all how do you define decision or indecision in the context of personal productivity?

Augusto Pinaud 5:14

indecision in the world of personal productivity specifically goes to you have all these set of projects and actions and things to do, and you have no clue where to start, where to start, or if you can start. So what that produce instead of pick something and move, even if may not be the best thing to move forward, what happened is, you are paralyzed, so nothing progress, nothing move forward, nothing gets done, because you don't know where to start. Okay, that's how I will define diet indecision on the productivity world.

Art Gelwicks 5:52

This is probably one of the hardest questions that that there is, is what is making a decision. I mean, it's, you know, get up and do something, if you have two things, and you gotta do one of them, you got to pick one. To me, it's what has the greatest return with the the minimum amount of downside. And it's, it's making that determination, determining what's the worst thing that could happen, and then acting on it. Even that's a terrible definition of decision making. There's much better ones out there.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:23

And I think we're all in the same general area, which is that we are trying to identify whether or not to seek out some end. And that's ultimately what a decision is, is seeking out an end. And humans are creatures that love to have closure, what we call psychological closure, we want to have all those open loops closed, we seek out closure and decision is what closure are we seeking out. And it could be in response to fight flight or freeze any one of those responses, right. So most people hear as fight or flight response. But this actually fight flight or freeze, we can actually stand our ground and take action right in the moment. We can flee from a situation and or we can freeze we can we can be paralyzed in that moment. And I tend to believe and we'll talk about this later in the episode. But I tend to believe that the freeze part of the fight flight or freez

A recent article in The New Yorker, "Was Email a Mistake?," triggered a conversation around the veracity of email in the Digital Age. The author, computer science professor Cal Newport, discussed this on a recent interview on NPR. This is our response to the question, was email a mistake?

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/063 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 managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Was Email a Mistake? A Response

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Was Email a Mistake? A Response

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

Was Email a Mistake?

Write Email With Maximum Efficiency Using This Military System

Scrum

Microsoft Outlook

Spike

Feedly

Stoop Inbox

“Bursty” Communication Can Help Remote Teams Thrive

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

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:23 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26

And today we are going to be discussing email. And this is a topic that is perennial, but more importantly, Cal Newport, Professor Newport. he's a he's a professor of mathematics Computer Science at Georgetown University. And he recently wrote an article in which he discusses his topic was email a mistake. And he brings up several different angles at which he attacks email. And I wanted for us to have a discussion around really what he's talking about, and whether or not that's real, was email truly a mistake. And to start us off, I want us to kind of just take a litmus test just go around. And what was your initial impressions about the article? And where do you stand on your usage of email? are you stopping use of your email? Are you mediating email with other modalities in order to be productive? How are you using email today? Do you believe email was a mistake?

Augusto Pinaud 1:34

I don't think email is a mistake, we may argue that the way we are using email and how it went out of control is a mistake. But it's not the email that will be equivalent to say, well, the fax was a mistake. It wasn't it was just a matter of what happened with email. I think email came in a moment where we were trying, we were in the verge of going global. And it broke, it brought a vehicle that allows to communicate with anybody, regardless where they are on a semi effective way. And dad in combination with other technologies that came at a time as a Blackberry, and people begin saying, Oh, I can really be more quote unquote, effective if I adopt these tools. The problem was, there was not really a solid execution plan, and we just got on the horse and let it run and hopefully turn into a monster, to be honest with you.

Art Gelwicks 2:32

Email is a natural evolution of this back and forth method of communication that we've had for years. I mean, we had pen pals, we had careers, we had pigeons, the concept is no different. It's just faster, and it spreads over a larger area. The challenge and I think a goose is right on this. It's how we use it, not so much the medium itself. So I'm a huge proponent of collaboration technologies, that's my area of expertise. And to be honest with you, a lot of times a lot of the things that collaboration technology, say they're going to replace could be done through just regular email through efficient and effective use of it. So yeah, I wouldn't blame it, I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. It's a highly effective tool, if used properly. And declaring that it is a mistake is a mistake in and of itself.

Francis Wade 3:26

I think it's a bit of both. I've argued with HR professionals that the single they missed the single largest factor cnet's biggest culture change maker, that's happened in our lifetime, which was email that when email was introduced, it was introduced as a technology, but it became a culture changer. So people's behaviors, ways of thinking ways of communicating ways of working together, all changed with respect to the fact that email was no possible. But it didn't happening a coordinated we, it was purely haphazard and purely, basically random. There was no planning. And as a result, on the far end of the email revolution, or the email culture change, we are living at the effect of poor implementation, up and down, I think we could all agree on that. And know that email has become embedded, there appears to be no way out. In other words, there's no easy there's no nice, easy, quick solution to the problems. Email has exacerbated.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:32 And I'll come down on the side of history, which is that email really came out of the 1960s. And the technology itself helped develop what is the modern day Internet, and so not to give you all a lecture on ARPANET and its history. But email itself is an open protocol, it's a protocol that allows a global community that is, we here you're on the planet and those up there on the International Space Station, beyond to be able to communicate without being connected to the same central system. Originally, email was designed in such a way that you both had to be online. So in order for me to send an email to Augusto, Francis or Art, I needed to call you on the phone and say, Hey, are you online, and then and then send that email and you would receive the the email on the other side, quickly, that became a, you know, difficult system, it was kind of like instant messaging, you had to be had to both be synchronously in sync in order to be able to get messages set back and forth. And that obviously didn't make much sense for asynchronous types of communication, which email would be the best board. So the the store and forward model became the standard, that's what we see today, where you send an email, and it sends it off to a server, that server holds that email. And then when the recipient is ready, they're able to retrieve that email from it. And because of mobile technology, and other web based, you know, email, that doesn't seem like it's an issue anymore, but the reality is, is that we have this ability to get email from many different points. You know, you can have your computer, your mobile phone, your tablet, your laptop, whatever. And all of them can receive email from your email server because of the store and forward method. So we have this open communications medium that is available to us today. And that is all based on the forward thinking of the progenitors, which was that we should have an open platform that should be given to the world, so that we're able to all communicate. And I think from that very basis, we can't say that email by itself was a mistake. The idea here, going back to what art was saying, you know, the idea here is that we need to have some way to be able to communicate asynchronously, we have to have some way in order to be able to not have an arbiter of our of our communications, just from a democratic perspective. You know, think about Facebook being the ultimate arbiter of everything that you ever say, through messenger and WhatsApp and so on so forth, which would you really like that to be the case? and email gives us that ability that gives us that that manifestation in an on the infrastructure level on the on the core internet level, which I think is is very, very powerful and very important. Now, we could talk about principles for using email and how that could potentially have gone awry.

But, you know, the reality is, is that email was was in my opinion, certainly not a mistake. And I think the article title was to get some shocking off to get some publicity kind of focused on it. With a with a shocking title. Let's talk about the idea behind what Professor and report here at Cal Newport is talking about. He is he's talking about this idea that he kind of presents a whole bunch of a slew of different ideas in the article. And I want to just talk specifically about asynchronous communication in today's environment, and whether or not the results of EK names a bunch of studies. And he goes through talking about the impact of different types of technologies. throughout time, what do you feel was the strongest argument that he makes, I'll just, I'll quote this section here. And then that way, we're kind of on the same page. He goes, as email was taking over the modern office researchers in the theory of distributed systems, the sub sub field in which as a computer scientist, I specialize. We're also studying the trade offs between synchronous and asynchronous. As it happens, the conclusion they reached was exactly the opposite of the prevailing consensus, they became convinced that synchrony was superior,...

Most don't think about it, but aside from finding the best productivity planner for ourselves, the very paper planner (a/k/a agenda, diary, journal, scheduler, notebook) didn't even exist until roughly 90 years. What did humankind do for the prior millennia upon millennia?! It wasn't until Gustav Grossmann came around with his own 200-page manifesto and leatherbound planning notebook in the 1930s, that the modern organizer was born.

Today, we who pay attention to our productive lives take it for granted at the plethora of options for planners on the market, as well as learning how to use them effectively. In this week's episode, the ProductivityCast team discusses the factors that make the best productivity planner the right one for you.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/062 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 managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | The Best Productivity Planner

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | The Best Productivity Planner

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

History of Day Planner

Levenger Circa system

FranklinPlanner

Staples Arc system

Day Runner

Apple Reminders

Remember the Milk

OmniFocus

The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future by Ryder Carroll

Casts referencing BuJo:

035 What Is the Bullet Journal? How Does It Work? – ProductivityCast051 Managing Digital Notebooks047 Reflections on Getting Things Done (GTD): What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part Two – ProductivityCast024 Can Productivity Be Fun? – ProductivityCast022 Productivity Pet Peeves – ProductivityCast016 The Power of Reflection – ProductivityCast013 Getting Unstuck! – ProductivityCast

Time Design (Time/System) 

FranklinPlanner

Panda Planner

Freedom Journal

Productivity Journal

Five-Minute Journal

Volt Planner

NeuroPlanner

The High Performance Planner (Brendon Burchard)

Commit 30 Planner

Revo Journal (caveat: site was not loading, or loading very slowly, when we were trying to visit it: http://revojournal.com/)

Travelers notebook

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

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

Francis Wade 0:20I'm Francis Wade.

Augusto Pinaud 0:23 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Art Gelwicks 0:24 And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25 Welcome, gentlemen to this episode of productivitycast. And today we are going to be talking about something that a lot of people use every day. But they probably don't give very much attention to it. And so the people who are listening to this podcast you listening to this podcast, are you probably more aware of the concept than not. But I thought what we would do today is we would talk about the productivity planner, the what we would call a personal organizer, or a day planner, that idea of something that helps you organize your day, your week, your month, your year. So on. To start us off, what I thought I would do is read from an article that was called the day planner by and Schmidt and I'll put a link to this in the show notes. Because I I actually highly recommend you read the full article. But basically, it's a little bit of history of the development of the day planner by this gentleman good stuff Grossman. And what I'm what we're going to do is talk a little bit about the history, I just want to read a little bit of this as a background and precursor to cover why the personal organizer came about and, or how it came about. And then we will get into a discussion on different types of planners that are out there. What really makes a productivity planner, great what what really sets one apart from from the other for you and your own personal productivity systems. And then we'll talk about some of the personal productivity planners that are on the market today. There are actually a plethora of them, and each of them are unique in their own right. While we won't do a full comparison today, at least piquing your interest in terms of the options that are available. So let's start off with the day planner, by and Schmidt just a small segment of it. She writes here, quote, in its beginnings, the planner wasn't much more than a bunch of loose pages size a five held together with some binding. The Economist, industrial psychologist and ex advertiser Gustaf Grossman, published a leather bound version of this predecessor to our modern organizers and time management systems in the 1930s, and wrote a 200 page User's Guide to go along with it detailing how buyers were supposed to use the binder book in the most efficient way. Consumers could personally order the planner with users guide from Gustaf Crispin himself, and it seems that more than a few of his contemporaries did so self employed as an advisor, occupational coach, and author word of advice literature since 1927. Grossman also sold a planner set in the decades after the Second World War. I'll just go on to the to the next paragraph and then I'll leave it to you to read the rest of the article, which is I think, very interesting. But going on, quote, Grossman conceived with the day planner, as an instrument that was supposed to support its users on his path to growth that is, so long as it was used in accordance with the User's Guide. It did this by helping him lead his life in a rational way. And part of leading one's life in a rational way, was the right kind of emotional self conduct. I would like to discuss how the day planner was supposed to assist ambitious individuals live a happy life by getting them to organize their feelings in a particular way. To what extent could writing down wishes and keeping track of engagements give rise to feelings that enabled users to constantly increase their productivity? How are users supposed to better themselves climb the ladder at their jobs achieve economic success, and thus achieve happiness simply by using the day planner in the fashion prescribed by the user's manual? Which feelings did Grossman see as being necessary and why? Which feelings was the use of the day planner supposed to generate? And which was it supposed to block out and quote, and so I will leave it there for you, I will pique your interest to go check out what Gustav Grossman expected of others in the way in which they were to use the manual. And this is really, as an Schmidt said, this is the precursor to the modern day planner, this idea of having a booklet that was basically blank pages, and a highly detailed set of instructions on how to manifest it. And we've come a long way from that artifact to today, where we basically have these planners, these organizers that are pre printed with instructions for how we should organize and manage our calendars, our events, and our tasks and projects. What's your history, what, when, and what types of planners have you used in your systems over the years,

Augusto Pinaud 4:55

I was never a big paper planner, my first planner that I can recall was cash to Data Bank, okay, that has a little keyboard kind of, I think was two or three lines of a screen. And that was my first the first product that I use similar to to a planner, at some point, I carried Morrison notebook, dinosaur planner, 11 years circa that allows me to move pages around and carry my notes and all that. So most of it, at least on the early ages was digital, I went from that Casio to was called Palm Pilot professional stay on lb for many, many years, then went to iOS. That said, I have worked and helped coach many people into making this planners work. And more recently, especially with technology and how technology, you know, has an important roles on everybody live understood really is so dynamic that there are certain things that are hard to keep up on. On a paper planner, I tend to advise people to keep the paper planner more for reflection point i connection between the speed of input and the ability of processing, that actually carrying a paper planner as they was intended at the beginning, especially the Franklin gobies and those things.

Art Gelwicks 6:27

Yeah, for me, it's easier to say what ones I haven't to use than the ones that I have. Just because it for the longest. I mean, I literally have cedar chest full of notebooks. It's just that bad of a sickness. I've been using paper systems for forever. I mean, ever since I was in, I want to say junior high school. Yes, I'm, I'm a geek, I'm okay with that. But those those types of systems regardless of which frankly comes day timer, day planner, you name it, staples arc. To me, it always came down to two brackets, they were either planner systems that were structured, or planner systems that were flexible....

If you haven’t heard about Kanban before (which many of our productivity enthusiasts had not, so you’re not alone!) started as a lean manufacturing process by Taiichi Ohno. It has since branched off into a process management and improvement method used by many in the productivity community (especially in the Lean, Six Sigma and Agile communities). In practical terms, with Personal Kanban, you create a visual process management system (Kanban means “billboard” in Japanese) for what you’re going to do, what you're currently working on, and how much you want to do (or what’s been done). There are many tools out there that help manage these kinds of boards and different styles for facilitating the boards. That's what we discuss in this latest episode of ProductivityCast!

N.B. Ray mentioned mistakenly kanban was developed in the 1960s/70s but it was actually developed in the 1940s/50s.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/061 for clickable links, the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

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

If you'd like to continue discussing managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Personal Kanban

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Personal Kanban

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

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Tonianne DeMaria Barry and Jim Benson

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future by Ryder Carroll

Rules of Personal Kanban

Visualize your workLimit your work-in-progress

Post-It Notes

Trello

MeisterTask

Wekan

Microsoft Planner

Notion

Being Productive podcast hosted by Art Gelwicks

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

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

Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26 And we are back this week with an episode on a topic that I really enjoy talking about. Because it's such an interesting flavor of a productivity system. What we're going to do today is we're going to talk about personal kanban, which is both a methodology and a book very similar to getting things done by David Allen. And so Personal Kanban mapping work navigating life as a book by Tony and Mario Berry and Jim Benson. And the history of it is actually found in combine the TGO, no lean manufacturing process that was developed back in I believe, the 60s or 70s, I could be wrong about that. But the idea here is that it has since branched off into a process management and proven methodology. The ideas behind Kanban have since branched off into process management and improvement methods used by many in the productivity community, especially in the Lean Six Sigma and agile communities. And the development in practical terms. Kanban is in essence, a visual process management system. And Kanban actually means Billboard and Japanese. And so that's what you're what you're going to do, what you're currently working on, and what you want to do or what hasn't been done being these visual boards. And so you're moving things along the process. And in essence, you're moving things forward. There are many tools out there that can help with these, and we'll talk about some of them. But today's goal is first to talk then about personal kanban. And that of course is then how you take kanban, the kanban methodology of of lean manufacturing process and the process management improvement methodologies into your personal productivity world. And so what we're going to do is we're going to talk a little bit about personal kanban, we're going to talk about how to use kanban in your own productivity system. Some of its benefits some of its, its its ways of working. And then we will talk about how to get started with personal kanban if you've never actually used to kanban board before, and what some things you could do to take your personal kanban to the next level, if you have used to kanban board in the past. Let's start off with the very basic what is personal kanban, personal kanban actually has only two rules associated with it. And so the idea here is that you visualize your work. And number two is that you limit your work in progress. But two rules and personal combine, it makes it very simple. And this allows you to be able to create a level of control of your work so that you can then visualize what the right things are that need to be done, then plan for what is going to be done in very, very quick fashion.

Art Gelwicks 3:13 It's interesting because the term kanban can throw a lot of people off. And when I when I try to explain to people, what kanban is, I always swap the term off with post it notes. Because that's basically as complex as it gets the the methodology works it just as well with post it notes as it does with any technology solution. And that can often take a lot of the fear and uncertainty and doubt away from approaching something like this.

Augusto Pinaud 3:38

I like that that approach of call it post it notes instead. That's that's a pretty brilliant one. For most people. I agree with you, when you use words like combat, people get confused. It is or confused may not be the right word. But he's like, that's a weird thing. I don't know exactly what it means. So therefore Let's not talk about

Art Gelwicks 3:55

Yeah, the end. The unfamiliarity of the term can really hurt people's adoption it,

Francis Wade 4:00

I guess I comment it from the from a, I guess a different perspective, because it was a topic I was taught as an industrial engineer, as an undergraduate. So I've been using the were familiar with the concept ever since since I was I guess, 20 years old, 21 years old, or whatever. And I was really surprised to see it come over into the personal productivity world. But I know it from I know it and I've used it from from ever since I was an undergrad.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:29 So what are the benefits of visualizing one's work in playing to the first rule of personal kanban? Why should one visualize their work?

Art Gelwicks 4:40 Well, right away, one of the things that I recommend for people when they're doing that is you're going to surprise yourself by how much work you actually have. kanban, by its nature, because it is either physically or visually tied. When you start to capture all of these things that you've got going on. Unlike a do list or unlike a project plan, combine really forces you to recognize the amount of work that you have on your plate. And that right there is often overwhelming to people, because they see all this stuff. And they realize that they probably haven't even captured all of it. But it is so important to be able to truly have a mental images to the amount of work that you're trying to handle. Specially personally, because we never give ourselves an opportunity to do that. at work. Yes, we have to, you know, report to other people what our work level is. But personally, the only person we have to report this to is ourselves. And often that's the way we procrastinate and hide is to not have an overall perspective as the amount of work that's on our plate.

Francis Wade 5:45

Over in the manufacturing world. The benefit of big benefit of using combine is that it gives you a an easy give a group a team an easy snapshot, because typically the combine borders on a wall somewhere. So everyone was playing the same, same sort of playbook. And when they could see how much roughly how much work there was to do by just looking at a glance. And if something was off, someone could raise a flag and say no, that's not correct, because this and that on the other and it would bring immediately bring everyone into the same space. It was. And if you're in a team environment and team is working on projects at the project level, then it can be really useful because then the entire team can agree yes, these are the items that we're working on. Again, it's better if it's visual, and if it's on a wall. But it can also work on a on a website or on a page or as an app. But this the the group visualization that that sort of that that was a big benefit map back most still is in the manufacturing world.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:49

And it creates a sense of accountability. I think, you know, if you see what needs to be done and who is responsible for that thing to be done, then it creates a sense of accountability, which is really great.

Art Gelwicks 7:00

provides you the opportunity to say no, or at least the supporting data to be able to say no, often you'll get hung up on there's this much stuff going on,...

Are you always hearing excuses from others about why they didn't get something done? Or, are you coming to terms with making excuses yourself for commitments you are making and breaking? In this cast, we discuss the particulars of excuses (and making justifications, and perhaps appropriates "reasons") for not getting a task or project completed.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/060 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 managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

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

The Difference Between a Reason and an Excuse (Because the world does not need another thumb sucker)

QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life by John G. Miller

How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life by Alan Lakein

“Responsibility” - Werner Erhard

Dunning-Kruger Effect

First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently by Gallup and Marcus Buckingham

Raw Text Transcript | Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

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

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:25I'm Francis Wade.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26

And we are back this week to talk about a topic that we have been really excited about, or I've been really excited about talking about, which is the idea of excuses. So many times, we ourselves experienced the idea of making excuses for getting things done. And we hear excuses from others about what they should have, would have could have done and didn't. And so I know that Augusto Francis and myself, we hear this quite often in our world of dealing with people in their productive lives. And so we've heard a lot of excuses. That's, that's all we're going to say there. And so what we wanted to do in this episode was to talk about the idea of what is the difference between excuses and reasons for not getting what you said, you're going to get done, done. And then talking about some of the excuses we we do internally, that is the excuses that we give ourselves when we are not getting things done, and how to overcome those, hopefully, a couple of tips on how to do that. And then how to deal with excuses from others, whether they be at home or in the workplace, how do we respond to excuses so that we can all be more productive along any project path, whether or goal that we might have. So let's get started with the idea that there is a difference between reason and an excuse. I'm going to start off with an interesting gentleman, he wrote a medium article called the difference between a reason and an excuse because the world does not need another thumb sucker by Gary Ryan Blaine. And I'm not going to fully read all of these. And but the the the gist of it is actually encapsulated in the quotation that he starts with, and it's by Mark Twain, and and it says, quote, there are 1000 excuses for every failure, but never a good reason. And the quote, in Blaine's definition here, he basically says that the the difference he believes between a reason and an excuse is that a reason takes accountability for one's actions, where as an excuse is an attempt to diffuse or deflect that blame, that accountability, that responsibility from the thing that you didn't get done. And he uses an interesting health related example here. And he says, quote, a reason for not going for a run is I have a broken leg. And the excuse is, I don't have the time. And I'm, I'm curious from you, gentlemen, do you agree with Gary Ryan Blaine's perspective of excuses, being a personality defect, character flaw? Or is it as an excuse something else?

Francis Wade 3:27

To be honest, I think reasons are what I give and excuses are what other people do.

Ray Sidney-Smith 3:36 fair, fair enough, fair

Francis Wade 3:38

say it, that's the reason you see it as an excuse. But that, you know, if I just look at what happens in my life, though, if I take a look deeper, and I get suspicious about my motives, I could see that this is somewhat true. Because when someone shifts from giving reasons, and I've worked with people I'm sure everyone has, where there's some point at which they go from being on the team on the same side trying to accomplish their goal. They are hell bent on achieving it, nothing can stop them. And when there's hiccups along the way, they give reasons, and then something happens. And it shifts and all of a sudden, they go into giving excuses. It's as if the tone of their and the mental model has changed. So they go from being someone who was on our side trying to make it happen to arguing why it can't happen, arguing why they're not at fault, and why they can't be counted on. So it's a it can even happen with the same person on the same project. It's just a subtle, he can't, you can't quite put your finger on it usually. But what you know, in your gut, if you've haven't had enough experiences that they're no last to you. And as they move into the world of deeper and deeper excuses, trying to bring them back into the world of reasons just doesn't work. It's very hard to do like it's possible. But it's very hard work to do. So I think in the very beginning, there is understanding that there is an end for me, there's it over the years of sort of thinking about this particular issue, I think of it like Latin and French. But when you're in the world of of reasons. It's like you're speaking speaking French, and you and I are communicating. And then when that shift happens, it's like I'm speaking, I'm still speaking French, but you've moved on to Latin. So although there is words being passed back and forth, because we're coming from these two different worlds, we aren't really communicating and no progress is being made. And until we get back on the same page, and hopefully it will be on the page of the French speaking reason giving kind of world until we get back onto the same page as no progress possible.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:04

I think I look at it a little bit differently. But I don't think we end up at the at different locations, I think we end up at the same location, which is to say that, for a person who feels like they are making excuses, on a consistent basis, you know, I think, you know, giving giving a reason for something not getting done, can be looked at as an excuse from the other person. And I think you're absolutely right there, you know, when, when I give a reason for me not getting something done, that's very different than when I hear excuses from others for not getting things done. But when I give a reason for something not having gotten done, I do recognize that it's because of the locus of control, that is I had control over the situation, and something beyond me, created, perhaps something that didn't allow me to be able to get something done. But I've taken full responsibility for whatever that is. And I take this into perspective a lot. Because as the as the owner of the company, I'm, I'm the I'm My head's always on the chopping block, right. And I very much believe in that perspective that, you know, I'm not going to throw my other people under the bus, I'm the I'm the front end of the business. And so when someone has a problem, I'm going to take, take it on the chin, so to speak. And because mistakes happen, no matter how good everybody is, you're always going to have mistakes that happen. And so the idea behind giving an excuse to me is throwing one of my staff members under the bus, as opposed to me just saying, you know what, I'm really sorry, this is my company, it's my responsibility. How do we fix this, there's a connection between a reason being something where you're taking responsibility and accountability, personal accountability for the situation, and you've decided to do something about it with that person, or, or, or with that organization, versus an excuse, kind of giving up control and saying, Okay, well, it happened to me. And so therefore, there's nothing I can do about it. And I think that I think that's where the author of the article, and I put a link to that in the show notes for anybody who who does want to read it. And that's where I think the author was coming from, although I don't particularly think that he articulated in a very, in a very compassionate way. That's that's kind of where he was, he was coming from. I will note to folks that when I was very early on, in my studies of personal productivity, I came across a very short book called question behind the question by john G. Miller. And it had a market impact on me in many different ways....

We all intuit the importance of our spaces in being and staying productive throughout the workday. Yet, companies and management have different goals and objectives when it comes to how they structure those spaces. In today's cast, we discuss the topic of open office spaces, and whether or not they are a productivity enabler or disabler.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/059 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 managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Open Office Spaces

Ray Sidney-Smith

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Open Office Spaces

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

Basecamp

“The Open Plan Office Is a Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Idea”

“Library Rules - How to Make an Open Office Plan Work”

Slack

Hipchat

Trello

Asana

Evernote

Varidesk

“The Essential Workplace”

“The future office is here”

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 one and all to productivitycast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney-Smith.

Francis Wade 0:23

I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:24 And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26

And welcome everybody to this episode of productivity casts where we will be discussing the topic that is quite complicated in terms of management and physical layout, and so on so forth. It's the idea of open office spaces, and whether or not their productivity enablers or disable errors. And this topic came up because I came across several articles from the gentleman who started the company base camp, formerly 37 signals. And on their medium blog, they have been writing about the idea of Open Office plans, Open Office, open plan offices, and whether or not they're good or bad for staff generally. But more importantly for us here today is about productivity, how productive our employees in an open office plan environment. And there are pros and cons to both sides. And I wanted us to have a discussion about that topic today. So let's, let's kind of start off with each of our perspectives on the Open Office, space design concept, and what our various experiences have been in them.

Art Gelwicks 1:37

I have been painfully clear over the years, I am not an advocate fan or otherwise, endorser of the Open Office movement, I don't think it's a good design. I don't think it's practical. And I think the rationale used to justify it does not hold the proverbial water. That said, there are reasons why you could have colored elaborative workspaces, which is a different thing entirely. But the idea of taking your entire staff and putting it putting them basically in a giant warehouse style room, no walls, no isolation, no opportunity to to focus, no privacy, just to be completely flies in the face of how people think how people operate, and how people basically spend one third of their lives because they're spending them at work. If I

Francis Wade 2:28

saw look back at my own experience, I've never had the the pain of suffering in an open office environment. I've only really worked for extended periods in some private office environments. So I think I've been lucky, and I've escaped the bullet. Because I've seen clients in these environments suffering and just unable to get anything done because they're so distracting on all levels. And the kind of work that should be their best work comes from I'm staying at home or hiding in the hiding in the closet or staying in their car, they actively tried to escape their environment. And I'll do the best work. But I've been lucky so far.

Art Gelwicks 3:13

Yeah, open offices really lend themselves to this idea of management by walking around, which is, to me, again, drives me bonkers because anybody who's working in these environments usually winds up trying to do one of two things. They either go hijack a conference room to try and get something done. Or if they have the opportunity, they disappear to someplace else in the building, or even stay home and do the work. So this should be a screaming red flag to anybody who's setting up an implementing these kinds of spaces that you know what, this just doesn't work. This this concept of come in here, everybody I worked in, I've worked in several OpenOffice plant environments, some more open, if that makes any since then others I've been in ones where literally, there are no walls, just monitors on desks, and everybody's basically looking at everybody else that will drive you bonkers. And you think about trying to get any sort of focused work done in that environment. And the most important thing becomes, where are my headphones? Why? Because I need to create artificial focus, because they've taken away all the opportunity for me to have real focus.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:30

I like you, Francis, I have never thankfully had to work in an environment that was that was, you know, of the Open Office layout. That being said, Today, I spend a lot of time working on the road, where I might be in CO working spaces, or other kinds of open spaces, like a cafe, where there are a lot of things going on around me. And there are no walls for privacy and that kind of thing. So I'm probably going to take a little bit of the middle ground here today, with regard to how office design should really be thought through which I think that there's likely a hybrid, I think by my argument today with you both is going to be is there is there a middle ground where we can have open spaces that facilitate collaboration, facilitate the kind of interactivity that we want, potentially reducing costs, because let's be honest, a lot of what drove the Open Office design plan was the fact that the build out for it was so dramatically easy, in the sense that you got a Florida building, and you threw a bunch of desks and chairs in them. And for all of the people out there who make the argument that there was more space design than that, in terms of flow, and so on so forth. I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. I think that there was a there was a clear understanding that if we could not have to buy cubicle dividers, if we didn't have to build offices, there were there was going to be a huge real estate benefit to that. That is reducing the the overhead and the cost of having to do that build out and became popular for at least partially because of that. On the other side to that those I've seen several co working spaces now that have provided a mixture, open space design, with these kinds of conference rooms and other clothes space designs that give both options to people when they need to work in, in a closed setting where they need privacy. And then in an open collaborative setting when they want to work and kind of have a little bit of ambient noise around them. While they're doing that. There's also a lot of really great technology, a friend of mine works setting an accounting firm, and or it's a consulting firm that does a lot of accounting. I'm not quite sure what that means. But the idea is behind their Open Office design is that they use technology, they use noise cancelling technology that is embedded above all of the desks. And so if I'm sitting next to you art, and then next to you, Francis, if I'm talking at my desk to you, and you're standing next to me, you can hear me, if you step about two feet outside of my desk zone, you can no longer hear me, because the acoustics are designed with the technology and you know, implemented such that there's constant noise cancelling happening around my desk and every desk in the space. It is very, very cool technology. And I can see that being potentially useful in that environment still doesn't reduce the visual distractions, and potential stress that comes with constantly seeing stimuli. But at least from a sound perspective, that's pretty cool.

Art Gelwicks 7:54

That's really cool technology. But it's also really rare technology. And it's also really expensive.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:01

Oh, nope, no question, no question that it's not only going to not be not proliferate among all offices. And it's primarily because of cost. And, you know, if you have a power outage, or anything like that, you know, you're you're pretty much dead in the water. Anyway, I want to discuss some of the things that if we can all agree that open office is not for everyone all of the time, what are some of the guidelines that you would prefer, in developing productivity, enabling office design, what are the good principles that we should take into account as it comes to laying out an office. So this is somewhere I've actually had the obligation and honor of having to do many times in my career, which is, we're going to open a new office. And now we need to design the office. And in multiple cases, it's been an empty brand new building,...

You’ve likely experienced good and bad meetings in your work and personal lives. Meetings that seem to never end, or as aimless or dull that they possibly lull you to sleep or madness from boredom. On this week’s episode of ProductivityCast, we cover the anatomy of a successful meeting so that if you’re able to, you can lead your organizational gatherings, volunteer group huddles, church committee confabs, and/or family meetings in a positive, productive direction.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/058 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 managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Anatomy of a Successful Meeting

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Anatomy of a Successful Meeting

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

Doodle

LettuceMeet

Advisory Board Anatomy of a Great Meeting

3M Meeting Anatomy Guide

Outlook group scheduling

Google Calendar group scheduling

N.B. G Suite Calendar allows you to see coworkers’ availability for scheduling (if your G Suite Administrator allows it), as well.

GTD DC Meetup

GTD NYC Meetup

Everlast Rocketbook notebooks

Raw Text Transcript | Anatomy of a Successful Meeting

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

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:25I'm Francis Wade.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26

And today we are going to be talking about the anatomy of a successful meeting. everybody listening likely has an understanding has an emotional response to the worst meeting that they probably attended last week. And we wanted to talk today about how to make meetings more successful, how do you how do you really manufacture successful meetings, even when perhaps you're not the person who is managing or organizing the event. So what I wanted to do for us today is first to walk through what really is, and are the parts of a successful meeting, both in preparation, participation and post Ops, I wanted us as a group to discuss how we manage participation during meetings before, during and after, and ultimately have a discussion about some of the the skills that we have to have in terms of communicating during the meeting, presenting and facilitating meetings, as well as closing out meetings, which can sometimes be difficult. So let's start off with what makes a successful meeting in terms of the individual parts that make up a meeting.

Francis Wade 1:44

I think it has to do with the mindset of the people who are coming into the meeting itself. A meeting is always a collaborative event between people. And the ones that take place in companies occur because the participants or someone is the someone instigates the need for the meeting. But it's not just the fact that they're instigating it, that's a potential problem is that they're doing so inside of a context inside of a culture. And most companies that I've worked with don't have a culture of seeing meetings as what I call a necessary evil, which is that it's something that needs to be as short as possible, as high quality as possible. As succinct and on point as possible, and should be reduced wherever possible, canceled wherever possible, people should be disinvited. People should be chased out the room, Steve Jobs, because meetings are huge, huge cost and time zone in terms of time, dollars and money to companies, but I've not been in a company that treated meetings as if it were an awful waste. And that there should be an ongoing process of reducing the time spent in meetings and the number of meetings, I'm yet to see them apply rigorous continuous improvement techniques to what I think is a an inherently wasteful activity that cannot be avoided.

Augusto Pinaud 3:09

I love the fact that you start by I have never worked in a company who has that. And because he's something that I like you when I don't I don't even know if I will say that my own business, you know, every meeting has that, you know, we tend to, we tend to struggle, you know, I years ago there is I don't remember if it's a GTD fast or one of those audio programs, or was one of the interviews with David Allen and and he was saying that when he was working with his wife on the same hotel room, and he needed to send something for her to do. Okay, the comment was something along the lines of given it's going to age the comment but what Samson underlies I put it on my system, up to the internet, into the server in California, to the internet, until Dec computer and his wife even that they were sitting on the same room. And he was explaining the effective and efficiency on that instead of interrupting the other person. And doing that one of the problems I see in many organizations is we forget that our urgency is not necessarily the other guy urgency, and we really fail to go, what is an emergency and what is not. Therefore, we add an incredible amount of unnecessary meetings, number one, and number two, we think that for every little thing we need to make a meeting with many of these things could be solved. The br other other things, that's one of the things in which I think things like a slack, where allows people to be there to create groups to create chat to create a hug. second meeting is great. The problem is what we must organization I have seen doing with software and pieces of software like Slack, is now let's keep the same amount of meetings plus, let's add now the slack. So what's happening now is the meetings are even less effective. Because you have the people sitting there having shorter meetings on Slack, while they're trying to not pay attention to the meeting they're sitting on,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:22

I'm a little bit draconian, when it comes to meetings, one, I don't like to have them if we don't have to have them. And to I believe that meetings are about making decisions. And so therefore, that's really the only reason for in essence, the traditional format of a I'm calling a meeting, as opposed to say an event where someone is going to present something, or what have you. So I don't particularly call meeting something where someone's going to give a presentation or something to that effect. But I understand that that can be considered a part of a meeting. But ultimately, a meeting is about making a decision. And whether that is brainstorming during the meeting, and people coming to consensus, either through an autocratic decision or a consensus or majority based decision, there is a decision that needs to be made, perhaps about one thing or multiple things. And so for me, meetings are all about what are the decisions that need to be made for actions to be decided. And if everyone can understand that construct in preparation, during and ending and leaving the meeting, then we can all be more productive. That's that's the lens through which I see it, maybe not everybody does. But that's that's the, that's the ultimate outcome of a meeting is that we've made decisions. So for me, I see the pieces of the anatomy of a successful meeting is that we've had great preparation, in furtherance of making there's decision we have a an understanding, when we sit down to the meeting with the format of the meeting is going to be who's leading the meeting, and how we're going to make decisions, right, whether it's going to be autocratic, I'm the head of the company. And so I'm going to make all the final decisions, or let's take majority vote, or we're going to consent as a group to be moving forward on a particular item on the agenda. And then finally, identification of who the responsible parties are, for what actions we decide, based on the decisions that we make. Those are really the those are really the anatomical parts for me of a successful meeting. Let's continue on in the discussion with how you manage participation, for successful meetings before, during and after. From my perspective, I I typically see meetings as being one person who is managing the entire process, typically the person who calls the meeting, and there isn't a lot of participation from the other members, which is the antithesis for me of a successful meeting, in the sense that if one person is preparing the agenda, and sends out a calendar invite, and then everyone just shows up to the meeting, without preparation, then that is out the gate and unsuccessful meeting, or at least it sets you up for lower possibility of success. So how do we how do we deal with those participatory components of a successful meeting?

Augusto Pinaud 8:37

Well, the first problem comes on what the meeting is. Okay, and how the organization understand a meeting, you know, I, I have been organizations work with organizations and participate with organizatio

What we did this week is unusual for us, but we hope this works out to be a good format for an ongoing series on the podcast. Each of us proposed an independent topic, a productivity potpourri if you will, and we asked it of the other ProductivityCast teammates. We all went round robin and answered and discussed these topics. And hopefully we get into a place where we realize, some of these topics could be its own episode with your feedback...so let us know in the comments.

In this cast, we discuss these questions/topics from the ProductivityCast team:

Art: If you had one piece of advice to give someone to get started on being more productive what would it be and why?Augusto: Importance to creating small changes to produce big impacts.Francis: How do you get better (i.e. more productive) over a career that spans decades?Ray: There are a plethora of tools out there today. How do you connect your various personal productivity tools to have an integrated management system?

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/057 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 managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Productivity Potpourri, Premiere Edition

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Productivity Potpourri, Premiere Edition

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

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox

Raw Text Transcript | Productivity Potpourri, Premiere Edition

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

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

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:27 And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24 Welcome everyone who's listening to productivitycast to this week's episode, what we're going to do this week is a little unusual, unique, it'll be something that we may try to do in the future. If this works out to be a good format, what we're going to do is we're going to take four independent topics that each of us has come up with, and we are going to ask it of the other productivity cast team members. So we're all going to go round robin and kind of answer and discuss these many topics that I think will be quite interesting. And and hopefully we get into a place where we realize, wow, this could be its own episode by itself. So let's see what happens we'll take a little bit of time for each of us to ask the question and then go from there. So let's let's start off at the top alphabetically. Art,

Art Gelwicks 1:15

one of the things that we always have to try to do is get people over that initial hump of starting to be productive. So the question I have for the three of you is, if you had to give one piece of advice to someone who was looking to get started on being productive, what would it be and why,

Augusto Pinaud 1:32

if I get somebody who approached me was technique dependent, the person I will say is one or the other. If you have a person who has at least a basic basic understanding of productivity, then I will tell them to start writing down daily their goals. If you have a person who is before that point, then I tell these people, this person to start collecting and start writing things down. Because I think if you don't have anything, the first thing you need to do is to get into the important habit of collecting of Don't let things scape to take things out of your mind on your brain. So that way you can go later into other steps.

Francis Wade 2:11

One piece of advice I'd give them is is is actually to capture something from their past, it comes from the idea that they already have 90% of what they need. And they're already doing most things productively, I'm assuming that we're talking to an adult who has a full life kids job, mortgage, you know, the average adult, the average functional adult. And what I tell them is that they're not new to productivity, that they've been trying to be productive since they were about 10 or 11 years old. And they've been building habits and practices and doing different things in order to become more productive. And I maybe take them back to their history and say, when did you? When did you realize that you needed to be productive, where you needed to be effective, and had them go back to some story about what happened when they were 11 years old, and something fell through the cracks, and it was a disaster. And so I'd want them to recap show what the great they've taken. And the reason I do that I do that is to get them present to the idea that they are already a builder of productivity systems, and one they have no probably just hasn't grown up to meet the needs that they have today. So I want to get that sort of skill in their awareness and then ask some questions or on what's the nature of their system today, from the point of view of the unwanted symptoms they're experiencing? So I'd ask them, What what are the things that you want to get rid of that aren't working so I would stop bad actually start with questions,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:36

in terms of the first piece of advice I give to most people who are interested in becoming more productive is to learn their tools fully, I can't impress upon people enough the importance of understanding the tools that they're already using it unfortunately, people tell me that they need a tool in order to be more productive. And most often than not, they're already using tools. So the very basic is most people know their way around Microsoft Word or some kind of text editor word processor. And lo and behold, you can keep a checklist in there. Honestly, you could keep your agenda, you know, calendar in a single word document and be fine. If you fully understand how Microsoft Word works, you'd recognize its power, and that you probably could create an entire productivity system in there, do you want to ultimately, maybe not. But the idea is, is that if you don't know your tools fully, then you don't know where they were, they fail you. And ultimately, that means that you are not going to be as productive as you can be. And you'll keep chasing the dream of an ideal tool, and nothing like that exists, there is no ideal tool out there, there's always going to be a tool that works 80 to 90, maybe you can give it even get it to 95% of your ideal, but that's not what makes you a skilled worker, what makes you skilled as a worker is being able to get the job done. And if you're good at it, then it doesn't matter what tool you're using. But it really does matter that you know, the tools, you know, so I guess it goes back to that, you know, if you give a broken hammer and a broken chisel to a skilled skilled sculptor, they'll still be able to you know on earth the the Donatello from the marble, and that's just the reality of it, you know, you you doesn't it doesn't matter what the tool is, it really matters the skill of the of the person who's using it. So learn those skills aren't now that we have all answered your question. What's your own? What do you have any questions for us based on our answers? And what's your answer to that question?

Art Gelwicks 5:39

I don't have any questions for you guys. Because I think you were very succinct and clear on getting some or giving some ideas to people on how to really get the ball rolling. My personal response to it is usually a two word answer, capture everything, probably the most common problem I see people having is either a, they have things falling through the cracks, because they just don't have a total picture is to everything that's coming in that they need to deal with, or they feel overwhelmed, because they don't have that total landscape. They're not sure what all they have to have taken care of, and when and how so they make the mistake of trying to keep stuff in their head. And as soon as you start to try to keep stuff in your head, you're asking for trouble. Our brains are not built for that. We're very good at processing, we're very good at manipulating, storing, and recalling not quite so much, at least not in the ways we need to be productive. So as a as a recurring thing. I tell people, if you're going to start someplace, start by capturing everything, I don't care where I don't care what tool I don't care how you're doing it pen, paper, audio recording, digital images, digital link, doesn't matter. Just the pure act of capturing everything will get you started on being able to handle your productivity. Well, that was a fantastic round one. We made it in under time. So that's great. Let's, let's take it to round two.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:01

Round two. That brings us to you, Joe, what's your question for us all related to small changes?

...