ProductivityCast

Social Media is ubiquitous today. Almost every mobile or Web-based app we use has social technologies built in—like buttons and emojis, commenting, rating and review systems, and the ability to connect, share and collaborate with others. While these features have made social media technology companies billions of dollars, they have also created some deleterious effects on humanity at large. How should we consider social media in the context of our personal productivity? And, what can we do so that we are using social media productively? That’s the discussion topic on this week’s ProductivityCast.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/056 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 | Using Social Media Productively

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Using Social Media Productively

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

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

Yammer

Word Replacer II (Chrome extension)

Hootsuite

Buffer

Instant app

Gyroscope

Android’s Digital Wellbeing

Screen Time on iOS

Freedom

Cold Turkey

RescueTime

You’re all welcome to join the ProductivityCast channel inside the Personal Productivity Club community!

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 0:20 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26 Welcome, gentlemen to productivitycast. Welcome to our listeners. For today's episode, I'm just going to get right into it. Today's episode is actually a jam packed episode where we're going to talk about social media and how to use it productively. And the conversation is going to be divided into three parts, we're going to talk about whether or not social media is doing harm to personal productivity writ large. And then we're going to move the conversation into some of the pros and cons of social media as it relates to PR productivity. And then finally, we're going to have a conversation about what can we all do with our use of social media in our productive lives. And so I'd like us to just really kick it right off with agree or disagree. Social media is doing more harm than good. for personal productivity.

Augusto Pinaud 1:22

I think I agree on that statement, you know, it is one of the problem with social media is that we take for us truth, a 40 and 140 characters statement, okay, doesn't matter, the length is statement. But the fact is, you find two or three people and say, Oh, if so and so said that that needs to be truth. And we stop the research and process that in personal productivity is important. personal productivity is not a cookie cutter, you know, he's not every site, every size fits everybody, I'm not every solution. It's good for everybody. But when you just take it for granted, or whatever he said, what happened is you stop analyzing the positive that can or cannot be half what the impact that certain solution or certain thing could have on your own system and on your own life, that produce people changing more often that needed that produce as a result or less effective

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:30

productivity. So your argument is that people need to maybe take a step back from the social media world and take stock of what they're doing. And strategically using social media

Augusto Pinaud 2:45

people these use in social media as a research tool, and it's never was never intended for that. So the problem is, you go into the link, and then you go into the rabbit holes, but never get anywhere,

Francis Wade 2:57

I think it's the sum of our experiences proven that they are very powerful tools. They do very sort of amazing things that could not be done in any other way. There's no way to accomplish being connected with so many people. So efficiently. However, I think that we, we've pretty much gone into the use of social media, with our eyes closed, kind of just blindly trusting whichever one we happen to be using. And the creators of the different apps and the different sites are, have become aware, skillful at sort of maintaining our attention. And we've just been a guest, like guinea pigs, rabbits, just kind of following along pretty blindly. I think we're sort of waking up to the fact that not all the behaviors that we're engaging in are beneficial to us that only engaging in social media has a a huge downside. And I think it's more a case of it's very powerful, there's huge benefits, there are also huge downsides. And we're just sort of waking up to the downsides and asking ourselves, is this worth it? I think net net, it is worth it. Because the fact that we're abusing the tools are not using them well doesn't mean that they can't be used well, and they can't keep giving us the benefits that we want. I think it's a matter of awareness. And sort of understanding that the the by the creators of social media we are they want to lure us into a particular kind of behavior or habit. And we need to be aware of that. And regardless of their inducements, sort of choose the ones that work for us, the ones that are most productive. In other words,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:50

I'm in I'm on the side that yes, social media is doing harm in some way, shape, or form, but probably not more then good. From a personal productivity perspective, on the on the end mass as a whole to the to people, you know, in general, I do believe that social media can be used poorly. And I think that's what you're speaking to both Cousteau and Francis is that there is a, a ripe opportunity here for people to be able to use social media in positive ways. But because it's addictive, and that really comes down to the way in which the software is designed. It's designed to be addictive, that we then get time mismanagement, because social media success into things that we maybe should not be paying attention to, that we should not be attending to content that doesn't apply to us doesn't matter in the greater perspective in life. And what that ultimately means is that people are set lower boundaries for what is quality, and what's worth bringing into their focus. And I think that's the that's the real problem is that we are now raising a set of of our, you know, people are young people are being raised in such a way that they are not learning how to differentiate the latest and loudest as David Allen would say, from the quality, slow, deep, thoughtful, intense, conversational modality that's required for us to have creative thoughts and do the pattern recognition, and to have reflection, and to have silence and to navigate emotional regulation as it relates to boredom and other kinds of uncomfortable feelings. Not in a fast paced, fury driven world. And I think I think because of that, it creates some productive downstream problems. And I'd like to discuss some of those now, which are, what do you believe are, are ultimately the pros and cons of social media, social media itself, sits on top of a wide variety of social technologies. And so that listeners have an understanding, as I teach social media in a small business context, I'm constantly forced to teach people that there are 30, plus different types of social technologies from the wiki, which is the software that runs large sites like Wikipedia, to a blog, a blog is a form of social media, it's a it's a post that other people are capable of, of engaging with. So if you look at the term social, social, meaning that many people can collaborate and engage on that piece of content, the media doesn't really particularly matter. It could be audio, it could be video, it could be text, it could be pictures. All of those are types of media, we tend to focus on Facebook, and social networks, that is external social networks. And so external social networks, Facebook, internal social networks would be something akin to a Facebook group, where you have this internal group of people within the larger social network, or the larger external social network. And so all of these types of media are and can be socialized. It just ultimately ends up being what is good about them. And what's bad about them is the way in which we use them potentially, and or the way in which they're designed. That is the way in which the developers are moving users in a particular dimension.

Francis Wade 8:48

Recently, I start I, I sort of engaged in the process of setting up a community, which has all the words a formal social media. So I had to think through the behaviors that I would like my community members to engage in, because I'm sort of starting from scratch. And I've learned that the behaviors I want them to engage in once they jumped with fi

We are picking up from where we left off on the last cast in our discussion of two books, The Power of When by Michael Breus, PhD, and When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Dan Pink. On this cast, we discuss the power of having an ideal daily schedule and we reflect on our own daily schedules and how we use our understanding of our chronotypes for optimal productivity.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/055 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 | Chronotypes and Ideal Daily Schedules

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | Chronotypes and Ideal Daily Schedules

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

The Power of When by Michael Breus, PhD

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Dan Pink

4:00 A.M. A Productivity Argument. by Augusto Pinaud

“Dolphin

“Dolphins may or may not have a regular sleep routine. As light sleepers, they frequently wake throughout the night and often do not sleep enough. Dolphins struggle to fall asleep, ruminating over the day’s failures.

“Dolphins’ extreme intelligence and tendency toward perfectionism probably explain why they spend so much time chewing over the day. They do their best work from mid-morning through early afternoon."

~ Being a Morning Person Isn’t the Key to Productivity. This Is

Being Productive (Art Gelwick’s podcast)

Episode 30: Active Data Tracking

Episode 31: Passive Data Tracking

Heat map (Productive Flourishing)

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 And I am Augusto Pinaud.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26 Thank you so much for being here with me. Gentlemen, we are going to be continuing our discussion from last episode, where we were talking about two distinct books, when the scientific secrets of perfect timing by Dan pink, and the power of win by Dr. Michael Bruce. So if you have not listened to that episode, go ahead and jump back in episode and listen to that episode on Chrono types and optimal productivity, which is the name of the episode and then hop on back over here and continue on, where Today we are going to be talking about our reflections on our own ideal daily schedules, and really fleshing out for for for you how we approach some of these pieces that might be in Confluence, or may be in conflict with the archetypes. And I think that'll be a fun, interesting discussion for us all this morning. Are before we got started recording, you had an interesting kind of starter question, I think that you would positive to to a gusto. You want to start with that. And we'll kind of go from there.

Art Gelwicks 1:37

Sure. The question in basically was, if you studied your Chrono type, and you understand which one you are, if you find you're not following that prototype, is it because you're making a conscious effort to not follow it? Or is it because the rest of your life is pushing you to a different one. So if for example, I by definition, right now, I am a lion, and that works pretty well, with my regular daily life schedule. But there are days that my krona type would be much better suited if I was a wolf, for example. I don't make a conscious effort to try and change it because like I said, it seems to work pretty well for me right now. But I'm just curious if that's something if you find you're not matching your krona type? Are you doing it by choice? Are you doing it by force?

Augusto Pinaud 2:30

You know, mine is exactly the opposite. When I went into the book, the chronic type that identifies the wealth that by the way, it's to the teeth, okay. I love because I love the silence. Okay, I love the non interruption. I loved all that part of working. So the wolf works for me, so well. And I did it for many, many, many years. What happened is, I leave sadly, on a different schedule than the wolf. When I was young, I could go in two or three hours of sleep, you know, work all night, and then go back and have normal life. Okay, that's stop working at some point. And I begin our lives and I was one to the other scene I discover. And I wrote about it on on the for a book is, in order for me to be the wolf, because I have a normal life. In the day. I need to decompress. So what happened is, I go and then finally, when I get that quiet for the wolf, okay, I need maybe half an hour, maybe two hours to decompress. Okay, and then I'm on full push. The problem was daddy's, then I go to bed at three, four in the morning, and I need to wake up at six. It really doesn't work well. So years ago, I begin trying the opposite. say, Well, why do you think instead of decompressing I just go to bed and wake up at four in the morning. Because what I discovered was a wolf is I really get after decompression all that couple of hours of good work. But mostly because well I'm obviously in six in the morning by four in the morning, I'm dead. So if I flip it on, it started waking up at four in the morning, I could get first super fresh, because I'm going to be completely rested. And those two first hours between four and six are incredibly, incredibly productive for me, that allows me to really be effective on on what I'm doing, and allows me to really get a lot more done during my day. But I admitted that I that is basically a conscious decision to push towards a lie on a schedule more than what the chrono type is. You know, I been waking up at four in the morning for a really long time I'm it is still a struggle, it is a conscious decision I need to make every day.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:05 That's so unique and different than my own because as I said in the last episode, I was surprised to find out and relieved to find out that I was a dolphin in the in the Michael Bruce sleep Connor type categories. And so here I am living my life like a lion. When in reality, I was down a dolphin I mean, every way that I could look at the dolphin, Chrono type sleep Connor type, I recognize myself in it a little different than a horoscope where you can find yourself in a horoscope. In my particular case, I did the I did the temperature test, you know I did. I've looked at it from every angle. And it's true I probably Emma Emma dolphin. And it just defies. Or at least it explains why I've had such a difficult time with Sleep my entire life. Remarkably, as I said in the last episode, it's been a relief to not have to feel like oh, there's, I'm doing something wrong with regard to sleep. It's just that sleep is different for me. So that was very, that was very cathartic. That was very, you know, and therapeutic. So that was a good part in terms of your question art in terms of how I'm operating in what I believe, as close to what I can do as a dolphin. So for as a recap for folks, dolphins, I'm actually reading here off of the bulletproof blog here because it has a good description of it for everybody. But it says dolphins may or may not may or may not have a regular sleep routine, their light sleepers and wake up frequently throughout the night. And often don't sleep enough, dolphins struggle to fall asleep. And they ruminate over the days failures. It says dolphins extreme intelligence tendency toward perfectionism probably explain why they spend so much time chewing over the day, they do their best work from mid morning through early afternoon. And that is other than struggling to fall asleep, which is not an every night affair for me. But it does on occasion, the everything else about the description and the book is to the tee. And that's a that's just a unique component of my life that I really, you know, I'd given quite a bit of thought to but until the power of when I hadn't seen a lot of material that wasn't in the category of some kind of sleep disorder, as opposed to this is just the way you are. And so for anybody who does take the test and is also a dolphin, you probably sense the same kind of relief I did, which is that there's not something wrong with you, that there is just really a different way of experiencing sleep, that not everybody, not everybody feels it's just a very different experience. I'm just trying to do as many things that Dr. Bruce talks about in the book to align myself with the social aspects of the other people in my life. You know, so a lot of people don't, in the power of when Dr. Bruce really goes into the perspective that we're either trying to be in synchrony with our bio time and, or with the social world. In my case, I'm trying to align contrary to the dolphin to be with the more social aspects of my life, you know, that is home life, work life, those kinds of things....

Every day, we wake up, we go about our day, and then we go to bed. In that span of one Earth rotation, we hope to and frequently achieve our basic needs. And, many of us want to do more. This where an understanding of chronotypes and how it impacts your productivity can help! Most people know about night owls, and maybe about morning larks (or, “early birds”) and hummingbirds. But, in this cast, we discuss two books that talk about chronotypes and optimal daily productivity in some unique ways.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/054 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 | Chronotypes and Optimal Productivity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Chronotypes and Optimal Productivity

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

The Power of When by Michael Breus, PhD

Bear, Lion, Wolf, and DolphinRelationships, Fitness, Health, Sleep, Eat and Drink, Work, Creativity, Money, and FunThe Power of When Quiz (to determine your chronotype)

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Dan Pink

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink

How to determine your chronotype via core body temperature:

“You want to have a fairly accurate temperature reading. A lot of the ear digital thermometers are ones that are quite helpful. What you’ll start to see, again you’ll start to see these differences in core body temperature rising and falling. With my lions, their core body temperature has a tendency to rise one to two, sometimes two and a half hours earlier than my normal folks, my bears. If you wanted to, right when you wake up in the morning, you could take your core body temperature, and then right after maybe 90 minutes take it again and then about 90 minutes before bed and then right as you’re going to bed. What you’ll slowly start to discover is that your core body temperature changes at very different points in the daytime and the earlier in the day that your core body temperature makes these changes, the earlier your chronotype is.” (Source)

The Temperature Test (from The Power of When by Dr. Michael Breus)

Ultradian rhythm

Being a Morning Person Isn’t the Key to Productivity. This Is

Podcast episode: Lions, Dolphins and Bears, Oh My! With Michael Breus – #344

ProdPod: Episode 69–Day Reset

Coffee nap

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 0:26I'm Francis Wade.

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

Francis Wade 0:25

Francis Wade,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26 So welcome, gentlemen to the show. Today, we're going to be talking about Chronotypes, Chronotyping, and the construct of ideal daily schedules for optimal productivity. And what I'd like us to do is to define Chronotypes for our audience. And we're going to be talking about Chronotypes and ideal daily schedules through the lens of actually two books. The books are the power of win by Michael Bruce. He's a PhD sleep psychologist, and Dan pink, many of you know that Dan pink from his other books, but he recently came out with a book called when the scientific secrets of perfect timing. And I feel like the two books really blend well together, they both talk about common typing, and they're talking about how to set up ideal schedules for for having a productive life. And I think they work well together. And you gentlemen can tell me if I'm, if I'm wrong. But let's let's get into first, the construct of a chronic type. Can anybody describe for our audience? What is a chronic type? What What does it What does the concept of a Chronotype mean?

Francis Wade 1:38

I think of a crowd tap as a preference for doing certain activities at certain times. And the way the I believe the book has it structured is it focuses on when you're at your sort of most alert, your most able, when your thoughts are flowing freely, freely when you can produce your best work. And different people have different preferences or contacts for the specter when they can do their best work. So for example, I'm am so obviously a morning person, it's it's painful to anyone who ever watches me who happens to be an evening person. Because it, it's almost as if I turn off, I literally turn off at about eight o'clock, and I become totally useless. Maybe seven. Definitely, not the best family. For me, best time for me is the early morning, which that's about five o'clock, and goes terrible. 1011 sort of degrades during the day, and then after that coffee at about one o'clock so they can sort of last and still be productive. But it's all a matter of sort of managing myself. Around my time. The Best Times for me, where do I miss work? I think knowledge of a corner type knowledge of one's quantum type leads a person to better manage his or her own internal state.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:05 And I would only add to that to kind of clarify for folks that you use the word preference. And I think that it's important to understand that our Chronotypes are ours are set biologically, we lean into these Chronotypes, the research has unfolded for us to give us a picture that most of this is based on our sleep. And when we sleep. And therefore what happens in the time opposing that sleep. Some of the famous Chrono biologists that people who've studied the rhythms of our, our days, right, so Kronos, you know, covering the rotation of the sun, and of that is the rotation of the earth. Each time the Earth rotates, we have a day, right. And so our whole construct of understanding this is based on mostly the circadian rhythm, but to some extent, the old trading rhythm. And so the difference between that is that the circadian rhythm is our rhythm throughout the day of our metabolism. So our metabolism, increases in the morning, has a bit of a dip, and then increases again, mid afternoon, usually, and then finally starts to subside as we make our way toward sleeping hours. And our old trading rhythm is actually a cyclical 90 minute, up 90 minute down energy pattern that falls along the metabolic or the circadian rhythm pathway. And so keep that in mind that this is there's a lot of this that is just biologically set. And it's something that was interesting to me. And I want to get your thoughts on this gentleman, which is in the power of when Dr. Bruce brings up a new perspective on chronic types. So the the customary Chronotypes that were developed by German quantum biologists basically had the morning Lark and the night owl, as you talked about, Francis, you are a morning Lark. And if I understand things, aren't you are as well, very much. So yeah. So in that vein, we have, we have the morning Lark, and we have the night owl. And then those are actually more unique than the vast majority of people 60 to 80% of people are hummingbirds, as they call them, neither morning large nor night owls. And, and so Dr. Bruce thought, well, in his sleep psychology practice, he wasn't seeing that he was actually studying insomniacs, and people with severe sleep issues. And so he got interested in figuring out, well, does this really make sense. And he came up with a new paradigm, which has four different distinct personality slash Chronotypes. So these aren't really purely Chronotypes, these are actually a lot of personality plus Chronotypes. And that immediately made me kind of suspicious to the whole construct. But ultimately, when I looked at the book as a whole, I really found there to be a really strong argument for it. And so he has these four pieces, the bear, the lion, the wolf, and the dolphin. And he chose to use mammals in his sleep paradigm has his chronic typing paradigm, which I think is appropriate, since humans are mammals. And, and so he goes on to talk about bears being traditionally what we would consider the every person hummingbirds, people who are neither morning larks, no night owls. Then he talks about lions, the traditional morning, Lark, Wolf, which is traditionally the night owl. And now this new, other Chronotype that he's called dolphin. And these are the folks who traditionally have sleep issues. And and this is near and dear to my heart, because upon taking the power of one quiz, which you can take on his website, I'll put a link to in the show notes. But if you go and take the quiz on on his website, you can figure out which of these Chronotypes you are, it's actually another test in the book that he talks about where you can actually take your temperature throughout the evening, starting, I think it's 7pm. It's every hour, you take your temperature, I'll have to look it up in the book, I'll put it in the show notes. But you know,...

Do you see the world in a half-glass-full or half-glass-empty perspective? And, pertinent to us, how does optimism versus pessimism affect your personal productivity? That’s the topic we tackle on this week’s episode of ProductivityCast.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/053 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 | Optimism versus Pessimism for Productivity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Optimism versus Pessimism for Productivity

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

Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?

Planning Fallacy

Use PERT technique for more accurate estimates

World War Z (IMDb)

The Productivity Paradox: Pessimism vs. Optimism

The Positive Power of Negative Thinking by Julie Norem, PhD

The Positive Power of Negative Thinking (article by Adam Grant, PhD)

The Surprising Upside of Pessimism (And How To Use It For a Psychological Edge)

Six Thinking Hats (Wikipedia)

Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono, MD, PhD

Transcript | Optimism versus Pessimism for 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 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 I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26 Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to another action packed episode. Today we are going to be talking about an interesting psychological construct, which is optimism versus pessimism as the two constructs. And the idea here is for us to talk about optimism and pessimism as it relates to our own personal productivity. When we talk about optimism and pessimism, I think it's good to understand the definition of that. And so that's what we'll do out the gate will define optimism and pessimism. And kind of in the context of personal productivity to some great extent, will each tell whether or not we're optimists or pessimists, generally or otherwise. And and then we'll in our third segment, talk about how we actually use our own optimism or pessimism, our outlook on on the world to affect greater productivity or how we overcome it. If we are, our productivity is lessened by the impact of our outlook. So let's get started. optimism and pessimism. optimism, pessimism can really be defined very simply as optimism as a general outlook on things, having possibilities having opportunities, you see the see the world with the glass half full, as opposed to the glass half empty, and more of a personal productivity perspective. I see it more as the fact that in in a moment, we define risk differently as optimists than we do as pessimists, right, we see the the opportunity of overcoming a risk, more likely than not overcoming that risk. And I think that can be actually a very positive thing, right? Studies show that optimists tend to be more successful, happier in relationships, they tend to have less depression. And so just generally healthier people than pessimists. But there are some good positive benefits to pessimism. pessimism, on the other hand, is an outlook on the flip side, which is that you see the glass half empty, most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time. And that means that you see the risk, the obstacle, the challenge, as being greater than the opportunities available to you. So we as pessimists, then have to decide how do we set Low, low expectations for ourselves while still being productive. And when bad outcomes do come not allowing them to de motive beta, and to cloud our judgment in terms of perspective outcomes in the future, or that is just perspective outcomes?

Art Gelwicks 3:08

When I think about optimism, pessimism things to me, they're very much extremes for personalities, they create this image, either the optimist of sunshine and rainbows and rose colored glasses, the pessimistic is he or from Winnie the Pooh. And somewhere in the middle is where everybody seems to follow. We were talking about this a little bit before the show. And I think if I had to define myself, I would say I am probably more of a procedural optimist. What the heck does that mean? I start off as a pragmatist, wanting to know, okay, what's the situation glasses and half full or half empty? I just want to know what's in it first, then I become a pessimist. Well, what's the worst thing that can happen right now? plan for those worse things? And know that because I understand the situation because I plan for the worst case, I think, a very good chance of things working out for the best, therefore winding up as an optimist. Yeah, it's a really long circuitous route to get to the end. But that pretty much defines the way my brain mechanic works on this.

Augusto Pinaud 4:13

I tend to be more on the optimistic side, to be honest, I, I wish to be more in the center, as are defined, but I tend to look at things from that optimistic lens, that I think, to an extent is what sometimes allow me to do some of the things I do because without that hope on that positive and they may not be some of them even possible. So understanding that and I agree that optimism and pessimism goes on that extreme or are both extremes.

Francis Wade 4:48

They started out more as an optimist, but have become more pessimistic over time. So I'm wondering if, if what happens is that we we start off at one of the extremes in our younger years, and then over time with experience will become more pessimistic. So this sorry, more pragmatic. So we become more realistic, just because we have more data to work with. I still think I remain pretty optimistic. But I'm better estimate or risk. So I'm not sure where that puts me

Art Gelwicks 5:22

that risk estimation pieces of big part of this too. I think you're right, it does come with experience, as if you are perpetually optimistic, and you wind up getting burned, which always happens not always happens, but it does happen to everybody. You start to incorporate that into your analytical processes and start to say, Okay, this is what could happen. I'm going to have to backtrack a little bit and see, what can I adjust for this to work out to the best positive reaction? I think

Francis Wade 5:52

there's a practical also example that I I use in my work, which is our own time estimation. And the plan fallacy, which for our listeners, has to do with the the tendency for people to underestimate how long a task will take. So it's a psychological effect, where we think it's going to take FAR shorter than the task actually does. And I've been sort of working on that for a bit in sort of my work and looking at how do people become better estimate dissolve time durations, which is essentially, if you're a someone, for example, in project management, or if you're someone who is just extremely busy, estimating your time becomes a very, very critical tool.

Art Gelwicks 6:40

See, this is also one of those things that can really derail, trying to get some things accomplished. If you're overly optimistic, you're right, your estimates are going to be off, you're going to miss things in the analysis that you have to do if it's a project or plan. If you're always really pessimistic, you can wind up in analysis, paralysis in a heartbeat. Because you get can't get past the things that seem to become the impossible roadblocks. You've got to have a mental methodology to be able to get you through those different stages. As you start to plan out whether it's personal activities, or professional activities, or, or really anything. I mean, if you focus on one of those two extremes too much, you're never going to get a realistic perspective, and you're never going to be able to put things in place to be able to execute. Like, I think it was, Franklin said all things in moderation. Well, this qualifies, especially when you're trying to get work accomplished.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:47

And in response to Francis, you know, the the idea of time estimation, it's been well documented that the younger you are the more impulsivity, and so therefore, the more likely you are are to think a minute lasts less than an actual minute. And that the older you get, then the more likely you are to be more accurate about time registration. So taking into account that I think the answer to the question is, is that for those of us who are over the age of 24, and probably under the age of 65, in that in that timeframe, when we're, you know, in our in our peak mental health, and I probably mean that that upper age limit is probably increasing as our longevity and our lifespan increases. But the point is, is that we, during that timeframe, it's practice....

Are you struggling with controlling interruptions that are hampering your productivity? This week, the ProductivityCast team looks at the issues surrounding interruptions and how we can do our best to mitigate and manage them when they happen.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/052 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

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Controlling Interruptions

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

None this episode.

Raw Text Transcript | Controlling Interruptions

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 0:25 Welcome to the show everybody. And we are going to today be talking about interruptions, and really about controlling interruptions. So what we thought we would do today is we would talk about the various types of interruptions that we all experience Francis was actually talking about before we started recording, that is those things that are external to us, not necessarily self interruptions, which we could call and define as, say, distractions. But more importantly, the things that are external things that we don't necessarily always have control over. And they interrupt our productive flow. And we need to be able to get back to being productive. And that's what we'll spend the second half of the show talking about, which is how do we how do we see ourselves back on to our productive pads for the day, when we are interrupted? What are the what are the major interruptions that happen throughout their work weeks,

Francis Wade 1:20

I'd say unexpected emergencies, things that I don't expect to happen.

Unplanned, actually, I'm dealing with one right now, I have my brakes on my car fixed, and it looks as if they didn't fix it properly. So it's feeling a little spongy. So I have to take, it's going to take I don't know, three hours, although today that I didn't plan on having the plan to work during those other be productive, longer waiting around at the shop to get the brakes looked at. So emergencies. And then there are there are people who don't realize that I'm in a particular kind of focus on. And they might just interrupt just, you know, innocently, but the effect is the same Nonetheless, the my productivity dips, and my goals don't get accomplished for the day.

Augusto Pinaud 2:13

You know, and I will add to what Francis just said, a little distinction between those emergencies, because they are what I will call the real emergencies. Okay, the ones that you there is there is no, you can control they happen. Okay, and those are one kind of a customer calling. Fine, you can control those. And the other ones that are Hello, the worst are the ones that are the lack of planning, okay, it's one now the other person emergency and they are trying to come to you to interrupt you and your own flow to make that also your emergency. Okay.

And they're different than you know that they're different from the customer. But they are at the end of the day interruptions, you know, they there is

there are problematic and for some people will there are kids in for interruptions. You know, I work out of work, and I work at home, and I work in many places. And well, sometimes you are with the kids, and it's a matter of trying to kids, you know, Mike, my kids know to interrupt if there is an important, but let's clarify that's important on their world, not our mind. So you need that's something that you need consistently tweak on work with them. So that way they understand really what the word importance, important means. So that way they interrupt, interrupt less or interrupt one is more relevant.

Art Gelwicks 3:46

Yeah, I'll go with the easy list. And the low hanging fruit ones, the the emails that you get the three off track the notifications that show up on your chosen mobile device, I the instant messages that up in the corner of your screen indicating something that you need to do the phone calls that come in, and the the all time favorite the drive by or shoulder touch, somebody walks up to you and says, Hey, I need you to do something, all those interruptions will throw you off track

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:14

all around us out with my my worst interruptions that happened to me, which are technology failures, or they may be failures, but they're just something's not working right now. And so therefore I have to divert my attention to fix that technology issue. And that could very well be the pen ran out of ink to some, you know, software is now having some kind of bug or glitch. And it's not working the way that it should, which should be a productivity enabler, and now it's becoming a productivity inhibitor. And so having to divert deal with that equipment failure, it, you know, derails me and not particularly a bad one, which is that when clients call that is not a common occurrence. For me, most of my client communications happened via email. And so we're calling clients when necessary, but we primarily communicate by email with our clients, or through our client portal. So the client call is is a clear interruption, a good interruption, you know, I'd love to hear from my clients. But the reality is, is that that is that is it's it's so uncommon today. That it's it's it's it's an adjustment that I have to make from concentrating on what I was doing on screen, and then having to you know, field a phone call, either through a call desk or whatever. So it's a it's it's definitely an interruption in my world. And again, like I said, it's not a bad interruption, it just happens to be an interruption. And so great. So I, I've got a list here now of emergency and non emergency interruptions from Francis, as well as people not realizing you're focusing on a project. That's what I heard from Francis from a gusto. I heard children. And,

and then, art from you, I heard email, instant messages or any kind of chat clients, mobile notifications, phone calls, and then coffee clutching, you know, people walking up to you and wanting to have a chit chat. And then I had tech issues and client calls. So that fits into your phone calls issue. So we can kind of ignore that one. Because phone calls or phone calls. Let's try to deal with these kind of in that order, then and start off with how do you deal with emergency versus non emergency interruptions? And, and more importantly, when they happen? How do you how do you prepare yourself to get back on track with regard to let's let's start with emergency interruptions? Say the building fire alarm goes off? Or the brakes on your car are not quite working? Well, which you know, that's important. So

do you have a rubric in place for being able to deal with emergency interruptions?

Francis Wade 6:59

I wish I said I could say that I have some fancy, fancy triage method, I sort of do what agosto does, which is to prepare people around me for for moments when I need to be non not interrupted. So I think it's

if I think of it, I think I plan my day based on when I want when I can be interrupted. And when I can't. So I stopped from my needs first, I guess. And then if I'm in a non interrupted zone, I try to turn things off, turn off all the reminders on my phone, I might even turn off the phone. I don't get that many calls. But But I could do it. That let me turn off reminders on the screen pop ups, anything that might stop me, I closed on Windows, and set my stop me from staying in the flow state or doing deep work.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:53

And just so for just so for listeners, Francis, this isn't a non emergency situation.

So the fire alarm is not going off. This is just generally right. Okay, good.

Francis Wade 8:03

But when I still have the same, can I start with me first, that's that was my schedule first. So my intention is still pure at that point.

And when I'm in the flow state, or when I need to be not interrupted, then it's church, then it's depending on the emergency that's happening in the moment. And I tried to punt anything, that's not even the brakes. For example, for example, my wife had told me that the brakes weren't working, and she had just come back in, and she's safe, and I'm safe. That's not an emergency in the sense that I need to bought myself out of the flow state in order to deal with it, I can deal with it when I'm finished. It's not worthy of breaking my concentration. So but but there are decisions that have to be made, when I'm in that zone, I think all of my sort of

...

In this week's episode, the ProductivityCast team discusses managing digital notebooks. With so much data flowing through your systems, taking and keeping track of our notes and reference information in our software of choice is critical to our personal productivity. How do you manage your digital notebooks?

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/051 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

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | Managing Digital Notebooks

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

Rocketbook Everlast notebooks

Evernote

Simplenote

Goodnotes

Google Keep

Google Chromebook

What are some good names for Evernote notebooks?

Bagua

Steven Covey’s four life areas (see Habit 7)

Raw Text Transcript | Managing Digital Notebooks

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. Good morning.

Art Gelwicks 0:27

And I'm Art Gelwicks. Good morning.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:30

So welcome to the show, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners. So today what we're going to be doing on the cast is talking about managing digital notebooks. That seems to be a pain point for a lot of folks. And so we thought we would spend a little bit of time today in this episode talking about how people manage notebooks. And so we all actually come at this from very different perspectives, I want us each to kind of talk about our own ways in which we manage notebooks, and how that either helps or hurts us in our own productivity systems. And maybe some of the challenges that we do face as we as we move along in it. Let's start off with how each of us actually manage notebooks, what types of notebooks do we use, specifically in the digital world, but we had an episode on bullet journaling. And we talked about the physical notebook world. And so we know that in some way, shape or form, those are always going to blend into one another. So let's talk a little bit more about our our digital notebooks today.

Augusto Pinaud 1:32

Very cool girl.

One is how you organize them How'd you find the information, you know, when you have to pay for one, you have this for good or for bad, you know, you can move forward, you may stay information but but you carry on. Remember,

have the the reminder in front of you that you have this thing to think Digital Lifestyle and fantasies you can now put on your ridiculous women are information for the same amount of way. The problem is how you are going to find that information as much as search capability is amazing. These days, it is still a problem of remember, what is the information you put it there? Or what is the information. Dude, another one to lose out a bad note. That said there is

better tools or tools that work better for certain people than others. And now the question comes on, on what you want to do now for, for me in particular, the notebook for to work. I, for years, I made the handwriting even that my my handwriting is awful, I missed the ability to hand write on the screen. But I did not want it to carry all the digital stuff that I carry with me every day plus, carrying a couple of notes. Now that

now that Apple had a pro with the pencil, then it gives me the advantage that I can do good handwriting notes. Okay, even carry a couple of different notebooks for a couple of different purpose. But take good notes in the process and having a good place where I can find it.

Art Gelwicks 3:22

It's funny because it is probably one of the biggest problems I personally run into. Everybody I talked to run into one note, which is my tool of choice for digital notes is fantastic at creating multiple notebooks. The heck they have is that every time you create a notebook, it's a separate file. So you you can wind up with just a plethora of different files. Now, there's a lot of advantages to that. But there's also some disadvantages to and trying to keep all that stuff organized, can be really problematic. You wind up with notebooks all over the place, you wind up with him in one drive in one note online, you're on your local hard drives, and

it becomes a matter of given take a lot out of the normal reaction is okay, fine, I'll just put everything in 111 note notebook, Say that three times fast.

If you do that, you've introduced a whole new set of problems.

So there isn't really a good solution for it. Now let's throw it on top of it. My other favorite thing, which is my paper journals, because I love writing paper, you capture information, you're able to review it. But it's one of the reasons why people have gone to digital Digital's easier to recut recall, easier to search, it's lighter, for lack of a better term in many cases. And working together a concept like bullet journaling in to this mix really becomes a struggle for a lot of people because they're like, well, I want to do it on paper. But I want the benefit fits of digital, how do I get to that happy medium. So they try to do things like recreate a digital bullet

journal in something like one note, which is never a perfect fit, it's doable, but it's not a perfect fit. And I think that's the hang up of all of this is there is no perfect answer to this, there's a it becomes a work process that you have to have, there's no flip a switch, all the notes will work just fine if you follow this structure, and I have yet to find a tool that does not have that problem. If it's handling digital note taking.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:34

I can see your point and and as you know, I'm an Evernote certified consultant and i and i love Evernote. So you know I'm a I'm a big fan of the the the way in which Evernote manages information. And you know, I think of Evernote more as a knowledge management tool. But in so many ways, it is the note taking software of choice for myself whenever I go into into into meetings, except for the fact that having a company pewter in a meeting while talking to clients is still somewhat of a barrier for me, I don't I don't necessarily know if clients don't particularly like it, but I don't like it. I don't like having a computer between us. Whereas having a physical notebook that I could take notes into general generally, is something that I feel more comfortable with. So I've actually gone to using a notebook called the everlasting notebook made by the rocket book team. And now they have all kinds of different notebooks. But this every last series of notebooks comes in different sizes. And they allow me to take handwritten notes, and then push those notes into the Evernote platform as as handwritten notes, but they are then OCR by Evernote so that I can search them. And this is actually really helped synthesize my digital system. And and so let me let me take a step back, though and cover a little bit of how I perceive Hello view the importance of being able to manage data in notebooks. Right. So, so from a note taking perspective, we have the capturing process into a notebook, we have then the management of that data within notebooks. And then we have the ability to filter and search, you know, surface the information, hopefully more quickly than slowly when we're trying to find that information that we want. And so whether you use notebooks in the classical sense or tags to be able to filter, organize, and also create workflows.

Managing that that information? Well, it's actually really important for the long term, I know that search is great. I know that the ability, you know, the search functionality, and in many digital tools today is great. But that that can't be the the the the extent of your organizing, of notebooks, because once it gets large enough, then your your rate of being able to surface the information you want quickly, easily and accurately. diminishes, diminishes to a point of making you less productive, not just not just be frustrating. But then you come into this perspective of the same problem we have with paper filing, which is that you can spend an exorbitant amount of time looking for paper things. Do you do you agree or disagree?

We'll start with you. Augusto. Do you agree or disagree?

Can you can you not talk right now?

Art Gelwicks 8:44

He's muted right now.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:45

He's, he's muted. He can hear me.

Unknown Speaker 8:50

Oh, okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. So he wants to he wants to Oh, okay. All right. Okay, cool. So um, yeah, so art, go for it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 9:00

disagree? What? What's your What are your thoughts?

Art Gelwicks 9:03

I wish it were that easy. I wish it were so easy to say, Yeah, I agree with it completely. Or no,...

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

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/050 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 discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes

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

Workflowy

OmniFocus 3

OmniFocus for Web (from OmniGroup)

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

Skedpal

Remember the Milk

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

Todoist

Google Keep

Trello

OneNote

Evernote

ActivTrak

Raw Text Transcript

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

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

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

Art Gelwicks 1:08

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:40

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

Art Gelwicks 2:45

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:20

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

Art Gelwicks 4:04

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

Francis Wade 4:11

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

Art Gelwicks 4:17

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

Francis Wade 5:12

Cool, thanks.

Augusto Pinaud 5:13

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

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

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:23

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

Augusto Pinaud 7:31

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

In this episode of ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, we have the pleasure of bringing you our very first interview! They won’t be often, but sprinkled in, we think that hearing outside voices of productivity experts would be a valued addition to the personal productivity conversations we have. This week, we’re delighted we got to sit down with Taylor Jacobson, founder and CEO of Focusmate, a virtual coworking platform for personal productivity enthusiasts like you.

Listen in our conversation with Taylor about his story, what virtual coworking with Focusmate does for your productivity, and what the future holds for this unique productivity tool and virtual coworking community rolled into one.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://productivitycast.net/049 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 discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Virtual Coworking with Focusmate

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Taylor Jacobson, Focusmate

Taylor Jacobson is the founder of Focusmate, a behavioral technology company helping remote workers improve their productivity. He's a trained executive coach with clients like Yale, Cornell, and Wharton, a wannabe adventurer, and a recovering pizza addict-turned-holistic health aspirant. His work has been featured in CNN, GQ, The Huffington Post, Men's Health, and more.

Show Notes | Virtual Coworking with Focusmate

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

Four Tendencies Quiz

The Four Tendencies - Productivity Book Group

Group versus individual performance on tasks requiring ideational proficiency (brainstorming): A review

Estimating the Difference Between Group Versus Individual Performance on Problem-Solving Tasks

7 Studies That Prove People Work Better in Teams

Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta‐analysis of Effects and Processes

Republic.co

Accredited investor (IRS)

B Corp

Focusmate

Raw Text Transcript | Virtual Coworking with Focusmate

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 hosts Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 Welcome everybody to productivity cast the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud 0:23 And I'm Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25 And we are back with an episode where we are doing something we have not done before here on productivity cast, we have not done an interview, we've not actually had a guest on the show outside of our normal contributors, Francis Wade, and our gal wicks. And so today on the show, we are going to be talking about virtual coworking for being more productive. And we thought, Well, why don't we have somebody on the show who can actually cover this topic in and with expertise. And so today we are really excited to have on the show, Taylor Jacobson, he is the founder of focus mate. It's a behavioral technology company, helping remote workers improve their productivity. He's a trained executive coach with clients like Yale, Cornell and the Wharton School of Business at Penn. He's a want to be adventure and then a recovering pizza attic turned Holistic Health aspirant. So his work has been featured in CNN, GQ, the Huffington Post, Men's Health and more. Taylor, welcome to productivity cast. Thanks for having me.

Unknown 1:25

Yeah. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:26

tell us a little bit about yourself beyond the bio that I read, what is something about you that people don't typically know about you that is of interest that are of interest to you, that you would love people to know,

Taylor Jacobson, Focusmate 1:38

I've really important part of my story, you could say I've been a high performer for my whole life. And that certainly, as a kid, a lot of my identity and my ego rested on this idea of being a high performer and having really high potential and one of my jobs a long time ago, something interesting happened, which is that I started working remotely for the first time, I really went from being a top performer to overnight, deeply struggling with productivity to the point where many days, you know, I wouldn't get anything done before noon, it would often feel like months could go by without really accomplishing anything. So since you gave me the nice, shiny, sexy bio, to kick it off, all complement that with like, you know, the the, the other side of the story, which is, I had this experience, and it was fairly humiliating, actually, as somebody who like really related to themselves and felt good about themselves, because of being a high performer. I immediately upon starting to work from home, really struggled probably six months after that wound up having a conversation with my boss, where she said, you know, she, she didn't fire me graciously, but she said, you know, you can't work for me anymore. And I wound up deciding to leave that company, maybe to save face, you know, it was, it wasn't a super conscious process, because I really just kind of went into a tailspin. And although superficially I, I started a new startup, at that point in time, something that actually went quite well, but sort of beneath the surface, I was, I was really struggling with shame and depression and, and really confronted by this, this new artifact of, you know, not being a high performer and what to do with that. So it's actually a really important part of my, my story. And I don't know if if everyone knows this, this part of my story, but it really deepened my interest in learning about not just productivity, but behavior change and spiritual growth, and just how do we get out of our own way and, and like be the people that we want to be.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:42

It's remarkable how these life events that could be perceived as negative can birth really positive things. And the opposite can kind of happened. It's very interesting to meet to hear when people have strong emotional downswings from things and what causes them, because they could be caused by good and ill and and so yeah, thank you for sharing that and and letting folks know about that that story. Because it's, it's important for us all to know that the reality of life, you know, that these things happen.

Taylor Jacobson, Focusmate 4:13

Absolutely. And sometimes those become like the sort of the wellspring of some sense of purpose or drive that that certainly is still fuel for my motor today.

Augusto Pinaud 4:24

So as I was hearing, Ray mentioned your bio, and he said, a bit chaotic us of pizza attic or for I don't know, if I still kind of have their former picks it because I still have terribly weakness, I'm able to identify. But I'm not sure if I can label myself as an ex addict on that. But it is funny because when, when I went home, when I went to work on my home office before God, or prior to that I was traveling the world, okay, I was traveling over to hundred and 50,000 miles a year. So I didn't have an office person. Okay, but my experience was really similar to what you're describing, okay, my house has never been so clean. And so organized. work was not happening. So I nice interesting how when I was looking at on what the things that you come up, you know, some of the things that I saw myself trying to fix that, obviously you're doing it was focused me on how much clever and technological way that what I did, but it is interesting how people think I know, someday if I work from home, if you will be great, and how challenging is to lose that identity to lose that routine, to understand that you need to set boundaries, that you may not have the skills to set what that change happen.

Taylor Jacobson, Focusmate 5:49

I think that I am best suited to give my gifts to the world when I have the autonomy and the flexibility. And I can work from home and, and all these things. And I believe there are many millions of other people who are like that, who just It doesn't make sense somehow for the way your brain works. And your body works in the rhythm of your life and your kids and your dogs and whatever to commute in the morning. But it does present a new set of challenges that I think, you know, a lot of people are grappling with now. And you know, as as a byproduct, I guess some of us like you wind up with really clean apartments and absolutely no work getting done.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:28

So So take us from the point of starting the new business, I'm presuming This wasn't focused mate. But that first business? And what led you to to starting focus mate then and and what is focused made? You know what, how do you describe it in in its most practical terms, I read it in your bio as a behavioral technology company for remote workers. What is focus made in its most practical terms of what led you to really starting that company after having had what I hear is a successful other entrepreneurial venture.

Taylor Jacobson, Focusmate 7:01

In simplest terms,...

Today, so much of our lives are lived in the ever-flowing river of data that we produce, consume and discard. But, what if you lose that data? What if your data gets compromised by some bad actor on the Internet? Do you have a plan in place to backup that data? That’s the topic of today’s cast -- creating a data backup storage system.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://productivitycast.net/048 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 discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | Creating a Backup Storage System

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

Google Drive

iCloud

OneDrive

Evernote

OneNote

Dropbox

pCloud

iDrive

Google Docs

Google Backup and Sync

Time Machine

Duplicati

Phones and tablets (Android and iOS) - backed up using https://www.sync-droid.com.

Google Drive gets downloaded and converted to native MSFT files (using https://www.driveexport.com/) and then saved to an external HDD which is then backed up using Duplicati to the cloud; and for G Suite users, enable Google Vault and also see:

https://spinbackup.com/

https://spanning.com/products/google-apps-backup/  

Raw Text Transcript | Creating a Backup Storage System

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 are your hosts, 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 productivity.

I'm Ray Sidney-Smith and I'm joined here with

Unknown 0:28

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:29

So much of our lives are lived in the ever flowing river of data that we produce, consume and discard. But what if you lose that data? What if your data gets compromised by some bad actor on the internet? It happens? Do you have a plan in place to backup that data. And that's the topic of today's cast. Francis originally generated this topic idea. So I'm going to turn it over to you, Francis to talk a little bit about the background that led you to come up with this topic in the first place.

Francis Wade 0:55

Let me let me go back in time a little bit when I started leading time management programs about 10 years ago, one of the skills that defined was something called storing. And it was really all about people. And what's happened over time is that it's of course changed. Because who uses paper anymore? Right? Most of us are using digital information. And the challenge is that many people have not made that transition from storing stuff on paper to storing stuff digitally. So they don't have the skills of having great backups. So what me battery backup is when a disaster occurs, you are completely protected. So tsunami or a hurricane hits, and there goes your laptop, and your phone and and all of your this gets and hard drive external hard drives? And what do you have to store your contacts, your appointments, all the critical information that you needed all your passwords? Where is all that information? And how can you keep it stored on over regular basis so that you're completely protected no matter what happens? And recently, I had a of course, a catastrophe. Yeah, I learned the hard way that my

my system that I thought was perfect had a flaw because it was not backing up a particular kind of file, which was that you know, the provided and tell me this information. I found that out after the fact, last a couple days work complained. But I realized that I didn't have a great system in place. Not as good as I thought I did. In particular, what bothered me was at things like pictures of my great great, great grandparents. So I have some pictures like that. I have the paper picture. And I have the digital picture. But I still haven't solved the problem of where you store either kind of picture, where do I store a long term legacy file, so that I can win one day? So it till I don't have great grandkids? But if I had great grandkids, if I think we're going to have them? Well, how would I show it hold? I keep it for them? How do I keep legacy files so that they last forever? What's the safe place is obviously not my hard drive or my smartphone. But where is it? So that's what sort of got the thought going.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:14

Thanks for the background. That's great. So I wanted to start us off with discussing perhaps the importance of having backups, Francis, you point out several of them, primarily the the idea of catastrophe that destroys a computer or all of your computers. I heard a couple of weeks ago, house exploded, probably from propane, or whatever the gas was that was being used in the house filled up, and the house literally exploded and killed the two the two residents. And that's just insane to think that that can happen in today's day and age. But it does hurricanes happen. A colleague of mine had all of his businesses, computer servers swallowed up by an earthquake. And so we all experience catastrophe on on occasion, my office had a building fire, actually, quite recently, to name a few, you know, catastrophes that that have happened to, you know, in my own world, and without those backups, really, that would have been potentially the end of the business, because so much of what a businesses is its data. And so do you do any of you have any thoughts in terms of the any thoughts that you wanted to share with listeners about the importance of of backup data, and then we can kind of go into how we each set up our systems or would would ideally set up a system,

Augusto Pinaud 4:41

I have one word for oldest, and the word is redundant. I mean, it doesn't matter where they are, but you cannot trust on a one place. So you need to have redundancy of those backups, especially the more important content is the most more redundancy you need. In my particular case, I have a service call code 42. It's a company who make it on the software is called crush plan, and that goes to their server and eat aside of that, I also have Dropbox for all the other files. And I also have Evernote so and they tend to be replicated. So if one of the three servers fail, or two of the three servers fail, I will still be okay. I also have a local hard drive at home that do backup. So I'm not going to say is completely fail proof. I'm sure there's ways that hold that can be containing a massive catastrophe that will make that I lose all of that. But in general, I think there is a I have a list chance of this happening to me,

Art Gelwicks 5:56

I run a similar process of one note, one drive Google Drive

Unknown 6:04

local hard drive,

Art Gelwicks 6:05

let's drives

the redundancy that

a goose oh just mentioned is critical to us. If you don't have a way to have things in multiple places, because we all know bad things happen. even beyond just bad things though data corruptions, synchronization, there's, there's a lot of reason why your information can get out of sync.

I count on those multiple systems. But if it's something's really critical, I'll put it on to a flash drive, and throw that flash drive into firebox. Things like tax return information, scans of critical documents, all of those are on a flash drive, that's in a firebox right now. So I've got stuff every place, which creates its own issues. But I should be able to recover whatever I need.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:04

Yeah, there certainly is something to say for understanding the various types of ways data can be destroyed. For example, art is talking about fire damage, obviously, there's an opportunity for water damage, if there's flooding, there's opportunity for if you are using digital data, most data is written through magnetic means meaning that it's imprinted through putting ones and zeros and magnetic code on on these on these, you know drive sometimes. And so the goal for you is to figure out and make sure that the data is stored in a place that is is not going to be magnetized, or have a strong magnetic magnetic field that's going to destroy the data. So you have to really think about these things, high pressure environments, right? You can't put, you know, if you if you decide to to backup to say DVDs, and you you write your data to DVD, and stick that in an environment that has high pressure, and a little bit of heat. And guess what that DVD is going to warp. And that will be the end of that. So long term storage needs to be thought about it needs to be in a climate controlled environment, you know, preferably off the floor, and, and fireproof. So. So yeah, if you're going to do physical data storage, that's, that's important. I personally believe in thorough backups of all of your data. But you have to start defining what you know, quote, unquote, all your data means. And whether you're keeping the data you need, or are in control of it all. Many times, you don't actually hold your data, like your your Gmail, email, if you use that, as a repository for information. Do you really have control over that....

This is episode nine, Reflections on GTD: What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part Two, and therefore the last in our nine-part series on the Getting Things Done (GTD) personal productivity methodology and eponymously-titled book, from the perspective of the ProductivityCast team–as long-term practitioners, critics and observers of GTD.

In this cast, Augusto Pinaud, Francis Wade, Art Gelwicks and I discuss what we wish we knew when we first started or came across Getting Things Done, the book and methodology, as we tried to understand and/or implement it.

This certainly isn't the last time we'll talk about GTD, but we had a great time discussing GTD in this series and hope you enjoyed it, too!

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/047 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 discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part Two

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part Two

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

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

Getting Things Done Virtual Study Group

Zeigarnik effect

GTD Fast audio program

Todoist

Waze (driving navigation app)

Raw Text Transcript | What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part Two

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 0:16

Welcome back everybody to productivity cast the weekly show about all things productivity I'm recently Smith I'm joined here with August to pronounce Francis weight in our galaxy. Welcome to the show gentlemen.

Augusto Pinaud 0:28

Good morning.

Francis Wade 0:29

Thanks Ray.

Art Gelwicks 0:30

Morning. Hey guys, how's everything going,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:32

it's good to have all of us on the show again this week and and we're back at it with a continuation of the conversation we were having last week. And to fill you all in. If you haven't listened to Episode 46, hop on back over there and listen to Episode 46 at productivity cast.net forward slash 046. And you'll be able to hear the first part of our conversation about what we all wish we knew. When we started GTD, some of us are not GTD practitioners now, but we've all been acquainted with the material and have probably attempted to implement it at some level. And these are all things that we wish we had known when we first attempted to go ahead and implement. So I'm going to kick us off here with the first item that I really am thinking about as we continue the conversation from last week. Which is this idea of, of trusting your system. And so David Allen talks about trusting the your system. And and through this concept of trust, you'll be you'll be more comfortable with externalising your tasks and projects. And I'm very curious about what you will also have to say about this. Because when I first thought about that, it was a real game changer. For me. I felt very excited about this idea that if I trusted where I was good to put things, then then I was going to I was going to be able to know where I put things. And what I learned was that trusting your system isn't merely externalising those tasks and projects it really does fundamentally require you to go back to your projects, lists and your task list and work those lists. Right. If you're not maintaining them, then you very quickly erode the system. It's not just trusting your system from the fact that you're trusting yet you're capturing into it, you must remember that you're not just capturing. But you have to also be clarifying. You must also be organizing, you have to also be reviewing and doing the work. If you're not doing each of those stages, then the system can't be trusted. The tools that you're capturing into won't be trusted, because you're not coming back to your your brain basically says, Well, yes, you're putting these things in the system. And they're not getting done. Why should I trust where you're capturing externally, I've got to bring all of that stuff and back into my, into my mind's eye in order to be able to keep keep going. Because you're not, you're not actually getting those things done.

Augusto Pinaud 3:22

I came from a heavy or bro heavy, unbroken Seven Habits from the Highly Effective People. When I discovered GTD and there was a lot of things that were happening at the time. But one of them was that the role and the job and the responsibilities on the personal side has changed so much that they ABC one two tree wasn't caught it anymore on I was kind of drowning dot said one. The things that make my transition harder at the beginning was the fact that I trust

so much my ABC, one two tree system, it was broken. And I was on I understood that. And I understood I need a better thing. But But when I read that concept on the book, I wasn't completely agreement. Because

until you earn that trust, then if you don't have that trust, you are not going to go back and do all the work that is required to maintain that system. And that applies to getting things done

CABI put it into your arm doesn't matter. If you don't trust that that system is complete and functional, you are not going to do the necessary job to maintain it. So it stays functional. And what the sad part is, your system goes from fully update fully functional to broken in really the blink of an eye.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:11

And there's always going to be some level of of information that you retain in your mind, you know that it's not, it's not a complete letting go. It's it's the conscious stuff that tugs at you, that goes away, but there's still an unconscious tug. And and I think that's okay, I don't think there's anything wrong with your brain exercising those those memory muscles, so to speak,

Francis Wade 5:37

I think we've talked about the organic effect for for our listeners who might not remember or didn't catch that episode. It's the subconscious way of remaining, or pinging or conscious mind that there's something it's it's not, it's likely to forget, or likely to not remember, or, or is part of the system that's not trusted. So the idea is simple as that when you complete a task, the task disappears from memory, and your subconscious mind no longer holds on to it. But when a task is left incomplete, it keeps sort of sending the signals to your conscious mind. And if anyone has ever woken up in the middle of the night with justice, you know, in a panic that I forgot to do something, and that I remember to send that email to Mr. Smith that I was supposed to send yesterday at the beat the deadline and, and I think I forgot, and that's all those, the garlic effect. And what it does over time is that it It destroys our peace of mind, because it leads to a feeling of overwhelm, as our subconscious mind goes into overdrive and tries to hold on to all these demands on our time. All these promises and commitments that we've made, the good part is that there's recent research from a couple of guys that you University of Florida, which showed that if you have a trust, essentially, is to put it in the language that we're talking about today, if you put your tasks in a trusted system, then the guy Nick effect goes away. That's that was their big fanning. So essentially, it matches what David Allen was saying, in principle is that his he was right and dead on by saying that as as if you can deploy as many tasks as possible to your trusted system and not use memory, you will be doing yourself a great service and avoiding any sense of overwhelm the problem this is a Google said, which can happen in the flesh of an eye. And this is sort of weird David Allen goes a little too far my man is that if you have a huge influx of tasks, new project new baby just bought, the hose car broke down, all of a sudden, you have a lot of tasks demand is and therefore very little free time to manage them with is that you go back to almost as if you are just starting all over again, because of the guy Nick effect kicks right back in just as if you are a beginner who doesn't even have a task list.

And at that point, you've got to either mitigate if it's a temporary kind of thing, or change your system to match the number of tasks that you're trying to manage. And that's the part that David Allen didn't mention in his book, he just said, Do this part. And this will create a trusted system for you, I think, a lot of work but other people are no seeing and all the work that we're doing

in my shop shows that that's not true in the sort of the end all and be all sense that you've got to change your tactics depending on the number of tasks that you've got to manage. And being flexible. And being aware of this guy, Nick effect is sort of a way to the listen to your subconscious, and then change your tactics accordingly. And that's that's that's the piece that I would add in that he he doesn't m