ProductivityCast

In this week’s episode, the ProductivityCast team continues their conversation about sequencing for greater productivity, this time about ordering projects to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/136 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 Projects Sequencing: Ordering Your Projects to Enhance Productivity from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Projects Sequencing

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Projects Sequencing

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

Microsoft ExcelNotionCodaLifelong learningLifelong learning institutes - Wikipedia  Tom’s Planner

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 0:22 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this action packed episode of productivity cast, I'm just going to call it this is going to be a lot of fun. We're going to talk today about really the other side of sequencing. We talked about task sequencing in the last episode. And in this episode in this cast, I wanted us to talk about projects sequencing, why would we benefit from it? what are maybe some of the pros and cons? What are some of the examples of ways in which we use sequencing in our own productivity systems, and potentially some pitfalls, some things that we see folks around us experiencing in terms of troubles and challenges, and then we'll end with maybe just some Quickstart tips, some tips and tricks for you to be able to get started with projects sequencing, if you're not already doing it? Let's start off with why what is the reason for someone to be able to and want to sequence projects, which are different than tasks? Can you give a compare and contrast there for folks, and then we'll go from there,

Francis Wade 1:32I think we've all been in that situation where we messed up a project so bad, because we thought it would be a short thing, or it would be a minor, you know, minor commitment, only to realize as opposed to two hours, it took 20. And as a result in crossed into an gotten away of other projects. And in retrospect, we look back and said to ourselves, boy, if I just sequenced it differently, if I had just focused on the one, and then decided to do the other at some point in the future. If I just applied a little bit of insight and maybe a little bit conservative, I could have saved myself a lot of heartache. So I think those who are interested in Project sequencing are those who take on larger projects, those who get asked to join lots of projects. But above all, there are people who've been burned by making mistakes by not sequencing projects correctly. I think that I'm sure that's what brings most of us that are called today.

Art Gelwicks 2:37It's one of the reasons why doing retrospectives uncompleted projects is so important, because it's the only way to learn what the sequences should have been that you didn't pick up in the first place. I mean, we assume we can figure those out, because we've done this, but because we've done this provides us the historical data and the insight. That's what those retrospectives provides. So when we start talking about Project sequencing and task sequencing within a project scope, if you're going to do that type of project, again, you need those learnings you need that insight? And if you fail to do it, what's the old saying you're doomed to repeat history?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:16Yeah, what I hear is that there is a finite set of resources in our life, whether that be time and energy and other things. And while we should have an abundance mindset, we should understand that focus is necessary, and that we have to allocate resources. Well, in order to be able to get projects successfully completed. And by sequencing projects, were in essence, postponing certain things or conditioning, certain things, so that the more important things, or at least the more important things right now get done well. And from my perspective, it's a standard of excellence in your personal productivity more than anything that forces projects to be sequenced. And the other side is that sometimes you just don't have the resources to be able to do that project right now, that could be a time resource, that could be a financial resource that can be a labor resource, you need someone in order for something to happen. And so there becomes a conditioning of when these projects get put on to your current active status than not. So let's talk a little bit about some of the examples in your own world where you benefit from being able to sequence projects in a way that really it helps you. I

Francis Wade 4:38think it helps me to say no, frankly, that's the biggest benefit for me, is that when someone comes along with red shiny object, the thing I've been waiting for all this time, and you know, they paint a picture of how great it will be to have me on the project. And it's not something I had originally planned to do. But you know in that moment Mental of optimism you scan. If you only do a mental scan, you're just back into trouble. But if you do a mental scan of your commitment, I use age, or I should be able to do that. And, and that comes because you haven't done proper sequencing of your own projects ahead of time. So when the request comes, all you're left with is a vague sense of Yeah, I think I'm I should be okay. But you don't really have anything that you're looking at, that's written down, you don't have anything on people, you have actually haven't invested the time to do real sequencing, which you must do. If you're someone who manages lots of projects and lots of tasks, you must have a an accounting, a written accounting of your long term commitments, otherwise, you become that guy. And we've all worked with that guy who says yes to everything. And that guy is a disaster. And if you find out that he says yes to everything halfway through your project, that he's working with you on your big trouble. But that guy, we don't want to become that guy.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:09Who do you give projects to the busiest person in the meeting, right? The reality is, is that many times, when you are the productive person in the room, people start to pile on, because they recognize that you're capable of being efficient and effective with your time. And that becomes a problem for you. So So understand, many of us here have been there, we understand that perspective. And saying no, is a way of potentially probably project sequencing, in the sense that you are, at the very least, pushing back against and setting boundaries against these kinds of, well, since Susan always gets everything done. Let's put more on Susan's plate. That's, you know, both inappropriate, and you know, unhelpful to Susan. But it's something that we have to be mindful of. And so you need to be able to set these boundaries to start, and then project sequencing becomes a little bit more useful. I'll give one particular example where projects sequencing for me is just kicked in. So at any given time, I am doing quite a lot of learning. And I call them journeys. I call them quests, you can call them learning paths, whatever it might be. But in any given year, I decide what it is that I want to learn. And so this year, I have been on a a pretty thoughtful path toward upping my programming and coding skills. And so I've been learning these various coding platforms in order to be able to figure out where I want to go. So my learning journey is sequenced. So that I am taking a particular course at any given time, and I am not taking other courses at that time, because I want to be able to make sure that one happens, then the next happens, then the next happens, so that I'm building upon that knowledge. And so we can see this in academic or educational environments very easily, right, if I don't have this information, then going to this next step is going to be not as useful to me than the next step, which is not going to be as useful to me. So as we advance in our skills, we can sequence the learning associated with those pieces, those stepping stones. And so that's how I develop my learning journeys. I sequence the projects, in this case, the courses or the deliverables in that. So for example, I started out with, I wanted to learn programming fundamentals. And so just not not getting too far into the into the specifics of any one language. So I started out with fundamentals this year, I've been learning all of the various different types of of programming models. And that's been incredibly useful to me....

This week, the ProductivityCast team tackles the topic of ordering tasks conditionally and task sequencing for momentum.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/135 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 Task Sequencing: How to Condition and Order Tasks for Greater Momentum, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Task Sequencing

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Task Sequencing

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

OmniFocusAny.doMicrosoft ProjectMicrosoft TeamsNozbeTodoistTemporal Structures in Individual Time Management - Wu DezhiRemember the MilkIFTTTZapierUnscheduleGTD Weekly ReviewJoin Ray’s Weekly Review Accountability Party on Fridays at 10:30 AM ET!KrispNotionPaprika (grocery shopping app)

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 0:17Hello, and welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:23I'm Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we are going to be talking about something that I find to be fascinating, which is the order of operations, so to speak of tasks. And tasks. sequencing is interesting to me, because I think that when we deal with so many complexities in life, there are ways in which we can really order the tasks that we're doing, not just for making them more effective, but also making them more efficient. And I think that it's important for us to think through how we put things one in front of the other. And so I thought today, we would have a conversation around the idea of why would you condition tasks? Why would you sequence tasks, in essence, and then we could talk about maybe some of the examples and or pitfalls that we experience when we do task sequencing. And then we'll close out with maybe some tips and tricks for you all to utilize when you want to jump start the process of task sequencing. So let's get started with Why do you task sequence? Why would you want to do task sequencing,

Francis Wade 1:32if we don't think about task sequencing, we end up making mistakes, small mistakes, big mistakes, we end up arriving at places late because we didn't start early enough, we end up with late deliverables, we end up being stressed, there's a host of problems that we can create if we don't do task sequencing correctly. And they all end up causing us emotional stress, the people around us come to realize that they can't count on us. It's loss of reputation, there's just a whole host of problems that gets created when we don't really pay attention. And we just do what we think we feel like doing in the moment. recipe for disaster.

Art Gelwicks 2:19Task sequencing is one of those things that you don't realize it's important until you don't do it. Because you go to plug into working on a particular task. And you realize that three other tasks before that had to be done first, for this one to be able to be executed. So being able to take the time to say okay, what, what's the predecessor what has to occur to prepare this task to be able to be successfully completed? And then what are the next tasks that get triggered from this. And often we, we lose sight of that. And partially because it's not a natural habit to think about the before and the afters. But the other thing is that most task management tools don't support this kind of thinking. They don't have any structure built into them. To have that transitional piece from task to task, you wind up doing it artificially through the organizational structure. So the outlines and nesting and things like that,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:17I think that OmniFocus is really the only one that I know of that has a true conditional task feature built into it. Are there any others that you know of that that really, truly will basically only show a task after you complete one?

Art Gelwicks 3:31Not without getting into the project management space that I've seen? I mean, most of that's a much heavier lift, which it shouldn't be that hard of a thing. I mean, to paraphrase, you know, top gears, Jeremy Clarkson, how hard how difficult could it actually be? Because all you need to do is provide a connection to the next task and ID. And maybe that's the charge is that every task would have to have some sort of unique identifier. But I'm really surprised that most more applications don't give you that option to say when I finished this, what's the next task I want to do? And be able to designate that and say, Okay, here's the next one in the sequence and the next one, because when we talk about flow states, when we talk about time blocking, these are perfect connections to that. And it just seems to be a blind spot in the task management applications that are out I will definitely

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:28say that I think that task sequencing is important, if you think about it from the perspective that we design checklists, because we want to know in say, any given known project, that we know the sequence, the order that those things should be done in one before the other. And many times what happens is we have the complexity of many different projects ongoing that has many different things that we need to do throughout any given day or week, and not knowing the order in which they're going to happen. It creates a level of just inefficiency that causes things to break down. And also, you lose momentum in many cases. And so if you think about it, if you have to go to the grocery store, you would group the things you're going to purchase, buy the areas of the grocery store, right, you're not going to go, go get the milk in, and then walk, you know, to the other side of the grocery store, then walk back and get the eggs. And then you know, you're going to when you're in dairy, you're going to get all the dairy items, you know, you get the milk, cheese, eggs, when you're in the bread aisle, you're going to get all of the, you know, grains. These are things that we naturally do in some areas of our lives. But for some reason, when we think about tasks, we don't actually group things, or sequence them in a way that makes them to be more efficient. And that just creates more problems.

Augusto Pinaud 5:45Yeah, only focus on that sense, as you were mentioned, was incredible in the sense that not only you could say, do not start this task, or show me these tasks on top. But you could also say, not only you cannot show to me until the prior one is ready, but also need to be after this date. And you could combine those two conditions, I have not seen anything that do conditions as incredible as OmniFocus. That's the sad part was a collaboration. But from the condition perspective, and the fact that you could mix, conditional or non conditional in the same projects, and you could have part of the project who has those conditions, parts of the project, or tasks that did not have them. It was really, really incredible. You brought

Art Gelwicks 6:31up the grocery list thing, right? That did does remind me the application any do it's interesting when you go and you plug tasks in there on their shopping list, it will actually organize those by category within the store. So like it'll try to put the dairy items together and the thing, so it creates groupings. But again, that's not a sequencing as per se, because there's nothing within that grouping. It's it's all you're in the dairy aisle, find your stuff, I'm trying to think about how some of the tools will do sequencing, for example to do is the closest you get with sequencing and Todoist as you can change the order of tasks in the list. And that's assuming you're going to work from the top to the bottom, most Kanban tools, you can rearrange the cards in the board, something like a Trello or something like a notion board, you can change the order that way to create a somewhat of a sequence. But there's nothing that locks it in to say that when this one's done, this is the next one that has to be done. And I'll make the argument that the next one is actually less important than what was the preceding one that needed to lead up to this task. So what had to be done first, because what I've seen consistently is that when you have a task that you're not prepared to execute with everything, it fails. But if you have a task, that's going to dovetail into the next one, that's logically the one that's setting up the success of the next task. So the predecessor is really the one that makes all the difference. And it really doesn't matter how you, you look at it. If you want to look at a task and say when this is done, I can do this next thing, or when I need to do this when I need to do the prior ones....

In this week's episode, the ProductivityCast team chats about how to track and manage time in a calendar/agenda style format to be more productive.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/134 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 Get More Out of Your Calendar from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Get More Out of Your Calendar

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Get More Out of Your Calendar

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

SortdMacSparkyAcuity SchedulingCalendlyManicTimeUnscheduleIkigai

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 0:22 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we're gonna be talking about getting more out of your calendar, how to track time in a calendar interface to an agenda style format, so that you can actually be more productive. And so let's get into the topic related to utilizing your calendar for tracking it is something that is probably common to many of us, that is we are used to the calendar format, we we've been raised to see time in either a monthly, weekly, even a day style agenda. And so we're very comfortable with laying things out. It is just another form of list in a, you know, in a matrix or otherwise. And so the idea of a calendar is useful to us. And I'm curious from all of you, how do you use a calendar for tracking? Let's start off with events? Since I think it's probably the most common style and way of or, or data that you would capture into a calendar? It's it's the most common form of data that you would capture into a calendar format, which is what is going to happen in the future? And so how do you how do you use a calendar in that sense, and then we can perhaps, then turn over to the task or in Francis's terms, time demand space to think about how you would capture, forecast budget, and ultimately track the things that are happening in your productivity system.

Francis Wade 1:57The way I do it, is to schedule the appointments in and then use an auto scheduler to fill in the gaps, so to speak, to put the flexible tasks in the times that I don't already have committed. But I think what you're alluding to is that that's that's the first part. And it might be even the easy part, the subsequent parts, which we all do, would do to some degree. And I think we all do mentally anyway, is we ask what whole? Well, did I build a schedule? And then how do I improve it in the future? How do I how do I do better? Scheduling in the future, because we've all the planning fallacy is real for all of us. We've all said all this to take an hour and five hours later, we're groaning and struggling. And but does that mean that the next time that we go to plan the activity that we're actually any better? Or do we fall right into the same trap? I think the great thing about using a calendar is that it allows you the opportunity to be accountable to yourself to some degree for the plans that you made. When you have a list, only a list. And no calendar, I think the opportunities for improvement are fewer and more, more difficult to grasp, because you're really just going off of kind of hunches and memory at least for the calendar year you have some possible data to work with. So I think the scheduling is perhaps the easiest part, the harder part is to become a better scheduler, which I think we all all need across the

Art Gelwicks 3:29board. I use it poorly. And we'll go from there. Yeah, I use it. I have a basic challenge. And I think a lot of people run into this, I have two calendars that I have to maintain and a minimum one business calendar, one personal calendar, the business calendar is not actually maintained on my own devices, it is maintained on a client machine. So I am actually take that back, I have three calendars because I also have the company calendar. That's part of the challenge I have is that I'm bouncing between calendars. So I have to think about where does this need to go when I'm going to capture something which is rendered my calendar management and usage fairly inefficient. I mean, I'm looking at double and triple work anyway, adding extra stuff to it for processing and learning from it has fallen by the wayside a bit. So there's definitely room for improvement with this mess that

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:27I have. And it sounds to me like you are doing that because of company policy.

Art Gelwicks 4:31I'm required to do it. Trust me, it's not voluntary. I would love everything to be in one place, but it's not.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:38Yeah. So my first suggestion to anyone is that if you are capable of doing so centralized to a singular calendar tool, even if you are utilizing multiple calendars in your world, seeing them and allowing them to overlay really is useful. You know, if you have, say a Google account like a Gmail account and you have a calendar there and you have an apple Will account and so on and so forth. That's pretty simple and easy to do, which is to bring those, you know, items over to one app, and then synchronizing into that singular app. And that allows you to see things that are happening in multiple contexts, multiple areas of your life in one space. And I think that a lot of people can benefit from from doing that. So certainly centralizing is helpful. And I think that what most people get fearful of is that then they'll be overwhelmed by seeing too many things at once. But remember that or if you didn't know, you can actually turn off those calendars just by taking them out of view. In Google Calendar, you literally just click on the calendar, and it will disappear from view, when you want to turn it back on, you can do that. And it'll just overlay and then hide those calendars on command. Same thing with Apple. Same thing with Outlook,

Augusto Pinaud 5:50I actually use an app called sorted, sorted pool from my calendar into a sheet and create every appointment as a task. And then that allows me to integrate that with Todoist. And then bring the other task into there. So allows me to really look not only to where are those calendars, events, but what I'm going to be doing on those calendar events. On top of that, I try, I don't do a good job in this to report every half an hour, what I plan to do, and what I actually did, and the days that I do that, well, I get much better success as the end of the day than the days that I'm not great at it. But it's something that I'm still working on to make a better job. My Calendars are crazy, mostly because one I do a lot of things, but two, it keeps colors for different parts of the business or different parts of the family and, and thing. So it's a carnival of colors. It's what it's probably in sorted what I use what I use the most. Even more than checking my own calendar,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:09you bring up a really great point, which is the coloring of items, I use two layers of color in my calendar. So each calendar represents a different area of my life. And what I call life category. So each calendar is is a life category. And sometimes they also are programs. So I will have a dedicated program because that calendar is then published for Google Calendar to a website or someplace else where it's automatically updating. So there's a reason for keeping that separate calendar so that I don't have to double entry into other places. What I do then is each calendar then gets an additional color for the context of work. So for example, if I have to be someplace physically, I will change the native calendar color to another color that tells me that I have to be someplace in person, because right now, that is the rarity, as opposed to the common being in a zoom or, you know, Google meet or something like that. Now, I'm like, Okay, I have to actually buffer in travel time and otherwise. And that means placing additional calendar events into the calendar to show travel time to and from that place. And those are variables that I like to know. So I will color the the calendar event, you know, an additional color. So it is very different from all the other events. And then when I'm planning for the coming week, I can see the little my case dark green events, and then I can say, okay, I can talk to my scheduling assistant and making sure that we are putting in travel time and buffer time between those things. So that I'm able to get to and from places but not just to and from, I need to debrief from those meetings. So I need to make sure that I have enough travel time and then time to sit down a

This week, the ProductivityCast team talks about how to set up effective reminders when you're time blocking (or time chunking) as your primary productivity system. The conversation turns out much more useful for anyone looking to set up an effective reminder system. Enjoy!

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/133 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!

If you'd like to continue discussing Time Blocking and Time Chunking: Setting Up an Effective Reminder System from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Time Blocking and Time Chunking: Setting Up an Effective Reminder System

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Time Blocking and Time Chunking: Setting Up an Effective Reminder System

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

Time Blocking Defined; Why Time Blockers Need Effective Reminders

West Wing (TV series)

What’s Available Today? What You Should Look for in a Reminder System?

Google CalendarApple CalendarMicrosoft CalendarApple RemindersGoogle TasksGoogle KeepMicrosoft’s Scheduled Tasks (Task Scheduler)Checker PlusZapierIFTTTMicrosoft PowerAutomateWindows Scheduled TasksTodoist RemindersOmniFocusGoogle AssistantApple SiriAmazon AlexaChecker Plus for Google Calendar™ EvernoteGboard (Android) / Gboard (iOS) (voice typing on Android/iOS)

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

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we're going to be talking about time blocking, sometimes called time chunking. And Francis brought this topic. So I'm gonna hand this over to Francis to kind of open us up in terms of kind of explaining to us what time blocking is. And what we're going to do today is have a little bit of a conversation around the idea of an effective reminder system, how do you set up reminder systems? And why is it important as a time blocker or time chunker, to go ahead and have reminders, remind you at the both appropriate time and a level, so to speak, and maybe Francis can speak to that a little bit. So that you can really do what you need to do when you need to do it where you need to do it. So Francis, for those of you who are maybe have no idea what time blocking is, can you explain for listeners, what time blocking is?

Francis Wade 1:15Sure, it's a technique in which you put a task a flexible task in your calendar. So in other words, you're moving it either from your memory or from a to do list and you're putting it on your calendar. In other words, you're assigning a time and the day and the duration to a task that you could do at different times. So you're pinning it, in other words to a specific spot in your calendar. And in general, it's it's not a technique that everyone needs to use, it's a bit of a requirement, if you are managing lots of tasks if you only have one task to do per day. And you can do that anytime, then you don't need time blocking. But if you have lots of tasks, and vertical discretionary time, then pinning tasks to your calendar becomes a requirement just because it's too hard to have to figure out what to do all throughout the day, go through all of your lists and figure out exactly what you need to do. It's easier to do it once in the morning or once at the beginning of the week. And then just execute it as you go along. So that's the general idea, you want to discuss that some more or sort of go on to the remainders.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:28I'm really curious about this, because I think a lot of people who hear what you're talking about, which is scheduling your tasks, and a calendar ultimately becomes more difficult as you place things in the calendar. And you realize that you don't necessarily know how much time something might take or that things might be overlapping each other in terms of the number of things you want to do in the same, say, hour, some calendars don't allow you to put things in smaller increments than say 15 minutes or 30 minutes. And so you have lots of things overlapping and that might feel cluttered. Is there a software solution that you utilize in order to be able to overcome that? Do you just get used to seeing overlapping? Basically calendar events in your calendar? What do you what do you think about all those kinds of challenges that people have with regard to putting things in a calendar view,

Francis Wade 3:17we could imagine someone who uses PayPal, it has a really difficult time because they it when things change, and they have to move things around, they're left with using an eraser crossing things off, it gets really difficult, someone like that will probably upgrade to a tool like Google Calendar, which basically allows you to put anything anywhere, anytime, overlapping as often as you want. It's not doing anything smart. It's just replicating what you had on paper in a digital version. So things can be moved around at will at the next level. They're auto schedules, which make some smart decisions. They don't allow overlaps. They try to optimize your calendar. And they try to make sure that at least you're looking at a feasible representation of your calendar and not just things thrown in there willy nilly. So that's the that's the most complicated level, the most sophisticated level I'm aware of.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:09So if somebody is going from task list and calendar two, than having too many, as you call them time demands that require you to kind of level up then there is software bespoke to the solution of taking all of those things and placing them in your calendar. That's kind of what I was leading the witness so to speak. I wanted to make sure listeners know that there is software out there that is built ready built for this kind of situation, that they're not just basically placing things into Google Calendar in this hodgepodge way. And so thank you for that. I'll position is for everybody. And Francis, you can maybe start us off. Why do people need effective reminders? If they're time blocking, they have everything in their in their calendar, or in their calendaring task based software. Why do they need To be able to be reminded about what they need to do

Francis Wade 5:02with it. The analogy I like to draw is that of the TV show The West Wing popular in the 2000s.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:08Okay, you're gonna need to explain to me the West Wing and reminders now.

Francis Wade 5:13The West Wing was a TV show about the president, the United States jab, jab back that I think his name was fictional, of course. And he had a secretary and her name was Mrs. Landingham, or Landingham, one of the two. Anyway, she was the perfect secretary, you know, in the show, in that he had a full schedule, as you may imagine, the President does, or a CEOs or anyone who has lots and lots of commitments to execute each day. And her job, one of her jobs, was to manage his calendar. But also, in addition to doing all of his time blocking, she would come and give him that proverbial tap on the shoulder when it was time to switch to another task or to consider switching to another task. And as you can imagine, she had different ways of doing this, you know, she could, you know, just kind of open the door and Wave at him to remain soft remainder that time to wrap up, or she come and tell them oh, by the way, you're there's a phone call coming in for you. And she would interrupt the meeting, and that will be a switch. Or she would walk into the meeting and say, Mr. President, your plane is leaving in two minutes. Well, he's the president. So he determines when the plane leaves, but let's say he didn't, there's a president, you have to leave No, in order to make your meeting with this dignitary via plane. And here's your bag, and here's your ticket, and Secret Service will escort you out the door. So she'll be very firm sometimes. So sometimes she'd be very soft. And sometimes she'd be very strong, different kinds of remainders. But what it allows the president to do is essentially relax. You know, David Allen says Your mind is is for coming up with tasks, not for remembering them. This is a bit similar, your mind is for executing, not for trying to remember what you need to execute. Next, at the minute, you need to execute it. Because there's a bunch of research that says that, that effort it takes to remember to do something at just the right time takes a whole lot of cognitive resources. And if you can outsource that to Mrs. Landingham, you're in great shape, because that person will basically just say, Okay, no, tie your shoelaces, I'm exaggerating, but Okay,...

In this week’s cast, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art discuss why task lists fail in your personal productivity systems? And, we offer some tips for making task lists that are resilient to our workaday worlds.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/132 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 Why Task Lists Fail? from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Why Task Lists Fail?

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Why Task Lists Fail?

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

How to Master the Art of To-Do Lists by Understanding Why They Fail : iDoneThis blog

Todoist

Remember the Milk

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 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast 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 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:23I'm Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this action packed episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we are going to be talking about Action Lists, actually, we're gonna be talking about task lists, and really what they're all about, why do we have them? Why do we use them, and some of the common pitfalls that people experience while they are trying to manifest and utilize their task lists. And this is a perennial topic, but I think it was triggered by an article that we picked up from the I done this.com site. And we thought we would have a discussion around some of the things that people really do get hung up on when it comes to task lists. So let's start the conversation off around the idea of why do we have a task list? What is the purpose of a task list, and let's go from there.

Art Gelwicks 1:10we start off with the common knowledge of everybody visualizes a task list. And it's a list of items with checkboxes next to it. And that's usually, unfortunately, as far as people will think. But a task list is so much more than that. And it's not just things to do, I think one of the biggest problems we get into and we saw this in the article, we've seen this, in numerous conversations about this topic, is understanding the scope of what a task list can do for us, rather than what we can do for it saying apologies to JFK. So when we think about a task list, we're initially trying to capture all those little things that we have to do on a given day, given week, given month, whatever. And we're trying to get those off of that list. Well, that becomes an action in and of itself, trying to clear that listing. I, I suppose that a task list is probably one of the best tracking and planning tools we have available to us. We use all different kinds of tools. But if you if you take a task list and you soup it up, you start to get into a project management tool. So wait, if it has that level of capability with just some extra features. What can a regular task list do to us do for us? Well, I think that's where we have to go back to our definition, what is a task list. And a task list in my definition, is a tracking and planning tool.

Francis Wade 2:41For me, it's an external representation of a bunch of psychological commitments. So we make promises to ourselves to do stuff in the future. And we make lots of promises, and some subset of all those promises, it can be captured externally. So that we are able to have some peace of mind because they are not swimming around in our heads. We use it it helps the chances that we'll actually get the task done. And so there's people task lists, there are calendars of different kinds, there are digital task lists, there are Excel spreadsheets. And then there's also having an administrative assistant, having an individual who manages, basically manages all your tasks for you. So that's giving someone the job of you know, once you have a task, you just tell the person and then you stop trying to remember it, and the person is trusted, they can be just as effective or more effective than a list or a piece of paper or a digital tool or anything like that. But the objective is the same psychologically, it's either in your mind swimming around causing trouble waking you up in the middle of the night, and likely to be forgotten, or it's in some trusted external mechanism that allows you have some peace of mind.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:09I would very much agree with Francis in in that definition, I think that I think of a task list as an externalized list of your work. It's just externalizing work. And when we take the work off of our own shoulders, the stress of having to remember it plus the really inefficiency of our mind to remember all the tasks that would could or should be done at any given time. We just aren't very good at being able to do that algorithm in very complex long term work. And so being able to do that in an external inside of a tool, paper and pen, digital or otherwise, gives us a longer term planning and a lot more complex planning capability than we would otherwise. And I think that's really useful for most of us. You know, I'm not really going to think about what I'm going to Do a year two years from now. But the reality is, is that I have a thought about something that's going to be done at that time, in that timeframe. Or on that timeline, I can go ahead and plant that in my digital system. And it'll show up in one or two years timeframe. And then I can deal with it. And that didn't, that stress didn't have to sit on my shoulders for any of that length of time, until I until I prompted it to give me that stress. And so it becomes a positive stressor, something that I am capable of tackling at that time, versus me every day for the next, you know, 700 odd days, thinking about that thing every day so that I don't forget it in in one or two years time. It's just kind of not necessary. So I think of task lists as being that one external piece. The other part is, for me the prioritization capabilities of a task list. Coming from kind of the GTD perspective, thinking of next actions, as being those physical things that will prompt me to move a project forward or move, move some kind of work forward, I'm thinking about it from the perspective that I'm looking at my action list and identifying what can be done right now have all of the possible opportunities of things that I can do during discretionary time. So there is there is that function, but it also is a prompting function for the things that must be done. Or there are two different pieces there, right, there's the stuff that I need to do, and want to do in my discretionary time. But there's also the things that must be done. And it is not withstanding my discretionary time, it needs to be done today. And I need to be able to do that. And so it to some extent, there is a date time and location function there to a task list that some people actually externalize to a calendar type interface, right. Some people put that into a scheduling system. We'll talk about that in a bit. So we have these two pieces that are that I think are are very similar, but not the same. But things that I can do on a longer horizons, I have a project and there's work that needs to be done. It doesn't have to be done today. But if I have to go get my driver's license renewed and my driver's license is expiring today, then I must do that today, that becomes a must. And it also becomes date, time and location fixed. And I think more of the context that kind of connect there, the more it becomes something that that we have to manage differently in our task lists than otherwise. And so maybe it even becomes a different task list for some people or a calendar or something like that. So I

Augusto Pinaud 7:26think I agree with that definition that you have, for me, they have three types, the ones that need to happen today. Now, regardless of the ones that should happen soon, because they The thing is getting louder and louder moderator and the things that I want to wish now that that wish list here, I want to read these articles, but but they are there, they're on my task list. But they don't. It's really more if I can get rid of that critical step, that I will be able to go to that to those nice to have. And I think that's where it makes a difference for me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:02From that point, we can then start to think about what are some of the common pitfalls that folks experience in creating task lists. So I see folks using, you know, task lists for all kinds of things. And sometimes they're doing them effectively. Most times, they are not, and and so then they come into contact with me because they're trying to figure out what the heck is going on with their business or with their world or whatever. And, you know, it's just one of those things where you you come into contact

This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art discuss learning and four stages of curiosity. Curious what they are? Listen in and learn! 😉

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/131 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 learning and the four stages of curiosity from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Learning and the Four Stages of Curiosity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Learning and the Four Stages of Curiosity

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

From Procedural Knowledge To Self Knowledge: The 4 Stages Of Curiosity 

Montessori education

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

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 0:28Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. This week, we're going to be talking about what we're calling the four stages of curiosity. And it actually came out from an article that Francis Wade had come across. And so Francis, do you want to kind of open us up in terms of this topic today. And then we'll get into a little bit of our agenda.

Francis Wade 0:46Sure, it has to do with knowledge acquisition or learning, the idea is pretty straightforward that you move from initially taking directions from someone who is an expert, someone who knows a lot more than you do. And you graduate from the bottom level to the point where you need to essentially create your own knowledge in order to make progress. Because there's lots of areas that we want to know something a lot about. If you get stuck at any one level, it'll the idea of the article is that if you get stuck at any one level, then it will actually for your development. So the idea is to notice when it's time to move to the next level, and then use the techniques that are appropriate for that low in order to keep making progress in the chosen area of interest. The concept that was provided was done in the in the form of a diagram, and we're gonna go over that, but it's a pyramid. And so that pyramid diagram starts with with four levels, in essence, hence, the four stages of curiosity. And as we make our way through today, you will hear us talking about those four levels. And we will explain those very shortly. And so today, what we're going to do is we're going to talk about the four stages. And just to give some preface here, the four stages are in Francis's terms here, process starting at the base of the level content, that is the next here, upper stage two, stage three is known transfer, and then stage four unknown future, let's get into the defining of the four stages. And then we'll talk about each of the stages in order. For instance, do you want to give us a little bit of background in terms of the items here that you've noted regarding procedural knowledge, self knowledge, and curiosity, let's, let's talk about these components that you talk about curiosity. And then we can define the four stages proper, when you don't know anything about the topic. And it involves actually doing something, not just knowledge acquisition, the best way to learn it in the very beginning is to borrow the schema from somebody who knows something. So you want to be them to be very prescriptive. And to tell you the details of what you need to learn what they've learned, pretty much tell you what they have done. If you have no background in the item, you've never done it before the actual you haven't done it before, it's brand new to you, the best place to go learn is from someone who's willing to translate what expertise looks like. So they lay it out to you. So that's the first level. The second level,

Francis Wade 3:18which I call the content level, is that you gain some interest. And by the way, this is borrowed from an article on, I just want to make sure I give the kudos where they're due on teach thought that calm the four stages of curiosity. The concept isn't is new, not new to me. But it's one the four levels that they laid out are what we're basing this conversation on. So firstly, that in the show notes are great, great. The first level again, is that you just follow what someone else tells you to do. The second level is that you start to gain some interest in the topic. So you've already been able to do what they told you to do. And now you're asking questions like, Oh, why this step? Why not that step. And you start to read around what it is that they're telling you to do. And you miss go deeper into their thought system. That's typically the next step is okay. When I read the Cliff Notes version, let me actually read the book. Let me read the listen to the videos, let me hear the podcast. Let me pick up some other people who are talking about how great this idea is, other people who are expanding on it. So you're learning pretty much the same schema, but you're learning more information about the schema. And then at the third level, you know, say, I know what I know and I know what I do, how do I apply what I'm learning to what I've done in the past or what I'm doing right now. So you're know looking to make things fit and this is where most people have a bit of difficulty because there's no schema that in any field. You know, if you're learning bowling and someone teaches you the basics, is going to come up point where the basics don't really apply anymore. But what you try to do is to keep applying what you've learned to what you're doing. And as you gain more expertise, you keep trying to do that. And as you apply, you start to fail, you apply, you start to fail, you start to get to the point where you start to question what you've learned. Because it was simple. It served you at this first step. But no, at this step, you've gained some expertise, you got some hours, you've been to the bowling, I was gonna say, bowling rink, no, you've been to the bowling alley a few 100 times. And you started to see nuances and you now need to move to the next level. So the fourth level is one in which you are you understand that you need to develop your own way of doing things and your own way of thinking about what you do. You need to think about analyzing what you're doing so that you can make improvements in the future. Because as you look to the future, you see what do I when I start to enter the World Series of bullying or the World Championships, obviously, what I learned that level one won't work for me, I need a coach to point out the areas where I need improvement or if I can't afford a coach, then I'll need to examine what I'm doing so that I can analyze it for further improvements. And also to anticipate that when I get to the Olympics of bowling in the Olympics, when I get to the Olympics of bowling at that very, very high, the highest of the highest levels, then I'm going to need to keep improving. So I No need to build a bit meta and say how do I keep improving my bowling so that when I eventually get to the Olympic level, it's not just a matter of being stuck in the way I do things. But I'm able to flex and unable to adjust and be able to still continue to make progress. And we

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:53can see that in thinking about any of our ability to be productive. We're always in some stage of learning something in our world. And I think it's really interesting to have these conversations around what learning is because for most of us, we actually never learned to learn. And we just were taught things. In that passive approach, we end up not building the skills to learn how to learn. And so I really find discussions around learning how to learn just fascinating generally, because the more we learn how to learn and learn how learning happens, we're better capable of manifesting new learnings faster and more efficiently and really more effectively. So that we're capable of drawing on these to be able to move and develop faster. So let's drive in to each of these stages. Let's start with stage one, where we are basically at the beginning stages of I don't know what I don't know, I suppose. How can people build scaffolding for purposes of learning at that stage of the game?

Art Gelwicks 8:01The first two levels of this seem to be the most basically intuitive. I mean, that seems to be where we just operate as people, that you have your innate curiosity about something a new topic comes past you. And you're like, where do I start? Where do I start digging into when you think about frameworks? This is something that I think you have to do across the board is to establish where are your credible sources going to come from whatever topic you're looking at, you should be,...

Last week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art started a discussion about caffeinated productivity. This week, they continue their conversation about their favorite caffeine beverages, timing them for greater productivity, and many of the varieties of caffeination available to the productivity enthusiasts out there.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/130 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 caffeine-based productivity from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Caffeine-Based Productivity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Caffeine-Based Productivity

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

See part 1 for more caffeine-focused resourcesBETTY Flavoured Condensed Milk (Cinnamon,Vanilla,Nutmeg) | jamaicabasket876Coffee Science: How to Make the Best Pourover Coffee at Home Your Ultimate Guide to Different Types of Coffee 

Is Coffee Bad for You?

Is French Press Bad For You? The Surprising Facts.Is Coffee Good For You? Is Coffee Bad For You? | TIME12 Health Benefits and 6 Disadvantages of Coffee - SMASHING IT!Coffee and health: What does the research say?

When Is the Best Time / Methods for Consuming Caffeine to Benefit Your Productivity?

Bad News: The Best Time of the Day to Drink Coffee Isn’t as Soon as You Wake UpWhen Is the Best Time to Drink Coffee?The Best Time Of The Day To Consume CaffeineThe Best Time to Drink Coffee: Daytime, Nighttime, and More

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. We are going to be continuing our conversation from last episode caffeine based productivity. And in the last episode, we really talked about the kind of foundational elements of caffeine, how it interacts with your body tips around really dealing with the different types of caffeine that you can come across, you know the many different types of caffeine. So if you have not listened to that episode, feel free to snap back to the prior episode. And listen to that. In this episode, what I wanted to do was have the ProductivityCast team here really talk about the different types of coffee based drinks that we consume, maybe some of the tea based drinks that we consume as well, that may or may not be the typical black coffee or tea, then we can talk about the ways in which we make coffee and tea. From a productivity perspective, what I want us to do is think about how we make our coffee and tea productively. That is to say, What's the best way to make it when we want to have it made quickly and efficiently? Well, I want to talk a little bit about some of the health benefits, people should have concerns or health disadvantages that we should have concern about when it comes to coffee. And then after we talk about that research, we'll get into really the best times to consume caffeine for being most productive. And so we'll get into a little bit about timing our caffeination at the end of the show. So let's kick into the different types of coffee, and other caffeine based drinks that you all have from the mundane perhaps for all of you not mundane to me, but I just like black coffee, it's the drink I am, I am I have right now in front of me. And so I drink my coffee, black. But there are so many different types of coffee and espresso based drinks. And so those who are not aware espresso are just basically coffee beans that have been ground and then forced pressure with a small amount of boiling water. So you just basically have the the concentration of the coffee in a less water as opposed to in more water. And so based on that espresso then gets mixed in with many other drinks, and either water or the different types of milk to create different combinations. What are some of your favored or favorite mixed drinks in the caffeine world,

Augusto Pinaud 2:47I am boring too. I drink a strong espresso, except during my weekly review on which I go for a strong Lahti usually, if if I will on the pandemic, now I do it at home. But I used to stop in a Starbucks and it was part of the part of the routine and then I get a toll quad A latte that is basically for shot of espresso, it's a little bit of milk. And I do it through the weekly review. And there is a reason why I have not only through the wicker review is because I have over the years condition, the brain to understand Oh, there is invoking discovery, maybe with a review time. And those kinds of things help.

Francis Wade 3:29I'm think I'm more basic than that even I am an instant coffee drinker. Take a cup every week or two weeks, somewhere in there. But I do have a little additive there that I use. It's a condensed milk made here in Jamaica and it has cinnamon and nutmeg in it. So it's, it's nice. And because I drink decaf on the days I don't take caffeinated coffee. It's a daily that's a part of my daily routine. But that gives it gives it a nice, a nice flavor not found. And I keep looking for other kinds of additives like that. But the convenience and the speed and the one for all kind of appealed to me. But that's instant coffee and condensed milk flavored condoms.

Art Gelwicks 4:15Yeah, I'm a variety kind of guy, I will go through the course of a day and like, make coffee, three different ways have four different types of tea just everything's always changing, and it varies by the day. Some mornings it's hit the curb because I'm in a hurry. Other mornings, it's I want this to be a process. So I pull out the Chemex and, you know, boil up the water and do the pour over and sometimes I want to be overly complicated. So I'll pull out the French press, but that's just it extends to the teas too. Sometimes it's a bag tea, sometimes it's a loose tea. Sometimes it's a really robust tea. Sometimes it's a it's a white tea, it doesn't. There is no rhyme or reason for me. For me it's more the change in the experience of each individual time.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:59So For those of you who may not know about all the different types of coffee drinks, there are so many of them. You know, you can mix basically espresso, and or coffee and espresso with different types of combinations of water. Or as I said earlier, different types of milk or steamed milk, a foamed milk, all kinds of really fun things in order to create different drinks. And so espresso is usually a one ounce forced press of the coffee beans. And so you get that really concentrated item. And then you will usually have an eight ounce cup of coffee. And that's the same amount of coffee bean for that eight, you know, 1012 ounces of water. And then if you do a double espresso, or known as a doppio, that's going to be two ounces of espresso. And then you can do all kinds of other fun things like macchiatos, which are an especial shot with foam, you can do Moca which then includes steamed milk and chocolate, and I am a fan of the mochas and many different types of lattes as treats. So get familiar with the different ways in which you can combine different coffee based drinks. That's kind of a fun way in which you can spice up you know, if you're if you're like art and want a little bit of variety, you can definitely do that. And what I found is on the T side, you can do many of these things. Also, I think the British are much more familiar with putting milk in tea, and putting milk based products and teas. That's something that's not traditionally an American thing. But there are all kinds of ways in which you can make tea lattes. And many of the same processes that you use with regard to pressing leaves and forcing water through them. You can also do with tea. And so don't limit yourself in that there's there's so many different fun, tea based drinks that you can make. So when the tea world, I tend to think about them in terms of regular teas, whether they be loose or or bagged, then there are the marches, which traditionally Japanese find ground powder that you either mix directly into the drink, or some people strain them until they kind of filter through. And then there's Mati Mati being a tea that you are placing into hot water, and then it just basically keeps steeping throughout the time you drink it. And Matei is a little bit different, because my understanding is that you keep adding more hot water to the montae. And they have like specialized mugs for Mai Tais. And so like you the the straw itself has a strainer built into it, all kinds of fun things, and you just keep adding hot water and the caffeine content actually increases as you put more hot water into the multi leaves....

This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art start a conversation about coffee and tea and all things caffeine!

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/129 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 caffeine-based productivity from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Caffeine-Based Productivity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Caffeine-Based Productivity

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

CaffeineCaffeine | The Nutrition Source | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public HealthHow Coffee and Caffeine Actually Affect Your ProductivityEffects of Caffeine on Cognitive Performance, Mood, and Alertness in Sleep-Deprived HumansCoffee in the WorkplaceEmber mugSapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah HarariUncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark PendergrastBulletproof Coffee Recipe: The Original Keto Coffee with Butter & MCT OilMatéTea / MatchaHerbal teas are non-caffeinated. FoodsSupplementsDrinksCaffeine/Energy shots (Best Energy Shots of 2020)Caffeine tabletsCaffeine patchesCaffeine chart | Center for Science in the Public Interest

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 0:22 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. Today, what we're going to be doing is talking about caffeine based productivity, what we want to do is to give you a survey of how to use caffeine to be more productive. And so we're going to take a survey of the do an overview of all of the various caffeine based products, and I thought what we would start with doing is kind of defining what caffeine is and how it works in the first place. And then we will cover the various types of caffeinated products that are in the world. Not all of them, but certainly some of them. And then some of the health risks I think that caffeine has and we can talk about those as well. And some of the benefits, there's actually some really good benefits in the in the health space for that. And full disclosure, we're not medical professionals. So you should probably talk to your your licensed medical professional before you take any advice. And then of course, we're going to talk about timing and methods for consuming caffeine. And I think that'll be really useful for folks as well just to understand those components of how to time your caffeine intake for greater productivity. So let's start with kind of the baseline, which what caffeine is both how we think about it in terms of our world, but also from a little bit more of a scientific perspective. So caffeine, of course, we think of as being in coffee and other products is actually quite a number of other products. But at its core, what caffeine is a stimulant. And it's kind of the opposite of what you might think in the sense that it actually blocks some neural receptors, so that it causes you to stay in a wakefulness state, you have adenosine, which is a molecule that attaches to parts of your brain and causes you to get tired, get sleepy. And these adenosine receptors on your brain are blocked by caffeine. So caffeine comes in, it goes through the blood brain barrier. And it antagonizes those adenosine receptors and blocks the adenosine from being taken up by the brain and basically absorbed by the brain. And that's what actually causes you to stay awake and feel that sense of wakefulness. So it can not only block you from getting tired from the adenosine, but it can also then increase wakefulness, in that sense as well.

Art Gelwicks 2:46If you're going to look at caffeine as part of your generalized productivity, you really have to understand the science behind it. I think too many people think, okay, a cup of coffee, or two cups of coffee, this is part of what I have, or three cups or eight cups or whatever. But understanding the science behind the chemical itself, as well as how it impacts your unique physiology. And that's the other thing is that it affects everybody differently. And it changes over time. I mean, that's one of the things that I've discovered is you can mess around with caffeine and how it affects yourself. It takes time to do it. But you can adjust your physiology based on how you consume caffeine to determine what impacts it's going to have. And it becomes predictable. It's not one of those, okay, I didn't get a cup of coffee, therefore, who knows what I'm going to be like today? No, if you pay attention to it, there's a period of time you can start to understand what this is. But if you don't take the time to understand the science behind the chemical itself, and what its job is, you know, being a suppressor like, like Ray just outlined, and the fact that it constricts blood vessels in the brain and understanding those mechanisms then gives you the predictability as to well, what's it going to do? And how am I going to use that, rather than it just being an external factor that kicks in?

Francis Wade 4:12I think it's worth knowing that information because the I believe the the common sort of the average way of drinking coffee is not informed by much other than habit. I think most people just drink it out of habit. They don't delve into the sense and they don't ask the kind of questions we're about to ask, but how do you make the best use of it? So they're just basically following the crowd, which I think limits its usefulness. And maybe even those are a few things that you don't want that

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:46caffeine is a cultural component. And if I if I had to go into a product business, where you could sell very easily, very fast coffee would be it. It's just such a cultural Moray. It's such a Strong Moray are in so many different cultures around the world. And it's just easy to sell in that sense. The interesting thing you noted our which is that when you do drink caffeine, it is also a vassal constructor, right? So it is actually constricting blood vessels. And that's another component here, which is that we also have to take some of the good with the bad here, the vessel construction is what causes you to potentially feel like you're thinking faster, things of that nature, you know, that people think about and the reality is, is your water consumption, how much water you're drinking, comparative to how much coffee you're drinking affects your ability to have that feeling of effect as well. But any vessel constructor can also cause headaches, and other kinds of issues with regard to anxiety, giving you that sense of anxiety, good to kind of keep us mindful of those pieces. A couple of other like little tidbits that I picked up along the years of researching caffeine, I've done many, many experiments with caffeine. Caffeine is something that takes a very short amount of time to get into your bloodstream, usually somewhere around 15 minutes. And it can stay in your body for hours and hours and hours, depending upon your particular body type your particular circumstances. And so just be very careful about the fact that if you drink coffee, say in the late afternoon, you could still have caffeine coursing through your veins, late into the evening, which could potentially disrupt sleep. So we'll talk about some of those risks as well, because it doesn't just stop there. The point is, there are all of these biological components that caffeine is working with. And we are complex biological creatures. And so as we talk about this, just remember that the complexity really does come into play in in so many regards.

Art Gelwicks 6:42One more thing to add. And this is a really common thing. Caffeine is not measured by the cup. So many people will think that, oh, I'll just have a smaller cup of coffee. It depends what's in there. It depends what you're drinking. It depends what the consumption is, cumulative, and raise absolute right? The cumulative effect of caffeine can be way more impactful than the shot of espresso you just had, I was just looking at a chart, comparing different caffeine levels and a Starbucks pikes place venti I think it was, as compared to a Starbucks espresso, you think and express Oh, wow, that's got a lot of caffeine. No, the venti is like 410 milligrams versus the espresso of 150. So understanding that the measure of volume has nothing to do with the amount of caffeine you're actually consuming. And where all those sources are coming from, that you're right, that has that cumulative effect.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:39And as we continue our conversation on we should talk about the fact that we will be talking about this in milligr

This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art continue the conversation about tags, discussing how they use tags in their own lives and work, and how to deal with the limits of software when tagging.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/128 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 productivity taxonomy from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Productivity Taxonomy, Part 2

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Productivity Taxonomy, Part 2

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

Remember the Milk

Skedpal

OneNote

Workflowy

Evernote

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

Augusto Pinaud I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis WadeI'm Francis Wade.

Art GelwicksAnd I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we're going to continue the conversation that we started last week. So in our last episode, we opened up the dialogue, because of a topic are brought to the team and wanted to discuss and that was all about tagging in our personal productivity systems. And we discussed really what productivity tagging really looks like, what does what does a taxonomy really stand for in a personal productivity system, we talked about some of the topics relating to it, but we really didn't dive into how we all use tags on our system. So I think that would be a really great conversation for today. So how do you tag and use tags in your personal productivity system

Francis Wade 1:08as little as possible, whereas you can tag everything from now until the cows come home? I think the purpose of tagging is, as we discussed in the last episode, to be able to manipulate large volumes of data by focusing on some smart attributes. And I think that one of the rules I have is, and this was from bitter experience of trying to use multiple tags, and all sorts of fancy hierarchies and tags, using attributes that were the most interesting is that we should be always aiming to use as least the least number of tags as possible because they extract extract such a cost. The managing tax isn't easy for us psychologically. And we should be looking to manage the minimum number possible to get the biggest benefit. There's a Pareto effect. In other words, so this is not a matter of and I see people asking questions all over the internet, you know, what should I tag? Should I tag this, I'm tagging with 10 different attributes. No, whereas they may be cool, and they will be fun. It is a utility problem. And we have a capacity to the number of tags that we can use. So my first technique, whenever I go to tag is use as little as possible, minimum number that I can get away with and still be effective. And then I'm going to add another level of tags or another dimension or degree, I think long and hard before doing it, and usually don't.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:36So what are the areas though, that you do use tags, from what

Francis Wade 2:39I know everybody tags, tasks, but they don't necessarily put them in a system. So in their mind, there is always tasks tagging happening all the time. And the same principle applies. You could tag your tasks in any number of ways. But the question is, Which one will you use? That will give you the practical benefit? So I use temporal tags, mostly? Few others occasionally. But temporal tags are duration, start time due date, its placement in a calendar relative to other tasks. So they're non overlapping, and so that there's they cannot be done at the right time. Temporal tagging is what I use mostly,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:20yeah, you bring up an interesting point, which is that you're you're talking about tagging from a time perspective, even a start time is that is that because your tool includes a start time field or you applying a tag as to when you actually plan to start that?

Francis Wade 3:36Both? Yes, I did it before I got the tool. And the tool allows me to do it easily, more easily.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:41Because I have a start time field and a due date, you know, completion date field in my Task Manager, which happens to be Remember The Milk. And so the so the idea of having a tag associated with when something's going to be done is more like morning, afternoon evening, kind of having a tag that tells me this is a block of work that needs to be done in the morning, or is the best time to be done in the morning, both for energy for performance management, but also for when it's likely is to be done. I try to use those tags for management of putting what should be in the right places in the right places. And even to this day, I've now chosen in Remember The Milk you have priority one, two, and three, and then no priority. So that's just color coded. And it's the way in which it sorts in the system. And I've chosen to apply that as the three parts of my day, as morning, midday, and really afternoon, evening, before I close out. And by placing those things in that timeframe. It gives me a fourth kind of block of time, which is end of day. So anything that is no priority ends up being in that. Well, you know, after dinner, I'm going to do these few other things in the evening. And that's going to fall to that point. So it actually color codes them and blocks them in that timeframe. So it's not priority anymore for me that the tag is that color, and grouping of those things in those sections.

Francis Wade 5:07If you could change the tag, you would really able to Morning, morning, afternoon, evening, after evening, but it

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:14doesn't matter to me because it's the color is 123 and zero. So that's really no, you know, there's no words applied to it. So it's just literally the color and grouping of the lists, which is perfect for me. And that also translates well over to when I print. Like, if I were to print the checklist, that's all going to manifest on the printed checklist, and I frequently will print it to PDF, so that I have that available to me to markup on my tablet. And it's really nice to have one, it's, it's just like one of those days, I've got a lot to do, I will literally print the the task list to PDF and put it on the tablet. And now it's in there and I can mark as I go, which is really nice. So you're

Francis Wade 5:53doing it by handwriting, you got it. Yeah, I wish I had something, something as sort of easy as that each of each. Anything I've tried to do to grab a calendar and have it in front of me easily turned into more of a hassle than anything else. So I pretty much just leave within Google Calendar, wishing that I could have it somewhere handy in front of me that I could mark it up in the same way.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:12But so Google can email you a daily agenda. And then you can automate the stuff from receiving the email, you can just click Print to PDF,

Francis Wade 6:22what I really want, I wanted to print a piece of paper that slides under the cover of my desk, which would be transparent, without me having to press any buttons. Okay, well, that's, I want something that I don't have to touch, because the printing and the messing around the paper or the PDF is all too much friction to do on a daily basis to

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:42be alright, anything, anything else about how you use tags.

Francis Wade 6:46And one more thing, which you brought up, which is one of the features of Scalpel. Scalpel is an auto scheduler. And it allows you to build a time map. So time map is essentially a list of preferred slots in your calendar. So that you can build several time maps, all of which are focused on some attribute like energy or time in the office or peak time for thinking or downtime for reading. So it automatically tries to use the time map that you assign a task to schedule that task in a sort of a zone of time throughout the week. So that's a very big attribute that they've introduced and use heavily to come up with an auto schedule whenever you're personable. So that's another one that time map art, how about you,

Art Gelwicks 7:40I'll pull this through three different applications that I typically use tagging on. And it's important to understand that, to me, tagging is useless without filtering. Because that's, that's what makes this applicable to getting at your information more effectively. So when I think about tagging things, and I'll start off with the one application I deal with all the time, which is one note. One note, it's a love hate relationship with tags within OneNote. Because they don't use the normal hashtag functionality, you know, put in a term, they have a part of the application that allows you to defin

This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art start a conversation about tags. Classifying information in our productive lives comes in many different ways. We discuss what tagging is, how tags are different from other types of organizing, and how to jumpstart your use of tags.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/127 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 productivity taxonomy from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Productivity Taxonomy, Part 1

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Productivity Taxonomy, Part 2

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

Hypernym / hyponym

Evernote

OneNote

Dewey Decimal System

Zettelkasten

Episode 124, Personal Knowledge Management With Zettelkasten

Bullet Journal

Episode 035, What Is the Bullet Journal? How Does It Work?

Episode 073, Tailoring the Bullet Journal Method

Episode 123, Productivity Labs, Methods Edition—Bullet Journal

Raw Text Transcript

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

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:25I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:27Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we're going to be diving into a topic that is near and dear to my heart, but I think is also really important for people to recognize as a fundamental component of personal productivity systems that I think is often lost in the world of just organizing your systems for action. And that is tags, the concept of using taxonomy to be able to be more productive. And this was a topic actually brought up by art Gelwicks. And so I'm going to hand it over to you art we were

Art Gelwicks 0:59talking about in one of the previous episodes, we're talking about organizing notes, and specifically recalling content from notes. And that always raises the specter of tagging. So I thought it would be worthwhile. Having talked about this in the past, for us to dedicate some time to this actual topic in and of itself, separate from applications right now separate from systems and implementations. But really what tagging means, what it means within the context of our personal and professional systems, information management for ourselves. And also, as we start to really get into it, how this helps us improve our organization. beyond some of the alternatives, things like folder structures and that sort. There's, you'll hear classically that, you know, tagging is better than folders, use tagging, don't use folders, use tagging, don't use folders. And I don't know if I necessarily agree with that in all cases. And I think that's where we need to start to dig into this, because there are so many variants of tagging so many conceptual pieces, that I think it's hard for people to really get their hands around as a starting place, but also to give it the extended life it needs for it to make a difference. I know a lot of people, including myself, have implemented different methods of tagging numerous times. Well, if you're implementing it numerous times, it means that numerous times it's not working right. So I wanted to see if you guys could help help me frame it up for the listeners as to what we think tagging is truly beyond just the Wikipedia definition. And also how we can start to help people out.

Francis Wade 2:50I think, first of all, we're there's different objects that can be tagged to or benefit. There's digital objects, which you mentioned, there's physical objects and psychological objects, maybe there's others that I haven't thought of. But in any case, the reason we tagged it is to, for me, it's like adding a handle to a suitcase. When you add the handle to the suitcase, you don't have to pick up the whole suitcase in its entirety, you could just use the handle. So it's a way of manipulating the object using a small kind of not substitute but a small attribute of the object. So if you're manipulating manipulating the attribute, then you don't have to manipulate the entire thing. And that makes it very handy or useful for us to get different things done. So a tag is always a bit of a manipulative shortcut. It allows us to manage lots of stuff, but only using some small attributes. So we're looking to get leverage the way you lose a handle on a suitcase. That's my

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:00theory. I agree with that in in, in large part, my thoughts on taxonomy is wide and varied, right. So if we think about taxonomy is just the categorization of a set, then we can go then deeper, when we start to think about it from a personal productivity perspective, which is, as Francis noted, we are applying how we apply metadata in a website. You know, for search engine optimization purposes, we can think about the application of new data on top of the original set of data. So the items in our productivity systems, whether they be projects, actions, events, or otherwise, documents, you name it, the idea is that we're applying data that is not the object itself to the object, so that we're able to better contextualize and also better able to sort or filter those things in our systems and we lose something When we don't do that, I feel like many times people set up systems and they actually lose capabilities, because they don't take advantage of that in the systems. And one of the things I really abhor is when I come across a tool that doesn't give me the capability of doing that kind of tagging. Now, there are some that I have cobbled together and have worked for me. So for example, I've been a Google Calendar user for many years. And I use tagging in that system. But I've cobbled that together, because I've had to use the search feature in order to be able to tag things because it's not, it doesn't have an inherent tagging capability. So there are these pieces in your world, we have to think through, how are you going to use a taxonomy to be best able to help you versus just I could have many different calendars, right, that's one option. And you can think about those as folders in a Dropbox OneDrive Google Drive perspective. But the reality is, is that that is a container tags are applied data, they are a way for you to be able to look at things across many areas of your system, many organized areas of your system. And that's really where tags become more powerful, is when you're capable of understanding that now tags actually serve two purposes. For me, I consider them an applied data or metadata perspective, where I am connecting disparate parts together for purposes of context. But then they also helped me connect other types of things for action. So what is really a reference type system, the other is an action type system. So we can use tags for say, I have all of my recipes, in a notebook in Evernote, that is for the recipes that I have, right, and they're all contained in there. But now I want to slice and dice, the different recipes in there to say, pastry recipes, things that are, you know, baked goods and that kind of thing. So I could have a pastries tag, but I could also then have a lunch and dinner recipes tag. And now I can separate those two apart, right, so there's that function of being able to do that. Plus, I could have a family recipe that is in my family notebook. And I can also tag that pastries. And that tag now gets pulled in when I search for all of the things that are tagged pastries. So now I'm not limited to where I'm putting things because if I can just apply a little bit of data to it, I can now find that data faster. At the same stage, I can have a notebook or folder for projects. And I can then identify a status to each of those resident projects as say, notes or documents. And now I can say, Okay, which of these projects are in status to, and then I can search for those, just by virtue of that singular tag. And that's the kind of power that I think a lot of people don't take advantage of in their systems, and really is, I think fundamental to you being able to be more productive.

Francis Wade 7:59I think it goes to the, to some degree with, with what Ray is talking about the programmers who write software for digital objects, I think there's a, there's a way in which they don't go far enough in anticipating the user's needs. They don't think through all the use cases, or they don't look for the unmet needs that the user is trying to fill. So they don't think as far as Okay, in order for me to meet that unmet need, I need to tag in the following way. So that the user can have access to the information in the way they want it. I think that kind of proactive thinking is actually kind of rare....