ProductivityCast

This week, Augusto and I sat down with co-author of The Power Bible, Brendon Lemon. Brendon is a comedian and with his co-author William Betweet, III, are the authors of this unique book on how to manage power dynamics in relationships. (We had some technical recording issues, so you may notice we jump a bit in the conversation. It still came out to be an intriguing conversation with Brendon, so we hope you enjoy it!)

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/126 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 The Power Bible with Brendon Lemon from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | The Power Bible

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Show Notes | The Power Bible

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

The Power Bible by Brendon Lemon and William Beteet, III

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

On the topic of pre-reflective self-consciousness, Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness

Slavoj Žižek - Wikipedia

Gad Elmaleh - Official Website

Gad Elmaleh - Wikipedia

SugarSammy

Eddie Izzard

interstitial journaling

Raw Text Transcript | The Power Bible

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. 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 0:17

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:23

And I'm Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24

And welcome to ProductivityCast. Today, we are bringing you a special episode as we are want to do a few times per year we interview people who we think are going to be useful to you out there in your productivity world. And today, we're going to be talking about a book called The Power Bible by William Beteet III and Brendon Lemon. And we actually have Brendan Lemon with us. So just a little bit about the book. So you have an understanding. I'm just reading here from the Amazon description here. This is a quotation that James all teacher, you know, presents at the beginning of the description, it says, quote, the core of the power Bible is how to light the mastery and confidence in yourself at a deep internal level, and using that confidence outwards, to clearly see the various frames and agendas being used by the people around you, end quote. And so the the description moves on to say, to have power over another one must first have power over one's self. And so this is a book of teaching you how to really assume that intrapersonal individual and societal control and to do that, as I said, we have Brandon lemon here on the show. Brendon from his website is a comedian from Detroit, where he started performing regularly at a famous comedy castle at the age of 16. Two years later, he was filmed for the documentary funny, which featured Christopher Titus and Mike Green. He moved to Paris in summer 2013 to both write and perform stand up in both French and English. He returned to the US and live between Colorado and Chicago in Illinois, performing and writing plays as well as being featured on a TV show Sex sent me to the ER and the movie. Do you believe he lives between Chicago and Detroit currently, and so welcome to ProductivityCast Brendon.

Brendon Lemon 2:08

Hey, thanks for having me, guys. I appreciate it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:10

It's such a pleasure to have you join us today. We have a lot to ask you and to discuss about the power Bible. But first, did I miss anything?

Brendon Lemon 2:17

No, you got it? I'm I think I would the Asterix that I would say to update that bio from from my website, I should probably go do it is that I have since moved to New York. But now I'm due to the pandemic in Austin, Texas. It's about the only place you can do comedy in the United States right now. So I'm doing a lot of outdoor shows.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:35

As a New Yorker. I'm I was raised in New York City. I'm a Brooklynite and but now I live in Pittsburgh. So you're you're in my hometown, or we're in my hometown for a while and now you're in Austin, another of my favorite cities in the country. Austin's a really good city.

Brendon Lemon 2:51

It's really cool. Pittsburgh is great, though. I went to Pittsburgh, and I was like, this is a more functional Detroit. Yes, yes.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:58

It's like the Midwestern vibe with a bunch of small towns mash together. It's really remarkable right

Brendon Lemon 3:04

around the rivers dude, it's great. Very, very cool. I

Augusto Pinaud 3:07

really like that description of functional Detroit.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:13

Alright, so let's get into the power Bible. Why did you sit down and decide that you're going to write a book about power? Where did that come from?

Brendon Lemon 3:22

Yeah, this is good. This is a good question. So I it should I should back up and say that it you the book came together. Because my co author and I, William petite, the third met in Chicago doing comedy. And what's kind of funny about that is that we were not when I first met him, I was like, I can't stand this guy. And we did not. We did not get along at all. Like all good marriages. We started that way and realized after getting to know each other a little bit more. We actually had a lot in common. And it wasn't just comedy. It was a lot of our background was really similar. We came from very different places. I grew up in Metro Detroit in the Midwest, from a what start would call a petite bourgeoisie family. He came from a very bourgeoisie family. He was born in Britain, raised in Hong Kong, his dad's from St. Louis. He's mixed race. He's got a very, I mean, Bill has a very and he talks about in the book, very diverse background. I have I have a very, I think white bread American background. But I think that our experiences growing up in my case is shifting sort of post colonial Detroit, in his in a in Hong Kong and all over caused us to reflect a lot on our sort of mutual alienation as like his adolescence, and I know this is really going down the rabbit hole. But that's a long winded way of me saying that, once I met him, and when we realized what we had in common, we had a common story of trying to figure out who we were related to the world of shifting sands that we kind of grew up on and you And what we began to realize when we talked a lot about it was that we had done a lot of work. We're both philosophers. He's a lawyer, I almost went to law school until I was literally talked out of it by everyone in my life. And I literally everybody I talked to, would say that I had, I have a degree in philosophy, which I joke is a degree and asking really good questions like, what's the meaning of life? And do you have any change, it basically allowed us, I think, to see how we needed to, at a fundamental level growing up, go inside of ourselves and kind of pick apart our feelings and how our feelings created beliefs, and how those beliefs influenced our identity and our person and how we worked our way out in the world. And going through that process, we developed a similar philosophy. And we realized, as we talked about it more and more, we really had something to create. And I think that the power Bible was finally created, because we wanted to produce something, we had something to share. And we wanted to produce a book that we wish we had, when we started this process out. We wanted something that somebody could take, and really try to understand how do I get what I want in life? How do I win conversations that matter? And winning conversations that matter isn't just tactics that happen in a negotiation, or interpersonally, it also happens inside of yourself, the first conversation you have to win is with yourself. And that's what we realized, I think was missing from a lot of books that we had read on the subject. And that's what we wanted to create with our Bible. That's a very long winded way of answering your question.

Augusto Pinaud 6:36

But that was one of the things that as I progressed in the reading was exciting for me, because I obviously didn't know what to expect when I begin the book. But one of the things I found when when we talk about power is the power towards daughters and how we're going to control that. And that is, so what it is. But if you don't control yourself, if you don't learn how to do it inside first, then the outside it's not real. So that was as I begin progress into the book, one of the things that got me into it and got me more interest. And we'll get to my questions that I have in a bit. Was that part of how you it is in a way more about what you're? Yeah, it talks about a little bit about the others. But it's really more about how you are going to use the tools and the framework to apply it yourself. Now. It's really exciting for

Brendon Lemon 7:32

me. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. Because I think you know, I mean, there's I guess there's two things I want to say ther

This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art start a new series on ProductivityCast, BookCast, to discuss books in time management-related genres. To start us off, we’re discussing The Myth of Multitasking, Second Edition by Dave Crenshaw.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/125 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 BookCast: The Myth of Multitasking, Second Edition by Dave Crenshaw from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | BookCast: The Myth of Multitasking

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | BookCast: The Myth of Multitasking

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

BookCast: The Myth of Multitasking, Second Edition by Dave Crenshaw

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, PhD

Rube Goldberg machine

bricolage

MacGyver

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 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 today's episode. Today, we are doing our second book caste, book discussions on books that we are reading and we wanted to share what we are reading with you today we are discussing the Myth of Multitasking how doing it all gets nothing done the second edition by Dan Crenshaw, he has written several books on productivity. But most notably, he has written and produced several courses on lynda.com, now known as LinkedIn learning, and that is the Microsoft owned company, LinkedIn, LinkedIn learning and the lynda.com platform. So if you ever go to LinkedIn learning or lynda.com, and you look at any of the productivity courses there, they're likely done by Dan Crenshaw. And so he has written this book this, do we call this an allegory or a fable of Helen and Phil, Phil being a productivity consultant that has come into this company to help out GREENGUARD with their productivity, specifically, the CEO, Helen, what did you guys think of the book? What were your ideas that initially kind of after finishing the book you thought about, and then then we can get into the kind of particulars of what Phil is really trying to portray here. What Crenshaw is trying to portray here through the character of Phil,

Augusto Pinaud 1:40another book was a really enjoyable I agree on on the issues of multitasking and the problems of lack of attention and lack of focus. So I, I think, for many people who think that they can be to certain degrees effective multitasking, it's important to understand what Crusher coal, by ground tasking, you know, that you can drive and listen music and versus actually when you need to put attention on the work and what is the cost of not putting the right attention to this to these tasks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:20He did attempt to bring a couple of new definitions to the world, I have frequently called what he was calling back tasking or background tasking. As meta tasking, that is something that is layered. And back ground or back tasking just didn't seem right, to me is the right term, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. And so the idea of kind of habit stacking, or these other terms that tend to muddle what is actually happening is, I think counter to my own productivity, when I think about it in those terms, they just don't make sense. If we are doing two tasks at once, one that doesn't require our full attention, and can be done either by a machine or simultaneously like having a conversation and driving while not is not the safest thing in the world can be done, or texting and driving, which is not safe and should not be done. Either. There are different standards of what can be done. And so this idea of back tasking, or background tasking, just didn't seem to stick with me as a term. But I recognize that it happens that we do it. And that it can actually be a very useful mechanism for time management,

Art Gelwicks 3:29the concept of back tasking to me as a rationalization within the book. I mean, it's it's talking about pushing something to an alternative system. Let's say you've got a video that you've edited, and it needs to render. So you're going to let the system render while you take some calls. That's fine, but you're not doing the work. And that's where I think it becomes a misnomer. And it actually undermines this whole concept of getting away from multitasking because we're talking about something else going on, but you're not actually doing it. So why even kid yourself that you're doing it, you're starting something off and running. This is delegation, you just happen to be delegating to an automated system. So I don't know, I think it's an unnecessary addition. And it clutters the concept.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:14Yeah, I think you could take the example of doing laundry while watching a television show. So there is a facilitated part here, which is that the washing machine and the dryer are going to do the bulk majority of the work but say that you're folding your clothes, or putting your clothes on hangers while watching the show. That's where you are in essence, you have your attention primarily on one activity where you're consuming something while still being able to do the other activity which is folding the clothes. I don't differentiate the fact that a machine is doing some level of the work like you said, you know, get video rendering and you go and do something else. You're still having to manage. If you're if you're managing the activity, then I consider you doing it. And so that's kind of how I've pieced those two pieces to So I, it's interesting because you're, you're differentiating that which is machine facilitated work. And that that you're managing and action based work that you're actually doing yourself manually. That's an interesting delineation.

Art Gelwicks 5:13See, but I would also challenge the the idea, the consuming example, because, to me, there's a difference between active and passive consuming. And if you are doing something like folding your laundry, you're passively consuming whatever it is that you know is on the TV, because for periods of time be ever they how short, you have to disconnect from that to make sure you actually fold the thing in front of you. So for that block of time, you're not engaged, you're not doing that other thing, which is that passive absorption of whatever's going on, you're not taking notes, you're not capturing details, you're not processing the information, it's just kind of floating in the background. So and I find myself doing the same thing, if I'm working on a project, and I decided, Oh, I'll play an audio book. While I'm doing this, too. It doesn't take me very long to recognize the fact that I'm getting very little value out of that audio book at that point, because I'm not focused on that. It's background, it's, yeah, I might absorb something, but it's not an effective use of the dual task. If I if I want value out of something, it requires focus. And that's, again, this is where I struggle with this a little bit, because it does make sense to me to take things that do not require my focus, and I do not need to drive personal engagement to get the value out of to some other things, whether mechanical, personal or otherwise, but simultaneously doing things. And it just flat out doesn't work. I mean, his definite, his reference to what he often we refer to as time slicing, you know, jumping back and forth between things, I think is a much more accurate representation of this. With that

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:49I'm gonna, I'm gonna snap us back to the beginning of the book, and start from the beginning of the book, which is, it is called The Myth of Multitasking. And we find fill in this narrative, where he is a productivity consultant. And he comes and meets Helen, the CEO of green garb. And as he is introduced to her, she is harried and dealing with multiple people in her office, and finally makes time to sit down with Phil, and then they are capable of having a conversation about her current time and task management. And what did you think let's just start at the very top of the chart in terms of multitasking, as he defined it, the idea of multitasking generally, how we've considered it and thought about it in society and work culture over the past several decades, because it is a fairly new invention. And we can kind of go from there. You know, there's a there's a story here. So let's stick to the narrative. And we can kind of make our way through the different pieces, perhaps. But what did you think about the presentation of the material of multitasking, and I'll just start with the fact that he basically posits that multit

This week, in continuing on our recent episodes about note-taking methods, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art are taking on a closely-related topic of personal knowledge management to discuss Zettelkasten. Don't know about Zettelkasten? Listen in and learn!

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/124 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 Personal Knowledge Management With Zettelkasten from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Personal Knowledge Management With Zettelkasten

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Personal Knowledge Management With Zettelkasten

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFZHuWLA09M

Zettelkasten

The Zettelkasten Method: Examples to help you get started.

Getting Started • Zettelkasten Method

OneNote

Evernote

Obsidian

Instapaper

Flipboard

Feedly

Pocket

Maker’s Schedule and Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham

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 0:23Francis 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. This week, we are going to step our toe into a little bit more of our note taking methodology topics that we were talking about earlier. And of course, that's going to get very muddy very soon. But we're interested in discussing the concept of zettelkasten. And today, what we're going to do is we're going to define the concept of zettelkasten, as best as we can, as the ProductivityCast team, and then talk about the ways in which people use zettelkasten in the in their own personal productivity methods and systems. And then talk a little bit about how you can maybe get started utilizing zettelkasten in your own work and life. And so let's start off with jumping into what is zettelkasten. And for those of you who are a little bit confused, it's ze TT ELKSTN. zettelkasten is a German word that means Slingbox, kind of like, think about the Dewey Decimal System in the old libraries, where you would put little cards into those little slip boxes. That's the the term that was used by this particular gentleman who developed the system. Art Do you want to give us a little bit of background on zettelkasten, where it came from, and then we can all kind of dive in and give our interpretations of what several caston is,

Art Gelwicks 1:44here's the nutshell version, the original premise. And unfortunately, I'm going to, I can't, I'm drawing a blank on the author's name, or the the writers name, but he's maybe a goose, or maybe Ray, you remember his name, very prolific writer, 400, articles, books, everything generated huge amounts of content. And he developed this system called zettelkasten, to allow him to organize all the knowledge he needed around these topics and all this research content. Now keep in mind, this was all pre digital tech. So he designed all this in an analog platform, basically index cards, and he would put a piece of information he learned or a quote, or a reference item on a card and have a specific index, a referencing number system to allow him to identify each one of those pieces. And then based on each one of those pieces, he's then able to go through and say, Okay, now how do these relate to each other? What are what are the concepts that are tied to this particular item. So let's say for example, I'm I don't know I'm writing a paper on flowers. And I find a reference piece of information about a particular type of flower, the zettelkasten, not only would have an index related to how this fits into my system, but also all the pieces that this is a flower, and this is maybe about pollination. And this is about location. The the core energy around this, if I can use the term energy is to create the relationships between the ideas, and in basically an old school method of hyperlinking. So that within each idea, you have those connections to the other ideas. So by being able to leverage those connections, you can find relationships between information and ideas that you normally would not recognize. And see. It's designed to handle a huge volume of information. And it's also designed to be very scalable. Its liability was always at the time. Because it was analog, it was it literally, and I can't again, I can't think of the guy's name. But if you look up one of his quotes he talked about that he always worked at in partnership with his zettelkasten. That's a big level of commitment for any system. I mean, if you're going to consider that system to be an equal to you, and whatever you're doing, adds a crazy level of commitment. With digital technology, it's easier to do the mechanical parts that were so prohibitive within zettelkasten to create the hyperlinks to create backlinks and the relationships within there to be able to do the search indexing around content to find those relationships between ideas. But it doesn't change the fact that this is something that really lends itself to pure knowledge management. I don't know that I would try to use a zettelkasten for task management or even managing a project. But if it's all the information around various topics, this becomes that kind of second brain type of approach and it doesn't have to be for just a topic. If you're working on say a thesis or something like that, you could use a zettelkasten to do that. But there's no classes designed to grow well beyond that. And its benefit comes from the fact that you may be putting content in there for your thesis. But you may also be putting content in there. From a series of articles, you're just randomly reading, and identify relationships between those things that you normally would not see, just because of how those hyperlinks are. I don't want to say organically created, but they develop on their own as they as you start to see the contextual relationships. I'm not doing the explanation of this justice, because it is a fairly complex thing to initially get set up. But at its core, thinking about dealing with those abstract pieces of information that we find very valuable in and of themselves. But we don't know what to do with and never truly realizing the the benefit of those interacting with each other. Well, that's where something like zettelkasten comes in.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:03Yeah, so the person you're probably thinking about was Nicholas lumen, or lumen in German. And so He's a sociologist, and quite prolific, as you noted. And so I really think about zettelkasten in terms of like capturing knowledge in ways that are purpose driven. One is reference. So I would consider that knowledge management. The other, of course, is being able to file then filter and find what I've consumed. And what I want to be able to remember from my readings, and that being able to help support me as I'm writing new material. And so you know, as I'm writing any longer term piece of material, I want to be able to capture and surface those items. So I think about the zettelkasten method from that perspective most frequently. And I think you've captured most of the pieces that I think would help to define what the zettelkasten method really does, and how it helps someone as a in their own system.

Art Gelwicks 6:56One point I did leave out and this is this was something that came up looking at it related to digital technology, is that one of the key things about zettelkasten is its small captures, we're not capturing like entire dissertations into the zettelkasten. These are all individual quotes, individual facts, individual items. And it's because they're small, they can relate to each other much more effectively than something that's large and comprehensive. It's a common question that you see, when people when you start to research implementing zettelkasten in a digital note taking tool, a lot of the feedback that you'll see as well, does it how well does it handle little notes. And that's exactly what we're talking about is the zettelkasten requires little notes. Most of our note taking tools are really designed around longer form notes. One note is a really common tool for using for zettelkasten. And that's one of the first questions is well, one note likes big notes, not necessarily little notes, but you can do that. So it's it's an important context to apply around it. When you think about a book you may be reading, you're pulling all those little things out. So the best example I can give you is if you would sit there and highlight something, that highlighted thing is a great candidate for zettelkasten card. Because that is an individual piece,...

Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art art starting a new "series" called Productivity Labs here on ProductivityCast. We're going to be discussing tools, methods and research we're experimenting with in our own personal productivity systems (even when they are not what we normally use) so we can report back to you what we've learned. This week, we're diving into how using the Bullet Journal method worked for us.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/123 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 the Bullet Journal method experiments 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 Labs, Methods Edition—Bullet Journal

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Productivity Labs, Methods Edition—Bullet Journal

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

Episode 035 - What Is the Bullet Journal?Episode 073 - Tailoring the Bullet JournalPatrick Rhone » The Dash/Plus System Going Further With Evernote masterclassAugusto referenced Anything But Idle, Episode 052, when discussing some research on taking notes on a laptop versus by handwriting notesGoodnotesEvernoteOneNoteOneNote Bullet Journal communityThe Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future by Ryder CarrollWorkflowyRocketbook notebooks

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:23I'm Augusto.

Francis Wade 0:23And I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:25I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:27Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, what we're doing is we are introducing a new I guess, we can call it a series in which we are going to be talking about different experiments, that is just discussing how we have each experimented with various methods and tools. Today is one of those methods discussions. And we're going to be talking about the bullet journal, we've of course, talked about the bullet journal in the past both what it is in Episode 35. And then again, we talked about really how you can tailor the bullet journal to your own needs. And episode 73. I'll put links to those in the show notes for us. dogfooding. A methodology when you're very used to another is very interesting. And I thought, well, we could do this more often, we could actually try these things out. And since art had had experience with the bullet journal already, I thought, well, let's put this together. And so good stone, I really started ideating. Well, let's do this with other methods over the course of time. And so that's really where productivity Labs was born from. And so let's get into it. Let's talk about the bullet journal in its most basic sense, because like I said, you can jump back to Episode 35, and go deep in to what the bullet journal method is. But let's do a an overview of the system itself. Then we'll talk about our own setup experiences, and then our own experiences actually using the bullet journal. So let's start with what is the bullet journal. And since we're going to consider you the resident expert, what is the bullet journal Just in brief for listeners, the bullet

Art Gelwicks 1:56journal itself, and I'm not going to do writer Carol justice with this, but I'm going to sum it up as best I can. It's a method of tracking activities and tracking notes on a running in daily basis. That is not tool specific. It is platform agnostic. So you can do bullet journaling. In a paper journal, you can do it on a digital pad, you can do it in most productivity applications. The design of it is supposed to be simplified, very simplified and very adaptable uses literally just that bullets and variations on bullets to help you keep track of the different things that you need to do. And we are making notations. There's a lot of detail that you can dig into it. But if you think about taking notes on a legal pad, and then adding some icons to it to make sure you can tell one from another, you're probably about a quarter of the way to a bullet journal at that

Augusto Pinaud 2:51point. For me, it's inevitable when I think on the bullet journal, and even with this exercise of the bullet journal, to think about Patrick Brown dodge Plus system and and we will put a link on on the notes because that's the first time I heard about the idea of not using something digital or not the first time but the first time I saw an implementation that seems robust enough, it really fits really well. Basically, the idea is that you use a dash and you can modify it, you know, they sit in the action is done, or you're waiting for delegates that data point or move. What I like about what I did was a bullet journal is that it's really I can see for certain people how this can be really useful. How can having everything in there, what kills me was a double entry that reentry they're recreating that part, I did not see a benefit on the cost benefit part of that in doing all that reentry. So even that my test was digital, and even that might test supposed to work really well. On the way I did it. I saw benefits. And I see a person who love paper on which brain works in a paper like base way can see a lot of benefits out of this. My concern was if doing this, you will skip the step of processing those notes. Because that's what I found online. You know that now that I can index me to process notes, that was a danger. Because there were things into that system that never made it out of that just because I knew where to find it on the index of that

Art Gelwicks 4:35you're bringing up probably one of the biggest weaknesses I consider in the system. It is not automation friendly. It is not designed or having any intention to leverage streamlining functionality that allows you to integrate if you're going to do this in a digital environment with other systems, tying it to task lists and things like that, and you have to go back to its original core Is that it, it is simplified enough that it can be applied everywhere. But because it is simplified enough, there's a lot of functionality that we would expect within productivity tools. That just doesn't exist because it's, it has to be able to be implemented anywhere. I mean, you could implement the bullet journal in Microsoft Word, you could implement it in Excel, you could implement it hack in a PowerPoint slide, if you wanted to. The concept carries over regardless of the platform. But just like you're saying, A Gousto. That means that labor part of it is on you. It's not on the tool that you're utilizing to manage that. I see that a lot. And I'll talk about the platform I've worked with it in. But there's a couple of different ways that it's commonly implemented on, on my platform. And they all struggle from that same problem is that lack of integrity when it comes to automation and streamlining functionality, and you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're going to be the one that cranks the widgets on this, you're going to be turning that handle, not some other system, or not some other tool rather

Augusto Pinaud 6:12well, and that brought my second shortcoming is how much this is really is a scalable, you know, I pick it for a particular project, not for my whole system. But even in this particular project. And it had been worked great the project start on March 1, it was a great way to do the test to collect the information to have all in one place. Even as the project is progressing, and the complexity and the pieces on the project has been adding, there has been more times that I'm that I've been feeling that it's slowing down the process instead of allowing me and it may be a part of automation, it may be a part of, I don't know exactly. But it felt multiple times that it was clear to me in week three, that this tool will not even be sufficient or sufficient for this project. Even that is not really complex one, it has a lot of input and reports. But it wasn't a complex one, and it was choking by week three.

Art Gelwicks 7:15Yeah, it's not a high velocity system, it's not, don't kid yourself, if you think you're going to do high velocity work through this kind of a system. Because it's not designed for that I wouldn't try and run a corporate project using a bullet journal. I however, would probably maintain all of my own notes about that project using a bullet journal structure, and emulate a lot of that functionality, because I have found that it is scalable at the individual level, it can go up and you can handle personal and professional within the same system and build it up. The one thing I have discovered, though, is you really you have to commit yourself to just using the system, you have to commit yourself to using your bullet journal and making it your trust

In this week’s ProductivityCast episode, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art voiced their thoughts on note-taking methodologies.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/122 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 note-taking methodologies from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Note-Taking Methodologies

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Note-Taking Methodologies

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

OneNote

Workflowy

Cornell Note-Taking Method

Mind Mapping

3 Best Note-Taking Methods

Common Note-taking Methods

7 Most Efficient Note Taking Methods

Evernote

FreeMind/Mind42

TheBrain

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 0:00Are 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 a goose open out 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 0:23And I'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 listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, what we're going to be doing is starting kind of an ongoing conversation we're going to have over the next few episodes on notetaking. And what I thought we would do today, what I thought we could have a conversation around is really the the note taking methodologies that we know of, and use and kind of go from there. So let's start off with some of the most popular note taking methods that are out there. And then we can kind of touch base on what we use, how we've used them in the past, and maybe some pointers in terms of how people can bridge the gap between the hybridization of notetaking, which is that people have to toggle between paper and digital so often today, even though they don't realize it because we get a lot of paper in our world. And we take digital notes many times, but yet we actually don't make them actionable. And I think there's this balance between making things, reference and action. And I'd like to have a conversation about that as well around these the baseline methods that I know of like outlining, the Cornell note taking method, there's mind mapping, there's just unstructured note taking. There are many other ways in which we can take note taking, where do you want to begin in terms of note taking methods that you know about, and you'd like to discuss?

Art Gelwicks 1:52Well, for me, it's a pretty straightforward one, I'm an outline guy. I love outlining, I use outlining that's, that is my fallback method, I find constantly doesn't matter what tool I'm using, I'll find myself creating outlines for organizing and moving through content. Mind Mapping is probably the counterpart in my mind to outlining, because it's that freeform structure, which outline limits a little bit, but I don't think, too, not to an extreme. But both, interestingly enough, translate just as well analog to digital, I can do them in both platforms. But also I found that they define the tools that I'm going to use. Because if I go into use a tool for note taking or try one out, if I don't have an easy ability to generate an outline in the tool, the tool is much less attractive to me, I have much less desire to use it. And even beyond that, to be able to get the content out of the outline to other tools, say from an outline into a word processing document, I have to be able to do that. So it still becomes that common denominator. It's the the one note taking method that I don't have to think about. It just naturally happens for me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:15So can you explain for listeners what you mean by outlining? What does the hierarchy of the content look like? How do you structure your outlining method?

Art Gelwicks 3:23It's it's interesting, because there are very formalized structures and outlining you can you can look up specific approaches to how to create outlines, numbering structures and things like that, for me, it's really just a matter of relevance of relationship of content to each other. And then creating a progressive structure. One of the problems with outlining that people will run into is, especially if you do it on the analog side. As you start to capture the outline, it feels like it's being locked into place, you know, you've created a top level topic, you've captured sub items underneath that topic. And you may have captured additional details under those sub items, and so on and so forth. When you're dealing with that on an analog platform, you know, if you're taking it on a legal pad, it can be challenging, because if you need to go back and put something in the middle of that, functionally and physically, that platform doesn't allow you to do that easily. On a digital platform. It's much easier, you can backtrack and you can interject it in. But what I find outlining is at its best is a way of providing context relevance between topics that you're dealing with, whether you're taking notes from a book, you're going through and capturing information during a meeting. You're planning out a project. It's a great way to provide that structure. For two methods that I use. One is lots of levels I Ness things deep. I mean I will drop things in I'll have a question and then underneath that I will address additional answers. If I have, there's a statement that's made, and I have my own thoughts about it, well, I'll drop in sub items under that, that show mine. Because that in the digital space gets coupled with collapsing and expanding, most good tools will give you the ability to collapse and expand an outline to its various different levels. And that gives you an ability to refocus your thinking, but also reorganize the content easily. If you look at tools, I use OneNote all the time. But there's another great one called workflowy, where you can collapse down to a top level topic and then move that around in your outline structure to reorganize it and get get your thinking more structured. So formal outlining methods, I think that's one of the things that scares people off from outlining is they think back to school, and they go, Okay, this is what I had to do. And I had to have a Roman numeral here. And I had to have numbers underneath and lowercase letters under. And that if I didn't have that structure, right, it wasn't correct. Now, that's a bunch of baloney. You can do whatever you want. You can do colored dots, you can do emojis, you can do numbers, you can do letters, you can do bullets, I'm a big one for doing bullets. If I have no reason to have a sequence for the things under an item, if there is a logical sequence, I'll use numbers or I'll use letters. But if there isn't a sequence, I just need to indicate that these are slightly different than the ones above it and the ones below it. So structurally, it's relatively simple. I mean, it's exactly what we define. We just can't overcomplicate it. And I think that's one of the hang ups with outlining is people get that PTSD from elementary school, or middle school, in this case, of trying to figure out how to structure it just right, you don't have to worry about that just write this stuff down,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:49I find that I, I spend most of my time using the outlining method, when I'm taking notes in meetings. If the content is highly structured, I find that outlining is best for me, because I can, you know, bullet, or 123 or Roman numeral one, number one, A, and I can follow the line of whatever that is that tends to be in an educational environment where I'm consistently taking an online course or I'm studying something online. And that gives me that conceptual framework for being able to follow and take notes along with those items, I tend to feel like this breaks down for me very quickly for being able to review and understand the notes when there isn't a structure or a flow to what is going on. So a meeting has an agenda, a seminar or workshop, the webinar or whatnot will have will have a syllabus, and I will be able to follow along with those things. If it doesn't have that, then that's where the outline method really breaks down for me. So just so that people have an idea that you know, you can, you can utilize or not utilize structure here, and that can be useful to you. Let's move on to mind mapping since art already brought it up. Mind Mapping is probably my favorite and preferred way of really capturing in general in a freeform fashion when it comes to brainstorming, or even sometimes collaboratively working with people so that they can structure their own thoughts. Many times people have difficulty structuring their thoughts. And so for those who don't know what a mind map is, a mind map is a freeform visual note taking method, whereby you create a parent thought, and that parent thought is usually in the center of a page....

In this week’s ProductivityCast episode, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art voiced their thoughts on note-taking—the value of note-taking, methods we use, and tips and tricks for taking notes in different contexts.

Note: I say that we're covering note-taking methodologies in this episode, but we will actually be discussing those in the next several episodes, so stay tuned.

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

If you'd like to continue discussing A Love Letter to Note-Taking, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | A Love Letter to Note-Taking

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | A Love Letter to Note-Taking

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

OneNote

Workflowy

Cornell Note-Taking Method

Mind Mapping

3 Best Note-Taking Methods

Common Note-taking Methods

7 Most Efficient Note Taking Methods

Evernote

FreeMind/Mind42

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 0:22 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 going to be talking about some fundamentals in the productivity world. And that is note taking. What I'd like us to do today is for us to talk about why we take notes that is we around the roundtable here at ProductivityCast, why we take notes, why maybe you should take notes. And then what I'd like for us to do is do a survey, kind of an overview of the top five or so, note taking methods that we know about and or use or have used in the past. And that will hopefully help you get a better understanding about how to take notes better. And so let's start off with why take notes. What is the what is the reason for taking notes, and I will step outside of that answer for just a moment to note that the note taking space, that is the industry around notes is roughly a billion dollar industry and is supposed to grow to about $1.3 billion by 2026. So in just under, you know half a decade, we're gonna see this explosion of the note taking software market, this is just in software, we're not even talking about paper planners, which is another multi, you know, billion dollar industry. And it's really interesting to see that note taking software is so popular, even though note taking itself is not the most sexy topic that people really think about when they think about productivity. It's just one of those things that kind of rests into the background. But it's something that I think all of us do, in some way, shape or form. And I'm curious why you take notes, what was the impetus for you to start taking notes? And why do you take notes? And what do you take notes of today?

Art Gelwicks 2:01Well, for me, it's pretty straightforward. It's because I can't remember everything. And it's for the things that I need to remember. And it will, when I think about notes, everything goes back to academic note taking we think about scholastic note taking and all that lovely note taking we had to do back then, but it carries forward. And part of the challenge that I run into with notes and note taking. And the reason why I'm doing it is now professionally, I do it for reference after the fact, again, things I can't remember and shouldn't be trying to remember. Secondly, it's for historical record of conversations and activities. And thirdly, and this is where I really struggle with a little bit. It's to provide context across different sets of notes, where discussions happen around different topics that are related to each other or similar to be able to go back and revisit those and say, Okay, well wait, maybe there's something else deeper here. But no taking in and of itself, I have yet to find a way that actually lends itself for that. I mean, there's other methodologies and things. But when you sit there during a call during a meeting, during your discussion, whatever, and you're just capturing stuff, you have to commit yourself to the fact that later on, you're either going to have to go back and rewrite this and reorganize it, or it's just going to sit there in a notebook or in a file or in the cloud somewhere. And you're probably never going to do anything with it. And

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:21I think that's one of the number one reasons why you would structure notes in and with a method so that you're able to actually identify what it is that is useful in and during some event that forces you to take notes whether that event is solo or with others.

Art Gelwicks 3:37Thanks. So also, I mean, the one thing I didn't call out there is a lot of times you take notes for other people, you take notes to share with other individuals. And that's almost even harder, because your structure and their structure may be completely unrelated. So they look at your notes and they go, What the heck is this mess, but you realize that you have all the context and the information you need. It's just the approach and how you visualize it is different now that

Augusto Pinaud 3:59you mentioned that I really feel bad for whoever need to look at my notes and reference. For me notes is a similar you know, it is my way to make sure that I understand what was discussed and more importantly for me, what are the projects and actions that come in out of that discussion. You know, as Art said, my my memory can't remember that not only that I learned many years ago that the mind is great for certain things, but not for that. So notes for me has has a simple process and it's a way to remember and I use markers through my notes so that way sometimes just the fact that I took the notes is enough and I don't need to go back other than to pull actions away. So I make sure that I mark I am a big proponent of the Cornell Method so that way I could pull actions out of that if I am doing it by myself and they used to be my maps and then the mind map same thing. I mark easily for me to just look without need the need of reading, I know what are the places that I need to go to pull it, I think

Francis Wade 5:05of note taking in sort of falling in three different buckets. One is for prospective memory, which is essentially next next actions, time demands, tasks, things that I need to do in the future. And I treat those very differently than I do notes that are for prospective member retrospective memories are, which is stuff that I'm trying to remember, and not forget, versus stuff that came into my awareness, I have no chance of remembering, but I need to retrieve at a later point. So I'm not trying to retrieve to remember, I'm actually storing it so that I can forget, forget, in the sense that I can't, I don't want to be able to retrieve it, I just want it to be available. So those three, those three notes may be mixed into the same page, but they're doing three different jobs. And from the moment and I treat them differently, I'll say

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:56that I started out my academic world with the idea that I didn't need to take notes, I really felt as though I was against the topic as a as a as a youth purely because I, I was brought up in in the mindset that you know, you're smart, and smart kids don't work hard, you should not need to work hard. And it was actually a really terrible cultural component, I think it still is, you know, when you tell children who are who are brighter than average, that they're smart, it tells them not to work hard. And so I would go through all kinds of sessions in school. And I would not take notes purely because I thought that I had to pay close attention. And only by paying close attention was I going to be able to recall everything. And remarkably, I just happen to have a very good memory. And so for many years that served me, and then scholastic duties expanded, and that started to fail. So I got my Trapper Keeper out and decided to use the note, you know, the notebook in it, for purposes of taking notes. And that's when I really started to feel like, wow, this is so simple. If I just take notes, then I can reference them again. And nobody cared. Nobody cared that I was taking notes. It wasn't like Johnny over my shoulder saying, oh, ravens taking notes, nobody cared. And, you know, that was, for some reason, there was this cultural component I just that I that I understood at a very young age. And for some reason, that made me not take notes. And going into the place where then I started to take notes, I recognize the value from that very early age that just that one twist of saying, Wait, I'm not capable of remembering everything that's happening in class, I can't remember all these signs, the teachers telling me, there was a point where I think probably in Bali, fifth or sixth grade, moving from elementary school to junior high school,...

The four-day workweek is lately in the news. Its promise is greater economic benefits for businesses and governments, and increased productivity for organization’s human resources. How should we think about this from a personal and business productivity perspective? Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art share their thoughts on the four-day workweek.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/120 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 Four-Day Workweek's Impact on 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 | Four-Day Workweek's Impact on Productivity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Four-Day Workweek's Impact on Productivity

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

The Day After Tomorrow: an Autonomy study on the 4 day week in the private sector

Related: The Five-Hour Workday: Live Differently, Unlock Productivity, and Find Happiness by Stephan Aarstol

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 0:24I'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 productivity cast. Today, we are going to be covering something that I think is quite kind of interesting, it will give us an opportunity to really think through something that we have just kind of taken for granted, it kind of sits in the background. And that is the workweek, how we structure our lives is so built on the routine around this structure of really the eight hour work day. And the concept that we work, a regular set of hours throughout our work week and our weekends being structured to be this space where we rest between work. And the reality is, is that much of it is a bit of a farce. We spend so much of our time thinking inside and outside of work when we're on so to speak. And yet at the same time, we don't really recognize the fact that we are always working in a way, whether that be being applied to life work or work work. There's kind of both of those pieces going on. And I'm really curious from the ProductivityCast team hear our thoughts around this. And what piqued this was that autonomy, which is a consultancy, based out of the UK, they put out a recent study that discusses the profitability of UK businesses, if they were to implement this four day working week concept. So that came to prominence in my own mind, we've talked about this on in on ProductivityCast In the past, and now the study came out. And in essence, it covered some really interesting and I think compelling arguments for the case of having a four day workweek. And so what I thought we would do is cover kind of the big ticket items that the study identified, and then talk about how we all view the four day workweek in the context of the US and other jurisdictions how they would really apply this, and whether it would work for individual productivity, and then what you all could do, say, to get started to test whether or not a four day workweek would really work for you. And so the report was called the day after tomorrow, and the name being named because of the COVID 19 pandemic. And of course, the fact that a lot of businesses have been in some form of shutdown and reopening and shutdown and reopening, and the impacts of how the four day workweek could benefit companies post pandemic. But anyway, it's called the day after tomorrow. The subtitle is stress tests, affordability and the roadmap to the four day workweek. This was published in December 2020. And I'll put a link to this study in the show notes. So you can have that autonomy, who's the author of the study, they're an independent think tank based in the UK and they provide necessary analyses, proposals and solutions with which to confront the changing reality of work today. And so that's really their whole goal is to help us flourish in the face of all of this change the in the summary of findings, I'm just going to note these I think these are useful, and then we'll get into the particulars. The summary of findings notes, we It says we provide a conservative worst case scenario for the impacts on profitability of a suddenly implemented four day workweek in the private sector. They also find that a four day workweek, with no loss of pay would be affordable for most firms once the initial phase of the COVID-19 crisis has passed. On the other hand, some firms in some industries would experience cashflow problems if changes were implemented too quickly. A four day workweek, with no loss of pay will most likely be implemented in the public sector before the private sector. And then public sector organizations could influence private sector businesses through procurement policy and other indirect routes. The process of changing expectations and behavioral norms could be sped up by the creation of a more of more bank holidays and the reintroduction of pro union legislation. Even if a four day work week in the private sector took longer than expected a four day work week in the public sector could support the UK long term recovery out of this particular pandemic. This particular crisis

Augusto Pinaud 4:26Well I think the first question is where is work happening and on what on how we define work you know it's work they actually meet the people is actually doing the report at what level we're talking I'm all for to certain roles to be a four day work week. You know, we if we think when we came with the idea of this or when they came with a CDL, five days 40 hours a week with the in implement on technology, efficiency, non technology. What we have gone is exactly the opposite way people must people in work in a lot more than those 40 hours a lot more than those five days. Even if you're talking public sectors, unless you are the person in the window, most likely you are working more than that. So I'm all all formed the question that I will have is, and and this is an American question, as an American culture is, are we ready to leave our addiction to work? Because the problem, when you look into the United States, specifically, there is some kind of an addiction to work, there is a badge of honor to say, Oh, I work 80 hours a week. You know, that doesn't happen in other cultures, you know, I make fun of some customers from Spain, and I make fun of them. Because, you know, we may be in the middle of a meeting, but it's time for a siesta. And that meeting need to stop, we hope to come back. And I remember when I begin working with them how difficult that concept was, for me thinking on the American way to work, you know, and how much they respect that hour. And that is a stop. And we continue after this yesterday, that was fine. When you go to other cultures, it is the same they have those rhythm that I have not found in, in the American working culture, you know, what I have found is let's see who can push harder. Let's see who can stay longer. Let's see who can work more, and is the exception to the rule. The companies who tend to work on those 40 hours a week.

Art Gelwicks 6:34Let me lay out some facts here because I actually did a little homework on this. Starting off the 40 Hour Workweek, I need to be clear about something we talked about the four day workweek, or a 32 hour workweek, because many cases, the four day work week is actually 14 hour days perceived. So you're not decreasing the number of hours, you're just compressing them into a shorter period of time during the week. That's a mixed bag. It's been documented as being a mixed bag, because anything more than eight hours has been shown to be not increasing productivity that goes back to the Henry Ford piece. But what's important to understand is where the 40 hour week came from, and it started well before Ford 1866, the National Labor Union asked for the eight hour work day It wasn't passed, but it started to increase public support. President Grant in 1869 was the first one to mandate eight hour work days for federal employees. And in 1886, the Illinois legislature mandated eight hour work days, this actually caused employer resistance resulting in worker strikes, including a bombing that killed 12 people, if you look up the Haymarket Riot of May 1, it's related to this whole thing. It goes from 1886, all the way up to 1926. Before we get Henry Ford included in this mix of popularizing the 40 Hour Workweek, and that's him saying, well, working more than eight hours, doesn't really benefit based on what he's seen. The Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, required overtime for all employees working more than 44 hours a week, but was then amended two years later to be 40 hours a week. And in 1940,...

In this week's episode, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art explain the concept of building a memory palace (a/k/a Method of Loci, or Journey Method) and then discuss its veracity in work and personal life, and some productive uses of the memory palace for someone starting out.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/119 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 building a memory palace from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Building a Memory Palace

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Building a Memory Palace

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

Method of loci

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6PoUg7jXsA

Raw Text Transcript

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

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:23 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to listeners to another, I think, action-packed episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we are going to be talking about something that goes by many names, but is all the same thing. We're going to be talking about the method of loci, also known as the memory palace method, or the Journey method. And what we're going to do today is really talk about its history. I just want to go through a little bit about what the history of the method of loci is, then we will talk about the method itself, how it actually operates, what are the functions of the method, the primary part of our conversation will then center on whether any of us have used the memory palace technique or the journey of method, technique, and what our experiences are with other kinds of mnemonics in either studies or at work. And then we'll close out with maybe some productive uses for you. And where you can apply the Journey method. Let's get into first, the history and the idea of the Journey method. The method of loci really started out in the concept of the ancient Greeks and Romans talking about the idea of memory, and how the brain really works, how the mind works. In this particular case, the, the ancient Greeks and Romans had a different perception or conception of where the mind lived. So we won't get into that. But in essence, it was used for memorizing everything when you studied in ancient Greece or ancient Rome, you were memorizing full treatises, and all of these things were required of you in order to be a learned individual, the mnemonic system known now as the Journey method, method of loci or the memory palace was developed. And so this is an very ancient concept. And so what I want to do is just cover what and how I understand the method. And then gentlemen, you can jump in with any questions that you might have. So the way in which I think about the Journey method is four distinct components. I use the acronym alles AI ls to remember it generally. And it stands for Association, imagery, location, and story. And the idea is, is that the more outlandish and connected pieces are in a specific location connected to a story, then the more likely we are to remember those things. And more importantly, in that order. And many people may know the Joshua force story. This is a guy who was not a memory, genius of any kind. But he decided to use this technique and won the World memory championship the following year, and he did a TED talk. And I'll post the Embed of the TED talk in the show notes. But in essence, he used the method of loci, he used this technique in order to be able to remember all of these cards in a deck and all these other memory, you know, tests that they put him through. And so the idea is, is that you come up with something that you want to remember, say it's a deck of cards. And in essence, that deck of cards becomes associated with something. So for example, you might decide that the the jack of hearts is a family member. Now this is something that you have an association with, and so therefore, it can be tied or anchored to something that you already know. And so generally, when we think about the method of loci, we're thinking about what are the things that we know what are the things that we're associated with so many memory champions, what they do is they take every letter in the alphabet, and they associated with a particular thing that they already know, a may or may stand in, as an apple. And now this leads us to the next point, which is that imagery, if we take that Jack of Hearts, and we're thinking about that family member, because maybe they look like the jack of hearts on the card. Now that creates a connection, but we also know have an image in our mind, we then placed them in a location and this is where the memory palace really comes into play and why they call it the memory palace or the mind palace, because you pick a spot in physical space, and then you recreate the journey, the story in that physical space. Now that physical space can be a very large place like the planet or the solar system, or the universe or a can be a desk literally just the space on your desk and you different you choose different points on the space on your desk. And so from there, you go through the process of telling the story of what happens to those things in that order. And by doing so you're able to remember all of the pieces. And as many people note, the more outlandish the story, the crazier the things are, the more novel It is to your brain, and therefore the the likelier that you will remember those components connected to each other. So through association or connection to things that you already know, imagery, placing them into physical locations, and then telling a story you're capable of combining. In this case, memory champions will sometimes can sometimes combine hundreds or 1000s of data points together in this method, and all they're doing is telling a story. And they're, they're telling themselves a story so that they can remember that story, as these pieces are being put in front of them. And what happens is, they can then speed up the process of memory for them. That's not particularly case for us. But for these folks who are in these memory championships, they are in essence, rapidly creating those stories by connecting those associated images, which are kind of pre populated in their mind, right? A is for apple, B is for boy, C is for cat, and so on and so forth. And now as soon as they see those components, they're capable of starting to tell that story. Oh, the Apple was picked up by the boy, the boy then saw a cat. Now, as I said, you want to make the story outlandish, you want to make it exciting and interesting. And that way your brain would be more likely to remember it. So you can say something like, you know, the Apple flew out of the sky and whacked the boy in the head, and the boy fell on top of the cat and the cat screeched, and, you know, and so on, and so forth. So you start to create these really provocative stories, these journeys of all of these connected data points. And when you see them in the locations, where they're supposed to be, that actually connects inside your mind to it maps it out, your mind maps out a physical physical location in that sense. So that's, in essence, the method of loci as best as I can kind of explain it. So from there, where do we go from here? What are the what are what are your experiences with either the method of loci or with other mnemonics that you've used, maybe in university or in other areas of your professional life,

Art Gelwicks 7:42this is a tough one for me, because I've never had any personal success with this. Mnemonics themselves have always been a struggle point, much less, you know, apples and houses with Uncle Bob. I mean, I, it almost to me feels like more work to try and remember this stuff than less because now I got to remember all this other stuff. And remember the story along with this other thing that I hope will help me remember, I've I have to admit, I really struggled with even where to start with this I've used. There are some mnemonics that I use. But even those take a lot of work to get to that point where they become second nature and their recall. I mean, it sounds great. It sounds like it would be fantastic to be able to just recall stuff like that. But I don't know, it just sounds like a really heavy lift to me.

Francis Wade 8:39I have used mnemonic, well, I can't say I use them, like I invented them. But I still remember the ones that was taught when I was a kid. So aren't that wondering if there's not some age component, that after you get past a particular point, the effort it takes to embedding a mnemonic is significant, but teach a kid a mnemonic, and they'll have it for life. You know,...

In this week's episode, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art gathered round the microphones to discuss what they noticed happening in the world of personal productivity, and then what their plans are for next year (in terms of their own systems and other work they are doing).

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/118 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 2021 in Review, 2022 in Preview from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | 2021 in Review, 2022 in Preview

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | 2021 in Review, 2022 in Preview

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

ClickUpZoomGoogle MeetApple FaceTimeProductivity unicorns like ClickUp face off in competitive market What the future of work means for productivity tools - ProtocolEvernoteGoodnotesZapierIFTTT

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

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

Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:25And 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 doing a year in review and a year in preview for personal productivity, both in the world of productivity and in our systems. So we're just going to cover some of the notable things that we kind of noticed this particular year. And it was a kind of an odd year, considering we've been dealing with the pandemic over the past two years. And so we're gonna highlight some of the notable items there. We're then going to talk a little bit about the things that we think happened, notably in our own personal productivity systems, or kind of in our world, and then what would like to what we'd like to happen again, the good things, and what we'd like to be different the areas of improvement, so to speak. And then we'll talk a little bit about what we're planning for 2022. For those of you who kind of follow it, pay attention to what we're doing out there in the world, you can kind of see and follow along with us as we make these kinds of implementations into our own worlds. And so let's start off with what were the kind of notable productivity events of 2021. What were the things that you really noticed in the personal productivity world that happened?

Art Gelwicks 1:37I mean, I think the biggest things that everybody is knee deep in right now and have truly recognized that wasn't necessarily new in 2021. But it became part of our norm is the understanding that the office as we used to know it has changed working from home hybrid from work, full remote work, whatever you want to call it, is here, and it's not going anywhere, it's no longer just a perk, it's no longer just a fun thing that you occasionally get to do this, this is a part of the new norm and will not be going away. And from a personal productivity standpoint, it changes the dynamic for us, because now, we don't have that clear dividing line of getting up driving, you know, commuting into an office working at a different location, and then coming back home. And having that separation for if you had that separation at all to start with. Now that's completely gone, because now work is in your house. So I think the impact of that in 2021 is forcing us not only personally and professionally, but on a deep individual level, to rethink what productivity really means to us to avoid overwhelm to avoid burnout, to really have a sense as to this is what is important to me. Do you think

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:05that that means that for the for the vast majority of people who still do need to go into an office environment, and there are still going to be people who need to do that? There's no question plus the folks who want to? And does that mean that we all have to be, in essence, like road warriors, we have to understand how to use our mobile technology better. What has this year really taught us about the fact that because if every organization in some way, shape or form is hybrid, and work is happening in different locations at different times, how do we how do we deal with that switch context happening across an entire organization?

Art Gelwicks 3:44See, I think this is one of those situations where the inflammation workers are getting a little dose of reality. Because if you think about most professions, let's say for example, a carpenter or a plumber or something like that, they will go to a job site, they will take their tools with them, they will go they will do their work, they will work as long as they need to they will come back but that's not their office as per se, information workers, especially in a corporate environment have gotten spoiled to say Oh, I will come in My computer will be there, it will be set up for me my desk will be there. They'll give me a nice office chair. And it doesn't have to be that way. And it isn't that way anymore. Those of us who have worked remotely or or worked in environments where we go to client sites and things like that we're used to going in with everything in our world in our backpack or our computer bag and setting up and working and leaving. So there's no harm in that. There's no harm and getting comfortable with that type of a road warrior mentality, not so much to the degree of Oh, everything has to be you know, maximum in functionality minimum inside but we have to be thinking about flexibility. And we have to also take responsibility, because we are now responsible for a lot of this stuff. It is not going to come and set stuff up Your house for you, you become truly responsible for things like your internet connection, getting your mouse working those types of things. And it's just, it's gonna sound a little harsh, but this is when people actually have to grow up about this stuff. Especially professionals.

Augusto Pinaud 5:19And yes, I'm laughing as you say they need to grow up because they should have grown up many, many years ago, but, but he's true. And all in those lines, yes. Now you're going to be but it's even more complex and deep like that, you know, you are seeing on manufacturing now that the production workers, okay, that's those people who is in the line who, okay, who has been traditionally they still need to go into the office, okay, they need to manage production, they need to help with all that are asking HR, okay, why they other people can be hybrid? And we cannot, how can we get our schedules more human? Because normally you have, you know, three shifts, you know, that shift in the morning, a shift in the midday the shift in the night. And the shift on the night for most people is like the worst shift the punishment shift. And now they're asking, well, how we can make it better, because otherwise, we are going to start looking for other solutions. And as you said, people is discovering, okay, now I don't have that it to help me connect my computer and fix it. And they are need to go out of their comfort zone. And that is on every level, we're not talking about the entry level guy, we're talking about the VPs, and the high level on the food chain, given on some of them, they still can call they it may not come but may remotely login into their computer, and help them fix. But it is a problem that we are seeing every day. The good news with all this is that most people experience what they quote unquote geeks has experience for years, in software, in teamwork in how to make these things more effectively into No, we don't need to sit into that conference room for two hours, we can make it in 15 minutes in a zoom call or a Google me or a Google or, or a teams. And that I think it's showing a lot of people in that corporate world that it can be done better. Now we are going to come for a long period of resistance, you know what we are been listening Oh, the big quitting thing that is coming? Well, that is part of the resistance. And he's the resistance of the old school saying we are not going to make the change. And the new younger generations are or geeks in this case, coming and saying, Well, if you don't change we're leaving. And that is going to be a really or make for a really interesting thing. In the year to come,

Francis Wade 7:58the pathway to be more productive, is going to be more clear, because we're online. The fact that we're online means that now we can actually we must actually measure certain things not most, but the software we're using is going to start telling us, it's going to start giving us analytics about our productivity. You know, for example, at some point in time, Google meats and zoom will start to give you back analytics that tell you how well the meetings are being run. At some point,...

A few times per year, the ProductivityCast team comes together to share with you a few software products and/or services that we know/use in our personal productivity systems, or with our client’s systems. We call this series Productivity App-apalooza, and do this in three rounds, with each of us taking the opportunity to explain the tool and why we believe it provides value to our productivity (and possibly yours). With that, here’s Productivity App-apalooza, Fourth Edition!

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/117 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 App-apalooza! Fourth Edition 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 App-apalooza! Fourth Edition

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Productivity App-apalooza! Fourth Edition

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

Round 1

Art - Journey (Journey: Diary, Journal - Apps on Google Play)

Augusto - Overcast

Francis - SavemyTime

Toggl TrackRescueTime

Ray - Google Forms

Round 2

Art - Fleksy (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.syntellia.fleksy.keyboard)

Gboard

Augusto - MindNode & Mind42

SimpleMind, Mindjet (now known as MindManager)

Francis - ZenniOptical

Ray - FancyHands(Sign up with this link and get 50% off your first month or 5% off your first year.)

Round 3

Art - Mighty Networks

Personal Productivity ClubMighty Taskers

Augusto - Day One Journal

Francis - Google Authenticator

Ray - Asana

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 gousto been out 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. And I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade, and I'm Art Gelwicks. Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode, we are going to do something fun a few times per year, the ProductivityCast team comes together to share with you a few software products and services that we know or use in our personal productivity systems or with our clients systems. We call these productivity Apple Palooza. And we do this in three rounds, with each of us taking the opportunity to explain the tool to explain the tool and why we believe it provides value to our productivity and possibly yours. With that, here's productivity APA Palooza fourth edition. And so for round one, ding, ding ding art Europe. Geez, why do I have to start? Okay, it's alphabetical. See, this is the curse of being the A. So anyway, sorry, gousto.

Art Gelwicks 1:13When we started to look at APA Palooza round four, I'm like, oh, okay, I gotta find something that's good. And I realized that I have something that I use all the time. It's called journey. And it is a journaling app. Now a lot of people will do journaling in whatever their organization organizational tool that they have is some do one note, some do notion, I use journeys, for a couple of reasons. One, it's available on the web, and on mobile, so you can journal into it whenever you want. Second, you can do images into it as well stacked multiple images. And third, it has its own PIN code so that your information is protected. And that's one of the struggles with journaling is if you want to be honest with yourself in journaling, you want to be truly honest and open well, then you're hesitant like Well, where's this stuff going, who's gonna see it, where's the access to it. And I just like the user experience, the consistency, the availability of the app on multiple platforms, it's just a nice way if you're trying to do that mental dump.

And it's not really organization, it's just get this out for the day, I found that's probably the best tool out there. For me, there's a couple others de one's another one didn't really care for it. But journey to me is the one that I recommend.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:32I use journey also. And I do that first. And then I just copy and paste that over to my reference system. And so I keep it in both places. And it's a little bit of extra work. And I've thought about how to automate that using some scripting. And I really do like journey. I like the ability for it to on mobile, especially auto detects whether you're sitting whether you're walking around and being able to capture capture in those multiple opportunities when you are alone and or just have thoughts and you want to be able to share them with yourself. So I really like journey. All right, next up lagu. So the first app that I have is overcast. And you know as a person, as you're listening to us into a podcast, you may have played with one or two other cast has been the software I've been using on on my iOS for for a really long time. And I like the fact that I can not only download the episode, but create smart list of the things that I want to have priority as well as increase the speed, as well as decide you know what, for this podcast, download every episode, but for these other podcasts download only the last one. So it gives me a lot of customization power. So it's a piece of software that I have really, really enjoyed for a long time. You have not played as much with overcast. The name of the developer Mark are hermant are meant Yes, he's he's very active in that podcasting space. And probably other there are other things that he does in in the space. But yeah, I think that overcast is great. And a lot of people of course, talk about pocket casts. I still am actually really big fan since transitioning over to Google podcasts, and the Google podcasts app and just really does everything I want a podcast app to do. And it's exciting to see that the space is expanding to have so many other podcast applications that you can use and do different things. I've seen ones that capture audio clips, so you can note, annotate the audio clips of a podcast and share those with friends and family. I think there's some really good things happening in the podcast space. Wonderful. overcast is a great option. Francis, your next.

Francis Wade 4:50So my first app is called save my time. And it's an innovative solution for people who track their time and I've always tracked my time and there are things out there.

toggle and other kind of manual methods for rescue time trying to track how you spend your time. But this one has a difference. It's tied into the your you're not your screensaver. But when you turn your device back on, what turned my phone back on, it immediately pops up. How did you spend the last X number of minutes since the last update, and so you can't avoid it. And it offers you a set number of options to choose from nice diagrams. And you can add any other number of categories of ways you can spend your time. So it's unavoidable. Because you're turning on or off, you're on and off your phone all day long. You can signal when you're about to change and move into a different context, or a different

activity by just simply put the tie in between the natural behavior of turning on your phone. And the artificial behavior of tracking your time. Then they call it habit stacking is brilliant. So I've kept the best notes. And I've been time tracking since I think the 90s, late 90s one time. But the quality of my time tracking has all of a sudden gone through because I'm able to not quite passively. But I'm able to trigger the capture of my spent time in this very intuitive way. It just it's just brilliant. Is it mobile only. I haven't tried it on on PC or laptop. But I went through a website and I only pay attention to the mobile version. So I think so

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:45great. And it looks like it's about $3 USD per month billed annually, or $5, USD billed monthly, if you stay monthly. And otherwise, you can do the free version, which gives you up to nine activities, what are activities over the different

Francis Wade 7:03categories that you assign your time to?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:06Great. And then it allows for what it calls limited history. I don't know what that limited history is, you know, the limited history is. Okay. And so professional gives you data expert export, calendar integration and a custom date picker if you upgrade to the paid plan versus the the free plan. And so

Francis Wade 7:28that's great I upgrade. Because I was I immediately saw the time savings because I spend for me to reconstruct my the last few days or weeks, which is sometimes what happens because I haven't it takes me a long time after go the screenshots, I've had to go to the manic time, which tracks the app usage and I have to reconstruct, it's like a small adventure. I can't remember half of it. Yeah, it's it's forensic and nature

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:57awful. But this is, I've already started to rebuild some of the things that I've tracked using the app that of course, I'm way more detail. This is,...