ProductivityCast

Back when smartphones first came out, some (including Francis) asked the question: is a smartphone superior to a knapsack full of gadgets? For example, was a sack with a camera, pda, phone a functional equivalent?  If so, did it offer more than convenience? Was there a real improvement in productivity?

Since then, the question has been answered by apps which rely and interact with multiple other apps, but the question is still valid. Just because a technology allows something to be done more easily or conveniently, may not mean that it allows for a bona fide improvement in personal productivity. What does a material productivity improvement look like? How can it be measured?

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/116 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 Convenience: Personal Productivity Enabler, or Not?, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Convenience: Personal Productivity Enabler, or Not?

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Convenience: Personal Productivity Enabler, or Not?

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vQVofN3YIY

How I'm Getting a Smartphone, While Avoiding Crazy Habits

Do You Need New GTD Contexts?. Or do you need to stop using them… | by Francis Wade | 2Time Labs

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.

Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. And in this episode, I'm going to turn it over to Francis to lead us into the conversation. Francis, you had a topic that you wanted us to talk about related to convenience. And so can you explain to listeners your experience and what we're going to talk about today?

Francis Wade 0:46Sure. I'm a I was a late adopter to smartphones. I didn't have one for a long time. And everyone was raving about how great they were. And I asked the question, why do I need a smartphone. And my initial observation was that the smartphones at the time, which was the early 2000s, mid 2000s, I argued that they were no better than a knapsack of gadgets. So if I had a knapsack with me, and I carried it everywhere, and it had a phone, PDA, GPS, a recording device to record audio, and record and a video camera, the smartphone, which combined those elements into one, my argument was that that wasn't more productive than my knapsack of gadgets. It was more convenient. And just because they were no bundled into a single device, did not make people more productive against capital P productive, although the convenience could not be argued with. So all the time that the argument was resolved, because there were lots of apps that came out in doo, doo, doo doo time that that had multiple connections between the different functions that never existed before. So that that that question was settled, in my mind. But I still sort of retained this kind of Luddite point of view, which is just because you can do something in a in a place or a time that is new to you. Does that mean that you're more productive? And the example I use is texting with texting and driving? Just because you can text while you're driving? Does that mean that you're more productive? Clearly, it's a convenience. But I think that today, back then the question was kind of up for up for grabs, but today we settled it. texting while driving is a dangerous convenience. So if we have a dangerous convenience, then surely we must have conveniences that don't add productivity, if we can go all the way to danger. Well, we don't have to go that far to say are their apps are the capabilities are that technology is being created today, which are only really about a mile, the convenience, but they don't really add to our productivity. And in fact, they could take away Take away from it.

Augusto Pinaud 3:19I think there is an important distinction to make in here, even before you can get to the discussion between productivity and convenience. And one is, is the activity that you're talking, putting in danger, you know, security or bring danger yourself but endanger others? And is this legal and legal or not. So after you pass that and i and i agree texting, we don't need any more proof how dangerous can be so so that that is not we cannot even get to the discussion, productivity convenience, because it will be a stop on the first filter that is is this putting you and others in danger? And the answer will be just that set. When you can pass those you know it's not illegal, it's not dangerous. Then now I want to quote there's a photographer called Chase Jarvis, who said something on the lines of the best camera is the one that you have with you. It's not about convenience, it's it or that's where the convenience and that productivity line gets really blurry. You know when you're discussing this You make me think on many months back before the first iPad was released and I carry with me, I really heavy back I was traveling 80 90% of the time. So I carry with me among other things, I scanner to laptops, chargers, Wi Fi router cables and a bunch of other stuff again, in a really, really heavy bag and when The smartphone came, what produce for me was the ability to start leaving some of the things behind for,

for a device that not only was going to be on my pocket, but that was going to make me even more productive. Why? Why more productive, because now I could act regardless where I was, you know, I, I remember having on my Palm Pilot, okay, so even before smartphones, the folding keyboard, why because that gave me the equivalent of a word processor and basic, I get it, it was a super basic spreadsheet, but that allow me to work basically anywhere that I could find some kind, some kind of flat surface, and I could work I could write, I could. And I was going to college in that time. So I could take notes there, typing the notes that that was the one of the first productivity things I remember, for me was that Palm Pilot with that keyboard, I went to law school, I was a paralegal. So getting into the court to take the notes, take the documents that I want to take the screenshots on a camera, I carry palmpilot on a camera and the keyboard and being able to type that directly instead of in a notebook, and allow me to get to the office and basically fire those notes, maybe do a quick review on fire those notes save me in average, comparing to the other paralegals of the firm between 45 minutes or an hour and a half. Because there was a limited access to computers, we tend to forget though things but I remember we were eight paralegals and two computers. So you need to sit in there and wait for the others to do that, while they were fighting for who was going to get that computer, I could do all that on my Palm Pilot and just ask them to synchronize and fire it was fantastic. So that I think it's really, really important. It was convenient, of course, it was convenient, but also make me incredibly more productive. As I begin to substitute things. With that technology, you know, came the first Palm Pilot didn't have a camera came the second one who finally had the camera, so or didn't have a front camera, they did have a camera. So I couldn't start taking all those pictures. So that means scanner out. Now I needed to find a software solution. So I could do those things. But although things were replaced, and there is a video somebody make, and I'm happy to find the notes that something on the lines of 30 years of evolution of technology, and you start seeing a desk full of stuff, and you end up with one little device. Is that convenient? Of course it is convenient, is that making people more productive? Of course, it's making people more productive, because now Jude doesn't depend on that, you know, recently you, Francis wrote an article about our we need new context. And as I read that, it made me think on the old context, you know, our office at phone, you know, at phone is a context that unless identity, it's it's a context that die, why because all of us carry a phone in our pocket, the iPhone, you may need to record the Android, whatever, you may not want to make the phone call, you may want it to do it in your office for other reasons, but not because you now are tied up to okay when I get back to home or when I get back to the office. So those contexts, you know, are evolving, same thing with connected to the internet. If we go back to that time you were talking Yeah, connected to the internet had a bunch of conditions that need to be met for you to do it. Today, we are connected almost anywhere. It is convenient....

Today we are discussing about Voice Productivity. the ProductivityCast team explains how to use Voice on our devices and technology to be more effective and productive. We have in the past We discussed voice assistants in episode 071 (Personal Outsourcing) and episode 086 (IoT Productivity).

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/115

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 Voice 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 | Voice Productivity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Voice Productivity

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

Brain.fm

Coffitivity

Gboard (Gboard on iOS)

Google Voice

Why time passage is longer or shorter at different ages

Reminders Pro

Narro

Active Words 4

Raw Text Transcript | Voice Productivity

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

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26

Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode. Today, we are going to be talking about voice productivity. And before the show started, we were talking about other things. And Arthur C. Clarke came up and I thought it was really interesting. So I'm going to start us off with this, which is Arthur C. Clarke is the British science fiction author. And he had these three laws that he talked about, of course, it's third laws, most known but I thought it was interesting for us to start off with kind of the other two, which is the first law of Clarke is that when a distinguished but elderly scientists, states that something is possible. He's almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Number two is the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible, great for a science science fiction writer. Hmm. And then his third law, which is his most well known law, and the one that I want us to kind of kick off from is any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It really conjured up something really interesting about voice productivity, which is that just a few 100 years, there are people who would have you know, kind of been burned at the stake as as sorcerers and witches and whatnot for some of the things that we can now do without ever physically touching anything. And it's just remarkable that voice productivity has taken us there, we have this ability to use audio, both for input and output to be more productive. And I just I find it very fascinating. And I'm looking forward to this discussion. Now, in episodes 71. We discussed a little bit about this in the personal outsourcing episode. So if you haven't listened to that episode, head over jet ProductivityCast dotnet forward slash 071, you'll be able to listen to the personal outsourcing episode, we also actually touched a little bit on this in the IoT productivity episode, which was Episode 86. So if you go to productivity cast dotnet, forward slash 086, you'll be also capable of listening back to that episode. So feel free to listen to those episodes in tandem with this, because there is some other material there as well. But we were talking about this episode, Augusto and I have talking about it. And, you know, the reality is, is that audio productivity predates and goes well beyond what we know today in terms of voice assistants. But we have so much around audio voice productivity that I wanted to kind of have this discussion. And then Augusto brought up this other really interesting, unique use case of this did you want to tell us a little bit about how that came to be. And then we'll get into the conversation,

Augusto Pinaud 3:01

of course, and this happened to me working with a new client. It's a new client that I'm coaching. And as we were looking into his personal productivity, we got to the keyboard. And when I publish 25 tips for productivity, one of the things that I said is learn to type, you know, typing when you spend your days, in the computer, the keyboard is your bottleneck, and the fastest you can type and the more you know certain things in a computer, the better you can use that computer. So when we test the speed typing speed of this client, it was really, really slow. So I told him, we need to get you a software to learn to type so we can get your speed up. So you can really be more productive at this to what the client answer. I'm not. To my surprise, what do you mean, you know, I'm not learning to type. So we need to find a different way. So we begin looking into the audio way and see if I could get this client to use the audio commands on his devices. So that way instead of typing the emails, he can dictate the emails. And that's how this episode came. Not only that it was really interesting for me, because as much as he's improvement in productivity came almost instantly he went from 2520 to 25 words per minute, to be able to dictate between 100 and 120. Not only that he now for the first time Feel free to do these emails to dictate this and it's really changing productivity in a way that I didn't envision. I my response has always been learn to type. You know, let me give you this tool. Let me teach you and I still think there is an incredible value into learning to type better and to type faster. But I have never considered the difference in the speed of that mostly because I, I personally have a privacy issue when I dictate, you know, everybody can hear everybody. And that doesn't necessarily appeal to me. But I understand that it's not a concern for you. Now you can go and type emails and do these things and really improve your speed and many other things. So I've been looking into this in the last week and a half or two weeks into how can you improve and really change things when we talk about this typing and input typing and everything else.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:40

So what I'd like us to do is to kind of have this conversation in three parts, we're going to talk about what are the ways we know voice and audio productivity can be used, productivity tools and workflows can be used. And then we'll talk a little bit about how we currently use voice or audio productivity technologies in our own productive systems, productivity systems. And then for you listeners, we can kind of close out with ways that you can get started with voice or audio productivity. And if you are already using these tools, then maybe how we would recommend leveling up in that space, what are some of the ways in which you can do more with some of these productivity tools, where you can get input and output by audio, and be more productive with it. So let's get started with what are the ways in which we can currently be productive. Using voice and audio,

Francis Wade 6:38

I don't use a lot of audio. So the little bit that I use, in terms of productivity, is I so I produce a column for the newspapers on the topic of productivity every two weeks. And I've done it for about 10 years or so. And one of the one of the techniques I use is that once I've gotten to almost the final draft, or it's been vetted by my colleague and wife, I actually record it. And the reason I record reason I recorded is not for the recording or didn't start off that way. But it started off as an attempt to even though the bumps in the manuscripts were 100 words. And so every two weeks, I reread over the article I've just written. And what I'm listening for is where the the grammar is a little tricky. The words don't flow, where I'm repeating words anywhere I could make improvements. And I started out doing that just for myself, just listen to how I could improve the text. And then I decided, why not why not recorded just for the heck of it. And then at some point later on, so why not publish it? for the heck of it. So I turned it into a podcast. But the the major, the major productivity improvement is, yes, it's cool to have the podcast. But it's the reading overload and capturing it on video and hearing my voice as I'm reading it, because it helps me to write become a better writer. I did that for my book as well. I read every chapter and then tried to listen to where things weren't making sense or where I was getting into problems. But that's one of the it's this. This is one that's been recommended for years. But it's a bit of it used to be a bit of a pain in the ass to do it's become easier.

Art Gelwicks 8:30

It's interesting, Francis, because I do something that's kind of the exact opposite in process. I use Microsoft Word Online and their dictate function when I'm going to script,...

Using the Eisenhower Matrix Productivity Method

Longtime productivity technique, Eisenhower Method, is often tied to the myth of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After all, it’s named after him! But, there’s much more to the prioritization method than meets the eye. In this episode, the ProductivityCast team explains the Eisenhower Matrix (or more aptly, the Merrill-Covey Matrix) and analyzes the use cases for the time-tested tool.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/114 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 How Is It Important But Not Urgent?!: Using the Eisenhower Matrix Productivity Method from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Using the Eisenhower Matrix

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

https://youtu.be/tT89OZ7TNwc

How to be More Productive by Using the “Eisenhower Box”Avoid the "Urgency Trap" with the Eisenhower Matrix TodoistRemember the Milk

Raw Text Transcript | Using the Eisenhower Matrix

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.

Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. Today, we are going to be talking about what is colloquially known as the Eisenhower method or the Eisenhower matrix. And what I wanted us to do is to cover kind of the origin and the outline of what the Eisenhower matrix is. So we all have a better understanding of it. There's a little bit of mythology around the Eisenhower matrix and the methodology underpinning it, then we're going to talk about our experiences with the Eisenhower matrix and how matrices generally can help us be more productive. And then talking a little bit about when and why you should use it. Where are the contexts in which the Eisenhower matrix can work? And then, of course, how we can blend it with other methodologies, productivity methodologies that we all use in our own productive worlds. So let's start out with what the Eisenhower matrix or what the Eisenhower method is. I'll start with the fact that in 1954, former US President Dwight D, Eisenhower quoting someone else, he was actually quoting Dr. Roscoe Miller, who was the president of Northwestern University. And so he was speaking to the second assembly of the World Council of Churches, it turns out and he was he is quoted as quoting Dr. Miller as saying, quote, I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important, the urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent and quote, this has come to be known as the Eisenhower principle or the Eisenhower matrix. Many people have then mythologized that somehow Eisenhower had developed this whole entire methodology around it. But the reality is, is that his importance and urgency construct was was taken from someone else. And while Eisenhower himself was a great time management afficionado, someone who really paid attention to how he used his time and had many other principles that he abided by, he was not the progenitor of any specific methodology, but it is what we come we have come to known as the Eisenhower matrix, that takes us forward to the concepts behind the Merrill covey matrix. And a lot of people don't know this, but Dr. Stephen Covey had been doing work with Rebecca Merrill and Roger Merrill. And the three of them combined, ended up creating what is now known as the Merrill covey matrix, which is the matrix that most of us know in the view of the four quadrants, and what pieces fit into those four quadrants, and in in the form of importance and urgency, we'll cover that shortly. But just understand that there's been a long arc of progression of people's thoughts around what the Eisenhower matrix is, and ultimately, what became the middle covey matrix and how we actually see that in much of the productivity Literature Today, and a lot of people get this wrong. And so I just wanted to kind of, at least point that piece out in terms of its history, so that we're all understanding the fact that everything between Eisenhower quoting Dr. Miller and any piece of productivity material that has been seen pretty much after the meril covey matrix was published and First things first, and other materials that covey and the Merrill's put out if they are interpretations of the concept of other people,

Art Gelwicks 4:08I mean, it breaks down the old, important, urgent, not important, not urgent analysis of being able to prioritize things. Therefore, something is important and urgent, you should go ahead and do it. It's important and not urgent, you're supposed to schedule it. If you're if it's not important, but it is urgent, you delegate it. And if it's not important, not in urgent, you just kind of put it in the trash can. The methodology is, this is about as close to common sense, as I think we see in the productivity space. These are the logical things, if it's really important that something gets done, you have to prioritize it. If it's really urgent that something gets done, it has to be prioritized. If it's neither one of those things, why you're wasting your time on it. So I get that stuff. I struggle a little bit with one of the categories Which we can talk about a little bit later on. But at the highest level, what I just outlined, that's, that's the question criteria that you apply to tasks and, and anything else, you're really trying to reprioritize to determine where actions are where and when action should take place.

Francis Wade 5:18When the matrix is a, from my point of view is a clever, a clever after the fact analysis of something that's already happened, which is that we create tasks in our mind. There are psychological objects and the moment of creation, we implicitly have a sense of whether something is urgent, not urgent, important or not important, it's might say it's subconscious. But it comes into existence in the moment that we create the task in our minds. So the matrix is, is a, like I said, a clever way to capture a decision that we've already made or a notion that we've already created. It's a way of making external, something that we already internally know. Making it external makes it easier to manage. And I think that's the genius of it, if any,

Augusto Pinaud 6:09as much as the matrix, I believe, had incredible things. And I agree with what Art said, it sounds really, really simple. I think people tend to struggle with the concept of urgent and unimportant and covey did a really good job, trying to discover and identify, you know, what really important means what really urgent being, so it makes more sense in the matrix. But I think still, people struggle with those two concepts and really making them work for them.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:47Just some other like small pieces here. So that we have a little bit of clarity in terms of what the Eisenhower matrix really can do, or what the methodology can do. All told. So the matrix is a visual device meant to be able to put particular items in a priority for you to be able to determine whether or not you do that thing. And so if urgency runs across the y axis, and importance runs across the x axis, then what you decide to do make a decision on delegate or delete ends up being those four DS ended up falling into those categories, in in the eyes of most people who talk about the Eisenhower matrix. So then it furthers beyond the visual device to then kind of this full methodology, you can use this for planning your week, you can use this for how to spend your time this, you know, the next three hours today, that kind of thing. And it can also help you plan the things into the future. So you can say, how should I spend my next year? How should I spend my next quarter, whatever it might be. So this tool is just basically a prioritization matrix that allows you to be able to look at almost any type of time horizon and decide things. Now, let's think about it from the perspective that we all now have a basic understanding of the Eisenhower matrix, Eisenhower method, and I'm curious about each of our experiences with utilizing the Eisenhower matrix. And whether or not it has borne fruit for you in and around your productivity system. What has been your experience

Art Gelwicks 8:31with it? The matrix itself is a good basic level tool. I use it to help people understand core concepts around prioritization. But honestly, in its daily use, it's got a lot of flaws. The one flaw that I find in it most frequently is in the categorization of urgent but not important. And most of the time when people look at that particular quadrant,...

Today, we take four questions that each of the ProductivityCast team has brought to the show and then we answer and discuss our perspectives.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/113 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 this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Productivity Potpourri, Numero Dos

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Productivity Potpourri, Numero Dos

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

Hey

Via Negativa

Unroll.me

Raw Text Transcript | Productivity Potpourri, Numero Dos

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

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:22 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this action packed episode of productivity cast. Today, what we're going to do is do productivity properly. numero dos, we are going to be doing our episode where we take four questions, one from each of us, and we discuss them in alphabetical order. So we're gonna go round robin, and take each question and discuss the question that each of us has brought to the table. And so because we are doing this alphabetically, aren't you? We're up first. And so go for it. What's your productivity potpourri question for us. All right, I'm

Art Gelwicks 1:04going to start us off with a thinker here. This is we always talk about retrospectives, whether it's a daily retrospective, weekly, monthly. So I'm going to throw this out to you guys as a six month retrospective. If you think back over the productivity choices you've made over the past six months, is there one that you would change if you had the opportunity to? And how would you change it? Is there something that you decided during this time period that you thought was a good idea, but after executing, and it turns out, maybe not so much. And I'll give you guys an opportunity to think about that. I'll throw mine in there. And it's actually a two parter. For me. My challenge was over this past six months, I decided to do more testing of whether or not I could capture notes digitally and analog pen and paper and make that system balance. The mistake I made is I did that with my actual system. If I had the opportunity to do that over again, and I do and I'm going to, I would do it in basically a dummy system, because what I found is the value of testing that process of trying to see could I do it digitally as well as analog, disrupted my own productivity solutions. It disrupted my note taking a disruptive my note organization. And I'm still in the process of backtracking and recapturing things the way they should be. It's, it was an idea at the time that had merit and I did learn a lot from it. But I would definitely not use my own day to day operational system as the guinea pig of that, that catalyze changes to my to do lists and other functionalities that again, I, I took the core, and I made it the guinea pig. And that would be the one thing I would go back and change is I would duplicate the system and test on the duplicated system. It's more work. But I think in the long run, I wouldn't be behind the eight ball like I am right now in some areas, you bring up a great point, which is that if you're going to test new tools or new systems, it's usually helpful to run that concurrently, while you are still maintaining your prior system in whatever fashion you need to,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:31I know that because I test so much productivity software, I always actually set up a singular project in that system to then run it through it. And that's how I test is kind of just, you know, slicing off a piece of the work into that system for that timeframe to see if it can actually do what I want it to do. And you know, many projects are tailored for particular types of software, particular types of systems. And so I'll usually do that. But I very infrequently, will move my system, I will set my system completely up in another tool to be able to see how it works to get the enough experience with what it will do for me and how it will work. But it's it's absolutely a good idea to not move your system completely until you're comfortable. And that means maintaining the current system, which can be a little bit difficult, which is why changing tools is it's never my first choice for people, you know, it's usually trying to make do with what you've got before you switch to another tool because there is that loss. There's that productivity hit that most people if they really thought about it are not probably excited about So my question to you aren't is after the change. Did you learn enough? And is there enough of a benefit on the other side that made it worthwhile?

Art Gelwicks 4:52I think after looking at the change, I learned a lot of things I don't want to do. That's and that's one of the things doing that kind of testing as you determine the wrong things as well as the ways to improve, I have found that there are some things that I'm going to change by not doing them anymore. And also finally galvanizing in my head that what I've always thought might be a viable alternative, really just does not have the opportunity cost tied to it. I like using my pens, I like using my paper notebooks. But the downside of being able to organize and recall that information for certain types of work, it's just not worth the effort. I have to categorize now. And this is part of what I put into my processes is where is the best place to do the work not only what is the work that needs to be done? So and I'll give you a practical example of this. I do work woodworking on the side as a hobby. And I was looking at as part of the processes, could I do designs online? Could I use a CAD tool? Can I use something else for that? And I absolutely could, the problem I get into is, it's not the best way for me to do that type of work. So I've made the conscious decision in my system to say, if I'm going to do that, I'm going to do it on pen and paper and rollers. Because I know that's the most efficient and the most effective. So putting that kind of decision making into the beginning parts of my process, I think are going to help a lot. And that's the direct learning I got from this experiment

Augusto Pinaud 6:34during the pandemic. And, you know, there were a lot of things that evolved for me, that were then revised to be changes, who would you know, the context were one of those, obviously, as context disappear, I require to update some of them. And same thing with the hard word. Because again, as I move a lot less, and spend more time in the in the office, and some things, you know, are going to stay that way, then the changes, you know, we're quite, quite interesting. So for me was, you know, I modify for certain notetaking activities, as you were describing art, I'm now taking them on a different application, especially on those meetings that require me to process the notes during meetings that I go through, I just take the notes, and if I need them verify, in many cases, I just need to file them. But there are other meetings that I go that the result of that meeting will define what I need to do. So in those cases, those meetings are those notes are taken on a different app. So that way, I process them before they go into my system. And that has make a productive changes. Same thing, as I said, was a context. And I'm right now currently working into hardware updates, and not necessarily to acquire or eliminate anything, but to make sure that what is right now hardware base, is doing what it needs to do or not.

Francis Wade 8:09This is a very simple one, I think maybe lots of people are already doing the same thing. But I've almost eliminated the use of the phone and replaced it with the use of video. And I know lots of people are doing that because video is the new sort of invoke way to communicate in real time. But what I've noticed is that my video calls are more productive than my just mere phone calls. And I think it has to do with the amount of information I'm able to gain by seeing the person and vice versa, I find them the cause shorter, more productive, more focused. And if I need to move them along, I think I can move them along a little better. Because I can transmit my need for urgency, for example, without having to say something I can non verbally do it. But I'm finding them way more productive. And we're more useful. So it's, I don't that I'll go back to doing voice calls when I can do video calls. The of course is the exception when I have to take a voice call because the person is on the road or they don't have data or whatever it is....

We had the pleasure of interviewing on the show, Nicolas Vandenberghe, CEO of KosmoTime. Nicolas Vandenberghe started selling newspapers in the streets of Paris in high school, studied Maths at Ecole Polytechnique then Business at Stanford GSB, started and sold 3 tech companies with up to 65 employees and $11M in revenues, ran Sales for a $2Bn telecom company negotiating billion dollar deals with companies like Google, now co-founder of Chili Piper - the System of Action for revenue teams - and of KosmoTime - the first Focused Productivity Assistant.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/112 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 Making Time to Focus With KosmoTime from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Making Time to Focus With KosmoTime

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Nicolas Vandenberghe (LinkedIn)

Show Notes | Making Time to Focus With KosmoTime

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

KosmoTime

Structured Procrastination

Raw Text Transcript | Making Time to Focus With KosmoTime

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.

Unknown Speaker 0:00Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. And I'm Augusto Pinaud. And we're your hosts for productivity cast and a few times a year we like to bring a productivity expert onto the show and talk about their application or the work that they do. And today we have the pleasure of having Nicholas Vandenberg. Nicholas started selling newspapers in the streets of Paris in high school studied maths at the Ecole Polytechnique, then business at Stanford GSB. He started and sold three technology companies with up to 65 employees and $11 million in revenues. He ran sales for $2 billion Telecom. And then he negotiated billion dollar deals with the companies of the sort of like Google, and now he's co founded a company called chili Piper. It's the system of action for revenue teams. We'll get into that. And what we're going to be talking about today, which is Cosmo time, the first focused productivity assistant, welcome to ProductivityCast. Nichols. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So what Didn't we say that you did that you wanted everybody to know what what what's, what's the essence of Nicholas Vandenberg? No, no, that's about right.

Unknown Speaker 1:27I grew up in France.

Unknown Speaker 1:31good at sales. So always that's why I started selling newspapers that there was a way to pay for my studies in a very fun way. And then I came to Stanford. And when I arrived on campus, my plan was to travel around the world and go to Asia. And in the first weeks at the Stanford Business School, a classmate of mine invited Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs told us what he was up to, at the time, not much actually had been fired from Apple, and he was working on this company called next. But yet it was so inspiring. I thought, This is what I want to do. When I grow up. I went to be an entrepreneur, I want to create software and try to impact the life of people. So ever since that's what I've been doing. So you started cosmic time, in parallel with this other company, chili pepper, can you tell us a little bit about chili pepper? first syllable? Yeah, that's going on. And then what prompted you to create Cosmo time very much. So it's actually not quite parallel, I started TD paper with my wife. It's a bit unusual, but she's a has a strong background in software product design, we bootstrapped the company t pepper, we target sales people, as I mentioned, I love sales. So we thought that the SAS technology was due for a revamp, and we were going to do it. That's not be correct. There's a lot of opportunities to sell software salespeople. And so as companies started growing, I found myself busier and busier. And I thought, okay, now now

Unknown Speaker 3:00is a time to really optimize my time. So I started using a to do list and,

Unknown Speaker 3:08and my to do list went in the wrong direction. So it kept growing and growing. So I thought, okay, I'll try another to do list. And so I tried to do a separate things, I tried Trello, I tried, remember the milk, all sorts of it to see if something will work better, and it didn't. And eventually, I thought, you know what, I'm going to solve that problem myself. And my wife thought I was crazy, it looks to be so busy, you're too busy, you're not going to take on another company method. Look, if I have this problem, I must not be the only one who has this problem. And we're also going to resolve it. So. So I did, we started a company on the side to help people busy people be productive. And as I said, the problem I found was that these two lists were really good at capturing the things to do, but not very good at helping you actually do them. And so my, it's been a super interesting journey, because my,

Unknown Speaker 4:02obviously, early on, we figured so I should mention my co founder Matta, who at the time was working at Facebook in the artificial intelligence group. So with this idea that artificial intelligence was meant to solve the problem. So that's an interesting starting point. And the idea was say, look, we need to reserve time to do your tasks, right, your list is good, but you need to do assign time. So our initial idea was to have the computer work as an executive assistant and plan your calendar. So compute where you should do this task. And it was a beautiful idea. And actually, when I told my friends about it immediately, we got

Unknown Speaker 4:47interest in got some other people invest in a company to get started. So we did we met as a brilliant engineer, we built a system that would take your list of tasks and schedule in the calendar.

Unknown Speaker 5:00compute where they would say to say this call with you guys. And then that's from 11 to 12, New York time, and free boom, it with three tasks in there because you know, two of them 15 years winter in this. So we went live at those, it was super excited. And

Unknown Speaker 5:15guess what happened, it didn't work at all.

Unknown Speaker 5:20It was a nightmare, because I never got to do the task that the computer including my schedule, he was like imagine we finish the quality level. And he doesn't have time to do three tasks. But you know, I want you to get to an espresso right. So I want you to check the pictures of my new baby. And so it didn't work at all. And then these tasks, he would reschedule and reschedule and reschedule it felt like the system was almost felt like the computer was getting angry at me, you know, instead of

Unknown Speaker 5:48instead or imaginary is going wrong. It was another computer getting angry. So circulars that is fascinating because it sounds like such a good idea, right? It's like a German executive assistant done by artificial intelligence, because executive assistant exists do a job, it seems to work, you think the computers can do even better.

Unknown Speaker 6:08So it doesn't work because your life is too predictable. And your mood is in predictable. And so what do I, what we discovered is that

Unknown Speaker 6:20the problem is a lot more complex. Because there are times when you want to do something, there are times when you're not in the mood to do something, you don't schedule you just just based on time and things, you also base it on what what you know is more important, what you feel like doing what you know, is going to take too much cognitive load, and you want to leave for Saturday, you know, when nobody bothering you. So we restarted

Unknown Speaker 6:43we were pretty much a waste, even change the name actually. Then we just went we started calling in the customer on time. And we thought okay, the idea of blocking time is a good idea. But what are the most difficult things to do. And we kept the concept of scheduling time. So we have a good calendar integration. And then with the two other things that are missing, so three of the things that are missing, one is distractions. So you want to help the user be motivated, but you don't want to take any chance on a distraction. So what is a distraction blocking feature that we didn't have at the beginning, we can go into more details, then we thought that a way to be more efficient is to minimize context switching. So we came up with this concept. At the beginning, we call it sprint, but users got a bit confused. So we call it a block, where you put tasks of the same nature together. So say, I need to work on the product. And I have three things I need to do. And we need to put them together and put a block that says work on product and then

Unknown Speaker 7:48execute the three tasks at the time of the block. And of course, the block can be scheduled in the calendar. So that's the second thing. And the third thing that we're working on we'll talk about is is what I call being not only e

We are going to be talking about software stewardship. And really what that means for the world of productivity, culture and society is remarkably impacted by how software today is developed, there isn't anything that isn't really run by technology, from your water plants, you know, the the treatment plants that are running water and sewage, to your cell phone. And on smartphones in your pocket. Everybody is connected to software in some way, shape, or form, even if we're not using that software directly.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/111for 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 Software Stewardship for the World 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 Software Stewardship for the World

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Productivity Software Stewardship for the World

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

Google Calendar

LinkedIn Learning - Programming Foundations

Raw Text Transcript | Productivity Software Stewardship for the World

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

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25

Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. Today, we are going to be talking about software stewardship. And really what that means for the world of productivity, culture and society is remarkably impacted by how software today is developed, there isn't anything that isn't really run by technology, from your water plants, you know, the the treatment plants that are running water and sewage, to your cell phone. And on smartphones in your pocket. Everybody is connected to software in some way, shape, or form, even if we're not using that software directly. And we thought it would be really interesting to look at that through the lens of productivity. And Francis, you brought up this topic to the ProductivityCast. Team. So I wanted to have you kind of preamble us talk to us about what you were thinking as a related to this topic, and then we will get into our discussion.

Francis Wade 1:24

But I was ranting, you know that many productivity folks do when they try to use a piece of software and realize that the developer, or whoever designed the software has totally missed the mark. And what's happened is that someone came up with a very bright idea. And the bright idea seems to be interesting and useful. We either use that using the software, or we try to use it. And we hit upon a block a block, or some kind of stop. And we realize from using the software that the developer had a half of an idea, or a poorly formulated idea before developing the software. And that's why the software doesn't work. So it doesn't fit our needs. It doesn't do what we want it to do, it kind of halfway gets there. But it needs to go away much further. So for example, Google Canada, or outlook Canada, for that matter, those both of those software apps, and all of the Canon most of the counters I've ever seen, a handful of are exceptional, but were designed based on appointment calendars. So they basically copied the appointment calendar that you would see in a doctor's or a dentist office where you put in meetings. And it's meant to track events that take place with other people. And that basic idea. Fast forward to today. And of course, we live in a world in which time blocking is a key element, or timeboxing, or calendar blocking any any time at which you decide to schedule a solo activity into your calendar that does not involve other people, and therefore is quite flexible. So neither calendar, and the two of them are the base calendars of that I think 90% of people use the one of those two, neither of them have Sorry, I should also include Apple calendar. But neither neither of the three, none of the three is geared towards people who do time blocking. And that's a critical activity that we must use in today's world, especially when you're working from home, you have to think very carefully about getting into the flow state. For example, creating time when you can do focus work away from family, kids, pets, distractions, meetings, calls, all the things that would disrupt you from doing your best work. And there's no provision, no real provision in any of these software programs for individual time blocking. And it's a kind of an inside joke among those who do time blocking because we're trying to do we're trying to force the calendar to do something it really wasn't designed to do. The creators of it, never intended for it to be used in this way. And here we are an even worse, there doesn't appear to be any effort by any of these three companies to do any kind of customization for time blocking. It's as if they've kind of said, Okay, this is enough, we moved on to more interesting things. And that's that has its own crazy logic. But again, back to the main point, designers and developers who think and come up with ideas that they think are pretty bright ideas end up causing problems for lots of many of us just because their theory or the idea they have in mind is just not robust enough.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:46

So I'll take your bait, and I'll look at this through the lens of Google and Google Calendar, which is that Google has given those of you who are time blockers The ability to add a calendar event, which is without anyone else, you know, you're not inviting anyone else, you can move it, you know, each calendar event is fungible. And they've even gone the next step of being able to add tasks at specific dates, and times, as well as all day task events in the calendar interface. If you were a developer or a product manager at Google, what would you tell them to do differently?

Francis Wade 5:30

Drag and drop? That's a simple one, simple drag and drop tasks and move them around so that you can manipulate your calendar will without having to go in and edit each individual light. So you can already do that drag and drop. Yeah, I'm gonna try that, right.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:47

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah.

Francis Wade 5:49

from day to day, or just

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:50

yeah, day to day, week to week. Oh,

Francis Wade 5:53

I stand corrected. But still, the interface is just not meant for that purpose. It was invented and created and put into the suites at a time when these were afterthoughts. And they haven't done much develop mental them even since then they've tried. Canada tried to put a Google Calendar tried to put in Google goals. Google Yes, goes right, barring from a scheduling software. But it clearly this wasn't meant for that. And that that particular feature is kind of just dropped off the calendar, I still use it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:30

You know, the funny part though, is that the the Curiosity is in Google goals, when you set a goal that's useful inside of Google Calendar inside of Google Calendar, the mobile application, but when you take it outside of that, say you put your you add your calendar, to Microsoft Outlook, or to woven or to another tool like that, you it then disappears, it's not a part of the feature set. And the reason for that, in my limited understanding of it is that calendars and what is a calendar infrastructure is ancient technology, we're using this old format. And so for greatest interoperability, where we're basically depending upon the legacy structure of how calendars were developed. And so all of this new technology, kind of like SMS, right, we deal with SMS, which is a terrible infrastructure system. But because it works currently, across all of the various telecommunications carriers, we continue to keep using it. And we know that RCS is the better standard, and we should all get there. But for some reason, we keep using the lowest common denominator. And that's a little different for me than email, which email is the right, interoperable standard, right, everybody uses, it's a part of the internet. And we all know how to make an email function. And what we build on top of that is really where developers start to have more say, hey, which is the new email app, email service from the folks who create Basecamp? You know, they're creating a highly opinionated email software on top of an email service, and it's still email, right? The the infrastructure is solid, the what you put on top of that really makes a difference. And I think here with calendar, just in this specific instance, Francis, I think calendar is I think we just need a better system, like, for example, calendars, that the natural ability to create a feed for your calendar, right,...

We are starting a new ongoing series on ProductivityCast called BookCast. Each BookCast, we bring you a productivity book that we have read and discussed the merits and demerits. We each come at the material from different backgrounds and experiences, therefore, some of us will dislike and some of us will dislike the material, and that will make for an enlightening discussion for you.

For our first BookCast, we bring you The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling.

I have been recommended this book so many times and so I wanted to bring this book to the ProductivityCast team to dive into its major tenets and discuss them.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/110

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 4 Disciplines of Execution (BookCast) 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 4 Disciplines of Execution (BookCast)

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | The 4 Disciplines of Execution (BookCast)

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

The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim HulingTodoist

Raw Text Transcript | The 4 Disciplines of Execution (BookCast)

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

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

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.

Francis Wade 0:24

I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:25

And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26

Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners. This week, we are starting a new ongoing series on ProductivityCast that we're calling book cast. And so book cast is where we're going to bring a new productivity book Well, a new to, hopefully you productivity book, but it could be an old book as well, that we're reading. And we want to discuss the merits and demerits of the material. I'm hoping that we each come at the material from different backgrounds and experiences, and therefore some of us will love and some of us will potentially not love the material, and that will make for an enlightening discussion for you. For our first book cast, we bring you the four Disciplines of Execution, achieving your wildly important goals by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim healing. I have been recommended this book so many times. And so I wanted to bring this book to productivity cast to dive into the major tenants and discuss them. So a little bit about the book First, the book is described on Amazon and pulling this from the Amazon description page. It says, Do you remember the last major initiative you watch die in your organization? Did it go down with a loud crash? Or was it slowly and quietly suffocated by other competing priorities? By the time it finally disappeared? It's likely no one even noticed what happened. Often the answer is that the quote unquote whirlwind of urgent activity required to keep things running day to day devoured all the time and energy you needed to invest in executing your strategy for tomorrow. And then it goes on to say that the four Disciplines of Execution can change that forever. It says the four Disciplines of Execution are for dx is a simple, repeatable and proven formula for executing your most important strategic priorities in the midst of the world win. And that includes the four disciplines being focused on the wildly important act on lead measures, keep a compelling scoreboard create a cadence of accountability. And so with that, the authors are Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim healing. Sean covey is not only notably the son of the late Dr. Stephen Covey, but he is also the senior vice president of innovations and products at Franklin Covey. And so he has been at the Franklin Covey company for quite a while. And obviously, he's the author of many other books, and and obviously helps with his father's company. Chris McChesney is the global practice leader of execution for Franklin Covey. And he's, of course, one of the primary developers of 40x. And then Jim huling is the managing consultant for Franklin Covey's four dx delivery of that material across the world. So he's he's responsible for the 40x methodology and the quality of the worldwide delivery. So those are the author's that's a little bit about the book. And as I noted in our lead up, the book is divided into four parts. What the methodology is 40x is broken up into four parts. And so I thought we would kind of have our conversation in those four parts. The book itself is designed in, it was designed in three sections, they go into the four Disciplines of Execution, then they talk about installing 40x, with a team, and then installing it on the macro level and installing 40x in your organization. But I think for our purposes, since we're going to talk about this kind of on the personal productivity level, we could talk about this on the four disciplines, each individually. So where do we want to get started with the conversation? Let's start with focusing on the wildly important, let's talk about what they mean by that and what wildly important goals are. And we'll go from there.

Francis Wade 4:23

I actually spent this past weekend working with a fertilizer company to develop their strategic plan. And one of the challenges my clients always grapple with is how do you separate that which is essential from that which is nice to have. And most strategy documents that I've read have done by other consultants with their clients look like mega Long, long laundry lists so they're like everything and the kitchen sink. And as you go through the kitchen sink, after the fact, you have a really hard time. Figuring out just what the strategy is you can see that they're doing 30, they want to do 30 things. But the 30 things don't actually fit together. In any kind of coherent, they don't tell a story. They don't provide a rationale or reason. They don't, they don't reveal what, what what Kaplan and Norton called a strategic hypothesis, which is the idea behind the strategy, they just look like a lot of stuff to do. And to give him what the author say, if you can find the and I'll go a step below, just saying what's wildly important, what's, what's the wireless, most important thing is, what's the hypothesis and the sequence of core activities, and how they fit together, and how you describe them to other people. That blob of information, which gets created come get created, doing a retreat is the most important. And it's got to be separated at all times from everything else that's nice to have, or everything else

Art Gelwicks 5:58

that's kind of emergent, for instance, brings out a really good point of the separation of critical versus desirable. But I think in a lot of cases, especially when we start to look at it at the personal level, those critical items aren't coming from us. They're coming from outside factors. And that becomes a significant weighing on how do you make that decision? Is it really your call in those cases, and that's, that sets the drive on what you need to focus on. A lot of the initial text focuses on development of the strategy, and then the execution of the strategy. Well, from a personal productivity standpoint, I think a lot of us don't have control over that strategy part. That strategy is getting defined for us by external forces. If you have not only just work things, but you have, say, kids that have to go to college, you have bills to pay, things like that become those wildly important goals. Because if you don't do them, nothing else really happens. So I think quantifying it around that around what's, what's the critical, what's the desirable. And then honestly, not excluding all the desirable things, when I work with clients in the corporate space, will go through and define a list of requirements on a project and I go through the same exercise, what do you need to have, what do you want to have, I always tried to include a couple of the once into the overall need listing. Because it makes, it makes the overall execution more effective. Those are the things you can say, look, it's just going off the rails, we just need to pull a couple things out, you can pull the ones out, and not affect the needs, and still have everything meet the requirements. So I think the focus on the wildly important is critical. But I also want to make sure that people don't put blinders on the fact that it must be only those things,...

Templates can be a clever time-saving tool in your productivity tool belt, if you know where they are in your productivity system, as well as create and use them wisely. Today, we’re discussing what a template is (or, rather, how you should use them to their best advantage), what types of templates we use in our own productivity system, and how to overcome some common obstacles in making templates in your productivity software work for you.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/109 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 Making Templates in Your Productivity Software from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Making Templates in Your Productivity Software

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Making Templates in Your Productivity Software

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

EvernoteTrelloAsanaRemember the MilkMicrosoft Word (Normal.dot, Normal.dotx; you can create your own DOTX file templates), Google Calendar (duplicate events)Android personal dictionaryTasker (Android)OneNoteNotionSharePointIFTTTZapierPower AutomateActiveWordsTextExpanderApple Text ReplacementsApple ShortcutsWhat Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith, PhDSkedPal Calendar Heat Map

Raw Text Transcript | Making Templates in Your Productivity Software

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

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25

Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. templates can be a clever time saving tool in your productivity tool belt, if you know where they are in your productivity system, as well as how to create and use them wisely. Today, we're going to discuss what a template is, or rather how you should use them to their best advantage in your own world. We're going to talk about what types of templates we use in our own productivity systems, and how to overcome some of the obstacles and making templates in your productivity software work for you. And with that, let's start off with defining templates. What are templates in your world? How do you how do you define the template? And ultimately, how do they How does your definition of a template benefit you, in your own outputs,

Augusto Pinaud 1:14

I use template for a couple of things and or more than a couple of things. So template for me is basically something that you write Finally, in the past, so you can use multiple times towards the future. So I use them in many applications, and for many purposes, you know, respond to emails and respond, things that can be really speed up and allow me instead of thinking, the response, or the same response every time allow me to look at the issue and work with the answers in a better way.

Art Gelwicks 1:52

Yeah, for me, templates fall into a couple of different categorizations. Commonly they are things that I would use for standardizing a process to make sure that it's consistent and repeatable. Or to improve the efficiency of some step in the process, maybe a capture or discussion. Finally, to really think about the simplification of a step, because templates for me are one of those things where you don't have to think about that step anymore, you pop it up, you fill it up, you know you you do the steps, and you move on to the next thing, you're not wasting mental cycles, trying to figure out what you're trying to do. And it really becomes a refinement of it. The fourth thing, though, with templates is to me, they're an educational tool. I think a lot of people benefit from taking templates, and then taking them apart and see how they were constructed. I know I do this all the time. And it helps me understand not only the process, but how the mechanisms work and gives me an idea as to how to adapt that to my own solutions.

Francis Wade 2:57

I tell you, the funny thing about templates is that when we started discussing this topic, a few minutes ago, before before the call, I thought I don't use any templates, I don't think I have a single one, I think maybe I'll take the contrary view that people shouldn't use templates. And I'll be the contrary, and today. And right in front of me was a template that I use every single week. I know. There's something to this after all. And I as I look around my life, I realized that I'm like a template freak. If I'm not, if I'm not that then I'm at least a lazy person who tries to take for what I learned from the past. So that I don't have to redo it and rethink it because it was so hard the first time that I've somehow captured it in some kind of form that I use going forward. So I think our listeners may or may not realize that these time savers are all probably already in their life. I think the poet today is in identifying them, and then replicating the idea across as many domains as possible.

Art Gelwicks 4:08

When I think you're on an important point there too, because you said the key word for me which is form, I consider in many cases, templates to be analogous to forms because of what they're doing is providing that consistent, streamlined, efficient structure for some step in a process. And I know for me, the majority of the work I do is around these kinds of form based intake solutions. So I would put forms in that same bucket as a template.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:39

So I think about templates as being something that is from my experience something about both quality and control. So the organization that I worked for wanted to make sure that they were controlling the outputs on the other side and in your own personal productivity. system, you are the one who's benefiting your future self by giving some level of control some level of guardrails to the outputs. So a template is a very wide category of repeatable content that you can use to control what the outputs are by controlling what the inputs are. And then on the other side, recognizing that by controlling the inputs, and and some to some extent, the output, you then can increase quality. And of course, there's there's time saving and potentially money savings there. And so many other, you know, useful benefits of the repeatability and the efficiency of a template. And I'll start by by noting that in my world, a template can be content that you use in a wide variety of places. So from a checklist of items to just a snippet of a word, to your name, address, phone number, any number of different types of things, things that you're going to do, and put into a system over and over and over again, that's the type of stuff that you want to template, or what I call templatized. And so if you're going to do that you got you have to really think about am I going to do this, you know, you don't want to create a template for a document, you're going to write once. But my rule is, if I'm going to do it three times, then there's going to be a template. And as soon as I hit that second time, do I say, okay, is this going to be a third time because then it's going to be a fourth, fifth sixth, and that attack, so I might as well create a template. And so for me, the benefit is recognizing when something is worthwhile being a template, and to to be able to templatized the items that I know, I'm just constantly putting into things, why should I waste the keystrokes, the mental energy, the the potential quality missteps, when I can just put that into a template, and then with a few keystrokes, generate that content that I know is exactly what I want, or at least I have the 80% rule, kind of the Prater principle of templates, I think, what is the 80%, that that will, that will be the substance, and then I just have to fill in the pieces,

Art Gelwicks 7:24

there's an additional piece that I would quantify on templates. And that's the creation of a template is an excellent litmus test as to your level of understanding of what you're trying to template eyes. Because if you don't have a good in depth understanding of it, you're not going to be able to create an effective template, you're going to miss things, the structure is going to be wrong, it's going to be inefficient. So you have to really get what you're trying to templatized before you can create an efficient template.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:54

And going back to my experience, as someone who used to build templates in an organization, I also recognize that it's a matter of helping others who may not understand your authority domain as well as you do. And so, you know, when you're creating, in my case, you know, advanced trust and estate plans....

In this week’s episode, we are going to introduce you to a productivity accountability technique called 25/55 (named for touching base every 25 and 55 minutes of every working hour). We describe what the 25/55 productivity accountability technique is, its components and why it works, how long you should practice a technique like this, and even a discussion on automating your check-ins. We’ll close out with some tips for those who may not feel like 25/55 will work for them; you’d be surprised!

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/108 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 25/55 Productivity Accountability Technique from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | 25/55 Productivity Accountability Technique

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Show Notes | 25/55 Productivity Accountability Technique

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

You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder (The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults w/ Attention Deficit Disorder) by Kate Kelly and Peggy RamundoFlow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhDDefault Mode Network (mind wandering)BlipBlip (Android)TelegramToggl TrackApple ShortcutsIFTTTRescueTimeActivTrakManicTime

Raw Text Transcript | 25/55 Productivity Accountability Technique

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 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 0:24And I'm Francis Wade.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. This week, we'll be discussing something called the 25/55 technique, we're going to talk about what it is why you would do it, how it all kind of works? And then how long you should do the 25/55 technique, if at all? What are the parameters for why you would want to do it, and some of the underpinnings for why you would approach the system for some particular length of time or not. So let's get into what the 25/55 technique is. Its origins are a bit muddy for me. So do not think that I know everything about this origin story, the details that I can say and remember well enough is that many years ago, this is going back a little bit more than a decade ago, a friend of mine had asked me to, in essence, start doing this. And I said, Oh, well, where did this come from? And my best recollection is that it was generated from some thoughts related to the book by Dr. Edward Hallowell. You mean I'm not lazy, stupid or crazy, which is, which is a self help book for adults with ADHD. And so I'll put a link to that book in the show notes. And so I believe that's where the, the idea of this all came from. The 25/55 technique is a method for you to be able to touch base with a social accountability partner throughout the day, and helping you to plan and manage from the half hour level. And so this is how it works, you find a communication platform that you both can agree on. And you in essence, will every 25 and 55 of the hour. And again, you can choose, you know, every 15 and 45 of the hour, it really doesn't matter what the kind of the meter of the or the tempo of the technique is, you get to choose if it's on the half hour and the hour, or if it's on the 25 and 55 at the hour. But kind of using a little bit of Pomodoro Technique here, giving yourself that five minute break between every 25 and 30 of the hour is kind of built into the 2555 techniques. So you choose a communications platform, it can be synchronous, or asynchronous, as long as you both can keep a thread going with one another. And so say SMS text messaging every 25 of the hour, you would write to the person starting at some particular hour of the day. So say you want to start at the eight o'clock hour, in the morning, you would say at 7:55am, you would you would send a message telling your accountability partner, what it is you plan to do in the next 30 minutes. Now, you then start working on that 30 minutes of work focused. And then at 8:25am, you would then again, message your accountability partner, and let them know what it is that you accomplished in the past half hour, did you do what you said you were going to do at 7:55. And then you're going to tell your accountability partner what you're going to do in the next 30 minutes. And that next 30 minutes is from the next hour, or it could be from from the 25 minute forward. I think that if you utilize the Pomodoro Technique, here, you would take that five minutes, take a breather, do what you want to do. And then at 8:30, you would start working on the next thing. And so you work on that for the next 25 minutes. So you are in essence, just checking in with that accountability partner. And mind you, your accountability partner is doing the same thing, which means that both of you are accountable to touching base. But if one for some reason lapses in touching base with that person, then the other person's message should prompt you to go ahead and respond back with your 25 or 55. You know, touch point. So you are throughout the day doing that process and keeping each other accountable in the sense that you're both watching what each other is doing, and not really providing any feedback. The notion behind the social accountability is not for you to be giving feedback necessarily. But you can obviously modify the technique in order to do that. It just depends on the nature of the accountability relationship and what you want each other to do in that regard. In my particular circumstance, I don't want any feedback. I just want the accountability to know that I am telling Someone else what it is I should be doing. And I'm doing it outside of myself beyond that, I really don't want anything. And so the goal then is to figure out the parts that work for you. And beef those up,

Augusto Pinaud 5:12there was two things that provide for me, one remind me to a book from the late Peter Drucker, called executive, the effective executive where the story goes that Drucker is start telling the clients, okay, I want you to write down, you know, what you are doing, or what you were planning to do and what you're actually doing. And this is exactly what for me is it 2555 produced, so every 25 and 55, I write what I did, and what I'm going to do, like, like you, I don't need the feedback, that looking into what I plan for the next half an hour, and what actually happens, allows me to curse correct, or really identify when, or I'm having too many external factors distracting me, or I am simply not moving forward into the goal of the day. But what that has allowed me to do is to get a more accurate information of why things happen or not happen, you know, when I said, Okay, the next the next half an hour. So before we went into this podcast, I Roca the next half an hour, I'm going to be recording ProductivityCast if I get to the end of that hour, and I go back and say, Okay, what I was going to do, okay, I was recording ProductivityCast great. I'm doing exactly what I planned. But if instead of that, I said, Okay, I'm going to be researching for this book, or writing this book. And then at the end of that half an hour, I come and said, You know what, what I did? Well, I don't know. Okay, did I write? No, I did not write, then that allows me into a much more smaller chunks. To catch up how distracted I am. Catch up, what is what is interfering into what I'm planning on what is actually happened. And that has been incredible powerful. For me, I even go on during two times of the two hours in the afternoon and two hours in the late morning, I even reduce it. And instead of report every 30 minutes, I report every 15. And the reason is, because are the times that I tend to get super distracted. So breaking the task into even smaller chunks, has been a lot more useful for me. The other thing that was interesting for me, I I have read for many years how you know Elon Musk, and Dorsey and Twitter and many others, you know, split their days into really, really small segments. And I could not see why. Or I could not understand why that was relevant to mention on delay, start doing 2555 do they do something like that? You know, what I'm planning what I'm doing, I have no clue. But what I can tell you is that the more distracted you feel, and the more distracted you are, the shorter journey to turn that interval, because what allows you is to stay on task, and stay moving forward a lot more. And finally, the other benefit I have experienced for 2555 is the fact that things move forward in a much more consistent way. Because now I don't depend on how distracted or not distracted I am to make things actually happen.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:44The important part I think abo

At the end of November 2019, David Allen, author and creator of Getting Things Done, held his latest (and presumably final) GTD Summit and at that time, he released his written drawings for what he called the ultimate GTD app. In this cast, we discuss the description provided and whether any existing software has gotten close.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/107 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 ultimate GTD app from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | The Ultimate GTD App According to David Allen

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

Ultimate GTD app (PDF)

eProductivity | Get It All Done in IBM Lotus Notes

Omni-Automation

Episode #51: The Ultimate GTD App - Part One - Getting Things Done®

Episode #52: The Ultimate GTD App - Part Two - Getting Things Done®

David Allen gives away the ultimate GTD app | Intentionally Productive

David Allen's GTD App Review - ERW Blog - Effective Remote Work Community

David Allen's GTD killer app can be created using OmniFocus and Shortcuts - OmniFocus / OmniFocus Automation - The Omni Group Forums

David Allen on the Best Software for GTD - Getting Things Done®

David Allen’s killer GTD app system brought into practice – Bert Kruisdijk

David Allen on the Best Software for GTD - Getting Things Done®

Amazing Marvin

Nirvana

Finot (Google Play)

Microsoft Outlook (purchase Microsoft 365)

Microsoft Access (purchase Microsoft 365)

OmniFocus

Remember the Milk

Zapier

IFTTT

GTDNext

Raw Text Transcript | The Ultimate GTD App According to David Allen

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 0:17A quick note, before we get started with our episode today, for those of you listening, who are interested in engaging with others, listening to ProductivityCast, please find our digital community at www.personalproductivity.club, sign up, and we'll approve you into the community. Then finally ProductivityCast channel and join that you can comment on episodes, ask questions and engage with the ProductivityCast team and community. It's easy to sign up and it's free. Again. That's www dot personal productivity dot club. Thanks so much. And now on with the show. Welcome back everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:53 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:54I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:55 And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:57Welcome to our listeners to this episode, where we're going to be continuing a discussion we've had around GTD with David Allen. And what we wanted to do was actually talk about the ultimate GTD app. According to David Allen back in 2019, David Allen held what I'm presuming is going to be the final GTD summit in Amsterdam. And he brought together all of his Rockstar advocates of GTD over the years, they all talked about different aspects of GTD, one of the things that David did at that time was open sourced basically released out into the wild, his own schema for what he thinks is or would be the requirements, but the ultimate GTD application, the ultimate getting things done application. And he had a detailed what he thought would work. Now take into account that David Allen comes from the Lotus Notes, platform. And I can 2001 he had Eric Mac, the programmer develop what is now known as he productivity. And it's the one that David still uses to this day, which sits on top of the Lotus Notes platform. But in essence, David has used and continues to use he productivity as his task manager on his desktop environment. And he's on a Mac. So I'm presuming that it works on the Mac as well. And so that's what David's been using for all these years. But David has a vision for what is the ultimate GTD software implementation. And he shows that in this document that he releases, it is 19 pages of fairly detailed notes and drawings showing what the visual should look like for this application and what it should be doing under the hood. So I will put a link to the PDF that they released, they released this on getting things done calm, and I'll put a link to this in the show notes. In essence, David has a series of features that he's looking for in the system. And so I'm just going to run down these pretty quickly so that we can have all a general idea. In essence, he put default debriefing process for the weekly review, he wants some way for the system to facilitate the weekly review for the individual to customize, list sorting, so that you can sort by due date, priority project, age, size, personal, personal versus professional, etc. Third, he has here cross reference projects to Related Actions waiting for his reference people, dates, meetings, etc. decision making and organizing expert system assistance to be built in a retrospective calendar, archive slash log global search a gateway to all other software. So while you are clarifying and organizing, you can have a gateway to all your other software that's connected to it allows free flowing thinking while tracking toward closure. It should be rules based customization so you should be able to it says For example, every a flight I'm guessing American Airlines Flight scheduled schedule 24 hour upgrade, meaning that it would automatically let you know to schedule your 72 hour upgrade based on the flight upcoming prints any views and a handy hardcopy format so that you can take it on the go generates complete hardcopy systems with up to the second lists and data. You can tag any file location activities into your in basket to ensure later closure and then an alarm. I'm presuming he means some kind of time based trigger. So those were the big components he listed as features that he's looking for in at all. Do you feel like David got the vision right upon reviewing the schema.

Art Gelwicks 4:55Okay, I'm gonna nitpick right out of the chute. He could at least type type this up that way God loves David Allen. But man's handwriting needs some help. But aside from that, I'm not. This is where I'm struggling. There are a couple of pieces in here as, as a software developer that I struggle with here. gateway to all other software immediately makes the hackles on the back of my neck stand up. Because that's, I mean that that's the Holy Grail. And it's so dependent on so many other things that it almost becomes the unraveling of so many solutions. Allows free flowing thinking while tracking towards closure. Okay, what the heck does that mean? Is it? Is it a brainstorming tool? Is it a structured brainstorming tool? Is it not a brainstorming tool at all? these are, these are really nice, high level things. But this is the same list, I look at it that the four of us would probably come up with sitting around the table with a bunch of beers for about two hours, and a napkin and a pen. I'm not seeing anything that is definitive, or even specifically derivative of GTD in this capability. I mean, this is what everybody wants a productivity app to do.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:21And I think that's kind of the point. Right? So this is this is from 1994, by the way, so you know, we're not talking about something that was developed in 2015, or even 2010.

Art Gelwicks 6:34Okay, so now I'm going to struggle with it a little bit more, because you're right, I did just see the date on that. So why release the spec for something that's more than 20 years old, has been done in so many iterations? Just I'm not understanding the value of how does he feel that this contributes to the overall advancement of personal and professional productivity?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:01I don't think that he thinks that anyone has built what he wants yet. I really think that's what it is. I mean, in the GTD summit, he said as much when he talked about it, that no application has gotten close, yet other than the productivity, which, of course, he led the charge with with regard to Eric Mac. But there are just some fundamental pieces that he talks about in and I'll put a link to this in the show, note all all the various areas and places, he's talked about the application development. And he talks about the fact that say, for example, with E productivity, you're able to list items that you want to do today. And then if you don't complete them, they kind of retract back into the system. So you have this temporary holding place for Oh, I want to do these things, you throw them into this. In essence, it's a it's a tag, and it then filters to that view, and then it goes away. If you don't do it today. It's like things like that. I think he's just he's looking for these finer pieces that are just not working.

Art Gelwicks 8:02Those are individual features. And I mean, if you go through and you build software,...