Automating Your Office: Improving Your Workplace Productivity With Office Automation

In this week’s ProductivityCast, we discuss:

What is office automation? How does it differ from home automation? What office automation do you currently have/use? What office automation would you use if technology/cost/other barriers to entry were not there? Where should you start with office automation?

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/087 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 Automating Your Office : Improving Your Workplace Productivity With Office Automation 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 | Automating Your Office

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

Four fundamentals of workplace automation

Raw Text Transcript | Automating Your Office

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

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:28

Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to a another episode of this productivity cast, where we will be discussing office automation. And what I thought we would do today is we would discuss the contrast between what is office automation and what is home automation and explaining that for everybody, and then getting into the context of what automation we use in our own office environments or the environments that we work in because that could be home as well. People have home offices, and people work from home. And those offices also can take advantage of automation. And then talking about what technology we would use if all technology was available to us and cost and other barriers to entry were reduced. What would we use in our office to help us be more productive in our workplaces? And and then we'll, we'll close out the episode with what are the first steps we would consider offering to our listeners to you listeners to start in the office automation space? So let's get started first with what is office automation and how does it contrast in your minds with home automation?

Augusto Pinaud 1:42

From my perspective, home automation, it's a lot more about comfort, okay, it's about security and comfort you go you know, get the lights Get, get automated, something's when you now come to the office. It's more related about efficiency on productivity. One of the First examples we can talk about, about automation in the office was the death of the paper fax, okay, and I need even that most people will not consider that automation. That's the first step. So the earliest steps of the office automation, the moment we stop having to worry about replacing, you know, getting a fax in the middle of the thing, and now discovered, oh, we run out of paper, it's called a birth a human being who send us that, to get that when now you can get the numbers digital and get that fax in the same way via email or directly in the email. You know, that's the difference between, in my opinion between home automation and office automation, it's office automation is more about how can we make the work more efficient, more productive, and even in some cases, how can we stop depending on humans for a certain task, you know, as much as You know, when you look on a small business offices, okay, how much can we use technology to not hire that person that we may or may not need or the fluctuation of their business at that particular point? can or cannot afford? And how can we use technology and automation to help that?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:20

I think that office automation is about helping make the business more profitable. And increasing productivity is, you know, one of those mean a big ticket big majority reasons and, and vehicles to that end. And the way in which I see office automation, really mostly different from home automation, is that there is so much more software involved in office automation than there than there probably isn't home automation, just because we spend most of our days working in an office environment or just working generally in our lives. And that information needs to be moved around. And now today since most people work on a computer, whether that be at a desk or on their phone, we are, are constantly being bombarded with new types of productivity software. And those software can be connected together. And we've talked a little bit about this before, with, you know, Zapier and other other integration tools. But I'd like to get a little bit more into that today, as well. And I'm sure we'll talk about it exclusively as you know, kind of workflow integration and workflow automation on the software side, in a later episode, but the real piece here is is how do you connect the physical electronics together for day to day productivity, along with the software that's available to us today? And I'm, I'm uniquely interested in seeing taking a step back. You know, my my audience is small business owners and I spend a lot of time In small businesses, helping them and so I see how many times a small business owner is using a lot of home automation, or least consumer based electronics and consumer based software in their businesses, because it's less expensive. There aren't enterprise licenses. And so I'm seeing a lot of that being used in the automation space. And we'll talk a little bit about that later today. But the that's really the part that I see is office automation is how we connect all of these various parts, these disparate parts to be able to help us get gains where we otherwise wouldn't think about getting gains. But we're doing these things routinely.

Francis Wade 5:43

I think the rationale is completely different than home automation. In other words, the Why is different. I think as automation needs to produce some, some results that accrues to the bottom line and there are well established Process Improvement reengineering, process management techniques that I've been around since the 90s. that tell you how to do that. And office automation for me is, comes from that, that kind of line of thinking, where there's an investment and then there's a payoff. And if there's no payoff, then it's not worth making the investment. And also, if something can't scale, then if your business is going to scale, then you need to look very carefully at whether or not that nice Gizmo is is actually adding value or not. So I think in home of home automation, that the need for comfort and to be the first on the block and to to have something that diversionary or entertaining, entertaining, is more possible. But in business, I think that the more black and white in terms of will I will I make an investment that produces Have a bang for the buck.

Art Gelwicks 7:01

Yeah, I think within the space of business automation, you have to remember two key areas. One, there is a big difference between physical automation and information automation, especially in the business space, that line seems to be a little bit more clearly defined. But secondarily, the influence you have over office automation is often just limited and defined by the role that you have. In many cases, things like facilities are responsible for printers, they're responsible for other controls. They're responsible for conference room setups and cameras. You don't have either control or influence over that. So you're really kind of limited in my automation is the things that I cannot influence and the things that influence me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:50

I came across a really interesting paradigm mine McKinsey, the big global Consulting Group, and they talk about kind of the four four fundamentals of workplace automation, you know, office automation. And they they talk about it from the perspective that there is automation of activities, and then read of it redefinition of jobs and processes, right? The idea of business processes being redefined based on that automation, the impact on occupation in general. So, like, if you have high wage occupations, those are obviously going to be, you know, changed by, you know, impacted by the by automation. And then finally, how that how that impacts creativity and meaning both for the workplace but also for the industry, the economy at large as well. And so, that's like, on the very, I think, kind of like you know, from the ground level up to the macro level in terms of how we consider automation and for like for you art where You are in an environment where you're not controlling the space. And I am in an environment where I do get to control most of my space. And then going into environments where, you know, I'm working with business owners trying to automate and become more efficient,

In this week’s cast, we discuss how the Internet of Things affects personal productivity. All those smart devices (including your smartphones and tablets) make up part of the large interconnected web of items tethered to one another by the Web. We provide our thoughts on approaching the IoT productivity in your home and life.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/086 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 IoT Productivity: How Internet of Things (IoT) Affects Personal Productivity, 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 | IoT Productivity

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

Big G - Google AssistantBig A - Amazon AlexaBig S - Apple SiriBig C - Microsoft CortanaBig B - Samsung Bixby

Nest Thermostat

Raw Text Transcript | IoT 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 0:25

And Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode. And what we are going to be doing this week is talking about the Internet of Things, and its impact on productivity on personal productivity. And what we're going to cover throughout the episode is a little bit of a definition of what IoT is, what the Internet of Things is, and how it relates to personal productivity. Then we're going to talk about what IoT we currently use in our own personal worlds or don't use and what we may be planned to use in the near future. Then we are going to broaden the conversation then to what we think how we think IoT is going to impact productivity in the next few years for those of you out there, and we want to do it from this future perspective, so that we're all a little bit more aware of how IoT works, and how it can work for you, and therefore help make you more productive. And I think that's a good thing for all of us. So let's start off with what the Internet of Things is. And so I'll kick us off just with kind of the basic understanding of what the Internet of Things is. And I'm going to read you the really wonky Wikipedia definition, and then I'm going to interpret what I believe it is. And then I'm going to open it up to the floor for for the other gentleman here to give their views. So Wikipedia defines the Internet of Things as a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals, or people that are provided with unique identifiers, you IDs and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human to human or human to computer interaction. What that really means is that the Internet of Things are all the things that are uniquely identifiable on the internet and connected to one another without someone else having to facilitate that connection. And that ultimately means that the Internet of Things is anything that we call quote unquote smart that is able to be connected to your, your internet connection at home or at work. And I guess along the way, if you were using your smart phone along the way, in a mobile device capacity so if you're in the car, or if you're on a bus or a train or plane, and or boat, I suppose you know, all of those things. And devices that are connected to the internet infrastructure are IoT,

Art Gelwicks 3:06

this whole idea of the Internet of Things I think the the Wonka pedia article there because I like your wonky Wikipedia article. So I'm going to coined that new term, the Wikipedia. That is pretty accurate, at least in my book as to what I perceive when we talk about Internet of Things. It's any, any device that you wouldn't traditionally consider a computer or a computing device, but you're still using technology to interact and control with it. So things like our lovely home assistance that we have the the Guillermo and elite, you know, Alicia, I'm trying not to trigger anybody. So pardon me with weird names that will go with big a big G and that and so forth for for naming purposes. So big a and big G is I think what we commonly understand now We think about Internet of Things, and all the things that those can interact with, that's not limited to that in any stretch. But it's all of everything wants to be connected anymore, at least companies who are releasing things all want things to be connected. I think for the the more important understanding of it, though, internet of things really needs to go beyond what's connected, and focus on how you're using that connection. How is that benefiting you? Is it connected just because it can be? Or are you actually deriving a direct benefit from using that connectivity to make life easier or more efficient or just more pleasant?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:42

And I think what what art is getting at here so that we have context is that I gave the more textbook definition, the longer pedia definition. And really, this ends up being about data and shared data. And when we when it comes to thinking about Your own productivity. Most of what you're doing is generating data, capturing data, manipulating data in some way, shape, or form. And by having devices, things out in the world that are, quote unquote smart, that are able to share that data, without you being the one to have to do it, necessarily, you know, there are potentially sensors and other things, capturing data ambiently. For example, your smartphone collects dozens of pieces of data points, you know, every second about you as you move around in the world. And that data can then be utilized by IoT devices to get things done for you. That's really the power here that I think about is how it can transfer and share that data without me having to do it. And privacy implications aside, we could talk a little bit about the the security and privacy behind IoT and the necessity for Security Standards and compatibility for both extensibility but interoperability as well. And those things, but the core here is that I don't have to do everything. Because now I have these. They're not that much smarter devices. They're just devices that are connected to the internet that are talking to one another, that are then capable of passing on these little data points that ultimately become the big data of me, that then knows more about me than I could know about myself in particular categories, and therefore, potentially helped me get new things done that I didn't know needed to be done. But now it can help forecast. For example, my phone could tell me how to get to work better because it knows the ways in which I drive to work. Or it could tell me that I really like one cafe over another cafe because I consistently rate the beverages I have at that cafe in a particular way. So there's like the new stuff. But it can also actually help me with the stuff that I know I need to do and know I want to do. And that's also really great.

Francis Wade 7:06

Like the definition that I'd love to hear the examples. That's that's a part because I'm looking around my office or my world trying to think of examples that I may have using without actually knowing I can't think of any yet but I'm hanging in there.

Augusto Pinaud 7:21

So one of the things that he's interested in was Internet of Things is that for most people, has come almost in an invisible way. You know, that comment that Francis made? It is interesting, because a lot of people are not even aware of the Internet of Things. And when their phone, you know, told them, they put an alarm that says the location and their phone is able to tell them, hey, you have a meeting in two hours and you normally have this meeting in your office and you are not in your office. Those kinds of things that are a combination of Internet of Things and artificial intelligence are things that people don't understand what ease they just know their phone do that and somehow the smartphones and these things has been getting into people live without people be necessarily conscious of what Internet of Things is. So they have led the terminology being a quote unquote geek terminology technically terminology without allowing them to understand this is part of your life when you can go to your fridge and Mark milk into the thing or your fridge can intelligently said hey, the milk that you put on the shelf is getting low and then pritch there are some that can so that is the internet of things but for most people, it is invisible. It is invisible. The fact that if you open your phone, it will tell you You are 17 minutes from home, okay or he will tell you do not take I 69 because There is a crash. And for most people, they don't understand that is the Internet of Things.

Some of us of a certain age were introduced to digital technology with four basics of personal productivity at the fore—calendar, tasks, contacts and notes. Today, the calendar seems to be the remaining function that presents prominently on any new smartphone or tablet that you might purchase. Why is that the current state of productivity? And, what can you do to go back to the future with making sure your mobile technology serves you, and not the other way around?

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/085 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 Back to the Future: From the 4 Basics of Personal Productivity to the Current State of 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

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | Back to the Future: From the 4 Basics of Personal Productivity to the Current State of Productivity

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

PalmOS

Apple iOS parental controls

Google Family Link

Google OnHub router (since this recording, Ray has moved entirely to Google WiFi)

Driving mode on Apple iOS

Driving mode on Android (Pixel)Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

Raw Text Transcript | Back to the Future: From the 4 Basics of Personal Productivity to the Current State of 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.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25We are back again this week to talk about something that I think all of us who are of a certain age have experienced over the course of time, which is a transformation from older technology to newer technology. And what we're going to really be talking about today is really the current state of productivity in light of that technological change. You know, I can remember back to my first computing device, so to speak. I received a ti 83 from my aunt as a hand me down. It was a The reverse calculators they used to call it and then I remember the first device I actually bought from myself with my own allowance and that was a Casio our 500 little spell checking dictionary device and what a long way we have come from way back then, but it really does say something about technology. Okay, so can you give us a little bit background in terms of what we're going to be talking about today and and how it affects our personal productivity?

Augusto Pinaud 1:29You know, I'm not I'm not that also all that I will share today it's been several things I have. But the reality is that when you look into productivity when you look back into into the past and you talk about those devices my first device was also a Casio I don't remember the model but I remembered you could not back that up so it was a painful If you lose, if deleted, given I was young enough or anything formation may not be that irrelevant, but, but it was painful. And when the Palm Pilot came to the market, I remember how excited I was to the fact that you could back that up. So there was not going to be, you know, loosing stuff anymore. But what I want to talk or discuss today is those four pillars that came from that time that has been somehow degrading into more powerful tools, but less obvious tools and how that has affect the current state of productivity. Before we start recording the show, you know, we were talking about, you know, those devices and we were talking about the planners, you know, the justa paper planner, you know, one book one page calendar per, per day, and how our PDA sort of the beginning of the PDA basically bring four buttons, calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes. That need was really The beginning you know, I remember walking in into what it was a Franklin Covey stores in the malls in the states and looking at those planners and looking at those, you know, and I'd imagine the possibilities and but those planners, were still basing it on the on those four pillars, you know, the calendar, the contacts a task and the notes when you fast forward now to 2019 what you found is rarely those four things and I will even argue in many cases, None. None of the manufacturers do really strong task management, you know, or context is okay. calendar may be the best they do, but how that affect, you know, our generation and even the generations before you know, what are the solutions we come to in order to make that happen? You know, when the iPhone came out, my biggest thing With the iPhone was you could not do tasks, you could not sort notes, there was a lot of problem that was quickly solved by third party software. But in a way, it was leaving a really powerful divide device with, you know, big shortcomings from the productivity perspective. And if you look today on my iPhone in front of me right now, you know, I was thinking of this, as we were talking before we start recording the show. You know, the four applications on the bottom of my iPhone are for writing for a journal for organizing and task management. You know, it is interesting for me, there is no calendar context or notes on this

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:45when I look at my own phone and think about how I manifest what I do productively on especially the dock, the main series of buttons at the bottom of the page. In my case, my phone has five spots in the doc and, and so in the center is his calendar. But then remarkably enough on either side is a folder for contact apps, then Google Maps because I just use it as much as I do for traveling. then to the right of the calendar is my browser, my Chrome browser. And then to the right of that are my task management apps, and task and project management, all of those combined into another folder. And that's because above that, I've created a widget. I'm on the Android OS. And so I've created I've added a widget for my task manager above that with all of the features that I like to use within that software. So it's all really readily accessible to me all of that to say that probably not much has changed for me since then. With regard to the way in which I think about the you know, the people PDA and, and back then, you know the Palm OS on my devices. And today with regard to using a small device that's with me all the time that it has access to my calendar and my tasks, specifically my my contacts on my notes, those are much more blended. But I do know that when I transitioned from, from the palm over to the first iPhone, I, I was already migrating everything to Google. So I already migrated everything to Google Contacts. And so my transition was just once digitally, it went from the Palm OS. I uploaded that to Google Contacts. As far as I can remember, maybe there was some period where that went to Yahoo, but I'm not sure. And then, and then it went into Google Contacts and that's where it's been ever since. I've I've actually never maintained a contact database outside of Google Contacts. And then that has always synchronized with all of my other devices. So it's a it's a pretty unique circumstance, I think, for me in the sense that while the devices have gotten smarter, the devices have gotten faster. My usage of those devices for those functions have not actually changed all that much.

Francis Wade 7:26I'm looking at my Android phone, and I'm asking the same question, but and what strikes me is that the the four apps that Augusto mentioned, none of them were internet based, so they weren't cloud based. Initially, they were really meant for standalone devices. So when I had my I guess, it See I had a I had a hp something or the other what it was, but this was like the early 90s. I tried to put in the contacts and I tried to put in tasks. I tried to do different things with it. Which should, theoretically allowed you to do. But once the phone was in the phone, it was a device once the device died. That was the end of it. I started to use the palm and had to re enter all this information. And I could sync with my laptop, but there was no cloud access. But I think the the game changer has been closed access because all of the the content that I have in contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes are all no cloud based. And the way I use the device is to access the cloud. It's, it's a portal to the information that I have safely secured somewhere. So it's a it's a device has changed from being the source of the information, which it used to be to being just one access point. Now, having said that, I think Augusto’s point is is is valid, which is when you win, you win those were the four primary buttons on your PDA. Essentially, the manufacturers were training you to operate the device in a particular way and to use it for a particular purpose. So it was it was,

Capturing, annotating and even doodling in lectures or meetings can be more digital than ever before. What are the options on the market? And, how do you approach smart pen productivity? That’s what we discussed this week on ProductivityCast!

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/084 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 smart pen 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

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Smart Pen Productivity

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

The 7 Best Smart Pens of 2020

6 Best Smart Pens of 2019 – 3D Insider

Best Smart Pens 2020

Livescribe smartpens (Livescribe Symphony came out between our recording and publication of this cast.)

Apple Pencil

Apple Pencil (2nd Generation)

Google Pixelbook Pen

Samsung active pen

Moleskine Pen+ Ellipse Smart Writing Set

Adonit Stylus

Sonocent Audio Notetaker

Cornell Note-taking method

ScanMarker Air

Squid

Nebo

Wacom tablets and pens

Equil Smartpen 2

Iris 

Goodnotes

reMarkable tablet

The Slate (by iskn)

Boogie Board

Microsoft Surface tablets

Raw Text Transcript | Smart Pen 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 0:25I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:27Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode. What we are going to do today is we are going to talk about the digital pen or that is the smart pen. What I'd like us to do today is to compare and contrast good old fashioned regular pens to the concept of the spectrum of different types of digital pens. And we have everything from pens that actually have ink that write on paper to digital styli that are writing on screens, and we'll talk about some of the particulars there. I'd like first also to do a comparison of the Major options on the market. And then to close out, I'd like us to have a little bit of discussion on basic tips for jumping into the digital pen or the smart pen market. If you are interested in a smart pen, what would you want to do? What would you want to do first in getting ready for that type of transition. So let's start off with what the various forms of digital pens are that are out there. So I'm going to cover at least three that I know of and then I'm going to have art explain the fourth since I probably can't do it as well as he can. So So first and foremost, we have good old fashioned pens, right we have ballpoint pens, we have fountain pens, we have the ability to write pen on paper, they require no battery. And in essence, we can digitize that by using our smartphones today and an application like Evernote or OneNote art What's the name of the Microsoft scanning application Office Lens Office Lens they You There we go. So we have Office Lens on the Microsoft platform and the ability to then just capture what we have written on paper with pen into our digital devices. Then we take the next step up, and we have other products that are in essence a an ink pen that has a camera or a series of lasers inside of the tip of the pen as well, that captures what you're writing on either specialized paper or just regular paper. And then that gets sucked into your digital world in some way shape or form. That data can be then turned into live typable text or remain as an as a digital form either as an image or as some other kind of digitized drawing. Then we go to the next step, which is a stylus and then we have the ability to write on screen in essence that requires a digital device where you have a touchscreen that can be written on and or a tablet of some kind that allows you to like the way cardboard is a stylus pad, where you're writing on a specialized board with specialized surface that then captures into your device very similar to your mouse or keyboard are

Art Gelwicks 3:20the other two that I would throw into this mix. One is the one that you see all over the place at like staples, and it's a capacitive end that is basically emulating the end of your finger, you would know it better as just a regular pen that has a squishy black, little almost like an eraser at the end of it. And it's used to create that connection between a touchscreen and the stylus device. The other one is one that is pretty much exclusive to the Samsung world and that's the S Pen. The S Pen is an active stylus that works with Samsung devices. Certain Chromebooks like the plus and the Pro, the also the note range of Samsung phones. Those are active devices that don't have a squishy end, they have a very sharp pen. But what they don't have is a battery. And they're deriving interaction from the screen surface itself. So there are two more specialized cases. But I'd say they need to be included into the mix.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:16That's the spectrum of the various digital pens on the market, or at least digitizing your ink into a device. And so let's get into some of the pros and cons of what is actually on the market. And I'd like to start from one end to the other, which is talking specifically about the pens themselves, and what we know about those particular devices. So I've been a Livescribe smart pen reducer for quite some time. And so Livescribe currently has the Livescribe three and the eight year now. And so the three of those models are the kind of class of similar pens that have in essence a camera that is embedded next to the ink cartridge. And as you as you write it is an essence capturing on on page. Now it requires special paper. So you have to have their notebooks or you need to have the ability to print their their paper, the so the format onto paper. So you can you can in essence like pairing with a levenger circa notebook or the staples Arc System, you can in essence, manifest your own planner, you know and notebook but you have to print that specialized paper in order for the camera to be able to know where you're writing and on what pages you're writing because it actually tracks what page you're on. And that helps it to organize the documents in your system. The the great part about the I think the Livescribe three is that it allows you to write in real time into lifetime typable text on your mobile device. So to kind of explain it, as you're writing in your notebook, you're putting pen to paper, and you're just happily writing along. Now the Livescribe three can capture audio at the same time. And when you click on any one of those points on the page, the physical page, you can jump back to that audio moment, you can also put a star like literally just draw a star on the page and then tap on it, and will actually create a, a bookmark to that point in time. And those are specialized little moments to snap you back to that particular moment in your notes, as well as in the audio. While you're writing in the with the Livescribe. Three though, if you look on your mobile tablet as it's open, it's recording the audio. And if you want it to you can turn that off, and so it can be recording the audio but at the same time, you will see the text being captured. Well at any moment in time. You can just swipe your finger across that text and it turns it into live typable text, you know, like ASCII characters, which is a really, really powerful feature. So, that's the Livescribe three I have not played with the ager but it's a it's, you know, the, it's a cheaper version. So it's about half the price of the Livescribe three, which I'm very curious about playing with it, it's it's got a smaller amount of memory. It's a little bit smaller in size. And I'm it's it's lighter. I'm very curious to see what this pen is all about. But it is the it is their latest duration and I'm presuming their movement into that space. It also auto synchronizes with Evernote OneNote, Google Drive and the Adobe cc cloud platform. We have many, many other pens in the market. We have the we have the Neo smart pen, the end too. We have the moleskin pen plus ellipse and I will put that links to these in the show notes so folks can just at least see them.

Art Gelwicks 8:03I played with the light of scribe when it first came out years ago. And the concept, I mean, seems solid enough, but all it's doing is in my book, at least all it's doing is helping the digitization part of the process, you still have a paper notebook, you're capturing information on the paper notebook, you have to deal with that at some way sometime, unless you're using just like legal pads and throwing the pages out. So while I, I think it helps with the digital transcription part.

From planner systems to no-code platforms to 3D printing, creating your own productivity tools today using analog or digital products has become easier than ever. But, how do you approach this so that you make an effective personal productivity tool for yourself, so not just scurrying down the proverbial rabbit hole?

That’s what we discuss in this week’s ProductivityCast! Creating your own productivity tools is possible, and we discuss the tools but also the strategy and methods to consider in approaching such an endeavor.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/083 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 you can benefit from creating your own productivity tools from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Creating Your Own Productivity Tools

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Creating Your Own Productivity Tools

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

Special Theory of Productivity

General Theory of Productivity

Levenger Circa notebook system

Staples Arc

Office Depot OfficeMax TUL system

Moleskine Smart Writing Set

Scanmarker Air Pen Scanner - OCR Digital Highlighter and Reader - Wireless

Foundations of Programming (Lynda)

Airtable

Getting Things Done (GTD) System in Google Sheets Tutorial

Coda

Notion

Microsoft Sharepoint

G Suite App Maker (this has been deprecated since the recording)

3D printing services:

ShapewaysSculpteoMore high-end, engineer-level 3D-printing: 3D Hubs

iOS Shortcuts (née Workflow)

Microsoft PowerAutomate (née Flow)

Tasker (Android)

Automate (Android)

Google Routines

IFTTT

Zapier

Raw Text Transcript

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

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:20 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:22I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, welcome one and all who are listening to us today, what we're going to do is we're going to have a conversation on this episode about the topic of creating your own productivity tools. And the the topic came about from considering the idea that today with the proliferation of so many different ways in which you can create your own X or Y, whether that be in the analog world, to creating things in the digital space. We now have all of these tools at our fingertips, and I will wanted us to talk about the the wide range of these services and tools available to us, for us to make our own tools. And I think maybe some of the principles first would be the underpinning for the conversation, and then making our way into some of the analog and then digital aspects of available resources to create your own tools. So let's let's start at the, at the kind of foundational level, what are the fundamental elements that you want in a productivity tool? And I'm going to I'm gonna pick on gousto with these two, how about you? How about you start us off with what are what are what's maybe, you know, two or three things that you think are absolutely important to have in any productivity tool that you would create, whether that be analog paper or digital

Augusto Pinaud 1:53good isn't an interesting discussion, and you and I have discussed this offline and I believe there is. One of the issues you find on all these things is what? Some people grow up what I call the basics of productivity. They are not present for most people, there are newer, younger people who come into the need for productivity. Begin discovering devices that didn't have what I call the basics. So the task then notes, the calendar and the context. You know, if you go back in time, you know, when paper was a big thing and digital organizers were not any digital organizer you bought in paper had those four things and I still believe they are the basic four things, you know, you need to have a place to have your task. You need to have a place to have your notes a place to have your calendar and a place to have your context. And what happened with the evolution of the smartphone is data Took the prominent front place and then went someplace in the back. And people simply came to devices that didn't have it. And what happened now is as they need or they are in the need to get more productive, or discovering, okay, what I need to do when they come in and are recreating the wheel instead of making the wheel, in many cases a little bit more efficient. I

Art Gelwicks 3:25definitely agree with a gousto on this. I think one of the parallels to this if you want to use an analogy, it's kind of like getting a driver's license. Before you get your driver's license, you're looking at cars, these are neat cars, you want to go drive. Imagine if you just went ahead and jumped in one and drove off something bad is very likely to happen. You need to go through the process of learning the basic steps, getting the mechanics down, getting comfortable with it before you can go through and jump in a car and drive away. Now take it to the next step. Now you want to not only drive That car but you want to customize it, you want to make changes to the car that are not standard, but fit your personality and how you work. You can see how far down that path that actually is. But yet, with tools like analog notebooks and many of the digital apps, we start at customizing, we don't start at the basics of learning what's in the box, and then going from there. And that's, I think, one of the biggest hang ups with this.

Francis Wade 4:26I think I would only add that most people sort of fail them fail into or use use tools like the ones that I was to describe because they had a failure. I think the failure comes from not being able to remember all the stuff that they thought they should be able to or could and when you know when they were younger and adolescence or a little bit older, or actually they're even some adults who To this day, won't write anything down, won't keep won't put anything in their smartphone and won't have a planner because they're still trying to use memory. I think it's Important to start with the sort of accepting that people try to use memory first for all these functions, and it's only when they fail that they look for replacements and they look for something better and they start to copy other people or they buy take a course or buy a book or get a planner, but it all starts with a failure of memory as the common denominator,

Augusto Pinaud 5:27I agree with you, Francis, but but also I love the analogy that art brought to the table because yes, it is true people go because of the failure, but also people go first into customizing so it is the you know, using arts analogy, I just put the car into the tree. And now let me take it to the shop. Okay, and let's now fix it fix the problem, but we are going to make it even more let's put blank let's put rims, let's put new Your paint job and not looking to the problem that is one what I'm trying to accomplish with this system doesn't matter if it's analog digital num, what you're trying to accomplish number two, how you work better because there is people who would love to to stay on paper and they go digital because they will people everybody's going digital. So I guess I also need to go digital where paper will work much better for them. And exactly the opposite. You know, your people will, but I can do it pretty Yeah, you have a really pretty blink thing that is completely dysfunctional. So I have seen both things because, yes, they come to a problem but they they are trying to fix a symptom more than understanding what the problem really is.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:51Okay, so I'm going to come at this from yet even a different angle. And let me see what you gentlemen have to kind of say about this. Which is on productive flourishing. And I'll put a link to this in the show notes. Charlie Gilkey, back in 2008, had put together two different perspectives two paradigms, he called them the the general theory of productivity, and the special theory of productivity, kind of a play on Einstein there. But what he tried to do with the general theory of productivity was to outline the perspective that a productivity system, in essence was supposed to encompass several specific pieces of the pie. basics of the two of them kind of mashed together is that a productivity system should help you with planning, with execution and with evaluation, and then a a tool or a system and I guess he would probably say a system but I'm gonna corollary this to just the tool right now is that the tool itself should have some these five fundamental components simplicity. usefulness be statically pleasing. So have some kind of aesthetics, connectedness, and cohesiveness. And so over time,

Emergencies abound. But, they don't always mean you have to lose personal productivity. With some contingency productivity planning, you can stay productive even when things break, when technology fails us, and when people snap!

Also, this was recorded a while back and since then, we're glad to note that Francis has since upgraded successfully and happily to Windows 10. 🤓

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/082 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 contingency productivity planning from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Contingency Productivity Planning

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Show Notes

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

Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF)

048 Creating a Backup Storage System – ProductivityCast

Francis Wade had Ray Sidney-Smith on his podcast to discuss backup systems:

Ep 60 Creating a Storage Decision Tool w/Ray Sidney-Smith p1Ep 61 Creating a Storage Decision Tool p2 w/Ray Sidney-SmithEp 62 Creating a Storage Decision Tool p3 w/Ray Sidney-SmithTry the Storage Decision Tool here

Raw Text Transcript | Contingency Productivity Planning

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

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:20 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:22I'm Francis Wade.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24and Welcome, gentlemen, welcome to our listeners. Welcome to you all listening. And what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about backup plans, that is contingency planning for greater productivity. We all come into contact with situations where stuff just goes south. And we need to be able to be prepared. We need to be flexible and adaptive. We need to be dynamic in the circumstances to be able to recover from those situations. And so today we're going to talk about three umbrella areas. Pretty much when things break when technology goes wrong. And of course, when people say The app. And so those will be what we talked about today in terms of what happens when those three areas of our worlds melt down. And we have to still be productive, we still have to get things done even when the problems arise. So let's start off with the notion of when things break, and ugly. So do you want to start us off with a personal example

Augusto Pinaud 1:27to kind of start with a personal example as he wake up this morning, grab his glasses out of his nightstand and end up with half of the glasses on the hand, the legs, one of the legs is broke. So traveling this week and I have all these PC things and it throws your morning off when you now need to add something that you know is time consuming. It's not as simple as say, Okay, well I need to replace it is I need to go stop on a particular place that only open on a certain time so it throw a big wrench on your planning. And like that many of the things many of these on expected failures and some of them you can plan the contingency I mean I went open the drawer on my nightstand and pull an old set of glasses and I have glasses otherwise I will not be able to see anything okay but but he's still a problem that now needs to be turned into a project that we need to look for next actions and everything else. So what do you do well, those things come in you're already complicated life

Francis Wade 2:29number conscious of this. The whole business of having backups because when I I, a migrated to Jamaica from living in the US, it was it was like moving from the land of reliable everything to the land of To a land of random, random everything random everything else. It was it was a culture shock to go from being able to live a very ordered, reliable, trusted, in some ways boring life in which everything was extremely predictable. And things were easy as a result, to move to a country where, where every day is a breakdown of some new concoction that you sort of have to navigate. And it was it was it was very difficult at first it's still it's still extremely challenging because he when the when the things that you can rely on, develop and become new and all of a sudden intrude into your world, it's it still takes the same level of ingenuity and effort. Like for example, just in the last year or so by cell phone services basically stopped working. Part of it is that I live up in the hills but something has changed in the networks here in Jamaica, the two major cell phone providers and the service that they provide has deteriorated to the point where Half of the time, it's impossible to have a phone call. And I've basically stopped receiving phone calls because people call me and all they get is voicemail. So I've had to adjust and readjust and use FaceTime and hat and Google Hangouts and, and telegram and Skype and WhatsApp is of no help. Unfortunately, it's very popular. But it's so popular that the word is that the telephone companies are throttling it, because they're losing too much revenue. But the other ones all work somewhat. So this is required. And this is just in the last year. It's just an example of what the kind of thing that when there's no copy of the source code create one,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:45you bring up a great point, which is that when when things break, like your cellular network, telephone network generally, then you need to make sure that you're aware of some some pieces of the puzzle. One is that it can break almost everything in your world can break I have a microphone that I'm speaking into right now and we'll get to technology stuff soon. But you know the the microphone arm could break. It's there's springs and joints and I'm use it every day. And it could just break. And what happens in those cases where there is a breakage and you need to now recover from that and still move on. Now my contingency plan is understanding what the scenario is. Right? So what are the various ways in which things could break and knowing what are the ways in which the contingency plan kicks into place? Right? So there's a scenario there's a cyber attack you you then think of Okay, what are the scenarios within which there could be a probability of some impact on your ability to continue to have continuity in this case for me, I always think of business continuity, but you were talking about your productivity system. So your productivity continuity then becomes a What's the probability of an impact? And those are the things that we pay attention to. So what could break in your world? And what would trigger you to know that there is a break. And so, for example, if your car's engine light comes on, that's a trigger, because it's at least warning you. And you then have the opportunity to do that. If you are writing with your pen, and all of a sudden the pen starts to and it's your only pen, you know, you have on an off site meeting, and it starts to you know, give not have enough ink in it, right? You know, you're like, Wait a second, why is this not? The why isn't the ink not flowing properly? That's a warning, that's a trigger. And then you have to figure out how you respond to the whole scenario. And so in the pen example, I always carry extra pens. I actually carry way too many pens on me at all times. And this is actually two problems and one, the first problem is that my pen could run out of ink I traditionally write with fountain pens, and I just like having a nice, you know, everyday nothing fancy fountain pen, but I tend to feel like it slows me down enough to think more thoughtfully about what I'm writing, especially when I'm taking notes by hand on like physical agendas that might be given to me at meetings. The other is I've been forced to use the the the friction pens that go with the the everlast, the rocket book everlast notebooks that I use for capturing my own internal notes when I'm meeting one to one with clients. And so that notebook uses the the gel ink pen that comes with the friction, you know, inside the friction pen. And so I have those two so I already carry two pens for when I'm capable of writing on my own or when I'm taking specific notes, but I want to use some automation through everlast notebook and Evernote and any other automation that's going to then get triggered beyond that. Automatically sending it to to whomever I need to. Well, the problem is that I frequently go to meetings and other people don't have pen and paper. And so I actually carry extra pen and paper for those people. Because frequently, I'm delegating or making recommendations of projects and actions to those people. And I want to make sure that they capture them. Because I can't depend upon others to have great productivity systems. And that by itself is a contingency plan. My contingency plan is that no matter what other tools people have, or don't have, or systems they have or don't have,

In this second part of our two-part series this week of ProductivityCast, we look at the ideas behind the book by one of our regular contributors, Francis Wade. Perfect Time-Based Productivity (2nd Ed.) is for the person who has already begun their productivity journey. It focuses mostly on task management and we talk about the ways we can gain greater insight into the way each person manages his/her tasks in order to find the best areas of improvement.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/081 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 Perfect Time-Based Productivity from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Perfect Time-Based Productivity

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

Getting Things Done by David Allen

SkedPal

Kaizen

Stickk

Perfect Time-Based Productivity: How to rescue your peace of mind as time demands increase (Second Edition) by Francis Wade (Amazon)

Perfect Time-Based Productivity – A unique way to protect your peace of mind as time demands increase (book website)

Fixed versus growth mindset - Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck, PhD

Discussion of Mindset at Productivity Book Group

Howard Gardner, multiple intelligences and education – infed.org

Multiple intelligences

The Age-by-Age Guide to Teaching Kids Time Management

Zwift

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, et al.

Make It Stick - Productivity Book Group

Change management

Evernote

OneNote

Notion.so

Productive Failure in Learning the Concept of Variance 

The 12 Important Life Skills I Wish I'd Learned In School 

Last Chance U

Micro-goal setting

Raw Text Transcript | Perfect Time-based Productivity, Part Two

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

Read More

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

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

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:23Welcome, gentlemen and welcome to our listeners to this second part in our conversation we're having around the book, Perfect Time-Based Productivity, the second edition by our very own Francis Wade, I'm going to pass it over to you, Francis to tell us where we left off kind of a recap of our last episode. And and then where we left off in the conversation, and what we're going to be talking about in this week's episode.

Francis Wade 0:49Well, last time we talked about the fact that today's learner or today's young person, let's put it that way. People who are younger than we are, are left to their own devices. develop their own productivity system which they do they start doing somewhere in the teens and unlike us authors with gray hair they have very few signposts very few very little guidance especially with respect to the the smartphones that they're using. And with less guidance it means that the systems they self develop end up having some gaps when they get into their let's say their late teens and early 20s this stuff development business is true for everyone but but for the today's user today's learner today's person entering the point is there's less signposts and less guidance than there has been in the past and or hypothesis was that as a result, they need a way to evaluate themselves which is what they do anyway, when they take a training program or pick up a book is that they go through a period of self reflection to see okay, where am I with respect to what this book or this person or this training is recommending and we had just gotten to the point where I shared a an evaluation I had done in under the guise of playing a game. So I shared the fact that a couple months ago, I picked up a esport called Swift, which is basically a bicycling training program online, which you attach a trainer to Bluetooth transmitter, it transmits the signal to your laptop, which then transmits the signal to the game which links you up to races and rides with hundreds, thousands of people all over the world. So you're essentially pedaling on your bicycle on a train against some resistance. And you're watching people go by you and you're catching up with groups, but it's all happening on the screen in front of you. And it's feels extremely real, as I shared the last time and it's, it, of course, makes you very, very fit and the proof of the pudding has been my own writing. So I've gotten measurably fitter since playing this game two months ago and The guys on guys who I ride with in my club are telling me that Yeah, looking much stronger and I feel a lot stronger yesterday I rode had a six hour ride and had no problem doing it. And so the thing is working, it started with a just kind of a lack because I didn't know where it would go. But the programmers have found a way to give me an experience that translates into real time fitness on the road, you know, where I where I do the man riding, I guess. And the idea, which is I guess, the one that is just an example of is that there's a way there are ways to use software to either evaluate or and or to train and or to gamify and or to give someone this immersive kind of experience. That's not just about having fun, like a typical game might be but actually results in a real skill. You know, I think of flight simulator, and what it goes for would be pilot It actually does build a real skill. So that's where we left off is what role does the digital world play in developing real skills, I guess we're going to tie it back to productivity skills. And then

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:12what Francis is talking about is right in line with a lot of the game design discussion that we've had in past episodes, but I think it's really important to circle back to this on occasion, which is to recognize the importance of certain types of components of game design, that that really engage us all in the learning process. And really, let's let's remove game design and just say good learning is built on some fundamentals. One is what's considered, basically, lateral thinking, and we've talked about Dr. Edward de Bono's work here with six thinking hats and that kind of thing, but in essence, interlaced learning, in my perspective is very akin to lateral thinking. Which is the idea of taking multiple, that's actually wrong. So scratch that. So I like both of these concepts. So I like the idea of interlacing your learning. And what that means is that in in when you're trying to learn you are taking different parts of the subject and learning them out of out of order. And the idea is, is that if it's easy, your brain automatically stops learning if it's difficult your brain attempts to rise to the occasion. Challenge is what makes us motivated challenge is what makes us learn human human civilizations. Humans as a as a species, we are, thankfully, who we are because of our ability to face adversity. And it seems as though that's also the way we best grow. That's how how we were best, you know, able to go from where we are to where we want to be. We embrace challenge and I think frequently what people want to do is find the path of least resistance. But when it comes to learning, it doesn't actually work that way. And so what what we want to do is we want to be able to have challenge. And that means don't try to learn things in order, don't go from Part A to part B, Part C, yes, you won't understand Part C, or part f as well, until you circle back around to the material. But the science clearly bears out that when we learn out of order, we actually learn we understand it better. We also have to make mistakes and get immediate feedback. If you learn something and you don't make a mistake in the process of learning that thing is you will learn it less you will actually retain it less than if you actually learn it, make a mistake along the way, get corrected quickly and then come to the end. You will actually have learned it better. You will retain it better, you'll comprehend it better. There's this better learning experience by virtue of you going ahead and having made mistakes and Again, that that tertiary part is actually immediate feedback. So as you're learning, you need to be tested, you need to be, you know, you need to, in some way, shape or form, you need to be able to show that you have actually learned it. And that forces you, it's kind of like accountability, generally, it's the idea that you have to be held accountable. And that that very nature of being tested in some way, shape or form forces the accountability. So from my perspective, I think that these are, these are game design principles. These are also learning design principles, whether that's pedagogy or andragogy. This is how we best teach.

This week on ProductivityCast, we have a two-part series being released to discuss Francis Wade's second edition of his book, Perfect Time-Based Productivity! In this cast, Francis explains the development of personal productivity systems in early life and how time demands can better help you identify how to spend your time wisely.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/080 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 Perfect Time-based Productivity from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Perfect Time-based Productivity, Part One

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

Getting Things Done by David Allen

SkedPal

Kaizen

Stickk

Perfect Time-Based Productivity: How to rescue your peace of mind as time demands increase (Second Edition) by Francis Wade (Amazon)

Perfect Time-Based Productivity – A unique way to protect your peace of mind as time demands increase (book website)

Fixed versus growth mindset - Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck, PhD

Discussion of Mindset at Productivity Book Group

Howard Gardner, multiple intelligences and education – infed.org

Multiple intelligences

The Age-by-Age Guide to Teaching Kids Time Management

Zwift

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, et al.

Make It Stick - Productivity Book Group

Change management

Evernote

OneNote

Notion.so

Productive Failure in Learning the Concept of Variance 

The 12 Important Life Skills I Wish I'd Learned In School 

Last Chance U

Micro-goal setting

Raw Text Transcript | Perfect Time-based Productivity, Part One

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 0:27Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners. Today, we are going to be talking about Francis's second edition of his book. Basically, we're going to talk a little bit about the ability for us to be able to do something that I think is really interesting related to Francis's book, perfect time based productivity. So Francis, do you want to tell us a little bit about your book, first of all, and then give us a bit of a preamble in terms of what we were discussing today on this cast?

Francis Wade 0:54Sure. So one of the core ideas which I've sort of run into, by mistake. I always thought there was a perfect kind of big set of behaviors out there then, and you just needed to learn them from somebody who's really smart. And that was my original thought. But I discovered that through the through leading courses that people already came into the programs with habits and practices, they're already using tools, they already have something in place. So I did a little bit of digging to the research and found out that they actually develop these behaviors, starting from adolescence, and going all the way into early adulthood. Specifically, I'm talking about task management behaviors. So they start to make tasks in their mind. It's a psychological process. Some people transition into making lists, some sat use paper, some migrate from using memory. But anyway, by the time they hit 25, let's say and they walk into a time management program or they pick up a book, these behaviors are already in place, and the research supports it to a great degree, but the training that we offer On a hole doesn't support on a whole. The training we offer says, here's something you don't know anything about. But what really happens, from my opinion is that the learner sits there reading or listening and says, Hey, I'm already doing half of this stuff. So in their mind, they're having to say, Oh, hold on a minute, they're going through a self evaluation, but it's not like they're learning advanced trigonometry, which they don't have any clue about. They're learning about task management, which is something they've done ever since they first heard the concept of time, which is about 10 years old. So we don't give up. We don't tell them this. Usually, they have to discover it on their own, but they're sort of left sitting in your courses on or training wondering, Hmm, I already do that. So they're doing their own ad hoc self evaluation. My book says, essentially, instead of doing an ad hoc self evaluation, let me teach you how to do one on your own without my being there at all. So just follow this process and you'll be doing self evaluation. But let me stop there and validate that idea of doing a self evaluation that people do that with you guys before I go on to the next piece,

Augusto Pinaud 3:09I agree to a certain extent that, and and even I don't know if 25 is even the age where we're where those problems start, you know, when you look at, you know, in the United States, specifically, how certain basic things or has been eliminated from the curriculum, okay, that you have people who go to college who don't know the most basic stuff, forget about complex stuff as time management, we're talking about the basics to fix anything, you know, I, you can see, you know, see friendzone customers who unclimbed quote unquote, coaching clients who are now struggle with their kids going to college that don't know the most basic things, you know, and they're wondering if they should have teach them and how they learn it and say, Well, I learned Some of that is school, I learned some of that. And the basic skills are not there. And they're coming to that 25. And there is really not an easy place to find where and how to learn those basic skills.

Francis Wade 4:12For example, I've met CEOs who still try to manage all their tasks using memory and it's not as if they aren't smart people, they usually really smart, at least book smart and business smart. But the idea the basic idea that we you know before or subscribe to, which is that memory is a bad place to keep your tasks. It's something that they've never heard they literally don't know any better. So to back up what Agusta saying people fumble stumble all the way into their 20s or even beyond. And they don't even know that they're fumble stumbling. They're just, they just made something up and they're trying to make it work as hard as they can. As one woman put it to me and of course, she had she saw that she needed to manage all her costs in her memory because that was a sign of being productive. writing anything down was like a sign of weakness. Well, by the end of the course she, you know, she got the opposite opposite story. But to back up what Agustina saying you know that the software doesn't help you understand that that we in a previous episode, we talked about the apps that are on your phone, they don't give a hint that you should be managing tasks, the way they used to back when we were picking up the first PDAs. So there's nothing in their environment that is saying, nudging you in the right direction, you're on your own.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:28So my only curiosity is that, as I think about my own experience in learning, time management and task management together, they really were a combined experience. I can't parse apart, having learned one separately from the other. As a as an adolescent. The whole notion of managing to be more efficient and effective, even though I didn't have those terms, was something that was very appealing to me. And so I imagined that there are people out there Who naturally gravitate toward order? And there are people who probably don't. And you're listening to us, if you probably gravitate toward order, or you recognize that you gravitate toward maybe chaos, and you know that you need that order. So we all share an experience where we're in. We're consistently focused on that. And our development led us to that point, whether either way, right. So the goal for us is to figure out from adolescence to adulthood and it's pretty interesting that you talk about the kind of around the age of 25, because our brains develop our bodies develop actually, up until that point until the age of 24 ish, people are still developing. And so the the maturation of the human of you know, human development is very slow and 24 years before Human is fully developed as a pretty, you know, long time, a period of time. And so I just think that at each stage of education, we're somewhat failing our, all of civilization if we're not teaching them the right time management and the right task management and the right goal management, whether that be projects or otherwise, at the at the stage in which they are at. And so I'd be curious, like in going back to my adolescence, again, you know, in essence,

Stress is natural. But, when that stress overwhelms us that can lead to not just reduced personal productivity. Detecting and managing burnout is a key capability for highly productivity individuals and that’s what we discuss on this week’s episode of ProductivityCast.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/079 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 detecting and managing burnout from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Detecting and Managing Burnout

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Detecting and Managing Burnout

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

Good Stress, Bad Stress by Barry Lenson

Mindset by Carol Dweck, PhD

Discussion of Mindset at Productivity Book Group

“A practical guide to detect early signs of burnout.”

“Burnout Prevention and Treatment”

“What Causes Burnout and How to Overcome It”

“Overcoming Burnout: 10 steps to reignite your flame and shine brightly once more”

Ecstatic response (or, “post-traumatic growth”)

ProdPod: Episode 112: Overcoming Burnout: Rest and Rejuvenation for Sustainable Productivity

Getting More Done - Fitnesses

Raw Text Transcript

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

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

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

Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners for this episode, where we will be discussing burnout. That is we're going to discuss really the functions of what, what are the pieces of burnout? How do we define burnout? And what are some of the signs that help to detect that you are burned out or that you are seeing someone else who is experiencing burnout because I think that's sometimes very helpful. In addition, we're then going to move on to discussing how we actually manage while in burnout mode. That is, while we're feeling this Explain when we're experiencing burnout, how do we deal with being burned out while we're burned out? And then ultimately, how do we overcome burnout? How do we get out of burnout so that we can get back to being the highly productive individuals that we are? Let's start off with defining burnout. What is burnout? Who wants to try and tackle that topic? First, I think the

Francis Wade 1:22most there's an extreme form of burnout. And that's the one people relate to the most, which is when you're physically exhausted physically, mentally, and otherwise exhausted and unable to function. I think it's an extreme position to be in. I think the people who get there usually aren't able or don't have the skill to pick up the early warning signs. So they don't know that that's where they're headed until it's too late. So it strikes me as a function of not knowing the signals, not seeing the early warning indicators, and then arriving in this position on wondering why do I feel this way? What happened? How do I get mess up back. But I think it comes as a shock, the very first time feeling of overwhelm and not being able to get out of it probably was but at the same time,

Augusto Pinaud 2:07the problem with burnout is that most people don't notice when they are on that way. And they made the moment they start identifying the exception, there is no much or no today can do. They're simply out and they the path to recovery, when you are that down that low. It is really, really difficult. And part of it is that I tend to believe that people don't know and don't have Well, good practices for self care, you know, we push and push and push and push and hope that things are going to last forever, but we do a really poor job on self care.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:45It makes some great points and I want to take a step back, I think and just educate our listeners on the different types of stress and how I look at the paradigm of burnout in the context of production. And so I first start off with the book, good stress, bad stress, which is by Barry Levinson. And I'm not sure I'll put a link to this in the show notes to see if it's actually still available for sale. But I've had some difficulty finding the book in in various sources over time. But either way, I'm reading from my copy, and, in essence, very tense and talks about the idea of stress being characterized in in two different in two different kind of checklists of qualities. And so you have good stress and bad stress you stress which is good stress, and then distress, which is bad stress. And so we have you stressors and distress, there's things that are positive or negative stressors, and so good stress is characterized by these various qualities. They offer visible rewards. It brings people together good stress also lets you develop and grow. It boosts your self esteem, it ends with resolution. Good stress also changes into something good when relieved, that is a kind of device Pass valve creates a positive outcome it opens up new possibilities when resolved results in high achievement, and it breeds optimism. Whereas on the flip side of things, bad stress has no desirable outcomes in sight and drives people apart while limiting you. Bad stress makes you feel worse about yourself. it merges into new conflicts and problems. And bad stress also becomes something bad when relieved it's dead ended. It lowers personal standards and bad stress causes negativism and defeatist attitudes. These two different things good stress, you stress and distress negative stress are these two competing forces in our worlds. Now, what we have to do is find more of the good stress and less of the bad stress but in essence, that's a that is categorical stress. That is once you you once you're experiencing distress It's negative and its impacts are negative, we then have volume based stress. And either either volume of use stress or distress can lead to burnout. That is, if you have distress of a particular say, impact, you know that that's a that is a very emotional form of distress, say someone very close to you passes away that categorical distress can cause some kind of negative emotional impact on your world. It's not necessarily going to cause burnout. burnout is when any type of stress categorical stress, good or bad stress is administered over time. That is you're experiencing those stressors over the course of time. This ultimately leads to physical, emotional or mental, some kind of prolonged behavioral stress. The goal for us is to recognize when we're experiencing that burnout, and really what happens is that You start to experience negative symptoms in your world. And the idea here is that when you are when you start to to recognize that there are emotional, physical and mental factors, and those, those excessive or prolonged stressor, stresses that you're experiencing, are there, you will start to feel burned out, you will start to feel all of that negative association with the work you're doing. The people you're around your social life, generally, you're gonna start to feel that impact. And, of course, it's not good on your on your body, it's not good on your wellness. And so that's that's how I see burnout. And then of course, that takes us then to what burnout means to your productivity. And usually, what I think of burnout is that you're poorly executing the tasks that you are doing, you are not doing the tasks that you Want and or need to be doing. And ultimately, you are getting feedback from the people around you that you're not performing at the level at which they expect ncu to typically be. So if you're if people around you are used to seeing you perform at a particular level, and all of a sudden, that level diminishes, that is a clear sign that you are burned out. burnout itself expresses differently based on the individual. So what your burnout looks like, is likely different than somebody else's burnout. And so sometimes people will think, Oh, well, I'm feeling maybe depressed, or maybe someone else says, Oh, I'm just feeling stressed out. I'm just feeling wired. For some reason. They're feeling more elevated emotionally, then, then typical. So everybody expresses burnout in different ways. And so you have to be somewhat sensitive to what's going on. You have to be a little bit more aware about what's going on in your world. So that you're able to recognize your symptoms, your unique symptoms of burnout so that you can then stop it. And correct course over the over time, let's talk about some of the symptoms of burnout. What does burnout look like? When you see someone or yourself in burnout,

Francis Wade 8:19I did it first and foremost, task overwhelm, but but not not to the sense that they have too much to do, but that they are not managing the things that they have to do well, so other words, they're there, they're not managing the demands of their time.

On this cast, we invited a special guest—our colleague and friend—Jim McCullen, to talk about his email-focused personal productivity system for Microsoft Outlook (and eponymous book), Control Your Day. 

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/078 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 Control Your Day With Jim McCullen from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Control Your Day Email Productivity System

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Jim McCullen

Jim McCullen considers himself a productivity hacker, always looking for ways to reduce the effort it takes to stay organized and get more things done. Jim is an avid GTDer and has built a system called Control Your Day that allows Microsoft Outlook users to apply GTD practices to manage their email, task lists and delegated work all from one virtual search folder in Outlook.

Jim published his book, Control Your Day, on Amazon which has sold copies across the world and recently published a Udemy video training series titled Control Your Day.

Show Notes | Control Your Day Email Productivity System

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

Control Your Day (website)

Control Your Day (book)

Corporate Email Mastery (course)

Raw Text Transcript | Control Your Day With Jim McCullen

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 0:25And welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast, where we actually are doing something a little bit different than we normally do. We have a guest today to talk about a system that I've known actually for quite a bit of time now. And and so what I wanted to do was for all of us to have a conversation around learning about a system based in Outlook called control your day. And so to do that, we have the progenitor of that system, Jim McCullen, Jim considers himself a productivity hacker always looking for ways to reduce the effort. It takes takes to stay organized and get more things done. Jim's an avid GTD er, and has built a system called control your day that allows Microsoft Outlook users to apply GTD practices to manage email task lists, delegated work, all from one virtual search folder in Outlook. So Jim published his book, control your day on Amazon. And it's sold copies across the world. And he recently published a course based on that series titled control your day. And so welcome to productivity cast,Jim.

Jim McCullen 1:31Hey, Ray, thanks so much for having me today. I am excited and look forward to be able to share some of this information with your audience.

Augusto Pinaud 1:38Oh, really, really excited to have you here. I think I met Jim at least virtually many, many years ago in a time where I was leaving on a closed outlook environment. But over the years, I have recommend Jim's book to many people who are on those kinds of environments who can't or can't install limited pieces of software. Leaving outlook and require really to unleash the power of Outlook. You know, I been saying for many years now the problem with outlook is that is a really, really long rope. And if you don't have a good guide, what happened is you tend to hang yourself with it. And Jim provide one of those good guides. Sowelcome, Jim.

Jim McCullen 2:21Thanks. So, yeah, let me just give you a little bit of an overview of control your day how I got started with it. So everything really started from David Allen's book, Getting Things Done. I was a passionate follower from shortly after it was published. I created all of the manual systems that he originally recommended the paper based systems. And then I started looking for technology solutions to deploy GTD with and at that time, there really weren't very many. And so I as I switched and started using Microsoft Outlook. I tried using these other to do lists and external lists to to match My GTD world and it just wasn't working for me because everything would always come back to Outlook for me. My company is heavily focused on email. We're a global organization, we have people working 24 seven email is just that best channel. And so I needed a way and outlook to apply these GTD practices. And so I started to build out this system control your day, and used it for a number of years before publishing a book or most recently, the training series on it. But the concepts that I deployed were, were really kind of taking a different approach to Outlook. So most of you if you're use Outlook, you probably have dozens or hundreds of folders that you organize your emails into. In control your day. I just use two folders. I have my inbox and my Sent Items. That's it. Everything else is managed in virtual search folders, which are basically just filters that you save in Outlook, and so bye bye Using these virtual search folders, I can organize everything from just my inbox in my Sent Items. The other key thing in control your day is, in most outlook users, you're managing by the received date in your email. So as messages come in that received date, they just keep pushing down other messages and you lose focus on them. What I do as messages come into my control your day system and outlook, I flag every single message with a due date of today. And then I can create a virtual search folder looking for that due date, and organized by that due date. And so that way as I'm processing my email, if new messages come in, and I don't need to deal with them for a couple of weeks, I can just push the due date forward two weeks. Same thing if I send a message to somebody, I can set a follow up flag with a due date on it for say two weeks from now and even put a note in there for what I'm waiting for. And so that that follow up flag in Microsoft Outlook. allows you to add a note. And so that note allows me to define next actions. So David Allen talks a lot about next actions and contexts. And I'm able to incorporate all of that in with the follow up flag notes, and then create these virtual search folders. And let me just come back for one second to the virtual search folders. So I really just have three, I have my due today. So that's everything in my system that's due today, whether it's in my inbox, or my Sent Items, I have my CYD folder, which is everything that's in my system. So anything that has a due date, and the way I clear that out is if I don't need the message, I just clear out the due date flag I've cleared mark the messages as completed. And it's out of my system. It's out of my folders, but it's still in my inbox in my Sent Items for reference. So the other item, the other one I have is my overdue folder. And so that's anything that I haven't gotten to and that ties in perfectly with with David Allen's weekly review, so at the end of the week, I can go back into my system and look at that overdue folder and understand that that's the work that I have to catch up on that I have to clean up. And then from there, I can create as many other virtual search folders as I need. So for example, I can set up folders based on context. So I can go say, hey, let me get all my next actions that have call at call at the front of the action. At that point, I can go in and see all my calls that I have to do. So I can create as many virtual search folders as I want, I can set them up, tear them down. But all my messages just exist in these two folders, my inbox in my Sent Items, and I'm not using any external software, which is critically important today, as companies locked down their environments and only allow you to use their corporate authorized software. All I'm using is Microsoft Outlook.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:55And so Jim, just so the listeners are aware if they aren't aware about virtual search folders. How How does one create? First of all, what is a virtual search folder? And how does one create it not in like a specific version of Outlook, but kind of how does someone manifest a virtual search folder

Jim McCullen 7:15just down on the left hand side, if you scroll down the left of your outlook window, you'll see search folders and you can create a new search folder. And once you select that, you can then go in and select the actual folders you want to look at. So for me, I always select my inbox and my Sent Items. So that's the two sources for this search. And then it allows you to put in any kind of criteria you want. So for example, in most of them, I'll go in and say, I only want to include messages that have a due date. That means they're somewhere in my system, I need to action them still, right. If they don't have a due date, I've finished it, I don't want to see it. I can also go in and say look at categories. So for example,