ProductivityCast

The ProductivityCast team decided to make a special appearance 😂 at Remote Work Productivity Conference 2020 and we recorded a live show...with a live audience. It was a lot of fun discussing remote work productivity and our reflections after our episode, The Age of Remote Work Productivity.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/076 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 remote work 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 | ProductivityCast Live from Remote Work Productivity Conference 2020

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes

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

(Coming soon.)

Raw Text Transcript | ProductivityCast Live from Remote Work Productivity Conference 2020

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 0:27I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:29 And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:31Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to everybody who is both watching us live but also listening in the podcast. Today we're doing something really interesting and I think it's gonna be fun. We are actually live at remote work productivity conference 2020. And if you missed it, you can head over to remote work productivity .co and check out the video replays. But what we're going to do today is we're going to have a conversation both as the panel here but also with live audience about remote work productivity. And I'd like to move it in three parts, as I've done in actually a panel discussion this morning that we had, but as well in just any discussion, I like to talk about strategies to the technology, and then collaboration, all three sets of practices that really pull together the functions of remote work productivity. And I'm going to start off with some of the my own thoughts here in terms of whether or not I've gotten all the pieces. So I asked this of the panelists this morning, and I'm actually curious what you gentlemen have to think is, as I said, strategies, technology collaboration, Did I get it right? Is it all the pieces and or are they the right buckets? Or, you know, what are the other ones? Now note that the panelists actually agreed with me. So I will start off right now.

Art Gelwicks 1:56You know, that's not how this works.

Unknown Speaker 2:00All right, so what were the buckets again?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:05strategies, technology, collaboration.

Art Gelwicks 2:09I would add probably a fourth one. And I don't have a really good name for it. So I'm going to call it psychology. Because it's it's the mentality and the mindset that has to go along with it. So you can lay out all the strategies you want, you can have the tech, but if you're not sensitive to the emotional and dq layer of it, the rest of its going to fall apart, because you're going to have a bigger issue.

Francis Wade 2:40I would add well being as well, I think, I think the ones we're adding could be probably collected on the strategies, different kinds of strategies. And that's how I really got all encompassing.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:51And that's what I really tend to think is that you know, strategies is a pretty large encompassing broad category of all of the productivity and organizational and biological strategies that we use toward having really performance, high performance in a remote work productivity environment.

Art Gelwicks 3:08Now, are we talking about it from the standpoint of as an individual working in that environment? Or are we looking at it from the perspective of a team of people working in that environment that you're part of, or a team of people that you're responsible for? Because to me, there's three different perspectives there.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:28Yeah, I would put all of the other things that are team based under collaboration, whether that's management or, okay, pure, pure, you know, pure leadership in essence, but you know, modeling yourself and that kind of thing. Yep.

Augusto Pinaud 3:43That's, that's how I understand it, you know, the part of, of the strategies is more closely related to the personal productivity, the part of collaboration, it is more to that team environment. As I said, the problem with technology is that technology is really a support tool. It evolves way too fast to be anything else than support. And, you know, if you look at the technology you were using five years ago, okay, versus what you're using now there's, in most cases, not even a comparison. So if it is more how you really set those strategies on can adjust doses, try to choose how you can in embrace collaboration and use the technology as a support for all those.

Francis Wade 4:31Yeah, but I would, I would, I would also add almost a caveat or a warning, which is that as new technology comes in, it disrupts people's concept of support. So a lot of people who are using zoom, for example, never used it before, who didn't want to you never wanted to use it before, who are being essentially forced to use it. And they've had to go through a learning curve that they didn't anticipate ever going through. And so technology for those people who are already requiring a certain level of support is a nuisance and an imposition. And it's a new learning curve. And I've got to adapt to it. So it's not, it's not support, it's a challenge. I will add that

Art Gelwicks 5:14caveat. And I'm going to build on that. Because when you are in a non remote working environment, you have, for lack of a better term, a level playing field. Everybody has the same conference room, they have access to the same materials, the same resources if they're working in the same building that type of thing. In this type of remote working environment, we're not on the same playing field anymore. I'm in a very comfortable office that I have set up with my recording gear and multiple monitors and I'm in my happy place. Other people are sitting at the dining room table with the dog chewing on one leg and the two year old chewing on the other. So we have to be cognizant of the fact of where we have previously assumed that everybody was operating at the same level. That's nothing The case anymore. And that has to be taken into consideration as one of those best practices to to be more empathetic and sympathetic to people's situations that they are trying to accomplish the work in that they were they were previously doing next to you, in many cases,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:18I have a real difficulty with the poor internet of people who without my meeting, you know, I just have that difficulty of like, Oh, you know, I can't understand you, I can't whatever. And you're absolutely right aren't that you have to like, take a step back, and like, take a deep breath and understand that it's not their fault. It's not a moral failing of the individual that their technology is failing them. You know, it's really just a fact that it's an imposition for them to have to work from home. In many cases, as France noted, no one prepared for this. We're going to get to a point though, I think as we make our way through this, where some of these pieces are going to be expected of people that you know, it's not their fault now. And john is noting here actually in the chat that sometimes it is their fault, bad Wi Fi, bad placement, no hard line. You're absolutely right, john. And but at the same time at this, at this kind of juncture people haven't really been educated about that. And I think it behooves all of us who are productivity minded, who are who are peer leaders, and are capable of helping people understand that these things exist, that the technology is actually rather difficult. You just have to really get over the fact that it's difficult and then move toward helping people understand that you know what Wi Fi, your Wi Fi router, is what connects you to the internet, if you are going to have a meeting, you need to make sure that you are potentially plugged into it physically like I am, I'm always physically plugged into the internet when I'm having a meeting like this because I don't want to deal with internet connectivity issues with the Wi Fi going down and otherwise and I actually have a fairly strong mesh network in my in my home office in my office in general. So you know like, we have to We're gonna I think we're going to go from a place of being okay with it to a place of being not okay with it. I'm curious if, if all of you think the same about that, or what do you think will happen as people start to feel like, okay, we've been in this for a while now, even after this lockdown is over and folks come out of, of a remote work productivity environment and start going back to the office and are

This week, the ProductivityCast team discusses the tools and tricks for producing content productively. Content production is not just for marketers; it's a fundamental component of many of our job duties. So, producing content productively can really help us save time and garner a stronger reputation among our peers and employers.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/075 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 Producing Content Productively from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Producing Content Productively

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | Producing Content Productively

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

Evernote

Dropbox

Apple Notes

Trello

Workflowy

OneNote

Notion.so

Google Drive

Ulysses

Scrivener

Google Docs

Hemingway

WordPress.org (software)

WordPress.com (hosting)

Raw Text Transcript | Producing Content Productively

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.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24And today, we are here to talk about something that many of us have to deal with on a regular basis. And we don't actually form formalize the process many times which of course, competes with our productive output, and that is our productive output. How do we create content, whether that be for internal purposes, you know, internal memos, if you work at a law firm, you have to do legal memoranda. If you're at a company where you have documentation that needs to be kept, you're constantly having to write including probably email as well where you know, some email requires quite a bit of substantive thought process plus outbound content, whether that's for a blog, a podcast scripting, video scripting, and all kinds of other kinds of outbound. You're writing short guides or ebooks for the company, we have to write a lot of content in our daily work lives, especially in the knowledge worker age. And what we want to do today is talk about some of the the gears that are necessary to make that engine so that you don't have to have your system be so hodgepodge to be cluttered and chaotic in the process of getting your content out the door. And so let's start off with some of the challenges people have with producing content productively.

Art Gelwicks 1:42Well, I think some of the main areas that I see consistently are one getting ideas for content, evaluating those ideas and then putting them into a content production schedule. The actual creation of the content itself whether it's writing the article, recording the podcast, The review and approval, especially if you're dealing within a business environment, that can often be one of the biggest bottlenecks to your production process. And then finally, how is that content distributed to your audience? And what feedback are they providing to you? And how do you incorporate that into the lifecycle of your content production process? So there's a lot of different steps that can be issues.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:27Absolutely. So let's try and tackle some of these in that order. Throughout this episode, I'm not sure we can really deal with the review and approval process. But we might touch on that as we as we make our way through. So let's start with the concept of kind of the macro level here of how do you gather ideas and set the tone for any content that you're going to be doing? And so I'm going to I'm going to use a blog as the easiest perspective here, but we could go in we this could work for almost anything. In essence, unless it's a one off kind of project, but the idea here is that you would have some kind of thematic calendar or schedule that you've created, so that you are not trying to ideate in this amorphous expansive field, you really need structure in which to be creative. I know that sounds very counterintuitive, but you need structure in order to be creative. And the boundaries help you be creative. And so whatever it is that you're going to be talking about, giving yourself some level of boundaries, some kind of theme allows you to be able to then brainstorm within that space, and then to be able to come up with ideas for topics, parts of, you know, the outlined parts of of a of a topic, you know, so you might say, Okay, well, I'm going to talk about this particular topic. I'm gonna talk about cars. Okay, well, what kind of cars are going to talk about and then once you pick a particular A type of car, say Toyota Prius, okay, well, you know, there are different models of Prius. And then you start talking about the different. So maybe the idea that is Oh, well, I'll talk about kind of the history of the Prius, and how it came to be. And I'll talk about some of its particular finer points before I go into compare and contrast between the different models of them. So the the brainstorming process really helps you once you have a theme, but if you don't have that theme, then you know what, what is the Lewis Carroll quotation? You know, if you have nowhere to go anywhere, we'll do something like that, you know, you really need to have some overarching direction.

Augusto Pinaud 4:41Interestingly, when you go into writing, one of the counter intuitive things is how much organization you need in order to really make the writing happen. You know, people think, Oh, well, you know, I will just sit and write and I wish to tell you that that works. haven't worked. For me a bit, but for me requires a lot of organization and when you read about, you know more, say mainstream or famous writers, they all have a structure on a plan. And I think it is really important regardless what the content you are producing, what is going to be that instructor where you are going to capture the ideas because the ideas will come Hey, write about x, okay, write about the Prius write about how about I write about the right button under the radio fantastic, but if you don't capture those ideas, what happened is they get back to to the author and after you capture them now. Okay, let's start with your outline. In this. What we're going to do is is where I'm trying to go with this article, so you can go into the actual writing and then editing and approving and everything else, but I think you need that and I think you need this structure to be able to do that in a more more effective way. And when we get to the to the next part, let's talk about software that we use a person who writes, you know, short content, like a blog and articles, but also write long content, like books, it is important, I use different tools for those two kind of writing because they require a completely different mindset. When you are doing one thing or the other.

Art Gelwicks 6:31I'm going to take it from kind of a corporate business positioning. If you're generating content, one of the key structures of this at the very early stages is does your content align with the corporate strategies that you have in place and the objectives that you're trying to drive within your business as you come up with ideas, or you're even just farming ideas. One of the first steps is to make sure those ideas are on those correct roads. Using your analogy from earlier, if not, they may be great ideas, but they're not going to help you stay on the target that you've already set out for yourself. So being able to quantify the idea immediately, I think about for process tools that I've built, if somebody puts in an idea, the literally the next step, the next field is how does this tie to the strategic needs? You know, which one of the strategic goal sets for this particular group team company organization? Does this resonate with? And if they can't quantify that, then it's okay. It's a good idea. But we're not going to do anything with that right now.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:40I really love the idea of making sure that whatever whatever you're doing is in alignment with the mission or goal of the greater organization. And that that could be you know, your, your fundraising committee at church. It could be your your library book club. It could be your company or organization, your nonprofit organization, it doesn't matter what the group of people it is, if you have a mission, I think that you should have all of this, make sure that it's an alignment. I really, really like that art. Next up, I want to I want to talk a little bit about once you once you have the the organization of designing those things, and there are lots of templates online for this. So you can just google templates for all kinds of things. So don't try and reinvent the wheel here. Use the templates that are available for framework and then you can start plugging in your id

We had the pleasure of interviewing the CEO of Radio.co and Podcast.co, James Mulvany, about Entrepreneurial Productivity for his 30 Interviews in 30 Days challenge.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/074 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 Entrepreneurial 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 | Entrepreneurial Productivity with James Mulvany

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

James Mulvany is a UK-based entrepreneur responsible for launching more than five internet companies. Currently, he's working on:​ ​Radio.co, Podcast.co & MatchMaker.fm.

Show Notes | Entrepreneurial Productivity with James Mulvany

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

Podcast.co

Radio.co

Matchmaker.fm

Raw Text Transcript | Entrepreneurial Productivity with James Mulvany

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.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:22And today we welcome to the show, James Mulvaney. He is the founder of radio.co, as well as podcast CO, and we wanted to kind of treat everybody with this interview because we think this is going to be a fun, interesting conversation regarding entrepreneurial productivity. Welcome to the show, James.

James Mulvaney 0:42Thank you very much for having me, guys. Yeah, it's pleasure to be here.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:45Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about your, your entrepreneurial journey here because it's very interesting to hear that you have this company radio co that helps people create radio stations, basically online. And then this podcasting platform what got you into this and what led you to here.

James Mulvaney 1:02So when I was sort of 1617, I was growing up and sort of finishing school I wanted to originally I was looking actually going into radio as on air talent, you know, as a DJ. And I used to always love music and I used to love listening to the radio, you know, when I was growing up, and I recorded myself on cassette tape and playing it back and all that kind of stuff like nerdy nerdy kid stuff, right? And, and, you know, he, when he got when it got to about 18 years old, I, I decided not to go down that route as a career, but instead I was learning how to build websites and a bit about the tech industry. This was back in like 2005 2006. I then went off to university and I grew a business which was rather than being actually involved in the radio industry, I grew a business supplying services, streaming media services to the, to the industry, because it was obviously an industry that I kind of understood because I kind of worked in radio a little bit. I've done some, you know, work experience. So I sort of understood you know, the value proposition there. Although when I began, I didn't really know what I was doing technically. So I kind of just figured it out as I went along. And yeah, it just sort of stuck, really, I'm still very passionate about radio and I love. I love audio as a tool to communicate. I think it's fantastic. And obviously, over the past, sort of four or five years podcasting has had this big resurgence, or even maybe the last two or three years, it's been quite a recent thing. Obviously, we launched radio.co in 2015. That platforms now got, I think, over 4000 different stations using it. So it's been very successful. And we had lots of clients coming to us saying, you know, guys, you're gonna have a podcasting platform, or you're going to implement some kind of podcasting feature into the service. So we sort of looked at the market and thought, well, do we want to do this as part of radio co or is really their opportunity to launch this as its own standalone platform. So we took the decision to actually create a completely new platform. You've built it from the ground up. We obviously have a link between the two services, but the two months It's also quite different.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:01Tell me a little bit about what the podcast co does as a platform. Obviously, it's a media hosting platform. But it does a little bit more than that. And I'm curious about what, what got you to think this is going to be the differentiator between a normal podcasting platform and this,

James Mulvaney 3:18we we will do some obviously, look at the market. And interestingly, the first ever podcast I recorded was like back in 2008. And this was just being like a business friend of mine and we were we had this podcast called kits to kickstart kick start profits. And that ran for like, I don't know, I think we made we manage 10 episodes or something. And this was kind of just us messing around with the medium. Fast forward like five years and you know, obviously we kind of saw that there was this opportunity of, you know, podcasting start to pick up and we looked at a lot of the the other software out there like when we meet my friend Steve records, his podcast, we used to like use WordPress with a plug in and it was really complicated and then, you know, to the idea of podcasting like to thousand eight around then was kind of you'd have to download the file onto your iPod to walk around, you know, and obviously nowadays, it's completely different. So we wanted to build a solution that was more modern, and easy to use. And it seemed that a lot of the podcast platforms out there really had been kind of launched in this period of like 2007, to about 2010. They're kind of quite clunky, old school sort of software. And we wanted to build something that was fresh, modern, and also looked at not just the actual you, how do you get your podcast online? But how can I distribute it to, you know, apple, iTunes, Spotify, Google and as many platforms as possible and really sort of take that technical knowledge away from people because it's still quite confusing for someone who wants to start a podcast the idea of understanding what an RSS feed is, is it kind of like to your average person, that's computer talk, isn't it? So so yet the plan was to just build a kind of done for you platform, just make it as super simple and clean to use in an easy as possible for consumers.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:02And by day, I actually teach people what RSS feeds are so I feel I feel I feel that pain, regular basis

Augusto Pinaud 5:09that pain is shared. You know, I I laugh when you mentioned cassette tapes. You know, I'm sure there is listeners who don't know what they are, but and they're they and then you went to the to the basic I but but it is interesting because I, you know, I said a lot I do business coaching and a lot of the things I tell the people is one of the big problems people have is they're really good at what they do. But they don't know how to share content and how to use that content to grow and what is really interesting for me about the platform is that it allows the people to come with that expertise but let you do or the platform do what it do well instead of a slowing them or stopping them to do that part and I think there is the need for for tools like that, as you said that we're you don't need to necessarily fully understand what our analysis is. But you can now come and bring the content, bring the expertise, you know, on the small businesses. What I worked the most with. That's one of the biggest, biggest obstacles is you have these people who are incredibly good, but are completely stuck where they are.

James Mulvaney 6:26Yeah, I totally agree. I think the way podcasting is as moved as well is, I think 10 years ago, it was really something reserved for enthusiasts, both on people who are making podcasts and also people are listening with them, or listening to them rather. So nowadays, you know, people who are producing podcasts aren't always that technically savvy, you know, people who just want to share their knowledge. And you know, why should they have to understand that stuff. So that was kind of really one of the core values of the platform when we were sort of designing it we thought it should be simple to use, it should not be intimidating and and Also, you know, accessible for anyone really,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:03we came into contact with you in a fairly unique way. And it was because I'm guessing I was on one of your email lists or something to that effect. And I came across this platform called matchmaker.fm. I logged in and created a profile. And and lo and behold, you popped up in my messages inbox. And so I'm curious about this match maker.fm platform that you've also launched within kind of the podcast co ecosystem, and what it's all about, and and then your, your kind of program here, the 30 and 30, where you're doing 30 interviews in 30 days, and tell us a little bit about matchmaker....

On ProductivityCast, we talked about the Bullet Journal method, the paper-based personal productivity methodology developed by Ryder Carroll, and tailoring the Bullet Journal method in our own personal productivity systems (as well as managing it in digital environments).

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/073 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 tailoring the Bullet Journal method from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Tailoring the Bullet Journal Method

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | Tailoring the Bullet Journal Method

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

We discussed the Bullet Journal Method in ProductivityCast episode 037, “What Is the Bullet Journal? How Does It Work?”

Some resources to get up to speed:

Bullet Journal tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4kueYhGEc8

The Bullet Journal Method book summary

Bullet Journal Guide

The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll

Essentialism by Greg McKeown

Goodnotes 3 (iOS)

Evernote

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

Arc Customizable Notebook — A Staples® exclusive

Arc Notebook Systems by Staples

Everlast Rocketbook notebooks

Moleskine mini-notebooks

Journey (app)

DayOne (iOS/macOS)

Trapper Keeper 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym6OYelD5fA

Raw Text Transcript | Tailoring the Bullet Journal Method

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.

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

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode where we are going to be talking about the idea of how we would tailor the bullet journal method to our own productivity systems. I've been giving this quite a lot of thought recently. And so I thought we would have an episode where we would all talk about the Bujo method and how we would actually use this in our system, even if we don't just kind of how we would so that you as listeners may incorporate some of the skills, some of the techniques that we have developed over time. How we would develop them using the bullet journal method. And so what we'll do is we'll do just a quick recap of boo Joe, to kind of aware of what it's all about. And then we will we will talk about ways in which we can supplement our systems in both analog and digital and we'll go from there. So let's let's start with what is the bullet journal method? art? Would you like to kick us off and tackle the the kind of top level explanation of what Bujo is?

Art Gelwicks 1:29Sure at the highest level. Bujo is really the brainchild of gentleman by the name of writer Carol. The bullet journal method is originally started as an analogue approach to keeping track of notes, tasks, activities, and basically keeping everything in one spot. focused around month activity in de activity but it is designed to be extremely simple Extremely adaptable. It's one of those things that there is no a lot of predefined structures and templates, there are now in the marketplace because it's so popular, but it is at its most basic. Each day, you're keeping track of the notes that you have from the day tasks, activities, all within just a couple of pages of a paper journal, and then continuing to build that over time. It's, it's a definite understatement of what's involved in the system. But at its most basic, I would say that bullet journaling happens to be one of the few systems that somebody could pick up and start to do within about a half hour.

One of the things that for me, it's really, really interesting about the bullet journal is that it requires zero knowledge about productivity. You know, one of the things that you find in other systems is that you need to at least understand the basics of productivity. You know, the bullet journal came as a solution for people who have zero knowledge If people have zero knowledge of productivity organization or any of those things. They can come read the book, read the basic. Before the book, there was even a basic explanation on it start running an over complicated over time or get more sophisticated over time depending on how you want it to look at that. And I think that was one of the biggest strengths that the bullet journal bring. It was for many people, the introduction to productivity on a on a current world where we have a gap between I don't know anything about productivity or I am an expert in productivity, there is a big big gap between those two.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:39And Ryder really explains bullet journal method as a as basically a Venn diagram. On one side you have productivity practices, and on the other side you have mindfulness and when where the Venn diagram overlaps, you know, two circles as they merge together and they overlap that central part What he considers the bullet journal method. And he calls this intentionality the idea of taking kind of the essentialism model from Greg MacAllan and saying, what are the vital what are the vital things in my life that need to get done and tracking those and maintaining those so that I'm able to focus and then to attend to the specific actions, focus on the goals and then attend to the specific actions that are necessary to move those important things forward in my life. And so yeah, that's the that's the bullet journal kind of in a nutshell, it's it is an analog system that Ryder Carroll developed because he had had some some attentional deficits. And maybe he is he was diagnosed with ADHD. I can't remember specifically from the book but I believe he was diagnosed with ADHD and he was feeling the stigma of it. Didn't know why he wasn't able to get things done. And this Bujo method was derived from his frustrations, his trial and error from all of this. I will, I will say that from my perspective, he kind of talks about this idea that there are these productivity principles. And then on the other side is mindfulness and or practice of, of the bullet journal method. I tend to disagree with that. I think there there are the traditional classical Greek, you know, components of theory, practice and performance. And so, there's kind of like a there, there are actually three circles in that Venn diagram. And so those three overlapping circles, the center part then becomes what he's talking about, perhaps, of intentionality, I would call it focus. And that's a that's an important kind of thing to kind of keep in mind here is that I think that there is there is learning productivity principles, as Augusto said. I think to a great extent, people who come to the bullet journal method can just implement the tool and get going and not necessarily have to have a background in productivity principles to begin with, although I would argue that we all have some level of it from being productive members of society. If you if you got to adulthood, you probably have some level of stuff going on.

Art Gelwicks 6:25The thing that's really nice about the bullet journal method is it's one of the few methods I found that lends itself to the digital digitally resistant, if I want to tag them as that when I look at and talk to people who are like, Look, I don't want anything complicated. I want all these online things. I don't want to try and tack track tasks on my phone. This is a perfect bridge type of solution for them. In many cases, it can be the end all solution for them. Honestly, I've done this very thing with my 82 year old mother who needed a way to keep track of What was going on and her need set was not only the amount of information she was keeping track of, but also keeping track of it over time and being able to go back and reference. Her concern was being able to remember things. And this is the type of tool, not just bullet journaling. But in this specific case, that lends itself to that kind of capture, and process and report methodology of being able to pull stuff back when you need it. Without panicking of Where did I put it? Where did it go? How do I find that information out?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:34Great. So what I'd like to do is just very quickly for our listeners, give us a just very, very brief overview of how you would set up the bullet journal system in an analogue environment that is opened up a notebook and then create a bullet journal method. Now we covered this in a prior episode. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And but I do Just one, I want people to get kind of a sense of just the very basics of this art. Do you want to? Do you want to try and tackle that? You know, I can get started and then continue. What do you want to do?

Art Gelwicks 8:11Why don't you start because I have a feeling yours will be closer to the

Over the past decade, Nozbe has become known as one of the best task managers on the market inspired by the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. (We've done a GTD podcast series, and we've recently interviewed David Allen, creator of GTD.) They have now come out with a completely independent product called Nozbe Teams, and as you can imagine it’s focused on small organization productivity inspired by all the lessons learned from their work with Nozbe Personal.

We sat down with Nozbe CEO Michael Sliwinski to talk about getting things done in Nozbe Teams--how it’s different from Nozbe Personal, what they learned from users, and what’s on the horizon for Nozbe Teams (now out in beta).

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/072 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 Getting Things Done in Nozbe Teams with Nozbe CEO Michael Sliwinski from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Getting Things Done in Nozbe Teams with Nozbe CEO Michael Sliwinski

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Michael Sliwinski

Michael Sliwinski is the founder of Nozbe – a tool that helps busy professionals manage time, tasks and projects – available as a web app as well as native apps for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iPad and iPhone. He's been running Nozbe as a remote-first company for more than 11 years running Nozbe. Now, he's launching Nozbe Teams to help busy managers of small teams get things done together.

Show Notes | Getting Things Done in Nozbe Teams with Nozbe CEO Michael Sliwinski

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

#iPadOnly by Augusto Pinaud and Michael Sliwinski

Productive Magazine

Work From Home: Augusto Pinaud (Facebook Live video)

Nozbe Personal

Nozbe Teams

Raw Text Transcript | Getting Things Done in Nozbe Teams with Nozbe CEO Michael Sliwinski

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.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25And welcome to our listeners to this episode, we've got a little bit of a surprise for you all. We don't do this very often. But on occasion here on ProductivityCast we invite a guest to talk about a topic or a thing that we think is really useful. And we're actually really delighted to have Michael Sliwinski here from Nozbe. And and so welcome Michael to the show.

Michael Sliwinski 0:47Hi, thanks for having me.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:49Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so do you want to tell us a little bit about you, you have a long standing relationship with Michael, and you want to tell us a little bit about Michael and then Michael can fill in the gaps.

Augusto Pinaud 0:59That sounds like Good plan. Yeah, I have the good fortune to call Michael a friend. I met Michael many years ago on a publication called Productive Magazine. And he's been talking about being No Office and Office Free seems at least the last 20 years, maybe more. Michael is the founder and CEO of Nozbe. And now, Nozbe has been growing and evolving and has a new product coming out called Nozbe Teams. And Nozbe Teams is one of the things that we want to focus this conversation on about this new thing. And I'm sure we will talk about #iPadOnly the book that we Michael and I wrote together and we still strongly believe in and still continue using iPads. And I'm sure also we will talk about No Office as it is really relevant to the dates that we are living right now. So we start welcome, Michael.

Michael Sliwinski 2:02Hi. Yes. Thank you. I'm good. I'm good. I. So anyway, before I start, like I love the podcast, I'm a big fan. And I'm a regular listener, actually, a few weeks ago, I was listening to one of the one of your shows, and then I was like, Hmm, I don't want to listen to listen to Augusto recorded, I will I want to talk to him. So that was really an impetus to send him a message and say, Hey, I haven't talked for a while. And then this is how we reconnected after a few months. So that was great. So anyway, I'm a big fan of the of the show. And I'm a productivity freak. So productivity geek, productivity freak, productivity aficionado, like, however you want to call it. And that's why I think I belong to the show in this sense. And, yeah, I've been building Nozbe and it's a personal productivity tool that helps people be awesome, by you know, getting their stuff together. And yeah, we've been All remote company 25 people right now I think I always lose count. But anyway, we don't have an office. We don't go to any office, we've always been remote. And that's why also right now we are trying to help people to, you know, to advise them how to how to deal with this current situation of the Coronavirus and how to stay at home and work effectively.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:20Michael I wanted to start us off with giving people an understanding of maybe the differentiation what specifically differentiates Nozbe from say other time and task and project management software that are out there. And then if you can give us a little bit of compare and contrast between Nozbe Personal and Nozbe Teams?

Yeah, so um, the first thing was that must be was built for me. I needed to solve my own problems, question my own itch and build something that I would that will help me get stuff done better. And second thing is a very powerful yet simple tool that I tried. I tried to simplify getting things done. I wasn't Taking inspiration from getting things done, but not direct implementation like you, for example, you compare it to OmniFocus, which has like lots of lots of great features. And it's very complex, you have to study OmniFocus, to be able to use it, for example, but not only is it simplified, because I tried to simplify origins where like I wanted to get next actions, projects and contexts. And that's it like nothing else. And this is what I did in the very beginning, when I was building Nozbe, right now mostly is grown after 13 years, to a very cool productivity tool with more than half a million users all over the world. Nozbe is also syncs across all the devices. So you can have it even on there wasn't even an Apple Watch app so you can have your next actions on the go with just your watch. So in this sense, we we have we tried to be actually multi-platform really easy to use. And what happened was like when we were building Nozbe as a personal productivity tool, again, to make Getting Things Done simple to make productivity as simple as, as possible to really be able to quickly put stuff into your projects into your tasks. And, and also comment on the tasks. So this way you have a larger context of what what you really want to do. When you when you think about Nozbe other tools like this, you know, they're all a different version, you know, different interpretation of productivity. And in my case, I wanted it to be as simple to use as possible, and also as portable as possible so that I could use it, you know, on my iPad, you know, I was done, I wrote the #iPadOnly book. And we just recently published it for free on the internet. So if you go to #iPadonly.com, you can just read it for free for me, the multiplatform the simplicity, and also collaboration. So again, something that you don't get when you for example, you have things or OmniFocus is collaboration with other people. So it must be it's very simple to share a project with anyone. So even if somebody who doesn't have Nozbe account can share a project with you. This way. You don't have to let go of your system you can share a project with somebody. And when they create a task, they create tasks in your project that you share with them. So we don't have to just you know, copy and paste things. This will be like a briefly a summary of Nozbe. So a very, very powerful simply simple tool, but you know, multi platform and you know, multi person if he wants to. Now we have two tools we have we just launched Nozbe Teams. And lots of people are asking, why would you build a completely new tool under the same brand name? Why not a newer version of Nozbe. But Nozbe Teams is is an opposite approach. It's approached from you create a team. So it's it's for a team to get stuff done together, instead of you getting stuff together with some people. So so let's like the simplest, the simplest version to explain the difference between these two products is that there needs to be the original Nozbe and we call Nozbe Personal is a tool to help you get stuff done. Also with some other people on all of your devices, but not be teams is to help teams get stuff done. So it's just basically just for teams. And there are like many things that we'll we'll talk today about the differences that come from that, but it's a, like a kind of completely different design decision, like from the get go. And,...

What do you do when you can’t create more time, but have more to do? That’s the topic we try to tackle on ProductivityCast. From enlisting virtual assistants to hiring productivity consultants to professional organizers to handyman services and everything in between, we discuss personal outsourcing to get more done.

Note: Art Gelwicks was with us for this episode, but unfortunately a technical problem means that his audio is left out of this episode.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/071 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

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

If you'd like to continue discussing personal outsourcing from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Personal Outsourcing: How to Increase Productivity When You Can't Make More Time

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Personal Outsourcing: How to Increase Productivity When You Can't Make More Time

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

FreshlyHellofreshBlue ApronInstacartRed ButlerFancyHandsLongerDaysIFTTTZapierPlatedBabelcubeFiverr Upwork (formerly eLance)100 Personal Outsourcing Ideas

Raw Text Transcript | Personal Outsourcing: How to Increase Productivity When You Can't Make More Time

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 0:25And we are going to be talking this week about personal outsourcing. And this is the idea of how do we actually create more of ourselves? How do we get more done in the same amount of time, as we've talked about many times on the on the podcast before, really doing more in less time is not really the ultimate definition of productivity. For many of us here on the cast. We really do believe in being able to get the right things done with the right effort, the right resources, and so on and so forth. And so it's about having the right direction yet there is a reality that we all need to figure out how to get more done in the time that we're given the same 24 hours per day. And so how do we do that? And one of those ways, is through personal outsourcing. And so what I wanted us to do today is to first define personal outsourcing what it really means to outsource ourselves. And then the other parts are figuring out what types of services are available to us what kinds of things can we outsource to professional professionals and to professional services. And then finally, a little bit of discussion about technology and technology's role, replacing ourselves in getting some things done that we may not need to do ourselves physically, mentally, in the course of our days. So let's start off with defining what personal outsourcing is. I'm going to start with some of the characteristics of determining whether to use personal outsourcing one of the first ones that I think is one of the most important and also the one that people Have to become the most aware of in their everyday life is what I call emotional landmines. And emotional landmines are really, when a task has a, a strong negative emotional resonance, some kind of negative response that you have to that thing. And many times it's that thing that's been sitting on your list for several days, maybe weeks, maybe even months, and years. And so if it has some kind of negative negative attachment emotionally for you, it's going to kind of it's a landmine in the entire task list or projects list. And it may just blow up the whole system, you may avoid your entire task list your entire projects list because of this one particular potential landmine, and many times what you could do is you could just have someone else get started on that project. And that can be a huge relief for you in being able to move forward and getting things done. Next up is what I call the knowledge, skills gap characteristic. Is it better to have someone else do this thing? That is? Do they have better professional knowledge or skills to handle that project? Or is it better for you to learn the knowledge or skills going forward? Is it something that you're going to have to do on a regular basis and it's just best for you to get the education now, to be able to do that thing so that you can go ahead and get it done. The third criteria are typical characteristics of personal outsourcing. You know, tasks or projects are repeating chores. Is it something that is repetitive and rote that you can easily hand off to someone else with proper instructions, and they could probably do it as good or better than you and remove you from the process which can be really a huge time saver. Fourth, the mundane and while in getting things done proper GTD method We frequently talk about handling the mundane. In reality, if a project is or task is so mundane, you're unmotivated to start it, it could be really helpful to outsource that item to someone else, so that they can handle that for you. And then finally, I talked about the time is money characteristic and time is money is to the effect that is your time. If you take your own personal personal billable hourly rate, and if you don't have one, it's time to come up with one then what can you use? What How can you use that time better on something more strategic, that is if you have a project that is revenue generating and you could be working on that as opposed to something that is not revenue generating and therefore is is taking up your time? It's it's basically a time for money trade, you can you are going to have a cost benefit and the plus by doing the work that's strategic and billable versus the work that is not strategic and not billable, but is going to cost you less money to have someone else to do it than for the time that you need to be billing. So even if you again are not handling billable hours, you should absolutely create a billable rate for yourself, how much are you worth per hour? And once you determine that, then you can have some basic schema for being able to determine if I outsource this to someone, i X dollars an hour, and I'm worth this dollars per hour. Can I do something else with that time? And is it going to be more worthwhile than doing this other thing, and that's the time is money characteristic.

Augusto Pinaud 5:42In top of what you said there is a couple of other important things I need, how much clarity you have on what you're trying to use the service for, you know, one of the biggest barricades I found when I when when people start getting into the service and getting into the workplace. assistance and getting into this kind of delegation is on really an understanding of what it is, as you were saying sometimes is, did you need to find out more before you can get there. And it is hard because the people who normally is looking into these solutions is people who's already doing a lot. They tend to be overworked and already and tend to make the mistake of slowing down to think to see what they're going to delegate, you know, when I, when I coach with people, or one of the mistakes I see with delegation is they start delegating little, little, little more and more and more and more, but they actually have don't have necessarily an idea of what they're delegating, or what happened if the person they're delegating, disappear or change, stop working with them any of those little resources. So, all those elements are also important to take into consideration is not only what The reasons emotional obstacles, but how prepared are you to do that?

Francis Wade 7:06I like your for your four criteria. It sort of helps me organize my own thinking. I've used quite a bit of help from different people, mostly online to do single jobs. Know when they get out have someone repeat a task, depending on the nature of the task. And right now I'm actually looking going to be start looking for someone to do some data entry. I got some information from a client, a spreadsheet, a printout of a spreadsheet, which has approximately 900 data points in it. The minute I saw it, you know, my, my eyes just glazed over and I said, Well, I hope I'm not the one who has to go into this so it falls right into that mundane category that you mentioned. And to know find someone I mentioned the service in a few minutes, but find someone who I can trust Probably be someone I haven't used either lately or have never used because I haven't done any data entry. I have delegated that recently. So I have to describe the job, I have to go through a few steps or two quality checks to pick the right person. And then there's the verification of the job, that they did a good job after the fact. So there's a few different steps that I believe we're going to be discussing. But getting all the steps done is a big part in delegating. Because it's,...

Today on ProductivityCast, we are interviewing David Allen, who is most often quoted for saying,

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

David Allen is the author of best-selling book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (the revised edition was published in 2015, among other works), and the eponymous GTD methodology, as well as the founder of David Allen Company.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/070 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 David Allen's answers during the interview, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | On Getting Things Done With David Allen

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Show Notes | On Getting Things Done With David Allen

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

GTD Summit

Remote Work Productivity Conference

GTD Virtual Study Group

GTD Meetups -- DC, NYC

GTD Café

Two-Minute Tips for Turbulent Times

Raw Text Transcript | David Allen Interview

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.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I am Ray Sidney-Smith. I am Augusto Pinaud. And welcome to our listeners to this episode today on ProductivityCast. We are interviewing someone most often quoted for saying your mind is for having ideas not holding them. We have the honor and privilege of speaking with David Allen, author of getting things done the art of stress free productivity, and the revised edition was published in 2015, among other works and his eponymous GTD methodology. Welcome, David.

David Allen 0:45Hi, Ray Augusto. Thank you. Thanks for the invitation.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:48No problem. We're what we wanted to talk about today was a chronological movement through GTD and your world. What we're gonna do is we're gonna first talk a little bit about the past. That is you getting things done the art of story Stress Free productivity around 1998. It was published in 2001. And I'm just really curious about this. What was your experience? What was it like for you to, in essence codified something that was, and it's supposed to be axiomatic. These are supposed to be enduring principles, but they're also unique in the way that every person kind of invests in them in their own life and work. How did you decide on how to position that for yourself in the book?

David Allen 1:23Well, actually, it all came right out of out of 25 years. You know, I started doing versions of this work in 1981 82. Before you guys are born, probably. And so it was really more out of thousands of hours I spent both in the training and executive coaching field and world with this methodology, you know, the first decade or so really, really identifying it and refining it, and then you're spending an awful lot of time delivering and developing and continuing to refine The methodology itself, but the basics of it really haven't changed even since then. So I knew what I was writing about what I didn't know how was to how to put it in a book. So that was a that was a challenging experience. It was funny, almost becoming an alcoholic writing a book about the stress free productivity. Because you know that I tried to write the book, like I gave seminars and keynote speeches, and it doesn't work that way. Books, very different media for people to engage in. So that's why it took four years from the time I pulled the trigger in 97, to start actually formulating the book. So I didn't have any problem understanding the value and the bullet and the bullet proof of it. But it did take me 25 years to figure out what I'd figured out, and that it was unique and nobody else seemed to have done it the same way. And that it was bulletproof, because it stood the test of going viral inside of some of the most challenging organizations. You could imagine. That it would that it would stick in. And so I knew at work, I just didn't know quite how to put it into a book. So that was that was that was a big challenge at that point.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:10So you think that the experience working with others with the with the material was actually what helped you have the kind of fortitude to know that it could be translated?

David Allen 3:19Oh, yeah, absolutely. And, and, you know, come on, the strange paradox of getting things done is that people are most attracted to it. The people who take to it the most are the people who need it the least. They're already the most productive, organized, systemic, systemic people you could ever meet. They're the most creative. It's just that they, most of those people that get attracted to this, their own creativity has just outrun their own ability to keep up with it. And so they find themselves up to their own limits, and they know they could produce more value if they had more space. And so they are attracted to this because, well, for whatever reason, the cool The cool thing about that is I've got the hang with some The best, brightest and busiest people you'd ever meet on the planet and spent literally, you know, Malcolm Gladwell talks about 10,000 hours, I probably spent 50,000 hours, literally, desk side with folks like that. So, you know, once you've had that level of experience, there's not a whole, you can't punch a hole in this stuff. You know, you kind of really know it work because it works. In variably. Over all of those years, anybody who implemented any of this produced exactly the same result without fail, or control or focus, or space to focus on meaningful stuff. So by that time, I had enough confidence because I'm not a kind of guy. I'm sort of introverted and I'm not ever really motivational speaker. I'm really more an educator and then then researcher about this than anything else. And so I had to feel real, real confident that you know, that 25 years of my life work, I was going to put, you know, sort of put it out there open source into the public. So, anyway, so that that's a short version of a very long story.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:58Yeah. And so on the on the personal productivity level, there's that level. And then there's the organizational productivity space and organizational structure. And I know that you have some history with holacracy. And so I'm actually really curious about your background in holacracy. From my bit of research, you met Brian Robertson of holocrazy, one at the conscious capitalism conference, and you decided to bring holacracy to the David Allen company. And for folks who maybe don't know what holacracy is, if you can give us kind of like the mini definition, and and then what did you learn from investing in holacracy? in the organization?

David Allen 5:36Oh, that's a big question. I mean, there's a lot of a lot of answers to that. So I could spend for a while but I'll try to. I'll try to give you the soundbite of it anyway, part of what holacracy is, was Brian Robertson sort of gotten religion with GTD and said, How do I create that in my organization? Because I can be real clear, and you can be real clear, but as soon as we have an organizational structure, you know, that increases complexity exponentially. And so Brian said Okay, how do we create organizational mind like water? How do we get organization as clear, as GTD creates clarity for an individual? How do we do that, organizationally, and very, very similar modality, really, they'll have to hand it to Brian, he, he's kind of from another planet, he was he spent a lot of time creating quite a rigorous structure, which was, which was quite which worked, really did work. And so, and I was about to, I was about to give up my company because of the stress factor and, you know, saying, why can't this company sort of run itself? Because I'm not the best player for the play in terms of being a CEO or trying to manage people. That's not my, I'm not particularly interested in it, and I'm not really good at it. I made a bad hire of previously of someone that I thought could could do that and it didn't work out very well and that was quite painful. And so That's when I said, Okay, let me see if I can learn how to run an organization myself. And so deep dive into studying. Okay, what are all the books you're supposed to read? And what, what's all that stuff? And then I, when I heard Brian speak on stage, I went, Oh my God, that's exactly what I was looking for. And it turned out he was big fanboy of mine. So, you know, we kind of got together. And, you know, was one of those, you know, the strange paradox of implementing self organization, I had to be quite dictatorial. I had, I had to, I had to sort of essentially legislate because I was going to follow the company if we did

We originally recorded this episode in July 2019 and the discussion we had couldn’t be more salient today--remote work. Remote work, working from home, digital nomadic lifestyles and more were trending upward before the COVID-19 pandemic, and now we are grappling with the realities of the shifting world of work out of necessity. In this blissfully-unapparent-of-the-future dialog, the ProductivityCast team discusses the positives and negatives of being in the age of remote work productivity, then how to be most productive while working remotely.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/069 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

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

If you'd like to continue discussing managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | The Age of Remote Work Productivity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | The Age of Remote Work Productivity

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

 What Is Remote Work?

10 remote work statistics you should know about

Dice's 2019 Tech Salary Report

Remote Work Employee Policy Template

Example of flexwork policy

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

Hoteling (or, office hoteling)

Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

Focusmate (virtual coworking)

049 Virtual Coworking for Being More Productive with Taylor Jacobson, Focusmate

Raw Text Transcript | The Age of Remote Work 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 0:26And we are back with an episode on a topic that is quite a bit in the news lately and I thought that it would be really interesting for us all to have a discussion on the topic of remote work and really how to be productive in and when you were remote working. And so, today we're going to talk about what remote work is kind of defining it and and understanding some of the the trends that are around remote work. What are the benefits and disadvantages are the advantages and disadvantages of remote working? And finally, I want us to talk about how to be most productive while working remotely. Because remote working does provide its own set of opportunities and challenges to being productive as an individual in the greater workforce. And so I thought it would be really good for us to be able to kick the idea around and have a discussion around that. So let's start off with what is remote work? How do you define remote work?

Art Gelwicks 1:26Well, I can start you with my definition. And that's it requires a benchmark and the benchmark is remote work requires you to have a designated location that you would normally work from and then not working in that location being able to be as effective in some other place that is not pre determined. Now, the problem is, is that definition immediately falls apart as you start to think about what work remote work is nowadays, but I believe when you if you were to ask Someone who is an executive or a manager, that's what they would consider the definition of remote work. You have a desk you have an office, you have some place that they expect you to be. And this is the ability to work someplace else.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:13I'm going to read from remoteyear.com They have a blog post that I'll link to in the in the show notes. It says what is remote work, and it says remote work is a working style that allows professionals to work outside of a traditional office environment. So that pretty much aligns with what you were talking about Art. Continuing, quoting. It is based on the concept that work does not need to be done in a specific place to be executed successfully. Think of it this way, instead of commuting to an office each day to work from a designated desk, remote employees can execute their projects and surpass their goals wherever they please. People have the flexibility to design their days so that their professional and personal lives can be experienced to their fullest potential and coexist. peacefully end quote. So, the idea here, at least as far as remote year is trying to explain it is that remote work is this way of being able to reconcile the conflicts between your professional work and your personal life. agree, disagree. Thoughts there,

Art Gelwicks 3:20See this is go back, this goes back to where I fight with this definition. Because just the the phrase itself means that there is some place that you are expected to be when you are quote, not remote. Well, okay, that's fine. But then you look at the second part, this is the type of work that does not require you to be in a specific location. So why is this defining an expectation that you would be in a specific location? So I think, just this terminology starts to limit what we're talking about here it braces that Oh, you're working remote. So you're not actually doing your normal work. This is something special, this isn't quite as good as polished, as perfect as if you were not remote. And I think whether that's true or not, whether that's perception or not, I think that's one of the things that gets conveyed a lot with that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:22Yeah, and thankfully, I think today we see so many more people who really recognize remote work as a, as a hiring location, like, you know, you'll see like, you know, in in a job description, it'll say, you know, location for wherever the job might be, you know, situated and it'll just say remote. And so we're seeing more and more positions being hired directly for a remote position for remote working. And so therefore, less and less people are being concerned about the fact that there may be a headquarters and you You know even even myself you know now thinking about hiring staff we we are becoming a remote company. And I've always kind of been remote because I'm always on the road or, and and I live out you know pretty far distance away from my primary headquarters for my company. So you know the the, the idea of working remotely is very natural to me. But at the same time, I've always had staff centrally located and now to have them not do that has been a real use. I hate to use the word game changer but it's been a it's been a market amount of, of change for the company and how we normally work. It hasn't really been that much of a stretch for me working with them, but then working with each other. And now I have to think about the idea of hiring people. You know who out the gate will not have experienced the city camaraderie with the staff. So there there are some implications there for in management and business ownership, thinking about how you design a company in the remote space, in the remote working space and, and on the flip side. So I think we're kind of in in a little bit of a transition space there. I'm reading here again, remote work has some statistics that were really interesting. And again, quote, it's predicted that by 2027, the majority of the US workforce will be working remotely. So we're just shy of 10 years before, it's telling us that were eight years or so I guess, before the majority of the US workforce will be working remotely. It says the number of those will the number of those with flexible working arrangements is also growing faster than the overall us workforce. at roughly three times the rate more companies are hiring and realizing the benefits and potential that remote work can offer. End quote. So we're in a space and time where, or rather space time when we are moving toward more and more of remote work. And I'm curious, Do people really understand the definition of remote work against other terms that we've heard kind of bandied around over the last 20 years, right? We have telework, we have flex work. And those are all different things. And I'm curious whether or not you think other people really know what remote work really means to them.

Art Gelwicks 7:35Okay, I got it. I got to make one thing real clear, fast, though. Every one of these terms conveys the message that this is a special type of work. This is a benefit to you as the worker that you are getting to do something. I'm going to use special again because I can't think of another word this morning. But it's just that this is a nice thing for you because you're you know our employee and you're working here. We're gonna let you work remotely and that's a perk until it's changed until that mindset goes away that this is any different than regular office work, that they are the exact same. I don't know that that 2027 number means squat to be and I

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:17think we have to make sure

We get your listener messages and we love them! So, keep them coming! We try to respond to most of them via email response when we get them. For those that require more than an email, we have started to respond to them here in episodes together. And, this is the premiere edition of our Ask ProductivityCast episode series. Whenever we get a few questions that require some heavy lifting, we’ll put out an Ask ProductivityCast episode. So, keep those questions coming!

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/068

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, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Ask ProductivityCast, 1st Edition

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Ask ProductivityCast, 1st Edition

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

Personal Kanban | ProductivityCast

Trello

ToDoist

What Is the Bullet Journal? | ProductivityCast

10 Big Ideas on Productivity from Getting Results the Agile Way

Patrick Rhone’s Dash/Plus System

GTD Connect

Episode #44: GTD for Creative People

Musician Evan Taubenfeld and entertainment lawyer Danny Passman join David Allen and Coach Kelly Forrister in an inspiring conversation about GTD for creative people. Lots of wonderful nuggets in this episode about finding the creative spark within the structure of a GTD system.

Getting Things Done (Series) | ProductivityCast (check out Episode 041, Organize)

Raw Text Transcript | Ask ProductivityCast, 1st Edition

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 0:25Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to another really exciting episode. I think today we're actually going to be answering listener questions. And so we have had a few questions that come in. Typically, I actually get emailed based questions from our listeners, and I respond back. And so if you ever do send an email, I'm usually behind the helm answering those questions, and they're just usually simple ones that I can usually respond to pretty quickly and easily. But once in a while, we get some questions and we thought, well, let's actually put these together and answer them here on The podcast would help the the entire community listening. So today we've chosen three different questions that we've received over time. And we're going to answer those questions for the specific individuals, but also for you as a broader community. So let's start off with our first listener question. Our first listener question comes from Dave. So let's get into it. And so our first listener question, as I said, is from Dave, Dave says that he's a longtime GTD practitioner, he has pulled in elements of personal Kanban JD Myers getting results, the agile way. And recently, he's been using the bullet journal by Ryder Carol. And so he feels like the layers are weighing him down. And he asked some specific questions about the system. And so he wanted to go into these one by one. And so the first one, he said that he is is using a todoist for his GTD He's using Evernote for his agile results, getting results, the agile way method. And then he's using the bullet journal for his notes. So in summarizing what Dave said, he basically said that he's he's putting too many things on his Kanban boards. And he's using it primarily to track learning of songs on the guitar. And so some of the boards are going stale. And he's also testing the revival of Kanban boards at work. Oh, as he thinks that that will work better in a team collaboration environment. He's also trying to figure out the link between outcomes to GTD actions. So let's let's start off with the personal Kanban board issue. He has too many things on his boards, and he's trying to figure out what to do about that. And for those of you who are listening, we actually tackled personal Kanban in Episode 61. So if you go to ProductivityCast dotnet, forward slash 061. You can go ahead and listen to that episode on personal Kanban.

Francis Wade 2:59Do you really want to know? Well, that's bad advice though. The wrong tool. Kanban boards were mainly manufacturing me for my factoring environments where space was limited. And the number of items that you'd put on a board would be small tasks are psychological objects, and you can create an infinite number of them. And the tool doesn't scale. I think he's creating more tasks than a Kanban board is designed to handle and some people would say, oh, gosh, just cut back your tasks. But that doesn't make any sense for most people because your commitments or your commitment to they don't go away because they don't fit on a board. So instead, so just give up the idea of trying to visually manage a list of your tasks because you've outgrown it and time to move on.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:48And I will give the flips Yeah, I will give the flip side to that, which is that I think, I think, Francis you should spend more time with with Trello because you're capable of filtering to a subset of the of the things that are that are in your visual field. And you are able to create different boards for different things so that what you are visualizing as work in progress is, is limited. And there, as you said, there's no real way to say okay, well, I'll just have less tasks, there's no way for you to say, well, I'll just have less tasks. But the beauty of a digital Kanban board is that you're able to say in Trello, you're able to filter down to the, the vital few that need to be in visual field at that moment. And so you are actually able to have much more data in a Kanban Board today, because of digital tools, while still holding to the lean manufacturing processes for yesteryear.

Augusto Pinaud 4:55I agree and then I'm that he's really good that we mentioned that No, there is no way to reduce the task. But also, one of the things I see often when I work with clients is the fact that we are trying to use the wrong tool or the wrong assumption, in many cases, both to manage this growing number of tasks. And what I mean was that is, you set up the original and, you know, they've, as many others set up the original assumptions for their personal Kanban, OmniFocus doesn't matter what is the tool, and the number of tasks start growing and growing to a point where their original assumptions cannot manage any more the number of tasks. And where I see many people doing is keeping that thing that used to work those assumptions that used to work and hope that somehow that will be able to manage, the new number of tasks. And what I work with many people is getting those assumptions updated because I agree You can’t go and say, Okay, well you know, any task or any task related to this, I'm just going to scratch it, forget about it and don't do it. That will be ideal, but that doesn't happen. But what we need to do is figure it out what we need to improve in the system. Okay, and it may be the whole system, maybe a complete overhaul, but what we need to improve in the system, so we can manage the new number of tasks. You know, if you think about a vehicle, a car, if you have a small pickup truck, okay, because you have a small trailer, no problem, but as soon as you fill that trailer and then decide, okay, now I'm going to pull a bigger trailer, who your truck may require an overhaul too, your truck may require now to go to a bigger engine to to be able to hold that amount of cargo. Same thing happened with your task. You know, I see a lot of people you know, with a compact vehicle, trying to pull a trailer And saying, Well, I don't understand why my system doesn't work? Well, it's not your system that doesn't work is the assumptions where you create this system works for a really particular set of load. When you go now to the amount of task you have, your system doesn't work anymore because the assumptions are wrong. And that may require for a temporary or do more weekly reviews or simply go and change those assumptions. Understand what are those assumptions? You know, one of the things that I recommend people when they set their system is figured it out the assumptions put them on writing, because we tend to forget what we thought when we create all those contexts. You know, you come and create a context and then you forgot about it to start using them and go numb to them. You need to be able to come back and remember why'd you create them what they mean? So that way, you can see if the assumptions on the system are still valid or not.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:02And so this actually closes out my thoughts on the personal Kanban side, which is to say that projects in personal Kanban systems are for keeping the team updated. In my perspective, if you're using Kanban,...

As we are living through a challenging period, and while some work may be limited, it’s still good to know proper skills like project planning in uncertain circumstances. In this week’s episode, the ProductivityCast team discusses the challenges we face when project planning in uncertain circumstances and ways to push through, along with tools to help.

(Please visit https://productivitycast.net/067 for clickable links, downloadable audio-only version of this episode, show notes and text transcript of this cast..)

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

If you'd like to continue discussing managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).

In this Cast | Project Planning...

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Project Planning in Uncertain Circumstances

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

Raw Text Transcript | DRAFT

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.

Ray Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of Productivity Cast. We are going to be talking today about project planning. And this is a topic near and dear to my heart. But it's a topic that actually Augusto brought up in the context of where we currently are in these uncertain times. And so I'm going to turn this over to you, Augusto, to kind of tell our listeners what we're going to talk about today.

Augusto Pinaud 0:49You know, with all these changes on the everyday reality that we have we one of the things that come really tied up with the principles in the Getting Things Done book is the Weekly Review and really tied up with the Weekly Review comes project planning, one of the things that are interesting with those two things is you get into a certain routine on what you're required to make that project planning happen to really get yourself into that deep thinking mode, same as wisdom, weekly review. And with all this disruption, people don't be able to go to the office or connect to the big, you know, screen on the on the conference room to do this deep thinking, all these things has been disrupted. So what I was thinking was, let's bring this concept back and let's remind people or help people into re envision how to change that in this condition to improve what you were having before or at least in the worst case scenario to be able to give you tools that will allows you to get back to that place where you were doing before. Project Planning, though, we said numbers were saying and the length we think this is going to be, there is no margin to say, well, that's fine. If it's a week, we can say, let's not do project planning. But as this is going to be a lot more longer than a week, we need to have all that we need that to happen. We need all that to to be a reality. So I hope that what we can do is to get all this done and get really all is working

Art Gelwicks 2:30when we talk about this whole project planning part of it. I mean, you look at systems like getting things done. You look at many of the other systems, they talk about establishing a fixed time each week to do this, whether it's your daily planning, your weekly planning, whatever. And I think one of the challenges that Agusta is bringing up is the fact that we start to count on that as part of a habit I had prior to all of this chaos going on. I had a very clear habit established, I would go into work I would sit down and at 745 in the morning, I would actually be sitting down with my notebooks, and doing my daily review with my coffee and my banana. So that process became an integral step in my workflow and my project planning. Well, this all changed shifting to a home base. Now I don't have the commute, which sets up the timeline that puts me in the right spot to start doing my daily review at 745. So I had to rethink that. And I'm still actually struggling with that a little bit, my morning doesn't start quite the same way. I'm still trying to find that right spot for that to fit in. So when we look at these types of project planning challenges, and we look at our system, we have to look at not only how our system becomes our point of constancy when it comes to being able to get the work done, but how do we integrate with that system in a changed environment? I could use a similar situation If it wasn't something that is not so Earth shaking, if you're just traveling, maybe you're on vacation for a week. Well, does that mean your your process unravels? Because you're in a different location? Your timing is different, your materials are different, the surroundings are different, or can you adapt what you're doing to that new location in that new environment at something we really have to take into consideration because our I know I speak for myself in this but I'm sure I speak for other people to our processes can fall apart, if we don't have that consistent, repetitive habitual motion of making them work so that we can actually get work done.

Ray Sidney-Smith 4:40Yeah, one of my central theses in and arguments in the productivity world is that our worlds are the sum of our routines. And when those routines are upset, that really does fundamentally degrade your productivity. And I'm always interested in seeing how people people operate in the face of being flexible with those routines and how flexible routines can be. And there's only so much they can bend until they break. And, and so I'm I think this is a really timely discussion. And the goal here is to figure out what some of the challenges people are facing that you're hearing people are facing. And let's have a discussion on those I hear from you Art, that the change of environment and the environmental cues that that our routine provides is is one major thing how about you will Augusto what are some of the challenges that you're hearing from others?

Augusto Pinaud 5:41You know, the the last of of that? I agree on the routine, obviously, but also the last of the tools. You know, I've been dealing this week with a lot of clients who have been calling and I can stand having one screen and some of us are, you know, really geeky. I have more screens that I'm willing to count on. In front of me right now but for most people they're coming from work they're having a laptop so they move from having one screen or two or external monitoring to the laptop screen or more and now they're dealing with a laptop and because this was not planned there is no backup plan for many people and or they are used to connect to go to the conference room connect to the massive thing and get that time or even got silent you know, Seams as as we were discussing last week, you know, being able to get silence to do this thinking process. And all that is you know, for many people all those routines hold those tools are out so do you need to get back and slow down for a second and get back to the basics. What do Did you know how to connect maybe to the TV in the living room? Can you do it in the living room? What what what are the things that you think are going to make a difference or you use to use that you can now get creative? So you can do it at home. And you can get somehow that same quality of review or project planning.

Francis Wade 7:08I noticed the same or a similar drop in productivity that Ray mentioned, when I whenever I've moved, I think Ray could probably share and Augusto so you guys can share your latest experience, the habits and the routines and the practices that were automatic or somewhat baked into the environment. And when the environment changes, such as in a move, all of a sudden, they need to be recreated all over again. And there is a I think for me, it takes about three months for me to figure out which ones have fallen through the cracks and like one of the ones that always causes a problem in the beginning is taking out the garbage. So taking out the garbage for me is is not my favorite chore. It's one my wife likes to remind me to do and it's easier when I've lived in the same place for a while and it's no become a part of some kind of routine. Either might go to bed routine, you know, my wake up in the morning and exercise routine, but when it's baked into some other some other activity, it's it's easy. And then I move and then that link gets broken and all of a sudden, the garbage hasn't been taken out any longer. They have been around for two years now. And it's that's still it's not that I haven't gotten back into a routine. But the problem is that we don't know which routines are going to be broken necessarily. It's more a matter of, hey, what's that smell. So after the fact then after the problem has been caused, then it's the defect tells us that there's something that's missing....