ProductivityCast

This week, we advance our series, The AI-Powered Professional, by exploring the "AI Coach." We'll dive into how AI is moving beyond simple task automation to becoming a force multiplier for personal transformation, focusing on "Accountability and Behavioral Design." We'll explore how these tools leverage data, psychological principles, and customized nudges to help us close the intention-action gap, consistently execute goals, and build lasting, productive habits. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/152 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing The AI Coach: Accountability and Behavioral Design 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 AI Coach: Accountability and Behavioral Design Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | The AI Coach: Accountability and Behavioral Design Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Loss aversion Stickk Positive reinforcement ELIZA Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist | 00:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a more fulfilling, productive life? Then you've come to the right place. Welcome to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. Here are your hosts, Ray Sidney Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Ray Sidney Smith | 00:17 Welcome back, everybody, to Productivity Cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud | 00:24 And I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade | 00:25 I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks | 00:26 And I'm Art Gelwicks. Ray Sidney Smith | 00:27 And welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. This week, we basically advance ourselves in our series, our ongoing series, The AI-Powered Professional. And we're going to be exploring today basically everything that we want to dive into how AI can move beyond simple task automation, simple task completion, to more of helping you with personal development, but just accountability and behavioral design. So let's talk about some of the tools we can use, some of the principles behind it, And we're going to start off with really discussing why we need... Technology to coach us in the first place. So Let's go ahead and dive into what the problem is, and then we can opine on whether or not AI can help us. So why would you need an AI coach? Who cares about having an AI coach? Francis Wade | 01:22 I had a friend who was a master's in exercise physiology. Shed clients. She was training them and she was meeting them at the gym every morning and She eventually gave it up because she said that with her Exercise Physiology Masters She was doing nothing more than bringing them all to bed. And delivering them to the gym. And standing by while they exercise. In other words, she wasn't actually applying anything she learned. All she was doing was being an accomplished nanny. It illustrates the reason why we do need this kind of assistance is because we're not, left to our own devices, we're not reliable. And there's a whole part of the coaching experience or delivering coaching experience That really is just about reminding on the one side and then holding accountable on the other. All the words. A lot of it has to do with just creating structure. And if that could be outsourced to AI, then, hey, Hold to us. Art Gelwicks | 02:22 AI coaching to me is... Better defined as coaching light. It doesn't carry any of the gravitas of an actual human coach. You can ignore an AI if it's telling you something that you don't really want to do? Yeah, it'll prompt you. It'll bug you. It can do all the things, but it's really... It's a way to get those reminders without the confrontation possibility. As part of the exercise. And I've seen people start to use AI in that kind of coaching approach and seen applications where they start to integrate this AI reminder into a process to encourage you to go through. And that's nice, and that's convenient. But it is still a device. So... I would definitely qualify AI as... Coaching light. A true coach is going to look at you and go, Yeah, but you can ignore that. You can't ignore me. Ray Sidney Smith | 03:17 Yeah. So stepping back to the core problem, which is that humans are really good at... Accomplishing things, utilizing accountability as one of the motivational paradigms. So we don't want to feel like we have reputational harm by not completing something. And so we can use accountability for that purpose. As I've talked about before, we have four layers of accountability that we can really think about. And the framework is that you have kind of self-accountability where you can keep yourself accountable to do something. You can have one-to-one accountability, whether that's a friend, a family member, or a professional. A professional coach, professional trainer, service provider and you are having them hold you accountable to do that thing, then you could step up to a group of then you can step up to what I call public accountability, where you claim publicly you're going to do something so that a vast majority of people beyond your close network know about you doing that thing. And so with these four layers of accountability, we know that we can get things done. And with AI coaching, we're really in that one-to-one accountability space. And I, like Art, really fundamentally believe that right now, at least as the technology is evolving, and how it's designed. Can't really replace a human coach. It can fill in gaps really well. I think that humans have the challenge of self-reporting We tend to be poor judges of our own consistency. We are not objective. And the AI can provide that objective, nonjudgmental, data to you on your actual behavior versus your stated goals. And since we have a human coach. Has a limited ability. To be available? The AI coach can basically provide nudges To be at a precise moment and place so you can have it monitor where you are, when you are and say, here goes this thing that you said you wanted to do and help you define whether or not you want to deviate from that plan. So say that I am in a particular application at work and I all of a sudden go to Instagram. The AI coach can now say, hey, Ray, I noticed that you went to Instagram instead of your work email. Is this a distraction? And now it can help just by that little nudge, helped me move myself toward the future. Planned activity as opposed to the unplanned activity that I was planning. We've had this indeterministic software for some time, but now we have AI versions of this, which is that it can block. Tools completely so that you can't go to a particular And that's a form of kind of coaching light, as Art was saying as well. So there's this notion that we're going to be able to do this. Providing a boundary to our access to things and that helps us stay on the pathway. So there's a lot of different reasons I think that can help us here in the coaching space but it's not a human. And even when we get to the concept of embodied AI, where we have robotics that are humanoid or humanoid-like robots, that then have AI embedded in them and they can be in your physical presence, I still don't see them as being the same thing as a full-blooded, bag-of-meat-and-bones person in front of you with the potential reputational harm of not showing up to do the thing. There is just something... Human to human about that I don't think a robot's really going to replace. Francis Wade | 06:54 Interesting you say that because my experience is that an AI coach, and I've not used the Actually, I have used an AI coach for my writing. But an AI coach... Is somewhere between just a Blind reminder, an alarm clock. On steroids. And a real person. It's moved up into that realm. But it's not doing the moving. I am. So what I'm doing is essentially I'm empowering people A voice. An automatic voice. To be more human than an alarm clock. And I think I could do some of the things you're talking about if I were to do it. I'm sure you've heard about the ideas around setting up a countermeasure mechanisms that involve creating a punishment for yourself if you don't. Accomplished the task. And I think there was a website. Allowed you to set up these punishments. And it was extremely effective. So there's nothing to stop us from having an AI persona. That For example, we say, if I don't stick to my diet this week, AI, you have the full permission to go into my... For the record. And tweet out to the whole world that you're punishing me in public for not... And you do something that's that I don't want you to do. And like, you praise up. Political party that I want to have no part of or something like that. But I sort of a punishment that creates a bit of a game that may not be necessarily dangerous or damaging in the long term, but it's at least somewhat annoying. I think I would respond to a game like that because I don't want my account tweeting out support for a party that I don't support. If that were the punishment, That would be enough motivation for me. ...

9/8/26 • 39:18

Stop treating AI like a simple search engine and start using it as your own personalized, tireless mentor. This episode explores how to leverage AI-powered tools to bridge knowledge gaps, master complex skills, and accelerate your professional growth through the science of adult learning. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/151 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing The AI Learning Partner: Socratic Skill Acquisition and Rapid Mastery 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 AI Learning Partner: Socratic Skill Acquisition and Rapid Mastery Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | The AI Learning Partner: Socratic Skill Acquisition and Rapid Mastery Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Andragogy vs Pedagogy Socratic Method Comprehensible Input / Comprehensible Output (in the context of language learning but generalizable) "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." ~ Alvin Toffler Future Shock by Alvin Toffler The Ultimate Deliberate Practice Guide: How to Be the Best  Strat Cinema (by Francis Wade) Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More The AI Learning Partner: Socratic Skill Acquisition and Rapid Mastery Raymond Sidney-Smith | 00:00 Welcome back, everybody, to Productivity Cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud | 00:06 And I'm Augusto Pinar. Francis Wade | 00:07 And I'm Francis. Raymond | 00:08 Raymond | 00:08 Wade. Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to today's episode. Today, we're going to be continuing our AI-powered professional series, And in this particular episode, we're going to focus in on how AI is... Helping people become better learners. Basically, how these tools are transforming personal and professional development. And so we're going to be talking about passive consumption, how we use maybe some Socratic method, and how we can do all of this through the creation of AI acting really as a personalized mentor tool. To basically challenge our understanding, accelerate our learning curve, and help us achieve proficiency, hopefully faster than before. And so let's talk about what traditional learning really looks like, and then we'll Talk about what the... Problems are in that space that we're trying to solve for when we're utilizing AI. Francis | 01:09 So the traditional model is that you sit down and receive knowledge from someone else. That there's an expert. Behind the scenes. But what's happening now is way more fluid than that. It's that. I'm somehow reaching out to an entity and it's reaching out back to me in real time. And it's an AI entity.  So no experience is give and take between you Something that's really smart. And where I am. And this give and take is not Obviously, it's not one directional, but It changes over time because I've noticed that cloud for example, is becoming better at finding stuff for me or teaching me stuff.  So it's like having this flexible space in which I'm being exposed to more things, I'm learning more things, I'm remembering more things. Because it's reminding me of more things. I'm accessing more options. And in so doing, I'm becoming a better professional. In my case, I'm thinking in particular of writing. I'm becoming a better writer. It couldn't have happened with a human being. The way it's happening with AI. And for the last year and a half, I'm really grateful for it because this kind of flexible space is Absolutely making me a better professional.  So it's again, It doesn't compare to anything that I've experienced before. So it's something that's brand new and it's evolving. I. Raymond | 02:38 Do, too. Augusto | 02:39 Hello. It is interesting. I'm going to talk about two cases that I recommend. For social media for artificial intelligence. One is I sometimes work with clients who have beaten up. Okay, beaten up as a child, beaten up as an early adult, beaten up. And one of the things that AI produce a different experience. Delusional, but a different experience is that AI will try to make you feel good. And I have recommended to a couple of my clients, go and have a glass of wine and a chat with your chat GPT. Okay, feel good. Because Feeling good, it's very important for productivity. It's very important for learning. It's very important. If you go, okay, I'm going to study this book. And you get into that, I'm going to study the book. But then you go like, okay, well... I don't know how to learn or I can't get into this material. The learning, the growing is very hard. Feel nice.  So that's one thing. But the second is how much Really? You can adventure. Into new topics, even if you don't want to master them. Okay. I remember Good day. Before Google, yes, because I'm that old. Okay. Where if you wanted to repair your car, okay, your best hope was to go to AutoZone or the equivalent and find a Hanes manual. Okay. And that thing was like the golden source. You could have every screw of that car had was on that manual. It was incredible. Then came YouTube and we asked how we did it before YouTube where you can see the video. Now it's even better. I have a chat for every vehicle we have in our house. Okay? And I can go and ask, not for, okay, how do you fix, no, for this specific model of this specific year of this. And it saves even more time. I enjoy a glass of wine once in a while. I'm very bad at it. Okay? According to a friend of mine, the reason is I don't drink enough wine. Okay? And if you get very good at it, you need to drink enough wine. I fail. Okay. But this is what is interesting. I've been putting into ChatGPT, okay, the wines that I enjoy. Okay. When I, and, What happened the other night, I was having dinner with some friends. We were in their house, and a friend of mine pulled three bottles of wine. I said, pick one. In the past, I will have picked based on the label. Guilty of charge. I know nothing about it. This time, I pull my phone, take a screenshot or a picture of the three labels and say, what matched my profile? And it picked something completely different to what I was going to pick. But It was actually fitting to the profile. It was a glass of wine that I enjoy because in the past what happened is I get the glass of wine and No, this one was. You can go from the mundane And you can really go with this. To the expert level. I was having a work issue with a VDI. For the people who don't know what a VDI is, it's a virtual desktop interface. And I basically have a client who gives me this VDI to do work with them. Fantastic. Except that I could not make it work for what I wanted to make it work. Chat GPT to the rescue? No. Okay, I went put all the details blah and it says the problem is you are trying it was an audio issue you are trying to make This on your iPad. The solution is try to remove I remove one of the layers it worked better and then I went and bought a And they're flying. Problem solved. The problem is the machine and the VDI cannot go and convert the audio to the VDI audio, to the iPad audio, to Bluetooth. Great. And remove two of those layers and problem solved. But these were things that in order to get to those conclusions, the number of trial and errors And the time that you need was... Among us. And now you can get those answers with two or three good prompts very quick. That bring me to the last point I'm going to make. I remember the first time I read Alan Toffer sentence saying, The analfabets of the future will be those who are unable to learn and unlearn. If he will be alive today, he will say that alphabets of the future will be those who can make prompts. And this is something when people say, then AI is going to take our work and the world and all this. Yes, it's going to change it. No question about it. And Terminator will be in the right of the corner. That said. The right prompt will really make this tool A tool? And if you don't learn how to do prompt and just think you can do what you did with Google, You are. Much likely dead in the water. Raymond | 07:48 There are a couple of things that I think AI can help with here in terms of learning. When you have full agency over your life, the way in which you learn is going to be different. When you have an employer who may be asking you to learn as you onboard into a new company, you may have to watch a whole bunch of learning videos to onboard into the company. That is a fundamentally different kind of learning than a teacher teaching you, a professor teaching you, a topic so that you can get a degree and move on in the education system.  So we need to think about the way in which we are thinking about learning as adults and that I think that perspective alone changes when you start approaching AI as what I talk about as basically being a learning partner. Because this becomes not just, I mean, there's so many different categories. I can go in a lot of different directions, but I will, I'll say that one, just learning on the fly, it becomes this wonderful learning experience....

8/25/26 • 53:22

In this episode, we continue our discussion of the AI-Powered Professional by returning to the AI Researcher persona. Picking up from the prior conversation (episode 149) on information overload and information toxicity, Ray, Augusto, and Francis explore how AI can help professionals move from traditional search toward more collaborative research, synthesis, comparison, and knowledge discovery. They discuss deep research tools, source verification, using multiple AI systems to challenge each other, Google NotebookLM as a grounded research workspace, AI-assisted book reading and writing, proactive information discovery, and the importance of treating AI research outputs as drafts or hypotheses that still require human judgment. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/150 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing The AI Researcher: From Information Overload to Active Knowledge Synthesis (Part 2) 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 AI Researcher: From Information Overload to Active Knowledge Synthesis (Part 2) Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | The AI Researcher: From Information Overload to Active Knowledge Synthesis (Part 2) Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. ResearchGate Google Search Google Scholar Academia.edu ChatGPT Claude Google Gemini DeepSeek Google NotebookLM Google Alerts Feedly Feedly Pro Zapier Evernote Evernote AI Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist | 00:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a more fulfilling, productive life? Then you've come to the right place. Welcome to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. Here are your hosts, Ray Sidney Smith and Augusto Pinault with Frances Wade and Art Gelwix. Ray Sidney Smith | 00:19 Welcome back, everybody, to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud | 00:25 I am Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade | 00:26 And I'm Francis Wade. Ray Sidney Smith | 00:28 Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this continuation of our discussion on the AI-powered professional. In our last conversation, we were really defining the problem around information overload and many of the issues that the modern professional or knowledge worker really deals with as it relates to all of the information. In our lives today. And what we wanted to do in this episode is continue that conversation. And talk through really how to take the sometimes overwhelming amount of information, but the treasure trove of information that we have every day coming into our world and really utilizing it in productive ways. I think that today, Thanks to AI, we no longer need to think about the concept of a search engine. We need to really think about this from the perspective of it being a collaborative engine and there is this kind of reality that it could be considered an answer engine, a research engine, all of these kinds of ways in which we can coin it. There are lots of different use cases today. We're particularly focusing in on the research And these more sophisticated AI tools can now perform tasks previously reserved for a research assistant or for you to take intensive manual effort to produce. And so let's talk through some of the ways in which you're utilizing AI for research purposes. And let's think through perhaps some of the pitfalls that people fall into as they're trying to use AI for research. Francis Wade | 02:12 I've been in a whole different world as a result of deep research in the last year. I remember before It was available. I used to do... Research via looking for documents like ResearchGate, I can search for a PDF using Google. I could search Google Scholar. You could go to academia.edu and What it would give back to me, these different sources, is Stuff that was close to what I was looking for, but not exactly what I was looking for. Matter of fact, it was often not close at all because I would have a specific question. And I'm trying to get a specific question answered. But I have to find somebody who actually answered that question in a document. Or maybe a book or in something. And usually I'd be looking for an academic source. And usually I wouldn't find anything.  So that's just, The game I would play was would be hunt and never find and that was 50%, 75% because I'd be looking for Esoteric stuff. Today, however, I have at my fingertips multiple A few different subscriptions to deep research and chat GPT does it for free up to a particular limit. And I can ask a very specific question. And to my shock, I can receive a plausible reply to my question Right. Pulls from credible sources for the most part. In the beginning, it When it first came out, they would pull from hallucinated sources, which was pain in the neck. But today... They've gotten to the point where They give credible... Specific answers to my very specific questions.  So my research has just multiplied by, it's hard to even compare what it was like No, Versal, what it was like before. Because I do so much of it now. It's really been a game changer.  So that's at the high level. The game is completely different for me right now. See you next year. Ray Sidney Smith | 04:15 And it will be different in a year from now even. More so. As the technology gets better. Francis Wade | 04:21 - I've told people that different parts of my work. Have undergone more change in the last year than in the last decade. 30 years before that, 20 years? And this is certainly one era that is completely different. Augusto Pinaud | 04:37 Sometimes digging and research in a topic and sometimes more than the papers, find the books. What is the book that, okay, I read this book. Now, What other... Go. Into this line and with books go on the opposite line.  Sometimes it's not only The papers, it's the one to give a more... Book rented? What books? Hey, I'm dealing into... And sometimes once I want to deal or work or research into this particular idea, Bye. Where can I find those books? Because you think, okay, I want to get, how do you get granular and now fast? But then now how do you find those book, those authors, who are the authors who I'm researching this, the same areas that I'm research, it doesn't matter if they're agreeing or disagreeing with you, but how you find them, that was a labor Of love. A lot of times, to find those books and to find those authors.  And then after that, then you needed to start Figure out which one was good, which one was bad. That job? One from weeks to hours. And you in hours can get a list that is better than what I was able to produce in months. This gets very interesting, the issue. Who's this? The expectations that now the people have. Because for what you're describing, similar to mine, it's not only get the information, now that just you were able to get to the sources pass through. But the other part of the process is still, you need to still read it, still download them, still digest them, still trying to connect those dots. That is still takes the same amount of time, but then First part, it's fantastic. The issue I see with this is I find a lot of people who think that find the sources is enough. And find the sources is just a step one of X number of steps to be able to get to the next conclusion. Ray Sidney Smith | 06:47 So I think about AI in a research context, when I say this is an AI researcher, Bye. That AI can still hallucinate. I know Francis is a little more, maybe more trusting than I am when it comes to these tools. But I've found ways to revalidate information even after it has pulled research And again, I Preface this always with everything I do with AI, I presume to be a first draft when it puts it out. And so I'm reviewing everything as though an intern handed it to me and it's an intern's work product.  So I need to make sure that it is correct. So we were all on the same page there. I think there are certain areas where AI is really good right now and where it will get better. I think that the deep research functions within all of the major tools that AI chat bots are pretty good right now.  So you have this deep research function in Claude Gemini, and ChatGPT. Personally, I've found that Gemini's does the best. I'm not sure why, but I just feel like it gets the most right when you prompt it correctly. And I don't like the verbosity around the deep research that Google puts out, but it's fine. It gets the data right, which is what I care about most. And that's one piece, which is you have this complex question and you need it to go out there and scour lots of sources and come back to you with an answer. And you don't know what the sources are. And I think in that sense, it can go ahead and find sources and then go ahead and do that analysis and synthesis that is really complex and therefore laborious and make it simpler.  Though Concern I always have with folks is that We're a little too trusting. So I'm going to, again,...

5/25/26 • 53:00

In this episode, we continue our series on the AI-Powered Professional by introducing the AI Researcher persona. Ray, Augusto, and Francis discuss how AI is reshaping research, learning, and knowledge work by moving us beyond simple retrieval toward active knowledge synthesis. Along the way, they explore the problems of information overload, low-quality information, over-trusting AI-generated answers, news and social media overwhelm, and what Ray calls “information toxicity.” The ProductivityCast team also discusses practical ways to curate inbound information, reduce cognitive friction, use AI-generated briefs and drafts responsibly, and stay in control of your attention while working with smarter tools. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/149 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing The AI Researcher: From Information Overload to Active Knowledge Synthesis (Part 1) 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 AI Researcher: From Information Overload to Active Knowledge Synthesis (Part 1) Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | The AI Researcher: From Information Overload to Active Knowledge Synthesis (Part 1) Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. ResearchGate Academia.edu ChatGPT Google Gemini Google Workspace Microsoft Copilot Feedly Evernote Social Fixer The New York Times The Onion Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist | 00:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a more fulfilling, productive life? Then you've come to the right place. Welcome to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. Here are your hosts, Ray Sidney Smith and Augusto Pinault with Francis Wade and Art Gelwick. Ray Sidney Smith | 00:18 Welcome back, everybody, to Productivity Cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Francis Wade | 00:24 And I'm Francis Wade. Ray Sidney Smith | 00:25 Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. This week, we are going to be continuing our dive into the world of artificial intelligence, which I like to call smart software, with another episode in our series of the AI-powered professionals.  So today we're going to be focusing on research and what I'm coining here is the AI researcher persona and how these new tools are really transforming the process of learning and researching and knowledge work for us. We're moving to a place where we can understand retrieval as basically active knowledge synthesis. And we're going to be talking through some of the challenges that folks face with regard to information overload and otherwise.  So let's first talk through the problems with research today. What do you find are the good or the positives around research today? And what are some of the problems that we experience? One of them we're going to talk about, which is information overload. But there are others that are out there.  And then we can give that context. Color with regard to how we can use AI as a researcher to help us with that process or those problems.  So what do you feel like are the primary problems today with research. Francis Wade | 01:47 I think in the past, very much a hit or miss kind of proposition. Where if you could find someone who had done the research... Answer the research questions that you have. You were extremely lucky. And the game was, how can I increase odds of success how can I be luckier So that meant that dwelling in places like Research Gate. Maybe at academia.edu.  Yeah. But ResearchGate was my goal, though. And For certain topics, especially the two that I specialize in, which are task management and strategic. Planning. I've pretty much got to the bottom of everything that I could find easily. It took a few years for each one, but I've sort of gotten to what I think is like the bottom. Where I read what they have to say. And I've noticed sort of where all the faults are why in neither field the research academics do is very useful in the real world?  You know, it's very esoteric and it's meaningful. Academics tend to write for each other. And for journals. And for advancement in their field. They don't like to go into areas that are cross bouldery that I like to mix and match different fields. They don't go interdisciplinary. It makes a real mess of the nice, clean, lines that they like to follow. And I don't like to go into areas that, you know, If you become an expert in an area where there's no conferences and no journals, no chairs and no departments anywhere in the world. If you go into an area like that, you know, you're sort of dooming yourself to obsolescence.  So with those problems, It means that for the two areas that I'm interested in, there's a, Not a lot of useful research. There is to find.  So finding something useful used to be a lucky proposition. And I would have to basically find someone who has enough experience in both areas to be able to do research in both areas so that they would have the questions. And finding that was like a needle in a haystack.  So it's always been difficult in the two areas that I Try to find research written on. It's always been an uphill struggle. Augusto Pinaud | 04:02 I think it's important to make an distinction between professional researching practices and the non-professional one. I agree in the professional researching the impact of AI has been incredible because now these people who Say. Knows better when they're trying to search and look into information. Cinta was not available. When you go to the noun informal research. It's interesting because I feel that we used to have Three levels of research, bad research, middle ground research, and good research. And now with the AI, we have gone and disappeared that middle because people think that they can find the answer that they believe is legit. Doesn't matter if it's true or it's fake information or what it is. They can go bump into any of these agents. Get an answer. And because of that, people stopped digging. Into is this really legit? But when you think in the world of productivity, When the first book of David Allen came out, we were talking about 2001, It was hard to find the information. It was hard to find the principles behind unless you have access to them. 25 years later, you can find A ton of information. The question now is, How did you know that information is legit or not? And that's why I think that middle ground has disappeared. You have the people who goes and do a prompt, and get an answer and assume Dad. The answer they're getting is the truth. And because of that, that's the stop of the research.  So what was part of the issues 20 years ago is, okay, I want to research this topic and now I have 20 books. No, they just go, ask two questions, get what they think is a truth answer, and take that That's a fact. Then you have the other level that is the people who are going to get that and try to figure it out. Is this a fact? They're going to try to dig out or it's not a fact. And what is the fact? What is interesting for me with AI is That middle ground, that guy who will have get that fact and tried to see why. I don't look legit or not legit. That disappeared. What I have seen is people getting the output that AI is giving them I'm taking them. It's a truth. It's an absolute truth that is even more scarier. And I have seen this In academic settings, I have seen this in professional settings, okay, where people go What is the obsolescence of this? Okay. Can you repeat that? I didn't get an answer.  So when that is, they never really dig. Hold on, did you want to do the vendor? Did you, did the chat GPT was floating you know, That, I mean, how been... Wonderfully. Last week. My son is a baseball fan, so he was watching the baseball and he wanted to see the score, so he asked, Madame Eyre. And But I may say, the game has not started. It was time for the game to start. That's true. The radio. Fuck. And you know, like, You've got me in the life. Damn, man. Give us whatever is for them. I've nothing to do. With the reality. And it was a great moment of, teach an opportunity because of that. If we will have the initial answer, what most people do, This other game has no authority. Okay, and you move on. But the reality is minimal. The game had started. We were in the middle of the game and there was a different score than what she was giving us on the third answer. And that is what Most people don't notice when they go into this research. AI will give you an answer. The question is if that answer is actually the answer or. Ray Sidney Smith | 08:11 Not. When it really matters, right? Learning that the game is not trivial, maybe not to your son, but to the rest of the world, you know, when it's... I will. Augusto Pinaud | 08:19 Make sure to tell him that right thing, that when the game is on, it's not trivial. You are going down in that scale of people he likes. You're going down, my friend. Ray Sidney Smith | 08:27 The unfortunate part is if you say, hey,...

5/19/26 • 38:54

In this episode, we continue our conversation on The AI Assistant as part of The AI-Powered Professional series. Picking up from Episode 147, the ProductivityCast team shifts from using AI merely to offload administrative friction and shadow work to thinking about AI as a true collaborative assistant. Ray, Augusto, and Francis discuss how to define roles for AI assistants, train them with useful context, manage multiple AI tools and personas, review AI-generated work as drafts, and build prompt workflows that help professionals get better results while staying firmly in control. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/148 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing The AI Assistant: Automating Administrative Friction and “Shadow Work”, Part 2 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 AI Assistant: Automating Administrative Friction and “Shadow Work”, Part 2 Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Francis Wade Show Notes | The AI Assistant: Automating Administrative Friction and “Shadow Work”, Part 2 Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Microsoft Copilot Google Gemini Google NotebookLM ChatGPT Claude Evernote Zapier Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More [00:00:00] Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a more fulfilling, productive life? Then you've come to the right place. Welcome to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. Here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud, with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. [00:00:18] Welcome back, everybody, to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Marco is jumping out. And I'm Francis Wade. Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to today's episode, where we're gonna continue our discussion on AI, and this is our series on the AI-powered professional. [00:00:44] in our first episode, we started the discussion about the concept of utilizing generative AI. in this episode, we also started the process of talking about what an AI assistant is really [00:01:00] like, talking about some of those administrative frictions, being able to get rid of, and automate that out of, your world to some extent, and dealing with shadow work as well, defining shadow work and so on and so forth. [00:01:13] We're gonna continue this topic into discussing today about really how to partner with your AI in a lot of ways, what the collaboration process really looks like. And so I'd like for us to discuss shifting using AI tools as a mechanism of just kind of offloading something, which it can do, but then becoming a more collaborative partner with that particular AI tool in order for it to become a true AI assistant. [00:01:45] And so I'm thinking of things like how do we ensure that AI is taking over the right kind of work and that it's not taking over the work that we should be doing, and how do we maintain control and accuracy? And of [00:02:00] course, there are a bunch of boundaries and ethical considerations that we should be thinking about and some thoughts about the future. [00:02:05] So let's start with what are some of those first principles, for us to be able to create a true collaboration partnership with our AI assistant? [00:02:19] Sure. I'm thinking about this from the perspective that If I want to work with my AI assistant, I need to choose particular categories of work in which it can actually collaborate. So for example, I want it to be able to help me take a rough sketch that I've made on either my iPad or on paper, and then to have the AI turn that into a full-fledged drawing, a full-fledged cartoon perhaps. [00:02:49] So the AI assistant is acting as my cartoonist, and so that's a role that I want the AI assistant to do. And while I can draw my [00:03:00] own cartoons, 'cause I've taken this drawing class, I feel competent to draw, you know, one part of a cartoon, but then it can fill in the rest by creating the other panels of the cartoon. [00:03:13] And this is really helpful to me because now I can make the first drawing. It can be roughish, you know, to give it the idea of what I want, and now I can help it help me, quickly generate more panels and get the cartoon done by virtue of that. But the idea is that it's now a role that I want it to continually be helping me with, and so that is the cartoonist role. [00:03:38] That's just one. I mean, like that, it doesn't, it doesn't have to be just role. It could be any number of things. But it's just like, that's the kind of thing that I'm thinking about. well, in the last episode, we sort of established the notion that, an AI assistant is like an intern who remembers everything, but doesn't have a whole lot of judgment. [00:03:56] isn't, a really good judge of, you know, the [00:04:00] things, whatever it is that we happen to be expert at. It, it's too much to ask the AI to rise to our level of, insight and understanding. Having said that, there's a whole bunch of stuff that now looks to me that, it looks different to me because I can now see it as automatable. [00:04:23] Like the example that you gave of, doing repetitive drawings or repetitive, animation. There's a bunch of things that I, and the list keeps growing, which is why I don't have a fixed answer. but it does start with this notion that I have an untrained intern that has infinite memory and infinite patience and doesn't have an attitude and works at all hours. [00:04:48] And if I train that intern, then there's more and more things that the intern can do, and there's gonna be a new app tomorrow that- allows the intern to [00:05:00] do even more. So it's hard to say what specific role because the roles keep changing, and they keep being added to. if anything, I would say there's maybe a rule, which is that, try to give the intern as much as possible, but always be the person of last kind of decision. [00:05:20] Be the one who's at the end checking to make sure the intern didn't make some, you know, gross error. So if there's any rule, that's the rule that I'm applying right now. Try to find more and more to give and then be the person at the end to do the checking. and then don't try to stress the intern out with judgment calls. [00:05:42] and even the limit-- even the line on what I call a judgment call is changing with AI because it's getting better, You know, the AIs that I use, I use memory, so it understands me and what my judgment calls are, better and better each day. So it's a tough question to answer.[00:06:00]  [00:06:00] So just stepping up a level, I would say that just the concept of establishing roles for the AI is the first principle. It's not necessarily that you're going to ever be exhaustive in terms of creating the roles, because sometimes the role you need for a specific chat is defined in only that chat, and then there will be ones where you're gonna need that as an ongoing kind of recurring thing. [00:06:29] It depends. You know, last episode I was talking about that wine help. You know, help me identify wine that I may enjoy based on my profile and educated that profile. But same thing on, on the professional side. I have a client who we, because of what they do, they, it's a report that is run every morning, and that report gets to them. [00:06:53] And the problem is it's impossible to, to analyze it long enough. You know, you can see the report daily. You can maybe go a [00:07:00] couple days back. But human, it's hard to really create trends and things from that specific report. Where it's been very cool is a play on the role we create a chat for that neural network, okay? [00:07:15] And now that report is dumped, for lack of a better word, into this chat. But this has now allowed us to identify trends not in three months, not in 90 days. Hey, this server last time this failed, okay, it was seven months ago. And it failed for three days. That information no human can provide for me. Okay? [00:07:38] But allows you to start seeing that, and that make it very, very specific. Okay? Same thing, when you write. After you train, yeah, it required to train the intern, but after you train, say, "Okay, this sound like me. This doesn't sound like me." You know, one of the things that I love to do is when I get an [00:08:00] idea, okay, let me discuss this idea with the content of, okay, or the ideas or the understanding that AI has of X person. [00:08:08] And you can say, "Hey, I want to look what will be the perspective of this text if Einstein read it." assuming you, you know what, physics and stuff. But that give you... Is the perspective you're going to get accurate? Well, it may be, it may not. But it will give you a counter that is very interesting. [00:08:30] One thing that I do very often is find the arguments in favor and against this i- this concept, this idea that I'm working on. And it now get... You know, I think the definition, part of the definition or the issue is this, for a lot of people, is the first time they get access to an assistant, to an administrative assistant,  [00:08:53] For most people, that is a concept that they heard,...

5/11/26 • 53:09

In this episode, we’re discussing how to use AI to automate "shadow work", the boring, repetitive tasks like data entry and invoicing that drain our energy. By viewing AI as a "million interns" that need clear instructions and human supervision, the hosts share how to streamline everything from professional billing to personal life choices like cooking and movies. While AI can sometimes make mistakes or "hallucinate," the episode explains that investing time in training your AI assistant can remove administrative friction and help you focus on the work that actually matters. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/147 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing The AI Assistant: Automating Administrative Friction and "Shadow Work" 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 AI Assistant: Automating Administrative Friction and "Shadow Work" Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | The AI Assistant: Automating Administrative Friction and "Shadow Work" Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. "Deep Work" and "Shallow Work" by Cal Newport Flow Theory by Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Personal Productivity Club Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist | 00:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a more fulfilling, productive life? Then you've come to the right place. Welcome to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. Here are your hosts, Ray Sidney Smith and Augusto Pinault with Frances Wade and Art Gelwix. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 00:18 Welcome everybody to productivity cast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Francis Wade | 00:25 And I'm Francis Wade. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 00:28 Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome, everyone. To ProductivityCast this week. We're diving into the world of artificial intelligence and its growing role in our personal productivity. This is going to be a part of an ongoing series we're calling the AI-powered professional. And in today's episode, we'll be exploring how AI tools are moving beyond simple task management to tackle tedious shadow work, things like administrative friction, small repetitive tasks, and context switching overhead that drains our time and energy. And so we're going to talk about how to approach shadow work with AI, how to overcome the problem, and we can talk about some of the solutions that we have utilized throughout the So let's get into this. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 01:13 Episode. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 01:16 And first, let's spend a little bit of time talking about what exactly is administrative friction and shadow work. Does anybody want to kind how they... Raymond Sidney-Smith | 01:26 Of tackle. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 01:28 Perceive what shadow work or administrative friction is. Francis Wade | 01:32 Sure, it's the stuff that I have to do to Execute the day. So it tends to be repetitive stuff. I don't have a choice. I must do it. No one else can do it. Typically, or I could train someone to do some of it, but most of it It's not worth training someone else to do it because there's probably some nuance that only I know. I see these things as a bit of a tax in the sense that In order to achieve your overall objectives, you have to do them. And yes, if you can get them automated, "Polite you, but point is that they're mandatory, they're required, and you don't have a choice.  So I know how I feel when I'm doing them because my heart sinks and my energy drops and I go through a whole metamorphosis into someone who wishes he were doing something else. So that's an emotional Sugar for me. Or a Marco. Augusto Pinaud | 02:34 You know, for me, the shadow work is all that work that is required to do to really be able to focus on being productive. And I'm dead. And the reason is, as Francis was saying, it's normally it's not the fun work. Okay. But it's the fun, it's the work that you need to do. To be able to get to that fun work to get to that. Work in which you can really focus and you can shine. And Us bored. As tedious That's it is. It's critical to be able to get a good session of productivity. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 03:13 Yeah. Cal Newport defines his concept of Shallow work. As I think what we think of as what we call shadow work. And so there's this concept of often performed while you're doing other things and doesn't create a lot of value. And I've always had a problem with the concept of shallow work and deep work. I think that those definitions, deep work being high value, items that you're highly focused on just really sounds like flow work to me. And so, but I define flow work, of course, the way that Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about it. And The goal here is to really look at this from a lens of if we're doing all of this administrative work, I think that there is some great value to some of it. As I typically use the example that you could have a five minute phone call and have a client say, let's sign the million dollar contract. Right. Was the five minute phone call worth it? Absolutely. And some people would consider that an administrative issue. Burden, right? That would be administrative friction having to take and have that five minute phone call.  So we have to kind of parse apart those things that are high value and don't take a lot of time. Those things that are low value and take little bits of time or lots of time, each of which are kind of problematic in their own way.  And then being able to overcome those through various mechanisms. Artificial intelligence is just one of them.  So we have to be mindful that what we're talking about here today is just one of the ways in which you can overcome this. But I don't think that AI ultimately becomes the panacea. It is just one option that you have among many for being able to overcome these kinds of issues. Couple things that I wanted to kind of talk about here is that I think that Data entry generally is administrative friction and is a classic type of shadow work that you can think of. And Honestly, data entry is what computers were built for.  You know, the whole concept of being able to take data and run calculations or structure it in a way I think is the archetypal form of shallow, shadow work. Francis Wade | 05:50 The data entry I have an intern that works with me or an associate who works with me and She was doing an entry job And I thought about it for a minute, because she was not enjoying it. And I said, It's one of those, again, it's one of those taxes that at some point you've got to pay because We all have to enter data at some point. And we'll try all our best to not have to do it. But again, it's one of those sinking feelings that after you thought of everything and you realize that at the end of all your thinking, you still have to enter the data. There's no shortcut available. You got to do it. And I entered I remember. , entering data early in There's a way to it. Into data and I was trying to share this with her That's more skillful. Because you're paying attention to what you're doing. You're not checking out to the point where you're making mistakes. And at the same time, you're taking care of your well-being.  So you're not engaging in conversations that are dragging you downhill and getting you depressed. That there's a way you have to manage your mind. And manage your attention. To do good data entry so that you don't do nonsense.  So it's actually, I tried to paint this picture for her. It's actually a skill. That Once you have it, you can always Do it. Use it. But it's not a skill to... Resist in the sense that you wish it weren't there. It actually has so much, sometimes the data has so much value, that you need to bring your best skills to your data entry.  So that you don't end up resisting it. You don't end up resenting it. And you don't end up making mistakes so it's a skill in and of itself. And funnily enough, after I gave her this, very inspirational explanation. I ended up spending It must have been at least six hours entering data. There was no way. I was yeah. And I actually did some automation. I did a little lab coding to kind of speed it up. But that could only get me so far. But not go any further. And I thought, I'm eating my own dog food, taking my own medicine. But I agree. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 08:19 Yeah, I'll say this. There are so many ways to ease the burden of data entry. Again, it's about the ways in which input and output in computer communication in human-computer interaction that we just don't think about.  So, you know, Our input options for a device are typically in an input perspective. There's audio, right? You can put audio through a microphone into it, which is what we're doing right now, recording the podcast.  And then there's video, having the device take in video. Or images and then of course mouse and keyboard and if you have a touch screen or a touchpad like a Wacom board, you're capable of putting in some kind of handwriting or hand drawing some kind of, you know,...

5/4/26 • 44:51

In this episode, we're discussing the concept of perspective as a contrast to the GTD concept of control. We explore the "Horizons of Focus" and the different altitudes of self-management, ranging from the "runway" of daily actions to the "50,000-foot" level of life purpose. We debate whether perspective is a tactical relationship or a pseudonym for context while contrasting top-down visioning with bottom-up execution. From discussing the "elasticity" needed in planning to identifying incongruencies between our values and our careers, we explore how these various layers of focus can transform mundane tasks into meaningful progress toward a fulfilling life. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/146 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 what perspective means in the context of GTD from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | What Does Perspective Mean in GTD? Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | What Does Perspective Mean in GTD? Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Getting Things Done by David Allen The 8th Habit by Dr. Stephen Covey Unlimited Power by Tony Robbins Tony Robbins Audio Programs GTD "Horizons of Focus" Model Personal Productivity Club Raw Text Transcript | What Does Perspective Mean in GTD? Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist | 00:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a more fulfilling, productive life? Then you've come to the right place. Welcome to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. Here are your hosts, Ray Sidney Smith and Augusto Pinot with Francis Wade and Art Gelwix. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 00:18 Welcome back, everybody, to Productivity Cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud | 00:24 And I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade | 00:26 I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks | 00:28 And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 00:29 Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this week's episode. Today, we are going to be talking about perspectives as a contrast to last week's episode on the GTD concept of control.  So in order to start off the conversation, I want to lay the groundwork with perspectives. The Getting Things Done March 2015 edition appendixes. Glossary of terms definition given for perspective. And it says, one of the two key elements of self and organizational management, along with control, and it refers to point of view, focus, altitude of horizon. We have this concept of horizons of focus in getting things done. And what I'm hearing from the definition is that David Allen is saying that each one of those horizons of focus is a perspective. That's what the terminology is talking about. And so with that in mind, I wanted to ask, Is. Perspective the right term? And what does perspective mean to you in your own. Francis Wade | 01:33 My mind perspective is a pseudonym for context. And as someone smart said, context is decisive. The background story from which you take your actions is all important. And it's malleable. And most of us just wake up into the context that human beings wake up into every day, which is something close to survival. Survival, desperation, fear, you know, how can I make it through the day kind of, point of view. I think that's the default.  And then to Create a new context, tics. Or any perspective takes. Conscious act for the most part conscious action it takes deliberate effort. I think this is all important. I think the book GT is really about that. And perspectives is one way of seeing it. I think this idea that... The context of your life is decisive is an idea that's been around probably since the Greeks. And that's something worth paying attention to.  So yes, it's vitally important. Art Gelwicks | 02:41 What I think is interesting about this looking at perspective and how it breaks down is that often perspective is not related to ourselves. If you look at the GTD structure you've got, and I'll work from the bottom up, Actions, Projects, Goals, Vision, Life The first four of those categories are often... Stolen for lack of a better term by corporate and work environments. To set the messaging. For everything that you're supposed to be doing and that becomes the context, for lack of a better term, that those get applied in. It's difficult for us to translate goals, vision and life into actual real life things, because every time we think about it, we think about, you know, the next five year plan at work.  So... If we think about it from the perspective of how they relate to each other, perspectives in my book, are pretty much whatever you're dealing with and the thing above and the thing below it.  So projects is a good example. If you're working on projects, The projects need to align to the strategic goals that you have. If it's business, obviously you have business strategic goals. If it's personal goals, The things that you're doing should align to those. You have to determine what those are, but they should be tied to it. And below that, the actions necessary to execute those projects.  So the perspective is less... What the term would lend me to believe, which is a view on things and more of a relationship. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 04:27 I certainly see perspectives for me. As a vertical planning tool. And so each of the additional perspectives above the actions level or the ground level in at least GTD lingo, you are seeing a different and therefore you were planning at a different time. "layer of time" So it's for me, I always think of time horizons is that, you know, projects are within our time bound within about a year and then you keep stepping up to further and further distances of time. Accepting the horizon too, which is areas of focus and accountability, which ends up being something that is it's a maintenance level.  So, While each of the time horizons keep going up in that sense, Horizon 2 is the exception there because it's maintenance. It's ongoing maintenance. And if you're like me and you've created other horizons, other perspectives, then you may have other time horizons in that sense as well. They're not going away. And so that has an infinite horizon in essence.  So I'm looking at it on a regular basis purely because it's perennial. It's always going to be there. The interesting thing about perspectives for me is that I think that there is a clear... I don't know if I want to say contrast or argument between other systems, other methodologies, other thought processes on this and perspectives. I'll give you one example, which is Dr. Stephen Covey's The Eighth Habit, where he talks about the concept of the four intelligences. And if... Control and perspective are really the only two vectors of a productivity system, then Where does something like the four intelligences fit. And I would say that Dr. Covey would say that this is perhaps a completely different dimension.  You know, the four intelligences being mental intelligence or IQ, physical intelligence, PQ, emotional intelligence, EQ, and spiritual intelligence, SQ. And so he has this perspective on the four intelligences and how they map to all of the rest of how you would develop in his language, you know, finding your voice and helping others find theirs. And so I'm always... I don't know if I'm conflicted because I have myself learned to deal with where these things fit in my own system. But I can see that there can be a difficulty for folks to think about how Picking. IQ, PQ, EQ, SQ, and turning that into vision, discipline, passion, and conscience in the eighth habit world, and then seeing the somewhat limited I wouldn't say limited, but more simplistic view of the perspective concept. And I'm curious from all of you, Do you see a conflict or do you see... Perspective is just basically holding other I. Art Gelwicks | 07:38 Think perspectives are a more tactical term. Approach. They're more tangible. We associate them with things and activities that we have going on. Stephen Covey's concepts are more to understand people. I want to say spheres of influence. I don't know that they necessarily relate directly to each other. There is no dotted line. It is difficult at best. To translate. For example, projects into mental intelligence, you're not going to be able to make that connection easily without it stopping. Significant amount of work. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 08:18 Yeah, but to interject right there, like, so if we step up a few horizons and we get to vision and purpose and principles, then we're really starting to connect. The concepts of what he's talking about there at the very top levels of the system.  So it's not really closer to the tactical level, but more when he starts talking about, you know, creating vision, right, which he defines kind of as applied imagination. And then he we keep stepping down to these other, not stepping down, but going around the four quadrants, right? To figure out passion and discipline and conscious and otherwise.  So it's, At those upper horizons,...

4/27/26 • 50:45

In this episode we're discussing the concept at the core of personal management: control. Specifically, we’ll be philosophizing about what control truly means within the context of the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. We'll start with David Allen’s definition, which ties control to the workflow stages of capturing, clarifying, organizing, reflecting, and engaging. But does that definition fully capture the complex, often psychological, reality of feeling "in control"? Then, we explore how to build tangible systems and "guardrails" that move us from simply feeling overwhelmed to being confidently in command of our work and personal lives. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/145 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 what control means in the context of GTD from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | What Does Control Mean in GTD? Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | What Does Control Mean in GTD? Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen How to Get Control of Your Time in Your Life by Alan Lakein Freedom.to (A Focus application used to block digital distractions) Fitbit watch (Used to track sleep) Byron Katie's process (A methodology for managing unwanted thoughts or feelings) Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist | 00:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a more fulfilling, productive life? Then you've come to the right place. Welcome to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. Here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 00:19 Welcome back, everybody, to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud | 00:25 And I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade | 00:26 I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks | 00:28 And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 00:29 Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode. Today, we are going to do some philosophizing, I suppose, and hopefully bringing ourselves from that level down to the practical. We're going to be talking about control. And what I wanted to do was to preface this with The concept of control and perspective in the Getting Things Done or GTD methodology perspective, which is that that's where came up to me in the first place. And over the years, it has changed. And so I want to talk about what does control mean to each of us and how do we actually make the concept of control practical even tangible in our own worlds. I'm going to define what David Allen says of control in Getting Things Done in the March 2015 edition, in the appendix, in the glossary of Getting Things Done terms, he actually gives a definition for control And then we're going to talk a little bit about what, the concept of GTD control is so that we can then define what We think of it as in contrasting terms.  So he says of control, one of the two key elements of self and organizational management along with perspective. And so that's what he calls control in the most basic terms. And if we think about it from the concept of control and perspective, control are the steps of the or stages of the workflow going from capturing to clarifying to organizing, reflecting and engaging on the action level of the horizons of focus. That is what he considers control.  And then as we go up the horizons on the y-axis, we then have projects and so on and so forth going up the horizons. And that's what he considers perspective.  So control are the actions that we take on the lowest level of the horizons of focus and everything above that becomes perspective. So kind of thinking of it as looking down at the actionability of the thing above itself.  So when you're at the highest level, Horizon 5 purpose and principle You are looking down at the other's vision, goals, areas of focus and accountability, projects, and actions. So that is the GTD definition. And... We have all probably thought of it as being insufficient in some way, shape or form in our own worlds. And now what I'd like to do is to ask you all, gentlemen. How do you define control? And what is... If I think Art gave a really great example before we started recording, if someone came to you and said, I'm feeling out of control, how do you help them get in control or under control in their life? Francis Wade | 03:10 So I think David Allen's definition is basically a process definition. So he's saying, here are the steps. Or managing tasks. And the ones that really start with capturing and so forth are basically the steps for managing tasks. And I suppose that I'm guessing that what he means by control is that the... Process of managing tasks is in control. Now, that has a very specific meaning in my world. I was trained in part as an industrial engineer. And we love For those of you who know the Leningrad-Stewart charts and control charts, we love the idea of measuring processes so that they stay in control. That's not practical for most people to be able to use these kind of diagnostic tools. But the way I would advise to answer your question, Reem, someone who tells me that they're out of control... Is to ask them What do you mean? Because the word control is a psychological object The definition has changed and it varies and there's no uniform. Understanding of what it means.  So you have to go to the next step and say, When you say control, the question I would ask is when you say control, What specifically? Symptoms are the ones that you notice and I would imply in real life. Not just in your emotional life, but in The Hard Tensible Life where are those symptoms occurring? Such that you're led to conclude that you're feeling out of control.  So I would immediately go to and I would focus and start to break down their response. Between I've mentioned psychological objects like I'm feeling stressed, I'm feeling unhappy, I'm feeling unworthy, I'm feeling lazy. As opposed to I arrive at half of my appointments at least ten minutes late. Okay, there we go. That's one. That's a tangible object. We can work with that. What else do you have? Well... I wake up in the middle of the night three times out of the week. With something that I forgot to do. That's two. All right, that's another tangible activity.  So I would look for the tangible symptoms. The things that you can put your finger on, you can touch, you can see.  And then accumulate those so that we move the conversation from and feeling out of control. Towards And again, in the lingo of industrial engineers is defects. We're looking for defects. And we're looking to put them together so that we can say, okay, with these five defects, the root cause of them are Because the truth is, control is a lag indicator. Peely Walter Control is a lag indicator. Comes a lot after. The things that you Did or didn't do.  So we're trying to go all the way back so that When we start to... Figure out what they should do, We're actually looking at things that they did do or need to do or didn't do. In tangible reality.  So that's how I would tackle it. Said that to me. Art Gelwicks | 06:21 Control to me is a very... Unlike the industrial... Definition of it. I look at it from the almost the psychological side of it. Control is a perceived state of comfort It's a lack of stress. It's a... Point of awareness. Of activity And I think when someone says they are out of control, my first reaction is to ask the question, When do you feel things went out of control. Because I need to know contextually Is this something that is a recurring feeling, which means that it is probably systemic. To a process failure Or is it something that has recently happened, which may be triggered by an environmental response or some external factor that has pushed things off the rails? But control itself like a, can be an extremely negative impact. On work and process and quality of work. Having a sense of control. I don't know is necessarily an extremely positive thing. It's basically neutral. You feel like, okay, if I'm in control, I can do... What I need to do. If I'm out of control, I can't do what I need to do. But at no point are we saying that if I'm in control, I can do better things. I'm just saying that I can do things.  So to me, I always look at it from the mental aspect of it more than the process one, because The process one I can chase. I mean, I can look at the measures. I can look at the metrics involved and say, OK, this is working. This isn't this. But that doesn't necessarily, again, translate to a lack of control. And we've all seen it. We've had people who have processes that work somewhat. But they feel like they are in control, but we know looking at it, it's like, no, you're not. As much as you think you are, you're careening wildly down the highway.  So... The subjectivity of that term and the amorphousness of that term makes it difficult to have that initial conversation. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 08:49 ...

4/20/26 • 38:41

In this episode of ProductivityCast, we continue our deep dive into the psychological and tactical differences between stalling out and stepping back. While Part 1 focused on defining the core constructs of procrastination and conscious deferral, Part 2 moves into the "why" and the "how." (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/144 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing the concepts of procrastination, conscious deferral and/or unconscious deferral from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Procrastination vs Conscious Deferral Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Procrastination vs Conscious Deferral Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Key Takeaways Practice Persistent Starting: Don’t focus on the final outcome; focus on the act of beginning. Success is the aggregate of many small "starts." Diagnose the "Anchor Weight": If you are avoiding a task, it is likely due to a "lack of definition." Take five minutes to clarify the very next physical step to lower the barrier to entry. Distinguish Deferral from Procrastination: Conscious deferral is a strategic choice based on missing resources; procrastination is choosing a lower-value activity (like escapist media) over a high-priority intent. Utilize Retrospective Planning: After completing a difficult project, perform a "post-mortem" to document the steps you took. This creates a historical record that reduces anxiety for similar future tasks. Stop the "Shoulding": Avoid labeling yourself a "procrastinator." Using the term often induces shame and a "fear-based response" that further erodes the confidence needed to begin. Timestamps [01:51] The Anchor Weight: Why lack of definition causes stalling. [07:50] Unconscious Deferral vs. Procrastination: The role of the unconscious mind. [12:32] The Danger of Identity Labeling: Why calling yourself a "procrastinator" is harmful. [20:12] Moving Past Anxiety: Tactics for getting the ball rolling on new projects. [27:29] Persistent Starting: Using Dr. Neil Fiore’s technique to overcome blocks. [36:38] The Hunter-Gatherer Brain: Why our biology fights against long-term goals. [44:31] The Benefits of Procrastination: Using it as a filter for the unnecessary. Resources Mentioned Books: The Now Habit by Dr. Neil Fiore Atomic Habits by James Clear Concepts/Methods: Getting Things Done (GTD) The Byron Katie method for questioning thoughts. Retrospective (Backwards) Planning. People: Gretchen Rubin (The Four Tendencies/Upholders). Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:27 And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith | 00:29Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we are going to continue our conversation around procrastination and conscious deferral. And the conversation last time really covered mostly us discussing the defining nature of or just defining the nature of these two constructs, both procrastination and conscious deferral. And so what I'd like us to do is So if you have not listened to that episode, I would highly recommend that you hop back to the part one of this particular two episodes, and then we will now continue today in terms of really discussing the What we're going to do today is then start discussing why we procrastinate in the first place? What are some of the understandings of why we procrastinate and what are reasons for conscious deferral?And then we will… Discuss probably in and amongst that ways in which you can overcome procrastination and when it's probably appropriate to do conscious deferral. When it actually may not be, and it then bleeds back into procrastination. And there's a fine line there, of course.So let's talk about what are the major reasons why You all procrastinate. What are the reasons you've determined that procrastination ekes its way into your everyday life?Art Gelwicks | 01:51I'll throw myself under the bus first. One of the most common reasons that I'll put something off is lack of definition. If I haven't taken time to truly define out all the steps necessary to execute something, it winds up with this anchor weight attached to it to say, "Well, you don't know what you don't know, and you don't know quite what you're supposed to do, so maybe you should go do something else." Whether true or not, That's kind of where things wind up getting pushed to.So that, I'd say that's my primary one is lack of definition around what I'm supposed to be executing.Augusto Pinaud | 02:28Yeah, I need to agree with you 100%. For me… I can tell. By Monday morning. How good or bad my weekly review was on Friday. And I wish to tell that all of them are incredibly good. And I get out of there with a clear mind. And sometimes it doesn't happen. Even sometimes I do some kind of weekly review on Friday. I need to compliment that over the weekend because that is Lack of clarity, that lack of have that clear list of projects and actions, all that it produce is emergencies, fires and procrastination in my world.Francis Wade | 03:12I have a question though then, because the kind of the procrastination that Art was talking about sounds to me more like conscious deferral. That he's not unconsciously Putting off. The lack of definition. He's consciously doing it.Well, I should ask him. Are you unconsciously doing it because you haven't defined the action or are you consciously doing.Art Gelwicks | 03:33It? No, it's… I would agree it would look like conscious deferral that I'm making that action that, I don't have enough detail, therefore I can't get started. I'm not going to give it that level of credit. It's really a, it's a two-step problem. And the more I think about it, the first step in the problem is recognizing that I now need to allocate time to gather that information to know what I need to do for that thing.So for example, let's say I'm planning out an online ad. And I have some of the information I need, but I don't have all of it. And I know it needs to go out at a certain time.Well, I could just say it needs to be done. Or… What happens is I recognize that I need to spend some time filling in those gaps of the process necessary for that item, which means I'm going to have to chase down information to fill those gaps.So to execute that Task? There's a bunch of extra work that I need to front load. And that makes that task feel bigger, creating a bigger anchor, creating a bigger roadblock, therefore, subconsciously encouraging me to push that back to do things that I know I can accomplish and move forward on, which unfortunately winds up in that thing getting pushed back to a point where it becomes problematic.So. There may be times where that's a conscious thing where I say, look, I just don't know what I need to know. Therefore, I'm not going to do that thing. But to me, that's not procrastination. You're absolutely right. That's a choice. That's somebody hasn't provided me an update or something like that. That's a waiting on or a follow up. It's when I myself have not defined things clearly enough. To say Should or should I not proceed with this? That's when the procrastination part will kick in and say, you know what, why don't you hold off on that? You can go do something that you feel better about. And it's, I think it's the feel part more than anything. Because there isn't a rational reason to delay that work. It has to be done. There's nothing about it that says that you shouldn't be doing it. But there's a subconscious feeling there that's saying there's an almost an anxiety that's attached to it. Saying, you're going to find something that is going to be a real problem. Maybe you should put that off. I don't know if that helps any of us.Augusto Pinaud | 06:00No. And you bring a great point that it's that anxiety. It's the procrastination. It starts happening because I start getting all that anxiety of, is this really up to date? Is this really possible? The valuable task that I need to move forward? Is this really what need to happen? Or not. And that or not is the killing part of that.Francis Wade | 06:25I have a different, not different, but I have a… As I'm thinking about this, I wrote a an article on procrastination. It was a long time, like a decade ago. But I basically said that Something along the lines that procrastination was not well defined. And it seemed more like a The feeling. Than a fact. But what's happened over the years is that If someone were to ask me if I procrastinate, I would say no. I don't have that. Kind of self-talk....

4/14/26 • 52:22

What if procrastination is not always procrastination? In this episode of ProductivityCast, we begin exploring the difference between true procrastination and conscious deferral, and why that distinction matters more than most people realize. This conversation challenges the labels we use, the judgment we attach to delay, and the hidden reasons we avoid certain tasks, making this a thought-provoking starting point for anyone who has ever wondered whether they are putting something off or making a more intentional choice. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/144 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 procrastination versus conscious deferral from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Procrastination Versus Conscious Deferral Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Procrastination Versus Conscious Deferral Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. In this first part of a two-part discussion, the ProductivityCast team examines the meaning of procrastination and questions whether the term has become too broad, judgmental, and unhelpful. The conversation begins by comparing common definitions of procrastination and quickly moves into a deeper exploration of whether all delay should be treated the same. The hosts distinguish between unconscious delay, conscious prioritization, and what Ray describes as conscious deferral, which is the intentional decision to postpone something for a clear reason. They also explore how the label of procrastination can create shame, obscure the real causes of delay, and distort how we interpret other people’s behavior in work and life. The episode ultimately reframes procrastination as a more complex mix of perception, prioritization, emotional regulation, and context, setting up a follow-up discussion on how to handle procrastination at both the project and task levels. Key Takeaways: Not every delay is procrastination; some delays are intentional, rational, and better understood as conscious deferral. Labeling yourself or others as a procrastinator can add shame without revealing the real cause of the delay. A better question than “Why am I procrastinating?” may be “What is preventing this from feeling clear, doable, or important right now?” In leadership and collaboration, replacing blame with curiosity helps uncover obstacles, competing priorities, or missing information. Much of what looks like procrastination may actually be displaced activity, where you are still doing something, just not the thing you believe you should be doing. Timestamps: [00:00] Introducing the problem of procrastination vs. conscious deferral [00:02] Why common definitions of procrastination may be too simplistic [00:05] Internal judgment, external judgment, and who gets to define procrastination [00:09] The emotional weight of procrastination and the case for conscious deferral [00:13] Unconscious choices, intuition, and the hidden reasons behind delay [00:19] How to think about procrastination in teams, leadership, and collaboration [00:33] Procrastination as displaced activity and preview of Part 2 Resources Mentioned: Wikipedia definition of procrastination Dr. Gary Klein on intuition Conversations for Action Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:27 And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:28Welcome gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today we're gonna be talking about procrastination versus or and conscious deferral. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna define procrastination. I think everybody procrastinates a little bit and sometimes a lot in their lives, and we wanna talk about why we procrastinate and what are some of the things we. Do when we consciously defer projects, goals, and tasks from what we are [00:01:00] presently and actively working on, and then we can close out with discussion on maybe if you are struggling with procrastination, what are some things that. If it's hindering your productivity, what can you do to get over that hump? And we can give some quick tips for folks to get started with conquering procrastination at the end. So let's start off at the top, which is, let's all get on perhaps the same page relating to procrastination. How do you define procrastination? I am gonna pause here for a moment. Francis, if you could just stay if everybody just stays off mute, I wanna see, I can void out your audio, so don't worry about muting yourself. Only because when I'm wondering if that has something to do with why it gets into the drift mode. 'cause when you are muted Oh. I'll start us off and you all can perhaps add on to the definition. And I went to a bunch of different places, but I think Wikipedia actually ended up having a, an interesting [00:02:00] definition that I don't necessarily agree with. And I think this is helpful for us to start the conversation, which is Wikipedia defines procrastination as an action of unnecessarily and. Voluntarily delaying or postponing something despite knowing that there will be negative consequences for doing so. So I immediately feel like this is not true in some perspective here because it says unnecessarily and voluntarily, and we know that not everybody is aware of the. Negative consequences and sometimes there are not negative consequences for procrastinating. And so I'm curious about just that base level definition from Wikipedia. Do you agree or disagree? That only works if you're taking involuntary delay and giving it a different name because [00:03:00] procrastination is a blanket term that any sort of a delay on something. It's either do it or don't do it. And if you do it, you're in action. If you're not, you're procrastinating. It's not about the how, so I don't know that I necessarily agree with their definition of procrastination. But I also don't think the term necessarily needs to include the cause. It is a delay of action. When an action should be taken. Maybe phrase it that way or it would be. Beneficial for an action to be taken, what the trigger of that could be, any number of things. And I don't think they, they are remotely related to the term procrastination. So this is where I have some difficulty because the most tasks, of course, are delayed until later. If not every task that you plan to do in the future is based on a delay and. There's a cost for delaying any [00:04:00] task. In other words it's, there's a risk that it might not get done. So the only way to remove the risk of doing a task and not doing a task in the future is to do it. No. So by that definition, procrastination covers every single task. That is, in other words, every time demand, every one that you're gonna do in the future, at that point, the verb procrastinate loses its value because all it's saying is, whatever you're not doing, whatever task you're not doing. No. At that point, I don't think it has much value. So I don't like the, I don't like the idea that procrastination is putting off a task. I don't think it, it adds a lot of value. I think there's a, what if we were to re rephrase the definition? 'cause we were all about definitions to procrastination. Being inaction when action should be taken. Because theoretically, if you're not doing something and you're [00:05:00] supposed to be doing that thing, you're either unintentionally putting it off. You're intentionally putting it off. It's an either or situation. There is a, there's a decision point for the conscious part, but the unconscious part, no, it can just happen. One of the things when we talk about what is procrastination, we never start to look at it from the standpoint of saying, okay, this, take something simple. Taking out the trash. I choose not to take out the trash. Or I'm going to do something else. I may have chosen to do something else. And what ha what happens is taking out the trash gets put off. But if that context isn't provided in the definition, the perception is then, oh, you procrastinated on taking out the trash. No, I did make a conscious decision to do something else I prioritized over. So when we go back to [00:06:00] procrastination. I still think it comes back to that inaction when action is warranted. How you get to that point could be any number of factors, but I think that's as simple in my mind. That's as simple as it gets. A piece that comes into mind for me though, is that your wife might say that you were procrastinating, and that's where the definition breaks down for me because there's an internal judgment ve

4/13/26 • 36:56

What if the world's #1 brain coach wrote a book that's better suited for someone else than you? The ProductivityCast crew puts Jim Kwik's Limitless under the microscope, and their verdict might save you 12 hours of listening time (or not! 😉). Today, we're doing a book review of Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life by Jim Kwik. (NOTE: We recorded this book review before Kwik published his latest edition, Limitless Expanded Edition (December 2025); however, at least for Ray, who had a chance to read the latest version, his opinions shared in this episode haven't changed.) (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/142 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 Limitless from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Limitless by Jim Kwik Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Limitless by Jim Kwik Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. In this BookCast installment, the ProductivityCast team dissects Jim Kwik's bestselling Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life. The panel explores the book's four-part framework — Free Your Mind, Limitless Mindset, Motivation, and Methods — and debates its value for different audience segments. Timestamps TimeTopic[00:00]Introduction & Book Overview — The hosts frame the BookCast format and introduce Limitless and Jim Kwik's background[04:30]First Impressions & Accessibility — The panel shares initial reactions, debating the book's entry-level tone and pop-culture framing[09:00]The Book as a Motivational Survey — Ray argues the book's strength lies in its motivational arc and broad survey of productivity concepts (Pomodoro, flow, mindset)[16:00]Pros & Cons Deep Dive — Discussion of the audiobook's bonus content, the book's resource page, repetitive self-promotion, and inconsistent acronym usage[23:00]Oversimplification & False Promises — Art raises concerns about "superhero" framing and the risk of leaving beginners feeling oversold and underserved[30:00]Amazon Ratings vs. Real-World Value — The hosts unpack the 4.7-star, 12,500-review score and what it actually signals about the book's audience[36:00]Who Should (and Shouldn't) Read This — Final recommendations: beginners benefit; experienced practitioners should go directly to the Kwik Brain podcast 📚 Resources Mentioned Books Referenced Limitless by Jim Kwik (the featured book) Getting Things Done by David Allen The 8th Habit by Dr. Stephen Covey Mindset by Dr. Carol Dweck Work Clean by Dan Charnas Works by Dr. Edward de Bono (including Six Thinking Hats) People Mentioned Jim Kwik — Author & brain coach Dr. Carol Dweck — Mindset researcher Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — Flow theory Dr. Edward de Bono — Lateral thinking Mel Robbins — Guest on Kwik Brain podcast Dr. Michael Breus — Guest on Kwik Brain podcast Dr. Brené Brown — Referenced for comparison Anthony Robbins — Referenced for comparison Stan Lee — Referenced re: Kwik's Marvel relationship Tools & Resources Kwik Brain podcast by Jim Kwik Limitless book resources page Limitless audiobook (available in full on YouTube at time of recording) The 10-Day Kwik Start Plan (included at the back of the book) Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Note: Parts of this automated transcript mixed up Francis and Art 🤪, so definitely listen to the audio to note who said what. Voiceover: Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a more fulfilling, productive life? Voiceover: Then you've come to the right place. Voiceover: Welcome to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. Voiceover: Here are your hosts, Ray Sidney Smith and Augusto Pinault with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond: Welcome back, everybody, to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. Raymond: I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto: And I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis: I'm Francis Wade. Francis: And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond: Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Raymond: Today, we are going to be doing one of our book cast series. Raymond: Basically, we're reading and discussing books that we think are of interest to the productivity community. Raymond: And we're somewhat reviewing them for folks so that they can know whether or not they'd be worth picking up. Raymond: And today, we're going to be discussing Limitless, Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life by Jim Quick. Raymond: And so a little bit about the author and then a little bit about the book, and then we will get into our discussion. Raymond: So Jim Quick, from his own website's bio, says, Raymond: For the past three decades, Jim taught his learning techniques to students from universities such as NYU, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and Singularity, Raymond: as well as executives and employees from companies such as Nike, GE, Zappos, SpaceX, and Virgin to get the most out of work and life. Raymond: He started out as, quote unquote, the boy with the broken brain, and over the past 30 years has been teaching all of these various methods for helping people, quote unquote, upgrade their brains. Raymond: The book itself from the Amazon description says, quote, Jim Quick, the world's number one brain coach, has written the owner's manual for mental expansion and brain fitness. Raymond: Limitless gives people the ability to accomplish more, more productivity, more transformation, more personal success and business achievement by changing their mindset, motivation, and methods. Raymond: So those are the three M's that he talks about in the book. Raymond: And I won't read the entire description here, but that's kind of the general gist of the book in essence. Raymond: So what I want to do today is I want to talk about kind of three different components here. Raymond: One is covering the key points. Raymond: What are the things that stood out for you in terms of the book? Raymond: And then we'll talk about the pros and cons of the book and some of the key takeaways that you had from reading the book. Raymond: And then finally, would you recommend or not recommend this book? Raymond: And why? Raymond: That is to whom and why? Raymond: So let's start off with kind of the overview of the book. Raymond: The book itself is broken up into four different parts. Raymond: The free your mind. Raymond: And this is really, I think, his opus on overcoming the reality that somehow you have a limited brain. Raymond: You have some kind of limitations. Raymond: How to kind of unwrap that component and think expansively. Raymond: Then part two, which is the limitless mindset. Raymond: Then part three, which is limitless motivation. Raymond: And then part four, which is limitless methods. Raymond: Basically, he goes from the what to the why to the how. Raymond: And among amongst those pieces, he gives little tidbits along the way. Raymond: What did you think about the book generally? Raymond: What were those key points throughout the book that that stood out for you all? Art: I I didn't actually read the book. Art: I used the audio book version of it, which made it a little bit. Art: I don't know if I want to say more challenging. Art: The overall sense I got from the book is that this this is a title that if you have never done any personal exploration into improving your productivity. Art: This is about as entry level as you get. Art: There's a lot of classic tropes, classic comments, classic nuggets of wisdom that are honestly every place that are consolidated into the book. Art: I was a little put off by some of the framing of some of the content. Art: Specifically, you know, how you can do anything. Art: You can master anything. Art: You can use 100 percent of your brain. Art: Stuff that we know through, you know, tried and true testing isn't accurate. Art: And it actually creates. Art: It can create a situation for somebody who's trying to get into improving their own productivity that they feel oversold when they try when they they listen to a lot of this stuff. Art: And there's key things. Art: And I know I'm fumbling with the explanation on this a little bit, but he'll go through a chapter and then he ends the chapter with here's the quick action. Art: Do this. Art: I'll use an example one. Art: He has a section on memory and he's talking about, you know, improving your memory and things like that. Art: And he ends with the quick action. Art: Memorize someone's phone number. Art: And that's the takeaway from the chapter. Art: And I listen to that. Art: I'm like, OK, I've listened to for this for quite a period of time now. Art: And you have just told me to memorize a phone number, which apparently was my problem to listen to the chapter in the first place. Art: Because if I can do that,...

4/6/26 • 40:03

Today on ProductivityCast we’re going to be talking about stepping away from getting things done so you can review and reflect, and then get back to getting things done better. It’s halfway through the year and so it’s a good time to discuss the mid-year review.

7/24/23 • 45:13

Today, the ProductivityCast team talks about terminology, that is, what are the terms that we use in the personal productivity space? And why is there so much confusion around those particular words that we use? (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/140 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 Defining Personal 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 | Defining Personal Productivity Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Defining Personal Productivity Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Raw Text Transcript | Defining Personal 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). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:23I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:25And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode. Today, we are going to be talking about terminology. That is, what are the terms that we use in the personal productivity world, and really, why there is so much confusion around those particular words that we use the importance of them. And then we'll talk about some of the terms that we all have defined over time. Some words, we've created some terms, or phrases we've created, and why. And then, of course, what we can do to make this a little bit more useful for everybody. And so let's start off with why is this important? What's the importance of the productivity terminology, the personal productivity, terminology that we use every day, Augusto Pinaud 1:11when, when I begin working into personal productivity and researching into practice, personal productivity, one of the things that surprised me was the definition that most people have off time. Mostly because the definition has nothing to do with time and everything to do with scarcity. Actually, if you pull a dictionary, the definition that most people have of time is actually the definition of viscosity. So as you look and begin from the wrong definition, to build personal productivity, the only thing you can do is build a rock model. You know, when you start with wrong assumptions, it's hard to build something that actually works. And that works for you. And that is the problem. And that happened was so many of the definitions plus invented work that some experts for color in some way are so people who study to spend time and study and decide to create to define things that it makes sense on the sale of the book that they're trying to do, but not necessarily on the definitions that people manage. And all that create. Over the long term is confusion. Francis Wade 2:28I think it's an unavoidable confusion because we are talking about psychological objects, not physical objects. And psychological objects have a history to them. They change over time. And they're they're made up and they are, they're very dependent on Lang on the language that you happen to be speaking in. We had a conversation off air about German language, German, and how words get made up all the time. And that's very easy to do when you're talking about intangible psychological objects. It's harder to do when you're talking about a tree, which you know, a tree today is pretty much the same tree as it was million years ago. But something like insomnia is a pretty recently made up word, because like 100 years old, and the way we use it obviously, is very different than people thought about insomnia 100 years ago. So a word like time when Weinstein came along and led us to think very differently about time. And before clocks were invented in this 12 or 1300s. People thought very differently about time then also. So as we create these words, they allow us to do different things. They help us in some ways, they hold us back and others. But the truth is that the meanings keep changing. And the fact that they keep changing, meaning that we have to pay attention to them, if we want to use them to, for example, make improvements in our individual lives, we don't have a choice. This is like a moving target. Bunch of moving targets. Art Gelwicks 4:11Yeah, to meet the definition, debate falls into the same realm as in rules for games. If you're not playing by the same rules, you're not going to know what the objectives are, you're not going to accomplish or achieve the common goals. So if you use a parallel, say American football, if everybody does not know or agree to what a touchdown means, then anybody can run around saying they scored a touchdown. There's a common definition, there is an agreed upon standard of measure. And that's what so many definitions provide is that standardized concept of measure and unfortunately, within the productivity space, that seems to be one of the sponginess things that we have is getting everybody to agree on And what definitions actually are. And there's two things that I run into all the time. And I've caught myself doing it. And I have to correct when I do it as well. One is I miss identification of definitions, applying the wrong definition for something, because that's what we think it means. But we're not 100%. Sure. The other one, and I almost want to say it's a little bit more insidious is the adaptation of definitions to support a particular model, platform, agenda, whatever you want to say, to put something into place, so that it goes Oh, see, because productivity is x, my stuff is accurate as why? Well, that's assuming that everybody agrees that x is what productivity is, and I don't believe that's the case. And so many, so many situations. So having a common definition for things that is, I don't want to say globally, agreed upon, but as closely commonly agreed upon as possible, really makes this even approachable. When we start to look at improving people's productivity and efficiency. Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:15I somewhat agree. And I think that what you're talking about there, art is probably why I have so many terms of art that I have created for all kinds of personal productivity situations, except that mine was built out of necessity, not out of building a model, and then choosing to shove a square peg into a round hole, it was, oh, this thing that I'm doing needs for me to define it. So I can explain it to others. And so it became a just a need to be able to create something to contain that new thought, that new method process or whatnot. And so I'm hopefully doing it on the opposite side of what you're talking about, which is I'm not, I'm not creating something and then trying to pigeonhole these pieces into it. But really choosing to embrace the, the term because it helps it's helpful in being able to explain it to others, I also find that my biggest challenge with personal productivity terminology is that we don't know whose term we're using, when we talk about any given term. If someone says to me, something I know like a time demand, I'm very clear, in the sense that I know that that came from a certain Francis Wade. And so if we go ahead and then say to me, Oh, well, a time demand is something else, not the one that I know is the term or the phrase created by Francis that I'm lost. And we don't have that kind of contextual framework. Right now, in the personal productivity community, people will use certain things like task or to do or even personal productivity, but they haven't really given us the foundation for what they mean by that. And when we enter into conversation, we're not in the appropriate context, you're talking about time blocking, or time boxing, or any of those other terms that are kind of loose, they can be defined many different ways. We're talking past each other, because you may think of it as being something very different than I think of it as being frequently, you know, we use the methodology getting things done. If we all were to define what getting things done well is today, we'd all have different definitions. And that is because we take pieces from the methodology. And I find that to also be somewhat confusing for people, when we then take that from the kind of macro level, have a methodology and when we bleed it down to the very individual pieces. Methods are incredibly difficult to, quote unquote, define because they are by nature, instructional. And so when we, when we try to give terms to things, they end up becoming confusing for people, because if I say GTD, or I say weekly review, or if I say next action, those three things are unique. Only one of them, by definition, will be useful to you, right? Because getting things done, or GTD is going to be a method and instruction, weekly review, same thing. Maybe you can define it in a in a core way. But it's still going to be confusing without giving you step by step instructions....

3/20/23 • 48:23

In this week’s episode, the ProductivityCast team debated subjective versus objective time as commentary on the article, “My Fixation on Time Management Almost Broke Me.”Thanks to Brian C. for the recommended reading! (See https://www.personalproductivity.club/posts/14785370.) (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/139 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 ProductivityCast - Subjective versus Objective Time 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 - Subjective versus Objective Time Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | ProductivityCast - Subjective versus Objective Time Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Is Time Management Really “Real”, Or Is It Just a Misnomer? | by Francis Wade | 2Time Labs | Medium Victim Mentality: Causes, Symptoms, and More The Impact of Temporal Schemata: Understanding When Individuals Entrain Versus Resist or Create Temporal Structure | Academy of Management Review  Ramit Sethi The R Project for Statistical Computing  Raw Text Transcript | ProductivityCast - Subjective versus Objective 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). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:23I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:25And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to ProductivityCast. Welcome to our listeners. Today, we are going to be talking about objective versus subjective time. And we will be trying to objectively thinking about whether or not it actually even exists. So, for instance, do you want to open this up with regard to this article. So basically, this is an article from hbr.org. And actually, Brian Clark in personal productivity club had brought this to my attention. And the article is my fixation on time management almost broke me by Abby J. Ship. She is a PhD researcher at Texas Christian University. And she has a PhD in organizational behavior from University of North Carolina. And so her research focuses on the subjective and psychological experience of time, including what she's quoting here as the trajectories of work experiences fit satisfaction and burnout, for example, and the nature of mental time travel and attention, and how individual views of time impact performance, well being and coordination in organizations. And so very interesting area of research that she does. Francis, can you open us up in terms of what Dr. Ship talks about? In this article? Francis Wade 1:36The topic of the article is my fixation on time management almost broke me. So it's a bit click Beatty, in the sense that you're thinking that she's talking about what everyone is talking about the respect to time management. But those of us who are in the know, you know, that you probably would want to what version of time management is she talking about? And how did it break her. So just in the way this article starts, I'm just gonna talk about the start for a moment. She's define time management in a particular way. She's claimed that the way that she relates to time management broke her. And she's, in a way blaming time management. And I think there's huge problems just with that she gets them to other more realistic things in the latter part of the article, but the context of it, I don't know if the, you know, you write articles, and then the editor decides what's the sexy part that will draw people in? Well, the sexy part that drew people in through the title is just way off base. And why well, I wrote an article can time be managed, and really looked at whether or not this is a reality or a construct in language. And I came away with the latter. So for her to go this far down the road without defining time management is a huge problem for those of us who care, both definitions like this and why they matter. Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:02Yeah. So I think about this from the perspective that what she's really saying is that because she became hyperbolic with regard to her own use of time management methods, right? She she basically had this obtuse view that she could do more and more and more not hitting upper limit, and or have unhealthy behavioral interventions, and then presume that those are time management. I just, this is where I have I struggled with her lead up to it, which is that there is this sense, and I think it's an unhealthy sense that many of us have, and I don't think she's out of the ordinary here. I think there there are other folks who are highly productivity minded, ourselves included, who get to a point, and we feel productive, and we think, well, we can be more productive, we could do, we could do that much more, and then it becomes unhealthy. And that actually drives us to spend more time on trying to iron out these small inefficiencies potentially, or small in effectiveness components of our world. And that ends up spending more time and being more deleterious to our outcomes and to our health and not so I get that I understand the argument, but that is not because of the time management methods themselves. That is a that is a psychological behavioral component, not an issue of the methodologies or the technologies themselves. Anyone else agree or disagree? Art Gelwicks 4:33But should the methodologies take that into consideration? No, Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:37I don't think so. Like okay, so Jerry Seinfeld is supposed to be the progenitor of the don't break the chain, time management methodology, where you cross off the items on the calendar in a mechanism to chain together and therefore create momentum around getting something done. Why is it his responsibility to then take into account all of the various psychological capabilities that we have and limitations that we have, when it comes to this, when, in reality, he just proffered what he does. He didn't say, there's some great psychological underpinning here, he didn't say there was some great, you know, amount of, of, you know, grand, whatever. He just basically said, This is what I do, it works for me. And it was taken and run with it. You know, and many other people have now talked about it about him, because he's a famous comedian, and so on and so forth. So like, I just don't see the the opportunity there for him to have given this underpinning, you know, he didn't write a book about it, he didn't do anything. But you know, what, don't break the chain helps. How many 1000s of people every year, get things done? Art Gelwicks 5:44Is there any reason to not do it, though? I mean, if you have the opportunity to take consideration of the subjective parts of how you're executing your productivity into consideration and compensate for them adjust or at least be prepared for them, does that not inherently make a better system for yourself? I mean, I think about things like you know, when you have something on your list that you're going to do, and you know, it's going to take you two, three hours to do it. And it's something you hate to do. You know, it's going to feel like it takes forever to get that completed. Well, that's perception. It has nothing to do with how long it actually takes it to get done. But it might, because if you don't want to do it, who says you're going to do it at your maximum speed, your maximum level of productivity, the odds are extremely good, you're not. So failing to take that into consideration, at least personally, sets us up in situations where I can understand the struggle that she's talking about. I don't agree with everything in the article, but I do understand the concept and the struggle that she's talking about. Where's the cap? I mean, we started talking about that at the beginning. Where's the top end of productivity? If I feel like I'm hitting? No, I'm hitting everything on my task list. And I'm getting my stuff done. And my projects are getting turned in? Should I stop there? Time management methodologies and productivity, you know? Everybody running around right now will go well, no, you need to work harder. You need to work harder, you can work harder, you're getting everything done. That means you can do more. And I can understand why that would break somebody. I can totally get that. Because there is no sense as to where does this thing go off the rails? And without that taken into consideration? Yeah, there isn't a methodology out there that says you've done enough stop. If there is, I don't know about it. I'd love to hear it if there is but I don't know of one that says, Yeah, you're good. Unknown Speaker 7:55And I don't think I agree with you there. I don't think there is one and it is an issue that you find into a lot of people, okay? Where, and I found that especially in people who ...

3/13/23 • 48:54

Today, we’re releasing this episode which was recording live at the Task Management & Time Blocking Summit 2023 stage. The theme of the conference is “One Size Doesn’t Fit All” and so the ProductivityCast team spent time discussing in front of the live audience what our thoughts are on challenges of one-size-fits-all and some thoughts of solving for it. Enjoy! (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/138 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 One Size Doesn’t Fit All - ProductivityCast Live from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | One Size Doesn’t Fit All - ProductivityCast Live Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | One Size Doesn’t Fit All - ProductivityCast Live Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Remember the Milk CrossPlatform podcast Raw Text Transcript | One Size Doesn’t Fit All - ProductivityCast Live Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and a Gousto pinout with Francis Wade and art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24And Art Gelwicks is with us somewhere in spirit. But he'll be back hopefully, and with us shortly. Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to you all, listening, live, watching live or listening after the fact to the podcast feed. We are here live at the task management and time blocking virtual summit 2023. And the theme for this summit is one size doesn't fit all. And what Francis kind of positioned us to do here on this episode was to talk about really the the ideas behind what does one size fits all mean? Does it really make a difference in our productivity? Can we think about this in a more, I think fluid and dynamic way. And I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit in this Episode Episode to talk about really the, the fine line between efficiency and effectiveness, when we think about one size fits all methods, tools, and otherwise. And so what do we want to get started here, let's let's talk about one size fits all being a problem, because we're consistently trying to do more. And as Francis talks about task volume, for instance, do you want to kind of talk to us about the number of projects and commitments that you typically talk about with regard to how one size fit all one size fits all really becomes a problem for folks, when they're attempting to do more and more Francis Wade 1:48Sure, is that we're greedy. It's, we fill our we fill our plates in terms of capacity. So we do as much as we can do, and we grow as much as we can grow. And when we get to a particular level, we still want more. So even if we pick up a new app and learn some new techniques and become more productive, because we can manage more tasks, eventually, or capacity runs out, because we just keep adding more tasks, we're really until eventually, we coupled and start to experience problems all over again, it's just human nature, the more we do can do, the more we want to do. And it's just a matter of wanting, just being aspirational, just being positive. Having a vision for yourself, that is beyond your grasp. wanting more out of life, wanting to grow, wanting to learn wanting to contribute, wanting to serve, you know, there's always all of these commitments, they sound great, because we are just wired that way. But what they all translate to in the world of task management in terms of what goes in your to do less than what goes in your calendar is one word more. So given that we always want more, there is no single set of techniques, and there's no single tool that will ever serve us forever. It serves us up to a point. And then we want more. And we either give up wanting more, which some people do, or we change our approach. So that more becomes possible human nature. Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:32And I would probably put a different lens on this, I would filter that response to the fact that we are in various different cultures and societies that really require a lot of us today, you know, there, there is just a different sense of the world than at the turn of the last century, or even the turn of the prior century to that. There's just so much more expected of us. And we are required to be connected to all of our past mistakes in a lot of ways. And that creates a lot of shame and regret for humans just generally. And I think the idea of one size fits all ends up being problematic for folks who do have any sense of their past, coming back to bother them haunt them, so to speak. And I don't mean this in terms of like doing something bad. I mean, in terms of like just capturing your existing task volume, and recognizing that there's a backlog that at its very nature causes a an emotional response that has its own effects on us. And I think that can be very, very troublesome for folks. So we have task volume. I'm going to kind of twist us to the other side to this, which is kind of Devil's advocacy, right out the gate, which is to talk about the fact that we have lots of solutions in the world and In which the one size fits all works. And maybe not perfectly, but maybe enough, I'll use the example of all in one productivity tools like an outlook outlook positions itself as the one tool you need for being able to manage communications. I think to some extent Microsoft Teams is starting to encroach in that space a bit. But But focusing on Outlook, right, we've got email, we've got calendar, we've got task management. At some point, it did a journaling type of tool in there as well, there was kind of a note taking capacity, you have add ins that extend on that. So it's customizable, and it's extensible, make the argument that that one size fits all strategy does not work for organizations. Art Gelwicks 5:49No, I'll jump in there and say it absolutely doesn't work for organizations. And it's exactly what organizations need. And here's why I say that. Because organizational implementation of those types of one size fits all solutions are not about the users using them. They're about what it takes to maintain them, and what it costs to deploy them. And what it costs to license them. That's the the objective. And that's the purpose, it has nothing to do with whether or not it's the best option for the end users, because they're rarely taken into consideration for that. So when you have a tool like Outlook, where Microsoft will tell you that it will do everything, including slicing bread, it's not, they don't really care that, well, it's not the best option for doing task management. And it's not the best option for handling your calendar. Typically, what you'll see retroactively is they'll try to shoehorn functionality into it, to get it closer to those applications that actually do those very things. So, in a corporate environment, it's extremely rare to actually get an application that's really good at the singular job it's supposed to do, because then you wind up with a huge number of applications to to maintain license and ultimately pay for Augusto Pinaud 7:06to go by little back to what Francis was saying. Us, you know, there are two problems, yes. Our task, you know, we go into task management or learning to manage our mess, because that overwhelm, okay, because we want more and more and more. And what is little say, in the world as you work with somebody is there is a moment in which you need to start looking for better. And what I mean by that is, as Francis was saying, and I will agree, there is a moment that you reach capacity. And when you reach capacity, what are you going to do, okay, as to this day, I have not been able to find the upgrade. Okay. So if somebody knows how to do an upgrade, please let me know. Okay, but since I cannot do an upgrade, this is what it is. So the moment you reach capacity, is when this game gets interesting, because that's where the geeking and the time management and the story comes into place. Because now is how we are going to get better task, okay, on how we are going to maximize that resources, those resources that we have, so we can really be productive. That is where things that I have mentioned before, in other episodes of this podcast, that do not do list, what is the things that you need to stop doing? What is what you need to teach others to do when I work with families for task management? Okay. How do you teach your kids how to use these tools? Because it's very interesting are my kids are 14 and 10. Okay, they can play with Windows, Mac, iPads, and Chromebooks. No problem, okay, switch between one or the other. But somehow, we parents, you know, don't give them the tools that we know they're going to need. Now do I think my kid will use not to be or to do is when they get to their professional life? Maybe not. But this is a great time to teach him, hey,...

3/9/23 • 34:52

In a post entitled, Hyper-Scheduling, David Sparks (a/k/a MacSparky) writes about his method of time blocking on a granular level. This week, the ProductivityCast team provides their commentary, challenges and methods on this concept of hyper-scheduling, which will hopefully spark ideas on how you can better manage your time-based work. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/137 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 Hyper-Scheduling: Commentary on MacSparky's Granular Time Blocking 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 | Hyper-Scheduling: Commentary on MacSparky's Granular Time Blocking Method Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Hyper-Scheduling: Commentary on MacSparky's Granular Time Blocking Method Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Hyper-scheduling - MacSparky  Unschedule How to Use the Unschedule - Video Tutorial  Google Assistant Time-Based Actions: Events - https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/7678386?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid Reminders - https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/9387035?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid Timers - https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7028899?hl=en Raw Text Transcript | Hyper-Scheduling: Commentary on MacSparky's Granular Time Blocking 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). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:23I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:25And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to this episode, today, we are going to be talking about the calendar and really how to utilize the calendar to be more effective, really related to David Sparks. And some of you may know him as Mac Sparky at macsparky.com and the Mac Power Users podcast, he has been writing about something that he calls hyper-scheduling since 2018. And I thought we would actually tackle this topic in terms of just covering what he is really talking about in his series of articles around this. And so in 2018, he wrote this article that he said he was experimenting over the last month, in essence doing more deliberate scheduling of his time. And so really, what it looks like is a an explanation of what is time blocking the idea of being able to put blocks of time in your schedule. In his particular case, he's calling it hyper-scheduling, I believe, because he is identifying more granular times where he's doing things. So instead of say, large swaths of time for the day, he's putting smaller and smaller blocks of time in the calendar for particular activities. And he defines various blocks. And he gives you the opportunity to be able to think about your own world in terms of what those smaller, more granular blocks could be, for purposes of having a schedule that you can fall in line with, as you make your way through the day. And the idea here, at least as I understand it, is that he's giving himself the leeway to change things around. But it's just a little bit more structure. He does this the night before. So instead of the morning of he does this the night before, and he gives some mechanics and so forth. He's written five or six articles about this over the last three years. And so I thought it'd be helpful for us to walk through through some of these pieces. And he's written some clarifying components of this, you know, some of the feedback he's gotten and his responses to those as well. And so let's just start off with that explanation kind of under our belt, right? This is kind of like a variant, or his his take on time blocking? What do you think about this take on time blocking? And what parts are good? What parts do you feel like, have an opportunity for improvement, Francis Wade 2:56he talks about capturing the schedule, initially on PayPal. And I've noticed, the first thing is that I changed my time blocking depending on how busy I am. So I'm in a hyper busy period this week, because I have a conference coming up that I'm in charge of, or hosting. And every minute of every day is valuable. And you know, I'm swapping things in and swapping things out and pushing things to next week. I'm in that mode where you're trying to conserve as much time as possible before a deadline hits. And I normally would keep my schedule on my calendar, but the ad on my digital calendar. But the idea of going into my calendar and doing it and dragging around and dropping, and then going through all the different steps that it takes. For me to get to the calendar I want seems like a lot of work. So when I'm in this face, I just made a paper calendar, I started to write things down because in a minute, I'm done as opposed to 10 minutes, or 15. And it made me think he's onto something. First thing he talks about the use of a digital PayPal entry and I forget the name you guys can you guys are experts in that area, you can speak to that. But it struck me that the interface and how easy it is to do time blocking has a lot to do with what kind of time blocking you do. Because I'm probably going to go back to using the computer using Google Calendar or schedule an escape path after this week. But interesting, I think there's different approaches depending on how busy you are and how much spare time you have. And he may be hinting at that. Art Gelwicks 4:41I liked the idea of that level of scheduling. I just don't think it's practical, at least not not in my world. I mean, it's it's nice to be able to go through and say, you know this will take 15 This will take 25 But I just don't think that works in most cases you spent So much time monkeying around with your schedule, that you almost get to a point where you're not getting anything done. I mean, I like the idea, the bigger idea of time blocking where you say, Okay, I'm going to allocate, you know, two hours to work on this today, and set that in your schedule. But as you dig down more granular, you're getting really to the point of a checklist with times assigned to it in my book. And that's, I think there's a law of diminishing returns, that starts to creep into this fairly quickly. Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:32I think this is highly dependent upon the type of work that you do, and the expectations you have of the other people around you. And so if you are delegating work, if you are managing people, and if you're working in any collaborative environment, many of these things are going to break down if you don't have a lot of control over your own time. And so in my particular world, where I do have a lot of control over my time, like I have almost exclusive control over my work day. And so the idea that I give control, so to speak to others to schedule, time in my calendar, or those kinds of things, you know, I've latitude to reject calendar events, move them around all of those kinds of things. And that does give me the ability to do some variant of time blocking if I wanted to. And so I can see this working for me, if I if I liked the idea of my calendar being filled with things other than meetings. And I think just because as a GTD er, I have a tendency to think about things from a list perspective, and not from a calendar perspective. You know, calendars are for meetings in my world, and then those things that do need to be done in a timeframe. And that means that there's actually more in the calendar than one might think. But at the same time, I do tend to use those calendar anchors for prompting me to look at my lists for what can be done. So in essence, the, the time blocking in my world is actually a context, not a set of tasks. And that sounds to me a little bit about what David Sparks is talking about here, where he has these, there triggers for contexts of things to do, and there's a melange there, have, you know, he's got a little bit of, you know, go do X, go do Y, those kinds of things, you know, routine based items. But for me, I like the idea of saying at this particular time, I'm going to transition and, you know, shift my modality from one to the next. And when I'm doing that, this is the thing I'm going to work on next. So when I look at the calendar, I can see oh, right, in two hours, I'm going to be shifting gears to this chunk of work. And that gives me the ability to start kind of moving myself in that direction, which I think can be helpful. Art Gelwicks 8:00What's too small, what size time block is too little at work to 15 Francis Wade 8:06minute blocks. But again, only in times when you have no discretionary time. Like for example, if I'm in a situation where I have three meetings, which are almost back to back, and I only have a half an hour between each one, then I'm going to not only have the energy,...

3/6/23 • 47:47

In this week’s episode, the ProductivityCast team continues their conversation about sequencing for greater productivity, this time about ordering projects to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/136 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing Projects Sequencing: Ordering Your Projects to Enhance Productivity from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Projects Sequencing Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Projects Sequencing Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Microsoft ExcelNotionCodaLifelong learningLifelong learning institutes - Wikipedia  Tom’s Planner Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:22 I am Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:25 And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this action packed episode of productivity cast, I'm just going to call it this is going to be a lot of fun. We're going to talk today about really the other side of sequencing. We talked about task sequencing in the last episode. And in this episode in this cast, I wanted us to talk about projects sequencing, why would we benefit from it? what are maybe some of the pros and cons? What are some of the examples of ways in which we use sequencing in our own productivity systems, and potentially some pitfalls, some things that we see folks around us experiencing in terms of troubles and challenges, and then we'll end with maybe just some Quickstart tips, some tips and tricks for you to be able to get started with projects sequencing, if you're not already doing it? Let's start off with why what is the reason for someone to be able to and want to sequence projects, which are different than tasks? Can you give a compare and contrast there for folks, and then we'll go from there, Francis Wade 1:32I think we've all been in that situation where we messed up a project so bad, because we thought it would be a short thing, or it would be a minor, you know, minor commitment, only to realize as opposed to two hours, it took 20. And as a result in crossed into an gotten away of other projects. And in retrospect, we look back and said to ourselves, boy, if I just sequenced it differently, if I had just focused on the one, and then decided to do the other at some point in the future. If I just applied a little bit of insight and maybe a little bit conservative, I could have saved myself a lot of heartache. So I think those who are interested in Project sequencing are those who take on larger projects, those who get asked to join lots of projects. But above all, there are people who've been burned by making mistakes by not sequencing projects correctly. I think that I'm sure that's what brings most of us that are called today. Art Gelwicks 2:37It's one of the reasons why doing retrospectives uncompleted projects is so important, because it's the only way to learn what the sequences should have been that you didn't pick up in the first place. I mean, we assume we can figure those out, because we've done this, but because we've done this provides us the historical data and the insight. That's what those retrospectives provides. So when we start talking about Project sequencing and task sequencing within a project scope, if you're going to do that type of project, again, you need those learnings you need that insight? And if you fail to do it, what's the old saying you're doomed to repeat history? Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:16Yeah, what I hear is that there is a finite set of resources in our life, whether that be time and energy and other things. And while we should have an abundance mindset, we should understand that focus is necessary, and that we have to allocate resources. Well, in order to be able to get projects successfully completed. And by sequencing projects, were in essence, postponing certain things or conditioning, certain things, so that the more important things, or at least the more important things right now get done well. And from my perspective, it's a standard of excellence in your personal productivity more than anything that forces projects to be sequenced. And the other side is that sometimes you just don't have the resources to be able to do that project right now, that could be a time resource, that could be a financial resource that can be a labor resource, you need someone in order for something to happen. And so there becomes a conditioning of when these projects get put on to your current active status than not. So let's talk a little bit about some of the examples in your own world where you benefit from being able to sequence projects in a way that really it helps you. I Francis Wade 4:38think it helps me to say no, frankly, that's the biggest benefit for me, is that when someone comes along with red shiny object, the thing I've been waiting for all this time, and you know, they paint a picture of how great it will be to have me on the project. And it's not something I had originally planned to do. But you know in that moment Mental of optimism you scan. If you only do a mental scan, you're just back into trouble. But if you do a mental scan of your commitment, I use age, or I should be able to do that. And, and that comes because you haven't done proper sequencing of your own projects ahead of time. So when the request comes, all you're left with is a vague sense of Yeah, I think I'm I should be okay. But you don't really have anything that you're looking at, that's written down, you don't have anything on people, you have actually haven't invested the time to do real sequencing, which you must do. If you're someone who manages lots of projects and lots of tasks, you must have a an accounting, a written accounting of your long term commitments, otherwise, you become that guy. And we've all worked with that guy who says yes to everything. And that guy is a disaster. And if you find out that he says yes to everything halfway through your project, that he's working with you on your big trouble. But that guy, we don't want to become that guy. Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:09Who do you give projects to the busiest person in the meeting, right? The reality is, is that many times, when you are the productive person in the room, people start to pile on, because they recognize that you're capable of being efficient and effective with your time. And that becomes a problem for you. So So understand, many of us here have been there, we understand that perspective. And saying no, is a way of potentially probably project sequencing, in the sense that you are, at the very least, pushing back against and setting boundaries against these kinds of, well, since Susan always gets everything done. Let's put more on Susan's plate. That's, you know, both inappropriate, and you know, unhelpful to Susan. But it's something that we have to be mindful of. And so you need to be able to set these boundaries to start, and then project sequencing becomes a little bit more useful. I'll give one particular example where projects sequencing for me is just kicked in. So at any given time, I am doing quite a lot of learning. And I call them journeys. I call them quests, you can call them learning paths, whatever it might be. But in any given year, I decide what it is that I want to learn. And so this year, I have been on a a pretty thoughtful path toward upping my programming and coding skills. And so I've been learning these various coding platforms in order to be able to figure out where I want to go. So my learning journey is sequenced. So that I am taking a particular course at any given time, and I am not taking other courses at that time, because I want to be able to make sure that one happens, then the next happens, then the next happens, so that I'm building upon that knowledge. And so we can see this in academic or educational environments very easily, right, if I don't have this information, then going to this next step is going to be not as useful to me than the next step, which is not going to be as useful to me. So as we advance in our skills, we can sequence the learning associated with those pieces, those stepping stones. And so that's how I develop my learning journeys. I sequence the projects, in this case, the courses or the deliverables in that. So for example, I started out with, I wanted to learn programming fundamentals. And so just not not getting too far into the into the specifics of any one language. So I started out with fundamentals this year, I've been learning all of the various different types of of programming models. And that's been incredibly useful to me....

8/29/22 • 51:07

This week, the ProductivityCast team tackles the topic of ordering tasks conditionally and task sequencing for momentum. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/135 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing Task Sequencing: How to Condition and Order Tasks for Greater Momentum, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Task Sequencing Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Task Sequencing Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. OmniFocusAny.doMicrosoft ProjectMicrosoft TeamsNozbeTodoistTemporal Structures in Individual Time Management - Wu DezhiRemember the MilkIFTTTZapierUnscheduleGTD Weekly ReviewJoin Ray’s Weekly Review Accountability Party on Fridays at 10:30 AM ET!KrispNotionPaprika (grocery shopping app) Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Hello, and welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:23I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:25And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we are going to be talking about something that I find to be fascinating, which is the order of operations, so to speak of tasks. And tasks. sequencing is interesting to me, because I think that when we deal with so many complexities in life, there are ways in which we can really order the tasks that we're doing, not just for making them more effective, but also making them more efficient. And I think that it's important for us to think through how we put things one in front of the other. And so I thought today, we would have a conversation around the idea of why would you condition tasks? Why would you sequence tasks, in essence, and then we could talk about maybe some of the examples and or pitfalls that we experience when we do task sequencing. And then we'll close out with maybe some tips and tricks for you all to utilize when you want to jump start the process of task sequencing. So let's get started with Why do you task sequence? Why would you want to do task sequencing, Francis Wade 1:32if we don't think about task sequencing, we end up making mistakes, small mistakes, big mistakes, we end up arriving at places late because we didn't start early enough, we end up with late deliverables, we end up being stressed, there's a host of problems that we can create if we don't do task sequencing correctly. And they all end up causing us emotional stress, the people around us come to realize that they can't count on us. It's loss of reputation, there's just a whole host of problems that gets created when we don't really pay attention. And we just do what we think we feel like doing in the moment. recipe for disaster. Art Gelwicks 2:19Task sequencing is one of those things that you don't realize it's important until you don't do it. Because you go to plug into working on a particular task. And you realize that three other tasks before that had to be done first, for this one to be able to be executed. So being able to take the time to say okay, what, what's the predecessor what has to occur to prepare this task to be able to be successfully completed? And then what are the next tasks that get triggered from this. And often we, we lose sight of that. And partially because it's not a natural habit to think about the before and the afters. But the other thing is that most task management tools don't support this kind of thinking. They don't have any structure built into them. To have that transitional piece from task to task, you wind up doing it artificially through the organizational structure. So the outlines and nesting and things like that, Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:17I think that OmniFocus is really the only one that I know of that has a true conditional task feature built into it. Are there any others that you know of that that really, truly will basically only show a task after you complete one? Art Gelwicks 3:31Not without getting into the project management space that I've seen? I mean, most of that's a much heavier lift, which it shouldn't be that hard of a thing. I mean, to paraphrase, you know, top gears, Jeremy Clarkson, how hard how difficult could it actually be? Because all you need to do is provide a connection to the next task and ID. And maybe that's the charge is that every task would have to have some sort of unique identifier. But I'm really surprised that most more applications don't give you that option to say when I finished this, what's the next task I want to do? And be able to designate that and say, Okay, here's the next one in the sequence and the next one, because when we talk about flow states, when we talk about time blocking, these are perfect connections to that. And it just seems to be a blind spot in the task management applications that are out I will definitely Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:28say that I think that task sequencing is important, if you think about it from the perspective that we design checklists, because we want to know in say, any given known project, that we know the sequence, the order that those things should be done in one before the other. And many times what happens is we have the complexity of many different projects ongoing that has many different things that we need to do throughout any given day or week, and not knowing the order in which they're going to happen. It creates a level of just inefficiency that causes things to break down. And also, you lose momentum in many cases. And so if you think about it, if you have to go to the grocery store, you would group the things you're going to purchase, buy the areas of the grocery store, right, you're not going to go, go get the milk in, and then walk, you know, to the other side of the grocery store, then walk back and get the eggs. And then you know, you're going to when you're in dairy, you're going to get all the dairy items, you know, you get the milk, cheese, eggs, when you're in the bread aisle, you're going to get all of the, you know, grains. These are things that we naturally do in some areas of our lives. But for some reason, when we think about tasks, we don't actually group things, or sequence them in a way that makes them to be more efficient. And that just creates more problems. Augusto Pinaud 5:45Yeah, only focus on that sense, as you were mentioned, was incredible in the sense that not only you could say, do not start this task, or show me these tasks on top. But you could also say, not only you cannot show to me until the prior one is ready, but also need to be after this date. And you could combine those two conditions, I have not seen anything that do conditions as incredible as OmniFocus. That's the sad part was a collaboration. But from the condition perspective, and the fact that you could mix, conditional or non conditional in the same projects, and you could have part of the project who has those conditions, parts of the project, or tasks that did not have them. It was really, really incredible. You brought Art Gelwicks 6:31up the grocery list thing, right? That did does remind me the application any do it's interesting when you go and you plug tasks in there on their shopping list, it will actually organize those by category within the store. So like it'll try to put the dairy items together and the thing, so it creates groupings. But again, that's not a sequencing as per se, because there's nothing within that grouping. It's it's all you're in the dairy aisle, find your stuff, I'm trying to think about how some of the tools will do sequencing, for example to do is the closest you get with sequencing and Todoist as you can change the order of tasks in the list. And that's assuming you're going to work from the top to the bottom, most Kanban tools, you can rearrange the cards in the board, something like a Trello or something like a notion board, you can change the order that way to create a somewhat of a sequence. But there's nothing that locks it in to say that when this one's done, this is the next one that has to be done. And I'll make the argument that the next one is actually less important than what was the preceding one that needed to lead up to this task. So what had to be done first, because what I've seen consistently is that when you have a task that you're not prepared to execute with everything, it fails. But if you have a task, that's going to dovetail into the next one, that's logically the one that's setting up the success of the next task. So the predecessor is really the one that makes all the difference. And it really doesn't matter how you, you look at it. If you want to look at a task and say when this is done, I can do this next thing, or when I need to do this when I need to do the prior ones....

6/13/22 • 53:43

In this week's episode, the ProductivityCast team chats about how to track and manage time in a calendar/agenda style format to be more productive. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/134 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing Get More Out of Your Calendar from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Get More Out of Your Calendar Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Get More Out of Your Calendar Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. SortdMacSparkyAcuity SchedulingCalendlyManicTimeUnscheduleIkigai Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:22 I am Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:24 And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we're gonna be talking about getting more out of your calendar, how to track time in a calendar interface to an agenda style format, so that you can actually be more productive. And so let's get into the topic related to utilizing your calendar for tracking it is something that is probably common to many of us, that is we are used to the calendar format, we we've been raised to see time in either a monthly, weekly, even a day style agenda. And so we're very comfortable with laying things out. It is just another form of list in a, you know, in a matrix or otherwise. And so the idea of a calendar is useful to us. And I'm curious from all of you, how do you use a calendar for tracking? Let's start off with events? Since I think it's probably the most common style and way of or, or data that you would capture into a calendar? It's it's the most common form of data that you would capture into a calendar format, which is what is going to happen in the future? And so how do you how do you use a calendar in that sense, and then we can perhaps, then turn over to the task or in Francis's terms, time demand space to think about how you would capture, forecast budget, and ultimately track the things that are happening in your productivity system. Francis Wade 1:57The way I do it, is to schedule the appointments in and then use an auto scheduler to fill in the gaps, so to speak, to put the flexible tasks in the times that I don't already have committed. But I think what you're alluding to is that that's that's the first part. And it might be even the easy part, the subsequent parts, which we all do, would do to some degree. And I think we all do mentally anyway, is we ask what whole? Well, did I build a schedule? And then how do I improve it in the future? How do I how do I do better? Scheduling in the future, because we've all the planning fallacy is real for all of us. We've all said all this to take an hour and five hours later, we're groaning and struggling. And but does that mean that the next time that we go to plan the activity that we're actually any better? Or do we fall right into the same trap? I think the great thing about using a calendar is that it allows you the opportunity to be accountable to yourself to some degree for the plans that you made. When you have a list, only a list. And no calendar, I think the opportunities for improvement are fewer and more, more difficult to grasp, because you're really just going off of kind of hunches and memory at least for the calendar year you have some possible data to work with. So I think the scheduling is perhaps the easiest part, the harder part is to become a better scheduler, which I think we all all need across the Art Gelwicks 3:29board. I use it poorly. And we'll go from there. Yeah, I use it. I have a basic challenge. And I think a lot of people run into this, I have two calendars that I have to maintain and a minimum one business calendar, one personal calendar, the business calendar is not actually maintained on my own devices, it is maintained on a client machine. So I am actually take that back, I have three calendars because I also have the company calendar. That's part of the challenge I have is that I'm bouncing between calendars. So I have to think about where does this need to go when I'm going to capture something which is rendered my calendar management and usage fairly inefficient. I mean, I'm looking at double and triple work anyway, adding extra stuff to it for processing and learning from it has fallen by the wayside a bit. So there's definitely room for improvement with this mess that Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:27I have. And it sounds to me like you are doing that because of company policy. Art Gelwicks 4:31I'm required to do it. Trust me, it's not voluntary. I would love everything to be in one place, but it's not. Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:38Yeah. So my first suggestion to anyone is that if you are capable of doing so centralized to a singular calendar tool, even if you are utilizing multiple calendars in your world, seeing them and allowing them to overlay really is useful. You know, if you have, say a Google account like a Gmail account and you have a calendar there and you have an apple Will account and so on and so forth. That's pretty simple and easy to do, which is to bring those, you know, items over to one app, and then synchronizing into that singular app. And that allows you to see things that are happening in multiple contexts, multiple areas of your life in one space. And I think that a lot of people can benefit from from doing that. So certainly centralizing is helpful. And I think that what most people get fearful of is that then they'll be overwhelmed by seeing too many things at once. But remember that or if you didn't know, you can actually turn off those calendars just by taking them out of view. In Google Calendar, you literally just click on the calendar, and it will disappear from view, when you want to turn it back on, you can do that. And it'll just overlay and then hide those calendars on command. Same thing with Apple. Same thing with Outlook, Augusto Pinaud 5:50I actually use an app called sorted, sorted pool from my calendar into a sheet and create every appointment as a task. And then that allows me to integrate that with Todoist. And then bring the other task into there. So allows me to really look not only to where are those calendars, events, but what I'm going to be doing on those calendar events. On top of that, I try, I don't do a good job in this to report every half an hour, what I plan to do, and what I actually did, and the days that I do that, well, I get much better success as the end of the day than the days that I'm not great at it. But it's something that I'm still working on to make a better job. My Calendars are crazy, mostly because one I do a lot of things, but two, it keeps colors for different parts of the business or different parts of the family and, and thing. So it's a carnival of colors. It's what it's probably in sorted what I use what I use the most. Even more than checking my own calendar, Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:09you bring up a really great point, which is the coloring of items, I use two layers of color in my calendar. So each calendar represents a different area of my life. And what I call life category. So each calendar is is a life category. And sometimes they also are programs. So I will have a dedicated program because that calendar is then published for Google Calendar to a website or someplace else where it's automatically updating. So there's a reason for keeping that separate calendar so that I don't have to double entry into other places. What I do then is each calendar then gets an additional color for the context of work. So for example, if I have to be someplace physically, I will change the native calendar color to another color that tells me that I have to be someplace in person, because right now, that is the rarity, as opposed to the common being in a zoom or, you know, Google meet or something like that. Now, I'm like, Okay, I have to actually buffer in travel time and otherwise. And that means placing additional calendar events into the calendar to show travel time to and from that place. And those are variables that I like to know. So I will color the the calendar event, you know, an additional color. So it is very different from all the other events. And then when I'm planning for the coming week, I can see the little my case dark green events, and then I can say, okay, I can talk to my scheduling assistant and making sure that we are putting in travel time and buffer time between those things. So that I'm able to get to and from places but not just to and from, I need to debrief from those meetings. So I need to make sure that I have enough travel time and then time to sit down a

5/30/22 • 47:13

This week, the ProductivityCast team talks about how to set up effective reminders when you're time blocking (or time chunking) as your primary productivity system. The conversation turns out much more useful for anyone looking to set up an effective reminder system. Enjoy! (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/133 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing Time Blocking and Time Chunking: Setting Up an Effective Reminder System from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Time Blocking and Time Chunking: Setting Up an Effective Reminder System Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Time Blocking and Time Chunking: Setting Up an Effective Reminder System Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Time Blocking Defined; Why Time Blockers Need Effective Reminders West Wing (TV series) What’s Available Today? What You Should Look for in a Reminder System? Google CalendarApple CalendarMicrosoft CalendarApple RemindersGoogle TasksGoogle KeepMicrosoft’s Scheduled Tasks (Task Scheduler)Checker PlusZapierIFTTTMicrosoft PowerAutomateWindows Scheduled TasksTodoist RemindersOmniFocusGoogle AssistantApple SiriAmazon AlexaChecker Plus for Google Calendar™ EvernoteGboard (Android) / Gboard (iOS) (voice typing on Android/iOS) Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your host, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:24And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we're going to be talking about time blocking, sometimes called time chunking. And Francis brought this topic. So I'm gonna hand this over to Francis to kind of open us up in terms of kind of explaining to us what time blocking is. And what we're going to do today is have a little bit of a conversation around the idea of an effective reminder system, how do you set up reminder systems? And why is it important as a time blocker or time chunker, to go ahead and have reminders, remind you at the both appropriate time and a level, so to speak, and maybe Francis can speak to that a little bit. So that you can really do what you need to do when you need to do it where you need to do it. So Francis, for those of you who are maybe have no idea what time blocking is, can you explain for listeners, what time blocking is? Francis Wade 1:15Sure, it's a technique in which you put a task a flexible task in your calendar. So in other words, you're moving it either from your memory or from a to do list and you're putting it on your calendar. In other words, you're assigning a time and the day and the duration to a task that you could do at different times. So you're pinning it, in other words to a specific spot in your calendar. And in general, it's it's not a technique that everyone needs to use, it's a bit of a requirement, if you are managing lots of tasks if you only have one task to do per day. And you can do that anytime, then you don't need time blocking. But if you have lots of tasks, and vertical discretionary time, then pinning tasks to your calendar becomes a requirement just because it's too hard to have to figure out what to do all throughout the day, go through all of your lists and figure out exactly what you need to do. It's easier to do it once in the morning or once at the beginning of the week. And then just execute it as you go along. So that's the general idea, you want to discuss that some more or sort of go on to the remainders. Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:28I'm really curious about this, because I think a lot of people who hear what you're talking about, which is scheduling your tasks, and a calendar ultimately becomes more difficult as you place things in the calendar. And you realize that you don't necessarily know how much time something might take or that things might be overlapping each other in terms of the number of things you want to do in the same, say, hour, some calendars don't allow you to put things in smaller increments than say 15 minutes or 30 minutes. And so you have lots of things overlapping and that might feel cluttered. Is there a software solution that you utilize in order to be able to overcome that? Do you just get used to seeing overlapping? Basically calendar events in your calendar? What do you what do you think about all those kinds of challenges that people have with regard to putting things in a calendar view, Francis Wade 3:17we could imagine someone who uses PayPal, it has a really difficult time because they it when things change, and they have to move things around, they're left with using an eraser crossing things off, it gets really difficult, someone like that will probably upgrade to a tool like Google Calendar, which basically allows you to put anything anywhere, anytime, overlapping as often as you want. It's not doing anything smart. It's just replicating what you had on paper in a digital version. So things can be moved around at will at the next level. They're auto schedules, which make some smart decisions. They don't allow overlaps. They try to optimize your calendar. And they try to make sure that at least you're looking at a feasible representation of your calendar and not just things thrown in there willy nilly. So that's the that's the most complicated level, the most sophisticated level I'm aware of. Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:09So if somebody is going from task list and calendar two, than having too many, as you call them time demands that require you to kind of level up then there is software bespoke to the solution of taking all of those things and placing them in your calendar. That's kind of what I was leading the witness so to speak. I wanted to make sure listeners know that there is software out there that is built ready built for this kind of situation, that they're not just basically placing things into Google Calendar in this hodgepodge way. And so thank you for that. I'll position is for everybody. And Francis, you can maybe start us off. Why do people need effective reminders? If they're time blocking, they have everything in their in their calendar, or in their calendaring task based software. Why do they need To be able to be reminded about what they need to do Francis Wade 5:02with it. The analogy I like to draw is that of the TV show The West Wing popular in the 2000s. Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:08Okay, you're gonna need to explain to me the West Wing and reminders now. Francis Wade 5:13The West Wing was a TV show about the president, the United States jab, jab back that I think his name was fictional, of course. And he had a secretary and her name was Mrs. Landingham, or Landingham, one of the two. Anyway, she was the perfect secretary, you know, in the show, in that he had a full schedule, as you may imagine, the President does, or a CEOs or anyone who has lots and lots of commitments to execute each day. And her job, one of her jobs, was to manage his calendar. But also, in addition to doing all of his time blocking, she would come and give him that proverbial tap on the shoulder when it was time to switch to another task or to consider switching to another task. And as you can imagine, she had different ways of doing this, you know, she could, you know, just kind of open the door and Wave at him to remain soft remainder that time to wrap up, or she come and tell them oh, by the way, you're there's a phone call coming in for you. And she would interrupt the meeting, and that will be a switch. Or she would walk into the meeting and say, Mr. President, your plane is leaving in two minutes. Well, he's the president. So he determines when the plane leaves, but let's say he didn't, there's a president, you have to leave No, in order to make your meeting with this dignitary via plane. And here's your bag, and here's your ticket, and Secret Service will escort you out the door. So she'll be very firm sometimes. So sometimes she'd be very soft. And sometimes she'd be very strong, different kinds of remainders. But what it allows the president to do is essentially relax. You know, David Allen says Your mind is is for coming up with tasks, not for remembering them. This is a bit similar, your mind is for executing, not for trying to remember what you need to execute. Next, at the minute, you need to execute it. Because there's a bunch of research that says that, that effort it takes to remember to do something at just the right time takes a whole lot of cognitive resources. And if you can outsource that to Mrs. Landingham, you're in great shape, because that person will basically just say, Okay, no, tie your shoelaces, I'm exaggerating, but Okay,...

5/23/22 • 52:40

In this week’s cast, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art discuss why task lists fail in your personal productivity systems? And, we offer some tips for making task lists that are resilient to our workaday worlds. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/132 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing Why Task Lists Fail? from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Why Task Lists Fail? Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Why Task Lists Fail? Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. How to Master the Art of To-Do Lists by Understanding Why They Fail : iDoneThis blog Todoist Remember the Milk Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:23I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:24I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:25And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this action packed episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we are going to be talking about Action Lists, actually, we're gonna be talking about task lists, and really what they're all about, why do we have them? Why do we use them, and some of the common pitfalls that people experience while they are trying to manifest and utilize their task lists. And this is a perennial topic, but I think it was triggered by an article that we picked up from the I done this.com site. And we thought we would have a discussion around some of the things that people really do get hung up on when it comes to task lists. So let's start the conversation off around the idea of why do we have a task list? What is the purpose of a task list, and let's go from there. Art Gelwicks 1:10we start off with the common knowledge of everybody visualizes a task list. And it's a list of items with checkboxes next to it. And that's usually, unfortunately, as far as people will think. But a task list is so much more than that. And it's not just things to do, I think one of the biggest problems we get into and we saw this in the article, we've seen this, in numerous conversations about this topic, is understanding the scope of what a task list can do for us, rather than what we can do for it saying apologies to JFK. So when we think about a task list, we're initially trying to capture all those little things that we have to do on a given day, given week, given month, whatever. And we're trying to get those off of that list. Well, that becomes an action in and of itself, trying to clear that listing. I, I suppose that a task list is probably one of the best tracking and planning tools we have available to us. We use all different kinds of tools. But if you if you take a task list and you soup it up, you start to get into a project management tool. So wait, if it has that level of capability with just some extra features. What can a regular task list do to us do for us? Well, I think that's where we have to go back to our definition, what is a task list. And a task list in my definition, is a tracking and planning tool. Francis Wade 2:41For me, it's an external representation of a bunch of psychological commitments. So we make promises to ourselves to do stuff in the future. And we make lots of promises, and some subset of all those promises, it can be captured externally. So that we are able to have some peace of mind because they are not swimming around in our heads. We use it it helps the chances that we'll actually get the task done. And so there's people task lists, there are calendars of different kinds, there are digital task lists, there are Excel spreadsheets. And then there's also having an administrative assistant, having an individual who manages, basically manages all your tasks for you. So that's giving someone the job of you know, once you have a task, you just tell the person and then you stop trying to remember it, and the person is trusted, they can be just as effective or more effective than a list or a piece of paper or a digital tool or anything like that. But the objective is the same psychologically, it's either in your mind swimming around causing trouble waking you up in the middle of the night, and likely to be forgotten, or it's in some trusted external mechanism that allows you have some peace of mind. Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:09I would very much agree with Francis in in that definition, I think that I think of a task list as an externalized list of your work. It's just externalizing work. And when we take the work off of our own shoulders, the stress of having to remember it plus the really inefficiency of our mind to remember all the tasks that would could or should be done at any given time. We just aren't very good at being able to do that algorithm in very complex long term work. And so being able to do that in an external inside of a tool, paper and pen, digital or otherwise, gives us a longer term planning and a lot more complex planning capability than we would otherwise. And I think that's really useful for most of us. You know, I'm not really going to think about what I'm going to Do a year two years from now. But the reality is, is that I have a thought about something that's going to be done at that time, in that timeframe. Or on that timeline, I can go ahead and plant that in my digital system. And it'll show up in one or two years timeframe. And then I can deal with it. And that didn't, that stress didn't have to sit on my shoulders for any of that length of time, until I until I prompted it to give me that stress. And so it becomes a positive stressor, something that I am capable of tackling at that time, versus me every day for the next, you know, 700 odd days, thinking about that thing every day so that I don't forget it in in one or two years time. It's just kind of not necessary. So I think of task lists as being that one external piece. The other part is, for me the prioritization capabilities of a task list. Coming from kind of the GTD perspective, thinking of next actions, as being those physical things that will prompt me to move a project forward or move, move some kind of work forward, I'm thinking about it from the perspective that I'm looking at my action list and identifying what can be done right now have all of the possible opportunities of things that I can do during discretionary time. So there is there is that function, but it also is a prompting function for the things that must be done. Or there are two different pieces there, right, there's the stuff that I need to do, and want to do in my discretionary time. But there's also the things that must be done. And it is not withstanding my discretionary time, it needs to be done today. And I need to be able to do that. And so it to some extent, there is a date time and location function there to a task list that some people actually externalize to a calendar type interface, right. Some people put that into a scheduling system. We'll talk about that in a bit. So we have these two pieces that are that I think are are very similar, but not the same. But things that I can do on a longer horizons, I have a project and there's work that needs to be done. It doesn't have to be done today. But if I have to go get my driver's license renewed and my driver's license is expiring today, then I must do that today, that becomes a must. And it also becomes date, time and location fixed. And I think more of the context that kind of connect there, the more it becomes something that that we have to manage differently in our task lists than otherwise. And so maybe it even becomes a different task list for some people or a calendar or something like that. So I Augusto Pinaud 7:26think I agree with that definition that you have, for me, they have three types, the ones that need to happen today. Now, regardless of the ones that should happen soon, because they The thing is getting louder and louder moderator and the things that I want to wish now that that wish list here, I want to read these articles, but but they are there, they're on my task list. But they don't. It's really more if I can get rid of that critical step, that I will be able to go to that to those nice to have. And I think that's where it makes a difference for me. Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:02From that point, we can then start to think about what are some of the common pitfalls that folks experience in creating task lists. So I see folks using, you know, task lists for all kinds of things. And sometimes they're doing them effectively. Most times, they are not, and and so then they come into contact with me because they're trying to figure out what the heck is going on with their business or with their world or whatever. And, you know, it's just one of those things where you you come into contact

5/2/22 • 43:26

This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art discuss learning and four stages of curiosity. Curious what they are? Listen in and learn! 😉 (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/131 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing learning and the four stages of curiosity from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Learning and the Four Stages of Curiosity Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Learning and the Four Stages of Curiosity Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. From Procedural Knowledge To Self Knowledge: The 4 Stages Of Curiosity  Montessori education Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:27 And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:28Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. This week, we're going to be talking about what we're calling the four stages of curiosity. And it actually came out from an article that Francis Wade had come across. And so Francis, do you want to kind of open us up in terms of this topic today. And then we'll get into a little bit of our agenda. Francis Wade 0:46Sure, it has to do with knowledge acquisition or learning, the idea is pretty straightforward that you move from initially taking directions from someone who is an expert, someone who knows a lot more than you do. And you graduate from the bottom level to the point where you need to essentially create your own knowledge in order to make progress. Because there's lots of areas that we want to know something a lot about. If you get stuck at any one level, it'll the idea of the article is that if you get stuck at any one level, then it will actually for your development. So the idea is to notice when it's time to move to the next level, and then use the techniques that are appropriate for that low in order to keep making progress in the chosen area of interest. The concept that was provided was done in the in the form of a diagram, and we're gonna go over that, but it's a pyramid. And so that pyramid diagram starts with with four levels, in essence, hence, the four stages of curiosity. And as we make our way through today, you will hear us talking about those four levels. And we will explain those very shortly. And so today, what we're going to do is we're going to talk about the four stages. And just to give some preface here, the four stages are in Francis's terms here, process starting at the base of the level content, that is the next here, upper stage two, stage three is known transfer, and then stage four unknown future, let's get into the defining of the four stages. And then we'll talk about each of the stages in order. For instance, do you want to give us a little bit of background in terms of the items here that you've noted regarding procedural knowledge, self knowledge, and curiosity, let's, let's talk about these components that you talk about curiosity. And then we can define the four stages proper, when you don't know anything about the topic. And it involves actually doing something, not just knowledge acquisition, the best way to learn it in the very beginning is to borrow the schema from somebody who knows something. So you want to be them to be very prescriptive. And to tell you the details of what you need to learn what they've learned, pretty much tell you what they have done. If you have no background in the item, you've never done it before the actual you haven't done it before, it's brand new to you, the best place to go learn is from someone who's willing to translate what expertise looks like. So they lay it out to you. So that's the first level. The second level, Francis Wade 3:18which I call the content level, is that you gain some interest. And by the way, this is borrowed from an article on, I just want to make sure I give the kudos where they're due on teach thought that calm the four stages of curiosity. The concept isn't is new, not new to me. But it's one the four levels that they laid out are what we're basing this conversation on. So firstly, that in the show notes are great, great. The first level again, is that you just follow what someone else tells you to do. The second level is that you start to gain some interest in the topic. So you've already been able to do what they told you to do. And now you're asking questions like, Oh, why this step? Why not that step. And you start to read around what it is that they're telling you to do. And you miss go deeper into their thought system. That's typically the next step is okay. When I read the Cliff Notes version, let me actually read the book. Let me read the listen to the videos, let me hear the podcast. Let me pick up some other people who are talking about how great this idea is, other people who are expanding on it. So you're learning pretty much the same schema, but you're learning more information about the schema. And then at the third level, you know, say, I know what I know and I know what I do, how do I apply what I'm learning to what I've done in the past or what I'm doing right now. So you're know looking to make things fit and this is where most people have a bit of difficulty because there's no schema that in any field. You know, if you're learning bowling and someone teaches you the basics, is going to come up point where the basics don't really apply anymore. But what you try to do is to keep applying what you've learned to what you're doing. And as you gain more expertise, you keep trying to do that. And as you apply, you start to fail, you apply, you start to fail, you start to get to the point where you start to question what you've learned. Because it was simple. It served you at this first step. But no, at this step, you've gained some expertise, you got some hours, you've been to the bowling, I was gonna say, bowling rink, no, you've been to the bowling alley a few 100 times. And you started to see nuances and you now need to move to the next level. So the fourth level is one in which you are you understand that you need to develop your own way of doing things and your own way of thinking about what you do. You need to think about analyzing what you're doing so that you can make improvements in the future. Because as you look to the future, you see what do I when I start to enter the World Series of bullying or the World Championships, obviously, what I learned that level one won't work for me, I need a coach to point out the areas where I need improvement or if I can't afford a coach, then I'll need to examine what I'm doing so that I can analyze it for further improvements. And also to anticipate that when I get to the Olympics of bowling in the Olympics, when I get to the Olympics of bowling at that very, very high, the highest of the highest levels, then I'm going to need to keep improving. So I No need to build a bit meta and say how do I keep improving my bowling so that when I eventually get to the Olympic level, it's not just a matter of being stuck in the way I do things. But I'm able to flex and unable to adjust and be able to still continue to make progress. And we Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:53can see that in thinking about any of our ability to be productive. We're always in some stage of learning something in our world. And I think it's really interesting to have these conversations around what learning is because for most of us, we actually never learned to learn. And we just were taught things. In that passive approach, we end up not building the skills to learn how to learn. And so I really find discussions around learning how to learn just fascinating generally, because the more we learn how to learn and learn how learning happens, we're better capable of manifesting new learnings faster and more efficiently and really more effectively. So that we're capable of drawing on these to be able to move and develop faster. So let's drive in to each of these stages. Let's start with stage one, where we are basically at the beginning stages of I don't know what I don't know, I suppose. How can people build scaffolding for purposes of learning at that stage of the game? Art Gelwicks 8:01The first two levels of this seem to be the most basically intuitive. I mean, that seems to be where we just operate as people, that you have your innate curiosity about something a new topic comes past you. And you're like, where do I start? Where do I start digging into when you think about frameworks? This is something that I think you have to do across the board is to establish where are your credible sources going to come from whatever topic you're looking at, you should be,...

4/18/22 • 62:23

Last week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art started a discussion about caffeinated productivity. This week, they continue their conversation about their favorite caffeine beverages, timing them for greater productivity, and many of the varieties of caffeination available to the productivity enthusiasts out there. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/130 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing caffeine-based productivity from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Caffeine-Based Productivity Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Caffeine-Based Productivity Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. See part 1 for more caffeine-focused resourcesBETTY Flavoured Condensed Milk (Cinnamon,Vanilla,Nutmeg) | jamaicabasket876Coffee Science: How to Make the Best Pourover Coffee at Home Your Ultimate Guide to Different Types of Coffee  Is Coffee Bad for You? Is French Press Bad For You? The Surprising Facts.Is Coffee Good For You? Is Coffee Bad For You? | TIME12 Health Benefits and 6 Disadvantages of Coffee - SMASHING IT!Coffee and health: What does the research say? When Is the Best Time / Methods for Consuming Caffeine to Benefit Your Productivity? Bad News: The Best Time of the Day to Drink Coffee Isn’t as Soon as You Wake UpWhen Is the Best Time to Drink Coffee?The Best Time Of The Day To Consume CaffeineThe Best Time to Drink Coffee: Daytime, Nighttime, and More Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:25And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. We are going to be continuing our conversation from last episode caffeine based productivity. And in the last episode, we really talked about the kind of foundational elements of caffeine, how it interacts with your body tips around really dealing with the different types of caffeine that you can come across, you know the many different types of caffeine. So if you have not listened to that episode, feel free to snap back to the prior episode. And listen to that. In this episode, what I wanted to do was have the ProductivityCast team here really talk about the different types of coffee based drinks that we consume, maybe some of the tea based drinks that we consume as well, that may or may not be the typical black coffee or tea, then we can talk about the ways in which we make coffee and tea. From a productivity perspective, what I want us to do is think about how we make our coffee and tea productively. That is to say, What's the best way to make it when we want to have it made quickly and efficiently? Well, I want to talk a little bit about some of the health benefits, people should have concerns or health disadvantages that we should have concern about when it comes to coffee. And then after we talk about that research, we'll get into really the best times to consume caffeine for being most productive. And so we'll get into a little bit about timing our caffeination at the end of the show. So let's kick into the different types of coffee, and other caffeine based drinks that you all have from the mundane perhaps for all of you not mundane to me, but I just like black coffee, it's the drink I am, I am I have right now in front of me. And so I drink my coffee, black. But there are so many different types of coffee and espresso based drinks. And so those who are not aware espresso are just basically coffee beans that have been ground and then forced pressure with a small amount of boiling water. So you just basically have the the concentration of the coffee in a less water as opposed to in more water. And so based on that espresso then gets mixed in with many other drinks, and either water or the different types of milk to create different combinations. What are some of your favored or favorite mixed drinks in the caffeine world, Augusto Pinaud 2:47I am boring too. I drink a strong espresso, except during my weekly review on which I go for a strong Lahti usually, if if I will on the pandemic, now I do it at home. But I used to stop in a Starbucks and it was part of the part of the routine and then I get a toll quad A latte that is basically for shot of espresso, it's a little bit of milk. And I do it through the weekly review. And there is a reason why I have not only through the wicker review is because I have over the years condition, the brain to understand Oh, there is invoking discovery, maybe with a review time. And those kinds of things help. Francis Wade 3:29I'm think I'm more basic than that even I am an instant coffee drinker. Take a cup every week or two weeks, somewhere in there. But I do have a little additive there that I use. It's a condensed milk made here in Jamaica and it has cinnamon and nutmeg in it. So it's, it's nice. And because I drink decaf on the days I don't take caffeinated coffee. It's a daily that's a part of my daily routine. But that gives it gives it a nice, a nice flavor not found. And I keep looking for other kinds of additives like that. But the convenience and the speed and the one for all kind of appealed to me. But that's instant coffee and condensed milk flavored condoms. Art Gelwicks 4:15Yeah, I'm a variety kind of guy, I will go through the course of a day and like, make coffee, three different ways have four different types of tea just everything's always changing, and it varies by the day. Some mornings it's hit the curb because I'm in a hurry. Other mornings, it's I want this to be a process. So I pull out the Chemex and, you know, boil up the water and do the pour over and sometimes I want to be overly complicated. So I'll pull out the French press, but that's just it extends to the teas too. Sometimes it's a bag tea, sometimes it's a loose tea. Sometimes it's a really robust tea. Sometimes it's a it's a white tea, it doesn't. There is no rhyme or reason for me. For me it's more the change in the experience of each individual time. Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:59So For those of you who may not know about all the different types of coffee drinks, there are so many of them. You know, you can mix basically espresso, and or coffee and espresso with different types of combinations of water. Or as I said earlier, different types of milk or steamed milk, a foamed milk, all kinds of really fun things in order to create different drinks. And so espresso is usually a one ounce forced press of the coffee beans. And so you get that really concentrated item. And then you will usually have an eight ounce cup of coffee. And that's the same amount of coffee bean for that eight, you know, 1012 ounces of water. And then if you do a double espresso, or known as a doppio, that's going to be two ounces of espresso. And then you can do all kinds of other fun things like macchiatos, which are an especial shot with foam, you can do Moca which then includes steamed milk and chocolate, and I am a fan of the mochas and many different types of lattes as treats. So get familiar with the different ways in which you can combine different coffee based drinks. That's kind of a fun way in which you can spice up you know, if you're if you're like art and want a little bit of variety, you can definitely do that. And what I found is on the T side, you can do many of these things. Also, I think the British are much more familiar with putting milk in tea, and putting milk based products and teas. That's something that's not traditionally an American thing. But there are all kinds of ways in which you can make tea lattes. And many of the same processes that you use with regard to pressing leaves and forcing water through them. You can also do with tea. And so don't limit yourself in that there's there's so many different fun, tea based drinks that you can make. So when the tea world, I tend to think about them in terms of regular teas, whether they be loose or or bagged, then there are the marches, which traditionally Japanese find ground powder that you either mix directly into the drink, or some people strain them until they kind of filter through. And then there's Mati Mati being a tea that you are placing into hot water, and then it just basically keeps steeping throughout the time you drink it. And Matei is a little bit different, because my understanding is that you keep adding more hot water to the montae. And they have like specialized mugs for Mai Tais. And so like you the the straw itself has a strainer built into it, all kinds of fun things, and you just keep adding hot water and the caffeine content actually increases as you put more hot water into the multi leaves....

4/11/22 • 38:44

This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art start a conversation about coffee and tea and all things caffeine! (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/129 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing caffeine-based productivity from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Caffeine-Based Productivity Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Caffeine-Based Productivity Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. CaffeineCaffeine | The Nutrition Source | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public HealthHow Coffee and Caffeine Actually Affect Your ProductivityEffects of Caffeine on Cognitive Performance, Mood, and Alertness in Sleep-Deprived HumansCoffee in the WorkplaceEmber mugSapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah HarariUncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark PendergrastBulletproof Coffee Recipe: The Original Keto Coffee with Butter & MCT OilMatéTea / MatchaHerbal teas are non-caffeinated. FoodsSupplementsDrinksCaffeine/Energy shots (Best Energy Shots of 2020)Caffeine tabletsCaffeine patchesCaffeine chart | Center for Science in the Public Interest Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:22 I am Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:24 And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. Today, what we're going to be doing is talking about caffeine based productivity, what we want to do is to give you a survey of how to use caffeine to be more productive. And so we're going to take a survey of the do an overview of all of the various caffeine based products, and I thought what we would start with doing is kind of defining what caffeine is and how it works in the first place. And then we will cover the various types of caffeinated products that are in the world. Not all of them, but certainly some of them. And then some of the health risks I think that caffeine has and we can talk about those as well. And some of the benefits, there's actually some really good benefits in the in the health space for that. And full disclosure, we're not medical professionals. So you should probably talk to your your licensed medical professional before you take any advice. And then of course, we're going to talk about timing and methods for consuming caffeine. And I think that'll be really useful for folks as well just to understand those components of how to time your caffeine intake for greater productivity. So let's start with kind of the baseline, which what caffeine is both how we think about it in terms of our world, but also from a little bit more of a scientific perspective. So caffeine, of course, we think of as being in coffee and other products is actually quite a number of other products. But at its core, what caffeine is a stimulant. And it's kind of the opposite of what you might think in the sense that it actually blocks some neural receptors, so that it causes you to stay in a wakefulness state, you have adenosine, which is a molecule that attaches to parts of your brain and causes you to get tired, get sleepy. And these adenosine receptors on your brain are blocked by caffeine. So caffeine comes in, it goes through the blood brain barrier. And it antagonizes those adenosine receptors and blocks the adenosine from being taken up by the brain and basically absorbed by the brain. And that's what actually causes you to stay awake and feel that sense of wakefulness. So it can not only block you from getting tired from the adenosine, but it can also then increase wakefulness, in that sense as well. Art Gelwicks 2:46If you're going to look at caffeine as part of your generalized productivity, you really have to understand the science behind it. I think too many people think, okay, a cup of coffee, or two cups of coffee, this is part of what I have, or three cups or eight cups or whatever. But understanding the science behind the chemical itself, as well as how it impacts your unique physiology. And that's the other thing is that it affects everybody differently. And it changes over time. I mean, that's one of the things that I've discovered is you can mess around with caffeine and how it affects yourself. It takes time to do it. But you can adjust your physiology based on how you consume caffeine to determine what impacts it's going to have. And it becomes predictable. It's not one of those, okay, I didn't get a cup of coffee, therefore, who knows what I'm going to be like today? No, if you pay attention to it, there's a period of time you can start to understand what this is. But if you don't take the time to understand the science behind the chemical itself, and what its job is, you know, being a suppressor like, like Ray just outlined, and the fact that it constricts blood vessels in the brain and understanding those mechanisms then gives you the predictability as to well, what's it going to do? And how am I going to use that, rather than it just being an external factor that kicks in? Francis Wade 4:12I think it's worth knowing that information because the I believe the the common sort of the average way of drinking coffee is not informed by much other than habit. I think most people just drink it out of habit. They don't delve into the sense and they don't ask the kind of questions we're about to ask, but how do you make the best use of it? So they're just basically following the crowd, which I think limits its usefulness. And maybe even those are a few things that you don't want that Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:46caffeine is a cultural component. And if I if I had to go into a product business, where you could sell very easily, very fast coffee would be it. It's just such a cultural Moray. It's such a Strong Moray are in so many different cultures around the world. And it's just easy to sell in that sense. The interesting thing you noted our which is that when you do drink caffeine, it is also a vassal constructor, right? So it is actually constricting blood vessels. And that's another component here, which is that we also have to take some of the good with the bad here, the vessel construction is what causes you to potentially feel like you're thinking faster, things of that nature, you know, that people think about and the reality is, is your water consumption, how much water you're drinking, comparative to how much coffee you're drinking affects your ability to have that feeling of effect as well. But any vessel constructor can also cause headaches, and other kinds of issues with regard to anxiety, giving you that sense of anxiety, good to kind of keep us mindful of those pieces. A couple of other like little tidbits that I picked up along the years of researching caffeine, I've done many, many experiments with caffeine. Caffeine is something that takes a very short amount of time to get into your bloodstream, usually somewhere around 15 minutes. And it can stay in your body for hours and hours and hours, depending upon your particular body type your particular circumstances. And so just be very careful about the fact that if you drink coffee, say in the late afternoon, you could still have caffeine coursing through your veins, late into the evening, which could potentially disrupt sleep. So we'll talk about some of those risks as well, because it doesn't just stop there. The point is, there are all of these biological components that caffeine is working with. And we are complex biological creatures. And so as we talk about this, just remember that the complexity really does come into play in in so many regards. Art Gelwicks 6:42One more thing to add. And this is a really common thing. Caffeine is not measured by the cup. So many people will think that, oh, I'll just have a smaller cup of coffee. It depends what's in there. It depends what you're drinking. It depends what the consumption is, cumulative, and raise absolute right? The cumulative effect of caffeine can be way more impactful than the shot of espresso you just had, I was just looking at a chart, comparing different caffeine levels and a Starbucks pikes place venti I think it was, as compared to a Starbucks espresso, you think and express Oh, wow, that's got a lot of caffeine. No, the venti is like 410 milligrams versus the espresso of 150. So understanding that the measure of volume has nothing to do with the amount of caffeine you're actually consuming. And where all those sources are coming from, that you're right, that has that cumulative effect. Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:39And as we continue our conversation on we should talk about the fact that we will be talking about this in milligr

4/4/22 • 41:44

This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art continue the conversation about tags, discussing how they use tags in their own lives and work, and how to deal with the limits of software when tagging. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/128 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing productivity taxonomy from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Productivity Taxonomy, Part 2 Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Productivity Taxonomy, Part 2 Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Remember the Milk Skedpal OneNote Workflowy Evernote Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud I am Augusto Pinaud. Francis WadeI'm Francis Wade. Art GelwicksAnd I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we're going to continue the conversation that we started last week. So in our last episode, we opened up the dialogue, because of a topic are brought to the team and wanted to discuss and that was all about tagging in our personal productivity systems. And we discussed really what productivity tagging really looks like, what does what does a taxonomy really stand for in a personal productivity system, we talked about some of the topics relating to it, but we really didn't dive into how we all use tags on our system. So I think that would be a really great conversation for today. So how do you tag and use tags in your personal productivity system Francis Wade 1:08as little as possible, whereas you can tag everything from now until the cows come home? I think the purpose of tagging is, as we discussed in the last episode, to be able to manipulate large volumes of data by focusing on some smart attributes. And I think that one of the rules I have is, and this was from bitter experience of trying to use multiple tags, and all sorts of fancy hierarchies and tags, using attributes that were the most interesting is that we should be always aiming to use as least the least number of tags as possible because they extract extract such a cost. The managing tax isn't easy for us psychologically. And we should be looking to manage the minimum number possible to get the biggest benefit. There's a Pareto effect. In other words, so this is not a matter of and I see people asking questions all over the internet, you know, what should I tag? Should I tag this, I'm tagging with 10 different attributes. No, whereas they may be cool, and they will be fun. It is a utility problem. And we have a capacity to the number of tags that we can use. So my first technique, whenever I go to tag is use as little as possible, minimum number that I can get away with and still be effective. And then I'm going to add another level of tags or another dimension or degree, I think long and hard before doing it, and usually don't. Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:36So what are the areas though, that you do use tags, from what Francis Wade 2:39I know everybody tags, tasks, but they don't necessarily put them in a system. So in their mind, there is always tasks tagging happening all the time. And the same principle applies. You could tag your tasks in any number of ways. But the question is, Which one will you use? That will give you the practical benefit? So I use temporal tags, mostly? Few others occasionally. But temporal tags are duration, start time due date, its placement in a calendar relative to other tasks. So they're non overlapping, and so that there's they cannot be done at the right time. Temporal tagging is what I use mostly, Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:20yeah, you bring up an interesting point, which is that you're you're talking about tagging from a time perspective, even a start time is that is that because your tool includes a start time field or you applying a tag as to when you actually plan to start that? Francis Wade 3:36Both? Yes, I did it before I got the tool. And the tool allows me to do it easily, more easily. Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:41Because I have a start time field and a due date, you know, completion date field in my Task Manager, which happens to be Remember The Milk. And so the so the idea of having a tag associated with when something's going to be done is more like morning, afternoon evening, kind of having a tag that tells me this is a block of work that needs to be done in the morning, or is the best time to be done in the morning, both for energy for performance management, but also for when it's likely is to be done. I try to use those tags for management of putting what should be in the right places in the right places. And even to this day, I've now chosen in Remember The Milk you have priority one, two, and three, and then no priority. So that's just color coded. And it's the way in which it sorts in the system. And I've chosen to apply that as the three parts of my day, as morning, midday, and really afternoon, evening, before I close out. And by placing those things in that timeframe. It gives me a fourth kind of block of time, which is end of day. So anything that is no priority ends up being in that. Well, you know, after dinner, I'm going to do these few other things in the evening. And that's going to fall to that point. So it actually color codes them and blocks them in that timeframe. So it's not priority anymore for me that the tag is that color, and grouping of those things in those sections. Francis Wade 5:07If you could change the tag, you would really able to Morning, morning, afternoon, evening, after evening, but it Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:14doesn't matter to me because it's the color is 123 and zero. So that's really no, you know, there's no words applied to it. So it's just literally the color and grouping of the lists, which is perfect for me. And that also translates well over to when I print. Like, if I were to print the checklist, that's all going to manifest on the printed checklist, and I frequently will print it to PDF, so that I have that available to me to markup on my tablet. And it's really nice to have one, it's, it's just like one of those days, I've got a lot to do, I will literally print the the task list to PDF and put it on the tablet. And now it's in there and I can mark as I go, which is really nice. So you're Francis Wade 5:53doing it by handwriting, you got it. Yeah, I wish I had something, something as sort of easy as that each of each. Anything I've tried to do to grab a calendar and have it in front of me easily turned into more of a hassle than anything else. So I pretty much just leave within Google Calendar, wishing that I could have it somewhere handy in front of me that I could mark it up in the same way. Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:12But so Google can email you a daily agenda. And then you can automate the stuff from receiving the email, you can just click Print to PDF, Francis Wade 6:22what I really want, I wanted to print a piece of paper that slides under the cover of my desk, which would be transparent, without me having to press any buttons. Okay, well, that's, I want something that I don't have to touch, because the printing and the messing around the paper or the PDF is all too much friction to do on a daily basis to Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:42be alright, anything, anything else about how you use tags. Francis Wade 6:46And one more thing, which you brought up, which is one of the features of Scalpel. Scalpel is an auto scheduler. And it allows you to build a time map. So time map is essentially a list of preferred slots in your calendar. So that you can build several time maps, all of which are focused on some attribute like energy or time in the office or peak time for thinking or downtime for reading. So it automatically tries to use the time map that you assign a task to schedule that task in a sort of a zone of time throughout the week. So that's a very big attribute that they've introduced and use heavily to come up with an auto schedule whenever you're personable. So that's another one that time map art, how about you, Art Gelwicks 7:40I'll pull this through three different applications that I typically use tagging on. And it's important to understand that, to me, tagging is useless without filtering. Because that's, that's what makes this applicable to getting at your information more effectively. So when I think about tagging things, and I'll start off with the one application I deal with all the time, which is one note. One note, it's a love hate relationship with tags within OneNote. Because they don't use the normal hashtag functionality, you know, put in a term, they have a part of the application that allows you to defin

3/28/22 • 57:31

This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art start a conversation about tags. Classifying information in our productive lives comes in many different ways. We discuss what tagging is, how tags are different from other types of organizing, and how to jumpstart your use of tags. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/127 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing productivity taxonomy from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Productivity Taxonomy, Part 1 Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Productivity Taxonomy, Part 2 Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Hypernym / hyponym Evernote OneNote Dewey Decimal System Zettelkasten Episode 124, Personal Knowledge Management With Zettelkasten Bullet Journal Episode 035, What Is the Bullet Journal? How Does It Work? Episode 073, Tailoring the Bullet Journal Method Episode 123, Productivity Labs, Methods Edition—Bullet Journal Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:25I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:26 And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:27Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, we're going to be diving into a topic that is near and dear to my heart, but I think is also really important for people to recognize as a fundamental component of personal productivity systems that I think is often lost in the world of just organizing your systems for action. And that is tags, the concept of using taxonomy to be able to be more productive. And this was a topic actually brought up by art Gelwicks. And so I'm going to hand it over to you art we were Art Gelwicks 0:59talking about in one of the previous episodes, we're talking about organizing notes, and specifically recalling content from notes. And that always raises the specter of tagging. So I thought it would be worthwhile. Having talked about this in the past, for us to dedicate some time to this actual topic in and of itself, separate from applications right now separate from systems and implementations. But really what tagging means, what it means within the context of our personal and professional systems, information management for ourselves. And also, as we start to really get into it, how this helps us improve our organization. beyond some of the alternatives, things like folder structures and that sort. There's, you'll hear classically that, you know, tagging is better than folders, use tagging, don't use folders, use tagging, don't use folders. And I don't know if I necessarily agree with that in all cases. And I think that's where we need to start to dig into this, because there are so many variants of tagging so many conceptual pieces, that I think it's hard for people to really get their hands around as a starting place, but also to give it the extended life it needs for it to make a difference. I know a lot of people, including myself, have implemented different methods of tagging numerous times. Well, if you're implementing it numerous times, it means that numerous times it's not working right. So I wanted to see if you guys could help help me frame it up for the listeners as to what we think tagging is truly beyond just the Wikipedia definition. And also how we can start to help people out. Francis Wade 2:50I think, first of all, we're there's different objects that can be tagged to or benefit. There's digital objects, which you mentioned, there's physical objects and psychological objects, maybe there's others that I haven't thought of. But in any case, the reason we tagged it is to, for me, it's like adding a handle to a suitcase. When you add the handle to the suitcase, you don't have to pick up the whole suitcase in its entirety, you could just use the handle. So it's a way of manipulating the object using a small kind of not substitute but a small attribute of the object. So if you're manipulating manipulating the attribute, then you don't have to manipulate the entire thing. And that makes it very handy or useful for us to get different things done. So a tag is always a bit of a manipulative shortcut. It allows us to manage lots of stuff, but only using some small attributes. So we're looking to get leverage the way you lose a handle on a suitcase. That's my Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:00theory. I agree with that in in, in large part, my thoughts on taxonomy is wide and varied, right. So if we think about taxonomy is just the categorization of a set, then we can go then deeper, when we start to think about it from a personal productivity perspective, which is, as Francis noted, we are applying how we apply metadata in a website. You know, for search engine optimization purposes, we can think about the application of new data on top of the original set of data. So the items in our productivity systems, whether they be projects, actions, events, or otherwise, documents, you name it, the idea is that we're applying data that is not the object itself to the object, so that we're able to better contextualize and also better able to sort or filter those things in our systems and we lose something When we don't do that, I feel like many times people set up systems and they actually lose capabilities, because they don't take advantage of that in the systems. And one of the things I really abhor is when I come across a tool that doesn't give me the capability of doing that kind of tagging. Now, there are some that I have cobbled together and have worked for me. So for example, I've been a Google Calendar user for many years. And I use tagging in that system. But I've cobbled that together, because I've had to use the search feature in order to be able to tag things because it's not, it doesn't have an inherent tagging capability. So there are these pieces in your world, we have to think through, how are you going to use a taxonomy to be best able to help you versus just I could have many different calendars, right, that's one option. And you can think about those as folders in a Dropbox OneDrive Google Drive perspective. But the reality is, is that that is a container tags are applied data, they are a way for you to be able to look at things across many areas of your system, many organized areas of your system. And that's really where tags become more powerful, is when you're capable of understanding that now tags actually serve two purposes. For me, I consider them an applied data or metadata perspective, where I am connecting disparate parts together for purposes of context. But then they also helped me connect other types of things for action. So what is really a reference type system, the other is an action type system. So we can use tags for say, I have all of my recipes, in a notebook in Evernote, that is for the recipes that I have, right, and they're all contained in there. But now I want to slice and dice, the different recipes in there to say, pastry recipes, things that are, you know, baked goods and that kind of thing. So I could have a pastries tag, but I could also then have a lunch and dinner recipes tag. And now I can separate those two apart, right, so there's that function of being able to do that. Plus, I could have a family recipe that is in my family notebook. And I can also tag that pastries. And that tag now gets pulled in when I search for all of the things that are tagged pastries. So now I'm not limited to where I'm putting things because if I can just apply a little bit of data to it, I can now find that data faster. At the same stage, I can have a notebook or folder for projects. And I can then identify a status to each of those resident projects as say, notes or documents. And now I can say, Okay, which of these projects are in status to, and then I can search for those, just by virtue of that singular tag. And that's the kind of power that I think a lot of people don't take advantage of in their systems, and really is, I think fundamental to you being able to be more productive. Francis Wade 7:59I think it goes to the, to some degree with, with what Ray is talking about the programmers who write software for digital objects, I think there's a, there's a way in which they don't go far enough in anticipating the user's needs. They don't think through all the use cases, or they don't look for the unmet needs that the user is trying to fill. So they don't think as far as Okay, in order for me to meet that unmet need, I need to tag in the following way. So that the user can have access to the information in the way they want it. I think that kind of proactive thinking is actually kind of rare....

3/14/22 • 49:11

This week, Augusto and I sat down with co-author of The Power Bible, Brendon Lemon. Brendon is a comedian and with his co-author William Betweet, III, are the authors of this unique book on how to manage power dynamics in relationships. (We had some technical recording issues, so you may notice we jump a bit in the conversation. It still came out to be an intriguing conversation with Brendon, so we hope you enjoy it!) (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/126 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing The Power Bible with Brendon Lemon from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | The Power Bible Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Show Notes | The Power Bible Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. The Power Bible by Brendon Lemon and William Beteet, III The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene On the topic of pre-reflective self-consciousness, Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness Slavoj Žižek - Wikipedia Gad Elmaleh - Official Website Gad Elmaleh - Wikipedia SugarSammy Eddie Izzard interstitial journaling Raw Text Transcript | The Power Bible Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:23 And I'm Augusto Pinaud. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:24 And welcome to ProductivityCast. Today, we are bringing you a special episode as we are want to do a few times per year we interview people who we think are going to be useful to you out there in your productivity world. And today, we're going to be talking about a book called The Power Bible by William Beteet III and Brendon Lemon. And we actually have Brendan Lemon with us. So just a little bit about the book. So you have an understanding. I'm just reading here from the Amazon description here. This is a quotation that James all teacher, you know, presents at the beginning of the description, it says, quote, the core of the power Bible is how to light the mastery and confidence in yourself at a deep internal level, and using that confidence outwards, to clearly see the various frames and agendas being used by the people around you, end quote. And so the the description moves on to say, to have power over another one must first have power over one's self. And so this is a book of teaching you how to really assume that intrapersonal individual and societal control and to do that, as I said, we have Brandon lemon here on the show. Brendon from his website is a comedian from Detroit, where he started performing regularly at a famous comedy castle at the age of 16. Two years later, he was filmed for the documentary funny, which featured Christopher Titus and Mike Green. He moved to Paris in summer 2013 to both write and perform stand up in both French and English. He returned to the US and live between Colorado and Chicago in Illinois, performing and writing plays as well as being featured on a TV show Sex sent me to the ER and the movie. Do you believe he lives between Chicago and Detroit currently, and so welcome to ProductivityCast Brendon. Brendon Lemon 2:08 Hey, thanks for having me, guys. I appreciate it. Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:10 It's such a pleasure to have you join us today. We have a lot to ask you and to discuss about the power Bible. But first, did I miss anything? Brendon Lemon 2:17 No, you got it? I'm I think I would the Asterix that I would say to update that bio from from my website, I should probably go do it is that I have since moved to New York. But now I'm due to the pandemic in Austin, Texas. It's about the only place you can do comedy in the United States right now. So I'm doing a lot of outdoor shows. Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:35 As a New Yorker. I'm I was raised in New York City. I'm a Brooklynite and but now I live in Pittsburgh. So you're you're in my hometown, or we're in my hometown for a while and now you're in Austin, another of my favorite cities in the country. Austin's a really good city. Brendon Lemon 2:51 It's really cool. Pittsburgh is great, though. I went to Pittsburgh, and I was like, this is a more functional Detroit. Yes, yes. Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:58 It's like the Midwestern vibe with a bunch of small towns mash together. It's really remarkable right Brendon Lemon 3:04 around the rivers dude, it's great. Very, very cool. I Augusto Pinaud 3:07 really like that description of functional Detroit. Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:13 Alright, so let's get into the power Bible. Why did you sit down and decide that you're going to write a book about power? Where did that come from? Brendon Lemon 3:22 Yeah, this is good. This is a good question. So I it should I should back up and say that it you the book came together. Because my co author and I, William petite, the third met in Chicago doing comedy. And what's kind of funny about that is that we were not when I first met him, I was like, I can't stand this guy. And we did not. We did not get along at all. Like all good marriages. We started that way and realized after getting to know each other a little bit more. We actually had a lot in common. And it wasn't just comedy. It was a lot of our background was really similar. We came from very different places. I grew up in Metro Detroit in the Midwest, from a what start would call a petite bourgeoisie family. He came from a very bourgeoisie family. He was born in Britain, raised in Hong Kong, his dad's from St. Louis. He's mixed race. He's got a very, I mean, Bill has a very and he talks about in the book, very diverse background. I have I have a very, I think white bread American background. But I think that our experiences growing up in my case is shifting sort of post colonial Detroit, in his in a in Hong Kong and all over caused us to reflect a lot on our sort of mutual alienation as like his adolescence, and I know this is really going down the rabbit hole. But that's a long winded way of me saying that, once I met him, and when we realized what we had in common, we had a common story of trying to figure out who we were related to the world of shifting sands that we kind of grew up on and you And what we began to realize when we talked a lot about it was that we had done a lot of work. We're both philosophers. He's a lawyer, I almost went to law school until I was literally talked out of it by everyone in my life. And I literally everybody I talked to, would say that I had, I have a degree in philosophy, which I joke is a degree and asking really good questions like, what's the meaning of life? And do you have any change, it basically allowed us, I think, to see how we needed to, at a fundamental level growing up, go inside of ourselves and kind of pick apart our feelings and how our feelings created beliefs, and how those beliefs influenced our identity and our person and how we worked our way out in the world. And going through that process, we developed a similar philosophy. And we realized, as we talked about it more and more, we really had something to create. And I think that the power Bible was finally created, because we wanted to produce something, we had something to share. And we wanted to produce a book that we wish we had, when we started this process out. We wanted something that somebody could take, and really try to understand how do I get what I want in life? How do I win conversations that matter? And winning conversations that matter isn't just tactics that happen in a negotiation, or interpersonally, it also happens inside of yourself, the first conversation you have to win is with yourself. And that's what we realized, I think was missing from a lot of books that we had read on the subject. And that's what we wanted to create with our Bible. That's a very long winded way of answering your question. Augusto Pinaud 6:36 But that was one of the things that as I progressed in the reading was exciting for me, because I obviously didn't know what to expect when I begin the book. But one of the things I found when when we talk about power is the power towards daughters and how we're going to control that. And that is, so what it is. But if you don't control yourself, if you don't learn how to do it inside first, then the outside it's not real. So that was as I begin progress into the book, one of the things that got me into it and got me more interest. And we'll get to my questions that I have in a bit. Was that part of how you it is in a way more about what you're? Yeah, it talks about a little bit about the others. But it's really more about how you are going to use the tools and the framework to apply it yourself. Now. It's really exciting for Brendon Lemon 7:32 me. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. Because I think you know, I mean, there's I guess there's two things I want to say ther

3/7/22 • 35:16

This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art start a new series on ProductivityCast, BookCast, to discuss books in time management-related genres. To start us off, we’re discussing The Myth of Multitasking, Second Edition by Dave Crenshaw. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/125 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing BookCast: The Myth of Multitasking, Second Edition by Dave Crenshaw from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | BookCast: The Myth of Multitasking Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | BookCast: The Myth of Multitasking Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. BookCast: The Myth of Multitasking, Second Edition by Dave Crenshaw Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, PhD Rube Goldberg machine bricolage MacGyver Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Hello, and welcome to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:22I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:24And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to today's episode. Today, we are doing our second book caste, book discussions on books that we are reading and we wanted to share what we are reading with you today we are discussing the Myth of Multitasking how doing it all gets nothing done the second edition by Dan Crenshaw, he has written several books on productivity. But most notably, he has written and produced several courses on lynda.com, now known as LinkedIn learning, and that is the Microsoft owned company, LinkedIn, LinkedIn learning and the lynda.com platform. So if you ever go to LinkedIn learning or lynda.com, and you look at any of the productivity courses there, they're likely done by Dan Crenshaw. And so he has written this book this, do we call this an allegory or a fable of Helen and Phil, Phil being a productivity consultant that has come into this company to help out GREENGUARD with their productivity, specifically, the CEO, Helen, what did you guys think of the book? What were your ideas that initially kind of after finishing the book you thought about, and then then we can get into the kind of particulars of what Phil is really trying to portray here. What Crenshaw is trying to portray here through the character of Phil, Augusto Pinaud 1:40another book was a really enjoyable I agree on on the issues of multitasking and the problems of lack of attention and lack of focus. So I, I think, for many people who think that they can be to certain degrees effective multitasking, it's important to understand what Crusher coal, by ground tasking, you know, that you can drive and listen music and versus actually when you need to put attention on the work and what is the cost of not putting the right attention to this to these tasks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:20He did attempt to bring a couple of new definitions to the world, I have frequently called what he was calling back tasking or background tasking. As meta tasking, that is something that is layered. And back ground or back tasking just didn't seem right, to me is the right term, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. And so the idea of kind of habit stacking, or these other terms that tend to muddle what is actually happening is, I think counter to my own productivity, when I think about it in those terms, they just don't make sense. If we are doing two tasks at once, one that doesn't require our full attention, and can be done either by a machine or simultaneously like having a conversation and driving while not is not the safest thing in the world can be done, or texting and driving, which is not safe and should not be done. Either. There are different standards of what can be done. And so this idea of back tasking, or background tasking, just didn't seem to stick with me as a term. But I recognize that it happens that we do it. And that it can actually be a very useful mechanism for time management, Art Gelwicks 3:29the concept of back tasking to me as a rationalization within the book. I mean, it's it's talking about pushing something to an alternative system. Let's say you've got a video that you've edited, and it needs to render. So you're going to let the system render while you take some calls. That's fine, but you're not doing the work. And that's where I think it becomes a misnomer. And it actually undermines this whole concept of getting away from multitasking because we're talking about something else going on, but you're not actually doing it. So why even kid yourself that you're doing it, you're starting something off and running. This is delegation, you just happen to be delegating to an automated system. So I don't know, I think it's an unnecessary addition. And it clutters the concept. Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:14Yeah, I think you could take the example of doing laundry while watching a television show. So there is a facilitated part here, which is that the washing machine and the dryer are going to do the bulk majority of the work but say that you're folding your clothes, or putting your clothes on hangers while watching the show. That's where you are in essence, you have your attention primarily on one activity where you're consuming something while still being able to do the other activity which is folding the clothes. I don't differentiate the fact that a machine is doing some level of the work like you said, you know, get video rendering and you go and do something else. You're still having to manage. If you're if you're managing the activity, then I consider you doing it. And so that's kind of how I've pieced those two pieces to So I, it's interesting because you're, you're differentiating that which is machine facilitated work. And that that you're managing and action based work that you're actually doing yourself manually. That's an interesting delineation. Art Gelwicks 5:13See, but I would also challenge the the idea, the consuming example, because, to me, there's a difference between active and passive consuming. And if you are doing something like folding your laundry, you're passively consuming whatever it is that you know is on the TV, because for periods of time be ever they how short, you have to disconnect from that to make sure you actually fold the thing in front of you. So for that block of time, you're not engaged, you're not doing that other thing, which is that passive absorption of whatever's going on, you're not taking notes, you're not capturing details, you're not processing the information, it's just kind of floating in the background. So and I find myself doing the same thing, if I'm working on a project, and I decided, Oh, I'll play an audio book. While I'm doing this, too. It doesn't take me very long to recognize the fact that I'm getting very little value out of that audio book at that point, because I'm not focused on that. It's background, it's, yeah, I might absorb something, but it's not an effective use of the dual task. If I if I want value out of something, it requires focus. And that's, again, this is where I struggle with this a little bit, because it does make sense to me to take things that do not require my focus, and I do not need to drive personal engagement to get the value out of to some other things, whether mechanical, personal or otherwise, but simultaneously doing things. And it just flat out doesn't work. I mean, his definite, his reference to what he often we refer to as time slicing, you know, jumping back and forth between things, I think is a much more accurate representation of this. With that Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:49I'm gonna, I'm gonna snap us back to the beginning of the book, and start from the beginning of the book, which is, it is called The Myth of Multitasking. And we find fill in this narrative, where he is a productivity consultant. And he comes and meets Helen, the CEO of green garb. And as he is introduced to her, she is harried and dealing with multiple people in her office, and finally makes time to sit down with Phil, and then they are capable of having a conversation about her current time and task management. And what did you think let's just start at the very top of the chart in terms of multitasking, as he defined it, the idea of multitasking generally, how we've considered it and thought about it in society and work culture over the past several decades, because it is a fairly new invention. And we can kind of go from there. You know, there's a there's a story here. So let's stick to the narrative. And we can kind of make our way through the different pieces, perhaps. But what did you think about the presentation of the material of multitasking, and I'll just start with the fact that he basically posits that multit

2/28/22 • 42:53

This week, in continuing on our recent episodes about note-taking methods, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art are taking on a closely-related topic of personal knowledge management to discuss Zettelkasten. Don't know about Zettelkasten? Listen in and learn! (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/124 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing Personal Knowledge Management With Zettelkasten from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Personal Knowledge Management With Zettelkasten Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Personal Knowledge Management With Zettelkasten Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFZHuWLA09M Zettelkasten The Zettelkasten Method: Examples to help you get started. Getting Started • Zettelkasten Method OneNote Evernote Obsidian Instapaper Flipboard Feedly Pocket Maker’s Schedule and Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:23I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:23Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:24And I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. This week, we are going to step our toe into a little bit more of our note taking methodology topics that we were talking about earlier. And of course, that's going to get very muddy very soon. But we're interested in discussing the concept of zettelkasten. And today, what we're going to do is we're going to define the concept of zettelkasten, as best as we can, as the ProductivityCast team, and then talk about the ways in which people use zettelkasten in the in their own personal productivity methods and systems. And then talk a little bit about how you can maybe get started utilizing zettelkasten in your own work and life. And so let's start off with jumping into what is zettelkasten. And for those of you who are a little bit confused, it's ze TT ELKSTN. zettelkasten is a German word that means Slingbox, kind of like, think about the Dewey Decimal System in the old libraries, where you would put little cards into those little slip boxes. That's the the term that was used by this particular gentleman who developed the system. Art Do you want to give us a little bit of background on zettelkasten, where it came from, and then we can all kind of dive in and give our interpretations of what several caston is, Art Gelwicks 1:44here's the nutshell version, the original premise. And unfortunately, I'm going to, I can't, I'm drawing a blank on the author's name, or the the writers name, but he's maybe a goose, or maybe Ray, you remember his name, very prolific writer, 400, articles, books, everything generated huge amounts of content. And he developed this system called zettelkasten, to allow him to organize all the knowledge he needed around these topics and all this research content. Now keep in mind, this was all pre digital tech. So he designed all this in an analog platform, basically index cards, and he would put a piece of information he learned or a quote, or a reference item on a card and have a specific index, a referencing number system to allow him to identify each one of those pieces. And then based on each one of those pieces, he's then able to go through and say, Okay, now how do these relate to each other? What are what are the concepts that are tied to this particular item. So let's say for example, I'm I don't know I'm writing a paper on flowers. And I find a reference piece of information about a particular type of flower, the zettelkasten, not only would have an index related to how this fits into my system, but also all the pieces that this is a flower, and this is maybe about pollination. And this is about location. The the core energy around this, if I can use the term energy is to create the relationships between the ideas, and in basically an old school method of hyperlinking. So that within each idea, you have those connections to the other ideas. So by being able to leverage those connections, you can find relationships between information and ideas that you normally would not recognize. And see. It's designed to handle a huge volume of information. And it's also designed to be very scalable. Its liability was always at the time. Because it was analog, it was it literally, and I can't again, I can't think of the guy's name. But if you look up one of his quotes he talked about that he always worked at in partnership with his zettelkasten. That's a big level of commitment for any system. I mean, if you're going to consider that system to be an equal to you, and whatever you're doing, adds a crazy level of commitment. With digital technology, it's easier to do the mechanical parts that were so prohibitive within zettelkasten to create the hyperlinks to create backlinks and the relationships within there to be able to do the search indexing around content to find those relationships between ideas. But it doesn't change the fact that this is something that really lends itself to pure knowledge management. I don't know that I would try to use a zettelkasten for task management or even managing a project. But if it's all the information around various topics, this becomes that kind of second brain type of approach and it doesn't have to be for just a topic. If you're working on say a thesis or something like that, you could use a zettelkasten to do that. But there's no classes designed to grow well beyond that. And its benefit comes from the fact that you may be putting content in there for your thesis. But you may also be putting content in there. From a series of articles, you're just randomly reading, and identify relationships between those things that you normally would not see, just because of how those hyperlinks are. I don't want to say organically created, but they develop on their own as they as you start to see the contextual relationships. I'm not doing the explanation of this justice, because it is a fairly complex thing to initially get set up. But at its core, thinking about dealing with those abstract pieces of information that we find very valuable in and of themselves. But we don't know what to do with and never truly realizing the the benefit of those interacting with each other. Well, that's where something like zettelkasten comes in. Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:03Yeah, so the person you're probably thinking about was Nicholas lumen, or lumen in German. And so He's a sociologist, and quite prolific, as you noted. And so I really think about zettelkasten in terms of like capturing knowledge in ways that are purpose driven. One is reference. So I would consider that knowledge management. The other, of course, is being able to file then filter and find what I've consumed. And what I want to be able to remember from my readings, and that being able to help support me as I'm writing new material. And so you know, as I'm writing any longer term piece of material, I want to be able to capture and surface those items. So I think about the zettelkasten method from that perspective most frequently. And I think you've captured most of the pieces that I think would help to define what the zettelkasten method really does, and how it helps someone as a in their own system. Art Gelwicks 6:56One point I did leave out and this is this was something that came up looking at it related to digital technology, is that one of the key things about zettelkasten is its small captures, we're not capturing like entire dissertations into the zettelkasten. These are all individual quotes, individual facts, individual items. And it's because they're small, they can relate to each other much more effectively than something that's large and comprehensive. It's a common question that you see, when people when you start to research implementing zettelkasten in a digital note taking tool, a lot of the feedback that you'll see as well, does it how well does it handle little notes. And that's exactly what we're talking about is the zettelkasten requires little notes. Most of our note taking tools are really designed around longer form notes. One note is a really common tool for using for zettelkasten. And that's one of the first questions is well, one note likes big notes, not necessarily little notes, but you can do that. So it's it's an important context to apply around it. When you think about a book you may be reading, you're pulling all those little things out. So the best example I can give you is if you would sit there and highlight something, that highlighted thing is a great candidate for zettelkasten card. Because that is an individual piece,...

2/21/22 • 53:31

Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art art starting a new "series" called Productivity Labs here on ProductivityCast. We're going to be discussing tools, methods and research we're experimenting with in our own personal productivity systems (even when they are not what we normally use) so we can report back to you what we've learned. This week, we're diving into how using the Bullet Journal method worked for us. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/123 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing the Bullet Journal method experiments from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Productivity Labs, Methods Edition—Bullet Journal Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Productivity Labs, Methods Edition—Bullet Journal Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Episode 035 - What Is the Bullet Journal?Episode 073 - Tailoring the Bullet JournalPatrick Rhone » The Dash/Plus System Going Further With Evernote masterclassAugusto referenced Anything But Idle, Episode 052, when discussing some research on taking notes on a laptop versus by handwriting notesGoodnotesEvernoteOneNoteOneNote Bullet Journal communityThe Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future by Ryder CarrollWorkflowyRocketbook notebooks Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:23I'm Augusto. Francis Wade 0:23And I'm Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:25I'm Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:27Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. Today, what we're doing is we are introducing a new I guess, we can call it a series in which we are going to be talking about different experiments, that is just discussing how we have each experimented with various methods and tools. Today is one of those methods discussions. And we're going to be talking about the bullet journal, we've of course, talked about the bullet journal in the past both what it is in Episode 35. And then again, we talked about really how you can tailor the bullet journal to your own needs. And episode 73. I'll put links to those in the show notes for us. dogfooding. A methodology when you're very used to another is very interesting. And I thought, well, we could do this more often, we could actually try these things out. And since art had had experience with the bullet journal already, I thought, well, let's put this together. And so good stone, I really started ideating. Well, let's do this with other methods over the course of time. And so that's really where productivity Labs was born from. And so let's get into it. Let's talk about the bullet journal in its most basic sense, because like I said, you can jump back to Episode 35, and go deep in to what the bullet journal method is. But let's do a an overview of the system itself. Then we'll talk about our own setup experiences, and then our own experiences actually using the bullet journal. So let's start with what is the bullet journal. And since we're going to consider you the resident expert, what is the bullet journal Just in brief for listeners, the bullet Art Gelwicks 1:56journal itself, and I'm not going to do writer Carol justice with this, but I'm going to sum it up as best I can. It's a method of tracking activities and tracking notes on a running in daily basis. That is not tool specific. It is platform agnostic. So you can do bullet journaling. In a paper journal, you can do it on a digital pad, you can do it in most productivity applications. The design of it is supposed to be simplified, very simplified and very adaptable uses literally just that bullets and variations on bullets to help you keep track of the different things that you need to do. And we are making notations. There's a lot of detail that you can dig into it. But if you think about taking notes on a legal pad, and then adding some icons to it to make sure you can tell one from another, you're probably about a quarter of the way to a bullet journal at that Augusto Pinaud 2:51point. For me, it's inevitable when I think on the bullet journal, and even with this exercise of the bullet journal, to think about Patrick Brown dodge Plus system and and we will put a link on on the notes because that's the first time I heard about the idea of not using something digital or not the first time but the first time I saw an implementation that seems robust enough, it really fits really well. Basically, the idea is that you use a dash and you can modify it, you know, they sit in the action is done, or you're waiting for delegates that data point or move. What I like about what I did was a bullet journal is that it's really I can see for certain people how this can be really useful. How can having everything in there, what kills me was a double entry that reentry they're recreating that part, I did not see a benefit on the cost benefit part of that in doing all that reentry. So even that my test was digital, and even that might test supposed to work really well. On the way I did it. I saw benefits. And I see a person who love paper on which brain works in a paper like base way can see a lot of benefits out of this. My concern was if doing this, you will skip the step of processing those notes. Because that's what I found online. You know that now that I can index me to process notes, that was a danger. Because there were things into that system that never made it out of that just because I knew where to find it on the index of that Art Gelwicks 4:35you're bringing up probably one of the biggest weaknesses I consider in the system. It is not automation friendly. It is not designed or having any intention to leverage streamlining functionality that allows you to integrate if you're going to do this in a digital environment with other systems, tying it to task lists and things like that, and you have to go back to its original core Is that it, it is simplified enough that it can be applied everywhere. But because it is simplified enough, there's a lot of functionality that we would expect within productivity tools. That just doesn't exist because it's, it has to be able to be implemented anywhere. I mean, you could implement the bullet journal in Microsoft Word, you could implement it in Excel, you could implement it hack in a PowerPoint slide, if you wanted to. The concept carries over regardless of the platform. But just like you're saying, A Gousto. That means that labor part of it is on you. It's not on the tool that you're utilizing to manage that. I see that a lot. And I'll talk about the platform I've worked with it in. But there's a couple of different ways that it's commonly implemented on, on my platform. And they all struggle from that same problem is that lack of integrity when it comes to automation and streamlining functionality, and you have to resign yourself to the fact that you're going to be the one that cranks the widgets on this, you're going to be turning that handle, not some other system, or not some other tool rather Augusto Pinaud 6:12well, and that brought my second shortcoming is how much this is really is a scalable, you know, I pick it for a particular project, not for my whole system. But even in this particular project. And it had been worked great the project start on March 1, it was a great way to do the test to collect the information to have all in one place. Even as the project is progressing, and the complexity and the pieces on the project has been adding, there has been more times that I'm that I've been feeling that it's slowing down the process instead of allowing me and it may be a part of automation, it may be a part of, I don't know exactly. But it felt multiple times that it was clear to me in week three, that this tool will not even be sufficient or sufficient for this project. Even that is not really complex one, it has a lot of input and reports. But it wasn't a complex one, and it was choking by week three. Art Gelwicks 7:15Yeah, it's not a high velocity system, it's not, don't kid yourself, if you think you're going to do high velocity work through this kind of a system. Because it's not designed for that I wouldn't try and run a corporate project using a bullet journal. I however, would probably maintain all of my own notes about that project using a bullet journal structure, and emulate a lot of that functionality, because I have found that it is scalable at the individual level, it can go up and you can handle personal and professional within the same system and build it up. The one thing I have discovered, though, is you really you have to commit yourself to just using the system, you have to commit yourself to using your bullet journal and making it your trust

2/14/22 • 48:55