This week, we bring you our third Productivity App-apalooza! We’ll review three apps each that we know and use, and think you might find value in knowing about and using too! We’ll go in three rounds of the ProductivityCast team.
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In this Cast | Productivity App-apalooza! #3
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Productivity App-apalooza! #3
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Round 1
Art - Do it now: RPG to do listAugusto - AnchorFrancis - Files to SD Card (Android)Files (Google) (Android)Ray - Mind42 (Web only) + FreeMind (Win/macOS/Linux)
Round 2
Art - Habitica: Gamify your tasksRay runs the GTD Party on HabiticaAugusto - Infuse 6Plex / SyncLounge for PlexFrancis - MailTrack (Google Chrome extension)Ray - SendRecurring.com
Round 3
Art - Epic To Do ListSuperBetter (book/iOS/Android) by Jane McGonagal PhDAugusto - FE File ExplorerFrancis - Remo.coZoom / SococoRay - File Juggler (Windows) / Hazel (macOS)
Raw Text Transcript | Productivity App-apalooza! #3
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:22 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:24 And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to this episode, and we are going to do another exciting episode, we have come to coin as appa Palooza, so this is our third time, where we're going to be doing four rounds, and discussing apps that we use in our everyday productivity systems and enjoy using and we we recommend them to others, and so why not share them with you. So as I said, we're going to go in three rounds, we'll have three rounds. And each of us will give our tool and kind of give you a little bit of explanation behind what it is and why we use it. So let's kick it off. Let's let's get started with this party and go with you art art I have you at first, what is your first app?
Art Gelwicks 1:13Well, I've got a bit of a theme to this app a Palooza since we're in a situation where people are trying to kind of deal with the mental aspects of having a lot of stuff to do, and unfortunately having time to do that. So the theme on mine are gamification, tat or the gamification of tasks. So the first one that I'm talking about is an app called do it now. Now, these are all on Google Play. These are all on Android, I'm sure you can find equivalent ones on iOS, but do it now is an old school style role playing game, but it's done with your task. So if you think about it, from the perspective of something like a Dungeons and Dragons, or that type of a game, what you're doing is you're creating a character into it now of yourself your own stats, the challenges, you create your characteristics, like memory, perception, strength, and you apply those criteria to the things that you need to do, whether they're individual tasks or recurring tasks. I like it because it's a fairly modern style of interface, and you build experience as you move forward. And you can chart those metrics as you move forward to achieve specific goals. So it's a nice way, it's a little bit complex. But it's a nice way to get into this idea of gamifying, the things that you have to do and setting those point goals to help yourself move forward.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:33Because so what's your first app in round one,
Augusto Pinaud 2:36my first app is anchor, and it is an app to record podcast podcast, like this one. It's been an interesting evolution, especially for a person who leaves iPad, only the recording and editing of the past podcast, even the power of the machine has been there for a while has taken longer to really get to reality. And anchor is the first application that allows us to really do that and to really record edit, even save templates. And it is a really easy, powerful way to start doing podcasts on on any device, iOS. iOS, is what I use, but I'm the reason I bring it here, obviously. But it is a really, really nice and powerful blood.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:24Now I happen to use anchor for one of my podcasts just because I needed to make sure that I was using the tool that you know a lot of my small business clients are using and talking about. And so I decided well, let me just use it for that purpose. Even though I'm I'm much more a fan of other podcast hosting services. But I've got to be honest, you know, the the anchor platform is is really quite useful and helpful are what's your experience been with anchor?
Art Gelwicks 3:52Oh, I love it. I've been using anchor since the beginning on my own podcast. From an implementation standpoint it there are some little inconsistencies in the interface between the devices. But to have an application and a platform that you can literally build or record, edit and publish your entire podcast off of your mobile device is pretty slick. I've sat down and I've recorded multiple episodes from inside my car, I've been able to jump around and do the different things I needed to do. And then sit down and say, okay, publish this all right from my phone, I can do it from my desktop also. So yeah, I love it. I use it. I use anchor for all my podcasting.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:28The only only issue that I have come across is that the anchor messages like if someone records the messages and and sends it to you, I had no notification of that because it was only in the app. And so just make sure that you do have the mobile application installed, because then you'll install the app several months later and realize that someone you know some persons have ftu audio messages that you had no idea existed. So just little things like that. You know, and if anger is lifted You know, please give people the ability to see name record their show so that they can have their control over their domain. And yeah, so next up, I have Francis Francis, what's your first app.
Francis Wade 5:12So it's called files to SD card. And it's on Android. And what it does is with a click of a button, you can transfer files from your internal device to your SD card. So it allows you to go through the directory, pick directories, or files, or basically whatever you want. And then with a with a tap habit all get transferred over and for folks who are having WhatsApp users. And if you belong to lots of WhatsApp groups, this is a most just because WhatsApp is doesn't allow you to save directly to the SD card, you have to save to the device, which means that if you are running out of space like I am, then you everyday you have to be moving files or and this is a way to do it in bulk takes about a couple of minutes to run each day, and allows you to keep going. I mean, this game will probably end because I imagined that there are other other programs that have files that I can't transfer. But at least for now, it's allowing me to extend the life of my smartphone.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:11One corollary to this is using the files app on Android. So you know, files to SD card isn't is an Android focused application. And the same thing kind of is being done by files. So there's an application called files, it's an Android app. And when you install it, it walks through your system. Again, it scans your system for things that you can get rid of like detritus, like junk, temporary files, you know, cache files, that kind of thing, but also these large media files that are sitting on your system, whether it be PDFs, mp3, you know, other video files as well. And it'll just give you a list of those so that you can purge them. And and many times, you know, those WhatsApp files are no longer useful. If you're sharing personal content, then why do you care about the GIF that your friends send you? You know, you could just get rid of it. So that's a kind of a secondary piece if people are really trying to save space on the device, and it's doing it semi automatically, because it'll just like prompt you at times and say, Hey, I scanned it, and I can save you x hundreds of megabytes worth of data. And then you could just go through and say okay, like in my case, you know, I found about a gigabyte, or two or 10 worth of excess podcast episodes that had just been sitting on my system from a prior podcast application. And I didn't need that stuff tape, you know, sitting on my system, so it was able to purge those pretty easily. So just check out the files app on Android.
Francis Wade 7:42There's one that comes native, that's called files. But that's not what you're talking about. Right?
Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:47It is indeed.
Francis Wade 7:48Yep, it is.
