A few times per year, the ProductivityCast team comes together to share with you a few software products and/or services that we know/use in our personal productivity systems, or with our client’s systems. We call this series Productivity App-apalooza, and do this in three rounds, with each of us taking the opportunity to explain the tool and why we believe it provides value to our productivity (and possibly yours). With that, here’s Productivity App-apalooza, Fourth Edition!
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In this Cast | Productivity App-apalooza! Fourth Edition
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Productivity App-apalooza! Fourth Edition
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Round 1
Art - Journey (Journey: Diary, Journal - Apps on Google Play)
Augusto - Overcast
Francis - SavemyTime
Toggl TrackRescueTime
Ray - Google Forms
Round 2
Art - Fleksy (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.syntellia.fleksy.keyboard)
Gboard
Augusto - MindNode & Mind42
SimpleMind, Mindjet (now known as MindManager)
Francis - ZenniOptical
Ray - FancyHands(Sign up with this link and get 50% off your first month or 5% off your first year.)
Round 3
Art - Mighty Networks
Personal Productivity ClubMighty Taskers
Augusto - Day One Journal
Francis - Google Authenticator
Ray - Asana
Raw Text Transcript
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
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Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life? Then you've come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your host Ray Sidney-Smith and gousto been out with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. And I'm Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade, and I'm Art Gelwicks. Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode, we are going to do something fun a few times per year, the ProductivityCast team comes together to share with you a few software products and services that we know or use in our personal productivity systems or with our clients systems. We call these productivity Apple Palooza. And we do this in three rounds, with each of us taking the opportunity to explain the tool to explain the tool and why we believe it provides value to our productivity and possibly yours. With that, here's productivity APA Palooza fourth edition. And so for round one, ding, ding ding art Europe. Geez, why do I have to start? Okay, it's alphabetical. See, this is the curse of being the A. So anyway, sorry, gousto.
Art Gelwicks 1:13When we started to look at APA Palooza round four, I'm like, oh, okay, I gotta find something that's good. And I realized that I have something that I use all the time. It's called journey. And it is a journaling app. Now a lot of people will do journaling in whatever their organization organizational tool that they have is some do one note, some do notion, I use journeys, for a couple of reasons. One, it's available on the web, and on mobile, so you can journal into it whenever you want. Second, you can do images into it as well stacked multiple images. And third, it has its own PIN code so that your information is protected. And that's one of the struggles with journaling is if you want to be honest with yourself in journaling, you want to be truly honest and open well, then you're hesitant like Well, where's this stuff going, who's gonna see it, where's the access to it. And I just like the user experience, the consistency, the availability of the app on multiple platforms, it's just a nice way if you're trying to do that mental dump.
And it's not really organization, it's just get this out for the day, I found that's probably the best tool out there. For me, there's a couple others de one's another one didn't really care for it. But journey to me is the one that I recommend.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:32I use journey also. And I do that first. And then I just copy and paste that over to my reference system. And so I keep it in both places. And it's a little bit of extra work. And I've thought about how to automate that using some scripting. And I really do like journey. I like the ability for it to on mobile, especially auto detects whether you're sitting whether you're walking around and being able to capture capture in those multiple opportunities when you are alone and or just have thoughts and you want to be able to share them with yourself. So I really like journey. All right, next up lagu. So the first app that I have is overcast. And you know as a person, as you're listening to us into a podcast, you may have played with one or two other cast has been the software I've been using on on my iOS for for a really long time. And I like the fact that I can not only download the episode, but create smart list of the things that I want to have priority as well as increase the speed, as well as decide you know what, for this podcast, download every episode, but for these other podcasts download only the last one. So it gives me a lot of customization power. So it's a piece of software that I have really, really enjoyed for a long time. You have not played as much with overcast. The name of the developer Mark are hermant are meant Yes, he's he's very active in that podcasting space. And probably other there are other things that he does in in the space. But yeah, I think that overcast is great. And a lot of people of course, talk about pocket casts. I still am actually really big fan since transitioning over to Google podcasts, and the Google podcasts app and just really does everything I want a podcast app to do. And it's exciting to see that the space is expanding to have so many other podcast applications that you can use and do different things. I've seen ones that capture audio clips, so you can note, annotate the audio clips of a podcast and share those with friends and family. I think there's some really good things happening in the podcast space. Wonderful. overcast is a great option. Francis, your next.
Francis Wade 4:50So my first app is called save my time. And it's an innovative solution for people who track their time and I've always tracked my time and there are things out there.
toggle and other kind of manual methods for rescue time trying to track how you spend your time. But this one has a difference. It's tied into the your you're not your screensaver. But when you turn your device back on, what turned my phone back on, it immediately pops up. How did you spend the last X number of minutes since the last update, and so you can't avoid it. And it offers you a set number of options to choose from nice diagrams. And you can add any other number of categories of ways you can spend your time. So it's unavoidable. Because you're turning on or off, you're on and off your phone all day long. You can signal when you're about to change and move into a different context, or a different
activity by just simply put the tie in between the natural behavior of turning on your phone. And the artificial behavior of tracking your time. Then they call it habit stacking is brilliant. So I've kept the best notes. And I've been time tracking since I think the 90s, late 90s one time. But the quality of my time tracking has all of a sudden gone through because I'm able to not quite passively. But I'm able to trigger the capture of my spent time in this very intuitive way. It just it's just brilliant. Is it mobile only. I haven't tried it on on PC or laptop. But I went through a website and I only pay attention to the mobile version. So I think so
Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:45great. And it looks like it's about $3 USD per month billed annually, or $5, USD billed monthly, if you stay monthly. And otherwise, you can do the free version, which gives you up to nine activities, what are activities over the different
Francis Wade 7:03categories that you assign your time to?
Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:06Great. And then it allows for what it calls limited history. I don't know what that limited history is, you know, the limited history is. Okay. And so professional gives you data expert export, calendar integration and a custom date picker if you upgrade to the paid plan versus the the free plan. And so
Francis Wade 7:28that's great I upgrade. Because I was I immediately saw the time savings because I spend for me to reconstruct my the last few days or weeks, which is sometimes what happens because I haven't it takes me a long time after go the screenshots, I've had to go to the manic time, which tracks the app usage and I have to reconstruct, it's like a small adventure. I can't remember half of it. Yeah, it's it's forensic and nature
Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:57awful. But this is, I've already started to rebuild some of the things that I've tracked using the app that of course, I'm way more detail. This is, this is brilliant that I wish I had thought of something like this.
