Today, we take four questions that each of the ProductivityCast team has brought to the show and then we answer and discuss our perspectives.
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In this Cast | Productivity Potpourri, Numero Dos
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Productivity Potpourri, Numero Dos
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Raw Text Transcript | Productivity Potpourri, Numero Dos
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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 action packed episode of productivity cast. Today, what we're going to do is do productivity properly. numero dos, we are going to be doing our episode where we take four questions, one from each of us, and we discuss them in alphabetical order. So we're gonna go round robin, and take each question and discuss the question that each of us has brought to the table. And so because we are doing this alphabetically, aren't you? We're up first. And so go for it. What's your productivity potpourri question for us. All right, I'm
Art Gelwicks 1:04going to start us off with a thinker here. This is we always talk about retrospectives, whether it's a daily retrospective, weekly, monthly. So I'm going to throw this out to you guys as a six month retrospective. If you think back over the productivity choices you've made over the past six months, is there one that you would change if you had the opportunity to? And how would you change it? Is there something that you decided during this time period that you thought was a good idea, but after executing, and it turns out, maybe not so much. And I'll give you guys an opportunity to think about that. I'll throw mine in there. And it's actually a two parter. For me. My challenge was over this past six months, I decided to do more testing of whether or not I could capture notes digitally and analog pen and paper and make that system balance. The mistake I made is I did that with my actual system. If I had the opportunity to do that over again, and I do and I'm going to, I would do it in basically a dummy system, because what I found is the value of testing that process of trying to see could I do it digitally as well as analog, disrupted my own productivity solutions. It disrupted my note taking a disruptive my note organization. And I'm still in the process of backtracking and recapturing things the way they should be. It's, it was an idea at the time that had merit and I did learn a lot from it. But I would definitely not use my own day to day operational system as the guinea pig of that, that catalyze changes to my to do lists and other functionalities that again, I, I took the core, and I made it the guinea pig. And that would be the one thing I would go back and change is I would duplicate the system and test on the duplicated system. It's more work. But I think in the long run, I wouldn't be behind the eight ball like I am right now in some areas, you bring up a great point, which is that if you're going to test new tools or new systems, it's usually helpful to run that concurrently, while you are still maintaining your prior system in whatever fashion you need to,
Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:31I know that because I test so much productivity software, I always actually set up a singular project in that system to then run it through it. And that's how I test is kind of just, you know, slicing off a piece of the work into that system for that timeframe to see if it can actually do what I want it to do. And you know, many projects are tailored for particular types of software, particular types of systems. And so I'll usually do that. But I very infrequently, will move my system, I will set my system completely up in another tool to be able to see how it works to get the enough experience with what it will do for me and how it will work. But it's it's absolutely a good idea to not move your system completely until you're comfortable. And that means maintaining the current system, which can be a little bit difficult, which is why changing tools is it's never my first choice for people, you know, it's usually trying to make do with what you've got before you switch to another tool because there is that loss. There's that productivity hit that most people if they really thought about it are not probably excited about So my question to you aren't is after the change. Did you learn enough? And is there enough of a benefit on the other side that made it worthwhile?
Art Gelwicks 4:52I think after looking at the change, I learned a lot of things I don't want to do. That's and that's one of the things doing that kind of testing as you determine the wrong things as well as the ways to improve, I have found that there are some things that I'm going to change by not doing them anymore. And also finally galvanizing in my head that what I've always thought might be a viable alternative, really just does not have the opportunity cost tied to it. I like using my pens, I like using my paper notebooks. But the downside of being able to organize and recall that information for certain types of work, it's just not worth the effort. I have to categorize now. And this is part of what I put into my processes is where is the best place to do the work not only what is the work that needs to be done? So and I'll give you a practical example of this. I do work woodworking on the side as a hobby. And I was looking at as part of the processes, could I do designs online? Could I use a CAD tool? Can I use something else for that? And I absolutely could, the problem I get into is, it's not the best way for me to do that type of work. So I've made the conscious decision in my system to say, if I'm going to do that, I'm going to do it on pen and paper and rollers. Because I know that's the most efficient and the most effective. So putting that kind of decision making into the beginning parts of my process, I think are going to help a lot. And that's the direct learning I got from this experiment
Augusto Pinaud 6:34during the pandemic. And, you know, there were a lot of things that evolved for me, that were then revised to be changes, who would you know, the context were one of those, obviously, as context disappear, I require to update some of them. And same thing with the hard word. Because again, as I move a lot less, and spend more time in the in the office, and some things, you know, are going to stay that way, then the changes, you know, we're quite, quite interesting. So for me was, you know, I modify for certain notetaking activities, as you were describing art, I'm now taking them on a different application, especially on those meetings that require me to process the notes during meetings that I go through, I just take the notes, and if I need them verify, in many cases, I just need to file them. But there are other meetings that I go that the result of that meeting will define what I need to do. So in those cases, those meetings are those notes are taken on a different app. So that way, I process them before they go into my system. And that has make a productive changes. Same thing, as I said, was a context. And I'm right now currently working into hardware updates, and not necessarily to acquire or eliminate anything, but to make sure that what is right now hardware base, is doing what it needs to do or not.
Francis Wade 8:09This is a very simple one, I think maybe lots of people are already doing the same thing. But I've almost eliminated the use of the phone and replaced it with the use of video. And I know lots of people are doing that because video is the new sort of invoke way to communicate in real time. But what I've noticed is that my video calls are more productive than my just mere phone calls. And I think it has to do with the amount of information I'm able to gain by seeing the person and vice versa, I find them the cause shorter, more productive, more focused. And if I need to move them along, I think I can move them along a little better. Because I can transmit my need for urgency, for example, without having to say something I can non verbally do it. But I'm finding them way more productive. And we're more useful. So it's, I don't that I'll go back to doing voice calls when I can do video calls. The of course is the exception when I have to take a voice call because the person is on the road or they don't have data or whatever it is. But video calling is a change that I made.
