ProductivityCast

Ray Sidney-Smith
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The weekly show about all things personal productivity

  1. 24/07/2023

    How to Conduct a Mid-Year Review

    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. A mid-year review is a practice like any other reflection activity, where we take the time to look over our progress, reevaluate our goals, and recalibrate our personal productivity systems. It’s a moment to pause, step back, and gain clarity on where we stand in relation to our aspirations and how we can make the most of the second half of the year. Correction: Ray said “weekly review” at the start of the episode when he actually meant “mid-year review.” (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/141 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 How to Conduct a Mid-Year Review from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | How to Conduct a Mid-Year Review Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | How to Conduct a Mid-Year Review Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Reticular activating system (RAS) The biggest myths about emotions, debunked | Lisa Feldman Barrett Antifragility 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). 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 0:18 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 0:26 And I’m Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. Today, on ProductivityCast, we’re going to be talking about stepping away from getting things done for a bit, so we can review and reflect. And what I mean by that is that we’re halfway through the year. And this is a really good time for us to discuss the mid year review. A mid year review is a practice like any other reflection activity, where we take time to look over our progress, reevaluate our goals, and really recalibrate our personal productivity systems. It’s a moment to pause the back and gain clarity, gain perspective on where we stand in relationship to our aspirations, and how we can make the most of the second half of our calendar year. So let’s talk today about what the [mid-year] review is to each of us on because it may be different. We’ll then talk a little bit about why why someone should do a mid year review. And perhaps why not, I mean, there may be some folks who don’t do it, and therefore giving some perspective there. And then we’ll talk about some of the elements of our own media reviews. And perhaps how you can get started developing your own video review. If you haven’t done one before, we’re just kicking the tires, and making your mid year review better. So let’s talk first about what is a mid year review. I kind of gave a definition in our preamble. But if you want to give some further color to it, what do you think the video review is to you? Augusto Pinaud 1:53Okay, we all have, you know, our reticular system activated by the means is our brain is like a scanner. And he’s paying attention to what we what we do what we are down, we want to know what direction we’re taking. If you don’t set that scanner in any direction, well, it doesn’t matter, it will scan something, but is that Samsung? What do you want. One of the things that I believe is important is to track that word did you want to go on it is still something that is valid that is interesting is there is nothing wrong in to change the direction. What is wrong is to in my perspective, is to walk aimlessly and just moving and seeing what is happening. So I have been personally on truck and off truck for both. And in my experience on truck is way more fun. So that’s part of the reason why I conduct this MC gear reviews and why I work with my clients, the clients that I have coached in to do this review and why I believe is very, very important. It is very simple to lose track. But it’s also easy to get back on it. Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:14As a sidestep just to clarify for some folks, what Lisa was talking about was the reticular activating system. And so this is a neural network in in our brain, right we have a neural network. And the RAS is responsible for a wide variety of things. And some of those things, of course, are our ability to identify patterns of things. It also regulates our wakefulness, it regulates our ability to basically have a consciousness, motivation, all kinds of other things. It’s also the thing that identifies our fight or flight response or flight flight freeze response. And it’s really how we perceive the world. So a lot of that RAS is activated, those network of neurons are really activated when we’re trying to identify patterns of things. So you know, when we see something that shaped like a lion, moving toward us, whether it’s a lion or not, our RAS kicks in, and we start to respond from a biological perspective, right, we prepare for fight or flight, because of our mind, surfacing those stimuli, we get activated for preparation for whatever that thing is. So just want to make sure folks are kind of on the same page when when we talk about the RAS, Art Gelwicks 4:22the mid year review, in my estimation is one of those things that becomes a necessary evil for many people because that they get so involved in the work and doing the work, that they haven’t got a running time period, they may not even do weekly reviews of going through and determining where they stand and where things are. I also think it’s a bigger review though. It’s the it’s the review that determines Are you on course, it’s not for minor course adjustments, but is your destination the correct destination. So for me, it’s always a matter of not only of determining Are you making progress on the goals that you’ve set Get out. But it’s an opportunity to say, okay, based on where the world stands right now, where my world stands right now, are those the right goals? Are those the opportunities that I want to be pursuing are those the objectives that I need to have at this point in time. That’s not something you want to do on a weekly basis, because you’ll never get out of the analysis mode. But this is very much in my mind, the opportunity to do a strategic analysis of what your goals and objectives are. Francis Wade 5:30And I’d be the contrarian here, or the devil’s advocate. For a change, Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:36surprise, surprise, Art Gelwicks 5:39that’s my job. Francis Wade 5:40I’m taking art putting on our chat for a while, I don’t do a video review. And I know that the logical that I should do one. But here’s why. I have three kinds of interests in the in our business. And we cover three web three conferences per year, one in productivity, the other one in strategy and another one in Caribbean HR. And they they go from March, March, June, and September. And we have our strategic plan for each one. And we gotten into the practice of updating the strategic plan after each conference. So we’re, we don’t quite review them because they don’t follow the calendar. But we do three rounds of strategic planning each year, to focus on each business. Invariably, for example, the strategic planning conference is coming up this week, probably next week, or the week after, we’ll do a review, or we’ll do a new plan for the next year. But we’ll also review the other plans. So we don’t really have a media review. receipts, not a not, not the way that you traditionally think of it, we we do forward planning for each each of the three businesses, so to speak, or interests. And in that we tend to cover the wall cannibal overlook, look over the wall, all three are doing. So not really. But in a way, I guess something similar gets done. This doesn’t follow the calendar, that’s for sure, Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:21I’ll offer a different perspective here, which is not counter to what Francis is talking about. But more from, from my perspective, I am a natural planner. So I could plan all the time, all the all the ways and do nothing, right? That would be my natural state of being. And I recognize that very early on in my life. And I realized that I just love planning, I love the idea of pulling out a Gantt chart, I love sitting down with a mind map and just planning all day long. And that’s not how things get done, right. So you have to step away from that planning activity or, or, if you’re like me, you have to step away from that to be able to get things done. But that also means that you need to reward yourself for doing the things. And for me having these reviews, both the weekly review and larger reviews gives me the opportunity to it’s kind of a reward for doing the work, because my natural desire is to actu

    45min

  2. 20/03/2023

    Defining Personal Productivity

    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). 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. But

    48min

  3. 13/03/2023

    Subjective versus Objective Time

    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). 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

    49min

  4. 09/03/2023

    One Size Doesn’t Fit All – ProductivityCast Live

    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). 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

    35min

  5. 06/03/2023

    Hyper-Scheduling: Commentary on MacSparky’s Granular Time Blocking Method

    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). 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, I’

    48min

  6. 29/08/2022

    Projects Sequencing: Ordering Your Projects to Enhance Productivity

    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). 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.

    51min

  7. 13/06/2022

    Task Sequencing How to Condition and Order Tasks for Greater Momentum

    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). 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

    54min

  8. 30/05/2022

    Get More Out of Your Calendar: Forecasting, Budgeting and Tracking Your Day

    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). 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

    47min
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The weekly show about all things personal productivity

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  • Criado por
    Ray Sidney-Smith
  • Anos de atividade
    2016 - 2023
  • Episódios
    141
  • Classificação
    Livre
  • Copyright
    ©️ 2025 - Raymond Sidney-Smith
  • Site do podcast
    ProductivityCast