Verizon Is Switching to RCS, and Helping Parents Be More Productive

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00

Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community Welcome to Anything But Idle. The Productivity news podcast. Today’s show is brought to you by co working space by personal productivity club. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:12

I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:13

And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. This is Episode 71. Verizon is switching to RCS thank God and helping parents be more productive. We’re recording this on July 26 2021. And so welcome to those of you who are joining us live. And of course, thank you for listening to those who are listening to the podcast afterward. Every week we read and review the productivity, news of the week, the technology space, and the productivity space combined. And we usually start off with a theme and this week’s theme was helping parents be more productive. And some of you probably don’t know this about me. But you know, I had siblings growing up, there are a total of six of us and for younger than me, and I had the pleasure of really helping to rear those three younger ones. And so I have quite a bit of experience changing diapers. So I’ve been I’ve been there in some some vague fashion, but I’m not a parent, and you are a gousto. So I wanted to I want to start off with kind of what considerations do parents like yourself need to make when building out a personal productivity system? If you’re looking at your personal productivity system, and you see that you are, you know, going to be a parent or our parent of children, no matter what their ages? What are the considerations? You have to think about that? I think maybe some of us who don’t have children don’t necessarily consider?

Augusto Pinaud 1:41

Well, the first thing is to understand what is going to be your role? or Why do you think in reality, your role, you know, you may think, Oh, well, I’m not going to be the primary caregiver. And that’s what happened to be fine, you need to be able to adjust that. And and I’ve been arguing about it for now, a while when when I talked to other breasts, that well, the role of the male and the role of female now it doesn’t matter that role, data, the role of one or the other is obsolete, what matter is who is going to be the primary caregiver, because that’s where the kid is going to come. You know, that’s who the kid is going to come to interrupt in the meeting, when the toy broke, or when he decided he needs a new color red. So you need to understand what is your role into that. And for a lot of people pandemic bring a shock to these things. Okay, when they discover, oh, now that I’m at home, I am the primary caregiver, and that produced to adjust a lot of their systems. So that is the first thing. The second thing is to try to get wisdom, other parents, how you’re going to manage all the information that is coming. And, you know, one of the things I advise to everybody is create a kid’s email. Okay, so have any and a Gmail account that is just for those two kids information. So everything that come from school, from doctors, everything goes to that email account, so that way, everything is archived on a central place instead of Okay, who was the last time or the last person who got the result from the pediatrician or those kind of things. The second thing is calendars. Okay, as your kids grow, they’re going to get into activities, get them used to the calendar. And the third thing that I tell parents is, trust me on this, if your kid can play on the iPad, Roblox or Minecraft, or whatever, it can manage tasks on a calendar, and in many cases better than you. Okay? And this is really important, because I found a lot of people say, Well, I haven’t created this because my kids don’t know how to use the calendar. Oh, if you teach your kid as you teach your customers, as you teach your bosses, you teach everybody in your organization, and you elevate them to that level, they will understand my kids have come to this desk and ask Can I see your calendar for tomorrow? And that is their key word to say I want to spend time with you. Okay, but they understand that if they don’t book into this calendar, it’s not going to happen. And there is nothing to feel guilty about. One of the things that a lot of parents feel is guilt, guilt about the fact that they work or they check email or they go to the park and need to check the emails. No, no, no. It’s a luxury to be able to grab your phone and go to the park. teach your kids that you are doing there is no guilt into that. My kids know that I work alone. Okay, that’s fine. Okay, but they also know that if they need my attention, they will get it Then if they want to do an activity with me, we will look into the calendar and blocked and when I block that time, he gets blocked on my calendar, and he gets blocked in their calendar. So when they come and ask me when is that we were going to do this thing together, I can go and tell them check your calendar, I will check mine, you check yours. So treat them some adult. My daughter started looking into these kind of things pretty early. She was six when she stopped asking when the calendar is Why? Because you need to start training them to that. Okay. My kids I have an accountant to do is why because all the family task responsibilities are managing to do is then I don’t have a fight when they come and say, Hey, I need I want more time to play Roblox. I can go and say oh, did you finish your responsibilities? And they will tell you, I don’t know. And I say well go and check to do it. And over time, when they’re really interested, they come and go and say I already Mark everything done. So they trust me, they’re really clever. For this, they know how to use it. And then less you over protect them into use these tools, the better they will use these tools. And what’s really interesting, what at the beginning of the pandemic, how well both of my kids were able to use video conference Why? Because that was normal for them. Okay, they have seen me do videoconference forever. They, you know, my son says, Oh, we have this old iPad, can I use this all iPad for the video conference. So I can use the other iPad to do work. And I don’t need to do it in the little screen. Okay, that came from him, given we had the technology to for him to do that, I get it. But also, it was something that came from him watching us and being treated us equal on this one, or one of the things a lot of parents do is, oh, well, they may not be writing I know, again, if they can spend hours playing Nintendo and Xbox and Roblox, they can learn how to manage a calendar and a task list, at least in my book.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:21

Yeah. And so when when it comes to parents watching and feeling to like they should do everything, especially productive enthusiasts, you know, productivity enthusiasts like ourselves, we tend to want to do everything, and to not do that increases some level of failing on our parts. How do parents seek out help? How do how do we? How do we get over ourselves in a way so that we can get the help we need from whether that be spouse, extended family, friends, colleagues, or otherwise, when it comes to being productive? when, you know, raising kids is not easy it there is a there’s an amount of work that’s necessary beyond just taking care of yourself. And so what do you think about when it comes to asking for help? What are some things that you can offer to folks in that category?

Augusto Pinaud 8:09

As a person who did not ask for help? And is in recovery? Okay, I, you know, I said a lot of times that especially inside of the house, the person who will do everything is the fastest one. Okay. And the fastest one normally is the most organized. The one with a system says the one who’s tracks what is happening, therefore, you end up doing everything. And that was me for so many years. And one of the things I did was I look for I did first I tried to adapt, everybody is especially my wife to my productivity systems. And that was a massive failure for years. So one day I decided, Okay, listening to was Einstein that says, you know, the definition of insanity is trying the same thing and expect different results. So I said, Okay, fine, this has failed enough. Let’s try a different way. And then what I did was I look into what my wife was using. And I asked her, where are you comfortable? And the answer that answer was to do so to do is then turn into the family default thing, I went and I put everything that was personal into there, and I begin sharing projects with her. But because that was her system, it was not asking her to adopt anything new. It was not asking her to change anything new, and that works really well. And with that, I been needed to retrain myself into delegating things. Same thing with the kids, the kids do a bunch of chores and they as they grow or as the second one grows, then some of those. They are older one gets more interesting ones. And then the younger one gets, you know, some more boring ones. And he’s in trouble because he is the last one, there is nobody else to dedicate. We are not going to explain that to him yet some, I’m sure someday he will come and complain. But it’s really need to be managed in the same way you manage your team at work. And, and that was one of the big learning as I remember. Early in my days of getting things done. There was a program called getting things done fast. And in there David Allen tell story about an executive who got home and his slide was caught off guard, not exactly because lack of income, okay, that person was making plenty of money to pay that bill. But his work life and I remember he did what David Lyons used to sell at a time was his work, life was so in control. But his personal life was completely Catholic. And well, you need to get that balance. Okay, how you’re going to manage people think life balance is about, oh, well, spending four hours at work four hours at home? No, no. life balance is about being able to balance both sides of the equation with the same quality. That’s the real time life balance. It’s not about spending four hours at work and six hours at home. It’s nothing to do with that. It’s about knowing what’s happening on both sides of the equation. And at least for my experience, as these kids get older, you know, all those things get more and more complicated. So the sooner you get them into a system than everybody can manage, the sooner you’re going to start working better with them as a team.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:54

Absolutely. And so the reason why we had this theme today was actually yesterday was parents Day, National parents day, I think. So happy parents Day Happy to you, Cousteau. And so with that, I just

Augusto Pinaud 12:07

survived for 12 years old 13.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:11

Yeah, my youngest siblings are in their in their 20s. Now they’re almost 30 I can’t believe it. So I feel I feel old. But the The reality is, is that for those of you who might have some suggestions or questions about parenting and productivity, feel free to throw those in the in the chat feed, throw those into the comments feed. And or, you know, let us know in personal productivity club, if you’re a member of personal productivity club, we’d love to hear your thoughts and engage around this topic. Because I know it’s a it’s a big topic that many parents are sometimes incapable of having that conversation with other people who kind of understand what you’re going through as a productivity enthusiast. So I really want you to all to kind of dive in and engage in that space. And so with that, let’s move on our way to our productivity and technology news headlines this week. So let’s get into our big tech small tech headlines this week.

Augusto Pinaud 13:06

So the first one is Apple Music has made clarifications of their what they call the music, spatial audio feature. And where it works, where it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work on every device, it doesn’t work on the speakers of every device. So you require a certain devices. So they’ve had the speakers of the iPhone xR, the iPad, or the iPad Mini, are not compatible with that. And they have an article of all the things so basically, the speaker’s of the iPad 12.9 third generation or knob on the iPad Pro 11. iPad Air are compatible, but they all iPad 12.9 is not. I may be deaf. But I have both iPads. I have a first generation and latest generation. And I have tried them on both to see if I could see the difference. I can’t.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:09

All right, from spatial audio to our next article.

Augusto Pinaud 14:12

Well, this is the end of the productive meetings, as we understand them, assuming that we can call soon were productive meetings at all. But it’s so Miss introduced in third party apps. That part was great event features third party app. It was great until we got that they added games to plays during the meetings. And it was like oh, great productivity, the little productivity we have finally, after a year of training, going to getting into this soon are out of the window. See you later. Bye bye. Yes, I

Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:45

thought this is really fascinating, because the reality is that what they’re doing is they’re making zoom extensible. And so they’re giving us an App Center now like many other successful programs have over the years. I think the games are foolish. That’s fine. I get it. You know, not foolish, I probably miss speaking there, I think there’s an appropriate way to utilize games, especially for, you know, icebreakers for teams. And you know, like, if you want to be able to have an icebreaker, if you want to be able to have happy hours with your team and a remote or virtual component, I see all of those capacities being useful. One thing that I’m really looking forward is to having a pomodoro timer. Because there’s several meetings, or you know, things like in CO working space, with personal productivity club, being able to have a pomodoro timer running would be really nice. And that just being a part of the interface. So there’s some things there that I like in in the way that it’s set up. The thing that really got me kind of like, what are they doing, they created this events platform called zoom events, though, in that same announcement, and that zoom events announcement is a whole new events platform. Now mind you, last year, they started beta testing something called on zoom. And it itself is an events platform that they created. It’s kind of baling wire and duct taped together. And I have not had great success with the platform other than to say that I actually hosted my first live Evernote masterclass in the platform had a number of problems with that, I think they’ve worked some of those things out. But so they’ve launched a whole new events platform called zoom events, which is events.zoom.us. And that platform allows you to be able to host basically conferences, you know, large scale events, it becomes Event Hub, within zoom events. So interesting to me, I’m guessing they want to compete with air meat, and with tools like cell events, and, and hop in those types of, you know, platforms that have cropped up, I’m really curious to see how that will help, especially for remote teams, and how those things will will kind of foster greater collaboration in the workspace. So onward to our next story this week.

Augusto Pinaud 16:56

Our next story is some a story from Android Central talking about Google task and how Google task is the most underrated Google app. And it is it is Google Google. task, as well as Apple reminders are something that comes in the phone, people can access. But most people don’t know, done, they done, they sim for the people to be more too basic for the basic and then too complex to or nobody used them. I don’t know anybody who productivity clubhead or not will use either of those two apps. I happen to

Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:42

I happen to know quite a number of people who use Google tasks. And it’s really interesting to me, though, because I you know, reading the article, I was like, Oh, yeah, there are people like this, who are they’ve tried all the apps. And they’ve realized that there’s Google tasks caked into the Google ecosystem, and they’re capable of just using it. And for me, for example, I have shied away from using Google tasks for years, because it doesn’t have the ability to tag tasks. And it’s been a real limiter for me. And of course, I could just, I could create different lists and do that, but just my normal working modality was to have a master list, and to be able to then slice and dice that list by virtue of tags. And so that has just been a limitation in the in in Google tasks, you know, forever. But it does have some really great things. I mean, it’s kicked into Gmail, it’s kicked into Google Calendar, it’s baked into docs, slides, sheets, it’s just they’re always in that sidebar, and you just click on a button, it’s available to you it has a mobile application, you could just you have access, you know, to it within Gmail from within the Gmail messages, you click on a message, that little checkbox with a circle around it, it becomes a task and Google tasks. I mean, there’s a lot of power to Google tasks. And I appreciated the author’s perspectives on the availability of Google tasks. So the fact that, you know, for the large swath of people who may be finding themselves over complicating their productivity systems, Google tests may be something you want to check out. Was there anything else in the article that you thought was interesting?

Augusto Pinaud 19:12

No, it was it was a really good article. It’s true is, again, if you leave on Google, you know that integration has so much value. But But yes, I certainly don’t know many people who leave and trust on Google task.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:32

Yeah. And I think anyone from Google is listening, please put a search bar in Google tasks, your Google. You know, like, I would be able to overcome the issue. If I could just have a search field. I could tag things, you know, just putting the number sign and whatever and I can manifest the tag system that way. This is no search functionality within the task panel. And so it’s just a little bit more difficult to be able to get those things, you know, organized. I can’t I can’t set up a GTD system. In Google tasks for myself, I mean, other people could do it, you know, create context based actions list. But I just don’t like to I want I want one singular list that I can filter can’t do it. So anyway, moving on to our next story this week,

Augusto Pinaud 20:13

teams, Microsoft Teams are set for serious productivity boost. And basically teams have gone Microsoft continue the integration with teams, and now they’re integrating with dynamics 365, their CRM, and they are both going to be working together. And that’s really, really exciting. You know, the reality is, if you leave on a Microsoft environment for good or for bad teams is a fantastic solution for them is, it is the same thing when you leave into Google is Google mean, that’s your solution, because everything is integrated. Same thing happened in your Microsoft, Microsoft world. And the fact that you can now add the CRM if that is the CRM that company use. Why not? That is fantastic news.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:04

I’ve got nothing else. onward to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 21:07

Perfect. Google is really signing universal emojis, and they are coming now with the idea to make them easy to understand in Android, Gmail, and Chrome OS. And you know, the emojis are something interesting for me. And this is the reason I put this article here. Because as more and more people get love for these things, I used them I’m not gonna say otherwise. And I use a lot of them. But I may be used the same 10 emojis, do I need them to improve and be more pretty? I don’t know.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:50

I think this has to do with greater accessibility, and greater inclusivity and diversity among the emoji that are available. That’s, that’s the only thing I can think of as being here. I’m like you I use the same emoji all the time. Quite honestly, I’ve, you know, I’ve been using telegram even with you when we chat. You know, in telegram we’ve been using telegram for so long that we have gone to using stickers more for a lot of the ways in which we communicate as responses to certain things that are happening. And so I see more of like the emoji and stickers in many different applications as being as useful or better than emoji in many cases.

Augusto Pinaud 22:27

Well, that is because in my case, they allow me to use Star Wars. So there is no reason to use anything else.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:34

And I always respond to you, or not always, but I try to always respond to you with the Star Wars sticker. But I’d really appreciate that you do that. I’ve got a little over a little while. What’s his name grow goo? You know, it’s on the ready whenever I’m trying to respond to against them. So, yeah, so I think I think this is all good. I think, you know, Google is doing a pretty decent job, Apple’s probably doing the best job in the Moji space. And please, Microsoft, get on that every time. For those of you don’t know, you can hold down windows and tap, either. I think it’s the comma comma or period button, I usually use the semi colon. But Windows key and then semi colon on the Windows platform will launch the emoji picker, you can actually symbols as well as diacritical characters. And so it’s really really helpful to just access your emoji key keyboard from that. It’s I think it’s what is it Ctrl command spacebar on Mac, and and so really, you know, just easy to pull up the the emojis and insert them while the the emojis on Microsoft are just they look like, I don’t know, they just looked like they’re out of the 90s. So Microsoft really needs to update there’s, I’m hoping in Windows 11 they are gonna do some stuff there. I don’t know if they’ve really put in soon enough to get them launched. So you don’t have to say anything there. I’m

Augusto Pinaud 23:56

not going to say anything. I’m exercising all the little maturity that I have to not say a word.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:06

All right with that we have covered our big tech small tech headlines this week, which means we’re going to take an ad break. When we come back, we will do the rest of our productivity articles headlines for this week. And so now a word from our sponsor this week, predict co working space by personal productivity club we’ll see after the break.

Sponsor Voice Over 24:25

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:35

Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle on Ray Sidney-Smith joined, as always, with acoustic pinout for our second half of Anything But Idle. And so let’s get into the productivity articles this week at gousto. What’s our first article to discuss?

Augusto Pinaud 25:49

So the first article I don’t know if it’s about productivity or not, but I, I decided that it was important to bring it up on Amazon lounge, Amazon pharmacy last week. And now you can go and bring your prescriptions there on. I don’t remember now it was three or five years ago when basically, CVS took the world, at least in the United States, by surprise when making some partnerships, and basically, to even target pharmacy out of business, among other things. And it is really interesting, Amazon for the second or third time taking a jab to the prescription world. You know, this is not the first time they did a partnership with Warren Buffett and before that didn’t result in too much, or at least not to the public. And now they’re coming into your prescriptions, they will ship it to you and say was big in prescriptions last week, when this ad came, I say you know what, I would love to get my amazon books in there and don’t need to stop into the do the line, you know, get an in there charger directly to my Etsy account and get it done. So I really hope that Amazon can do this, right. So we start moving our prescriptions of whether given that said, the insurance company work exclusively with CVS is going to be a little challenging to begin with. But I’m sure that will adjust.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:20

Yeah, this is really interesting to me. So So Amazon purchased pillpack, several years ago, and I’m wondering if this is the same service or different than pill pack. Now, if you go to pill pack.com, you see it’s pill pack by Amazon pharmacy, it seems like Amazon pharmacy is slightly different, maybe a little bit more full feature than pill pack, but I’m not sure it may be the same service. So for those of you who may be using pillpack Be mindful that Amazon pharmacy is now on amazon.com. And therefore it’s integrated with all of the pieces of Amazon behind it. So that’s really quite convenient. And you know, I don’t I don’t know why I wouldn’t use it other than, you know, the fact that everything’s already with my current pharmacy, right. And so, but you know, I’m, I’m all for supporting your local pharmacists. So if you’re capable of doing that do that.

Augusto Pinaud 28:11

Yeah, but for example, in my case, when when the CVS took over three, five years ago, I don’t remember. Okay, we were on target. And we were forced to move out of target because at that time, the insurance basically, I don’t remember the numbers, but but if you buy it on CBS, it was $1 if you buy it on target was $3. So you move. So I wonder if Amazon will be able to to break that. And then if they break in convenience may win.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:41

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, on to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 28:44

So the next article is an article from Mike, David Spark, Mike, Mike Sparky, talking about the plan versus the day. And this is an article that hit close to home because I should do a much better job reporting, what I do or what I plan to do in the next 30 minutes and what I did on the last 30 minutes and when I do that, which order is really convenient and effective. But that’s basically what he proposing here. You know, you’ve planned your day and then on the other piece of the paper you write down what exactly happened that day. The way we I have it is I have an accountability partner who I text or should text every half an hour, and I should receive a text back from from this person every half an hour. That said, my experience doing this and my experience when clients do this, it is really remarkable because people start seeing where the day really is going. And that’s incredibly powerful. So I wanted to share this for the people who listen to us. And if you have not David even coming to offer the paper offering multimarkdown all for a long time. You can do it and I’ll do it in your calendar. my calendar cannot accept any more inputs at this time. But, but but he’s really interesting, he really went uncover, if not every basin, or many of them. So what’s a really good good article?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:14

Yeah, I appreciated what David is talking about here, especially since it comes from that perspective of you can you can do a plan for the day, but that’s not the way the day is necessarily going to go. And if you’re not feeling like those are matching your you’re not doing everything you plan to do every day, then it’s helpful to know where those things differ. So that going forward, you can just say, this is what I’m actually going to do. And then it ends up being what you do. Because if you plan to do something, and then do it, don’t do it over time, it just competes with your self efficacy, and then you start to feel ineffective. And that’s when all of those negative self speak issues come about and you know, negative feelings towards yourself. It’s not necessary. And you can do more when you’re motivated by virtue of seeing yourself have success with some system. And so making sure that you’re planning the day and executing the day, as you planned, it is really, really helpful. Okay, on to our next story.

Augusto Pinaud 31:04

Google wants employees to return to home, despite the productivity gains, and it’s an article from Bloomberg. And once you go into the article, and yeah, it’s because

Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:23

So first and foremost, you know, back in back in April, Google basically came out and said, Oh, well, we want to, we want to get people back to the office ahead of schedule, and you know, all kinds of other things. And they realize that there was enough pushback internally, that they should probably hold off for that. And so, you know, that was kind of step one, they started doing some internal research and decided that in September, they wanted to start getting people back to the office. Now, this was based on certain findings, that said that 75% of employees want more collaboration and social connectivity in the in the workplace. And that was kind of the reason for them wanting to push, notwithstanding the fact that they determined that their engineers are actually more productive, working remotely, or just as productive as working from home or otherwise. So they, they know that they’re in kind of a tenuous space. And I think lots of companies are in that space, where we recognize that actually, people could be as productive at home as they can be at the office, if not even more productive in some, some, sometimes in one way or the other. Right? Like, I could go to the office and I couldn’t be more productive than I could be at home, depending upon my home and life situation, and my own mindset and mental models around working at the office versus home, and vice versa. So it’s It has nothing to do with location has everything to do with the output. And Google is making that algorithm algorithmic decision that they’re they recognize that the culture of Google is so important that they want to bring people back to the office for that reason. Now, I don’t know if it’s the right reason. I don’t know if it’s the right decision, either. But that’s what they’re saying. They’re saying, Yes, we recognize the data actually says one thing. And we also recognize that people want another and we have to, we have to mediate between those two. And I think the ultimate kind of thing that we kind of come to the the consensus we understand is that we need to give people choice, we need to give people opportunities for a hybrid approach to work. And this distributed work model really should be all of that Mullenweg from automatic, we really need to start thinking about the distributed model of work. And that way, no matter where people work, they can be productive. And if we empower people to do that, I think it’ll be really much more useful here, then us, you know, kind of volleying back and forth across the the court thinking that one is better than the other versus really, as always, a hybrid approach is going to be better. The middle, the middle road is going to be the better path for us. All.

Augusto Pinaud 33:57

Correct. So our next article is from about Manchester in the UK, and it’s what type of personal assistant Do you use, or should you use and this is really interesting because it’s relevant. I’m having this conversation with a couple of people. And the article goes into the different times as an assistant to do your admin duties or to do your content creation or to do your social media to do research, to do email management, or even to do just simple errands. And I am I particularly have one for social media help I have one for those errands i if i can delegate that those errands, I happily delegate those errands, I don’t need to do them. There are things for example, as content creation, there are things like research that I enjoy. So I tried to the best of my abilities to not delegate any of them. does work, evil management, I mean, it just start considering. That sounds quite interesting. But as we were saying before, when we talk about parents at the beginning, one of the big challenges with getting this assistance with successful is the ability to let go. And as I was saying, at the beginning, if you think you are the only one who can take the dishwasher out, then your kids will never be able to do it, they will be really happy, okay, but you will be stuck to take in the dishwasher forever. Same thing happen. In this case, if you think you are the only person who can send a tweet, because nobody will send a tweet better than you, then that assistant has no chance. The second thing, and again, it’s apply as the same as the kids this was, I remember, the moment I understood that they have in a virtual assistant is like having another kid that how liberating this was. And you know, in a good way, I didn’t mean this in a bad way to either partner, the kid’s mother, not the assistant on the sense that the more detailed my instructions were to both cases, the better the result was, when I tell my kids or when I used to tell my kids is your time to clean, you know, the waist of the dog outside. Again, the job was never to distend when I create now a checklist, this is what I mean was this, again, you need to grab the bag, you need to do this, you need to pick this, you need to put it in here. And now the bag need to go into trash. And after that you need to wash your hand slice. Now the work was done in the way I was expecting with the virtual assistant was exactly the same way I remember my first task that I delegate was a trip. Why? Because Well, that’s what happened when you don’t have a clue. Okay, so I told this person, this is my airline, this is my car. This is how tell I’m going book with a plane. Okay, 22 messages later, I told the person stop doing it, please, no more. And I went on booking in three seconds. And I was really frustrated. And I went and look for advice to a colleague of mine. And this person said, Well, where is your checklist? And I was like, no, what do you mean the checklist? What do you expect? I give her all the data? And mine is easy. No, no, no. Let’s go back. And, and again, it was a learning experience. So as this is important, yes, you can reduce cost, you can increase efficiency, you can scalable your operation. But you for this to have any chance of success. I think you need to let go.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:45

Yeah, I’m not the I’m not the greatest delegator. Having managed a fairly large team at one point. And now managing a smaller team, I still find myself struggling with giving up tasks that I want to do. And I do recognize, though, that the more and more I do delegate, the better off I am, in terms of the quality of output, you know, across the board. And the other scientists is that, as you talked about just giving clear instructions, I have gone to recording myself doing tasks, so that it can really just reduce the overhead of explained to people what I’m doing. So as I’m doing it, I’m just explaining it by voice and recording my screen. And that frequently solves about 95% of all of the issues that will crop up because they’re actually watching it, what I will frequently do is have them then watch the video and then create a checklist from watching me in the video, if I don’t already have a checklist created that way, they’ve kind of manifested their own checklist. And then I can look at it and say, Okay, did they get it all? Correct, you know, did they get all the components that I want them to do? And then I can say, okay, by the way, at this point, just make sure that, as I said in the video, this thing is really important to me. And just make sure that you take care of that. And as long as there’s a dialogue with them, they are that much more empowered to get to your standard of excellence, because they may not have the same standard of excellence that you have, for example, you know, my system probably has a higher standard of excellence in some areas than than I do in other areas, right? Like I’m much more diligent about certain things. And she’s much more diligent about certain things. And that really helps us complement each other because I can say, Hey, you know what, when I do this thing in that system, can you make sure you look at it and make sure that I got it, right, because she’s just human, she’s always aware of that stuff. And there are other areas where I want to make sure that when she does work, I’m looking at that, because that’s just an area where I know that if it’s not exactly the way I want it to be, I’m going to be upset, but I’m not upset with her. I’m just I just want it to be a certain way. And that’s helped me actually offload more work than before because I would always feel this sense of, it’s not going to get done the way that I want it to get done. And the reality is, is that if I can get rid of 80 to 90% of the work, then the other 10% is worth it right? You know, that makes it that much easier, don’t be worried about having to take the 10% across the finish line, because you’re getting rid of 90% of the work. So you know, sometimes you get a little bit hung up on that stuff. And what I’ve been primarily working on is actually doing the first 10% of the work, right? preparatory work, doing the content creation, and then having others take over the other components so that I can then move on to the next thing. And everyone else can kind of clean up and do the distribution, and whatever else needs to be done with other kinds of work that we’re doing. So it’s kind of balancing those pieces out. But there are a lot of areas in which you can get assistance. And it’s readily available today. And we should take advantage of those components there. So the opportunity, all right, on to our next and last productivity article.

Augusto Pinaud 40:43

So medium magazine is having an article about the toxic culture of self help, and it was a good article, and the article says, you know, people, apparently you can get richer, smarter, happier, become more popular and more confident, the self industry that seems to have an answer, or does it? And are you can find a book for in the self help industry for every solution for every problem, maybe a problem for every solution to but the issue, I don’t think is toxic culture, I think the problem is, the application is toxic. Because sadly, is not the book doesn’t matter how good the book is. And you get a book, like getting things done that many of the people who listen to us have read more than once. Yeah, but if you don’t apply, I don’t care how good the book is. Okay. And that’s one of the things of the culture of self help. We jumped to the next book, and to the next book, and to the next book, but never slow down enough to really get good at any of those books. Did you need to read Getting Things Done? As I have read it? No, you don’t. Okay? But you need to make sure that you come back to some of those materials that you find that relevant, and really apply them and really see, remember that the person who read that book that you self help book that you can see, they’re so good. The second time, it’s not the person who read it the first time, hopefully. So I don’t think it’s a toxic culture, I think the problem is, we don’t stay long enough into the material to really get good at the material.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 42:42

Yeah, I somewhat disagree with the article. And in using the term toxic culture of self help, I liked the article for bringing up some important components that people feel sometimes, you know, shaded by material, because it makes them feel as though they should be doing things that they don’t need to be doing. And I feel like there’s a sense of, in especially social networks, like Facebook, and otherwise, where people put up their kind of picture perfect lives. And somehow they are to feel as though they should have and live those lives. Life is messy. You know, for those of you who can’t tolerate messy, that’s okay. You may, you may structure your life a little bit differently, so that you don’t have as messy of a life. But I just consider life messy. And I am bringing my level of order to the level of comfort I need to for to bring kind of order to that chaos. And so I do what I do, because I need that level of order. Not everybody does. And for me, you know, behaviors or habits, however you kind of discuss them behaviors are to individuals, as organizations or groups of people are to culture. And so to say that there’s a toxic culture means that the people around you in the self help space are somehow parroting something negative or toxic. And honestly, I mean, I’ve been in the personal productivity, call it self help and time management space, whatever it is, but I have only ever had the most warm and embracing sense of culture in that space. I mean, I hope that I give as much in that sense when people come to me with needs of help. And I certainly don’t want anyone to ever feel as though because I give sometimes, you know, like in the meetups that I run in the GTD meetups, I sometimes give a little tough love. But you know, it’s all done in the sense that they want to do something and I’m trying to help them be better. And the goal in at least I don’t want to say the goal I feel like the culture in the in at least the community I have have seen and in personal productivity club is one of compassion is one of empathy, and one of collaboration and wanting to help and so I don’t I don’t really know nor really care what People are doing on Facebook and Instagram And otherwise, in terms of putting up their kind of fake, you know, front end, I know that in the real world, we struggle in the real world, we need to help each other in the real world, the material that you get from a self help book doesn’t need to be implemented 100%, you can just take one little nugget from getting things done one little nugget from the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you can take one nugget from even dare I say, deep work, and you can, you can get a benefit out of all of those. And you can, you can do well by yourself in that capacity. So I reject the notion that there’s a toxic culture around self help, I believe that there is actually a really positive culture around self help, and that people are potentially experiencing some level of toxicity by virtue of having a, you know, an inappropriate view of what they should be doing about themselves. You don’t need to be doing everything, you don’t need to be doing all the things people tend to pile on, you know, I have to do this, and I have to do this. And I have to do this. And that sounds like to me, perfectionism, not toxic culture. So I hope that what what we get out of this article is that reach out to people in the self help space. And I hope you get as much warmth, and embracing as I’ve gotten in that space, I have met so many great friends and people that I consider colleagues and friends over the many years that I’ve been in the personal productivity space. And if anybody is giving you trouble, you let us know. And I just don’t, I will have a talk with them. Because you should only be having a positive experience in the culture. And then and then right match the amount of work you need to do to your level of capability. Don’t try and go beyond that, because it’s only going to cause you strife, and, and struggle. And that’s not going to be positive for anybody. So I just want I want I want this to be a welcoming, affirming space for people in in the personal productivity space, whether whether you consider that self help or not, or self help, Jason, really do believe that. So that takes us on to our new tools of the week segment. And so each week, Augusto and I scour the interwebs for the various productivity news and technology news and all the various productivity articles that we bring to Anything But Idle. And of course, we come across many new tools and services that we think you might like. So in new tools of the week, we bring you those tools, one each one from each of us. And so this week, I thought I would show everybody a physical tool for change. And this week, I am bringing to the table. This little it’s called play work. And I was thinking of it in line with the with kids, right. So this is a little timer, it’s a physical timer. And it has two different sets of time on it akin to, let’s say, the Pomodoro Technique. And so what you can now do is if you have a child, you can actually set a timer, say it’s 1520 minutes where they need to do a particular assignment. And then you can set a little play timer. And so then they have the ability to play for some period of time, I bet that five minutes is probably not enough for a younger child. Maybe as they get older, they they can you can figure those things out. But I really think you need to do a little bit more preparatory work with those kids before you go ahead and thrust them into something like this. So one, help them manifest a playlist, like what are the things that they like doing? What are the things that they would want to enjoy doing in short bursts that will allow them to go ahead and enjoy themselves, and then identify the work that they have to do home assignments, homework assignments, maybe you have some additional work their chores, like going and cleaning up after the dog, and or taking out the garbage, doing laundry, these are really important things for kids to know, to grow up to be healthy adjusted members, you know, in their own lives. And so they do need to learn how to do this kind of work and giving them play and work combined together really can be so motivational. So I think this is a really, really fun tool to be able to kind of play with your kids and get used to. And so yeah, so that’s my tool this week. Hopefully some folks get some benefit out of it. And maybe you get it for yourself. Maybe you get it for your kids. But it’s kind of fun too because it has this little lever z like kind of tap play and tap work and has a little beeper that goes off on either side and there’s two different tones, I believe it is for either play or work so you get a different tone for each already Cousteau what’s your new tool this week.

Augusto Pinaud 49:33

So my new tool this week and I also when in a physical tools called air fly and done by a company called 12,000 that I have had pretty good luck with their products before and what they do is they allowed you to connect it to basically any device who have a 3.5 headphone out and then connect to the outputs. I love my earbuds on I use my airports all the time, and happens that I sometimes get devices from clients that they want me to do the work that I do with them on those devices, and then not all of them are compatible, or sometimes they are not for security, so I can plug in that into the laptop or the device. And now I can go put my my carpets on and talking to get the music in the way I like. That is really, really effective for me. So I wanted to share that today.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 50:34

That is fantastic. The air fly because it

Augusto Pinaud 50:37

flies cold. Yeah. And then you have four versions, they have one that is just the most basic one that you can even connect to set of headphones to that one that you can connect to USB C and one that you can even use it to transmit from the phone to the radio or to the device.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 50:57

Fantastic. Looks like 12 South actually has quite a number of other products as well in the air fly. Not very cool. Very cool. All right. onward to our story, our featured story this week, our featured story this week is all about for reasons switching to Android messages or Google messages to default for RCS. And so this is phenomenal. I am so so happy about this in so many ways. And of course, we have a lot to talk about here. So first and foremost, for those of you who don’t know, RCS is N stands for rich communications, rich communication services. So just like SMS short messaging service, and MMS, which is the multimedia messaging service, those are the two messaging services we currently think about when we use a telco or telecom carrier. When you send a message, by phone from your Messages app to someone else that is usually sent through SMS or MMS. If it’s just text, then it’s going to go by SMS, if it’s if it’s going to be photo or video, it’s going to be sent over the MMS protocol. Well, Google, in the right perspective, decided that they wanted to bring all of the messaging platforms together under a more secure and clear protocol. And that was RCS, they’ve been working over the last few years to make that happen. There was another initiative, the ccmi. And I think in April varizen, went ahead and kind of just abandoned that effort, trying to get together all of the various communications carriers in that other platform. And so now, at&t, T Mobile, and Verizon in the United States have all determined that they will support the RCS standard on Android. And in 2022, this means that you get end to end encrypted messaging, you get chat based features, like being able to emoji a message, being able to type and see that the person is typing in some other lightweight features like that in the system. So I just I’m really, really excited to see us have secure communications. I mean, that’s the biggest part for me is that these communications between individuals so that we don’t have to worry about the the messages being sniffed at by governments or otherwise. And so that’s the part that really speaks to me, especially folks overseas. And of course, as we said before, this is being supported by us Telecom carriers, the three majors, so we need, obviously, international telcos to now support the standard as well. But this is a big move in the right direction, except for the one big missing party and all of this. And do you want to know who that is? That’s, of course, Apple. So, you know, the way in which I see it, and you can give some, some thoughts here, a gousto. Because you are in the apple ecosystem, you know, Apple has patchworked, together, as I understand it, Apple messages. So what is iMessage is basically multiple different purchases, acquisitions and development over time, and it’s a big holy mess. And so they decided to put up this firewall. So they have this firewall that they implemented to kind of shield imessages from the various pieces of the puzzle that are problematic. And so they have the choice of continuing the firewall or rewriting Apple messages from the ground up. And from my perspective, this would be a really great time to make that choice to rewrite Apple messages from the ground up and support RCS and then make everybody a part of their blue bubbles. So, you know, like, Where do you come down on this Augusto in terms of Do you think Apple will make it make a choice in that direction? not to put too much opinion into it, but what are your feelings? What are your feelings there in terms of what would make them want to support this versus not?

Augusto Pinaud 54:45

Well, suddenly there apple and and probably the answer is no, they will never support it. Why? Because they are Apple, and that’s what the reality. That said, I wish they do because I remember Remember, and even to this day happened where I remember what you could start sending text messages, because you knew that the other person was an iPhone. So one example I can use is Michael Slowinski. Okay, Michael wins, Kanye has been a guest on the show. And he and I has exchanged text, often. Okay, so it was really nice when I could start sending him text because I knew he had an iPhone, and it was blue. And it didn’t cost me an international text message. So if we go to RCS, everybody, including Apple, that means text messages could get universal, regardless where they are. And that means, yeah, services like WhatsApp and telegram that is basically what they do, will be in, will need to up their game or challenge the game, but also will simplify the life for a lot of people. You know, right now, for me, I have received text messages in the text message app in the WhatsApp in the telegram. And I would love to receive one place, all of them in one place.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 56:09

Yeah, I don’t I don’t see that happening anytime soon. The question about no hope in this, but I actually don’t see the the need for telegram to feel any level of risk here or even WhatsApp for that matter, which is owned by Facebook. But the goal here with RCS really, for me is that SMS is inherently insecure. And the The reality is, is that every day, you know, basically billions of people on the planet are exchanging these short messages with each other thinking that they’re sending it over a more secure platform than then they would otherwise. And they’re not, you know, they’re getting their security codes, text message to them from their banks, they’re getting there, you know, all of these kinds of things are happening. And if we supported RCS RCS, then we get a more secure environment. And that would require all of them to support that platform to be pretty easy. I mean, you know, implement with Twilio, Twilio will support the RCS standard very quickly. And and then most of those background services then become secure, truly secure, as opposed to what we have right now, which is very, you know, it’s it’s Swiss cheese at best. And so I would really like to see us be able to move in that direction of having much more secure messaging on that level, and telegram just, I mean, telegram beats Google messages and Apple messages and features, you know, 100 to one, you know, the ability to have, you know, rooms and social audio rooms, and, and the rich sticker environment, all of those things, even with G board installed on Android, you know, telegram is still a better application, you have dedicated apps across all of the devices, you have all of this, you know, ability to have channels and groups as well as individual one to one messages. I really like the way in which telegram and many others signal and otherwise have have created these, this app ecosystem that helps us message. So I’m really hopeful that what we see in RCS is just bringing a new protocol that provides end to end encryption for users and it creates a more secure environment for us to be able to communicate and I hope this becomes a global reach a global protocol that we can all just like, I mean, the the the signal protocol which has come to WhatsApp, right, so you know, basically Facebook is now utilizing the the end to end encrypted protocol from signal and that has become somewhat of a standard protocol is kind of the standard bearer for if you want to do EDI, he, he really well, then that’s what you do. I hope that RCS really becomes that on the planet. Alright, any other thoughts around this?

Augusto Pinaud 58:50

No. And I really hope that Apple turned around, but who knows?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 58:57

All right, we’ve got a few announcements and gousto before we close out what are our announcements this week?

Augusto Pinaud 59:02

So the first announcement we have is Samsung next galaxy on pack is happening online on August 11. Yes, you’re hearing right they have called every event this year galaxy unpack why. But on August the 12th we will have an especial event. And we are going to have here with us Art Gelwicks. So So booked your calendar for that. The next announcement we have is coda raise. 100 million bucks now is one of the race series d 400 million bucks. That was one of the apps I brought on a past episode as a new tool the week they tried to be the whole one place documents. Really interesting app. And finally, Google fix the issue that was breaking Chrome OS devices and now you can update Bigger. The other night, we have another more news that are going to be on our show notes. And that’s all.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:00:09

Fantastic. All right, we’ve covered the productivity and technology news and articles for the week. Thank you, Augusto for joining me this every week.

Augusto Pinaud 1:00:18

Thank you very much.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:00:19

All right, everybody, let us know in. So first and foremost, if you’re on Anything But Idle comm, you will find our show notes. If you’re not on Anything, But idle.com, you can find our show notes by going to Anything But idle.com forward slash 071. Each of our episodes are numbered those three three digit numbers. And so if you type Anything But Idle comm forward slash and that three digit number, you’ll be taken to our episode page for that week. And you’ll be able to find our show notes, which will include links to all the stories, they include our new tools of the week, when we have our contributor segments, those are there for you as well, they’re, you know, they’re available for you as well. any extra stories we didn’t cover, those are in the extra stories section. And we also include a text transcript that’s machine generated. And so it is there, you just click on that Read More link, it’ll expand the the transcript for you to read right there. Or you can click the PDF download button right below it. And that will download it as a PDF for you to read offline, maybe want to throw that into good notes or into Evernote or something like that, and read along while you’re listening or watching the show. So that’s all there on Anything But idle.com. If we missed a story, after you reviewed all of the show notes, then come join us and go to Anything But idle.com click on the Contact page and let us know you can also comment on the episode page if there’s an article that you want to share with us. And if there’s a story you want us to cover in a future week, you can tweet at us at Anything But Idle Comm. And we have our DMS available for us to do to do that. And you can also just submit it through the contact page. So you can go ahead and submit the contact page, any articles that you think are pertinent for us to discuss and so if you have a question or comment, that’s also the place to reach us at Anything But Idle Comm. And if this is your first time watching the live stream, welcome, Hello. Nice to meet you. And so go ahead and click the subscribe button so you get notified when we go live weekly in the future. And feel free to also click the thumbs up icon which helps to let the Google in the YouTube universe know to bring new personal productivity watchers and listeners to the fold. And so thank you for doing that. If you are listening to the podcast show and you’re not already subscribed or following the podcast, feel free to go ahead and do that we have instructions on Anything But idle.com for being able to subscribe or follow the podcast so you can find that there. If you are you’re already doing that. And you can also leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts or Stitcher or otherwise. And that really does help us reach more personal productivity enthusiasts like you. And so thank you for doing that. With that. We will see you next time here on Anything But Idle. Here’s your productive life.