Podcasts about apple calendar

What happens when motherhood collides with disappointment, longing, and the parts of ourselves we thought we had to bury? In this raw and resonant conversation, Dr. Becky sits down with The Push and The Whispers author Ashley Audrain to explore the complicated terrain of identity, self-trust, and the forms of self-preservation we rely on to survive — and stay human — in the midst of parenting. Together, they unpack what it means to hold space for all the parts of ourselves: the ones we show, the ones we silence, and the ones still trying to be heard.Because being a mother doesn't erase who you are. It just makes the work of knowing — and owning — yourself that much more essential.Get the Good Inside App by Dr. Becky: https://bit.ly/4fSxbzkFollow Dr. Becky on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drbeckyatgoodinsideSign up for our weekly email, Good Insider: https://www.goodinside.com/newsletterFor a full transcript of the episode, go to goodinside.com/podcast.As parents, the mental load is real—to-do lists, doctor's appointments, sports practices, work events, birthday parties… Should I keep going? If your family is anything like mine, it can feel like there are a thousand things to remember and your brain is running on overdrive. What if I told you there's a way to bring a little more calm and clarity to your chaotic, always-changing family schedule?Meet Skylight Calendar. It's a central, easy-to-see touchscreen with clear colors, so everyone in your family can stay in the loop. As someone obsessed with efficiency, it almost feels like magic how seamlessly it syncs with all of the calendars you're already using—Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook, and more. I truly see this tool as your partner in sharing the mental load with your kids AND partner.And because life doesn't stop when you leave the house, Skylight offers a free companion app. You can add or update events, check off to-do lists, and stay in sync with your family no matter where you are. Another great feature: If you're not completely thrilled within 120 days, you can return it for a full refund. Ready to say goodbye to calendar chaos and hello to a more organized and connected family life? Right now, Skylight is offering our listeners $30 off their 15-inch Calendars. Just go to skylightcal.com/BECKY for $30 off. This offer expires December 31, 2025.Today's episode is also brought to you by Great Wolf Lodge. As a mom of three kids, I'm always on the lookout for family adventures that offer something for everyone (including myself!). That's why Great Wolf Lodge is high on our list of future destinations! They offer a world of fun, all under one roof, including water slides, a lazy river, a massive wave pool, arcade games, mini golf and nightly dance parties! With 23 locations all across North America, and more on the way, chances are there's a Great Wolf Lodge just a short drive away from you. You can save up to 40% off on any stay at Great Wolf Lodge from now through August 31st when you book at participating lodges. Just visit GreatWolf.com and enter the promo code “GoodInside” – when you book.

Notion Calendar trasciende el simple reemplazo de Apple Calendar; ofrece una integración profunda con tu información en Notion. Un ejemplo perfecto de cómo expandir un ecosistema sin complicarlo.Contacta con el autor:X: @jlacortBluesky: @lacortMail: lacort@xataka.comLoop Infinito es un podcast de Applesfera sobre Apple y su ecosistema, publicado de lunes a viernes a las 7.00 h (hora española peninsular). Presentado por Javier Lacort. Editado por Alberto de la Torre.

This week, I'm going to show you how to design your “perfect” day. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 348 Hello, and welcome to episode 348 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. What would a perfect day look like for you? I'm not talking about drinking sangria in a park, feeding animals in the zoo, and later, a movie.  I'm talking about how a typical day would go.  What time would you like to wake up? What would you enjoy doing for the first hour of your day? What would you like to do in the evenings? And what time would you like to go to bed? These questions are all part of what I call designing your perfect week. It's an exercise that helps you to bring some structure into your day. Once implemented, this reduces the number of decisions you need to make each day and makes planning less demanding and a lot faster.  Not taking control of your calendar means others will take control of it. If not your boss or customers, it'll be your family and friends. This leaves you being pushed and pulled all over the place.  When you wake up in the morning, you have no idea what will happen or where you will end up. More dangerously, you will have no idea whether you can get your work done, and inevitably, you'll find yourself with huge backlogs and a lot of accumulated stress.  Not a great place to be if you want to be better organised and more productive.  So, let me show you how you can regain control of your calendar and start putting what you want first.  This means it's time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Megan. Megan asks, hi Carl, I've tried designing a “perfect” week but found I don't have enough time to do everything I need to do. Do you have any tips to fit everything in?  Hi Megan, thank you for your question.  That you have discovered you don't have enough time for everything you want to do is part of why I recommend people do the Perfect Week calendar exercise. The purpose is to help you see what you do and don't have time for.  But first, how do you set up the Perfect Week calendar? First, open up your calendar—it doesn't matter whether it's a Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar. What you are going to do is create a new calendar and call it “Perfect Week”. I recommend you do this on a larger screen. It is possible to do it on a phone, but you won't see the bigger picture of the week. A laptop or tablet works better when you do this. Now, begin with your personal life. How much sleep do you want? What time will you go to bed? Block those times in first. For instance, if, in your perfect world, you go to bed at 11:00 pm and want seven hours of sleep, then you would block 11:00 pm to 6:30 am. (Allow yourself thirty minutes to fall asleep). Now, how long do you want for your morning routine? Perhaps you want the first hour of your day dedicated to you. To exercise, read, plan, meditate and/or write a journal. All you need to do in your perfect week calendar is block the time you want for these activities on your calendar. Call it your Morning routine time. (The details of what you do in that time can be added as a checklist in your notes later.) Next look at the evening. What would you like to do?  Be careful here; you may wish to block time out for family and friends. When you do this, you are involving other people, and they will have a different agenda to you.  You could, for instance, protect 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm for family time, but be flexible. Your teenage daughter will unlikely want to spend much time with you. Your partner, on the other hand, may wish you to sit with them and talk or watch their favourite TV show.  Consider “family time” as being flexible. If no one wants to spend time with you, be available. Perhaps you could read in the same room as your family or do some chores around the house.  Next, what would you like to do later in the evening before you go to bed? Put that on your calendar. Many of my clients enjoy playing a musical instrument, others use that time for self-study and some go out for an evening walk. Whatever you want to do, put it on your calendar.  Now, your work.  A couple of questions you can ask here are: how much time do you need to do focused work? Work that if you are consistent with will prevent backlogs and ensure you meet your deadlines.  And how much time will you allow per week for meetings?  Limiting your available meeting time is a great way to control time.  Imagine you work a forty-hour week and you want three hours a day for focused work; that would leave you with twenty-five hours each week for everything else.  If you were to limit the time you were available for meetings to fifteen hours a week, that would leave you with ten hours for all the unexpected demands that inevitably pop up. Would that be sufficient time? Play around with these numbers and see if you can find a happy balance.  With the meeting limit once you have filled the limit for that week, you only offer meeting times for the following week.  As this is your perfect week, you can fix times when you are available and when you are not.  Once you have completed your perfect week, does that look like a week you would be happy living? One adjustment I made to mine was on a Monday. My calls begin early—well, early for me—meaning I need to wake up at 6:15. That's much earlier than usual. I discovered I was not able to work effectively after around 11:00 am. So, I added a ninety-minute nap window from 11:00 am. That worked perfectly for me.  Now, once you have created your perfect week, turn on your other calendars. Where do things align? You will probably find some activities already aligned, but some will be wildly out Your mission now—should you choose to accept it—is to align your real calendar with your perfect week one.  This mission will not happen instantly; aligning things may take several months, but it gives you a purpose and goal.  What happens if, after doing this exercise, you discover there are not enough hours in the week to do everything you want to do?  Most people find this after completing this exercise.  It is worth remembering you do not have to do everything all at once. You could take a course on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and go to your Pilates class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings. Perhaps you could do your weekly planning on a Saturday morning instead of a Sunday evening. This is about completing a puzzle. How do you fit everything into your 168 hours a week?  You can also consider making things seasonal. In the winter months, you do one activity, and in the summer, you do another type of activity. After all, the weather is generally nicer in the summer, and the days are longer.  You may even wish to use the Spring as the cleaning-up season. I do.  Designing the perfect week calendar is not about locking you into a strict structure every week. Its purpose is to help you become realistic about what you can and cannot do each day. It's from here that you can design the kind of life you want to live. Over the five or six years since I first did the Perfect Week exercise, I have modified it many times. For example, when I did it the first time, I had this rather ambitious idea: I would go to bed at 11:00 pm and wake up at 6:00.  That didn't last very long. Many of my coaching calls happen late at night, and I often don't finish until after midnight. Now, I go to bed at 1:30 am and wake up at 8:30 am (except for Mondays). That has worked for me for over a year now.  I've also learned that while I've always believed that I am a night owl, I am more focused and creative in the mornings. This led to me protecting 9:30 to 11:30 am five days a week for my focused work.  One thing you don't want to do, Megan, is to try and squeeze everything in. That will leave you feeling exhausted. Always remember you are a living, breathing human being, not a machine.  You need breaks, you do need to stop and enjoy nature and the environment you live in. It gives your mind a rest, and it elevates your creativity and fulfilment by giving you something different to look at other than a screen.  While I am very structured, I like it that way—I still keep my afternoons free for activities I want to do in the moment. Taking my dog, Louis for his walk, doing the grocery shopping and reading, for example. Whatever needs my attention, the afternoons are when I can do it. Learning those things was a result of doing the Perfect Week exercise.  David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, often says, “You can do anything, but you cannot do everything”, and I've found that's true. That means the question becomes, what will you do? I would also say that the end of the year is a perfect time to do this exercise. The start of a new year gives you a motivation to try things and develop the kind of week you want to live.  Thank you, Megan, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week. 

This horoscope is for the full moon in Aries, which happens on Thursday, October 17, 2024 at 7:26 a.m. ET.Visit transitcal.com to get transits personalized to your natal chart on Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Outlook! Use my code ETHEREAL15 for 15 percent off.Book a reading with me on my website at etherealastrology.com/readings.We recently ended, changed, or broke free (perhaps unexpectedly) from some relationships, money, and mindsets in our life that were holding us back.As a result, we are feeling more able to be our authentic self, align with our values, and do what we want to do in life (that is easier, quicker, shorter, and more in our best interest).However, we are really struggling to actually do those things we want to do in life that are easier and quicker now that we have the freedom to do so (without these things holding us back). That is because we are not used to doing things in this different way, don't identity ourselves as a go-getter, feel unsafe taking action, feel ungrounded taking action, feel mean doing our own thing, and/or feel bad about some recent events.As a result, we are not doing anything at all, or are doing things in weird ways — like sideways, or taking the long route, instead of hitting them head on.Because of that, we may feel very sad and triggered, like nothing is changing positively in our lives for the better. We may also bring up tons of stuff that has happened in the past that didn't go right. We may also feel angry and upset and take that out passive aggressively on other people.That is because we aren't doing anything for ourselves to put our lives in a better place.As a result, I recommend that we find the courage and choose to take action, even if it is uncomfortable. I also recommend that we focus on the present (instead of get lost on the past), look on the bright side, and have fun with the process.I also recommend that we learn from our mistakes and be flexible.If we can do that, we are eventually going to find our way, act more effectively, and make significant positive change in our lives, especially by this time next year!Contents of this video ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬(0:00) Introduction(8:10) General Themes(14:00) Past Context(15:05) Specifics(50:55) Summary(55:30) Other Notes(1:09:55) Inside Degrees(1:19:25) TarotFollow me on Instagram:http://www.instagram.com/ethereal_astrologyWatch me daily on Horoscope.com:https://www.horoscope.com/us/horoscopes/general/horoscope-overview-daily-today.aspxThe song in my intro and outro video is "Escape" by Sappheiros.License: Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0Music powered by BreakingCopyright: https://breakingcopyright.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What are the time-tested principles of better time management and productivity? That's what I'm exploring in this week's episode.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links:   Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 337 Hello, and welcome to episode 337 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. If you have read books on time management and productivity, you may have picked up that there are a few basic principles that never seem to change.  Things like writing everything down, not relying on your head to remember things, planning your day and week, and writing out what is important to you.  These are solid principles that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. The tools we use may have changed, but these principles have not and never will.  What is surprising are the attempts to reinvent time management. New apps and systems seem to come out every month claiming to be “game-changing”—I hate that phrase—or more ways to defy the laws of time and physics and somehow create more time in the day than is possible.  Hyrum Smith, the creator of the Franklin Planner, an icon of time management and productivity, always said that time management principles have not changed in over 6,000 years. What has changed is the speed at which we try to do things.  Technology hasn't changed these time management principles; all technology has done is make doing things faster.  Today, I can send an email to the other side of the world, and it will arrive instantly. Two hundred years ago, I would have had to write a letter, go to the post office to purchase a stamp, and send it. It would arrive two or three months later.  Funnily enough, I read a book called The Man With The Golden Typewriter. It's a book of letters Ian Fleming sent to his readers and publisher. He often began his letters with the words “Thank you for your letter of the 14th of February,” yet the date of his reply was in April.  Not only were things slower fifty years ago, people were more patient.  So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Lisa. Lisa asks, Hi Carl, I've noticed you've been talking about basic principles of productivity recently. Are there any principles you follow that have not changed? Hi Lisa, thank you for your question. The answer is yes, there are. Yet, it took me a long time to realise the importance of these principles.  The first one, which many people try to avoid, is establishing what is important to you. This is what I call doing the backend work.  You see, if you don't know what is important to you, your days will be driven by the latest urgent thing. That's likely to come from other people and not from you.  Stephen Covey wrote about this in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, with his Time Management Matrix, also called the Eisenhower Matrix. This matrix is divided into Important and urgent, important and not urgent, urgent and not important, and not urgent and not important.  The goal of this matrix is to spend as much time as possible in the second quadrant—the important but not urgent. This area includes things like getting enough sleep, planning, exercising, and taking preventative action.  The more time you spend here, the less time you will spend in the urgent and important and urgent and not important areas.  Yet, unless you know what is important to you, the only thing driving your day will be the things that are important to others. That includes your company, your friends and family. They will be making demands on you, and as you have no barriers, their crises will become yours. You, in effect, become part of the problem instead of being part of the solution.  When you have your life together, you can offer calm, considered solutions to those you care about. You also know when to get involved and when to stay well away.  Yet, you can only do that when you know what is important to you.  Many authors and time management specialists refer to establishing what is important to you in different ways; Hyrum Smith calls this establishing your governing values, Stephen Covey calls it knowing your roles, and I call them your areas of focus.  These are just names for essentially the same thing. Get to know what is important to you as an individual. Then, write them down in a place where you can refer back to them regularly so you know that your days, weeks, and months are living according to the principles that are important to you.  It's these that give you the power to say no to things that conflict with your values.  Without knowing what they are, you will say yes to many things you don't enjoy or want to do.  The next principle is to plan your week and day. Again, this is another area so many people avoid. I remember hearing a statistic that less than 5% of Getting Things Done practitioners do any weekly review.  If you've read Getting Things Done by David Allen, you'll know that he stresses the importance of the weekly review in almost every chapter.  People who don't plan are often driven by the fear of what they might learn, such as a forgotten project deadline, an important meeting that needs a lot of preparation, or a lost opportunity.  Yet, these are the results of not planning. If you were to give yourself thirty minutes at the end of the week to plan the next week and five to ten minutes each evening to plan the next day, many of the things you fear will never happen. You will be alerted to the issues well before you need to act.  For me, consistently planning my week and day has been life-changing. This simple activity has ensured I am working on the right things, dealing with the most important things, and ending the week knowing that the right things were completed.  Prior to becoming consistent with my planning, I was all over the place. I spent far too much time on the unimportant and saying yes to many things I didn't want to do. I was also procrastinating A LOT.  A huge benefit of planning is that you get to see data. In other words, you learn very quickly what is possible and what is not. When you begin planning the week, you will be overambitious and try to do too much. The more you plan, the more you learn what can be done.  No, you won't be able to attend six hours of meetings, write a report, reply to 150 emails, go to the gym and spend quality time with your family.  When you know what is important, you will ensure you have time for it because you plan for it (can you see the connection?). You will start to say no to some meetings (and yes, you can say no by offering an alternative day and time for the meeting) and renegotiate report deadlines.  A third principle is to manage your time ruthlessly. By that, I mean being very strict about what goes on your calendar. Never, ever let anyone else schedule meetings or appointments for you.  Your calendar is the one tool you have that gives you control over your day. Allowing other people to control it essentially turns you into a puppet. No, never ever let that happen.  Now, before Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple Calendar, we carried our own diaries around with us. No one else could have control of it. If you were fortunate enough to have a secretary (now called an “executive assistant”), you would meet with her (secretaries were largely female in the 60s, 70s and 80s) each week and explain when you were and were not available.  Your secretary would then gate keep your calendar. The best secretaries were pretty much impossible to get past. They protected their boss's time.  People knew that time was important and for anyone to do their work, they needed undisturbed time. Your calendar was respected.  A person's diary was so important that the courts would accept it as evidence they were in a particular location. I doubt very much they would do that today.  A mistake is to say yes to a time commitment too quickly. This is how we get conflicts in our calendars. You cannot be in two places at the same time—that's another law of physics—so you either say no and offer an alternative date, or you have to waste time renegotiating with someone later.  I am shocked at how often I see conflicts on people's calendars. Clearing these up should be the first thing you do during your weekly planning.  Information you need to know about the day should go in the all-day section of your calendar, not in the timed area. Only committed timed events go in the time area of your calendar.  When your calendar truly reflects your commitments, you can then set about planning a realistic day. If you have six hours of meetings and thirty tasks to complete, you will know instantly that you have an impossible day, and you can either move some of your appointments or reduce your task list.  Ignoring it only diminishes the power of your calendar, leaving you again at the mercy of other people's crises and issues.  This is about being strict about your time. Wake up and go to bed at the same time each day so you have solid bookends to your day. Ensure you protect time for your important work and your family and friends. And never let other people steal your time.  The final principle is the tool you use won't make you more productive or better at time management. Tools come and go. In the 1980s, it was the Filofax. In the 90s, it was the Franklin Planner. Today is the latest fashionable app. It doesn't matter. None of them will ever make you more productive.  What will make you more productive is knowing what is important to you. Having a plan for the day and week so you know what must be accomplished that day, and week. And being in complete control of your calendar.  Get those three things right, and you will feel less stressed, more in control of your life and have a sense of purpose each day. Isn't that what we all want?  I hope that has helped, Lisa. Thank you for your question.  And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

Apple Calendar. The TTJ instructor team walks you threw the Mac Calendar app. Creating new appointments, setting locaiton for travel times, shared calendars, and much more. Enjoy this session to add this Calendar app to your Daily work flow. Follow SturItUp on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Also subscribe to my WhatsApp Channel, Podcast Channel, and Youtube Page for instant updates and to stream all SturItUp content. Support TechTalk Coast2Coast by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/techtalk-coast2coast Find out more at http://tech-talk.coast2coaststudio.com

This week's question is all about how I use the technology I have to be more productive and better manage my time.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 315 Hello, and welcome to episode 315 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. There's a lot of technology today that helps us be more productive. Our computers make producing work easy compared to twenty-five years ago. It's also made producing some kinds of work a lot cheaper. Imagine the cost of studio time if you wanted to record an album in 1999. Today, all you need is a laptop and a microphone, and you are good to go.  However, with all that wonderful technology, it's likely we have a lot of devices lying around gathering dust. I have a camera with four or five lenses sitting in a gorgeous canvas camera bag I haven't used in over five years. Now, all I take with me when we go on a trip is my phone. I'm not a professional photographer; I don't need all that equipment.  And don't get me started on all the apps I find I need to purge every once in a while because I don't use them anymore. Then, there are all the subscriptions you may be paying for that you are not using.  As an example, I recently discovered I had a Fantastical subscription. I used to use Fantastical. It was a cool calendar app that allowed me to have all my Todoist tasks and events in one place. Shortly after seeing what that did to my calendar, I stopped that integration (it was horrible. It made it look like I had no time at all for anything but work and meetings). Why was I paying for a service I was not using? I don't know, but it did cause me to go through all my app subscriptions to see if there were any more. (I found four more services I was paying for I was no longer using). This week's question addresses the heart of this technology overwhelm, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. This week's question comes from Mark. Mark asks, hi Carl, I was wondering what digital tools you use to get your work done. You seem to be using a lot of tools, and I thought it must be very confusing to decide what to use.  Hi Mark, thank you for your question. I remember hearing an interview with Craig Federighi in which he explained Apple's thinking on its products. He talked about how sometimes you work on your laptop, and other times, you may find the environment more suitable for an iPad. A good example of this would be when working at your desk, you may prefer the laptop, and if you attended a meeting, the form factor and mobility of an iPad might work better. It certainly did for me when I was teaching. I would create all my teaching materials from my computer, but when I went to the classroom I took only my iPad. That was all I needed to teach with.  Today, I no longer teach in classrooms; I work from home. However, I do like to step away from my desk and work somewhere else occasionally, and when I do that, I will only take my iPad with me. It's great for writing and fits nicely into a small shoulder bag I carry when I go out.  But let's look at how I use each individual device, and I will explain why. My phone is always with me, which means it's the perfect UCT (Universal Collection Tool). I have my phone set up so I can quickly collect tasks, ideas and articles I would like to read later.  I use Drafts, an amazing little app that connects with Todoist and Evernote. With Evernote, I have it set up so that if I have a blog post or YouTube video idea, I can send it directly to my content ideas note without having to open Evernote. Drafts also allow me to dictate my ideas, which is essential as I have most of my ideas when I am walking my dog, Louis. I can then collect my ideas and keep an eye on Louis at the same time.  When I am out and about, I process emails from my phone, but I rarely respond from there. There are better tools for responding to actionable emails. I have a process for email management which involves clearing my inbox between sessions of work and then setting aside an hour later in the day for responding. I will respond usually from my computer, but if I am away from my office, I will use my iPad.  And, of course, I use my phone for instant messages and occasionally scrolling social media when waiting for my wife (A daily activity haha). I also have an old iPad Mini. I love that iPad. It's my content consumption device, and on there, I will read blogs and articles I have collected through Readwise (an app for collecting articles you want to read later) and books through the Kindle app.  This iPad mini is not connected to any messaging service (Except Apple Messages) or email. It's purely for consumption.  I should say I am not into gaming—never have been, so I have no gaming devices or apps. My guilty pleasure is reading and watching historical documentaries—which YouTube provides me in abundance. I will watch these on the big TV at home late at night when I am winding down for the day.  My iPad Pro (I think the 3rd edition) has the Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil connected, and as I mentioned, I use that as my main mobile device. The keyboard is wonderful to type on, and the Pencil is great for highlighting sections in documents. Strangely, I don't ever use it for writing. I'm a fountain pen user, and the Apple Pencil (or any stylus, for that matter) doesn't feel right for me. Plastic on glass doesn't work (in my humble opinion). The feel of a 14 carat gold nib on some fountain pen-friendly Japanese paper has got to be experienced to be believed. I also use my iPad Pro to listen to music when I am working. The battery on that thing lasts forever. I have a Bluetooth speaker in my office that has incredible bass (I love deep house music when I am working; the bass really helps)  My computer is for the heavy lifting: recording this podcast, editing my YouTube videos, and creating workbooks and documents. I also do a fair amount of my writing on my computer too. I also prefer to clear my actionable emails on my computer. All my design work is done on my computer from creating thumbnails for YouTube videos to workshop banners and online course materials.  And that's it for devices. Now apps.  My primary productivity apps are Apple Calendar, Todoist and Evernote. I have experimented in recent months with Apple Notes, and while Apple Notes is an excellent note-taking app, Evernote has some features that Apple Notes does not. Primarily the ability to create note links that can be pasted into Todoist. You can do this in Apple Notes, but it's fiddly, and I hate things that are fiddly.  Todoist is where I keep my tasks. It has a beautiful and simple interface, and in the ten years I have used it, it has never let me down. Todoist is on all my devices, as is Evernote, but… This is where Evernote is currently weak; I find the mobile version of Evernote poor. The text is too small, and there are too many button presses to get to where I want to be. However, as I use Drafts to get notes into my system, that's something I can live with.  And that's a good point to make. I've used Todoist for over ten years, and Evernote has been my go-to notes app for almost fifteen years. This means I have learned how to use these apps properly, I've come to trust them, and I don't have to waste time trying to figure out how to do a particular action. I've learned everything I need to learn to use these apps optimally.  Apple Calendar has been my calendar app of choice for pretty much the last twenty years. I did try Fantastical for a couple of years, but the additional features were not very useful to me. Certainly not worth a subscription.  Now for the miscellaneous apps. I use Acuity for my coaching scheduling service. This means my coaching clients can book a call whenever they want to, and there's no back-and-forth trying to find a mutually convenient time. As mentioned earlier, I use Readwise for my book highlights and for collecting articles. This is a recent change as previously I used Instapaper, but they are doubling their prices in May, and they don't offer anywhere near the service Readwise does. The great thing is as I read a book and highlight a section or add a note, those notes and highlights are synced to Evernote in a notebook called Readwise.  For all my writing, I use Ulysses. This is a fantastically minimal writing app that, in full-screen mode, is just a dark screen with white text. There are no distractions at all and I can focus all my attention on my writing. This is synced with iCloud so if I am out and about and only have my iPad with me, I can carry on writing where I left off.  I recently looked at the number of words I have in Ulysses, and it's now approaching three million. That just blew me away—three million words in eight years. I wrote my book, Your Time, Your Way in Ulysses, as well as all my podcast scripts, blog posts and newsletter articles. It's a treasure trove of all my writing, and it's all archived in iCloud. That's one of the best things about not app-switching. You begin to create an archive of all your work in one place.  There is an exception to my writing process. I send my coaching clients written feedback after each call, and for that, I use Apple's Pages, which is Apple's version of Microsoft Word. Pages allows me to use a saved template for all my feedback.  For my admin and financial tasks, I use Apple's Numbers. I don't need the complexity of Microsoft Excel; my spreadsheet needs are simple.  And that's about it. The only other item I use to get my work done is paper. I use an A4 Rhodia notebook as my planning book. This is where all my projects, weekly planning and YouTube video ideas get developed. I also returned to writing my journal by hand after using Day One for five years. That was because I felt my life was beginning to be dominated by screens, and it's nice to get more use out of my fountain pen collection.  The most important thing for me is to keep the tools I use to a minimum. I've been down the road of trying out a lot of apps. What I discovered is that it's not the app that does the work. It's me. And for me to do my work in the most efficient and effective way possible, I need as few distractions as possible. Simplicity is my keyword when it comes to apps. The longer I need to spend trying to learn to use something, the less time I spend doing work. Which in turn means I spend less time with my family and doing the things I want to do. Not a very good way to manage time or be more productive. I hope that answers your question, Mark. Thank you for sending it in and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

In this episode, Spotify tells us we're a Top 10 podcast for ten listeners, a Top 5 show for eight listeners, and a Top Podcast for 4 of you! Grateful is an understatement. Thank you! We follow that with a discussion on Itsycal, a menu bar item that extends the functionality of Apple Calendar. In episode 21, Jeff talked about Astropad's Rock Paper Pencil, an iPad screen cover that turns writing on iPad into a better experience. Tom just received his this week and shared his first impressions. To wrap things up, Jeff shared his first-day experience with the technology in his new BMW X1.Links from the show:Itsycal for MacRock Paper Pencil by AstropadBMW X1Contact Us Drop us a line at feedback@basicafshow.com You'll find Jeff at @reyespoint on Twitter and @reyespoint@mastodon.sdf.org on Mastodon Find Tom at @tomfanderson on Twitter, and @tomanderson on Threads Join Tom's newsletter, Apple Talk, for more Apple coverage and tips & tricks. Show artwork by the great Randall Martin Design Enjoy Basic AF? Leave a review or rating! Review on Apple Podcasts Rate on Spotify Recommend in Overcast Intro Music: Psychokinetics - The Chosen Apple Music Spotify Show transcripts and episode artwork are AI generated and likely contain errors and general silliness.

You may be completely happy with the native calendar app on your phone or computer…and if so, you may not need to listen to this episode (but of course you should…just for sheer entertainment). But, if you are like us, you may have a need for more than the standard features to keep up with all of your events. Features such as scheduling availability, weather integration, and natural language input may be enough to warrant trying something new. The Brothers discuss their must-haves and ideal calendar app features that you should consider, as well as two of the top calendar applications on the market. Which app do the Brothers use, and which do the Brothers wish they were using? You will have to watch/listen to find out.Products/Apps/Services mentioned in this episode:Apple Calendar: the native Apple calendar application. BusyCal ($49.99 for permanent app ownership and 18 months of upgrades, included in SetApp subscription)Fantastical ($4.75/month, if you pay for a year)Your Hosts:Alan Jackson (the older Brother) is a producer of online content with Jackson Creative and survey researcher with Jackson Insight.Brian Jackson (the younger Brother) is an Associate Professor of Kinesiology at Pacific University and Product Director/Consultant at Senaptec, Inc.Have any feedback for the Brothers regarding this topic (or future topics)? Visit www.Brothers-In-Tech.com or email info@themesh.tv.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Are the old ways still the best ways? That's what I explore in this week's podcast.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 271 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 271 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. Have you ever wondered how people managed their work before we had computers on every desk and a smartphone in every pocket? I mean, how was it possible to manage our email when the only place we could read and respond to email was at our desks in our place of work? How did we know when we had a meeting when the only way to add a meeting to our calendar was to pull out our diaries and handwrite the meeting into it? Well, it may come as a surprise to many of you, but people did manage. In fact, I would go as far as to say people managed a lot better than they do today. Not using a digital system meant that it was far easier to compartmentalise our work. For instance, responding to letters—the things we used to communicate before email—meant we needed to be in the office. If we were not in the office, we could not respond to the letter.  This meant if an important, so called urgent, letter arrived on a Saturday morning, it would not be read until Monday morning and a response would not be going out until, at the earliest, Monday evening. So, in theory, if an urgent letter was sent on Friday afternoon, you would not be getting your reply until Tuesday morning, at the earliest. And, there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.  Yet, things got done. Deadlines were met and there was just as much stress around as there is today.  I was lucky, I began my working life just as the workplace was transitioning to the digital systems we use today. This meant I had the opportunity to see both sides. The analogue, the midway (where it was half analogue, half digital) and digital.  What I've learned is that there are advantages in both types of system and when you combine the best of the analogue systems with the best of the digital systems you can build yourself a robust, reliable time management and productivity system.  So, before we continue, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from David. Hi Carl, When I was working in the mid-1990s, we did not have computers or smartphones but we did have a system for managing our appointments and tasks. Do you think technology today has helped us or made managing our time harder?  Hi David, thank you for your question. You are right in observing that people managed just fine before computers, smartphones and iPads came onto the scene. In fact, while people still became overwhelmed, there was a better sense of time than there is today. Because we had to manually write out the things we had to do, rather than enter them into an app, we were much more conscious about what we were committing ourselves to.  Today, your task manager will take thousands, if not millions of tasks, and while that may sound fantastic, it does create a problem. The problem being: when will do do all these tasks?  The reality is, we cannot and never will be able to do everything. There is just too much we would like to do and a limited amount of time to do it in. When I was teaching English, I enjoyed the session where we looked at the words time and money. The two nouns share the exact same verbs. For instance, spend time on something, spend money on something. Or we can save money or save time.  But not only do these two words share the same verbs, they can also be thought of as the same thing. If we choose to spend money on a new iPad, that means we have less money to spend on other things. So, if you have $3,000 in your bank account and you choose to spend $1,000 on an iPad Pro with a keyboard and Apple Pencil, then you are going to have $2,000 left to spend on other things.  Let's say your rent to mortgage is $1,000 and household expenses come to $800.00, then you only have $200 to spend on other things.  With time, we all get 166 hours a week. We are usually committed to spending 40 hours at work, perhaps we need to spend 2 hours a day commuting to and from work (that's ten hours) and there's sleeping, eating and keeping ourselves clean.  If you decide to pay less rent or mortgage pretty soon you will have a debt that needs to be paid and if you don't pay it, you'll lose your home. If you choose to skip your sleep for a few days, you'll make yourself sick and won't be able to do your work and you'll likely lose your job.  Just like with bank account, there is a finite amount you can use and you get to choose how you spend your money or time on your commitments Technology has not changed that. Just because we can manage our to-do list digitally, doesn't mean we automatically become more productive. And just because we can schedule repeating events on our calendar, doesn't mean we have more time.  Most companies and individuals go bankrupt because they have over-committed themselves with debt. Likewise, you will burn yourself out if you over-commit yourself with time.  Now, one of the downsides of the digital systems is, the ease with which we can commit ourselves. We can throw an unlimited amount of tasks into our task managers without necessarily seeing what we have committed ourselves to. The more you throw in there, the less time you have for other things.  Conversely, with an analogue system—one written out on paper, you can see exactly what you are committing yourself to. Either you are writing your tasks out on a piece of paper or you are adding them into the notes section of a diary.  The act of writing them out, triggers your brain to resist adding too much. You become very aware of what you are committing to and how little time you have.  Recently, I was talking with a tech loving friend of mine who is always trying out the latest productivity apps—he understands it's a bad habit of his. However, he did confess to me recently that whenever he feels overwhelmed he pulls out an old fashioned notebook and writes out all the things that he thinks he needs to do.  Once he's done this “brain dump”, he will cross out all the tasks he either doesn't want to do or knows deep down he's never going to get round to doing.  This act of pruning his list leaves him feeling better and a lot less overwhelmed.  And that is where good old fashioned pen and paper still holds an advantage over the digital tools we now have access to. The awareness of what you are committing yourself to is far greater than when you use digital tools.  I love my Apple Calendar, it allows me to add recurring events, subscribe to my rugby team's calendar so I can see when they are playing and I can share a calendar with my wife so I know when our family commitments are. The downsides to modern digital calendars is you can allow other people to schedule events for you. For me, that's not good. That's like giving people access to your bank account and letting them withdraw money without asking you. You're never likely to do that are you? So why are we allowing people to do that with our time.  With a digital calendar, I would recommend you make sure you have, at the very least, the option to “accept”, “decline” or “maybe” a meeting request. I would also suggest if you need time to work on a piece of work, to block that time out. You do not need to worry, the other person cannot see what you have blocked out. All they see is that you are unavailable at that time. This will safeguard you against time thieves filling up your calendar with their priorities.  One area where I feel digital tools are better than analogue tools is the notes app. Traditionally the issue people had keeping all their notes in a notebook is finding their notes later. There was also the issue of scribbling down an idea on a scrap of paper only to lose that scrap paper.  With digital notes, you don't lose them and finding notes you wrote years ago is as simple as doing a keyword or date search within your notes app.  There is a danger if you in the habit of switching your digital notes app every few months that you will lose something. But if you stick with one notes app, over the years you are going to build, as Tiago Forte called it a “second Brain”.  I've been using Evernote for nearly 13 years and when I do a keyword search for something I am often pleasantly surprised when I get a note I wrote sever years ago. It's a great way to reminisce and also can trigger me to build on the ideas I had back then. That isn't as easy with paper-based notes unless you spend a lot of time carefully indexing and organising your notebooks—which can look incredibly impressive in a bookcase, but does take up an enormous amount of time just keeping organised.  Digital notes apps do a lot of that hard work for you.  So, David, to answer your question, I have found that when it comes to my calendar and notes, digital tools have made life much easier. There are dangers with your calendar, but if you are vigilant, your digital calendar can serve you better than having to carry around a diary everywhere you go.  And with your notes, you now have access to a library of ideas and thoughts on your phone—a digital device you carry with you everywhere you go. That again, is far better than carrying around a notebook—or series of notebooks so you have access to everything.  The only digital tool I feel is better in an analogue system is the to-do list. A paper based to-do list worked for centuries. The digital to-do list, or as we call it now task manager, can cause a lot of overwhelm and stress. It doesn't help you to prioritise what's important unless you keep it well organised and curated—which I find most people don't do—and a lot of things we add to our task managers disappear, never to be seen again until it's too late.  Thank you, David for you question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This just in, egg corner, you won't believe what happens next! Scammers are everywhere, watch out! It's my way or the highway. Wait, who's way? Andrew tells us about a brand new app called Calendar.app and 15 alternatives. And don't forget, ~~One Prime Plus Dot Com~~ Canion Dot Blog Slash Save! Damn Flies 00:00:00 Gnat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnat) :bug Fly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly)

What can AI do for us in the future? "How Platforms Die." Moving files off an old iPod Where can you purchase lossless audio tracks? Is there some best practices to prep your photo and video files for better long-term storage on a network-attached storage (NAS)? Syncing your calendars across multiple platforms. Hands-on with the Amazon Echo Show 10. Why are there several partitions on my USB drive? What are my options for remote support with my parents? Some lovely restaurant recommendations in Petaluma. Is it worth upgrading o the new M2 MacBook Pro that was released earlier in January? How to work within a restricted WiFi network to do wireless printing from a tablet and use Alexa to make phone calls? Hosts: Leo Laporte and Mikah Sargent Guest: Ant Pruitt Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Show notes and links for this episode are available at: https://twit.tv/shows/ask-the-tech-guys/episodes/1959 Download or subscribe to this show at: https://twit.tv/shows/ask-the-tech-guys Sponsor: cachefly.com

What can AI do for us in the future? "How Platforms Die." Moving files off an old iPod Where can you purchase lossless audio tracks? Is there some best practices to prep your photo and video files for better long-term storage on a network-attached storage (NAS)? Syncing your calendars across multiple platforms. Hands-on with the Amazon Echo Show 10. Why are there several partitions on my USB drive? What are my options for remote support with my parents? Some lovely restaurant recommendations in Petaluma. Is it worth upgrading o the new M2 MacBook Pro that was released earlier in January? How to work within a restricted WiFi network to do wireless printing from a tablet and use Alexa to make phone calls? Hosts: Leo Laporte and Mikah Sargent Guest: Ant Pruitt Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Show notes and links for this episode are available at: https://twit.tv/shows/ask-the-tech-guys/episodes/1959 Download or subscribe to this show at: https://twit.tv/shows/ask-the-tech-guys Sponsor: cachefly.com

What can AI do for us in the future? "How Platforms Die." Moving files off an old iPod Where can you purchase lossless audio tracks? Is there some best practices to prep your photo and video files for better long-term storage on a network-attached storage (NAS)? Syncing your calendars across multiple platforms. Hands-on with the Amazon Echo Show 10. Why are there several partitions on my USB drive? What are my options for remote support with my parents? Some lovely restaurant recommendations in Petaluma. Is it worth upgrading o the new M2 MacBook Pro that was released earlier in January? How to work within a restricted WiFi network to do wireless printing from a tablet and use Alexa to make phone calls? Hosts: Leo Laporte and Mikah Sargent Guest: Ant Pruitt Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Show notes and links for this episode are available at: https://twit.tv/shows/ask-the-tech-guys/episodes/1959 Download or subscribe to this show at: https://twit.tv/shows/all-twittv-shows Sponsor: cachefly.com

What can AI do for us in the future? "How Platforms Die." Moving files off an old iPod Where can you purchase lossless audio tracks? Is there some best practices to prep your photo and video files for better long-term storage on a network-attached storage (NAS)? Syncing your calendars across multiple platforms. Hands-on with the Amazon Echo Show 10. Why are there several partitions on my USB drive? What are my options for remote support with my parents? Some lovely restaurant recommendations in Petaluma. Is it worth upgrading o the new M2 MacBook Pro that was released earlier in January? How to work within a restricted WiFi network to do wireless printing from a tablet and use Alexa to make phone calls? Hosts: Leo Laporte and Mikah Sargent Guest: Ant Pruitt Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Show notes and links for this episode are available at: https://twit.tv/shows/ask-the-tech-guys/episodes/1959 Download or subscribe to this show at: https://twit.tv/shows/total-leo Sponsor: cachefly.com

What can AI do for us in the future? "How Platforms Die." Moving files off an old iPod Where can you purchase lossless audio tracks? Is there some best practices to prep your photo and video files for better long-term storage on a network-attached storage (NAS)? Syncing your calendars across multiple platforms. Hands-on with the Amazon Echo Show 10. Why are there several partitions on my USB drive? What are my options for remote support with my parents? Some lovely restaurant recommendations in Petaluma. Is it worth upgrading o the new M2 MacBook Pro that was released earlier in January? How to work within a restricted WiFi network to do wireless printing from a tablet and use Alexa to make phone calls? Hosts: Leo Laporte and Mikah Sargent Guest: Ant Pruitt Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Show notes and links for this episode are available at: https://twit.tv/shows/ask-the-tech-guys/episodes/1959 Download or subscribe to this show at: https://twit.tv/shows/all-twittv-shows Sponsor: cachefly.com

Screens are everywhere. Today we talk about bringing a screen, purposefully, into our homeschool environment as a learning tool and a one-stop-shop to aid the educator. With a tablet, we can take our books on the go, reference our curriculum, teach, and enrich all from a single device. It's not the totality of our homeschool, but it can do just about everything. Let's talk about how you can build a purposeful tablet-based learning platform. Why a tablet For the Educator Apps for the Educator For the learner Apps for the learner Things to remember Touring The World Resource Guides Check out our country resource guides to help you with your around the world journey: https://gumroad.com/homeschooltogether Consider Leaving Us A Review If you have a quick moment please consider leaving a review on iTunes - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/homeschool-together-podcast/id1526685583 Show Notes Trello - https://trello.com/ Notion - https://www.notion.com/ Apple Calendar - https://www.icloud.com/calendar Microsoft One Drive - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.skydrive&hl=enUS&gl=US&pli=1 Dropbox - https://www.dropbox.com/ PDF Expert - https://pdfexpert.com/ Foxit - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.foxit.mobile.pdf.lite&hl=enUS&gl=US Libby - https://libbyapp.com/ Kindle Reader - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.kindle&hl=enUS&gl=US BlueFire Reader - https://www.bluefirereader.com/bluefire-reader.html EverNote - https://evernote.com/ Canva - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.canva.editor&hl=enUS&gl=US Goodnotes - https://www.goodnotes.com/ Strides - https://www.stridesapp.com/ MinimaList - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/minimalist-to-do-list-widget/id993066159 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/ Khan Academy - https://www.khanacademy.org/downloads Duolingo - https://www.duolingo.com/ Google Maps - https://www.google.com/maps Google Earth - https://earth.google.com/web/ Procreate - https://procreate.com/ ArtFlow - http://artflowstudio.com/ Notability - https://notability.com/ Calligraphy Handbook - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/calligraphy-handbook/id830584075 Filmic Pro - https://www.filmicpro.com/ PowerDirector - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cyberlink.powerdirector.DRA14022501&hl=enUS&gl=US Stop Motion Studio - https://www.cateater.com/ Simply Piano - https://www.hellosimply.com/ Moodscaper - https://www.moodscaper.com/ Audible - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.audible.application&hl=enUS&gl=US Downcast - https://www.downcastapp.com/ Podbean - https://www.podbean.com/podcast-app-iphone-android-mobile Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/ Wikipedia App - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia&hl=enUS&gl=US AllTrails - https://www.alltrails.com/mobile Seek - https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seekapp Google Arts and Culture - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.cultural&hl=enUS&gl=US Connect with us Website: http://www.homeschool-together.com/ Store: https://gumroad.com/homeschooltogether Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/homeschooltogether Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/homeschooltogetherpodcast/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/homeschooltogetherpodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/hs_together The Gameschool Co-Op: https://www.facebook.com/groups/gameschoolcoop/ Email: homeschooltogetherpodcast@gmail.com

On today's show, Matts life admin continues to go down hill and the boys seek out some tips for a better nights sleep... 

David Radin steps up to the One Mic Stand to tell us how Confirmed takes the friction out of scheduling meetings and managing your weeks strategically. He says users gain 14% to 25% increase in meeting acceptances, faster confirmation of meetings, and decreases in time and effort involved in getting meeting to happen. With its unique blend of role-based user interfaces, Confirmed can be customized for your needs, whether to reach meeting partners who are less motivated than you or to facilitate walk-up flexible scheduling of face-to-face or virtual meetings. Confirmed helps you combine best practices with insights, automation and analytics to get the most of every day. It can be integrated with Salesforce.com and works with Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar as well as 20 web-meeting platforms.

In this week's installment of the Simon Says podcast, Simon unpacks Apple Calendar and Reminders. He examines what generally makes a good calendar and to-do list application, unique features included in Apple's versions, and some issues that grind his gears. Equipment (Affiliate Links): Microphone

Podcast 192 This week, I have a slightly different kind of question to answer about the various tools I use to produce my work each week.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Tools I use Blog posts 2018 2019   Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook More about the Time Sector System The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 192 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 192 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. A question that occasionally arrives in my inbox is one asking about what tools and apps I use to do my work, so I thought it was about time I answered this question.  Now, I have written a couple of blog posts over the years about this, and I will put those in the show notes so you can see how often I have changed my apps over the years. I should warn you though, I am boring. I very rarely change the tools I use. I'm inspired by people who've been using the same tools for years. It seems that with this approach you become one with the app or tool and it just becomes a part of who you are and what you do. It means you focus more on the work and less on how to do something with the app you are using.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Ricardo. Ricardo asks: Hi Carl, would you tell us what apps and tools you use to do your work. I know about Todoist and Evernote, but what other apps do you use every day?  Hi Ricardo, thank you for the question, and I should say thank you to all of you who have emailed me with this question before. Okay first up, as you say, Ricardo, I use Todoist and Evernote as my main productivity tools. I've been using Todoist now for just over eight years and Evernote's been a part of my life for twelve.  These two apps are the backbone of my whole productivity system. Todoist tells me what tasks I need to perform each day and what my objectives are. Evernote manages my project work, goals, my content ideas, and notes and is pretty much my “second brain” as the current term appears to be.  All my research, quotes, and articles of interest are kept in Evernote. At the last count, I had over 8,000 notes in there. The great thing about Evernote is you are not restricted by how much you have in Evernote, you are only restricted by the amount you put in there each month. I have the Personal Account—what used to be called pro—and that gives me 10 GB of uploads per month. I've never come close to hitting that limit.  Todoist manages my tasks and I use the Time Sector System for organising my tasks. That means my tasks are organised by when I will do the task: This week, next week, this month, next month, etc.  However, Todoist and Evernote are not the first apps I open in the morning. That honour goes to Day One, my journaling app. Back in January last year, I decided to experiment with digital journaling for a year. Previously I had a hit and miss journaling habit with a paper-based system, but found whenever I was away on a trip I rarely opened my journal. So, I thought I would try digital journaling and chose Day One to be my digital journal. I liked the idea I posting a picture every day and the journal being searchable by tags.  Over eighteen months later, I haven't missed a day and I've posted a picture every day too.  So, When I wake up, I begin my morning routines. This involves drinking a glass of lemon water and brewing my coffee. I use a Chemex coffee maker and there's an art to making the perfect coffee with a Chemex. (I researched it for hours on YouTube) So, while my coffee is brewing, I do my shoulder stretches. Once my coffee is brewed, I sit down at my desk and open up my iPad, and hit a shortcut I have pinned to the Home Screen that opens up a new entry in Day One and for the next ten minutes, I write. I use a template that has a number of little checklists so I can monitor what I am doing and making sure I am following the right habits.  Once I have my journal written, I open up the email app on my iPad. I use Apple mail (I've been using that app since 2001 when Apple launched Mac OS Ten) and clear my inbox. Most of my emails come through the night. So when I open Mail, there are likely to be about 100 to 150 emails. So, for the next 20 minutes or so I go through these, clearing them and moving them to where they need to go. Either Action This day, archive or delete. I practice the principles I teach in my Email Mastery programme and I can promise you, those principles work.  After I've completed those tasks, I usually have a couple of hours of calls. These are usually run through Zoom.  Now I have an M1 MacBook Pro, that I bought back in February and it's an amazing computer with one flaw. The built-in camera is terrible. So, I have a Logitec Brio 4K video camera attached to my LG 27 inch 4K monitor that I use for all my Zoom calls and workshops.  Once my calls are over, I exercise and shower, and then sit down to do the day's writing. For writing blog posts and newsletters—like my Learning Centre's weekly Learning Note, and the script for this podcast, I use an app called Ulysses. This is a fantastic writing app that puts everything out of the way while you are writing. As the filing system uses iCloud as its backend, I keep all my writing in here.  I have been using Ulysses for just over five years and I have hundreds of blog posts, all my podcast scripts, and newsletter essays in here. At a quick glance, there are over a thousand pieces of content in here. WOW! That's a lot of words written over a five-year period.  One of the great things about sticking with an app is you learn how to use it properly and proficiently. I know all the keyboard shortcuts, I know how to quickly add tags, move drafts to my different folders without having to think about it. When I am in Ulysses, all I need to think about is my writing. I'm not wondering what this feature des or that one. It's set up exactly how I like it so when I begin writing, that is all I need to focus on.  I do have one other writing app I use though. For the books I write, I use Scrivener. I've written every book using Scrivener because it's purpose-built for book writing. My first book was a book I wrote on Presenting in English way back in 2009. So, I must have been using Scrivener for twelve years now.  It's not the prettiest of apps, but it does the job, and like Ulysses, when you are writing all the functions disappear and you can focus on your writing. I am currently using it now to write The Time Sector System book.  The biggest advantage of Scrivener is when you are ready to publish, it will create all the formats you need. Word documents if you are sending the book to a publisher, Kindle format if you want to publish on Amazon, and ePub if you are publishing to Apple Books. All the formats are built-in.  While on the topic of writing, I use Apple Pages for my formatted documents. For instance, I write feedback for all my coaching clients after their calls—it's a summary of what we discussed and the next steps they can take to improve their systems or achieve their goals. All these are written in Pages and I have a saved template for these documents.  Likewise, for tracking sales, my coaching clients, and anything else that requires a spreadsheet, I use Apple Numbers and for all my presentations for workshops and seminars, I use Apple's Keynote.  As I say this, I realise I've been using Pages since it was launched in 2005— so that's been in my toolbox for sixteen years. Numbers was released in 2007 so, that's been in my toolbox for 14 years and Keynote since 2003, so that one I've used for nearly twenty years! WOW!  I should say, I prepare my online course outlines using Numbers and I have a template set up for this. When I am updating a course, such as my recent Time And Life Mastery course, I pull up the outline from the previous version and work from that. That tells me which parts need updating and which can be left alone.  Now for the other category.  I use Asana for tracking my weekly content. I produce around six to eight pieces of content each week and they are all in different states of readiness. So to track where each is, I use a Kanban board in Asana and move these along as they are developed. I use a simple column system of planning, in production, post-production, scheduled, and posted.  The calendar I mainly use is Apple Calendar, but the back end is Google Calendar because of the integration with Zoom. I do have Fantastical on my computer and I pay for the premium service, but I really only use that for setting up group meetings and using the little dropdown calendar on my desktop for quick reference to see when my next call or appointment is. I'm probably not using Fantastical to its full potential, but Apple Calendar on my desktop is a dream to use. It is simple, and once again I've been using it for a very long time—almost 20 years.  Safari is my browser of choice, although I use Chrome for more work-related tasks such as accessing Asana and uploading YouTube videos. For reading, research, and watching videos though, I use Safari.  I also have some little helper apps. The most commonly used one is TextExpander. TextExpander allows you to create little snippets of text that you can call up using simple text. For instance, if I want today's date in the British format—my preferred format—I type E Date and the date will magically appear.  I also use it for my filing conventions. I file all my documents using YYYY-MM-DD format and by typing F Date, that will give the date in that format.  TextExpander is also used for emails I regularly reply to or send which saves me a lot of time.  On my phone and iPad, I use Drafts a lot. This is a simple text app that allows me to collect tasks, notes, and pretty much anything else related to text and I can then send it to either Todoist or Evernote.  I use Apple Reminders for my grocery list and this is shared with my wife so we can both add to a single list. I love how I can use Siri from my Apple Watch by saying something like “Add broccoli to my shopping list” and boom it's added. I also use Goodnotes for any courses I take. I like that it doesn't turn off my screen when I am taking notes during a course. I can also upload the course's workbook and then use that as my guide adding note pages.  I used Goodnotes a couple of years ago when I was in Singapore at Tony Robbins' Unleash The Power Within event. If you've ever done a live Tony Robbins event you know that the day is long and my iPad's battery (a 2018 iPad Pro 11 inch with Apple Pencil) coped remarkably well even though the screen was on a lot of the time.  The great thing about using my iPad in those types of courses, I can take a picture of a slide and instantly annotate the picture in Goodnotes.  For my design work and editing videos, I use Adobe's Creative Cloud. Photoshop seems to be permanently open (another piece of software I've been using for a long time—about fifteen years!) and Premiere Pro makes an appearance every week.  For cloud storage, I mainly use iCloud—I have a 2 terabyte iCloud account so everything I work on goes in there except when I am collaborating. Then I use Google Drive.  I also have Dropbox, but that is only used for backing up my book projects as Scrivener seems to only support Dropbox storage for backups.  And that's about it. That's all the tools I use to get my work done. Hopefully, you will have noticed that I've been using most of these tools for years. I know the damage caused by app switching. Yes, it might be cool to be playing with the latest shiniest app on the market, but this means you have to transfer all your old data and learn a new app. To me, that's a complete waste of time. You will never find the “perfect” it does not exist and it never will. So, stick with one app, learn it so it becomes a part of you and then you will find your productivity improves. You are no longer thinking about how to do something and instead, you just do it.  I hope that has given you some insights, and I know I have finally answered a question that keeps popping up on my podcast questions list. So thank you, Ricardo. Thank you also to you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

In this episode, Nunzio Presta founder & CEO of Buy and Sell a Business comes on the podcast to share how someone can build a business in 2020, advice for new entrepreneurs, and how to find your path in business. If you have ever been curious about entrepreneurship or becoming a business owner this episode has tons of gems for up and comers. But don't be fooled, this podcast isn't just for new entrepreneurs, in this episode we go into detail about entrepreneurship by acquisition, the importance of routine and emerging trends in the business world. Thanks for listening and if you enjoyed this episode please make sure you share it with the world, leave a review on iTunes and subscribe for future episodes!   

Are you planning to bring a guest onto your live video show? In addition to preparing your own material, you will want to prepare your guest as well. This way you can ensure your guests are ready to answer any questions or topics that you have for them and that you have a successful live stream. On this episode, we share a checklist that you can give your guest before they come on your show. Preparing your guest for a successful live show  Set expectations - when is your live video show taking place? Send a calendar invite - Google Calendar, Harmonizely, Calendly, Apple Calendar. What is the show about? How long is the live show? What is the show format? Is it an interview? Is there a panel? What are you expecting from your guest? Provide a link to the show beforehand. Send over a brand kit (to help with promotion). Tell guests about the platform they will be using - do they need to download or install something? Provide a backstage link (this is just for the guest, to bring them into the green room). Provide a public link (this is used for sharing on social media, email, etc). Getting information from your guest. For example, a bio, headshot, topic and more. Will guests be promoting an offer? What is it? Where can viewers connect with your guest? Get a website or list of social media channels. Confirm that your guest is available. Do this the week of and day of your live video show. Have your guests arrive early. 15 to 30 minutes beforehand is recommended. Encourage your guest to wear headphones. Test audio and video equipment beforehand. Click the subscribe or follow button, push play, and let's get you moving with live video! https://launchyour.live/ (Launch Your Live Official Site) https://facebook.com/launchyourlive (Facebook) https://instagram.com/launchyourlive (Instagram) https://twitter.com/launchyourlive (Twitter) https://linkedin.com/company/launch-your-live (LinkedIn) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjAelMZ-TPHw-vn0fWTxQ9A (YouTube)

My calendar is probably the most important productivity tool I use (even more important than Asana). It's how I organise my life, see what's coming up and ultimately how I plan what I should be doing. But when I work with clients, I'm often surprised by how little or how much they have on their calendar. Or I see they're not using basic features that can help you to get more out of their calendar. The calendar you use really doesn't matter that much. Most people use either the Apple Calendar (like me), Google or Outlook Calendar. They're all pretty similar and the advice I'm going to share isn't specific to any one tool. Show notes » paulminors.com/177 Download my productivity blueprint and learn the processes and tools I use to be more organised and achieve more in my business and home life. You'll also get my FREE 3-part video training series where I'll explain 1) 4 simple steps to supercharge your productivity 2) common mistakes to avoid 3) the 10 productivity tools I couldn't live without. Download here » paulminors.com/products/productivity-blueprint/ If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast. I'd also love it if you could leave me a review. Doing this will help more people discover the show so they to can get more done and get more out of life. Intro/Outro Music: "Synthia" by Scott & Brendo --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/paulminors/message

Ever forget when that next dinner meeting is? Tired of having to pull out a separate device just to find out when you're expected at the dentist? That all ends now. In this session, Matthew Vollbrecht, Certified Apple Teacher will share how to use the Apple Calendar app to create one-time, recurring, and all-day events. Add custom repeats, invite family, friends, and coworkers to your events, set custom alerts, manage multiple calendars, and easily find events when you need them. Plus, learn the differences between the Calendar app and the Reminders app. Don't miss this opportunity to learn how to stay organized with Apple Calendar.

En esta ocasión regresamos de nuestra pequeña ausencia y nos reunimos cada quien desde la comodidad de su sala, para platicar acerca de las mejores acciones para organizar tu rutina diaria. ‘Amat Victoria Curam’ o ‘La Victoria Ama La preparación’ es el capítulo donde platicamos sobre la importancia de ser organizado en todos los ámbitos, desde tu clóset hasta tu agenda de trabajo, las ventajas de tener una buena organización y los efectos de carecer de ella. También te contamos bajo qué piedras habíamos estado escondidos, desde la última carrera de Trail Running de Fer, en Mota Chica, García, Nuevo León; hasta el nuevo emprendimiento de Rob, Y Griega Marketing, una pequeña agencia de mkt & publicidad aquí en Monterrey (IG,FB en @ygriegacreativa). 

Puedes usar Apple Calendar en www.icloud.com, y también Google Calendar en www.calendar.google.com, ambas herramientas son gratuitas, sólo deberás contar un usuario (también gratuito) para acceder. La rocketbook* que mencionamos y utilizamos, puedes encontrarla en https://amzn.to/2Vt2o58 También queremos invitarte a que te unas al #Reto2020 con nosotros, de 24 libros leídos al final de 2020, en ‘Entre Café y Libros’, con Rob, en Instagram y Facebook en @entrelibrosymuchocafe Finalmente, nos encuentras en redes sociales en @unpodcastdiferente, o en nuestras cuentas personales en @fernandoivandejesus o en @yosoyrrev. Envíanos un mensaje, comentario, y comparte este programa para que sea más fácil que otros puedan acompañarnos. ¡Nos escuchamos pronto nuevamente! *Sujeta a disponibilidad
**Precios pueden variar de acuerdo al país

Podcast 121 This week we have a question all about apps and choosing the best combination of apps for you.    Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow Carl's YouTube Channel The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Carl Pullein Learning Centre  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script Episode 121 Hello and welcome to episode 121 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. This week it's all about which apps to choose for your productivity system and how to choose them. With apps like Wunderlist and Newton Mail closing down, this week has been a timely reminder that the apps we choose for our system are important. Choose the wrong apps and you spend a lot of time having to transfer your information from one app to another when it closes down or becomes too expensive to manage. Choose the right app and your system and the app can now together.  But before we get into this week's question don't forget if you are ready to move beyond the to-do list my Productivity Masterclass Workflow course will do that for you. This is a brand new course designed to teach you how to create workflows in your day so you create enough time to focus on the things you want to focus on. Full details of the course are in this week's show notes.  Okay, it's now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Myke. Myke asks: Hi Carl, I am a very heavy Apple user, and I love their products. I think they could be the key to my productivity if utilised properly. I have an iMac at home, and iMac at work, a MacBook pro for when on the go, an iPad, and an iPhone - as well as multiple Homepods throughout my home. What productivity "stack" would you recommend for someone like myself? Thank you Myke for your question.  I've always felt the benefit of sticking with built-in apps is you are much less likely to have an app you rely on shut down on you. Just in the last couple of weeks, I've received notifications about two popular apps closing down. Wunderlist and Newton Mail (again) and this is certainly something that concerns me.  Part of building a productivity system is consistency. The amount of time it takes to not only get your stuff into a system, and that time can be a lot, a more important element is the trust you have for that system. If you don't trust your system then it is not working. This means if you are planning on using third-party apps you need to make sure the apps you are using the companies behind them are structurally and financially sound.  A couple of years ago I used Newton Mail as my email app of choice. It was wonderfully simple and minimalist and it had everything I needed in an email app. Then I got a notification to say they were closing down.  Several months later, I was told they were starting up again and this time it would be different because they had a big financial backer. And then last week we were told they were closing down again.  Fortunately, this time I was not going to make the same mistake so did not return to Newton. I set up Apple Mail on all my devices and while there are a few features that are lacking such as scheduled sending which I did use in Newton, it was no big deal and scheduled sending is rather less important than having an app that will not go away. Apple Mail has been a Mail app I have used for nearly twenty years and it is solid and dependable. I also know a lot of people who invested time and effort into Wunderlist and we now know that will be closing down in May. That has been on the horizon for a while now, but the end date is finally approaching and if you are a Wunderlist user you only have three months to migrate to another app.  This makes things difficult for other app developers. Trust is a big issue for anyone wanting to build a strong productivity system and if there is any uncertainty then people are not going to invest their time and money in an app that may or may not be around in five years time.  Evernote is an app that I have used for over ten years. It has always been solid, dependable and has been a huge part of my digital life. Unfortunately, these days their lack of development and the competitive state of the notes app market with apps like Notion, Bear Notes and Apple Notes have created a huge mountain for it to climb if it wants to get back to being one of the top note-taking apps. The good news is Evernote is apparently cash positive and it does have a loyal following. My worry is if the updated Evernote does not meet customer expectations (which are incredibly high after more than a year of back end development) what happens next?  I have found Evernote difficult to use on my iPhone since iOS13 came out so I have been using Apple Notes more and more and have now found workarounds for many of the things I used to do in Evernote that Apple Notes cannot do. Until recently, Evernote was one of the first apps I opened in a morning on my computer, now I open is only a couple of time per week. Personally I hope and pray Evernote's impending update will not disappoint, but if it does I already have a replacement at the ready.  So what can we do? Well if you want to be completely protected the best advice I can give is go with the built-in apps. That means if you are in the Apple ecosystem where possible use the Apple apps.  Apple Notes is a serious contender in the notes app market now. It's free and has an impressive set of features. The Apple Reminders update last September gave this built-in to-do list some much-needed love and now has quite an impressive feature set  And Apple Calendar has been a solid calendar app for over twenty years. There are a few features it could do with, like the ability to allow people to book times on a public calendar, but it is a very dependable calendar app.  Microsoft has a solid set of productivity apps too. Outlook is the industry standard for most companies when it comes to email and calendar and OneNote is one of the best note-taking apps out there.  For your To-dos, Microsoft To-Do is likely to become a solid to-do list manager in the near future, particularly if it does incorporate many of the features Wunderlist had.  And of course, Google has it's own Tasks and Keep and has probably the best calendar app out there The problem with using these built-in mainstream apps is you do not get a lot of features and if something does not work properly it can be a long time before they are updated. But they are unlikely to disappear, they are simple to set up and simple to use. And in my experience, it does not take a lot of time to learn how to use them.  That said, the biggest thing to remember is the app you use is rather less important than the system you set up. As long as the apps you are using are dependable and you allow enough time to learn how to use them then almost any app out there is going to do the job for you. App switching is time-wasting and can be a huge cause of procrastination. I've always said pick one app and stick with it for a year. That gives you enough time to learn how to use it properly and develop workarounds for the things you want to be able to do with it.  My recent organisational change in my to-do list manager could easily be created in any type of app. So far I have shown how to set it up in Apple Reminders and Todoist and in the coming weeks, I plan to show how this could be set up in Trello and TeuxDeux. These apps are very different and yet a simple organisational system can be set up in any of them. That's why your ‘system' is more important than the apps you are using. Another reason why your system is more important than the apps you use is if the worst-case scenario does happen and the app you are using shuts down or becomes prohibitively expensive, you can quickly and easily transfer your data across to new apps.  So there is a lot to be said for using built-in apps. They are reliable, consistent and have just enough features to be able to do what you need them to do.  Let's take the Google suite of productivity apps as an example. Given that all you need is a calendar, a to-do list manager, a notes app and a cloud storage drive. With Google, you have them all. Because of the way Google has added plugins and extensions to their Chrome browser, you can build an amazing productivity dashboard using Chrome. Gmail can operate your email, and if an email comes in you can quickly add it as a task to Google tasks or highlight a section in the email and add it as a note to Google Keep. Another great feature of Google Keep is you can create mini (or full) checklists and all sorts of other types of notes and have them easily accessible as a side panel in your browser.  Microsoft office also now allows you to add add-ons to Outlook so you have quick access to your calendar, to-dos and notes from your Outlook window. And of course, all your files can be stored in OneDrive.  If I were to completely start again with building my own productivity system, given all my devices are Apple, I would set everything up using only the Apple apps. Apple's sharing functionality across all their devices makes adding tasks, notes and events incredibly easy and iCloud storage is cheap - $10 for 2 terabytes of storage.  So, if you want to build your very own productivity system, today I would advise you to start with using the built-in apps your devices come with. If you are in the Apple eco-system like you, Myke, I would use Reminders, Apple Notes, Apple Calendar and iCloud. If I were predominantly a Windows user I would use Microsofts apps and if I were hybrid ie, my computers were Windows and my phone was either an iPhone or Android phone I would go with the Google set.  Only after at least six months would I consider third party apps and would only change if I was having some serious difficulties managing my work with the apps I was using.  I hope that answers your question, Myke. Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Today on the pod I'm joined by Rian Doris, co-founder and COO of the Flow Research Collective, which is a peak performance research and training organization headed by Steven Kotler. You may remember Steven from episode 31 of the show where we chatted about adventure athletes who are pushing the boundaries of human potential. If you haven't checked it out, carve out some time to do so - that show is one of my most popular episodes by far and I think you'll see why. In this episode, we're going to do something a little different. We're going to focus mainly on one topic - that is, getting shit done. You know, since you haven't heard enough about that in this new decade already. Seriously though, even with all the hype of the new year it's still a great time to reevaluate your processes and build a plan for yourself to achieve the life you want. We'll be walking you through what I would call the ULTIMATE evening and morning routine. It's worth putting out a fair warning, Rian and I nerd out pretty hard core on productivity, flow, and life hacking - so if you're anything like me you'll be in heaven and if not, don't say I didn't warn you. This episode not only dissects Rian's strategy that led him to cofound one the world's leading organizations in peak performance and flow science, but also is chocked full of fantastic resources - so be sure to check out the resources section below for all your geeking and linking needs.  Speaking of resources, Rian and Steven have generously offered to give a free one-on-one coaching session plus 10% off their most popular flow training program, Zero to Dangerous, for all listeners of this show. Simply use the link below to apply. On your application interview call with the team, be sure to mention my name and you're good to go.  Oh and I apologize in advance for the audio quality on this one. I don't even remember where I was during the recording, but clearly it was an airport bathroom or something

Episode 56 of The Teaching Space Podcast discusses some tools for productivity in an interview with Francesco D’Alessio. Introduction Hello and welcome to the Teaching Space Podcast. It's Martine here. Thank you so much for joining me. Martine: Today I am thrilled to bring you an interview with productivity expert Francesco D'Alessio. Francesco, welcome to the show. Francesco: Hello, Martine. Yeah, good to be here. I'm very excited. Martine: Not as excited as me. I'm a bit of a fan girl. I can't lie. I've been listening to your show for a while and following you on YouTube and things like that so it's a real pleasure to have you here. Could I ask you to introduce yourself to the Teaching Space listeners? Francesco: Yeah, I know that, it's great you've been following for a while and obviously I've seen you in the community so much helping others, which is amazing. Martine: Doing my best. Francesco: Definitely. Yeah, no, for the viewers out there, my name's Francesco. I run a YouTube channel called Keep Productive which is essentially helping people to find the right tools for their needs, whether that's work or life. It's a very fun pursuit and very recent pursuit of mine. Martine: Excellent. Productivity is your thing, really, isn't it? Francesco: Yeah, apps and software. Martine: Apps and software. How did this interest in productivity start? Francesco: It's probably quite a weird thing for a 24-year-old to be this interested in, right? Martine: No, definitely, no I think it's great. You're never too young to be into productivity. Francesco: That's it. Yeah, I think my sort of passion came ... I was in school. I think I was about 15 or 16. It was just before year, I think I was in year 12 and I had sadly failed all of my grades that year, minus Italian, but I'm figuring by the name I should have passed that one right? My AS levels were sort out the door which was a bit of a shame. Then I had the opportunity, like many year 12 students do, is to repeat the year which I was a bit annoyed about but after speaking with my mum she was like, "You need to get organised this summer and really got on it." I ended up reading a book that I'll probably end up mentioning a couple of times called Getting Things Done by David Allen. Martine: One of my favourites. Francesco: It's a classic, isn't it? Martine: Definitely. Francesco: I read that one and obviously with that book came all of the other useful software like Evernote and a couple more at the time. I came back to school and I started doing well in my grades and all in this sort of outside world of that. I ended up weirdly teaching some of my teachers about the productivity apps. Martine: Amazing. Francesco: I felt like I had a knack for teaching other people about how to use software. It sort of spiralled form there, I'd say. We've been working on the channel for about four, five years now and it's been growing ever since. Our goal really is to review as many softwares as we can and make sure we cover them in the most honest way, I guess, to help people find the best one that meets their needs. Martine: Have you always been into technology in a kind of a general sense? Are you quite a tech-y sort of a guy? Francesco: Oh, yeah, 100%. I follow all the tech stuff up so obviously that's probably where we clashed on Notion right? Martine: Yeah, totally. Totally. I'm an early adopter of many many tools and apps and things like that. So, yeah, I can totally understand that. It all started in school for you. That's super interesting. I love the idea of you teaching your teachers how to do certain productivity things. There's nothing like instilling confidence in a learner by getting them to teach you something. That's fab. Francesco: Yeah, and obviously they found a lot of benefit from those apps as well so it was really good to see. Martine: As you know, my listeners tend to be teachers or trainers. We face some quite unique productivity challenges. For example, often we end up trying to do administrative type work, in other words, the work that we're not doing in the classroom during short bursts of time between sessions. The main part of the job is being in front of the class and teaching but then we've got these little gaps in which to do our non-teaching work, so from a productivity point of view…that's really tricky. We've also got constant interruptions, too many meetings. Oh my goodness. I've never worked in an environment where meetings are so loved. These are just a few of the challenges that my listeners will be facing as teachers and trainers. We just wondered, bearing in mind that kind of set up, whether you have any tips or tools or anything that you recommend to busy teachers and trainers out there? Francesco: Yeah, sure. I've got a few notes in front of me that I'd like to cover. Some of them are some useful methodologies I think would work and also some recommended tools. Yeah, and as you said, teachers are… When I was in school and at least after school with a lot of my friends going into teaching they always seem to be quite timed for teachers. It's sad to see but obviously it's such an immersive job and it's such a passionate job that everyone wants to get very emotionally involved because they want to help the children so very much. It's a very noble pursuit definitely. I think methods are probably the backbone of productivity in general although I don't know all the methods and I tend to bring in experts to talk about that. I normally recommend a lot of good stuff that's helped myself and other people. I would say the first process that I recommend is going back to the Getting Things Done bye David Allen. Martine: Yes, definitely. Francesco: It's a fantastic book. What I quite like about it is it will teach you a way of processing anything new and that's quite beneficial for all types of work. Whether it's admin work or ad hoc work it actually can be scaled to any situation. What I recommend doing is grabbing a copy of GTD or listening to it at least on apps like Audible because it will give you a framework that then you can then apply to the admin side of stuff. Martine: I totally endorse that recommendation I must admit. One of the best things I took away from David Allen's book was the idea of just having one trusted place to keep everything. The idea that you don't have things all over the place in different apps and different locations in your office and things. That one trusted place thing for me was a massive takeaway. Francesco: Yeah, 100%. I can imagine that you kept quite strict with it and once you've kept that sort of rigidity to GTD I think it can be so beneficial like not storing things in different places and making sure to capture things in a specific way, organising it and then clarifying it. It can really help, really help. Then I would say like you mentioned those short bursts of times that sometimes can be interrupted or sometimes can actually be uninterrupted but more likely interrupted. The Pomodoro Technique by Francesco Cirillo, is a really fantastic one and that's a very simple method of 25 minute timers and then a five minute break and having that cycle repeat itself. [Check out Episode 12 for more on this] The goal behind this is you're wiring into that 25 minutes work without being distracted by other stuff. You've got one task or two tasks in hand that you'll be doing back to back and it's a real point, an opportunity for you focus. There's some great Pomodoro timer apps out there but you could just start by using your timer on your iPhone or Android phone. I highly recommend it to, from teachers to professionals to students because they all seem to find a lot of value from it. Martine: I think it's a great point about using it with students. I use it personally when I'm marking because I do have a tendency to get a bit distracted when I'm marking and having that enforced time block helps me zone right into what I'm supposed to be doing and I get into a state of flow a lot more easily and a lot more quickly. I think for marking it's brilliant but I love the idea of encouraging students to use it. Generally, they've all got a phone in their back pocket so they've got that timer available. You can encourage them to put headphones in to get themselves really sort of zoning in on their work and I just think that's a really good tool for students. So a top tip there for sure. Francesco: Yeah, definitely. The app that I would recommend for students as well is an app called Forest. Martine: Oh, I love Forest. It's one of my favourites. Francesco: It's so good isn't it? Martine: Yeah, really good. Do you want to explain a little bit about what Forest is because I love it. Francesco: It's such a friendly application. Any of the students can download it for IOS and Android, I believe. The concept is you set a timer. It can be 25 minutes, 40 minutes, however long you want your students to focus. At that time, it starts planting a tree over those 25 minutes. If the student decides, "I'm going to go over to SnapChat or Instagram," the tree dies if you don't get back to it within, it's a couple of seconds. The goal is they've got to create a tree and over time build a forest. I think it's a really healthy way to stop using your phone. Obviously you can set a timer and then forget about the timer and jump on your phone or go on your laptop or something and that's quite a nice way in making sure you're focusing. Martine: The gamification of focus. I absolutely love it. Francesco: Yes. Martine: One of the things that's really helped me with Forest, because I am a competitive sort. I can't lie. I've got a group of people that I follow and who follow me on Forest and we kind of compete to see who can have the best forest. Francesco: Oh I love it, yeah. Martine: This is what I do in my time. Francesco: It's a great app. Martine: Yeah it really is. I highly recommend it. I will make sure that I link to it in the show notes so people can refer to any of the apps that you mention. Francesco: I'll tell you my final sort of methodology or book is a book called, How to be a Productivity Ninja, by Graham Allcott. The reason I recommend this is it's actually a really beneficial for e-mail and admin. Although GTD's a very good framework this has like, it's packed full. It's a fairly meaty book and it's packed full of how to process e-mail, how to reduce stress when you're doing admin tasks. It's got a lot of good advice that can be used across the board. I can't recommend that book enough. Martine: Fantastic. Again, I'll make sure there's a link to that in the show notes. Those are your top methodologies or approaches to productivity. What about specific tools? Have you got any of those that you'd like to recommend? Francesco: Yeah, sure. I typically recommend three types of apps and I try to say that people should have these core apps at least and that's a to do list app, a calendar App and a note taking app. A to do list app really for your upcoming tasks, actionable stuff you need to get done. A calendar for obviously meetings and events and things like that. Then a note taker for all of that information that you're gathering. Of course it depends on, you know, you can't obviously store information so you'll have to check with your department's, what access you have of course. The to do list app site to start with, I always recommend two ones that I think are really strong. That's Todoist and TickTick. Martine: Okay. Todoist I use actually and I can definitely say it's a great app. Personally with that one I like that it integrates with Google Calender. What's TickTick, did you say? I've not come across that one before. Francesco: It's all one word, TickTick. It's very similar to Todoist in a sense but what people like slightly more than Todoist in some ways, is it has a calendar ability inside it so if you wanted to plot all of your stuff in a calendar you can do it. That's something that Todoist doesn't have just yet. Martine: That's super interesting, particularly if you like to time block your day, bearing in mind that teachers tend to work to a timetable, then actually that could be really useful. Francesco: Yes, 100%. I think that's why I tend to recommend it. It's a very beautiful application. The good news is they've only recently added a Pomodoro timer to it so I guess it even adds even more to it, right? Martine: That sounds like that it's really worth a look actually. I'm thinking to myself, "No, I've committed to Todoist. I can't change yet again." Francesco: Todoist, I'm still user of that and I love it. I think it's such a good application for determining ... I think it's better at a cleaner interface and making sure that you've got a list in front of you. You can organise stuff based on time which is quite lovely. I think that's a great application all around, so there's no need to switch. Martine: No, I mustn't, I really mustn't, but I do have a bit of a passion for to do lists apps in particular so I'm going to stay loyal to Todoist for at least the next month or so. One thing I like in particular about Todoist is the ability to kind of look at what the next week looks like, how may tasks that you've got coming up, for me to do a bit of foreword planning I find that particularly helpful. That and the integration with Google Calendar as I mentioned. So two good recommendations there. Francesco: Of course if you start using that GTD process both of those applications have what's called an inbox and that's essentially your task inbox for dumping all the stuff you haven't processed yet. It's a pretty neat experience. Obviously calendar apps, I typically recommend people stay with Google Calendar or Apple Calendar, normally because I guess sometimes the calendars either G-suite or it could be Microsoft in some institutions. I guess it's up to that department or that school, right? Martine: Absolutely. Interestingly, my college where I work, we are a G-suite for education establishment, however, and I don't know the reason why, I really must talk to IT support, we use Outlook for e-mail and calendar. It's really frustrating because we use Google docs and everything else is G-suite. The great thing about Google Calendar is that it talks to every other app in the suite so it almost feels like you're kind of, you don't have that seamless integration when you're doing a bit of Microsoft and a bit of Google. It's something I'm working on changing, put it that way. Francesco: You're filtering in and working out how to get it changed? Martine: I'm on it. I am absolutely on it. You're a Google Calendar or an Apple Calendar or whatever the kind of native calendar to what your use is, that would be a recommendation? Francesco: Yeah, I use Google Calendar but on my iPhone I have an app called Moleskine Timepage. Martine: Ooh, interesting. Francesco: It's a very nice app. It's a paid subscription app so I think it roughly works out at about $11.00 a year or something like this. It's just such a beautiful application. It helps to make everything look very attractive on the go at least. I would say the note taking side, obviously bringing together lots of information is really important. Of course a lot of teachers would be considering OneNote because that's obviously connected with Microsoft services but I would say Evernote is also a very strong option, especially for teachers that are looking to annotate pieces of work and be able to use the web clipper for deep research and just in general use some of the PDF abilities that Evernote has. Of course when it comes to note takers Notion sort of falls into that spectrum and that's obviously where our passions lie at the moment, isn't it? Martine: Yeah, absolutely. That's certainly how I discovered you, Francesco and what you do is through Notion. I have mentioned Notion a few times on the podcast but I really struggle to actually explain what it is. I tend to say it's like a personal intranet and it can be pretty much whatever you want it to be and it kind of runs on data bases but maybe you can do a better job of describing it than I can. Francesco: I think that's probably how I describe it. The way that I always say is it's like Lego building blocks. It's almost like that software you can create yourself. It's really weird because it's one of the ... I don't know whether you remember Evernote in its early days when it first launched. People were coming up with so many different uses and that was quite exciting. You had people using it to organise all of their work and even use it as their project manager to some extent. When I'm getting e-mails about how people are using Notion it's very exciting. There's a chap who e-mailed me the other day saying he uses it to organise all of his heart data so that whenever he visits the doctors he has all of the heart monitoring information that they need to know. When I was with the Notion team last week they said people were using it to organise their bowling society. Martine: Oh, that's so cool. Francesco: And all of the scores that they made. Yeah, so all of these use cases are like wild. At the same time it's quite an exciting application for note-taking because they're slowing adding stuff to it that makes it a really strong platform. Martine: Oh, that's really good to hear. I think probably one of the most creative uses I have for Notion, two of my favourites I think. I use it to manage the podcast, so from planning to writing out the notes, to sharing it with my VA so she does my social. I use it for complete podcast planning, but also for meal planning as well. That's one of my favourites too. I have a data base of recipes and I have a couple weeks set out like on a Kanban board. That really works quite nicely. Francesco: Yeah, it does. That's, I think, quite an exciting use as well. A lot of people like it for ... it's one of those apps that actually blends work and life and not in like an intense way either. You could be planning your podcast but then jump over to your meal planner within seconds. It doesn't feel disconnected in any way. Martine: I think that's a really interesting point because up until a good sort of year or so ago I was dead against mixing my day job stuff with my personal stuff when it came to productivity tools. I liked to have things totally separate. The reality is that those two things are very closely interlinked with my life, so now that I tend to look at everything through one lens I find it a lot better. I'm more productive. Francesco: Yeah, definitely. I think what's quite nice about Notion is it is like that personal intranet you mentioned. It's almost like it's even more so a second brain because you can almost lay out your home page like your brain of all of the different aspects of your life. I use my Notion as a way to track finances, health. I use it with my wife to plan what rooms we're going to have in the house and travel. It's literally like a consortium of information that ... It's like my brain. I'm not sure whether I'd be able to go much further without it. Martine: I love the idea of it being your external brain. That's a really good way to describe it. I think for me the one thing that I'd really like to see with Notion would be an integration with Todoist because I did try running my task management through Notion and there were just ... It's a brilliant tool but there were just a few too many clicks required for me to do task management in there so if there was an integration on the horizon I would be thrilled. Francesco: Yeah, yes. I agree. I agree. Notion does 80% of what the majority of apps do but it doesn't do, for example, Todoist amazingly because it's not a task manager. It can do task management. It's a very strange experience but I can imagine they'll be adding to this and hopefully building on it. I'm sure we'll have all our fingers crossed, right? Martine: Yeah. They're a very young company and from what I can tell they're very responsive to feedback. It's really interesting to see what they've got on the horizon. Francesco: Yeah. I'm hoping to do ... Well, I was out there last week with the team, actually two weeks ago now, blimey. They are a very fast moving team. They seem to put updates out pretty regularly and it's quite exciting what's happening. I think it's all keep an eye on them. Martine: Yeah, definitely. It's nice too, I was a reasonably early adopter with Notion. It's kind of exciting to see them developing. So yeah, we'll keep an eye out. Fantastic. Francesco: Definitely, definitely. In terms of planning projects I think that's a good way as well. Obviously Ever Note and Notion do a good enough job of being able to store the data and manage that but if a teacher was looking for a way to maybe visually plan, I'd recommend checking out either Trello or Asana. They don't necessarily have to use Notion at the same time. They could use like Trello and Ever Note or Asana and Ever Note. They're both really good ways to visually organise because they've got that boards feature that helps you to plan visually. Yeah, I wouldn't rule those out as a way to keep track of you and your department because if you want to share stuff with other people then you can assign tasks there pretty easily. Martine: It's definitely a tool that works well for collaboration. I would say the same goes for Trello and Asana, as I've used both of those. If you want to collaborate with a team then all three of those options are good ones, Notion, Trello, Asana. They're great for collaborative work. Francseco, is there anything else you would like to add to those amazing recommendations? Francesco: No, the thing is ... What I recommend is just trying to read as many useful pieces and books about the busyness and time and trying to learn as much as you can because there's a lot of good conversations about mindfulness in the workplace blended with the actually busyness and the concept of it. I recommend trying to keep track on Apple News of all of those good articles. There's another book I'd want to recommend now. Sorry. A good one is Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. Martine: I swear we read all the same books and play with all the same apps. We're separated at birth. Francesco: Yeah, we need to ... We'll just be starting to share now stuff for e-mail. We'll just be like, "Have you read this one? Have you read this one?" There's so many good books out there at the moment. I think it's just about taking in how you can calm down in the workplace. I think more employers are actually understanding that that's a thing as well which is good news. Martine: It's a big conversation in education at the moment, the work life balance approach and that's very much what I focus on with The Teaching Space. I want to help teachers be as brilliant at their job as they can be without having to take work home at the weekend. I think that Digital Minimalism book recommendation is a good one because it's all about balance. You and I love tech. We love apps. We love all that stuff but actually quiet time, fresh air and just tuning out from all that stuff is also incredibly important and very healthy. Francesco: Yeah, definitely. The final recommendation is just subscribe to The Teaching Space because it is definitely one of the best podcasts for education. Martine: Oh, you're very smooth, Francesco, very smooth. Well on that topic what I'd like to do is give you an opportunity to tell The Teaching Space listeners where they can find you on line. Francesco: Oh, that's very kind. You can just type into YouTube KeepProductive. We've done plenty of Notion videos and we try to help you match up with the best apps. Again, we'll give you recommendations and if you want to pop me an e-mail directly francesco@keepproductive.com. I happily recommend apps, to hear obviously your needs and then we recommend apps so feel free to reach out to me. Martine: That's very generous of you Francesco. Thank you for being on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure. Francesco: Thank you for having me. It's been really fun. Further Listening Why not check out these episodes for more on productivity tools for teachers and trainers?   How to Stop being Distracted and Interrupted by People and Things How to Use a To-Do List Properly Managing Your Teaching Workload With Asana Why The Pomodoro Technique is The Perfect Productivity Tool for Teachers 7 Books That Have Made Me A Better Teacher

Selecting a time zone in Google and Apple calendar is terrible. Original Article: http://www.gregoryschmidt.ca/writing/timezone-ux-problems

What sort of work do you do day‐to‐day? - After a rich morning routine (meditation, reading, journaling, and exercising), Tomas spends his days focusing on his blog, catching up with emails, and editing his upcoming book. What is your daily to‐do list tool? And why? - Todoist (https://todoist.com/) (iOS/Android/Mac/Windows/Web) (Both for personal and work tasks) How do you go about taking notes? - Physical notebook - Apple Notes (https://www.icloud.com/notes) (iOS/Mac) (For notes on the go) - Evernote (https://evernote.com/) (iOS/Android/Mac/Windows) (For longer notes) What do you use when it comes to organising your calendar? - WorldTimeBuddy (https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/) (For checking out timezones) - Apple Calendar (https://www.icloud.com/calendar) (Mac/iOS) Do you use a certain tool for tracking projects? Or do you solely use a task list? - Tomas tracks his projects following his self-awareness rules and the Mental Framework (https://medium.com/personal-growth/the-10-10-10-method-make-decisions-like-warren-buffett-and-ray-dalio-99e4857d05e3). What hardware do you use for work? (phone, laptop, pc) - 13-inch MacBook Pro (https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch) - iPhone X (https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone-x/) - Apple Mouse (https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MLA02LL/A/magic-mouse-2) - Audio-Technica Microphone (http://www.audio-technica.com/cms/site/c39d4794571cd2a1/index.html) - Zoom H1 Handy Recorder (https://www.zoom-na.com/products/field-video-recording/field-recording/zoom-h1-handy-recorder) - Sony RX100 Camera (https://www.sony.com/electronics/cyber-shot-compact-cameras/dsc-rx100m5) - Apple Magic Keyboard (https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MLA22LL/A/magic-keyboard-us-english) - STANDapart laptop stand (https://standapart.co/) - Beats Studio 3 Wireless Headphones (https://www.beatsbydre.com/it/headphones/studio3-wireless) - Beats Wireless Earphones (https://www.beatsbydre.com/earphones) Do you use any analog/offline processes? - Set internet-free hours - No phone on Sunday and just read or meet people outside - Monitor your energy in order to understand when to be productive or not, be more spontaneous from time to time Find Tomas: - Newsletter - here (https://tomaslau.com/newsletter/) - Blog - here (https://tomaslau.com/) - Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/tomaslaurinavicius/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/tomaslau), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/tomaslaublog) Special Guest: Tomas Laurinavicius.

What sort of work do you do day‐to‐day? Alexis runs her business theming her days doing some batch work. She takes care of the customer service and content creation aspect of her job, writes blog posts, creates videos and Instagram photos, works on new products and manages her online courses. What is your daily to‐do list tool? And why? Charmed Life Planner (http://www.strangecharmed.com/shop/product-category/printable-planner-inserts/charmed-life-planner/) How do you go about taking notes? Note section in her Charmed Life Planner (http://www.strangecharmed.com/shop/product-category/printable-planner-inserts/charmed-life-planner/) Apple Notes (https://www.icloud.com/notes) (Mac/iOS) (For notes and ideas on the go) What do you use when it comes to organising your calendar? Charmed Life Planner (http://www.strangecharmed.com/shop/product-category/printable-planner-inserts/charmed-life-planner/) Apple Calendar (https://www.icloud.com/calendar) (Mac/iOS) Do you use a certain tool for tracking projects? Or do you solely use a task list? Functional Planning Bundle (http://www.strangecharmed.com/shop/product-category/printable-planner-inserts/functional-planning-bundle/) What hardware do you use for work? (phone, laptop, pc) 11-inch MacBook Air (https://www.apple.com/it/macbook-air/) iPhone 8 (https://www.apple.com/iphone-8/) Western Digital Hard Drive (https://www.wdc.com) What are your 3 favoured apps for getting the work done? (Eg. marketing, designing) Adobe Photoshop (https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop) (Mac/Windows) Adobe InDesign (https://www.adobe.com/products/indesign) (Mac/Windows) Final Cut Pro X (https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/) (Mac) Afterlight (https://afterlight.co/) (iOS/Android) (For editing photos) Clear (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clear-todos/id493136154) (iOS) (For lists and ideas) Canon Camera Connect (https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/explore/solutions-services/mobile-apps/camera-connect/) (iOS/Android) What app do you use for handling emails? Apple Mail (https://support.apple.com/mail) (For personal and work) Mailchilmp (https://mailchimp.com/) (For newsletters) What's your planning process? How do you plan for the week or month ahead? Alexis layouts all her projects at the beginning of the year, each quarter and each month she reviews her goals and projects, she also performs monthly and weekly reviews. Each Sunday she plans her top 5 projects for the week and then her top 3 tasks for the next day. Do you use any analog/offline processes? Meditation in the morning Walking her dog Exercising at home Listen to audiobooks on Audible Changing her working space around her home Find Alexis: Website - here (http://www.strangecharmed.com) The Charmed Shop - here (http://www.thecharmedshop.com) YouTube - here (https://www.youtube.com/user/MissTrenchcoat) @misstrenchcoat - Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/misstrenchcoat/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/misstrenchcoat) The Productivity Alchemist Kickstarter Campaign - here (https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/68262-the-productivity-alchemist-doc) Special Guest: Alexis Giostra.

What sort of work do you do day‐to‐day? Carl works as communication coach in Korea and also as University visiting professor at teaching a course called Business Creativity. What is your daily to‐do list tool? And why? Todoist (https://todoist.com/) (iOS/Android/Mac/Windows/Web) (Both for personal and work tasks) OmniFocus (https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus) (iOS/Mac) (Used in the past) How do you go about taking notes? Evernote (https://evernote.com/) (iOS/Android/Mac/Windows) (For both personal and work notes) What do you use when it comes to organising your calendar? Google Calendar (https://www.google.com/calendar/about/) (Android/iOS) (Integrates better with Gmail) Fantastical 2 (https://flexibits.com/fantastical) (Mac/iOS) (Best mobile app) Apple Calendar (https://www.icloud.com/calendar) (Mac/iOS) (Clean mobile view) Do you use a certain tool for tracking projects? Or do you solely use a task list? Asana (https://asana.com/) (iOS/Android) (For a big picture view) Steve Dotto's video on Using Asana for managing content - here (https://youtu.be/jNOMhe9JANg) How Carl uses Asana - here (https://youtu.be/2rMJ1NW8FfI) What hardware do you use for work? (phone, laptop, pc) 27-inch iMac (https://www.apple.com/imac/) (from 2012) MacBook Pro (https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/15-inch) (2 years old) iPhone X (https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone-x/) What are your 3 favoured apps for getting the work done? (Eg. marketing, designing) Keynote (https://www.apple.com/keynote/) (For presentation design and logo design sketch) Photoshop (http://www.adobe.com/Photoshop) (Used only occasionally) Illustrator (http://www.adobe.com/Illustrator) Ulysses (https://ulyssesapp.com/) (For short and medium form writing) Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview) (For writing books) What are your team communication tools? KakaoTalk (http://www.kakaotalkdownload.com/) (For communication and share files with group classes of some companies managers) What app do you use for handling emails? Newton Mail (https://newtonhq.com/) Apple Mail (https://support.apple.com/mail) (Used occasionally) Gmail (https://www.google.com/gmail/about/) (For online shopping and newsletter) What's your planning process? How do you plan for the week or month ahead? Carl starts a note in Evernote for any new specific projects and creates a list of tasks at the bottom of the note, then the tasks and copied and pasted into Todoist. Any of other notable apps you do like to mention that you use to get things done? Numbers by Apple (https://www.apple.com/numbers/) (For simple spreadsheets, to track data like YouTube subscribers) iCloud (https://www.icloud.com/) (To keep file synchronised) Do you use any analogue/offline processes? Hermès (https://www.hermes.com/us/en/reading-and-writing/notebooks-and-agendas/) Ulysse notebook (https://www.hermes.com/us/en/reading-and-writing/notebooks-and-agendas/) (For note taking during face-to-face meetings, the paper is fountain pen friendly) Parker (http://www.parkerpen.com/), Montblanc (http://www.montblanc.com/) (Some of the fountain pens Carl collects) Find Carl: YouTube - here (https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlPulleinGTD) @carl_pullein - Twitter (https://twitter.com/carl_pullein), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/carl_pullein/) Facebook Page - here (https://www.facebook.com/CarlPulleinProductivity/) Blog - here (http://www.carlpullein.com/) Medium Blog - here (https://medium.com/carl-pullein) Carl's book Your Digital Life 2.0 - Website (http://www.carlpullein.com/books), Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0782NTS7C/), iBooks (https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1323757047) Special Guest: Carl Pullein.

In this episode, the crew talks about enterprise applications, scalability, and productivity. Transcription provided by https://twitter.com/wtoalabi Episode 53: Bigger & Better Music.... Intro: Alright welcome back to another episode of the Laravel Podcast, I am one of your hosts, Matt Stauffer, I have got two guys joining me...Can you introduce yourselves? JEFFREY WAY: I am Jeffery Way! TAYLOR OTWELL: And I am Taylor Otwell. MATT STAUFFER: It's been a little while but we are back with a little bit more to share and if you haven't gotten a chance to check out the Laravel New...News Podcast...all *laugh...*Check out the Laravel new Podcast where... Interjections MATT STAUFFER: Checkout the Laravel New..News Podcast...oh my gosh! Everytime now! News Podcast, where Jacob Bennett and Michael Dyrynda, basically being Australian and ' Illinoisian'  tell you all the greatest and latest news that is going on with Laravel, so, because they are covering that so well, we are going off the beaten track a little bit talking about a few kinda broader topics, so, what we did was, we put out some requests on the Twitter account and said "Hey folks, what do you want us to talk about?" And we picked a couple interesting ones and we just want to...just like the reader grab bag or... whatever you call it on your podcast Jeffery, so, the first one at the top of the queue is...something we hear about all the time, not just in this particular request, which is "Can Laravel be used for big apps?" And sometimes this comes in the same conversation of well you know if you want to do enterprise you should use this framework or if you just want to do a cute little thing, then use Laravel. You know, there are all this like statements and perceptions that people have and make about this, so before we go anywhere else, I would ask like, what is and do we know, what is the definition of an enterprise app, like if someone, and then again we are trying to give as much grace as possible to the person who actually thinks there is a distinction...what makes an enterprise app? Is it about lines of code? Is it about patents? Is it about security? Is it about traffic? Like what makes something a big app? And or an enterprise app? Do you guys have a sense for that? JEFFREY WAY: I really don't. So I basically have the same question. From afar, I will just say an enterprise app is something I imagine that is really really big...I don't know, it is an interesting distinction that people always make. I mean for as long as I can remember, even back in the Codeigniter days, you had this idea that Codeigniter is for these sorts of hobby projects but then if you are on the enterprise level, you are gonna reach for Zend or you are gonna reach for Symphony. And I feel like even after all those years, I can't quite figure out, what specific features or functionality do they have, that make them suitable  for enterprise or what would Codeigniter  not have or what does Laravel not have...hmm... is it related to the fact that Zend has a big company behind it? And whereas with Laravel, you know, like everyone is just gonna keep creating threads about ...what happens when Taylor dies? Is that the kind of idea? Like this is open source...it's kind of rickety...you are not sure what the state of it is, you are not sure if it's going to be abandoned? And with Zend, maybe if you have a big company behind it..maybe you can depend upon it more? Maybe? I don't know, I have the same question as everyone else. TAYLOR OTWELL Yeah, I think most people mean lots of classes I guess. You know, lots of code, lots of lines of code and I think the answers is, you know, obviously I am going to say yes it can be used for big apps, one because it has been used for big apps in the past, so we already know it's true basically. But then also, I think that, you know, Laravel is good for any app that PHP is good for, so, Laravel gives you a good routing system and a way to route request as classes and sort of beyond that is really up to you, you know, once you are past the controller, you basically have total freedom to do whatever you want to do, so, it's up to you in terms of if your app is going to be scalable in terms of complexity. And also I think Laravel is kind of uniquely qualified and better at making big apps than other PHP offerings right now, for a few reasons. One because when people start talking about big apps, a lot of time there is dependency complexity and Laravel Dependency Injection Container  is really good and it's really thoroughly baked in throughout the entire framework. When you talk about complicated apps, a lot of time you are also talking about needs like background job processing and Laravel has basically the only baked in queue system out of any major framework in PHP...hmmm...and then of course there is event broadcasting and other features that I would say are more kind of on the big app side of things, so, not only is it...can it be used for big apps, I think it's uniquely better for big apps than other alternatives out there in PHP right now  for those reasons. And I think it's just a little misleading because it is easy to get started with, and has a very simple starting point. And since that has a single route file you can kind of jump into it and start hacking around on, but it also scales up, you know with your needs and with your team's needs in terms of complexity...so yeah, that's kind of my take on it. Everyone kind of thinks that their app is a special snowflake you know, that has this, very unique requirements that have never been required in the history of web apps, but, the vast majority of applications don't have unique requirements and they don't really have unique needs and you know Laravel and many other frameworks really are going to be a good fit for them but I think Laravel is the best option in PHP right now for a big sophisticated application. JEFFREY WAY: And it is funny because, for whatever reason everyone thinks their project is going to be the one that really put Laravel to the test in terms of how many page views it can render in a single second...all that stuff like...if you need to worry about that, you are at such high level and you will know if you need to worry about that or not, but 90, I would say 99% of projects will never even get close to that point. So, it's almost like, to be frank, it's almost like a sense of vanity that you think the project you are working on right now is something that really needs to worry about that, because you probably are not even close. TAYLOR OTWELL Yeah, and we are assuming, developers don't approach projects in a rational way, even though we think they might. Like people don't choose frameworks in a rational way, they don't choose anything really laughs related to tech in rational way, a lot of time, as surprising as that is. There's a lot of things that go into it and some of it are sort of personality things, maybe they don't like a way that a certain framework is marketed or not marketed. You know some people are very turned off by active marketing around open source, so, maybe they don't like the style of Laravel sort of friendly, hey look at easy this is easy kind of marketing and they are turned off by that, and so they choose something that is more toned down, more sort of suite and tie like Zend because that fit's their personality better. It's not really a technical decision, it's more of just personality or subjective decision. And that happens a lot with tech in general, you know, some people don't use anything that is popular in general, just the kind of classic hipster type thing. I think a lot goes into it and rarely is it purely technical. Sometimes it is... they don't like me! You know, they don't like me personally. And so they don't like Laravel or use Laravel. JEFFREY WAY: I like you Taylor. Everyone laughs JEFFREY WAY: Right before we started recording, I guess RailsConf is going on and I was watching DHH give his presentation live...and he was kind of talking about this to some extent...the idea that it is important even for a tool like Rails or Laravel to have like their own culture and their own sense of values. And he was talking about how like a lot of people take this idea that you just learn all the different languages and then... you do...you are a programmer. So, if you need to work in this local language, you do it and you just apply everything over. And he was talking about how like while that is true, what is wrong with being part of the community that has a very specific culture, very specific views...he talked about like the  people that are still using Rails are doing it, maybe not just because it's better, but because they agree with the values that Rails represents. That is like the huge reason why people still use it to this day. And I think, that is very much true for Laravel as well. It is kind of interesting way to think about things. It's all personality, it's about what your values are. What you connect with and what you don't connect with. TAYLOR OTWELL Yeah...when I first started Laravel, that was a big part of how I wanted, how I thought Laravel could be successful, because I knew that in my own life, like there is sort of this ongoing desire to sort of connect with a group of people. Some sort of community or whatever around shared values. And you know that can be found like around many different things like music, or sport or religion, or whatever.  And I knew with programming like I wanted to connect with this group of people that has similar values about writing really clean code and having a good time doing it and making it enjoyable and sort of interesting, new and fresh. And that's kind of how I presented Laravel and I think it resonated with some people that were also looking for a group with those kinds of values. And that is still the kind of the values that we obviously try to share today, but yeah, it wasn't necessarily a purely  technical thing, it was building this group of people that sort of resonates around similar ideas  and working on it together. MATT STAUFFER: It's interesting 'cos I think that even in my question, I conflicted big and enterprise and I think that you guys kind of really drew out the difference between the two in some of your answers, I mean if we think about it, like Jeffery's first answer was, while enterprise might be really interested in having a company back it versus a person..like Taylor said, we get the question of what if Taylor gets hit by a bus all the time. And it makes sense right, like we have clients all the time coming to us like, say, you know well, you know the CEO or the board or the CFO of our multi-million dollar or multi-billion company are very worried that we are gonna invest a whole bunch of money and time in something and X ..and it's not always...and that Taylor might get run over  by a bus, but a lot of developers are getting non-developer input on decisions they make here and there are certain times where some IT persons have set up some rules that says like "You can only use projects like this and not [projects like that and I do wonder whether there are some constraints there like one of them being, that it must of be owned by a company, I know that when we worked with CraftCMS a lot of people said well, why would you, there's actually a business value of using CraftCMS over something Wordpress because Craft is making money and therefore it's a sustainable business model and therefore the business people are actually less worried about this thing disappearing. Right? So like maybe a more direct chain of profit to the people who are running the thing might actually make it clearer. I don't know if that exists maybe ZendCon would be something like that but I know it's Laracon too...I don't really know! But it's interesting that the requirements of ...like the true enterprise requirements...like because I work for a company, my company has these requirements...but I think people, including me when I ask these questions conflict that with big. And so I think there is a good place to take this next is, lets step away from enterprise a little bit...enterprise culture is a thing...you know whatever...let's talk about big, so the thing mentioned Taylor, and Jeffery both of you said a lot of people come along and say oh well mine is going to be the one that finally pushes those bounds right, I am gonna run into traffic issues and stuff like that, so, first of all, like I know that we can't say a lot of the names of big sites that are running on it but I feel like is there anything we can do to kind of like just ... I mean, I know several of them 'cos I am under NDA with several of them, you know, who have talked to us about doing some work with us but there's like multi- I mean milions of millions of hundreds of millions of page views sites running on Laravel...there is like Alexa top 500 sites running on Laravel, there's ...hummmm...what's the big group of all the businesses in the US? I can't remember the name of it...Fortune 500 companies running on Laravel...like multiple Fortune 500 companies whose websites are running on Laravel. Are there anything that you guys can share, like to say, hey look, this is the proof, like we've got big stuff running through here. TAYLOR OTWELL Trying to think some of them..I mean like the Vice Video, Log Swan, you know, various video games sites like FallOut 4 had their landing page on Laravel...other stuff like that, but you know, it's sort of never seems to be enough and it sorts of becomes this treadmill of, you know, I have to give one more proof that it sort of can work...and I just wonder like what's really underlining the question like, do they want to know that if I build my big app on Laravel will it be infinitely maintainable and clean...and no, Laravel won't automatically make your app amazing to maintain for 10 years, you know, I don't know if it's like trying to sort of scale responsibility for you also having to do a lot effort to like make your app enjoyable to maintain or what...but... MATT STAUFFER: Bad programmer, can write a bad app with any framework right? Like, nothing is going to rescue you from that..not saying that the person asking is necessarily bad..but I think that's a great point you made earlier Taylor, I wish we can further into it, is that with Laravel like yea ok, Laravel has it's own conveniences but at some point every single app is basically just you writing PHP... TAYLOR OTWELL: Yeah MATT STAUFFER: And especially at this level when you are talking about hundreds of thousands of lines of code, like the vast majority of the dependencies there is going to be just PHP code right? TAYLOR OTWELL: Yeah. Once you get...let's just take like a Laravel app...'laravel new'...whatever...once you are at the controller, method, in your controller class, everything else is up to you, so whether you use the validator or whether you even use Eloquent at all, or whether you use anything in Laravel, is entirely up you, so it was your choice to do whatever you did past that point. So, it's not Laravel making you do any one particular thing. So, that's sort of the point where you are gonna have to, you know turn your thinking cap on and really plan on how to do a big project, because as far as the framework is concerned, the framework is gonna be a much smaller concern than your actual code, you know the framework is gonna be routing session, some caching, some database calls, but you are the one that is gonna have to like, figure out the domain problems of your app, which is gonna be way more complicated I think, than any framework problems you are gonna have. Like, how is this app gonna work? How is it gonna provide value for our customers, or whatever, those are all like much bigger questions I think...than worrying about can Laravel be used for "Big" apps. MATT STAUFFER: One of the questions we got on Twitter was, how to build big sites with Laravel, scaling, deployment,  database structure, load balancing, so, lets say someone is on board right...yes, Laravel can be used for big apps period..it's good..so, what are some considerations that you would have, so if you were taking, you know, a default app out of the box and you "laravel new" it and you build some basic stuff and someone says alright, this app that you just built needs to be able to handle you know, a million hits a week next month..what are the first things you would look to, to start, kind of hardening it against that kind of traffic? TAYLOR OTWELL: Hmm, really simple things you could do is to make sure you are using a good cache or session driver, so probably you wanna use something like Memcache or Redis or something that you can centralize on one server or Elasticache if you are on AWS whatever, you know, you are also probably gonna use a load balancer...PHP is really easy to deploy this way you know, to put a LoadBalancer up and to make a few PHP servers and to alternate traffic between them. PHP makes it really simple to do that kind of scaling and then with Laravel, make sure you use config cache, make sure you are using the route cache, make sure you are doing composer dump autoload optimized, you know, really simple things you can do to sort of boost your application a little bit. MATT STAUFFER: Jeffery, I know Laracast is pretty huge, you kinda in there day in, day out, so I know you are super focused on making sure that it's performing, especially related to maybe, let's say, databases and deployment, can you give me any kind of tips that you have there for people who are building new kind of high traffic apps that you have learned from developing Laracast? JEFFREY WAY: Yeah, Laracast is surprisingly high traffic, if you look at the numbers. And I can tell you, not doing that much...just to be perfectly frank, beyond what Taylor said, a lot of that stuff is kind of the fundamentals...of using config cache...a lot of people will just deploy and stick with the file based cache driver...laughs..you will obviously have some issues with that...but, I am not doing anything that fancy. A lot of it becomes basic stuffs like, people completely ignoring the size of their images...like that is always the very first one I bring up and it's such a 101 tip, but if you go from site to site, you can see it being abused immensely. There is so many ways to work it into your build process...or if not, just dragging a bunch of images into..like a Mac app...I am trying to think of the one I use... TAYLOR OTWELL: Is it ImageOptim? JEFFREY WAY:  ImageOptim, yeah just, like when you deploy you can drag a bunch of images up there and it will automatically optimize them as best as it can. And you would be shocked how much benefit you can get from that...versus people who just take a 100kb image and they throw it into their project...you know it's funny that people will debate single quotes versus double quotes all day and then throw a 200kb image into their banner, you know, it makes no sense, people, are silly that way. TAYLOR OTWELL: I think another great thing to do is separate out your database from your web server. If you are building anything, you know, that you care about...like in a real way, it can be good to do that..and sort of, if you don't do it from the start, it can be kind of, you know, scary to make the transition, because now you've got to move your live database to another server...but, there are tools out there to make it pretty easy, there are even free packages out there to make it pretty easy to back up your database, so, that has always been really nice for me to have that on a separate server. So definitely if you are gonna have to start do that because it just makes it easier to do that scaling where if you wanna add a second server, you don't have this sort of funky situation where you have one webserver talking to another webserver because it has your database and all that other stuff where now if you want upgrade PHP you've got to upgrade PHP on the same server that your live database is running on...just scary situations like that...that, that would help you avoid. MATT STAUFFER: Are you guys using a lot of caching on your common Eloquent Queries? JEFFREY WAY: Yeah, I do quite a bit. TAYLOR OTWELL: I really don't on Forge. MATT STAUFFER: I wondered about Forge, because with Forge, each query is gonna be unique per user right? Versus with Jeffery where there might be like a page that lists out all of the episode and you might have 10, 000 people hit that same page. With Forge, it's more 10,000 people each seeing a totally different list right? TAYLOR OTWELL Yeah, it is very dynamic. The one thing I do cache is the list of invoices from stripe because there is a stripe API call we have to make, so we do cache that. JEFFREY WAY: Yeah me too. TAYLOR OTWELL: But other than that I don't think I really do any caching. So, Jeffrey probably has more insight on that...? JEFFREY WAY: Well I have a lot of the stuff on the Forum, because the forum just gets hammered...you will be surprised about how popular that forum is... MATT STAUFFER: I won't be surprised because it shows up on the top results of everything. JEFFREY WAY: I know and I do love finding my forum when am googling for my own ignorance. And I go to my own website to figure out how to do something which is a great feeling! But I do have some queries related to the forum that are pretty intense, a lot of like multiple joins, pulling in stuff, so I do cache that..even summary,  I cache that every 10 minutes at a time. Just to reduce the weight a little bit. I get a lot of use out of that stuff and then, yeah, of course, the type of stuff that doesn't just change like Categories or Channels or like Taylor was bringing up, there is no reason not to cache those things. And yes especially the invoices it's a great example, if you are making a network query every single time a page is hit, there is really no need to do that if it's going to be the exact same results...every single time give or take a change or two...so those are obvious cases where you want to cache it as long as you can. TAYLOR OTWELL: How do you burst your cache on Laracast? JEFFREY WAY: Whenever something cache bustable takes place...I guess... TAYLOR OTWELL: Ok so I guess like whenever a new category is out and stuff, you just ... JEFFREY WAY: When a new category is out yeah, as part of that I will just manually bust the cache...or no, I will automatically bust the cache...in other areas, it happens so rarely that I just boot up 'php artisan tinker' and do it myself....*laughs...*which is crappy, but no, anything more common like that, I will just automate it as part of the...whenever I update the database. MATT STAUFFER: We are working on an app right now that has Varnish sitting in front of it. And so literately the code that is behind our Skype window right now is me writing a job that just wipes the Varnish cache either for the whole thing or for specific routes in response to us notifying that the change happens and that's an interesting thing because the cache is outside of Laravel app, but it's cached based on its routes...and so I have the ability to say...well, these particular changes are gonna modify these routes and I built an intelligent Job that kinda get sent out anytime we need those things. So even when it is not within the app, even when it is not your Laravel cache, there is still a lot of ability to kind of put some heavy caches on. And in speaking of that kind of stuff cache busting, use the Version in mix all the time. I mean that is just, because then you can throw Varnish or whatever else and just do infinite cache on your assets. And if you all don't know what that is, it's essentially every single asset that gets built by Mix now has like a random string appended at the end of the file name. And every time it's changed, it gets a new random string on it. And so you can set a forever expires on your Javascript files, your CSS files or whatever else, because anytime it needs to change, it would actually be a different file name as your browser will get to request it and then Varnish will get re-request it or whatever is your cache is. JEFFREY WAY: But on that note, actually, I have been thinking about that, is there...can you guys tell me any real reason why when we are using Versioning, the file name itself needs to change? Because you are using that Mix helper function already to dynamically figure out what the version file is, so is there any reason why we can't just use a unique query string there, or not a unique query string but taking where we would change the file name to include the version, we just include it as part of the query string and then the file name always stays the same? MATT STAUFFER: I know that HTML5 boiler plate used to do just query strings and I hadn't even thought about that, but that might be possible, where the files always stay the same but your...what's that JSON file that has the .... JEFFREY WAY: JSON manifest... MATT STAUFFER: Maybe that just adds the id into the new id to pass? And it's just like authoring comment or something like that? JEFFREY WAY: Yeah, when you version the file, it creates, basically it gets like a Hash of the file that you just bundled up and then that gets included in the new file name...but every time you bundle if that changes, you will never know what that file name is called in your HTML so basically you can use this Mix helper function that Laravel provides that will dynamically read that JSON file and it will figure out, oh you want this file, well, here is the current hashed version and we return that...but yeah I have just been thinking lately like, is it kind of dumb that we keep creating a new file, when instead, the Mix manifest file can just have the relevant query string updated. MATT STAUFFER: So, I googled really quick and there is a thing from Steve Souders....who is the guy who originated the 13 rules of make your website faster or whatever they were...the whole like, you know less HTTP requests, and it's called in your files names don't use query strings...I havent read it yet...oh High Performant websites...I havent read it yet and it is 9 years old. My God! Now that I am seeing seen him talking about Squid, I have worked with Squid before which is like a pretty old cache, but a lot of stuff that works for Squid also works for Cloudflare so I am guessing Cloudflare is either using Squid or adopted Squids terminologies and I do think...and I also did a whole bunch of work with one of our clients who is writing custom Varnish rules right now. And I do remember that stripping query strings is a thing that happens sometimes especially when it doesn't matter, for example in the case of asset, I think it maybe a thing that he do by default, so he is digging through here and Squid and proxies and stuff like that, I think basically what he is saying is your proxy administrator could go and teach the  proxy to care about query strings but all then ignore them by default... JEFFREY WAY: Ok MATT STAUFFER: So by choosing to use it with query strings you are opening up a lot of job opportunities where it doesn't work the way you are expecting. TAYLOR OTWELL: I have been using Cloudflare quite a bit recently. The whole Laravel website is behind Cloudflare, heavy Cloudflare caching, very few requests actually hit the real server. Mainly because it's all static, you know documentation but am a big fan of that, especially when you are scaling out webservers, if you are using, you know, some kind of Cloudflare SSL. I think Amazon has a similar SSL service now, it makes so much easier to add a web server because you don't really have to think about your certificates as much, you know, putting your certificate on every server, especially because since you can just use like a self-signed certificate if you are using the Cloudflare edge certificate...so that's something to look into and it's free to get started with and it has some nice feature for scaling.  MATT STAUFFER: I helped some folks at this thing called the Resistance Manual, which is a Wiki about basically...huh......sorry to be mildly political for a second...all the negative impact of the Trump presidency and how to kind of resist against those things. And so they wanted me to help them gather their information together and I said well I can help out, I am a tech guy and they were like, do you know, you know, media wiki, which is the open source platform behind things like Wikipedia, and I said no, but you know, I can learn it. Turns out that it's like really old school janky procedure PHP and so I said yeah I can handle this but it is also just extremely dumb in terms of how it interacts with the database and so when you are getting you know millions of hits like they were on day one, we had a like a 8 core, you know, hundreds of hundreds of dollars a month Digital Ocean box and it was still just tanking. Like couple of times a day that the caches were getting overflowed and all that kind of stuff, so, I threw clouldflare on it, hoping it would be magical and the problem with that is it's not Cloudflare's fault it's because Cloudflare or Squid or Varnish needs to have some kind of reasonable rules knowing when things have changed and for anyone who has never dealt with them before there is a sort of complicated but hopefully not too complicated dance between your proxy and reading things like expires headers and E-Tags and all that kind of stuff from your website. And so if you throw something like Cloudflare or something like that on it and it is not working the way you expect, the first thing to look at is both the expires headers and the cache link headers that are coming off of your server pre-cloudflare and also what that same response looks like when it's coming back after going through cloudflare, and cloudflare or whoever else will add a couple of other ones like did it hit the cache or miss the cache and what's the expires headers and what's the Squids expires headers, so there are lots of headers that give you the ability when it just seems like it is not just working the way you want and there is only like 3 configuration options in cloudflare, then what do you do? Go look at your headers and I bet that you know, 15 minutes of googling about how cloudflare headers work and Squid headers work and then inspecting all your headers before and after they hit cloudflare and you will be able to source out the problem. Alright so, we talked databases, we talked loadbalancing a little bit, deployment, so, if anybody is not familiar with zero downtime deployment, just a quick introduction for how it works...if you use deployments on something like Forge the default response when you push something new to your github branch is that it hits 'git pull', 'composer install' 'php artisan migrate' or whatever, so your site could erratically be down for seconds while the whole process runs and so, if you are worried about that  you can run, 'php artisan down' beforehand and 'php artisan up' afterwards, so when it's down, instead of throwing an error, you just see like hey this site is temporary down kind of thing. But if you are in a circumstances where that is a problem, you might want to consider something like Capistrano style or Envoyer style zero downtime deploy, look somewhere else for a much longer explanation but essentially, every time a new release comes out, it's cloned into a new directory, the whole installation is processed and run there and only once that is done, then the public directory  that is getting served is symlinked into that new directory instead of the old one. So you end up with you know with the last 10 releases each in its own directory and you can go back and roll back into a previous directory and Taylor's service Envoyer is basically a really nice User Interface in front of that... For me that has always been the easiest way to handle deploys in a high kind of pressure high traffic high loads situations is just to use Envoyer or Capistrano. Are there any other experiences you've all had or tips or anything about how to handle deploys in high traffic settings when you are really worried about you know those 15 seconds or whatever...are there any other considerations we should be thinking about? or anything? TAYLOR OTWELL: That's the extent of my experience..I haven't had anything that is more demanding than using Envoyer. Am sure there is you know...if I were deploying to thousands of servers, but for me when I am just deploying to 4 or 5 servers Envoyer has been huh...pretty good bet. MATT STAUFFER: And hopefully if you are deploying to a thousand sites, then you've got a server person who is doing that. You know like we are talking dev'ops for developers here right,  like when you are running a minor server not when you are running a multi-billion dollar product and the clients I have been talking to were working with all these kind of Varnish stuff..I didnt setup Varnish you know, my client setup Varnish and took care of all these stuff and he just kinda asked me for an input in these kind of stuff and so I definitely would say like there is definitely a limit at which...you know...people often lament like how many responsibilities they are putting on developers these days. I don't think we all have to be IT people capable of running servers for you know, a one thousand server setup for some massive startup or something like that. But I think like this whole, you know, how do I handle a thing big enough that 15 seconds of down time where a  migration and composer run...I think that is often within our purview and I think something like Capistrano or Envoyer is for me at least it's being a good fix...the only situation I have not had to run into which I have heard people asked about online and I wanna see if you all have any experience there is, what if you do a roll out and it has a migration in it and then you need to roll back?  Is there an easy way to do the 'migrate:rollback' in an Envoyer rollback command or should you just go Envoyer rollback as you SSH in and then do 'php artisan migrate:rollback' TAYLOR OTWELL: Sort of my view on that recently like over the past year has been that you will just never roll back, ever. And you will always go forward. So, because I don't know how you rollback without losing customer data. So, it's, a lot of time not really visible to rollback. Lets just pretend you could, then yes, there is no real easy way to do it on Envoyer, you will just kind have to SSH in and do php artisan rollback like you said. But I think a lot of times, at least for like my own project like Forge and Envoyer, I can never really guarantee that I wasn't loosing data so I think if at all possible, what I would try to do is to write an entirely new migration that fixes whatever problem there is. And deploy that and it will just migrate forward, you know. And I will never really try to go backwards. MATT STAUFFER: You find yourself in that accidental situation where you deploy something that should never have been, then you then go 'php artisan down' real quick, run the fix, push it up and let it go through the deploy process and then 'php artisan up' after that one deployed. TAYLOR OTWELL: Yeah. That's what I would do. If it's, I mean, sometimes if it's low traffic and  you feel pretty certain no one's messed with the new database schema, then probably you can just roll back, but, I was just worried  in Forge's case that people are in there all day, I would lose data. So that's why I would every time possible to try and go forward. MATT STAUFFER: Yeah, that makes sense. TAYLOR OTWELL: I have actually stopped writing down methods in my migrations entirely recently...not that it's optional. JEFFREY WAY: I feel evil doing that! Like I very much get the argument...but, when I create a migration and I just ignore the down method, I feel like, I am just doing something wrong. I am still doing it right now. TAYLOR OTWELL: It's really mainly visible in Laravel 5.5 'cos you've got the new db:fresh method or db:fresh command, which just totally drops all the tables without running any down methods. MATT STAUFFER: I end up doing that manually all the time anyway because at least in development, the most often when I want to do refresh, it's often in context where I still feel comfortable modifying  old migrations..like basically, the moment I have run a migration in prod, I would never modify an old migration. The moment there is somebody else working on the project with me, I will never modify an old one unless I have to and it's just so important that I have to say hey, you know, lets go refresh. But often when I am just starting something out and I have got my first 6 migrations out, I will go back and  hack those things over and over again...I don't need to add a migration that has a single alter in it, when I can just go back and edit the thing. And in that context often, I change the migration and then I try to roll back, and sometimes I have changed it in such a way where the rollback doesn't work anymore. I rename the table or something like that... JEFFREY WAY: Right.... MATT STAUFFER: So fresh is definitely going to be a breath of fresh air. JEFFREY WAY: I do wish there was maybe a way to consolidate things, like when  you have a project that has been going on for a few years, you can end up in a situation where your migrations folder is huge...you just have so many. And it's like every time you need to boot it up, you are running through all of those and like you said sometimes, just the things you've done doesn't just quite work anymore and you can't rollback. It would be nice sometimes if you could just have like...like a reboot, like just consolidate all of these down to something very very simple. MATT STAUFFER: We did that with Karani I don't know if there is...there is a tool that we used that helps you generate Laravel migrations from Schema and we did it soon after we had migrated from Codeigniter to Laravel for our database access layer. Karani is a Codeigniter app where I eventually started bringing in Laravel components and then now, the actual core of the app is in Laravel and there is just like a third of the route that are still on Codeigniter that havent been moved over and once we got to the point where half of our migrations were Codeigniter and half of them were in Laravel it's just such a mess so we found this tool...whatever it was. We exported the whole thing down to a single migration, archived all the old ones,  I mean, we have them on git if we ever need them and now, there is just one..you know, one date from where you just get this massive thing, and then all of our migrations happen kind of, from that date. And for me, I actually feel more free to do that when it's in production because the moment it's in production, I have less concern about being able to speed it up through this specific process because like if something is from two months ago, I am sure it had already has been run in production and so I feel less worry about making sure the history of it still sticks around... JEFFREY WAY: Alright...right... MATT STAUFFER: Alright...so the next question we have coming up is, "I will like to hear about how you all stay productive." And we've talked on and off at various times about what we use..I know we've got us some Todoist love and I know we've got some WunderList  love...hummm... I've have some thoughts about Calendar versus Todo lists and I also saw something about Microsoft buying and potentially ruining Wunderlist..so what do y'all use and what happened with Wunderlist. TAYLOR OTWELL: Well, Todo lists are dead now that Wunderlist is dead. MATT STAUFFER: Yeah...So what happened? TAYLOR OTWELL: Wunderlist was my preferred todo list, I just thought it looked pretty good...and Microsoft bought them I think, that was actually little while back that they bought them but now they have finally announced what they are actually doing with it...they are basically shutting down Wunderlist and turning it into Microsoft Todo...which doesn't look a lot like the old Wunderlist and doesn't have some of the features of the old Wunderlist...but it looked ok..you know, it seems fun, so what I have done is migrated to Todoist rather reluctantly but it's working out ok. JEFFREY WAY: Please correct me...is this funny like, Wunderlist is gonna be around for a very long time but just the idea that they are shutting down it's almost like you feel compelled...we've talked about this with other things too...where it's like you suddenly feel like oh I need to migrate...we talked about it with Sublime, like if we find out tomorrow, Sublime is dead in the water. But you can still use it as long as you want. Even though, it would still work great, you would have this feeling like well, I gotta get over to Atom or I gotta start moving on...'cos this place is dead, even though Wunderlist is gonna work for a long time. TAYLOR OTWELL: Yes...laughs...as soon as it was announced, I basically deleted Wunderlist off my computer... All laugh.... TAYLOR OTWELL: Which makes no sense, but it's so true... MATT STAUFFER: I needed a new router and everyone told me, you use the Apple Routers 'cos they are the best...but I have heard they are 'end-of-life'd'....and I was like no way...no way I am gonna throw all my money there and someone say well, why does it matter...you know...you are gonna buy a router and you are gonna use it till it dies? And I said I don't care...I am gonna buy something else 'cos it just...I don't know...it's just like you are putting your energy and your effort after something that can't...you know can only be around for so long and you just want..you want be working with something that's gonna last I guess... JEFFREY WAY: Yeah...I am still on Wunderlist right now. I am hearing...humm..if you guys are familiar with "Things" that was like the big Todo app years ago...and then they have been working on Things 3 or third version for a year...it's been so long, that people joke about it..you know, it's almost like that...new version of..humm..what was it...there was hummm...some Duke Nukem game that.... TAYLOR OTWELL: Is it Duke Nukem Forever..? JEFFREY WAY: Yes! For like 10 or fifteen years and it finally came out! It's looking like next month, "Things 3" will be out and I am hearing it..like the prettiest ToDo app ever made I am hearing really good things. So, I was hoping to get in on the beta but, they skipped over me. So, I will experience it in May but I am excited about it. So, that's the next one..but you know what, I am never happy with Todo apps..I don't know why. It's kinda of weird addiction...if you say an item address basic need...even like a Microsoft Todo. Ok, your most basic need would be to like say...Go to the market on Thursday. You can't do that in Microsoft Todo. You have to manually like set the due date to Thursday. Rather than just using human speech. TAYLOR OTWELL: Have you tried Todoist? JEFFREY WAY: Todoist works that way. Huh I think Wunderlist works that way but now, Microsoft Todo doesn't. MATT STAUFFER: Oh ok..got it. You lost that ability right? JEFFREY WAY: Yeah, it's so weird like every task app would have something that's really great and then other basic things that are completely missing...and it's been that way for years. MATT STAUFFER: I always feel bad, I mean I bought things...thankfully I managed to skip...what was that thing...OminiFocus, I skipped OminiFocus which is good 'cos that is hundreds of dollars saved for me. And I tried...I tried all these different things and I finally figured out that  there is a reason why I keep jumping from one to the other, is because..for me...this is not true for everybody...and I think it might have to do with personality a little bit...and the industry a little bit, and what your roles are whatever, Todo lists are fundamentally flawed because they are not the way I approach the day...and they are not the place my brain is...so, I can force my brain into a new paradigm for even a week at a time but I have never been able to stick with it and it's not the app, I thought it was the app, I thought just once I get the right app, I will become a todolist person and I realized, I am not a Todolist person so I can try every app and it can be perfect and I will still just stop using it 'cos it's not what I think about. And when I discovered that I can't use and then later found some articles talking about how I am not the only person who come up with this...that validated me...'cos I put it on my calendar and so, if I need to do something, I put it on my calendar and then it gets done. And if I don't put it on my calendar, it doesn't get done. End of story. It's so effective for me that my wife knows at this point that if she asks me to do something and I don't immediately pick up my phone and put it on my calendar, she knows it's not gonna get done. Because that's..that's how things happen and so, it's amazing to me, that..laughs...she literarily, when she first started discovering this, she sent..and she's not not super technical..like she's smart, she just doesn't like computers all that much...but she knows how to use google..and so, she, when she first discovered this, she sent me a calendar invite that is "Matt Clean Toilet"...and it's for 8 hours every Sunday and so, I will be on a screenshare..'cos she's like that's how I am ever going to clean the toillet right?...so I will be on this screenshare with a client and I will pull up my calendar and to say hey when is it a good time for us to have this meeting? And I will be like..oh "Matt Clean Toilet" takes the 8 hours....laughs... But for me, my todo list is my calendar. And everyone kinda in the company knows what my calendar is completely for and Dan actually has asked me to start marking those things as not busy, so, Calendly, our appointment app will still allow people to book...like clients to book times with me during that time..but like essentially, if I need to get something done, like, I..I need to review a whole bunch of pull requests, like Daniel who works with me literarily just put meeting invite on my calendar for tomorrow 10:30 and it says "Code Review @ Daniel". And literarily after this podcast, there is an hour that says "Code Review with James" because they know that that's how they get it....and there is...500 hundred emails in my inbox and all these other things I have to do, but if it goes to the calendar,  it gets done.  So, have you guys ever tried that? Does it sound like something that will click with you or no? JEFFREY WAY: I think it makes good sense for you because it sounds like your days are scheduled like your day is full..humm...my day isn't quite as much like do this with so and so, I don't have as many meetings. So, most of my day is like: these are the things I wanna get done. And it doesn't matter whether I do it at 9:AM or 9:PM, so, Todo list works good for me but yeah..I can see how like if my day was very segmented and scheduled that would make far more sense than reaching for some todo app. TAYLOR OTWELL: Yeah..my days are usually pretty free-form outside of the kinda standard schedule where I always do emails and pull requests first thing in the morning but then after that lately it's been...you know..was work on Horizon..now it's work on the thing that comes after Horizon, and that's pretty much the rest of the day, you know, besides whatever Laracon stuff that I have to do recently, which is more of a seasonal thing you know. But I got lunch, all booked, that's done...but whatever we need, you know, furniture, catering or whatever. But yeah, then I pretty much just work on one thing throughout the day. So, I don't really switch context like that a lot. But I was so despondent at the Wunderlist announcement that all Friday afternoon I wrote a chrome extension that when you open  new tab, it opens "Discussing Todo List" that I wrote in VueJs and you know HTML and it uses the chrome sync to sync it across my chrome account to all my laptops whatever...so... every new tab has a todo list, but even that, I was still not happy with it and deleted it and the whole afternoon went with the todo list. Anyway, but I have forgotten about the Chrome extension thing. I need to open source it. MATT STAUFFER: Every developer has to make their own Todo list at some point in their lives. TAYLOR OTWELL: Yeah. That's interesting about the calendar though...I want to get Calendly because it looks like a really cool app and try some more calendar stuff 'cos I haven't really dug into that as much as I could. MATT STAUFFER: Yeah...I use basic Calfor my desktop app, I know that, I  think I use Fantastic Cal on the phone or something..a lot of people love that...the thing that we like about Calendly is that it gives me a public link that syncs up to my Google calendar and so when we need to schedule things like we are in the middle of hiring right now or client meetings, I just send them to my calendly link and I just say, go here and  schedule time with me and it syncs up with my Google calendar and it shows them all the times and I can say..go schedule a 60 minutes meeting and I give them the 60 minutes link or 5 minutes or whatever and you can put different rules around each. So I teach calendly when do I drop my son off at school and when do I ...you know drive from my home office to my work office all that kind of stuff...so that it knows when I am available and then..because we just wasted so much time between Dan and me trying to get our calendars in sync. So, that's what I love about Calendly. TAYLOR OTWELL: What really sold you on basic Cal over like you know just Apple Calendar or whatever? MATT STAUFFER: I wish I can tell you...I know that it handles multiple calendars better...but it's been so long since I made that choice that I couldn't even tell you. I know that Dan, my business partner hates calendars more than any person I have ever met and almost every time he complains about something, I am like oh yeah, you can do that with Basic Cal and he is like "I still use Apple Calendars" I know those things but I can't tell you what they are..so. Alright...so one last question before we go for the day. Saeb asked "It would be nice to hear why are guys are programmers. Is it just something you love and enjoy or is it just a way to put bread on the table? Is it passion what is it that makes you wanna be a programmers?" JEFFREY WAY: I will go first. I fell into it. I think we are being disingenuous if we don't say that to some extent...but  I know even from when I was a kid, I love the act of solving puzzles. I remember I had this Sherlock Holmes book and it's one of those things where every single page is some little such and such happens...somebody was murdered and then Sherlock comes, points to so and so and says you are the  person who did it. And the last sentence is always..."How did he know?!" And that was like my favorite book. I would go through it every day and try to figure out how  how did he figure out that this was the guy who...you know...robbed the bank or whatever it happened it be. So, between that or I play guitar for over a decade and I went to school for that. It's all still the same thing of like trying to solve puzzles trying to solve riddles trying to figure out how to connect these things. You may not know it with guitar but the same thing is true, like puzzles and you start learning about shapes on the guitar and how to transpose this to this. And how to play this scale in eight different ways...it's still like the same  thing to me it's figuring out how to solve these  little puzzles. And so for programming, I feel like it's the perfect mix of all of that. There needs to ne some level of creativity involved for me to be interested in it....I always worried I would end up in a job where I just did the same and only this thing every single day. And I would finish the day and come back tomorrow and I am gonna do the exact same thing all over again. So there needs to be some level of creativity there which programming does amazingly well or offers amazingly well. Although my mum would never know. I think she thinks I gave up on music and went to this like boring computer job...and even though when I explain to her like no there is huge amounts of creativity in this I don't think she quite makes the connection of how that is. So, yeah, between the creativity and solving puzzles, and making things, it's a perfect mix for my personality. TAYLOR OTWELL: I was always really into computers and games and stuffs growing up, so it was pretty natural for me to major you know in IT in college but I didn't really get exposed to the sort of the front side of programming and open source stuff until after college when I started poking around on side projects and stuff like that. So, I did kind of fall into this side of programming you know, where, you are programming for fun as a hobby and working on open source after I graduated but I was always kind of interested in looking back sort of things that are similar to programming so like into games like SimCity and stuff like that where you are planning out you know, your city and sort of...one of the similar things you do when you are building up big projects or whatever a big enterprise project you know was sort of planning and trying to get... just the right structure whatever, so I was kinda always into that thing. And just sort of naturally fall into that path later in life. MATT STAUFFER: I...my brother and I started a bulletin boards service...out of our spare bedroom, I mean we were in Elementary or middle school or something like that..and he is 3 and half years older than me and he is a little bit more kind of like intellectual  than I am, so, he learned how to code the things and he said why don't you be the designer. And that kind of trend just kept up. When he learned how to make websites, he be like well, I am gonna make websites and you be the designer. And so I kinda had this internalized idea that A...I was interested in tech..but B, I was the design mind. And the thing is, I am not a very good designer...like the only reason I kept getting into design is because I had like... I was creative, I was a musician and stuff but also because my brother already had the programming skills down and so he needs a designer right? And so, I think that I went off to college, by that point I already had a job as a programmer, I already had my own clients, doing you know frontend web developments and basic PHP, Wordpress that kind of stuff but I was like well I need to become a better designer so I went off to college for design and I just realized I am not a designer, so I left. And I went off and I did English and I worked with people and I worked for a non-profit having thought you know like oh that is not my thing and then I kinda did a turn round when I left the non-profit, my wife went back to school and I needed to pay the bills, so it was..there is an element of paying the bills..I say like well I know that web development pays well, so I will go back to that. And just discovered that I love web development...it is fulfilling and it is satisfying...it is creative...it's using your brain in all this really interesting ways...each one it's a little bit the same, a little bit unique, there is always really great things about it...I mean I remember one of the things that drove me nuts about my previous work..both in design and in working in the non-profit is that there is no sense like whether you did a good job or not. There is no sense of when something is done. You are just very kinda of vague and vacuous and with this, it's like there is a defined challenge...and you know when it's done. And you know whether you did a good job or not. And I was just like that was huge...that was so foundationally helpful for me. And so I think just kind of being able to approach it and realize that it's creative..like, it's creative and it is well defined..it's a little concrete..it's a challenge all those things together I think for me..and it turns out that it wasn't just a way to make money and I have also since discovered now that I run a company that I also have all the people aspects here..it's about relationship, it's about communities...I mean we have talked about that a lot in this episode and running a company is about  hiring and  company culture and all those kind of stuff... So I get to comment especially at the level of tech that I get to do day to day whether it's open source or running company I feel like it's all of the best together in one word. JEFFREY WAY: So Matt, how did you go from taking on smaller projects when you went back to web developments to suddenly running Tighten? Like how did you get there? What happened? Were you getting more projects than you can handle? MATT STAUFFER: The opposite. I...I had no work. I worked out of a co-working space in Chicago and I only had about 10 hours a day, fifteen hours day filled because I didnt know anybody. And I had not been doing anything in the industry for 6 years. So, I said, you know what? When I worked for non-profit there was this need I had and I still worked for those non-profit's per time at that point, so I just started building an app...I built an app by hand while I worked for the non-profit in PHP and it was terrible. And I was like oh, I have heard about this framework thing, and so I tried building it in CakePHP and it was terrible, and so, those experiences matured me a little bit...and so by the time I was now kinda going solo as a developer, every free moment I would have, outside of the you know, the contract work I had, I would go learn Codeigniter. You know my buddy Matt had learned ExpressionEngine and said hey, checkout Codeigniter I think you might like it. So I learned Codeigniter and I did all these work in Codeigniter and I built  this whole app which is Karani, the thing we are talking about today and I built Karani and I made it for myself and then my friends wanted it and so then I made it for my friends and then it was costing me money to upkeep, so I learned how to charge them money..and Stripe was brand new at that point, so I almost went with Stripe but I ended up going with BrainTree...I got into like big and software as a service app development through there...and right at that same time... I was teaching my buddy all about modern web development HTML5 boiler plate all that kind of stuff after work one day and this guy walked over...the one guy in my co-working space that I had never met, who was always in his closed office and he was like, are you a developer? Are you looking for work? I was like yeah..and he was like..I need you...would you consider working for me? I played it all cool but I was like YES..PLEASE I NEED WORK!!! I only have 10 hours of work a week right now. And it was Dan... And so, Dan and I worked together on this massive project for a year and the client took 6 months to actually get the work ready for us. And he already had me booked  and he already had me billed and he was why don't you just go learn become the best possible developer you can..I will throw you know, 30 hours a week jobs just off my various you know various projects...but in all your free time and even in those projects, just learn to become the absolute best, because we were working for, you know, this massive billion dollar international company at that point. And responsive was like  just a thought in people's minds. So, I wrote you know, articles and I created responsive libraries back in the early days of responsive and all those kind of stuff and I was like really up in the middle of it. And then we built this app. So, I had like a lot of kind of things that took me very quickly from like hey I haven't written any code or any professional code  in 6 years to like to the point where I was ready to build an app for this billion dollar company. JEFFREY WAY: That was amazing. That is how learn best too. MATT STAUFFER: It really is..and Dan and I loved working together so well that within 6 months we decided to go into business together and 6 months or a year later, we named it Tighten and the rest is history. MATT STAUFFER: And so, we are super late and Jeffery, you are the one who has to edit this all later, so I apologize for that..so Ok. Future Jeffery, editing this, I am going to do you a favor, call it a day for now so..guys...it's been a ton of fun..everyone who submitted questions to us on Twitter, the ones we didn't get to today, they are still on our trailer board, we will get to some of them next time... But keep sending us stuff for us to talk about and like I said, the Laravel news podcast is doing a fantastic job of keeping you up to date on regular basis with news so definitely tune in there for that...but we are gonna be talking about more long form stuffs  when you got questions for us, send them to us either to our personal accounts or twitter account..for the podcast and we will try to get to them whenever we can..so, until next time..it's Laravel Podcast thanks for listening. MUSIC fades out...

Our lives can get out of control busy. We discuss the apps and services we use to stay organized, efficient, and productive.

Today’s guest is Martin Gleeson, a co-founder of The Electron Workshop and Serversaurus, two companies that sit under the umbrella of Arktisma, which is one of the founding members of the B Corp movement in Australia. Serversaurus, which promotes an equitable workplace, was the first 100 percent carbon-neutral Australian web-hosting company, partnering with Greenfleet Australia in 2007 to offset their carbon emissions. They’re also part of the One Percent for the Planet movement, donating one percent of their sales to environmental causes. We recently changed hosting to Serversaurus primarily because they’re a B Corp, and we’re working towards achieving B Corp accreditation. Join our chat as we discover and discuss: Martin's awareness of a fair workplace at the age of 12 and why he gives a damn Principles of a fair workplace: respect, autonomy, equality Treating people the way you expect to be treated The psychology and effects of men asking for higher wages than women Pushing equality between men and women in the workforce The advantages of working four days a week Creating a more equitable workforce and other issues they need to face About the B Corp movement and why they chose B Corp How to become a B Corp: Learn the process of becoming one! Getting help from The Intern Group Resources small businesses can tap into (business templates and handbooks) Martin's advice for success in business partnership Processes and channels they've used for effective communication Various challenges they've faced and solutions they've applied Organisational tools they use (Apple Calendar, Highrise CRM) The demographics of clients they serve What makes Serversaurus different from other web hosts The company's green initiatives How they're supporting their employees to engage in environmental causes Quotes: Money is the oxygen of business. Treat people the way you expect to be treated and that should be the default position. If you're negotiating something, the first person to get their deal on the table is the one who is going to do best out of it. You say you're B Corp then they know what you're about. It's a shorthand way for sharing your values. The key to any effective relationship is communication. Don't be afraid. Be prepared to be yourself and to put your values and your ethics way upfront. We worry more about the opinions of people that we don't respect than those that we do. Episode Resources: Connect with Serversaurus on Twitter or Facebook The four-part blog post on Arktisma's and Serversaurus' B Corp accreditation journey Business Victoria Templates Three tips and insights: Do the things you know have to be done to keep the business going. Do these first and don't avoid them just because you're not good at them or you don't like them. (i.e. admin and sales) Communication is very important. Set up daily, weekly, monthly, and annual catch-ups that not only reflect on the what’s happened in the past but also focus on strategies and tactics for the future. Don't be afraid to put your values and ethics way out in front and keep them. Gratitude - I am very grateful to... Music: Sung by Vince Jones   Old Mother Earth Knows link   Written by Horace Silver and my support team. Thank you to those that have Subscribed, Rated & Reviewed us on itunes. You can leave a comment below or an audio message – I'd love to hear from you & I will respond as soon as I can.

Is skeuomorphism dead? In this episode we discuss the transition to flat designed the removal of Apple Calendar’s fancy Corinthian leather. We also have a discussion about just what UI design is and provide some guidelines for developers who might be trying to make their apps more useable. Mentioned Links A Twitter follower shared a funny video... View Article The post 7: There Was Color in 1973 appeared first on Helvetic: A Podcast.