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As we are living through a challenging period, and while some work may be limited, it’s still good to know proper skills like project planning in uncertain circumstances. In this week’s episode, the ProductivityCast team discusses the challenges we face when project planning in uncertain circumstances and ways to push through, along with tools to help.
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In this Cast | Project Planning…
Show Notes | Project Planning in Uncertain Circumstances
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Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I’m Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:24
I am Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:26
I’m Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:27
And I’m Art Gelwicks.
Ray Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of Productivity Cast. We are going to be talking today about project planning. And this is a topic near and dear to my heart. But it’s a topic that actually Augusto brought up in the context of where we currently are in these uncertain times. And so I’m going to turn this over to you, Augusto, to kind of tell our listeners what we’re going to talk about today.
Augusto Pinaud 0:49
You know, with all these changes on the everyday reality that we have we one of the things that come really tied up with the principles in the Getting Things Done book is the Weekly Review and really tied up with the Weekly Review comes project planning, one of the things that are interesting with those two things is you get into a certain routine on what you’re required to make that project planning happen to really get yourself into that deep thinking mode, same as wisdom, weekly review. And with all this disruption, people don’t be able to go to the office or connect to the big, you know, screen on the on the conference room to do this deep thinking, all these things has been disrupted. So what I was thinking was, let’s bring this concept back and let’s remind people or help people into re envision how to change that in this condition to improve what you were having before or at least in the worst case scenario to be able to give you tools that will allows you to get back to that place where you were doing before. Project Planning, though, we said numbers were saying and the length we think this is going to be, there is no margin to say, well, that’s fine. If it’s a week, we can say, let’s not do project planning. But as this is going to be a lot more longer than a week, we need to have all that we need that to happen. We need all that to to be a reality. So I hope that what we can do is to get all this done and get really all is working
Art Gelwicks 2:30
when we talk about this whole project planning part of it. I mean, you look at systems like getting things done. You look at many of the other systems, they talk about establishing a fixed time each week to do this, whether it’s your daily planning, your weekly planning, whatever. And I think one of the challenges that Agusta is bringing up is the fact that we start to count on that as part of a habit I had prior to all of this chaos going on. I had a very clear habit established, I would go into work I would sit down and at 745 in the morning, I would actually be sitting down with my notebooks, and doing my daily review with my coffee and my banana. So that process became an integral step in my workflow and my project planning. Well, this all changed shifting to a home base. Now I don’t have the commute, which sets up the timeline that puts me in the right spot to start doing my daily review at 745. So I had to rethink that. And I’m still actually struggling with that a little bit, my morning doesn’t start quite the same way. I’m still trying to find that right spot for that to fit in. So when we look at these types of project planning challenges, and we look at our system, we have to look at not only how our system becomes our point of constancy when it comes to being able to get the work done, but how do we integrate with that system in a changed environment? I could use a similar situation If it wasn’t something that is not so Earth shaking, if you’re just traveling, maybe you’re on vacation for a week. Well, does that mean your your process unravels? Because you’re in a different location? Your timing is different, your materials are different, the surroundings are different, or can you adapt what you’re doing to that new location in that new environment at something we really have to take into consideration because our I know I speak for myself in this but I’m sure I speak for other people to our processes can fall apart, if we don’t have that consistent, repetitive habitual motion of making them work so that we can actually get work done.
Ray Sidney-Smith 4:40
Yeah, one of my central theses in and arguments in the productivity world is that our worlds are the sum of our routines. And when those routines are upset, that really does fundamentally degrade your productivity. And I’m always interested in seeing how people people operate in the face of being flexible with those routines and how flexible routines can be. And there’s only so much they can bend until they break. And, and so I’m I think this is a really timely discussion. And the goal here is to figure out what some of the challenges people are facing that you’re hearing people are facing. And let’s have a discussion on those I hear from you Art, that the change of environment and the environmental cues that that our routine provides is is one major thing how about you will Augusto what are some of the challenges that you’re hearing from others?
Augusto Pinaud 5:41
You know, the the last of of that? I agree on the routine, obviously, but also the last of the tools. You know, I’ve been dealing this week with a lot of clients who have been calling and I can stand having one screen and some of us are, you know, really geeky. I have more screens that I’m willing to count on. In front of me right now but for most people they’re coming from work they’re having a laptop so they move from having one screen or two or external monitoring to the laptop screen or more and now they’re dealing with a laptop and because this was not planned there is no backup plan for many people and or they are used to connect to go to the conference room connect to the massive thing and get that time or even got silent you know, Seams as as we were discussing last week, you know, being able to get silence to do this thinking process. And all that is you know, for many people all those routines hold those tools are out so do you need to get back and slow down for a second and get back to the basics. What do Did you know how to connect maybe to the TV in the living room? Can you do it in the living room? What what what are the things that you think are going to make a difference or you use to use that you can now get creative? So you can do it at home. And you can get somehow that same quality of review or project planning.
Francis Wade 7:08
I noticed the same or a similar drop in productivity that Ray mentioned, when I whenever I’ve moved, I think Ray could probably share and Augusto so you guys can share your latest experience, the habits and the routines and the practices that were automatic or somewhat baked into the environment. And when the environment changes, such as in a move, all of a sudden, they need to be recreated all over again. And there is a I think for me, it takes about three months for me to figure out which ones have fallen through the cracks and like one of the ones that always causes a problem in the beginning is taking out the garbage. So taking out the garbage for me is is not my favorite chore. It’s one my wife likes to remind me to do and it’s easier when I’ve lived in the same place for a while and it’s no become a part of some kind of routine. Either might go to bed routine, you know, my wake up in the morning and exercise routine, but when it’s baked into some other some other activity, it’s it’s easy. And then I move and then that link gets broken and all of a sudden, the garbage hasn’t been taken out any longer. They have been around for two years now. And it’s that’s still it’s not that I haven’t gotten back into a routine. But the problem is that we don’t know which routines are going to be broken necessarily. It’s more a matter of, hey, what’s that smell. So after the fact then after the problem has been caused, then it’s the defect tells us that there’s something that’s missing. And I suspect that that’s what’s happening with lots millions of people who are not working from home is that they’ve been following routines that were probably established by luck or by circumstance or by somebody else or by peer pressure. And all of a sudden, it’s as if they moved, they did move and they’re no having to recreate these routines from scratch and they are struggling because they they don’t remember where they came from. They don’t remember when they put them together, they probably can’t even tell you why. All they know is that something work and know something isn’t working. And why that is, is I suspect a mystery to millions of people. Right now
Ray Sidney-Smith 9:15
let’s talk about what folks can do when they are project planning in what I’m going to call uncertain times. There is a number of different factors here in terms of dealing with, you know, the risk and uncertainty of anything as it changes. And what are the first things? What are the first tools? Where do we start in terms of approaching project planning when we’re in this kind of environment?
Art Gelwicks 9:43
Well, I think you got to start where you always do I mean, if we if we decide to change our process and our mechanism because the environment has changed, we’ve introduced a new a new variable into the equation, and I think that’s going to cause more problems than good. So use your same process. I wouldn’t recommend modifying anything, especially when you get into a new situation because again, you don’t know what’s causing the problem. At that point, you don’t know if you’re having a problem because you just feel out of place or that there’s something specifically wrong that has changed with your system.
Ray Sidney-Smith 10:16
My number one rule is to slow down. And I don’t really mean slow down in the sense of like, physically move slower, but in the sense of being able to, to set aside all of the current projects that are not vital, so that you can look at what you’re doing in terms of the most important most essential projects and start to get them realigned with whatever the circumstances are. And I liken this to the idea of hiring a new assistant when most people hire their first assistant, and they’ve never worked with an assistant before. They believe that immediately they’re going to be more productive and that is wrong. You’re going to be less productive because you have to To onboard that person to your preferences, the technology, you’re using the rules of the road, you know what what types of policies and practices need to be in place, you need to provide instructions, usernames and logins, there’s a, there’s quite a bit of stuff that needs to be done to get that assistant empowered to then take over work from you that you were doing, whether that be administrative or other types of work. And so there’s this upstart cost to getting to that point where then you are more productive, because you have this other person who can help support you in these regards. And many times what happens is that people offload to an assistant things that they weren’t doing before they were the things that were falling through the cracks, so they weren’t even getting done. So that’s not actually making you more productive. It’s actually getting you to the point of satisfying standards. And I feel the same thing about productivity when it comes to project planning. When we when we have a change in circumstances, that could be a change in, in office environment. Like right now, you know, as we’re recording, we’re in the midst of this global pandemic, and we are, we’re working from home and, you know, essential workers are going out there and working, and so on, so forth. But the goal is to be able to sustain our productivity in in the right amount. And right now, when you have this huge transition of going from potentially a routine, like Art, where you’re going to the office every day, you know where you’re supposed to be, you know, the context of what you’re supposed to be doing based on the environment you’re in. And that gets disrupted. You need to pause and plan you need to sit back for a moment and think, am I trying to do too much in an environment where that’s not supposed to be done? having lots and lots of video conferences with your team may not be the best use of your time right now. When you’ve got the kids at home and they’re running around and Trying to claw your eyes out because they’re bored. You know, you really should take a moment to really just sit back and think, well, maybe this is an opportunity for some brainstorming and some creative work, that may not be the thing that immediately comes to mind. But it may be the best thing for you to be doing. Just as an example, obviously, you need to look at your unique circumstances and decide what it is that you’re going to do. But I think that it’s really important for you to take this opportunity to just take a deep breath and hit a reset, in terms of what you have been doing up until now. Right? It’s just been a kind of a shock to all of our systems that this circumstance has been happening and now that we’re in it for a while we have been in it for a while or at least some of us have been in for a while. You know, some some are newly and freshly minted into the working from home environment. But there there needs to be a there needs to be a time where we just like stop and think okay, what can reasonably get done in a day, when I’m no longer in the situation that I was in, which is having access to other staff members in person having access to resources like conference rooms, as Augusto was talking about, and other technology, you know, like the office printer, you know, like you don’t have those things. Now, what do you do in this environment and you need to cut back, I think the ultimate goal is to actually cut down the number of things that you’re doing, which actually increases quality, right? So as the quantity decreases the quality of the specific things you’re doing the projects you do take on, actually increase quality. And think about it from How can I do do less and have higher quality during this downtime?
Art Gelwicks 14:45
See, I think you hit it right on the head there, Ray when you’re talking about being able to simplify and change your evaluation criteria. throwing out points like I don’t have the office printer available. I don’t have the conference room available. I don’t have The opportunity to sit down in the same room with people that needs to now become part of your project planning process. You need to be able to integrate that in to say, Okay, I can’t do that. What can I do? Like the one of the the bane of my existence? The, you know, everybody sit around and have a staff meeting type of thing around about a project? Is that critical? Is that necessary? Can you get the same information through other channels that are a better fit to the way things are currently operating? And if so, does that help the way your project executes? And if so, can you integrate that into your project planning, we’ve got to reevaluate and I like your idea of slowing it down because it does take a lot of time to kind of rebalance. If I had to use a, an analogy for this. I think about it like driving somewhere we get to the point where we’re comfortable driving on the highway, you know, 6570 miles an hour, we put it on cruise control, and we just go back and forth and back and forth. I don’t know how many people have had a long commute. They get to the point where they think that their car could probably make that commute without them. They’ve made it so many times. Well, now, this is the equivalent of introducing snow into that commute. It doesn’t change where we’re trying to get to. But it’s a new factor. And it introduces new problems. And we have to slow down and take a look at it. What I’ve been pushing as of late is the go for the simple solution. So often we over engineer solutions, we make things far too complex, we, we count on too many moving parts to be able to get to the end result. I’ve been pushing quite aback a bit back, especially to my clients that look at what you’re trying to get to, and what is the easiest thing that we can use to get to that point? Do we already have tools that get us to 80 to 90% of it? Do we have processes that already get us there? Can we use those you can always make something more complicated later, but starting it off simple means that at least you’re going to get things accomplished.
Francis Wade 16:56
But to play devil’s advocate, I think people you know, we We’re talking as if this, this all happened in this nice coordinated way where you had a whole one day workshop to plan your transition to the office. it you know, this didn’t quite happen that way. This was, all of a sudden, there’s an announcement from wherever that you’re not coming to work tomorrow. And you’ve got to uproot yourself and start working from home with the kids and the spouse and with all the distractions and you don’t have a home office, the novel laptop, you know, the sense I have is that this didn’t happen in a coordinated way where people had time to sit back and reflect they were thrown into the deep end, where all of a sudden, they needed to just pick up everything and just relocate them become this whole different kind of worker. And in that environment. It’s more a matter of desperately trying to hold on to the few things that seemed to work inside of a whole bunch of chaos. I think that’s where most people have been for the last maybe more Countries the last couple of weeks is sort of desperately holding on to the few things that remain the same. And the few things that still function and the few things that made the transition while putting off the things that are not working, broken, can’t be fixed in the short term don’t have an easy solution. So there’s a there’s a level of desperate holding on by my fingertips before I go crazy. That’s happening in theirs in their lives right now, not devil’s advocate, but just to argue that this is this is this is different than a planned move. Or it’s different than one in which you have all the spirit time. This is a desperate reaction to a life threatening situation.
Art Gelwicks 18:39
Oh, you’re definitely right there. I mean, the client, my primary client, moved close to 15,000 people to 95% working remotely mode in less than a week. It’s kudos to them that they were able to accomplish that fact. Yeah, not without his hiccups, but that’s expected. But you’re right. The biggest issue is that it is unplanned. So maybe this is our opportunity to back up and say, Okay, if this happens again, and it will not necessarily this, but some sort of transition is going to occur, what can I pre plan to be able to get myself to an operable level as quickly as possible?
Francis Wade 19:18
For example, I responded to someone’s someone’s question around, it wasn’t quite the time blocking question, but it was a question or what do I do know that I just did back home and why are things so different? And my response was that if they weren’t there, and they weren’t using time blocking before I my response was that you can see this as a season. So you’re, you know, entered, your life has not entered overdrive, where all of a sudden you have, I’m assuming that the person for example, had kids and pets and you know, that they’re back into a house in which working in a house in which they don’t have an office site. Let’s assume the worst case and I said, it’s like this You went from having the leisure of a focused office that was quiet and organized. And everybody was working on the same thing. And there’s a few disruptions and there’s no TV going and there’s no distractions and everyone, there’s adults only and they’re, they’re all focused on they’re there for one thing, they’re not there for a million things. And you all of a sudden there’s an explosion in the demands on your time. And time blocking could be your answer for the season in which you’re in and once you go back to the office, and things go back to normal, if they ever do but if they go back to normal or the way they were before it’s fine, you can revert so you know, having lists and not doing any kind of time blocking whatsoever because you didn’t need to and you won’t need to in the future, but during the season that you’re in, it might be the only way for you to retain your sanity because you you you must move into this different kind of zone. In order to get north to keep your sanity forget about he pretty In order to keep your sanity and not have basic things like people need to eat, and have meals have something like that fall off the tracks, because all of a sudden that everyone’s meal, the 21 meals that you need to prepare throughout the week for every single person in the household is now back in your lap as a responsibility, for example, so you must do that. But the way to prevent things from going completely awry, and for disasters to happen is now the time lock, because that’s the way to retain your sanity in this season. So that’s one technique, but then there’s probably a whole bunch of others that are appropriate for the switch that they have made. And they might be only appropriate for the switch that they’ve made. When this switch goes back to business as usual, then a whole bunch of them won’t be needed anymore.
Ray Sidney-Smith 21:50
I really like the notion that aren’t brought up earlier of a work trip. And considering this very similar to that and you The way in which if you go on a work trip, and you are if you have if you’ve had that experience, obviously, if you haven’t had that experience, it’s a little bit more difficult. But just envision yourself having, you know, gone on a work trip. And in that environment, what do you have available to you, you typically have less equipment, you have a shortened period of time in which you can get work done because you’re on a trip because you’re, you’re doing something somewhere with some people most of that time. And the goal is to figure out in those little pockets of time, what projects can you deliver on. And that’s going to be a limited, more limited number of projects. And you’re going to have little smaller periods of time where you can actually get that kind of work done. And so I think one of the aspects that you have to think about in project planning in these uncertain times is Figuring out what are those types of projects? I, again, going back to what Art said earlier, which is like, there’s a context now, that’s similar to the GTD context where it’s like, okay, you know, what, what are the various pieces available to me? What are the various resources available to me, and then eliminating any of the projects where those resources are no longer available to you, because you can’t go to an on site with a client and do those things with them there. You can’t have access to particular types of technology, if the technology is something that is physical, like the 3d printer at your office is not coming home, to sit in your dining room table. So no longer are you going to have an option to maybe create a prototype using that tool. So all of these pieces need to be thought about and those projects get just get put on hold. I think if you are reporting to someone, it’s important to communicate that those projects are not going to happen. And why. So that they don’t have an expectation. And if they have any other, you know, if this is a condition precedent to some other project or some larger project, that they’re making sure that they’re now aware, so they can make sure that they put those on hold. And then the things that you can do, also communicate those to the rest of your team, because there’s likely someone else who works with you, who’s also struggling. And by seeing the types of work that you can do where you are, and they may be in a similar role, they may be empowered to then be able to do that work also, which will help the entire organization and especially in this time, when you know, we’re probably going to go into an economic recession. And there’s all these other things that are kind of on everyone’s mind in terms of of kind of panicking. I’m, I’m not a panikker i’m a i’m i’m always anxious. So I’m always in the pause and plan mode. I’m never in the panic mode. So the goal is to figure out what he In the pause and planning stage you can do because even right now, in the midst of all of this, there is an opportunity to pause and plan. And if you can do that, then you’re going to be better off than you would if you just panic the entire way through. So even with that bit of kind of uncommon, common sense, we know that if we can do that level of reduction of projects that can’t be done, increase of the projects we can do, putting those to the front of the queue and sharing that widely among your team, you’re going to be in a stronger position to be able to be productive in this environment. Switching gears a bit. What are the tools that some of you use when you are project planning just generally, but also ones that kind of help you during a transitional period or uncertainty or a period of uncertainty?
Art Gelwicks 25:56
I’ll admit that if there’s a situation that’s kind of uncertain like this I run back to my analog notebooks. I go back to paper and pen, it’s it’s too easy for me to get lost in the rabbit holes with Alice, when it comes to the technical tools and in the digital technology around trying to build a new solution for a newly perceived problem. That actually causes more difficulty than its than it’s worth in many cases, because I start to mentally wrap myself around that challenge rather than addressing the challenge at hand. So I’ve had to start to and I don’t say had to, I’ve always done this, go back to my paper and pen and start saying, Okay, what am I doing? What What do I need to capture? What do I need to go through? And yeah, it’s not optimal. There’s rework that has to happen later. There’s notes that have to be captured into trusted systems, but it goes back to that simplification step. I simplify it down, I boil it down to its basic things. And that allows me to focus and to concentrate. And as a parallel aspect to this, I think that’s one of the most common things I’m hearing about people in this session. environment that we’re in now, for so many years, we’ve talked about the benefits of working from home and you know, it’s great, you’re out of the office environment, you’re comfortable, you’re in your bunny slippers, you can, you know, be relaxed, and that’s, that’s fine. If you’re the only one in the house, what working from home never considers is when you have multiple people in the house, then you’re basically bringing your office home. It’s just that your coworkers are probably barking at the mailman or doing things totally unrelated to what you’re trying to get done. So that changing environment introduces its own stress, and you have to find a way to get out of that stress. So for me like I said, I go back to pen and paper I go back to the absolute basics and then build back up from there.
Augusto Pinaud 27:48
Oh god, he’s part of the problem is what we understand some of those concepts ask that concept. You just bring in of working at home, it change working at home, as was working At home when I decide to come and work from home is, is no more I mean when as far as you know my family is in here and they’re doing all the things that’s not what I technically sign up when when I started working from home that was not the idea. So the or that was not the the idea maybe the idea is not the right word that was not the conditions that that was set. So all those conditions has changed. So now you need to come back to again to what I was saying to what are those basic things that you need to actually accomplish that work at home? I
Francis Wade 28:39
my routine hasn’t changed all that much summer fortunate because I’ve been always working from home for the last 20 30 years I guess. And I so my routines are work from home routines. So this has not changed very much. I don’t have kids. I don’t have pets and my wife and We’ve been working together for 15 – 16 years from home. So it’s really not a whole lot has changed for us. We spend most of our time at home the same way. But the one thing I did introduce recently was to put together a 12 month calendar. It’s a rolling calendar. And I was looking for tools that would help me to do that more effectively. Something that would look like a project plan laid out over the next 12 months, I couldn’t find anything. I had to create something in in Google Sheets, but I didn’t really find what I was looking for. In templates in Excel couldn’t quite find a project by project. So not a Gantt chart, which is one big project, but down to the nitty gritty, but I wanted something like a program manager for the next 12 months and preferably something that I could zoom in on and see what’s what should be happening in August. For example, in this particular projects, if I could click on the month of August, it would expand and show me all the activities that belong to August. I wanted something like that, but couldn’t couldn’t find it. But the reason that I needed something like that was the uncertainty has led me to ask, okay, well, what if this scenario happens if that scenario happens, if this other scenario happens, what other ways and actions I’m taking that will allow for success in different outcomes, regardless of outcome, or, or if particular outcomes happen? And those things are our long term because some of them take an investment. For example, I put them together a summit is a as far as I can tell a six month investment, and I’m putting together one in September and I’m done know doing the basic groundwork. So these six to 12 month investments, they have to be made early on, and that’s the way that I’m buffering against all of the others. certainty
Ray Sidney-Smith 31:00
one tool that I think many people utilize in different environments. But I feel like this is one of those times that it works really well are mind maps. And so taking Art’s tools of paper and pen and you know, a field notes notebook or whatnot, and just creating a mind map of the various things that you you want to be doing, and freeform thinking through. What are the things that can be done in terms of actions and resource limitations that make a project available or not available? I think a project plan. Mind Map is just a really great tool because it helps to engage you in that way. I’m more digital oriented. So I use a lot of digital mind mapping. And you can use many of the digital mind mapping software that are out there. But for me, I think that just generally planning things. My Maps are the way In which I like to plan things out. And so I would naturally gravitate toward a project plan mind map for doing that. And David Allen, the Dave Allen company, has created the project planning triggers list. And so you can create a mind map that has all of the various triggers in it, and work through them. Right. So work through the natural planning model, or just work through the triggers list to think about the various aspects of projects that will either activate or deactivate projects that are currently on your plate. And I think that’s a really good at least starting point for folks for complex projects. For the more simple projects, I think it’s just a matter of looking at them and saying, Okay, in this environment, with working from home, limited, you know, resources, and potentially spouse, kids, dog, mailman, whatever you know. interrupting me throughout the day, what can I get done, and then deciding to kill your darlings. You know what cannot happen right now, and setting those aside until such time as they can be reactivated in your system. But I think at this point in time, I really can’t impress upon people enough. If you are not like Francis, or like many of us who are comfortable working on the road, or working from home and have been doing so for a very long period of time, this transition period is not the time to try and do everything and be everything to everyone. Now’s the time to really reduce it down to the essentials, because people, people need you and you need people for emotional support and for social support. And those things take time and energy that you need to that I think is just a little bit more important. And so it’s about having the right projects now on your plate as opposed to To just thinking about the work stuff, I think work is important. And I think the work you’re doing is likely important to you, otherwise you wouldn’t care. But the goal is to figure out what the right projects are to be moving forward at work and taking into consideration that, yes, if there is an AR layoffs coming down the pike and or concerns about your position, you want to be choosing the projects that are going to make you shine the most make you you know, make your position and your role and to you, the most important person to stay in the company after the layoffs happen. So now’s the time to do that planning to figure out what’s the work that really makes a difference to the company’s bottom line to the organization’s mission. That may that’s most important to the person who’s going to make the decision whether to keep or cut your role, or you specifically, now’s the time to be picking those people. projects to be working on, because that’s what’s going to, you know, invest in, hopefully keeping you around after those things happen. So a little bit of this is is self preservation as well, in choosing the right projects. I think that we are all resilient. And I’m heartened by the amount of camaraderie I’ve seen people showing and sharing about their working environments. And it seems that a lot of people are really rising to the occasion of helping each other during these environments that I hope when we go back to the kind of normal working order, if we want to call it that, if there if there is such a thing after this, you know, whatever we go back to, I hope that we continue this level of collaborative. We’re all in it together perspective, and so much of us being productive About interdependence, about understanding that we cannot thrive as a society as a civilization as you know, as who we are on this planet by not working together. And so I hope that a little bit of that rubbed off on all of us as we go through these difficult periods and and figure out how to have that be a lasting and dynamic aspect of our future, being productive together. So if you have a question or comment about this episode, or something that any of us discussed while we were discussing, project planning in uncertain times, we have lots of ways in which you can engage with us you can comment on the podcast episode if you are on the podcast website. Feel free to go over there. It’s Productivity Cast, dotnet, forward slash, and then the three digit episode number. And you can also go to Productivity Cast dot Net forward slash contact, and you can write us a message, or you can record an audio message and send it to us. And we always appreciate getting those. Also on the show notes page, I’m sorry. Also on the page for the episode, you’ll find our show notes that will include links to anything that we discussed, along with a way for you to subscribe, it’s free to subscribe, you just click on the button and follow the instructions for being able to subscribe from your favorite podcast app. And all kinds of other fun things like our text transcripts of the episodes are there, you can download them as a PDF or you can read them on the page by clicking that little read more button on the page. So lots of things check out on the podcast website. While you are there, you can in your podcast app. There are a couple of apps I think Apple podcasts and Stitcher that allow you to be able to leave a review or rating for the podcast if you could do that, that would be fantastic. That helps us grow our personal productivity listening community. It also helps As improve the podcast over time, and so thank you for doing that. Thank you to Augusto Pinaud Francis Wade and Art Gewicks for joining me here on this and every cast. That brings us to the close of this episode of Productivity Cast, the weekly show of all things personal productivity, take care, everybody.
Voiceover Artist
And that’s it for this ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things productivity, with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.