Productivity App-apalooza! Fourth Edition

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. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your host Ray Sidney-Smith and gousto been out with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. And I’m Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade, and I’m Art Gelwicks. Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode, we are going to do something fun a few times per year, the ProductivityCast team comes together to share with you a few software products and services that we know or use in our personal productivity systems or with our clients systems. We call these productivity Apple Palooza. And we do this in three rounds, with each of us taking the opportunity to explain the tool to explain the tool and why we believe it provides value to our productivity and possibly yours. With that, here’s productivity APA Palooza fourth edition. And so for round one, ding, ding ding art Europe. Geez, why do I have to start? Okay, it’s alphabetical. See, this is the curse of being the A. So anyway, sorry, gousto.

Art Gelwicks 1:13
When we started to look at APA Palooza round four, I’m like, oh, okay, I gotta find something that’s good. And I realized that I have something that I use all the time. It’s called journey. And it is a journaling app. Now a lot of people will do journaling in whatever their organization organizational tool that they have is some do one note, some do notion, I use journeys, for a couple of reasons. One, it’s available on the web, and on mobile, so you can journal into it whenever you want. Second, you can do images into it as well stacked multiple images. And third, it has its own PIN code so that your information is protected. And that’s one of the struggles with journaling is if you want to be honest with yourself in journaling, you want to be truly honest and open well, then you’re hesitant like Well, where’s this stuff going, who’s gonna see it, where’s the access to it. And I just like the user experience, the consistency, the availability of the app on multiple platforms, it’s just a nice way if you’re trying to do that mental dump.

And it’s not really organization, it’s just get this out for the day, I found that’s probably the best tool out there. For me, there’s a couple others de one’s another one didn’t really care for it. But journey to me is the one that I recommend.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:32
I use journey also. And I do that first. And then I just copy and paste that over to my reference system. And so I keep it in both places. And it’s a little bit of extra work. And I’ve thought about how to automate that using some scripting. And I really do like journey. I like the ability for it to on mobile, especially auto detects whether you’re sitting whether you’re walking around and being able to capture capture in those multiple opportunities when you are alone and or just have thoughts and you want to be able to share them with yourself. So I really like journey. All right, next up lagu. So the first app that I have is overcast. And you know as a person, as you’re listening to us into a podcast, you may have played with one or two other cast has been the software I’ve been using on on my iOS for for a really long time. And I like the fact that I can not only download the episode, but create smart list of the things that I want to have priority as well as increase the speed, as well as decide you know what, for this podcast, download every episode, but for these other podcasts download only the last one. So it gives me a lot of customization power. So it’s a piece of software that I have really, really enjoyed for a long time. You have not played as much with overcast. The name of the developer Mark are hermant are meant Yes, he’s he’s very active in that podcasting space. And probably other there are other things that he does in in the space. But yeah, I think that overcast is great. And a lot of people of course, talk about pocket casts. I still am actually really big fan since transitioning over to Google podcasts, and the Google podcasts app and just really does everything I want a podcast app to do. And it’s exciting to see that the space is expanding to have so many other podcast applications that you can use and do different things. I’ve seen ones that capture audio clips, so you can note, annotate the audio clips of a podcast and share those with friends and family. I think there’s some really good things happening in the podcast space. Wonderful. overcast is a great option. Francis, your next.

Francis Wade 4:50
So my first app is called save my time. And it’s an innovative solution for people who track their time and I’ve always tracked my time and there are things out there.

toggle and other kind of manual methods for rescue time trying to track how you spend your time. But this one has a difference. It’s tied into the your you’re not your screensaver. But when you turn your device back on, what turned my phone back on, it immediately pops up. How did you spend the last X number of minutes since the last update, and so you can’t avoid it. And it offers you a set number of options to choose from nice diagrams. And you can add any other number of categories of ways you can spend your time. So it’s unavoidable. Because you’re turning on or off, you’re on and off your phone all day long. You can signal when you’re about to change and move into a different context, or a different

activity by just simply put the tie in between the natural behavior of turning on your phone. And the artificial behavior of tracking your time. Then they call it habit stacking is brilliant. So I’ve kept the best notes. And I’ve been time tracking since I think the 90s, late 90s one time. But the quality of my time tracking has all of a sudden gone through because I’m able to not quite passively. But I’m able to trigger the capture of my spent time in this very intuitive way. It just it’s just brilliant. Is it mobile only. I haven’t tried it on on PC or laptop. But I went through a website and I only pay attention to the mobile version. So I think so

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:45
great. And it looks like it’s about $3 USD per month billed annually, or $5, USD billed monthly, if you stay monthly. And otherwise, you can do the free version, which gives you up to nine activities, what are activities over the different

Francis Wade 7:03
categories that you assign your time to?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:06
Great. And then it allows for what it calls limited history. I don’t know what that limited history is, you know, the limited history is. Okay. And so professional gives you data expert export, calendar integration and a custom date picker if you upgrade to the paid plan versus the the free plan. And so

Francis Wade 7:28
that’s great I upgrade. Because I was I immediately saw the time savings because I spend for me to reconstruct my the last few days or weeks, which is sometimes what happens because I haven’t it takes me a long time after go the screenshots, I’ve had to go to the manic time, which tracks the app usage and I have to reconstruct, it’s like a small adventure. I can’t remember half of it. Yeah, it’s it’s forensic and nature

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:57
awful. But this is, I’ve already started to rebuild some of the things that I’ve tracked using the app that of course, I’m way more detail. This is, this is brilliant that I wish I had thought of something like this. He is brilliant. That brings us to me, my first choice in round one is something that I feel like everybody should know, but maybe doesn’t know. And that is Google Forms. Google Forms is a survey tool, a questionnaire tool that is built into your Google account. It’s within the Google Drive space. And there are so many uses to Google Forms in a productive capacity. One is just like with Francis, where he’s using save my time, you can actually do time tracking directly in Google Forms by tying a Google Forms form to a Google Sheets workbook. And so you can just have the Google Forms form open on your machine, give yourself the ability to enter as many times as you want, you know, basically repeating entries and have a singular, you know, block where you just complete, what is it that you completed, and the amount of time say that you have associated with that thing. And so I actually set something up like this several years ago, just to test it out. And it was incredibly useful. I’m just having it available on your phone, having it available on your phone, on your, your, on your desktop, anywhere you are, you can really just capture the data into the system. And of course, I moved over to toggle, as Francis mentioned toggle earlier as my time tracking tool. But when I was using Google Sheets as my primary vehicle for time tracking, I had moved from tracking in Excel to then tracking in Google Sheets. And that was just an easy transition for me. And I decided, Oh, you know what, I could actually do this as a form. And so I actually created that Google Forms form and that was great. And and so if you just want to keep everything in side of your Google account and don’t want to have to have another tool and go to something like, you know, toggle or otherwise or save my time. You know, Google Forms is actually a really, really great tool in that particular use case. But there are other ways in which you can use it productively. For example, you can set up your own tests. So for example, say that you’re trying to learn French, or you’re trying to do other kinds of things, you can create, in essence, flashcard style tests within Google Forms, you can, you can create questionnaires for friends and family to pull people in terms of when you’d like to go to the movies, you could do all kinds of fun things, you know, well, when we go back to having movies in real life, but we can do all kinds of polls, and other types of question type answers, you can embed forms within a web page. And that’s really helpful if you have a use in a business case. And you can even have people upload documents into a Google Forms form, so that you can actually have those things uploaded as well. So you have lots of flexibility with Google Forms. And it’s free, it’s a part of your Google account. And I always recommend it as a first line of being able to do that kind of questionnaire survey, but as well as just giving form to a data entry environment so that you can actually structure the data entry. Well, because sometimes looking at a Google Sheets workbook, or Microsoft Excel workbook that that sheet environment isn’t the most pleasing. Plus you can’t get necessarily give details, you know, you can ask yourself questions and put those details in the in the question, and that way, you can actually answer them correctly. So with that, ding ding ding that is round one brings us to round two of our apple Palooza, our productivity Apple Palooza. And so with that round two, art, Europe,

Art Gelwicks 11:48
all right, this one is a replacement keyboard. It’s for mobile devices, specifically on Android. It is called flesk ke FLS ke y. It’s similar in design to like the Google keyboard and all the other ones, but I like this one because it has a couple of gestures built into it. It’s very responsive. It allows you to do things like you know do the gift searches and actually do voice dictation into record and have the text transcription. But it has two gestures that I have learned to love, absolutely love. One is across the center of the keyboard as you’re typing. If you make a mistake on a word, if you just swipe across the center row of the keyboard, it will delete the last word you typed in. Quick, easy, knock it right out. The second thing is if you swipe from the center of the keyboard up, it’ll grab the first autocorrect in the autocorrect line and drop that into place Now you would think that’s not really that big of a deal. I have found that just the way it’s designed and the controls my typing is more accurate with flysky than it is on any of the other keyboards I use.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:54
Flex Flexi flex

Art Gelwicks 12:57
Flexi Flexi, yeah. I thought it was FL sky.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 13:03
That’s fL fL EKS Why?

Art Gelwicks 13:06
Oh my goodness. Alright, what he said. So it’ll be in the show notes. So luckily, there’s an autocorrect for the name of the freakin product. So anyway, that capability coupled with the mic option so that you can actually do text to speech or speech to text on it is nice because it’s speech to text goes through Google’s capability. And it actually pops it into a you know, press to talk button. So I actually will have the keyboard sitting up, you know, taking notes on my phone on a little stand. And I’ll just tap it and type and verbally type something in and stop so I don’t even have to pick up the phone to type it. So that combination of features while again it’s it’s just a keyboard, it’s a keyboard it is actually made my text entry more productive. So whatever it’s called, that’s the thing I think you should try.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 13:59
Fantastic. Yeah, so Flexi and I really like g board and I will just add insert this again to say that g board is the Google keyboard application, you can install that cross systems. So for example, I have the G board application on my iPad, I have it on my Chrome OS devices. I have it on my mobile phone and so I’m you’re able to use g board across those is Flexi cross platform. Does anybody know?

Art Gelwicks 14:28
I don’t know that. You can use Flexi on iOS, but I know you can install it on a Chromebook if you want to. Fantastic.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 14:36
That’s great. I’m going to I’m just going to visit Flexi comm very quickly to make a note. It’s downloadable from the App Store. Oh, wonderful. Yes. So it is available on the Google Play Store as well as in the Apple App Store. So it looks like just like g board. You can install Flexi on an across your operating systems, which is fantastic because I’m going to go do that now.

Art Gelwicks 15:00
Yeah, one of the one of the things for those of you who are metrics geeks, there is a badges and stats section of the app that will tell you how many typos it’s corrected how many keystrokes it’s saved and your typing proficiency or efficiency rating. So how much it’s gone up by using like, flat ski, plus flysky. I will never get that right. Let’s just be clear.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:23
Not to worry, not to worry. Wonderful choice. All right, next up, Augusto, what is your round two choice for productivity APA Palooza.

Augusto Pinaud 15:32
So I have two apps I’m going to cheat on these around to the first one is the mind map application I use on my Mac as well as my iPad on his mind note. And it is a great application, it synchronizes across everything. And he works incredibly, but one of the things that I learned working with Ray was, why would you want to do or collaborate on a mind map and it is really powerful. Not for everybody, you need to work with persons who think on a certain way and are comfortable with mind maps. But if you find people who are comfortable with that there is a piece of software called mind 42 that basically works on any browser, but allows real time collaboration on my maps. And it is if you are working with people who again can work on on my maps for likes to work on my map, it is super, super powerful and really, really great.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 16:36
There is a some kind of fee associated with mind 42 if you want to upgrade to remove ads, but otherwise mine 42 is actually free. And I’ve actually paid for the lifetime license, just because I want mind 42 to be around a while. And so if you do end up using mind 42 it’s really nominal to buy the lifetime access. I’m not, I don’t know what I paid for it, but it was very, very inexpensive, and then takes away all of the advertising forever. And just gives you that palette where you’re able to take any node any thought and attach tasks, images, you can attach another mind map so you can actually tie one mind map to another in mind 42 mind 42 also allows you to export into a bunch of different Mind Map files, so you can import them and export them out of the system. And I actually like to do that because I like to download the mind map into my mind mapping software locally, and then upload it back to mind 42 if I need to, and so just really, really great tool. What are the differences if you if you happen to know Augusto? What the differences between say mind node and simple mind what what do you feel like are the are the defining comparison features between some of the other more popular mind mapping software,

Augusto Pinaud 17:50
I move from mine jet to mine note, many years ago, I’m I tend to to, to stay on software for a long time, apparently, since somebody mentioned that to me the other day, that I tend to pick a software to stay there. And then and that is true, I believe you pick this up for and learned really well instead of trying to go from software to software. So I cannot tell you at least not a recent comparison of those. I’ve been on my note for a long time, at least over a year, maybe more. So I don’t know to these days. What are the features? difference between those? For me the big deal, when I got it was the synchronization between I have two iPads. And I need the things to synchronize between them without me thinking about it. So that was one of the big things by No Did I add to the Mac on that equation. And my note could do those three things. And that was enough for me to jump into that

Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:54
I can’t speak more highly of Mind Mapping just generally as a mechanism for being able to do all kinds of things. You can journal, you can brainstorm, you can collaboratively, take notes, you can take notes, individually. There’s so many different uses for mind maps. And so my note is a great choice in and amongst that. All right, next up, Francis Francis, what is your round two choice.

Francis Wade 19:16
My second choice is zenni optical, which is an app that you use to buy glasses. And this is courtesy of art that never heard anything like this. And he shared with us a few months ago that he just bought a couple of years of glasses for that was maybe 150 bucks or 120 bucks. And I my immediate response was it must be illegal, immoral or fattening because there’s no way because my manual glasses cost like 400 500 bucks and they involve various degrees of pain and mishap and all the rest of it. So Adam repeats my glasses. For years I’ve replaced the lens but not not the glasses themselves. But anyway, so I try Thing art, I went online and the app that you use the design, pick your glasses on Xeni optical is just mind blowing. And both my wife and I, you know, we took her, not just take a picture, but they actually take a composite, create a composite video of your head moving from left to right. And once the pictures taken once the video is made, they superimpose the glasses over your head, so that you can see what you actually look like wearing hundreds of different options of glasses. So you get a far away, you get way more time, you get a far better look at what you actually look like in the glasses once they’re done. And it’ll compare to the walking into a store and getting two seconds to look at five different ones or whatever number they actually have that look decent. You know, you could spend weeks months looking at hundreds if you really wanted to send me we spent a couple hours and order them. And they arrived here in Jamaica about two to three weeks after the 30 day refund policy. So the product is is awesome. But it’s not mind blowing. You know, it’s it’s affordable glasses, no name brands, no famous anything. But lots of choices. And it’s the process enabled by the app that I really want to highlight the innovation that they made in choice and purchase and options. And really all you’re putting in is a prescription and then you go to town. So that’s the that’s the real innovation. And that’s what I found really admirable, the whole experience was just flawless. And just just wonderful. My glasses came yesterday. And I’m really happy with them. So I think there’s going to be lots of lots of new apps like this, that just just transform the way you think that you have to purchase or consume an item. And the digital transformation, I’m sorry, for those who are selling glasses in traditional stores at this point, because they are going to really have a tough time, they’ll need to pivot they’ll need to,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:15
you know, adapt and adopt new technologies in order to be able to stay in the market. And that’s the nature of the game, right? There is another shirts, there’s a shirt app out there that does this for dress shirts. And if I if I remember the name, I will put this into the show notes. But the idea is, is that you do the same thing, you kind of hold up your phone, snap some photographs, or have I’m presuming you have to have someone take the photographs of you for that to even be useful. But then it it goes ahead and tailors the shirts to your sizes because it knows it’s taking this 3d, you know, kind of imagery of you. And that’s really powerful. I mean, that’s, that’s great, I’m

Francis Wade 22:58
looking forward to serve you or an ideal picture of you.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:03
It’s got to fit you. So it’s got to be realistic. So the shirts gonna show it’s going to, you know, be tucked in places and bulge in places where it needs to

Augusto Pinaud 23:13
be I was interested on on the other part, as soon as you said realistic is just crutch it out on my list.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:21
Well, I have the I have, I have the trouble with you know, the, you know, everybody kind of makes fun of me, but you know, finding shirts that are, you know, tailored thin enough for me. And, you know, I happened to be an ectomorph and endomorph ectomorph, which is I don’t know, anyway, I happen to have a the the slimmer build. And it’s very difficult for me to find shirts that are not just billowing, you know, from the sides, you know, like I raise my arm and there’s a there’s a sale that appears. And so, you know, then I have to take it to the tailor and have them pull in the sides so that I can actually have a normal fit. And slim fit is not truly slim fit. Not in the United States, at least. They’re they’re slim fit for people who want to feel like they are slim fit not for people who are actually slim. And so these types of shirt companies that can allow for really tailored shirts at an affordable price. To be quite honest. One thing that I could just always offer to folks is that most of the time when I take a shirt to be tailored to have them, trim it down. It’s really inexpensive. I don’t know why people think that tailoring shirts is all that expensive. You can take them to your local dry cleaner if they have a tailor. And they’ll they’ll pull those designs in, they’ll shorten lengthen cuffs, those kinds of things. And it’s really nominally priced. So I don’t really understand that. But either way, it’s really nice to have the convenience like you’re talking about Francis to be able to just you know scan and now that’s kind of set in the system. And then any shirt that you buy after that is now going to be in their system so it’s really easy to purchase from

Art Gelwicks 24:57
Yeah, those of us who use those types of types of apps Epson will go through and scan it in the app immediately goes, Oh, you want a Hawaiian shirt? Like, come on.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:09
Alright, so thank you, Francis. And to close out. To close that round two, I’m going to talk about one of my favorite services, which is fancy hands. And so fancy hands is a company owned by Ted Rubin. And he’s the CEO of fancy hands and with fancy hands does is gives you in essence, short tasks that can be handled by virtual assistants. And they are capable of doing anything that you can on the computer, in essence, and you can even put your payment information in there, and they can make purchases on your behalf, they can make restaurant reservations, they can do all kinds of things, research, they can phone, people, all kinds of, you know, virtual assistants services. And the pricing works out to be roughly about five to $6 per request, depending upon how many requests you ask for every month. And you can scale it up and down, you know, based on your needs each month, which is really nice. And so I just really, you know, I enjoy using fancy hands. It’s a great service. And the the other point is that I have a signup link from, from fancy hands from Ted Rhoden and it gives you 50% off your first month or 5% off your first year if you buy like the annual plan, I guess. And so I’m guessing I get some kind of credit in the system. But that doesn’t matter to me. But if you want 50% of your first month or 5% of your first year, use the link that’s in the show notes because why the heck not. And so But yeah, I can’t speak more highly a fancy hands, it’s just a really great service, they have a pool of assistance. So you actually put the pool of assistance, you you basically put your task into the system through iOS, Android email, there’s even an ability to record directly into the app your request, you can go into the web app and type it in, that’s where I mostly do my requests. And then someone picks it up. And then they say ask any questions that they need in order to be able to solve the problem and do the request. And then they go go to town, each request is calculated up to about 20 minutes per task. So that’s why they’re kind of these little micro tasks, but they’re, they’re smaller tasks, they’re not things that you want someone, you’re not going to go to Upwork or Fiverr to get someone to do ongoing work, that kind of thing. You can stack tasks. So you can say I need this thing done. And so I need you to take three requests in order to get that done. And that’d be an hour’s worth of work. But these are really for those. Gosh, can you call the library and just deal with this, you know, overdue, you know, book issue, which is my typical problems is like, No, I want to keep this book for another couple of weeks. And so but something that easily, fancy hands can go ahead and take care of for you, which is just really, really great. So ding ding ding, round two is complete. And that brings us around to round three of our productivity app a Palooza and that is over to you art. What’s your third round choice?

Art Gelwicks 28:05
Okay, this time, I wanted to call out something that’s top of mind for a lot of people in that social networks. There’s a lot of kerfuffle around, what should I use? What should I use? I’m not happy with the big ones. So I want to call out one called mighty networks. I’ve used mighty networks for a long time. We actually here at ProductivityCast use mighty networks as our as the Center for the personal productivity club. Francis, I believe you use it as well. It is a private, least structured. Social Network. It is designed to allow you to go through and set up your own community, put your information in and coordinate with other people have chats publish, I mean, Ray can talk to adjust as much as I can, probably more so. But if it’s something that you’re looking to set up or participate in a topic based community and you don’t want to play in the normal spaces, this would be something that I would absolutely recommend.

Francis Wade 29:11
I’d add my voice to that I’ve used art introduced me to mighty network. And I’ve used it for all kinds of applications, conferences and communities and training and they have a an LMS built in. And it’s it’s gone from strength to strength. And if they don’t have a free version, so there’s no reason to not create a community of learners or fans of a particular product. There’s lots of applications especially know that if you’re on a social network, you know that you’re exposed to all of the traffic from SEO, the rest of Facebook if all you really want to be on is in a Facebook group, which is distracting and also some people just don’t want to be on the big network. like Facebook, or Instagram or Twitter. It’s just a great, great application.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:06
Yeah, art actually also introduced me to mighty networks. And I have fallen in love. I mean, for the things that it does, it does well. And for all of its limitations, I feel like that those are the things that the company themselves Gina B and Kini have formerly of Ning. So you know, it’s steep in deep understanding and interest in community management and community development. And so she’s aware, she leads a really great team of people who are just capable of, of iterating on the substantial quality around community, right, it’s a community focused application. So it’s community first everything. So the the events on top of it is based on community, the, the LMS, the the course platform is built on community, and there are certainly places where it can grow. But I have found it to just be such a stable space for us to be able to have that kind of community. And so I’m really happy to have personal productivity club founded on that and actually run another one for my company, on mighty networks as well. And both of them I couldn’t be more happy with and in that regard. So if you are and need that in your company, or in your world, mighty networks is definitely something to look out for. So thank you for bringing that up Art. Augusto, what’s your route to choice,

Augusto Pinaud 31:22
my rent to choice. It’s an eye journal application called day one. And I was you know, it says researching for this episode, I was like, Oh, I have never talked about this, or what is happening, we I check and double check the list we have not mentioned they want anyways, I’ve been using day one, as my journal application of application of choice for a really, really long time. It works on the Mac, it works on the iPhone, it works on the iPad, he allows you to create multiple journals allows you to upload images, videos and a bunch of things. And it is really an incredible application, I recommend people who don’t journal to journal your notice, in my humble opinion, one of the best ways to personal productivity and to improve personally. So if you are looking for a place to journal, that may be an incredible option for you.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:24
So what is what is the difference that you find in say, looking at something like journey versus day one? What What do you see is the comparison for for listeners? This one’s obviously Apple focused. So if you’re an apple user, this is clearly a little bit more. Apple II,

Augusto Pinaud 32:40
this is completely completely apllied. Yes. I have never used journey. So I You made me open journey. I think your journey goes all on the cloud there is Oh, it has google it has APA scores. I’m not familiar with journey to be honest with you. I can join because I’ve used good.

Art Gelwicks 33:01
Yeah, it’s and it’s very much that day one very much has an apple feel to it has always had it works really well on iOS devices, especially on the iPad, I used to use it on there a lot. It has a nice functionality. When you go through and you’re adding in imagery, or you’re adding in text prompts, it has a very clear visual display, and it has a has very clear visual style. Functionality wise, I don’t think it necessarily has that much of a difference in functionality. For example, when you go in and you create an entry, you get the same sort of captures, such as your location, the time, the weather, providing the map connection, you do have the ability to share your posts, which are which is kind of nice. But in both of them, it’s really, it’s really the visual difference. The only thing that I would say, between the two and this is again, just having the choice between them. If I was working in iOS, and Android, I might be more inclined to use something like day one because I don’t know that journey on iOS looks quite as good. I like journey because journey has the web interface to and if I remember I don’t remember if day one has web or not, but it might they’re very close together in capability if you’re looking at one I would say look at the other two choose between them.

Augusto Pinaud 34:26
Yeah, as you said day one day one, you know they have really stay on the apple ecosystem. They even have an app for your Apple Watch where you can record voices and text if you want to. While journey goes almost universal, I mean they was the browser universal but also they have apps for Windows for Mac for for Apple. So it’s I think more important sometimes then, than the app and I think this apply to Too many of these things we mentioned, Appaloosa is not necessarily the app we’re bringing in the app is something that we use something that we like something we have a good experience. But it’s I think, also further into the concept, you know, argue journaling and what you’re using for that. And this may give you an idea to search and give now to apps where you can get a comparison but the most important thing, my opinion will not be if you use day one, or journey or anything else, but the importance on on your on the journey and the journal part.

Art Gelwicks 35:36
Now, one thing I did notice, just jumping into it real quick, day one has the cape has two capabilities that I’m not seeing in Germany one is the ability to have multiple journals. So you can create maybe a Business Journal and a personal journal if you wanted to, which is kind of nice. It also supports within its setting capabilities within sync, the ability to connect through IFTTT to automate entries into day one, which, again, if that’s your thing, then that’s your thing. I think they’re like one, one a within the market space. And they’re definitely both work, it’s worth a try.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 36:13
I also like the day one can import your Instagram posts, so it can just automatically import your Instagram posts, which is a direct integration inside the day one app, I like I like some of the features there. Plus, if integration ifft integration would be a great, it would be a godsend for journey. They need to really add that so that you’re able to suck posts from journey. I just don’t like the silo data, which is why when we talked about it earlier in round one, I like that process of do we talk about round one? Round two? Round one? Round one? Yeah, well, we talked about it in round one, because I like the ability to have my data not siloed, I purposefully write the post, and then you know, write the entry and then I copied into my own system. And in this case, it’s Evernote for me, and and then I encrypt that text, and there is inside of Evernote. And so I just like having that centralization of data. And it’s just it would be so nice to be to be able to have both views, right? One is the backup of the data. But the other is having journey, be the input point, which is really what I’m looking for. And I think that same thing is capable of being done in day one, because you have that integration. So one nice feature of day one as well is that it has the ability to print photo books, if I understand. So it’s capable of creating these journal journal entries. And I kind of have done that same thing with Google Photos, in the sense that, you know, you can create these, I’ve just created them all as drafts, and they’re sitting there, but the idea of having a series of photographs, and then annotating those photographs, so that you remember the trips that you might have taken or or print, you know, big events that might have happened in your world. And that gives you this kind of photographic chronology of what has happened. And that’s kind of nice. And so day one allows you to to commemorate those memories in a in a in a book and a physical printed matter, which could be a gift or just a memento for yourself.

Augusto Pinaud 38:09
Yeah. And then you can do that Book Printing, with with not only the pictures, but everything that needs, they got directly to go in the app, you know, you select the Book Printing, and this star on around 1499. So they’re not really, you know, incredibly expensive. But then you can build it from there have the pages you know, you can add Instagram pictures from there to add to journals, or just print the actual journal with the pictures and the text that you create. So if you say, Hey, you know what I want to prove to you go through, for example, art who pre pandemic used to travel. You know, if he goes to the next cover Fest, he can create his journal for the cover fest. And as soon as he’s back, click on the app, print, and now have a book with all the memories, all the little things he collect and right through the journey.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 39:01
Alright, Francis, what is your round three? choice.

Francis Wade 39:05
I’m just in love with Google Authenticator. So I have interacted with a few companies, not a terrible number who actually use it. And it’s the antidote to that problem I’ve had killing me of, oh, we’ll send you a text with the secret code that you need to input. And it just so happens that I live in a bit of a dead spot where some text messages just never get to me. So Google Authenticator gives me Of course, it has an instant code built in. So for those who haven’t used it, it’s a way of doing two factor authentication. So it’s, the company sends asks you to go into Google Authenticator. Create an account for them, essentially. And then whenever you login, if they suspect or need further verification, they ask you to read off the number that’s in Google Authenticator. They put it into their system that verify Is that you’re the right You are the true owner of the account. So it’s a it’s a two factor authentication system. The great part is that you do not have to rely on email, which is not secure on SMS, which is not secure. That the you’re the only person who has that particular app, dialed into your account on your phone. And I am having to ask companies who have the option, whether they can, can I please use it? And they say, Oh, yes, sir. Because they’re so used to sending text messages or sending emails that I often have to prompt them to actually use Google Authenticator. But for me, it solves so many security issues. And it works. So far, it’s worked flawlessly for me. So I this was a brilliant innovation, and I hope more companies jump on the bandwagon and use it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:55
Yeah, I can’t speak more highly of Google Authenticator. And now with a recent upgrade, so that you’re able to have authenticator on multiple devices, so that you can actually synchronize accounts. by exporting your accounts and putting them on two different mobile devices, you now can have the one time passwords display in multiple devices, which means that if you lose a device, you’re not locked out of accounts, which was kind of my big concern, always with things not locked out permanently, because you should be taking the backup codes that any service provides to you and saving those securely someplace, literally printing them and putting them into a clearly safe place from theft, water, fire, and and that way you have those backup codes to re access those accounts in an inconvenient way. But in from just a convenience factor. Now, being able to have authenticator synchronized across multiple devices is just phenomenal. And I can’t speak more highly of Google Authenticator. Now, if you are allergic to Google, just remember that Microsoft has their own authenticator. If you want to be outside of the Big Four tech, you can use LastPass authenticator.

Art Gelwicks 41:59
Yeah, I use the LastPass. One all the time, it just flat out works. I mean, that’s really, and that’s the only thing that I’ve consistently like to bet the last password. And I don’t know if this is the case with Microsoft, or Google’s is it has an an easy function to restore. I think it’s restore from the cloud. If you switch devices, and you need to re install the two factor authentication app. You don’t have to go through a lot of steps. I actually set it up from my car the one day and it just flat out work.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 42:26
Yeah, because it’s tied to the it’s tied to the account, which is really, really helpful. And so that synchronization is very helpful. But yeah, so so one password does have a one time password authenticator built into it as I thought. And so yeah, just everybody get multi factor authentication, and certainly two factor using a an authenticator application, you will secure your account so that passwords won’t matter as much. Not that they don’t matter. But they won’t matter as much as it relates to being able to secure your press, especially your primary accounts. I mean, it’s so important to be able to have that security. So thank you for bringing that up, Francis. And to round out round three and our apple is all together is my choice. My choice. This time around is going to be Asana, Asana different than the yoga poses. Asana is a project management software for, for teams. And I use that in one of the divisions of my company, but I also use it for managing all the personal productivity activities that I do. And the goal is to be able to just have a space to track those things. What I really like about Asana, you know, in difference to say Trello is that the conversation functionality within Asana is just a little bit more fluid a little bit nicer. I think that from an aesthetic perspective, there is an aesthetic there that many people like about Asana, I happen to be a boards person, I like that Kanban feel of seeing cards and being able to physically move them in a virtual space. But I really do value the ability to have that seamless conversation, and not be included in every conversation and the reduction in email by virtue of having that Asana comment thread, really embedded within it. Now, I would like Asana to have a little bit better of capabilities in terms of copying and pasting and moving tasks and projects from one workspace to another. From one project to another, it seems a bit clunky to me yet that some of the data can’t be copied and pasted over. Also, if you have multiple Asana instances, again, same thing with Trello, or with some of these other applications where you’re not quite sure what rights or features are missing or included, based on which account you’re in. And that can be sometimes frustrating, you know, it’s like, oh, well, I have this automation functionality in Asana here, but I don’t have it in this account because it’s not upgraded. And that just seems frustrating that you’re paying on one part but and not paying on another and so therefore you’re blocked from the features. And so at some point, this is just gonna have to be solved by all of the major project management software out there, which is how to make money, but also not block me from features when I’m paying for those features and IV individual maybe the the, the other entities that own the instances that those accounts are not paying for them, but I just feel there’s a there’s a diminished value feeling there as a consumer that just needs to be solved. But otherwise I’ve been very pleased with Asana since they’re very early days. And now there are Asana pros. These are basically independent consultants who can help you with Asana implementations. And so if you go to asana.com, you can find the pros place just like with Evernote, they have Evernote certified consultants, I happen to be an Evernote certified consultant. And then there are Asana pros who are basically independent consultants who can help you with Asana, implementation, training, and other kinds of issues there for implementing it in your business. So very cool there. Alright, gentlemen, that closes us out. For this productivity Appaloosa. Links to all the products and services that we talked about are on the episode page on productivity cast dotnet in the show notes, so if you want to find any links to those things are some of the other tools that we talked about around our primary choices? Those are all there. While we are at the end of our productivity Apple Palooza fourth edition. The conversation doesn’t have to stop here. If you have a question or a comment about what we’ve discussed during this cast, please visit our episode page on productivity cast dotnet there on the podcast website at the bottom of the page, you can feel free to leave a comment or question. We’ve been getting some and that’s fantastic. wonderful to see you all engaging. We read and respond if needed to every comment or question. Also, you can find us in our digital community that aren’t mentioned earlier personal productivity club, where we have a dedicated group to ProductivityCast. So if you visit ProductivityCast dotnet forward slash community, you’ll be directed to personal productivity club to join. And then you can go ahead and join the ProductivityCast group which is under channels, click on channels, and you’ll find our ProductivityCast group. If this is your first time with us, please consider adding us to your favorite podcast app maybe overcast like a gousto noted. If you click on subscribe on ProductivityCast dotnet you’ll see the instructions to follow us and get episodes downloaded for free every time a new one comes out. And if you’ve enjoyed spending time listening and learning with us today, it’d be a great help to us if you add a rating or review on Apple podcasts stitcher or pod chaser, your compliments motivate us to keep going your feedback helps us get better. And those ratings help us grow the personal productivity listening community. So thank you to those who have left ratings and reviews. They’re really helpful. We we seen them and appreciate all the feedback and keep them coming. I want to express my thanks to Augusto Pinaud Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks for joining me here on ProductivityCast. Each week, you can learn more about them and their work by visiting the episode page or going to ProductivityCast dotnet and clicking on about I’m Ray Sidney-Smith and on behalf of all of us at ProductivityCast here’s to your productive life.

Voiceover Artist 47:54
And that’s it for this productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity with your hosts Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.