Back to the Future: From the Four Basics of Personal Productivity to the Current State of Productivity

Some of us of a certain age were introduced to digital technology with four basics of personal productivity at the fore—calendar, tasks, contacts and notes. Today, the calendar seems to be the remaining function that presents prominently on any new smartphone or tablet that you might purchase. Why is that the current state of productivity? And, what can you do to go back to the future with making sure your mobile technology serves you, and not the other way around? (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/085 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing Back to the Future: From the 4 Basics of Personal Productivity to the Current State of Productivity from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Francis Wade Art Gelwicks Show Notes | Back to the Future: From the 4 Basics of Personal Productivity to the Current State of Productivity Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. PalmOS Apple iOS parental controls Google Family Link Google OnHub router (since this recording, Ray has moved entirely to Google WiFi) Driving mode on Apple iOS Driving mode on Android (Pixel)Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Raw Text Transcript | Back to the Future: From the 4 Basics of Personal Productivity to the Current State of Productivity Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More 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 0:26I'm Francis Wade. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25We are back again this week to talk about something that I think all of us who are of a certain age have experienced over the course of time, which is a transformation from older technology to newer technology. And what we're going to really be talking about today is really the current state of productivity in light of that technological change. You know, I can remember back to my first computing device, so to speak. I received a ti 83 from my aunt as a hand me down. It was a The reverse calculators they used to call it and then I remember the first device I actually bought from myself with my own allowance and that was a Casio our 500 little spell checking dictionary device and what a long way we have come from way back then, but it really does say something about technology. Okay, so can you give us a little bit background in terms of what we're going to be talking about today and and how it affects our personal productivity? Augusto Pinaud 1:29You know, I'm not I'm not that also all that I will share today it's been several things I have. But the reality is that when you look into productivity when you look back into into the past and you talk about those devices my first device was also a Casio I don't remember the model but I remembered you could not back that up so it was a painful If you lose, if deleted, given I was young enough or anything formation may not be that irrelevant, but, but it was painful. And when the Palm Pilot came to the market, I remember how excited I was to the fact that you could back that up. So there was not going to be, you know, loosing stuff anymore. But what I want to talk or discuss today is those four pillars that came from that time that has been somehow degrading into more powerful tools, but less obvious tools and how that has affect the current state of productivity. Before we start recording the show, you know, we were talking about, you know, those devices and we were talking about the planners, you know, the justa paper planner, you know, one book one page calendar per, per day, and how our PDA sort of the beginning of the PDA basically bring four buttons, calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes. That need was really The beginning you know, I remember walking in into what it was a Franklin Covey stores in the malls in the states and looking at those planners and looking at those, you know, and I'd imagine the possibilities and but those planners, were still basing it on the on those four pillars, you know, the calendar, the contacts a task and the notes when you fast forward now to 2019 what you found is rarely those four things and I will even argue in many cases, None. None of the manufacturers do really strong task management, you know, or context is okay. calendar may be the best they do, but how that affect, you know, our generation and even the generations before you know, what are the solutions we come to in order to make that happen? You know, when the iPhone came out, my biggest thing With the iPhone was you could not do tasks, you could not sort notes, there was a lot of problem that was quickly solved by third party software. But in a way, it was leaving a really powerful divide device with, you know, big shortcomings from the productivity perspective. And if you look today on my iPhone in front of me right now, you know, I was thinking of this, as we were talking before we start recording the show. You know, the four applications on the bottom of my iPhone are for writing for a journal for organizing and task management. You know, it is interesting for me, there is no calendar context or notes on this Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:45when I look at my own phone and think about how I manifest what I do productively on especially the dock, the main series of buttons at the bottom of the page. In my case, my phone has five spots in the doc and, and so in the center is his calendar. But then remarkably enough on either side is a folder for contact apps, then Google Maps because I just use it as much as I do for traveling. then to the right of the calendar is my browser, my Chrome browser. And then to the right of that are my task management apps, and task and project management, all of those combined into another folder. And that's because above that, I've created a widget. I'm on the Android OS. And so I've created I've added a widget for my task manager above that with all of the features that I like to use within that software. So it's all really readily accessible to me all of that to say that probably not much has changed for me since then. With regard to the way in which I think about the you know, the people PDA and, and back then, you know the Palm OS on my devices. And today with regard to using a small device that's with me all the time that it has access to my calendar and my tasks, specifically my my contacts on my notes, those are much more blended. But I do know that when I transitioned from, from the palm over to the first iPhone, I, I was already migrating everything to Google. So I already migrated everything to Google Contacts. And so my transition was just once digitally, it went from the Palm OS. I uploaded that to Google Contacts. As far as I can remember, maybe there was some period where that went to Yahoo, but I'm not sure. And then, and then it went into Google Contacts and that's where it's been ever since. I've I've actually never maintained a contact database outside of Google Contacts. And then that has always synchronized with all of my other devices. So it's a it's a pretty unique circumstance, I think, for me in the sense that while the devices have gotten smarter, the devices have gotten faster. My usage of those devices for those functions have not actually changed all that much. Francis Wade 7:26I'm looking at my Android phone, and I'm asking the same question, but and what strikes me is that the the four apps that Augusto mentioned, none of them were internet based, so they weren't cloud based. Initially, they were really meant for standalone devices. So when I had my I guess, it See I had a I had a hp something or the other what it was, but this was like the early 90s. I tried to put in the contacts and I tried to put in tasks. I tried to do different things with it. Which should, theoretically allowed you to do. But once the phone was in the phone, it was a device once the device died. That was the end of it. I started to use the palm and had to re enter all this information. And I could sync with my laptop, but there was no cloud access. But I think the the game changer has been closed access because all of the the content that I have in contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes are all no cloud based. And the way I use the device is to access the cloud. It's, it's a portal to the information that I have safely secured somewhere. So it's a it's a device has changed from being the source of the information, which it used to be to being just one access point. Now, having said that, I think Augusto’s point is is is valid, which is when you win, you win those were the four primary buttons on your PDA. Essentially, the manufacturers were training you to operate the device in a particular way and to use it for a particular purpose. So it was it was,...