Good morning. How are you? This feels weird. What do we do again?
We are a technology podcast that talks about the newest updates from the Blackberry company, I believe. The Blackberry company. So I can't wait. I'm going to talk to you about the they stop selling the Blackberry Classic.
This is exciting and the spirit of news. Oh, and also the Senate, the US Senate is finally moving out of the Blackberry system. Lots of Blackberry news today. Blackberry show with Sawyer and Mikey.
That's us. That's for reminding me. What exactly what we do. Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's been a while since there's been any Blackberry news. So, you know, we have to talk about BBM. It's a messaging service. It is a messaging service.
People use it for messaging. I don't use it for messaging. It's one of the ones I don't use. Welcome back, man.
To both of us. Yeah. How are you? Good.
Just as happy as I've ever been. Am I? Am I quiet? You're a little quiet.
Really? I'm very near my microphone. It could be. I do have the air conditioning full blast two feet away from my face.
So I can hear that. That's new. That's not a thing that I usually would hear air conditioning. So far has been a springtime show.
So as it transitions to a summer show, you're going to get one little extra bit of white noise in the background. All right. I see. No problem.
Yeah. Unless, unless of course we switch the time and I do it in the morning and you do it in the evening, in which case you won't hear the air conditioning. But 6 p.m. And I face the sun at 6 p.m.
So the sun is all beaming into the apartment and the air conditioners running full blast. And I'm still not using blackberry messenger. So my life is hell at the moment. What happened to you to do it?
Seven? Seven, right? You do it. Seven.
Yeah. But again, it's springtime. Yeah. Yeah.
So this is you chose poorly. And today, today, you wanted to ask me something about workflows, right? Yeah, I was going to ask you, how did there are many things to ask you about about workflows, I guess? But do you use any what do you can where do you stand when it comes to workflows?
Well, I mean, it's a pretty big umbrella topic to cover in 20 minutes, half an hour or so that we're going to do today. So why don't I just, why don't I help the show for a second? Just give me one second. You can just fill the air with a dead air space music for a second.
I really going to do music. Sorry, it's not here. It's just you and me folks. This is of course the magic of radio.
Oh, he's there. Yeah. That's what we do. So that's I'm going to be warmer during the show for the sake of the show.
Oh, really? Yeah. That's me. That's fine.
You should do it. Or is it because you can't hear me? It's partially because I can't hear you. Sorry.
That's okay. No, now I can hear you just fine. This is all very exciting. Obviously, this will never end.
We should be like, you're talking more like computer workflows like things you do on your computer, your personal computer. You're not talking like ways to calm and balance your life outside of technology. No, no. Oh, well, see, those things are converging more and more.
Outside of technology is becoming less and less of a thing. So even like your workouts are part of our workflow. But I guess, no matter what I'm doing that, I mean, just more traditional automated workflows, I guess. Or a system you have that you crafted yourself or was designed for a thing you do in the professional realm.
Yeah, I mean, I definitely do that kind of thing in my work. So I'm a graphic designer and I mostly work in in layout and type. And there are a boatload of things you can do to automate layout and type. InDesign is essentially a labyrinth of automation techniques.
So that is kind of what I do every day. And I guess that's like that to me, the idea is like you use this tool so that the real thing you do is slightly easier and faster and more efficient, right? But I guess I don't know that I think about it in terms of automate. When you say like workflows and like automating your life and stuff, I sort of, I can't help a picture like life hacker.com and like, you know, ways of making your coffee professor and like turning your lights on automatically.
So you don't have to and things like that. Is that kind of what you mean? Or do you really mean like the sort of down to brass, like what I do for a living? How do I make that easier and faster and more efficient?
I mean that more. Let's start there. Because the other one, it'll flow out to the other one later on. Okay.
So I mean, I mean, to say you have your tool, right? You have your hardware that you make your things in. Yeah. So I have a computer, right?
That's really the big one, right? To get into like workflows and automation is to have a computer because a computer is more or less just a set of instructions on how to do a thing that we used to be able to do in real life, but it took longer. Right. But the tool for designers especially has remained generally the same over the past what 15 years it's a computer and it's changed forms from, you know, for some people desktop or laptop, but it's generally the same thing.
Workflows then would for me would mean, so you have your software too, which is remain generally the same. It's the thing, it's the application used to make stuff. So when I talk about workflows, I guess I would mean linking that first piece of software that you that you make stuff in to everything else before it goes to the real world, you know, to output. That isn't say the original thing of making something and then print.
Yeah, so everything in between that and final output is a thing that I feel has changed so frequently and can be done and could have been done in so many ways over the past 10, 15 years or for me growing up, making something and leading to its final output has everything in between that has changed in so many ways and can be automated in so many ways or can be done manually also. And the reason I wanted to bring it up for the show is because I actually realized I there are now that I'm getting older, I'm kind of calcifying my desire or my openness. I am calcifying and my openness to learning the most efficient way at any given time is, you know, becoming lower and lower and lower and I'm starting to stick to my old ways. Oh, you're actually you're actually finding that you're not looking for new fancy ways to do things as much as you do.
Yeah, and the sense that I should be, you know. Okay, so is this is maybe the crux of what we're going to talk about is that like you feel like you feel like you should be constantly trying to improve the thing you do, but over time you're finding that that's been slowing down and you're accepting that like a workload and stuff that you do in your work instead of trying to find new things. Yes, or I'll take that some mistake or alternatively I try to find the more efficient ways and I learn it for a day or two and then I just you know in a pinch like when there's a little more pressure from the real world to make something I just revert back to the old way because it's what I know. Right.
Yeah. We're a little pied in the sky at the moment. So here, I'll give you an example of what I do. So I work in InDesign and say I have a an article that I need to lay out and there's certain things I need to do.
I need to get the headings right, I need to get the body font right, I need to get the footnote font right. Something I've been playing with in InDesign is threading styles together so that instead of I see a heading a body paragraph and a footnote and I would have to lay those out manually right or say or click three times in order to make it look the way I want. I'm figuring out ways to click once and have all three of them look exactly the way I want. It saves a lot of time.
It lowers the chance of errors. That kind of thing is something that I mostly keep an eye out for and I'm constantly researching to see if people have come up with better solutions. But the reason I do that is entirely time based because what I work on often has a lot of repetition and a lot of doing the same thing over and over again in different contexts. What I try to do is minimize the repetition as best I can and that is something I've learned in InDesign is a years long process.
You actually maybe never stop slowly reiterating. I wouldn't know how to go back. I wouldn't know how to go back to the way I did things two years ago. Does that make sense?
Yes, it makes sense. It makes so much sense. I don't necessarily think of it as a choice. I feel like I have to.
I have to keep pursuing this. I have to keep iterating and getting better. If I don't, I feel like there's somebody right behind me who's catching up. Do you feel like that?
No, not at all. I suppose that's probably a major reason why it doesn't stick for me. You don't have the wolf at the door. No, I don't.
I really don't. Yeah, for a teacher. I'm relatively almost always the youngest person in the faculty room. In a room full of teachers, I'm surrounded by old people who don't use smartphones or don't have a laptop and use the office computer, which I think if you can afford it, but you still choose to use the office computer, it's really strange to me because why would anyone want to do that?
An example for me would be the notes apps or the text apps I would use or I have used over the past five, six years. I started off thinking that the, so here's what's needed. So we have, all the teachers have to make lesson plans, right? Sure.
And what we do with the lesson plans is, so we're given a template and we apply a template to the thing that we, to the things that we make. And then we print them out, the original ways, you print them out and then you use them and then you keep them in a folder, print two copies, keep one in the folder and then give the other one to your boss, to the coordinator. And then as things become our software based or more computer based, that's the thing where it got a little messy for me because to me, the most efficient way for me would be what I'm doing now, which is use the Notes app on iOS because it's everywhere now, and syncing on iCloud for some reason is suddenly reliable. More suddenly, isn't like the last month or like last year, because I've tried it last year and I did not find it to be reliable.
Oh, really? Yeah. I would say since iOS 9. Oh, okay.
Yeah, you had very different experiences there then. I got my iPhone this year, so I've had iOS 9 the whole time and I found the Notes app to be Notes and reminders to be frustrating. Yeah. That's not a common, I see our listeners are probably agreeing with you more.
Sure. But for me, it's been very reliable, especially. And the new features on the drawing and the lists and all those things are very convenient for me. But see, after I make them a Notes, because I, what my needs are that they need to be in every device I have, no matter what I bring, they're all on there.
But I would need to then copy and paste that and then put them, paste that on a Word document and then do exactly the same thing. What the problem for me or the tension for me would be, there would have, I would have been the one to develop a system and at one time I did propose a system where everybody has a Dropbox folder, everybody has a Dropbox folder and everybody puts all their things there and everybody, all the features just have one copy or one thing or one root source for all their files, except for their local drafts. And this worked for about a month or less, I think. And then it just broke down to degree by degree.
So the first degree it broke down is everybody started saying that in a pinch, or like old teachers say, I still don't get Dropbox, sorry old teachers, if you're listening, you're probably not. I'm not surprised. Yeah. But the box is like, it's something that actually is very difficult to explain to someone who hasn't used it for two years already.
Like it's just on a certain level, it's just like, wait, what? It does what now? How is it? Wait, it's a folder that does a different thing than this other folder over here?
Yeah. It's, you know, I don't blame people being confused about Dropbox. Yeah. And I don't blame other people either.
But the crazy part for me is, or I guess the reason I feel it's a thing to be brought up is that I, you know, so they break it down one level and I didn't say I didn't get the Dropbox yet, you know, I didn't get the Dropbox to you, they would say. So I emailed it instead. So then you break down, it always breaks down from whatever the new thing is back down to email and then beneath email, just print it out and give it to somebody. That's right.
Yeah. So and the funny part is I'm noticing now for me that that's essentially what I do as well. Now, I now realize it's not even a thing I think about anymore. So I'm gonna stop you right there.
I'm gonna stop you right there. I know exactly why you're doing this. You had the hubris to think that you could change other people's workflows. Yes, because in my mind, I would think that, you know, I'm the one who knows how to do this.
I'm the enthusiast. Of course. It's a common thread for our shows. Sure.
It's breaking down for me. Now that I have the iPad bro, you know, where I need the cloud, right? I found that it's to this day, I still have this unease, even if I'm not actually doing anything that needs my laptop, I still feel I need my laptop and I broke it down. Why do I need it?
It's because I need to be able to get a local file and email it very easily in case Dropbox fails or worst case, print it very easily or copy it to a flash drive. Sorry, that's the second thing. Between printing and email, there's flash drives. And I can't do that.
And if I think about it for more than a minute, it's actually fine. The world now works for people like me who I don't have to bring my laptop anymore. I really practically don't. But then I would have moments throughout the day for no reason and I'd just be like, I need my laptop, crap, I should have brought my laptop.
Even if I don't really need it. It's because of this perceived thing. And the reason is worth bringing up is that I'm not supposed to feel that way, Sawyer. I'm supposed to be the guy that's totally fine and totally over it.
And it is you, Brisson. Here I am being one of the old guys. I'm the old guy now. It's not your fault.
The fault is that you're in a community that is probably pretty slow to move on to new things. It's not your fault at all. You can have the best of intentions and your workflow could be perfect, but the second you bring in another person, it all goes to hell. It is next to impossible to get people unless you are a project manager and you have the authority and the firing capability to make sure that everybody is in line with the way you want things to be done.
It is next to impossible to herd people into a certain kind of work. Like a certain way of working. Next to impossible. You know how long it took me to get my partner onto the same messaging app that I like?
It took me like three years, dude. And that's just a mode of communication between two people. I wish you the best of luck, but I will put money down that you will never actually get your colleagues to do the workflow that you want to do. It doesn't mean that your workflow isn't totally the best way to do things.
It just means that it's like Shepard and Katz. It's next to impossible. But why is it hard? Why is it hard?
I don't think it's because your colleagues don't want to work a slightly better way. It's probably because they don't see the benefit and they don't have their feet to the fire coming from the other direction. Like I said earlier, they don't have the wolf at the door. They don't feel the need to jump to a new rock and they don't see why they need to jump to a new rock.
So that's I think mostly why it doesn't really work. Is there a lot of competition at your office? Absolutely not. I say office.
What do you call it? Faculty? Yeah, it's an office. It's just called an office.
But there's not a lot of competition. There's not a lot of like, if I'm not getting better all the time, I'm very replaceable. You know, a company line is that there is. But I would say this extends to pretty much the entire education industry that there is and there should be.
More than many other industries, ours is the one where people should be getting better all the time because I feel the stakes are a little higher for us. But industry culture is that they don't, unless you're in a specific or unless you're in high-end universities, specific universities here have that culture. But then many, many, many, many schools here and I would say across the world maybe, don't. Teachers are stereotypical teachers.
The old ones, no offense, old ones. Again, I love you guys. Some of you are my favorite people. I'm being stereotypical here.
But, or not being stereotypical here, but I'm raising stereotypes here. But those stereotypes are, they ring true. You know, once a teacher settles into a certain way, that's their way and for five, 10, 15, 20 years and then 20 years pass and you realize you've been the same way. And you know, and if there is any effort at all to advance or develop, it would be in the subject matter, which I suppose is the most important thing.
And because all the energy gets put into real life and then advancing it at least subject matter, I think processes and workflows are I think that, you know, that get left behind. They don't, more than any other industry, I think they resist new methods the most. Everybody just wants to take the paper, which is fine. Yeah, it's, it's, I understand that.
But then the same people who study that or who teach that the about the environment and that paper is not, you know, the best way to go about things anymore is if there are more efficient or more or greener ways to do things are also the people who would rather just stick the paper because at least they won't disappear when you press the escape button or something. So, so it's, it's, it's, this is not an old problem in the world. But the thing that I'm finding is that I'm becoming more and more like them. I guess you're right, it isn't my fault.
Right. But, but now I'm, you know, it is hubris. It's a moment of hubris for me. I guess that's why I wanted to talk about it.
It's, it's, it's, it's unraveling that I'm just like them. Well, not, I don't know necessarily because you do, you do want things to get better. If anything, you've maybe accepted the fact that it's not going to happen as quickly or in the way that you might like. But you know, who's to say maybe they all want to things to get better?
Oh, no, they're wrong. They're totally wrong. They're completely wrong. They're, of course, the new way is better.
And I don't even know what the new way is specifically in this kind of, but the new way is better. The new way is always better. That's why it's the new way. But almost always, almost always a new system that's come up to solve an old problem has, has taken into mind all of the things that go wrong when you try to use an ulcer.
Like it's almost always better. The problem is that it's so hard to put people on board. This is something that happens with people who are really enthusiastic about a certain subject, like technology, where you are really early adopter and you're like, oh my god, this method is amazing. Like I'll bring up the windows phone quickly.
Like the way windows phone, like organized, like your contacts was so amazing. And the workflow that it was so good that I wanted other people to use it just so they'd be able to like actually organize their contacts for once because no one ever does. Right? But that's dangerous because now you're recommending windows phones people and that's a bad idea.
You know, I don't, it's, it's so hard if you're excited about a new thing, that no one else is excited about that new thing. Even though it might make all of your lives easier. And so what I sense that you're feeling is that you're frustrated that no one else wants to come along with you. So now you feel like, well, I might as well give up.
Yeah. It's self-doubt. I think no paper's horrible. We lost all of our forests, dude.
Like it's bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you're right.
You know, it's the world's just wrong, man. It is. But if you if you look over time, things are slowly getting better. Yeah, are slowly getting better.
And you just want to keep fighting that could fight. This is going to be a pretty short show. We've got to wrap it up in about five minutes. This can totally be a two-parter.
If you want to like think about this for another week and we can come back and hit it again. Unless a major thing happens in the industry. I mean, they could come out with a new blackberry classic. Yeah.
That just in a week just takes over the iPhone. Oh my god, that would be we would talk about that, right? Yeah, forget workflows, man. There was that I remember they had that fire sale, the first blackberry tablet that came out that that that I bombed pretty bad.
But here in Canada, they had like a crazy fire sale for the tablet, where it was like 500 bucks. And all of a sudden it was like 100 bucks. And they sold like a lot of that. And so there was there was a little bit of news.
It was like all of a sudden blackberry sold like X million copies of their of their tablet. So maybe they'll do that with the classic, maybe they'll be another fire sale. I'll bet you anything that a lot of people would buy. It's the classic is now it's reaching Motorola Razors status as a classic phone.
Yeah. So a lot of people are going to buy those ones. Yeah, maybe by then they'll have a more efficient workflow than email using a primarily email centric device to figure out better ways to do things. Yeah.
I mean, there you go. See, but sometimes people do hop on to the new hotness, right? If like, could you imagine? So your government employee and even an iPhone fan for the last 10 years, and they're finally giving up blackberry, do you not feel like maybe all your hard work and trying to push that gets like it just takes time.
Systems are slow. People are slow, especially like with blackberry. I think people were actually pretty happy with how it worked for the most part. So they were like, well, I don't see the point in going over to that thing over there.
Yeah. Well, one last thing. I guess one of the things we'll move into or one of the things we can be talking about over in the show is sinking services as well, right? What do you use for work?
For work? Or do you need them for work at all? I mean, so like my my freelance work, I sync everything to my personal one drive and I pay for the storage. I have 10 terabytes of storage there.
Yeah, because for the money, you get absolutely the most storage for I pay 100 bucks a year and I get five users, which I share with my family and all of us get 10 terabytes of storage each, which is just indubitably insane. So I back up with that and I back up everything to a portable hard drive as well. I've got a pretty good backup thing in terms of sinking though. Like that's like I pretty much just use one draft.
I use Dropbox for text files and my personal writing because I use Scrivener and Scrivener just works better with Dropbox. But that's all I use Dropbox for. But none of these are like working through great systems. These are just things you use.
These are just things I use. I use them for my work in my freelance work. In terms of my day job though, I go to an office where I work on Adele and they have an exchange active sync server. I love how Adele is a typical office computer.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I feel good to just unload this in the show. As far as this.
Yeah. I suppose there doesn't need to be a solution for this. You're right. It just takes time.
Sometimes just patience. Sometimes just patience and being right for a long time. You know, like people who wanted like the iPhone to take over the Black-Arian government, they were right for a long time before they got what they wanted. You know, they're absolutely right.
They paid just a little more attention to the industry or to the wins. But that's the thing. They may not have been right in 2008. So I understand them taking their time to something like that.
Anyways, man, I have to run. This is a good sort of short show. I think it probably will be a part one. But yeah, we'll come back at this again next week.
Let's do it. I have some links. I'm going to send you about this. So let's do some reading this week and then we'll come at it with some more focus.
Okay. Awesome, dude. You take care. You do man.
Take care. Cheers. Bye.