I am not a fan of phone calls. If you look at my cell phone voice usage in the course of a month, you might wonder why I even have a cell phone as I use it as a phone very sparsely. I am pleased to say though, that my wife and family tolerate this little quirk of mine and we still keep in touch. With most of my family this is accomplished via SMS text messaging with an occasional long form message via email. With my wife, however, we “chat” constantly throughout the day about anything that pops into our brains but we do it in such a way as to remain productive compared to the spouses that stop what they are doing to take or make a call to each other, and thus, the topic of today’s pinch of productivity.

I work in an office of cubicles. My wife works from home, meaning she has an external job, and is the keeper of our household, but also gets paid by a company to do her daytime job.

I’m doing all I can to avoid saying that she is not “just a house-wife” or “just a home-maker” as I have too much respect for the people who are able to do that and so much more, like Her!

Anyway, as a person who loathes phone calls, my wife knows that, unless it needs to be discussed by phone, we stick to other means of communication, and I don’t think our communications have suffered in the process. The trick we use from our respective desks during the day, and even our respective smart phones when away from our desks is Slack. We used to use Google Chat but that either has gone away, or is still in the process of slowly dying as they started sending out deprecation messages several years ago, despite it still working for some time following those messages. [This is in no way any kind of paid endorsement for Slack and there are no affiliate links or any other means of promoting Slack other than to say that it’s free, and it works for us!]

The great thing about Slack is that, just like Teams and other instant chat programs in use today, it does not require you to make a phone call, schedule a video chat or even compose a message and send it via an email, etc. It’s just there, in a small corner in the lower right hand corner of my 3rd monitor and it emanates a polite ding when a message comes through. I don’t usually have to stop what I am doing to respond to a quick question or statement. When a thought pops into my head or a question I wish to pose to my wife, I just type it into the little Slack window and off it goes. We both operate with the knowledge that it is not instant messaging per se. I don’t tell her every time I get up to do something else nor does she. The thoughts, questions, messages and whatever else we share are just there in the Slack window when we return, and we are able to respond accordingly.

The other great thing about Slack is the ability to share files. This extends to both our computers and our phones. If there’s a photo, a pdf or spreadsheet we want to share with each other, we just drag and drop it into the slack window, and in a second, it appears on the other person’s computer. The same can be said with our phones. If either has a photo or something else to share on our phone, especially during the workday, sharing it via our slack chat doesn’t require us to switch programs or devices to quickly share a glance while remaining productive and not losing the train of though we are currently involved in. And a fair amount of files, such as images, preview right inside of slack, adding even more convenience.

This is all done with the mutual understanding / managed expectation that it is not “instant messaging” in the truest sense of the word. If something is urgent, we know to resort to the telephone for a more instant response.

The beauty of this is that we are able to keep an open line of communication throughout the day and “chat” about anything that pops into our brains without stopping work to call each other or email each other, etc. I overhear other folks in my office stopping to call their significant others and some I even see grabbing their mobile phone and heading outside the building to have their conversations with some level or privacy from within our little cubicle farm. I consider us lucky to be able to have most of these conversations, and even an occasional disagreement, via our slack chat, and it hasn’t resulted in any domestic issues as of yet!

The other added benefits of Slack are that, as a result of some pretty stringent IT policies where I work, I can’t install external software without it getting security clearance and an act of congress, blah blah blah, so other similar apps we considered were not possibilities because of this. The nice thing about Slack in this respect, is that all of the fuctionality I’ve referenced is also available, as evidenced by my use case, through a web browser tab open to our slack channel in its own little window. This includes the file sharing capabilities.

The last little extra bit of productivity splashed in here is that, as is the case with other similar utilities, Slack also has a channel that is just mine, so if I want to get something quickly from my phone to my desktop, whether it be a file, a phone number or perhaps a website url, I can drop it into my private channel window on the device I am using, and it appears on all devices where I am running Slack in one form or another — and it remains there, like if have a thought at bedtime that I want to explore in more detail at work the next morning. This has proven useful when I have my work computer and personal laptop running and need a file on one that is currently on the other. Sure there are a million other ways to get this file from one pc to the other, but given that I have Slack just sitting there, already open to chat with my wife, it requires very little effort to use it for this purpose.

I am certain that there are privacy or security issues that some of the many internet nay-sayers can weigh in on, but I’m not sharing many nuclear launch codes nor my plans for world domination via Slack. It’s a quick and easy way to try and stay out of the dog house by keeping an open line for day to day chatting with my most significant other. As always, YMMV.

My employer’s office system of choice is Office 365 which means that my email software is Outlook. I realize that many folks out there say you shouldn’t use your inbox as your to-do list, but in my case, 95% of the things I have to deal with on a day to day basis come into my life via email, so to then take those items and move them to another program continues to feel like a wasted step. So my to-do list IS email based, and my goal at the end of the day is Inbox Zero.

The first step in this process is to disable all email notifications. I read somewhere that email is not something that one should react to in the moment. By this, I mean that, I was previously guilty of being one of those people who would react to the dings and pop-ups of emails, stopping whatever else I was doing to see what the notification was about, and more often than not, it wasn’t anything worth interrupting the current task to check on, but hey, I had already interrupted myself so why not handle this email, then get back to whatever I was doing. This could often stretch a simple task into an hour long task as a result of stopping, diverting my attention, doing something else or not, then ramping back up into the task I was trying to previously complete. While I do practice and make the most of using a multi-monitor setup, and do love it, it is NOT something that enables multi-tasking per se. It instead allows for rapid attention swapping, but it’s not the way to become a multi-tasker as I’ve found that term to be something of a unicorn. I probably check email more frequently than a lot of “experts” advocate, but I always try to complete the task I’m doing before returning to the inbox to see what might be next.

Now back into the inbox, and the goal of inbox zero. My emails tend to fall into 5 categories:

• Handle It Now
• — Do It Now
• — Read It Now
• Postpone It / Reschedule It
• Delegate It
• File It Away

Handle It Now — Pt. 1 — Do It Now

If it’s something that will take me a relatively short amount of time to complete, this is always my first choice. That amount of time isn’t set in stone and can be longer on days with fewer pre-scheduled issues, or shorter if I’m already anticipating being pulled in a lot of directions. So if it falls into the “Handle It Now” category, then that’s what I do, and when it’s done, that email gets filed away as handled, and is off my plate.

Handle It Now — Pt. 2 — Read It Now

There are a few daily emails I get that often contain at least one or two little blurbs of knowledge that I want to absorb. So, as long as nothing is currently on fire when I come to these emails, rather than promising myself to get back to them later, and adding them to some infinite to-be-read list that never sees the light of day, I try to take the minute or two needed and go through it, learning what I can, perhaps jotting down a note or two, filing the whole email into a reference folder or deleting it, but never just leaving it sit in my inbox.

Postpone It / Reschedule It

This is never ideal, but there are many times where I am not in a position to act on an item right then and there. Perhaps I’m waiting on additional info from someone else, or something else about it is still in process. Either way, it’s just not feasible to handle it in this moment. This is where a secret weapon of mine comes into play.

Secret Weapon Number One — fut.io

There’s a service I’ve spoken of before and continue to get the most use of every day in my quest to remain productive from within my inbox. The service is called Follow Up Then. The brilliance of the service lies in its simplicity. If there’s an email that I know I will need to deal with in a week, I simply forward it to “1week@fut.io”. It’s off my plate, out of my brain and comes back to me as a new email 1 week later. The interval email addresses that exist at Follow Up Then are virtually limitless. I can forward it to a particular date and time if needed, like “dec25th1pm@fut.io”, or something as vague yet specific as tomorrow@fut.io, 1hour@fut.io or 2years@fut.io. Whatever the date or interval specified before the @fut.io, that is when the service will send the email back to me to act on it. These emails also come with clickable postponement options that I can setup in advance.

I can click a button to postpone it for a day, a week, a month, etc. if I’m not ready to deal with it at that very moment. I can even forward something to a time later in the day in case I just don’t want to handle it right now, but do wish to tackle it before the day is done, so perhaps it’s waiting for me after lunch. This gets it out of my inbox and out of my brain, until it returns to be completed when I am ready. There are also ways to set flags in these emails so that it keeps bugging you until an item is completed, and other ways to even delegate the task to someone else and have reminder emails pop up visible to both you and the person you’re delegating it to, or just to you, to remember to follow up at some point in the future. They are a great service with a ton of features available in the free version, and even more in the paid version. There is no affiliate link or anything for me to gain by advocating their use. If you’re curious, just forward an email to tomorrow@fut.io and that’s it — you’ve begun using Follow Up Then!

Another great aspect of the service is that, if I’m driving somewhere or even lying in bed, and an idea pops into my head, I have a mailto shortcut setup so I can quickly send an email to tomorrow@fut.io so that when I get to work the next morning, I get the reminder, and I get the follow-up option buttons in case I’m not ready to deal with it at that exact moment. For those who might say that I could just send an email to myself, this is true, but the options in the fut.io email add a little more flexility to next steps if needed.

Delegate It

Well, there’s no secret weapons to this one. Sometimes something reaches my inbox and it is better handled by someone else. Perhaps a pseudo-secret weapon here is how the request might be phrased to get someone’s help without them feeling burdened by the request. For that, I owe a debt of gratitude to author Chris Voss and his advocation of Tactical Empathy.

File It Away

Some of what I receive is neither actionable by me, or anyone else. These items are typically reference material of one form or another. While I do have a reference folder inside of my Outlook, my other secret weapon for archiving such info is, of course, the OG of all second brains — Evernote. Half of you just rolled your eyes, and the rest of you are shaking your heads in agreement. If you’re an Evernoter, great, and if you use another system, I respect that as well. The key isn’t agreeing on one system, but instead, having and USING a system to store info for retrieval at a later date.

I use two main ways to get things from Outlook into Evernote. The first of these is to simply forward the email to my personal email address. Every Evernote account has a “secret” individualized email address that allows someone to send an email into Evernote as either a new note or have it appended to an existing note. My second way of getting items into Evernote involves the use of a desktop folder that automatically imports the contents into Evernote. There are times where the entire email isn’t what should be preserved inside of Evernote, and instead, an attachment file is what should be archived. In this case, I simply drag and drop the attached file from my outlook onto that folder on my desktop and it magically appears in Evernote. I keep this pretty simple as I employ a single folder going into a relative catch-all notebook to move my stuff. It is possible to create separate folders that are configured to place items in specific notebooks, etc., but I’ve not gotten that far into the process thus far.

Conclusion

There are as many Medium Articles about “My Productivity Methods” as there are flavors of ice cream in the world. I enjoy reading about how other people do things and possibly taking an idea they’ve mentioned or a piece of software they are using and seeing how I might incorporate it into my flow. Whether you choose to adopt the methods I’ve laid out as your new way, or you’re able to grab one notion from all of this and add it to your system, I wish you nothing but the best in your quest for the perfect system and hope that you’ve enjoyed this pinch of productivity.

Afterthought

As I’m sitting here putting the finishing touches on this article, a reminder email popped into my inbox reminding me of a task I do everyday at 1pm. I’ve never found much success with todo app reminders nor calendar appointments to aid in getting this task done everyday, but using recurring reminders in FollowUpThen and making a mental commitment to myself to not delete that 2pm reminder email until I’ve actually completed the task has led to a 100% success rate in getting that 1pm daily chore handled and not thought about and forgotten as was the case more times than I’d care to remember while using previous reminder methods. So we’ll consider this Pinch 6.5!

This month’s blog will be major a departure from my usual Pinches of Productivity. I’ve been a little too slammed at work, ironically enough, to focus on being productive, but this past week, I was given something else to reflect on and wanted to commit those memories to the written word before any more time allows them to fade…

Just as they say cats have nine lives, I’ve probably had as many careers over the years. I’ve had plenty of jobs, but a handful of what one might consider careers that these jobs would fall under. One of these careers had to do with helping to run one of the top 5 commercial country music radio stations in the USA back in the 90’s/2000’s. I worked my way through a few titles while doing this but ultimately wound up being the Assistant Program Director for 92.5 WXTU — Philadelphia’s Country Station, and it was in this capacity where I met a lot of truly great people, but last week, as one of those great people allegedly broke a portion of the internet, I paused for a moment to recall one of the more unique experiences I had during a decade of very unique experiences. And so with that in mind, I give you…

My Dinner with Taylor Swift

I was privileged to work with one of the top program directors in the industry, Bob McKay, and he taught me many great things about the radio business. One of these things was that you need to keep your ownership happy to ensure smooth sailing, and another was to always go out of the way to spot true talent and do what you could to make sure that talent was presented to your listeners. Sometimes he and I disagreed on what might be considered true talent, but when it came to a young female singer song-writer, oddly enough, from our own backyard, we knew early on that Taylor Swift was the real deal. I can’t attest to whether these practices are still in place in these modern times of Spotify and satellite radio, but back in my radio days, a big market station like ours in Philadelphia mattered. Record labels made their marketing efforts a priority with these major market stations, and in several cases, one or two extra “spins” of a new single in morning or afternoon drive time radio on our air-waves could give enough notoriety to a song to move it up a position or two in the charts.

I mention all of this because it was a very unique give and take between the radio stations and the record labels. They provided us with plenty of their artist’s cd’s and other merchandise to give away to our listeners in an effort to help keep their artists exposed and relevant, but they also made it a point to bring these new artists by the station whenever possible. Some we would enjoy lunch or dinner and pleasant conversation with, and other times, the label might bring lunch for the whole station and have the artist perform a conference room concert. My boss took this to another level, by offering a select few of the more talented artists a coveted spot performing live on the air during our morning show. We had done several of these interactions with Taylor, and there was no doubt in our mind as to the caliber of entertainer she was, even in the earliest stages of her career. We knew she was a super-star in the making and so did her record label. They did not miss an opportunity to market her any and everywhere they could have. Taylor and her Mom were relatively frequent visitors to our radio station and it was really a treat to see her creative process at work and to hear her chat about it with us and our listeners through various interactions.

So how does this translate into my dinner with Taylor? What makes this dinner special enough to blog about from the point of view of someone who has had hundreds of such meals with various artists during my time with the station? Well, remember those two things that I mentioned my boss having taught me a few sentences ago? We’ve already covered the spotting talent part. The other part of that was keeping the station owners happy…

Every year, the company that owned the radio station would host a special get-together for their station managers and program directors from all over the country. They would pick a different one of their market citys to host the event each year, and in September of 2006, Philadelphia was their chosen city. This meant that the radio stations owned by this company, who were part of the Philadelphia market, would work together to plan to host a day of meetings at a local hotel culminating in a dinner party where awards were given to various company owned station recipients from across the country and the ownership could address their staff, stir up some corporate pride, etc. Apparently, it was also incumbent upon the host market to procure an artist to entertain the group in the course of the evening. After all, it was a group of radio station management, so getting a record label to fly in a new artist was rarely a problem, especially in the larger markets like Philadelphia. I can only assume that by now, you’ve put two and two together and deduced who was coming to dinner.

While it is true that, yes, my boss was able to secure Taylor Swift as the evening’s dinner entertainment that isn’t the part of the story that bears telling. I am sure there isn’t a radio station anywhere on earth with enough “juice” to have Taylor Swift come a play a few songs at their company dinner party today, back in 2006, a couple months into her first single and a month away from her first CD dropping, Taylor’s label was eager to get her in front of everyone they could and Taylor seemed to be a great sport about doing it. So was her Mom, who, as a good Mom should, accompanied young Taylor on these radio station visits, which I am sure must have gotten old real quick for both of them. It’s worth pointing out that many of these trips involved relatively late nights with dinners involving some key station staff, usually followed by very early visits to chat with the morning show personalities on-air, long before the sun came up the next day, but I guess this is one of the chores that make up the path to stardom.

So back to this radio corporate dinner. I don’t know just how many of the radio managers and programmers in the room that night initially appreciated or even recognized who the evening’s entertainment was by name alone. Some folks got autographs as the night progressed, others posed for photos and a few stopped by our table for some conversation. Assistant Program Directors such as myself don’t typically attend these events. I was lucky enough to be there because I was the guy who coordinated most things to do with artist interactions for the station and I was also the guy who could best wield the relatively newish concept of the digital camera we had for station events. With all of this in mind, just as is the case at weddings and other social events, there is a seating hierarchy. I don’t remember too much about who was seated at our table, but I was seated at a lesser significant table, with Taylor, her Mom, and a couple of session players that accompanied her. Taylor’s record label rep, Scott, and my boss were seated together at a table closer to the front with some more important people relatively speaking. I was kind of a social misfit in the radio game as a card-carrying introvert, so at most of these fancy dinner interactions, I enjoyed letting my boss, the label reps and the artists do most of the talking, and I could easily appear engaged while just listening to everything that went on around me. This evening didn’t afford me that type of opportunity, because at this table, I was the host and had to force myself to interact much more than I would normally do. The conversations were nothing I really recall, and probably more small-talk than I’ve ever made in my life, trying to engage with Taylor and her Mom throughout the course of a long night, surrounded by a bunch of radio people from all over the country, many of whom were in radio formats that, at this stage of who Taylor was, would have little or no knowledge of this young country singer and as such, no real interest in interacting with her. But that was about to change.

I can’t say for sure if Taylor had a notebook as you might expect someone who is always writing songs to always have at arm’s length, or if she used cocktail napkins or perhaps just her brain, but this is the part of this story that makes it worth telling, and remains one of the highlights of my decade in the country radio business. There were some announcements made before dinner by my boss’s boss’s bosses and some other company big-wigs, then dinner, then a seemingly endless barrage of cute little awards accompanied by cute little stories from various market and station managers about the year they’ve had. Everyone would laugh at these anecdotes and I would snap photos as various people received awards from the owners, and so the night went on building up to the eventual performance by our guest of honor, Taylor Swift.

Taylor warmed up with a couple of her soon to be popular songs, then proceeded to blow the minds of every person in the room in a way that I have never since seen duplicated. This continues to be a story that I tell whenever asked about my “wow” moments in radio. I mentioned Taylor’s note-taking earlier, because I have to assume that she was the only person paying attention to everything, and I do mean everything that all of these people spoke of throughout the entire evening. Without any warning or prompting, as her final song of the night, Taylor proceeded to sing a freshly written original new song. The terms “freshly written”, “new” and “original” almost seem inadequate to describe the song that Taylor sang. Somehow in the course of the evening, in the midst of all the stories and banter, Taylor had composed a coherently rhyming set of lyrics and a corresponding melody on her guitar that “LITERALLY”, and I use that term in its most literal sense, paid tribute to most of the people who were honored and spoken of throughout the course of the evening! I don’t know that there is a way to have hired a room full of writers to listen in on the evening’s conversation and have them come up with a viable song by the end of the evening that could have more accurately summed up the entirety of the night as Taylor was able to do. To this day, the thought of how amazing that song was and how the room erupted during and after the song, remains mind-boggling. It was a typical song, about 3 or 4 minutes in length, as best I can recall, but it tied together so many of the little snippets of conversation from the course of the evening so perfectly! The room was full of amazed people. Many who didn’t start the night knowing who Taylor Swift was would certainly leave that night with a glimpse of this entertainer that would stay with them for a long time to come.

I’m sure there are some people who thought that perhaps she was provided some intel on the night’s stories ahead of time or that there was some other gimmick to having pulled off this instant musical recap of the evening. But I was there, sitting with her, hanging out, shooting the breeze and the occasional photo, never realizing until the end of the night, that while holding her own with the miscellaneous conversations of the evening, her song writing genius of a brain was cranking out the lyrics and melody that she would then perform to culminate the night. Chances are, as quickly as the song was sung, it was forgotten by both her and a crowd of amazed radio folks. For Taylor, cranking out this amazing little ditty was as much a routine as it might be for your or I to knock out a quick email. This was long before the days where everyone carries both a still camera and video camera with them all the time. The digital camera I used at the time could probably have recorded the performance but that wasn’t as much of a reflex as it is today. Perhaps that’s regrettable in some ways, but then again, perhaps by not being focused on trying to record the event for posterity, I am able to close my eyes and go back to that night somewhat vividly. While not verbatim or even close, I still smile when I recall the night that young Taylor Swift amazed a room full of people who, by their chosen profession, had probably already witnessed some pretty cool things in their lives, but nothing that would ever come close witnessing the song that was imagined, written and performed, in an instance, in a truly once in a lifetime scenario by a young lady who would go on to much bigger and better things, like eventually breaking the internet!

As we chatted throughout the evening, Taylor seemed grateful for the opportunity to have performed that night and grateful for the pictures I snapped throughout the evening, which we were able to review during slower moments. I had offered to send her a CD with the photos from that night and I remember that she had written down an address where to send them, somewhere in Nashville, probably to her record label, but that’s a detail I’ve long since forgotten. I never followed up to see if she received the CD and thinking back now, I’m doubtful as I am sure that the address I would have sent that CD of photos to probably had a practice of quickly discarding CDs received in the mail from “random people”. Oh well — I am sure Taylor’s highlight reel of photos wouldn’t include this random night almost 20 years ago anyway.

My radio career ended in 2009 and I’ve reinvented myself a few times since then, and in a very different way, so has Taylor. She continues to amaze me with every move she makes. I hope that a few of the spins I was able to throw her way, as a result of truly enjoying her music, helped her star trajectory early on, and I am very proud to have known her in the earlier days of her career. The last time I saw her live was in 2009, and the crowd noise was overwhelming in a relatively small venue (Foxwoods in CT?). I can’t imagine that same crowd noise amplified to the degree of a stadium show today. I would hope that if she thinks back long and hard, she might remember something about that night sixteen years ago, but I am sure she has had many similar if not crazier experiences since then. This night was one of several great experiences I was able to share during Taylor’s early years. I hope Taylor is doing as well as the media portrays her to be. A talent as special as hers deserves the status she has attained and hopefully a proportional amount of happiness. I’d love to shake her hand one more time and share one or two of these memories with her face to face, but failing that, sharing this memory with whomever has hung in here long enough to have read this far will have to do. All this writing about that night and young Miss Swift has brought to mind many great memories from back then. Particularly, another memory about a hand-written note she once sent me because she had to bail on a lunch we had scheduled. Maybe I will postpone my Productivity Pinches one more time and share the (briefer) story of the most unique piece of mail I have ever received, from none other than, of course, Taylor Swift!

A Pinch of Productivity #5

Moving from House to House with Evernote

Preface — this one is going to be a little longer that the typical pinch of productivity, as for a lot of people, this topic might be their first major leap into a project management role, whether they know it or not, and whether they are ready or not.

As previously mentioned, my wife and I recently helped her parents move from a larger home further away into a smaller place that is closer to their children and grandchildren. thus the reason for no Pinch of Productivity last month, as there was a lot of moving going on.

Physically, I’m not as much much of a help as I might have been 20 years ago, so I try to contribute wherever possible especially when it comes to ways to work smarter not harder.

A lot of this involved using Evernote as the proverbial extra brain. [I don’t use second brain here because I figure that, at some point, someone will trademark that.] Some of what is explained here was used in practice to make the move go better, and other items were revelations that would have made for a smarter move, but if you are able to combine both, I would hope it would make for as optimal a move as is possible, if there is such a thing.

One of the things we looked back on and realized a tad too late, was that a central repository for the many contacts you will make along the way is a great starting point. A single note with these contacts, shared amongst everyone involved is the first of many invaluable digital notes.

When the notion of moving first came up, initial preparations started with getting the old house in shape before listing it for sale. Whatever couldn’t be handled internally was outsourced to various handy-persons and tradesman derived from friend and neighbor recommendations, research, etc. Whatever the sources, keeping those discoveries in a well tagged notebook enabled my in-laws to track who was handling what, and gave my wife and I the ability, from an hour away, to help with a follow-up call or a scheduling call without the constant need to relay information back and forth. This resource started with the fixer-up phase of this grand project, and continued through a laundry list of resources to include:

- The fixer upper folks already mentioned for the “old house”
- Real Estate professionals to start the listing process
- The myriad of inspectors and others who had to check the house out to certify is as saleable
- Resources to find and or purchase empty boxes and other moving supplies
- Resources to donate items not being moved
- Info on various movers and storage facilities
- Realtors for the “new house”
- Utility contacts for both houses
- Info on the new neighborhood
- Important dates (a calendar is great, but a historical view of these dates in one list is an interesting way to look back on the whole process.)
- The finite points of the move — like as relevant a list as possible of which items are going into which boxes. This might seem a little excessive and is a choice, but having ready access to what is where several months later has returned a positive yield on the extra time invested on this aspect of the move.

For some items, a broad term for box K1 might be “Kitchen Stuff”, but the fact of the matter is, if this box is one of the first you pack, then 146 boxes (yes, that’s an actual number!), unless you’ve been committing this stuff to a memory palace or something, you will not have any clue what went into box K1. So, a reasonably detailed list of what is going into each box might enhance your sanity levels 4 months into the process, when you’re starting to settle into the new place and are now in need of your corkscrew or the mixer you’d like to find for those first mashed potatoes in the new house. Rummaging through 18 boxes labels “Kitchen Stuff” is just not the way to go. On the other hand, being able to search in Evernote or your chosen note indexing app, and quickly learn which box or boxes you need to look in, can make for a slightly less stressful evening of meal prep. And while I agree that the overall goal is to get everything unpacked, having the ability to find things as you need them leads to two things. One, the speed to quickly locate those items, and two, in the case of downsizing from a large three-story home to a smaller, one story home with limited storage and a garage full of boxes, a quick way to get a feel for which items you truly need on a day to day basis, and those that remain boxed after a bit of this find-and-use process, might be less needed than they once were, and possibly better left in their boxes, bound for a donation center of some kind to become someone else’s useful clutter.

Speaking of packing, and this is more of a practical note than an electronic note — items like hand tools, tape of every type, utility knives, cleaning supplies, trash bags and anything you might need to enjoy a week’s worth of pizza type meals, should be in a box of essentials that are the last thing you pack up in the old house, and the first thing you carry into the new house.

Other things to consider for this essential category might be all of your extension cords and other wires as you disconnect them from your devices in the old house. There is a strong possibility that they might wind up in similar spots in your new home, but the way that these gadgets get hooked back up may require a new combination of power strips, extension cords and wires compared to how they were previously connected, such that, keeping the wires used with “gadget A” boxed up with “gadget A” might not be helpful when reconnecting as opposed to going to the electric stuff box and grabbing the power strip and extension cord you now need for the slightly different new configuration.

A side note to this side note — if you are hiring movers to come and grab all of your boxes to get them from old to new, or in this case, old to storage to new, just know that these pros are very fast and very efficient. While in many ways this is a good thing, just know that as much as you think you will be able to successfully direct their movements in a way that best suits you, if these pros see a box, they are trained to grab that box and stow that box in their truck, and to pack all of these boxes away quickly, tightly and efficiently. I mention this because a box of essential items as described above, that we thought was marked as such, and set out of the way, so we could take it ourselves, instead of the movers grabbing it — well, suffice it to say that in their swiftness, that box was quickly swept up, packed up and disappeared into the myriad of boxes that filled up their truck. TL;DR — items that you want to keep with you and not have moved by the movers, really need to be put in your car or in some other way, completely separate and perhaps even inaccessible to the movers. This isn’t a dig at the movers, as they were faster and more efficient than we could have ever imagined. Like I said, if it looks like something they should be moving, it is getting moved, so make sure you secure your essentials before they get there, because once they start, they are like a whirl-wind as they sweep through every room and make everything disappear.

So we’ve covered a lot of moving essentials here and I’m pleased to say we’re more than half way through, so onto the new house…

We were fortunate to actually meet up with several contractors in the new house to get quotes on some renovations, before the old owner moved out. She was very accommodating of such visits and also very accommodating in doing a walk-through with me. We went from room to room and she would identify what various switches did, which switches had those little hidden dimmer tabs next to them, and when we found an odd switch in a closet, or otherwise out of the way, she was able to advise me of things that could have taken us months to figure out. There was one switch, for example, tucked away in a coat closet, that actually controlled the motion sensor lights outside of the front door. Neither she nor I could explain why this switch was where it was, but as a result of this walk-through, that mystery was solved before it became a mystery. This walk-around was made much simpler by the use of a voice-note in Evernote where I just walked and talked. My wife took pictures of the locations of a few of these odd switches as well, so a month or two later, we could re-visit these and not try to rely on our memory.

If you’re the buyer and not going to have that unique benefit of a walk-through with the current owner, try to take notice of such oddities and perhaps get those questions answered realtor to realtor. If you’re the seller and are aware of a few oddities like this and want some good karma, leave some notes about such things to help the new occupants find their way!

Contractors / Projects / Details — oh my… So obviously, the best time to have a house painted or any other similar improvements, is when it’s empty, so we coordinated a bunch of these projects, again primarily with the shared contacts notes mentioned above, so that anyone involved had all of the contact info for all of the players.

In addition to the contact info, something that might be useful at some point in the future, would be details like the paint colors and codes that were used in each of the rooms. Having hired a painting crew to handle this, our being able to print out the Evernote table that listed each room with the corresponding paint colors and codes made their job a bit easier and they appreciated it. [Don’t forget this other tip about what to do before the painters get started!] But also, if at some point, we need to order more paint, or twenty years from now, leave a list of the paint colors for a new buyer, details like this, once stored in Evernote, are in a safe place for years to come, and can also be printed out and added to a paper filled binder as a backup if you have someone not as comfortable with the digital aspects of things. The same can be said for room measurements, window measurements, door widths (will a delivery fit through the front door?), appliance model numbers, some info on the garage door opener, etc. Making note of this type of information is helpful in a multitude of ways. Knowing the model of the refrigerator helped me locate a filter for the water/ice dispenser while in a store. The info on the garage door opener helped me search for an owner’s manual to learn some of the fancier tricks it could do with the home WIFI setup. I’m not saying you should go room to room and gather this info on day one, but as you and your phone are learning more about your new home, taking a few seconds to jot down (or faster yet, a quick voice memo or photo note) with these details, might make for a more productive trip to the hardware store.

It is true that information is power, and having this information in a shared resource accessible by all of the parties involved is not only super powerful, but super portable as well. And with the simplicity of sharing info in Evernote, I am pleased to say that even sharing the info with my less than tech-savvy In-Laws has not been as painful a task as one might imagine. Setting them up with free basic accounts has afforded them the ability to access all of this shared information about their new home and they’ve even taken to storing some other information in their Evernote accounts as well, so I consider that an added bonus, and it has led to fewer sticky notes on the refrigerator in their new home!

They are moved in and settling in. They still have a garage full of boxes, but they gauge their progress one day at a time, and one box at a time, and each time we visit the new house, more and more of the garage is visible, and they are able to proudly exclaim about the progress they are making each day. And as a result of the information we’ve gathered in the notebook simply titled with their new address, when a question arises about something, their is less guess work involved, because a lot of the information we might need to answer that question is at our disposal.

Hopefully, a little of what I’ve learned from this process can make your next move a little smoother. Well, this information and a lot of patience, because that is the true key to surviving the moving process!

~@RoyL_EcE

#EvernoteExpert #EvernoteTips

This Pinch is more of a live and learn kinda thing, but pseudo-productivity related given the amount of time I could have saved…

I just helped my In-Laws move from one house to another, and with our living closer to the new house, my wife and I helped out by meeting with a lot of contractors to get estimates on various things to be done to the house prior to them moving in.

When we worked out the details on getting the place painted, we were locked and loaded, and when I visited the house following a week of painting, I had a revelation that, had it occurred to me sooner, would have saved a lot of double work on the back-side of the painting (by us).

The simplest little over-looked detail in what the painters had to work around anyway — switch and outlet covers. The painters had to take off every old outlet and switch cover to paint the walls of the house. When reviewing the terrific job they did, the one thing that really stood out were the now grungy old switch and outlet covers. When going through to count them up, this 1800 square foot, 2 bedroom house had about 40 outlet and switch covers of various sizes and configurations.

A trip to the big orange box store revealed that, when bought in bulk, these new covers start out at around $0.60 each. Had I thought of this a week sooner, instead of the painters putting back old covers, they could have simply replaced them with shiny new covers that I could have easily provided.

As a non-expert in this matter, I can honestly say that, as my wife and I go around the new house, replacing 40+ old outlet covers that were recently re-applied to freshly painted surfaces, pre-planning with a focus on the minute details would have been time well spent.

TL;DR — If you are going to paint your house, buy new switch and outlet covers rather than putting the old ones back up. You’ll be glad that you did! And in applying this to other projects, keep an eye out for the sub-projects that lie at or beneath the surface, which might be better as forethoughts rather than afterthoughts.

’Til next time.

~Roy

Here is another Pinch of Productivity that might put me in the minority and possibly even in the productivity doghouse, if such a place exists, among some purists. As someone who has struggled with the quest for the ultimate to-do / reminder system, I started out paper-based — both plain and fancy, transitioned into plain and fancy text based systems back in the DOS days. I once wrote a to-do program in Dbase, I’ve tried the little index cards that came early on with Windows, “remembered the milk”, blah, blah, blah straight up until the recent launch of tasks and recurring tasks in Evernote…

Some of my handful of readers are already saying — oh here we go, another post singing the praises of Evernote — enough already — you love Evernote! While it is true that, yes, I do love Evernote for a lot of reasons, having given them a fair shot over the past few months as a potential new home for my to-do list, I can honestly say that this will NOT be another Evernote love story.

My goto task management system always seems to revert back to my good old (Outlook at the moment) email inbox <insert ominous music and gasps here>. My main reason for this is perhaps best described as habit based. I have benefited from the concept of killing new email notifications. I am not constantly distracted by stopping what I am doing to check what the newest emails are all about, but at the same time, despite the advice of many productivity gurus about only checking email a few times each day, when I am done with the task I am working on currently, or whenever there is a natural break in the action, I do check in on my inbox. I tried listing my tasks in tons of places like Evernote most recently, but I can always rely on my habitual glances at my inbox, so it is there that makes the most sense for me to house my most important tasks / to-dos, etc.

As I look at my desktop setup, Monitor 1 has an essentially blank looking screen where my currently empty inbox sits, waiting for the next tasks to make their way into my realm. Monitor two is two Directory Opus windows, all set to handle the files I might need to access, and monitor three has my Evernote home screen and a notepad++ window open, where I am composing this story. (I will talk about Directory Opus and Notepad++ in a future Pinch.)

I have taken to using Evernote to list a few “someday” tasks, like the idea for this story. When I got started this morning on my inbox, and zeroed it out of all the items that came in overnight, I knew I had a moment of tranquility with nothing else pressing, so I popped over to the “someday task list” in Evernote to see what was pending but not pressing, and chose to check off this story idea — my Inbox Zero reminder system.

So typically an email comes in with an item I need to act upon. In true GTD fashion, I decide if it’s something that can be handled immediately, whether it be something that gets forwarded on because it needs someone else’s action or endorsement, or is it something I can process on the spot, and be done with. In trying to maintain the O.H.I.O. Goal — only handle it once, I try to just deal with most things. The only fly in that ointment is when I have to depend on someone else for next steps. So if I can’t just deal with something, and it needs to be passed along to someone else, but eventually due back to me, here is where my secret ingredient comes in to help keep my inbox at zero.

When forwarding the email to a boss or co-worker or whomever, if it is something that I know I need to revisit in a week or a couple of days, I bcc a copy of the email to my little friend — www.followupthen.com. With little muss or fuss, blind-copying 3days@fut.io, 1week@fut.io, 3pm@fut.io or even 1year@fut.io will cause the recipient to receive the email, but it will also send me back a copy of the email in the timeframe or at the date and time which I specified in the bcc email unbeknownst to the other recipient. There is even some more technically advanced stuff that the service can do where it detects a response and kills the reminder email, but I’ve not ventured that far into this wonderful service. Anyway, having passed the email onto the next person on the accountability chain, and set myself a reminder to “circle back” when appropriate, I move the email out of my inbox and more importantly, out of my brain, and onto the next task I go.

When that next person performs their actions, I can cancel the reminder via the fut.io website interface, if I am so inclined, or just kill it when the email reminder comes in, knowing that it has already been handled. There are also ways to cause the reminders to persistently come in every day until something is marked completed, and there is even a way to do it so that both I and the recipient are bugged with the same reminders until the task is marked as completed. I consider this the nuclear option and reserve it for the rarest of instances.

Followupthen.com is a free service for their basic functions, just like Evernote. And just like Evernote, both services offer paid upgrades as you explore some of the more advanced services they offer. None of these links are affiliate links so I am not saying any of this in an attempt to get micro-rich one or two clicks at a time. I am instead suggesting that these — free to try — services are handy little items in my quest to get as much done as possible, in the least amount of time, while not clogging up too much brain space, and might be worth a moment of your time to check out.

This inbox mentality also applies to daily reminders and things that pop into my brain in the middle of the night. As far as daily reminders go, for example, I need to take a pill a couple times a day, but when I am at work, and don’t have my wife helping me to remember, I am quite terrible at taking those pills. So an email to weekdays815am@fut.io and another at weekdays215pm@fut.io result in an email every weekday, at those times, simply reminding me to take that pill. I make it a policy to take the pill before deleting the email. If I am distracted at the time the email comes in, once I get back to my desk, or are otherwise not distracted, the email is just sitting there, waiting to remind me to take the pill when I see it. If it gets to be too late to take that dose (shame on me), I just delete the email and move on to the next (task or pill). As far as ideas in the middle of the night, I can simply send myself an email so it is waiting for me in the morning, or, by using followupthen, I can be more specific about when I receive the note so I get it when I need to see it.

The last thing I will say about the simplicity and beauty of Followupthen.com is that, to get started, there is nothing to set up. The email addresses that I have listed here are not unique to my account or anything like that. The service simply responds to the email address from which the messages are sent, so if you want to see a reminder email an hour from now, having never used the service before, just send an email to 1hour@fut.io (fut.io is their abbreviated domain — you can also use @followupthen.com if you like typing the extra characters) and if it is your first time using the service, I believe you will get some type of welcome email, but more importantly, with no extra effort or sign-ups, etc., you will get that reminder email in a hour. Do the action you’ve reminded yourself to do, delete the email, maybe reflect on how awesome this Pinch of Productivity was and go on about your day.

I hope this Pinch of Productivity is helpful.

’Til next time.

~Roy

Add this to the recent integration with a very popular calendar service (one for now, but we’re told that there are more on the way) and the advances in the customization of the Evernote Homescreen with widgets, and I hope you might agree, that Evernote has taken several huge steps towards being a centralized app from which a very productive work session can be completed.

As an Evernote enthusiast, I am thrilled to now be able to show off this new feature to the world. But part of the reason for writing this particular Pinch of Productivity is that, at least in my opinion, setting up recurring tasks in Evernote is not as straight-forward as some other features within the program, so I thought a quick walk-through of the basic steps to set up a recurring task might be a good way to help spread the word.

There are many ways to take this further and tweak the settings to take full advantage of this awesome functionality, but here, we will just set up a basic recurring task to point out where to go within Evernote to make this happen. I fully encourage everyone to get used to this process then start clicking around to explore all the ways to take this wonderful new feature to the next level.

So let’s create Recurring Task Number One…

These steps were completed on a Windows machine, using a beta version of the software. It is possible that the production version might vary slightly, but I am confident that the core steps will remain the same and I will certainly revise these steps as needed if there are major differences in the production release.

From the Evernote Home Screen:

Step one:

• File Menu — select ADD TASK -or-
• From the Big Green NEW Button, select Task-or-
• Keyboard Shortcut [Alt] + [t]

Then:

• Give the task a name (and preferably an action word — “Buy Ketchup” is more meaningful than “Ketchup”)
• Click on “Set a Due Date”
  - In the box that comes up, you will have the ability to choose a specific date, or make use of some quick choices:
  - Today
  - Tomorrow
  - Next Monday
  - In a Week

You can also choose a time for the task and even set a different time zone if needed.

So far, these are the same steps as setting up a single occurrence of a task — now we get into the recurrent part of things. There is no check-box to look for to make it recurrent. Instead, below the “In a Week” button, you will see a little bit of text that says “Does Not Repeat”, which indicates the default state of the task, as non-repeating, but these words are also where you click to make the magic happen, so let’s click on “Does not Repeat” and enter the world of recurring tasks…

The box that pops up has a list of standard choices including “Does not repeat”, Daily, Every Weekday… down to Annually and then you’re given the option to choose a custom repeating pattern. There is an artform to this customization that will make for another pinch of productivity sometime in the future.

Once you’ve defined your recurrence pattern and clicked DONE, you’re taken back out to the new task screen. The final important step here is to set reminders. Just like your choice of note apps, and how you order your cheesesteak (have I mentioned I’m a Philly Guy?), here is where you decide how frequently you wish to be reminded about the task. I like to (need to) be bugged about a task frequently. I have found that the most useful reminders about meetings on my calendar are those that occur 5 minutes prior, one minute prior and at the actual start time of a meeting, so as to keep me on target. So my preference is to load up the reminders. Obviously, you are welcome to have as many or as as few reminders as you see fit.

Here is a good place to note that, within the settings window, you can set up your default reminder settings. This will cause those reminders to be created for every task, although you can always alter these settings globally or on a per-task basis as your preferences and needs dictate. The default settings are accessed by clicking the gear wheel next to your account name in the upper left corner of the screen, below the file menu.

Settings → Tasks → Default Task Reminders → Here you can choose up to 5 reminders that accompany every new task.

Back to the new task window, with the task, recurrence and reminders all set, you can finish up with any flags and assignments you wish to add and you can choose to leave this task in the default location (The “Things to Do” Note) or move it to any other note in your account. When you’re all set, click create — and there you have it — a shiny new recurring task!

The last thing I will mention that I have found helps me get the most out of these new tasks is their presence on my Evernote Homescreen. My homescreen setup consists of a large calendar widget across the top, followed by a pinned note that I refer to almost daily, a scratch pad to quickly capture any new thoughts on the fly, and of course, the “My Tasks” widget, all making up the second row of homepage widgets. With these widgets on my homescreen and the main navigation window along the left side of the screen, my external brain command screen is complete and I am all set to be productive in countless ways.

Many thanks to Evernote for adding this awesome new feature. This is another thing that used to require another application to work in tandem, but can now be handled from within this single wonderful application.

As always, your mileage may vary and your choice of productivity application is just that, your choice. Obviously, I like Evernote but fully acknowledge that their are plenty of other choices out there that work well for others. I hope this pinch of productivity is of use to those Evernoters out there who are new to recurring tasks.

Thanks for stopping by.

~Roy
Evernote Certified Expert
Seeker of all things Productive

#EvernoteExpert

#EvernoteTips

Last month, in Part 0, I introduced myself, so if you’re interested in that, check it out here. Now onto my first actual Pinch of Productivity!

Disclaimer — Evernote is my choice to house my second brain. I fully realize there are many choices out there, and if yours is not Evernote, than perhaps this tip won’t be for you, but please come back, as there will be content specific to Evernote, but also, plenty of non-denominational pinches of productivity as well, and no talk in any direction about which note taking app is best, as they each have their strengths and weaknesses and there is room in this world for all note-takers, no matter where those notes wind up, as long as they are winding up somewhere!

For those of us who have chosen Evernote as their Second Brain home, there are tons of little gems that lead to “oh” moments, whether you stumble on them by accident, or read about them somewhere like here, the moment you try one, and it works, you’re inclined to say “oh!”.

So in this inaugural Pinch of Productivity, I touch on a few hidden gems that can be referred to as Evernote Shorthand. Some of these might be comparable to markdown or other tech language typing, and these are all discoverable in the documentation of Evernote, but I thought it might be nice to gather some of these up in one space in the hopes of creating a few Evernote Oh! moments.

All of these are followed by a space, enter or tab after them to activate:

[] = Creates a Checkbox

[x] = Checked Checkbox

# = Large Header

## = Medium Header

### = Small Header

1. = Start a numbered list

1) = Start a numbered list

* = Start a bulleted list (asterisk)

- = Start a bulleted list (dash)

+ = Start a bulleted list (plus sign)

— — = (Three Dashes) Adds a divider line

` = The apostrophe like character on the tilde key — when used to enclose some text causes the text to appear as a code block. (used in `pairs`)

[][]X2 = creates a 2x2 table — brackets represent number of columns, number is the number of rows — I believe it must be a lower case x — [][][]x4 yields a 3 column by 4 row blank table. *This does not seem to work for creating a single cell table (which is a shame because they make great colored section headers). It can be a single row, but a minimum of two columns at the present time. You then need to delete a column if you’re going for the 1x1 table.

colon telephone colon — using actual colons and no spaces between the colons and the word — causes the icon of the word to appear if said icon available like the telephone on the next line:

☎️

Some of these take a little practice and can be frustrating at first, but once you’ve seen them in use, they are some wonderful shortcuts, especially if used in concert with an AutoHotKey shortcut or a StreamDeck button if used frequently.

Not sure if these work in all versions of EverNote. I just tried them all on in a note on the Windows version to make sure they still work, and those that I listed did work. Some of these might even work in other applications but this is about their use in Evernote.

As a tease of at least a couple of future pinches, and to try and hold myself accountable, I hope to go into a little detail on an exciting new feature coming to Evernote and also some talk of creating keyboard shortcuts, some for within Evernote, and others for more generic use.

Happy shortcutting!

~Roy
Evernote Certified Expert
Seeker of all things Productive

#EvernoteExpert

#EvernoteTips

I sat through the classes and even learned a thing or two about the program that I didn’t know before. I took each of the exams and passed, and here I am, a Certified Evernote Expert. There are a lot of experts in this small group who seem to make some income from consulting on Evernote, but my seeking this certification was purely out of a true fondness for Evernote.

Within the program there are monthly continuing education online meetings and other online get-togethers where we gather and obviously discuss Evernote, but we also digress onto other topics, typically involving productivity on one level or another, given that a common bond amongst Evernote Certified Experts (ECEs) would be a passion for productivity. As an introvert, my intention in logging into these meetings was to lurk and learn. I was happy to be in an online room with some folks who really know Evernote inside and out, and like to get together to possibly share some of that knowledge and learn a thing or two along the way. In a recent session, I was compelled to break my silence when, much to my surprise, I had a tip or two to add to the discussions and several of my fellow experts seemed to take notice and appreciate the insights I was able to share. One of these was about some interesting tidbits of Evernote knowledge that I mistakenly assumed was more commonly known than it actually was, and another was about some external software and a piece of hardware that have changed my life in my quest for ultimate productivity.

These comments made in these online meetings led to some posts in the expert message boards, and those posts led to my Evernote Staff Liaison to suggest that I create a blog of some sort to share these tips with the world. I have read some great posts on various aspects of productivity here on Medium, and when I searched for “best blog platforms”, Medium came up on several lists, so it seemed like a good place to start.

So here we are, with the introductory post of the Pinch of Productivity Blog. As I discover things that enable me to shave a minute or two off of my daily workload, whether in Evernote or outside of it, I will jot down some of those thoughts here in the hopes of enabling some other folks to be a little more productive along the way.

That’s enough for now. I suppose in the next post I will introduce myself aside from being an ECE and beyond that, let the pinches of productivity roll. Obviously a good amount of these tips will involve the use of Evernote, so if you haven’t experienced it yet, their free accounts offer tons of potential and are a great place to get started, so, if for some reason, you’ve read this far, and remain curious, head on over to Evernote’s site and get started with the best way I’ve found to (try to) remember everything!

(The links to Evernote’s site are direct links — not affiliate links or anything like that. It’s a wonderful free program. There are paid plans available and plenty of people who prefer other similar programs. This is just my thoughts on Evernote. Do with them what you will, and have a great day!)

#EvernoteExpert #EvernoteTips

@RoyL_EcE