Episode 5 - Goals, Letters

Podcast: Productivity Alchemy

File Name: PA-Episode5

File Length: 00:53:38

Transcription by Keffy

Kevin:                          [00:00:00] Hi folks! So, this podcast may not contain explicit content but we do use adult language and are occasionally drinking adult beverage, so parental guidance suggested. Maybe like a PG-13 kind of thing. And on that, welcome to Productivity Alchemy episode 5. So …

Ursula:                         [00:00:20] Woo!

Kevin:                          [00:00:20] Episode five, yeah. And before we check in with our wombat test subject and we talk about goals a little bit this week I wanted to say that we’re back from Anthrocon—

Ursula:                        [00:00:28] We are.

Kevin:                          [00:00:31] And it was absolutely brilliant. Now, I know you didn’t keep up with your planner much because you were busy working.

Ursula:                        [00:00:37] Yes.

Kevin:                          [00:00:38] Before we left, we get our schedules on this giant spreadsheet. It’s a huge thing and it contains everybody who’s going to be working security, all of their positions for the entire weekend, and it’s a real pain to read even online. So, I took some time and I printed out the schedule in a way that I could, on the planner, lay flat and see just like a 12 hour shift, with like the entire crew at a time. This was really helpful. Instead of having to scroll through and figure out, okay, where’s Saturday PM, and where am I on this because I know I’m line 37, and then who are the people working with me… And there are 70-some lines on this thing.

Ursula:                        [00:01:20] He also printed out one for me that was just Ursula’s Anthrocon schedule. Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday, and Monday, which was just the times I was working and the position.

Kevin:                          [00:01:29] Yeah, and I had one of those for me, too, and that really helped.

Ursula:                        [00:01:33] That helped a lot.

Kevin:                          [00:01:33] So that it was sort of cemented in my mind just preparing the document when I was going to be one and when I was going to be able to sleep. And, that was really useful.

Ursula:                        [00:01:43] And I had no idea when I’d be on it at any given time so I could just pop open the planner and look at it and that was actually extremely helpful.

Kevin:                          [00:01:50] And, now that Anthrocon’s over, I’ve removed those pages from my planner.

Ursula:                        [00:01:53] Uh, there it goes.

Kevin:                          [00:01:54] Because I don’t need them anymore—yeah, exactly. Because they took up quite a bit of space, and I’m probably going to do this again next year, because it was really easy, and maybe I’ll print up a couple copies for the crew so that—on 8.5 x 11 so that they can read them as well. Because it was—I had people grabbing my planner to look at it. So, I think that was pretty useful. And, so that was—that was the extent. Now, it’s the beginning of the month, which means it’s time for me to sit down in my planner and go over what my goals for the month are, what I plan to get done this month. I’m a little late, but we were at Anthrocon…

Ursula:                        [00:02:31] Yep.

Kevin:                          [00:02:31] And were kind of unconscious for the—like, day we were home. So, I’m a little late behind that, but that’s okay because I’ve got all month, and as long as I get it done beginning of the month I can wrap my head around what I’m doing.

[00:02:48] Now you, my wombat test subject, were saying, you had some thoughts after last week’s show about goals and why goal-planning seemed very foreign to you.

Ursula:                        [00:02:59] I… okay, first of all, bear with me, because I’m going to try to say this in a way that doesn’t come off like, “You are a slave to linear thought and I am a free spirit because that’s not what I’m…”

Kevin:                          [00:03:10] That’s absolutely not what you’re after, yeah.

Ursula:                        [00:03:12] No, but I don’t really… my career, life, etc, has not in any way proceeded according to linear planning.

Kevin:                          [00:03:27] That’s true.

Ursula:                        [00:03:29] I did not ever, at any point say, I—okay, I guess I was—you know going to college and graduating, but I’m not sure that counted as a goal so much as a, of course this is a thing you will do. And, like, a friend of mine dropped out of college and I was like, whoa, what? That’s a thing you can do? So… my writing career came about largely because my buddy Deb was like, do you want a literary agent, and I was like, “Yeah, sure, whatever.”

[00:03:59] Actually, what I said was, “What the hell?” and she’s never forgiven me for that. Okay, she never let me forget it. She thought about it as funny.

Kevin:                          [00:04:06] There you go.

Ursula:                        [00:04:06] My art career came about because a friend of mine was like, “You can sort of draw a little, we should do a comic,” and I was like, “Okay. Uh, I can’t draw that well, give me a year to teach myself how to draw,” because I assumed that was a thing you could do.

Kevin:                          [00:04:21] Yeah.

Ursula:                        [00:04:22] I was corrected. It is a thing you can do, I was perhaps a little over-optimistic about the time-frame.

Kevin:                          [00:04:27] That’s fair. That’s fair.

Ursula:                        [00:04:29] Um, so, that never happened. But then, later on, I was an illustrator because of…I had learned to draw. And started doing comics again sort of at random because I was just doodling and I put a word balloon on one and it was like, oh, hmm. I had been fighting with someone on the internet at the time.

Kevin:                          [00:04:48] This is a regular past-time for you.

Ursula:                        [00:04:49] Yes. And… I started writing children’s books because the agent that the friend got me was like, “Can you write a children’s book?” And I was like, “Yeah, that seems like a thing I can do.” I’m working on Cryptic Stitching, a game now, that I’m working on because my buddy Mur was like, you should check out this—

Kevin:                          [00:05:14] This cool thing.

Ursula:                        [00:05:14] This cool game thing to make little choose your own adventure games, and I did and it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed it, and then I sort of forgot about it and then another friend of mine more recently was like, oh my god, you’ve got to finish this. And I was like, oh, yeah, that’s a thing I can do. I do not… I do not set myself these goals of “I will do X. I will have a career in this. I have this long term plan of X.” I just kind of fall sideways into stuff and I have done it often enough now that I’m more or less just accept that as long as I’m working hard on things and following things that seem interesting, sooner or later it will be worthwhile.

Kevin:                          [00:06:00] Fair, fair, fair. Let’s see if I can find… there was a note about that. That’s not the one we wanted… I can’t find the. I can’t remember if it was an email or a comment on the podcast. We’ll get to this one in a second. But one of the listeners had written in and said that maybe something you could think about when you’re thinking about goals is more along Dog Skull, because we—

Ursula:                        [00:06:23] Dog Skull Patch is a piece of property that I own, seven acres down the road.

Kevin:                          [00:06:28] Right, and I wish I could—I wish I had the email in front of me, because I really want to give this person credit. But, you know, preparing—you want to hunt deer on this land. That is actually a goal.

Ursula:                        [00:06:40] That’s true.

Kevin:                          [00:06:41] And so, you have this goal of being able to hunt deer come deer season, which is November-ish?

Ursula:                        [00:06:46] Yeah, I really gotta take the gun safety class.

Kevin:                          [00:06:49] Yeah, exactly, well, there’s the gun safety class you need to take, there’s—you have to get the stand…

Ursula:                        [00:06:54] And the hunting license, yeah.

Kevin:                          [00:06:56] And the hunting license. And so, these are all steps into eventually picking up the phone one cold, cold morning and saying, Kevin, get out of bed, it’s time to come dress this deer.

Ursula:                        [00:07:05] Okay, that’s fair.

Kevin:                          [00:07:06] You know, and it…

Ursula:                        [00:07:08] Okay, I can see that, yeah.

Kevin:                          [00:07:10] Another one that may be similar is when it comes time to—like right now it isn’t a plan, but if you were going to put a greenhouse on it.

Ursula:                        [00:07:19] Which I would like to do, yes.

Kevin:                          [00:07:21] So your goal is to put a greenhouse on that property.

Ursula:                        [00:07:25] Yes.

Kevin:                          [00:07:25] You don’t have concrete plans around it, but it’s something you really want to do. And so, these are some goals that are actually applicable to you. Whereas my goals are…

Ursula:                        [00:07:36] Everybody seems to always think professional goals, and like, I have none. I am doing things I never expected to do and it’s kind of cool.

Kevin:                          [00:07:45] Well, one of my goals that I was putting down for this month, as I was starting to plan out my month and figure out what’s happening when, was to build up a buffer of these episodes because we’ve got a lot of travel coming up in August and—for Worldcon and for Bubonicon, and there’s a good chance that—I mean, they’re going to be tired, or it’s going to be very difficult to record while on the road, although one of the things I’ve put down as a—something I’d like to do this month is to schedule some interviews with people while we’re at Worldcon because that’s a great place because there are gonna be people from all over the world and I want to get so many different people’s takes on what’s going on.

[00:08:31] So, that’s where my goals are. Not just the professional of, I want to be a project manager, so I need to take project manager classes. I want to make this podcast as thrilling. Well, okay, maybe not thrilling, but as informative—

Ursula:                        [00:08:44] Thrills, chills, planners.

Kevin:                          [00:08:46] Exactly. But as informative as I can for the listeners. And that means getting more than just you know gurus and whatever. And I like having on people like, I’m not really organized and then we find out that secretly they are.

Ursula:                        [00:09:01] Or at least they have—they are more organized than they will claim.

Kevin:                          [00:09:05] Than they think they are, than they think they are.

Ursula:                        [00:09:05] Liz, for example.

Kevin:                          [00:09:05] Liz, for example. Thinking of that, we have some letters this week.

Ursula:                        [00:09:11] All right.

Kevin:                          [00:09:11] First up, I want to read this comment from Lydian, specifically—

Ursula:                        [00:09:17] Wait, before we start reading the emails—since we don’t have an interview, we’re doing email this time.

Kevin:                          [00:09:22] Yeah yeah yeah.

Ursula:                        [00:09:23] Was there something you’re going to do to me? Like, do I have to do something?

Kevin:                          [00:09:27] Well, you need to start thinking about your goals.

Ursula:                        [00:09:30] Frickin’ goals…

Kevin:                          [00:09:31] Well, you know… I’ve given you some suggestions, but you know, once you have that idea of having a goal and you write it down, then you can start working out the steps you need to reach the goal.

Ursula:                        [00:09:43] I… I suppose I need another planner sheet for that?

Kevin:                          [00:09:48] You can use a straight, plain piece of paper. You can use one of the…

Ursula:                        [00:09:51] Yeah, but I’ll lose the piece of paper.

Kevin:                          [00:09:53] Well, you could use the… okay, actually this thing already has a little “this month’s goal” spot in each of the—oh wait, you’ve already replaced them, haven’t you? So, it may be, yes, you need a page that looks like—here, on the June page here where it says “currently” or whatever. You want something for Goals. The one I have in the journal I use, here, let me bring up this page, so you can—

Ursula:                        [00:10:20] This is Volt Planner.

Kevin:                          [00:10:21] This is my Volt Planner, but yeah, it’s basically a page with a long checklist on it that says, “What am I going to make happen?”

Ursula:                        [00:10:28] June goals, yes.

Kevin:                          [00:10:28] Yeah, so, like, for June I had, “Start a new podcast,” hey guys. “Schedule the PM training” which I’ve had to push out again because life got in the way of being able to schedule it, and maintain my bill schedule because I got a little out of whack earlier this year on my finances.

Ursula:                        [00:10:48] Which reminds me. Did you ever pay that one bill that those people called when we were driving about?

Kevin:                          [00:10:51] Yes.

Ursula:                        [00:10:51] Okay.

Kevin:                          [00:10:51] Paid it today.

Ursula:                        [00:10:53] Excellent.

Kevin:                          [00:10:53] Because I made a note that I was gonna pay it today.

Ursula:                        [00:10:56] Woo.

Kevin:                          [00:10:58] So, those were my goals for June. July, I’m still working out, but it’s… I’ve got Build a Buffer, Schedule the Training like I’ve been meaning to do for too long, now. I’ve got a Work Summit coming up later this month, so there’s some planning that has to be done around that. Those are going to be my goals for July. Not all of them have a concrete plan. One of the things that does come up, though, in the Volt Planner, that I really like is, let me bring up that page. And, by the way, if you’re printing your own journal pages and using a disc bound notebook, get slightly heavier than standard printer paper.

Ursula:                        [00:11:35] Which reminds me, I have the cardstock. We can actually talk about this at some point when I have the stats in front of me, but I like the—I would go at least 40 pound and 60 pound’s even better, and you can just get that straight off the shelf in blocks of like cardstock, or HP’s heavy printer paper, yeah.

Kevin:                          [00:11:53] This is dirt-cheap Staples paper, so—

Ursula:                        [00:11:57] And it’s flimsy.

Kevin:                          [00:11:59] Yeah.

Ursula:                        [00:11:59] Whereas mine, is nice and stiff.

[00:12:02] [Sound of cardstock thwapping in the background.]

Kevin:                          [00:12:03] Okay, that’s … that… I see how firm that paper is, yes.

Ursula:                        [00:12:08] That got a little weird.

Kevin:                          [00:12:09] It did. Um, so, each month of the Volt Planner has a challenge page. In this case, the 31 day challenge for July, where you fill in for the next 31 days, I want to… And then, I want to make this… why you want to make…I want to make this happen because, and then my plan of action.

[00:12:28] So this is forcing me to sort out that PM.

Ursula:                        [00:12:31] Let me look at this thing. Sorry, you can’t see this, internet.

Kevin:                          [00:12:33] No, but you can see samples of it at InkandVolt.com. They are not paying me to say this. This is just—I really like their product and it’s what I’m using currently.

Ursula:                         [00:12:43] Oh God. There’s a thing at the bottom that says, “I fully intend to commit myself to this for the next 31 days” and then you sign. No, that’s bullshit. Cult. It’s a cult.

Kevin:                          [00:12:52] Stop. That is… that works for me. It may not work for you. You don’t have to put it on the bottom of the page. Okay?

Ursula:                        [00:12:58] Remember DARE?

Kevin:                          [00:13:01] I remember DARE.

Ursula:                        [00:13:01] DARE was a big anti-drug program in schools in the ‘80s and ‘90s in the US. This was part of the war on drugs. I don’t even remember what the hell it stood for. All I remember is my stoner friends saying it stood for “Drugs Are Really Expensive.”

Kevin:                          [00:13:25] Uh, yeah, I don’t remember what DARE was… stood for either, yeah.

Ursula:                        [00:13:29] Drug and something Resistance Education, I think. Anyway. They make you sign a little pledge. And, I’m in 6th grade, you know, and there’s this, “I pledge to remain drug-free” and I signed it because everyone in the class signed it, but as I was signing, I was thinking, “This is a load of bullshit” and this is—the fact I signed this piece of paper is not ever going to stop me from doing drugs if I plan to. And indeed later in life I would prove to be correct. Because I know myself, and I… my signature on something matters if it’s a legal contract. If it is a thing at the bottom going, “I fully intend to commit myself with a signature” I’m sorry, that makes my skin itch.

Kevin:                          [00:14:15] And that’s fine.

Ursula:                        [00:14:15] It’s okay if it works for you, I’m not judging you, I just…

Kevin:                          [00:14:19] So, yeah. And it helps because what I’m doing is psychologically, I think of it as a contract with myself. It’s not a contract with the planner, it’s a contract with myself that I am going to get this done.

Ursula:                        [00:14:30] And now we get into the “nobody tells me what to do, not even me” problem.

Kevin:                          [00:14:33] Exactly. So, for you, this may not be… this is not the best approach.

Ursula:                        [00:14:37] That would be the number one way to stop me from ever doing it.

Kevin:                          [00:14:41] Oh, I should write up a form that says, “I promise I will continue to snore every night for the rest of my life signed____” and get you to sign that. No, wait… yeah, okay.

Ursula:                        [00:14:53] Your puny attempts at reverse psychology would not fool the dog, let alone me.

Kevin:                          [00:15:01] It didn’t work on the kids, either, so there you go. But for me, it doesn’t force me into anything, but it sort of reinforces the idea that I am making a commitment to myself that I want to get something done this month.

Ursula:                        [00:15:19] And it’s awesome that it works for you and that you can commit to stuff. Commitment gives me hives.

Kevin:                          [00:15:26] Why have we been together almost ten years and why are you married to me?

Ursula:                        [00:15:30] Uh, it uh… because you weren’t clingy?

Kevin:                          [00:15:35] You proposed to me, even.

Ursula:                        [00:15:38] That’s probably why.

Kevin:                          [00:15:39] Yeah, okay, okay, yeah.

Ursula:                        [00:15:40] You could have just walked, and so I was like, oh, I better lock this one down. Uh.

Kevin:                          [00:15:48] So, all right.

Ursula:                        [00:15:49] Yeah, anyway.

Kevin:                          [00:15:50] So, uh…

Ursula:                        [00:15:51] Planners for people with aberrant psychology.

Kevin:                          [00:15:58] You know, uh…

Ursula:                        [00:15:58] And clearly it must work for a lot of people because they do this and people buy planners, and maybe, and people think it’s a good idea.

Kevin:                          [00:16:02] And that’s the thing. Is, this is how the Volt Planner uses this because this is how the founder actually kept herself on track. So this is basically, you know, the way you’re sort of designing your own planner? Best I can tell, the Volt Planner was what she was using herself and then she marketed. So, it’s a very similar thing.

Ursula:                        [00:16:24] But why doesn’t everybody just design their own planner?

Kevin:                          [00:16:28] Because not everybody wants to go through all the trial and error. I know several people who are like, oh my gosh, GTD is the thing for me, or no it isn’t. Bullet Journaling is insanely popular because it’s very easy and in it’s original, minimalist form, it’s easy, it’s very straightforward, and you can do it with almost any piece of paper.

Ursula:                        [00:16:56] Did we get any angry emails saying “Screw you, I’ll make my Bullet Journal pretty if I want to”?

Kevin:                          [00:17:00] We did not. But I have some Bullet Journal emails, too. I have a couple on that. As a matter of fact, our friend Jared Axelrod had posted specifically that after hearing the rants about it on the last show, they were inspired to go and restart their Bullet Journal.

Ursula:                        [00:17:20] Oh, yay!

Kevin:                          [00:17:20] So, I think that’s—that was great to hear.

Ursula:                        [00:17:24] So my goal for next week is to have goals.

Kevin:                          [00:17:27] Exactly.

Ursula:                        [00:17:30] All right, but none of my goals can be accomplished in a month. Nothing important…

Kevin:                          [00:17:34] And that’s…

Ursula:                        [00:17:34] Nothing that I would be like, “is a GOAL” is a thing I can do in a month. It’s—that’s like a to-do list item.

Kevin:                          [00:17:42] Yeah, but that’s fine, right. The idea of a goal is not to have something that you can just finish and check off your list. I mean, the goal should be something big and something you want to work towards.

Ursula:                        [00:17:57] I have never had a five year plan.

Kevin:                          [00:17:58] That’s fine.

Ursula:                        [00:17:58] I’ve never had a two year plan.

Kevin:                          [00:18:01] That’s fine.

Ursula:                        [00:18:03] I sort of know what I’m doing this fall.

Kevin:                          [00:18:06] You…

Ursula:                        [00:18:07] A little.

Kevin:                          [00:18:07] You maybe know what you’re doing next week if you’re lucky.

Ursula:                        [00:18:11] I know when my next deadline is.

Kevin:                          [00:18:13] The important one. But the idea here isn’t to have a goal, a set of goals with a concrete plan, with a step-by-step, this is what I have to do by this date to get it done. Goals can be much more loosey-goosey. It’s to get you thinking about—you want to get this thing done, you want to climb a mountain, you want to—we want to make Dog Skull something—

Ursula:                        [00:18:42] A native plant habitat and deer blammo range.

Kevin:                          [00:18:47] It’s—

Ursula:                        [00:18:47] Actually I increasingly think it might be awesome to be able to put up a tenant farmer on there, but I need to hook up power and water and maybe put up a yurt.

Kevin:                          [00:18:54] But the whole idea is these are not things that you can just write a quick checklist and then go done done done done. There are things on it that you can put down as a checklist, like getting the water hook up and getting the electrical hook up, once we have something to hook them up too.

Ursula:                        [00:19:10] You’re going to make me tear down that house.

Kevin:                          [00:19:12] Yes. I’m going to make you tear down the house. I’m not going to let you plant rose—what did you want to?

Ursula:                        [00:19:17] Climbing roses.

Kevin:                          [00:19:17] Climbing roses until it was completely covered because someone or something will be in there when it collapses covered in roses and then it’s—then there’s liability issues.

Ursula:                        [00:19:32] Anyway. Okay. All right, so, I have my marching orders. Have a goal. Make a goal.

Kevin:                          [00:19:39] One or two. You know.

Ursula:                        [00:19:43] Two goals. Jesus.

Kevin:                          [00:19:44] When you start thinking—what I’ve found was when I started thinking about goals, some were really hard and some it was just like, oh yeah, one, two, three, four, five, six. If I just were to sit down and go over the goals I want to accomplish, even if they’re like, bucket list, lifetime things, those flow a lot more easier than if—when I sit down for work, and they’re like, okay, what are the goals to accomplish this quarter. “I dunno…” Because there’s a higher expectation there, not, this is something I’d like to plan for and be able to do someday. This is something I have a very finite amount of time to get done and so what is something I can think of as reasonable in that time period. And, maybe next week, we can talk about smart goals which is a very specific measurable, actionable, I can never remember what the R is…

Ursula:                        [00:20:48] Really…

Kevin:                          [00:20:51] What’s that?

Ursula:                        [00:20:51] Really.

Kevin:                          [00:20:52] No. Um. Specific…

Ursula:                        [00:20:55] You’re right, that was terrible.

Kevin:                          [00:20:56] Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely. SMART goals. So, professionally, a SMART goal is a lot better than the “My goal is to write a novel, okay, what do I need to write a novel.” A SMART goal is much more focused on something that you can get done in a reasonable amount of time. That you can get, you know… and we can talk a lot about SMART goals.

Ursula:                        [00:21:27] We may have to, because like… I… as soon as you say goals, my brain is like, “Oh God, people are expecting me to know what I wanna do with my life and I’m 40, and I still don’t know what I want to do with my life. I just keep doing things and they seem to go well.” But, I mean…

Kevin:                          [00:21:45] And that’s fair.

Ursula:                        [00:21:46] Like… it would be cool to go to India some time.

Kevin:                          [00:21:53] And, you know… we’ve—we kind of did that with the it would be cool to go to Africa some time. It would be cool to go to Tibet some time, and we’ve already got, even though it’s not us driving it, that we’re still part of something that we’re gonna go to Tibet in a couple of years.

Ursula:                        [00:22:08] I yeah, because when we start getting into long-term goals, basically all I come down to is make the world a better place, do not die in a ditch outside of Walmart.

Kevin:                          [00:22:20] And one of those is significantly easier than the other.

Ursula:                        [00:22:22] Those are basically my life statement. Like, you said like an artist’s statement, it was like, oh well… what are they called? Action statements, or?

Kevin:                          [00:22:29] A personal mission statement, yes.

Ursula:                        [00:22:33] Okay, yeah. That’s don’t die in a ditch outside of Walmart, make world a better place.

Kevin:                          [00:22:39] The make world a better place is much more towards the mission statement whereas don’t die in a ditch at Walmart is more of a goal.

Ursula:                        [00:22:46] But… actionable. That is—that is one of my missions is to not die in the ditch at Walmart.

Kevin:                          [00:22:55] We’ll build all of this and begin tying it all together as we progress.

Ursula:                        [00:23:01] I’m gonna dig me a ditch on Dog Skull Patch…

Kevin:                          [00:23:03] Yes. Do you plan on dying in it?

Ursula:                        [00:23:06] Well, if I’m dying, that way I can die there and not outside of Walmart.

Kevin:                          [00:23:11] All right, we can work with that. Can we go to the letters now?

Ursula:                        [00:23:16] We should do—we should do a fancy segue and pause.

Kevin:                          [00:23:18] Um… so there was another—there’s a letter about that, too. We won’t do a fancy segue this week. Oh, well then… I’m getting hand gestures that say perhaps a fancy segue is necessary. So here is the fancy segue that should have music that we’ll discuss later.

[00:23:36] Welcome back, uh, someday we will have music there.

Ursula:                        [00:23:38] Yes.

Kevin:                          [00:23:40] And we had a letter actually asking for that, kind of. So, we’ll get to Lydian’s email in a minute. First, we’re gonna read this one from Jen W. that says, “I very much enjoy the podcast. My current system is some weird mutation of getting things done, Outlook tasks lists, and Habitica. It mostly works for my tech support programming day job.” Excellent. “And raising kids at home. Mostly. My job has a lot of OMG do this RIGHT NOW!!11!ONE!!! moments that make many systems throw up their hands and surrender.” Oh, tell me about it. I’m in IT, I understand this completely. It’s a very common problem in IT. Still, between worklists and GTDs lists, things get done. One suggestion for the podcast: could you put music or some kind of audio cue between the Wombat Test Subject,” that’s you, “interview and wrap-up sections. That’d be shiny. Seems like a natural place for a sponsor ad, too.”

Thanks. Thank you for writing in, Jen. So, yeah, that is—that is something—we were listing to podcasts while we were on the road, and that’s something I was noticing about the ones Ursula likes to listen to in particular. Other than the fact that their voices are really calm and make me want to go to sleep even though I’m fascinated by the subject.

Ursula:                        [00:25:02] This was, I believe Things You Missed in History Class.

Kevin:                          [00:25:08] That one and the…

Ursula:                        [00:25:09] Stuff You Should Know?

Kevin:                          [00:25:10] Stuff You Should Know, yeah. I mean, they’re great. They’re informative, but I don’t know what it is… maybe it was just…

Ursula:                        [00:25:17] When you on a long, long road trip, and you’re running on three hours of sleep, and you’re hung over…

Kevin:                          [00:25:22] Yeah, music to sing along with…

Ursula:                        [00:25:25] And very peaceful.

Kevin:                          [00:25:26] Music to sing along with is a lot better to keep you engaged than a podcast where it might be fascinating but they’re very calm about it.

Ursula:                        [00:25:33] I will say, what I like are quiz-show podcasts, because, like… then I am shouting answers at the radio and that keeps me very engaged.

Kevin:                          [00:25:40] Right, but one of the things they did really well was they had that little musical bit before they’d go and do an ad and the next segment. And so, I was listening to that and thinking, you know, that may be something we should do.

Ursula:                        [00:25:52] Yeah.

Kevin:                          [00:25:53] So, yeah, thank you…

Ursula:                        [00:25:53] You should do. This is all you.

Kevin:                          [00:25:55] I should do, yes. Thank you Jen. And, one thing I will recommend if you haven’t read it: if you’re in an IT position and you’re having to deal with that big interruptive thing that you get with support and programming, but you also have tasks to track, you might want to read Time Management for System Adminstrators from O’Reilly Press. It does a nice kind of overview of a hybridized Getting Things Done and ticket tracking system, made specifically for system administrators and programmers and it helped me out a lot when I was in a much more reactive environment that allowed for maybe some structured time of “this time of the day is not for tickets and that part is.” So, that’s that. Thank you for writing in.

[00:26:45] All right, so that was Jen. Next, now we’ll get to the other one that I’ve been teasing. Teasing at, now. So, Lydian wrote in to say, “I feel Liz’s ‘Oh God, I forgot something’ rant. I’m terrible about keeping up on my email. I finally got caught up on deleting stuff so I should switch to Inbox from Gmail. I was cleaning stuff out and found emails from Ebay of stuff I sold and freaked out for a second, because I couldn’t remember if I had shipped it or not.”

Ursula:                        [00:27:12] Oh, God. I… feel your pain intensely. That is part of the reason that… one of the things that I did for my own mental health actually was offload my print business to Topatoco, because just the, Oh God, I’ve sold a thing, oh God, it’s been two weeks, oh God, they they… oh God, I’m going to die.

Kevin:                          [00:27:32] One I thing will say is Inbox from Gmail, if you’re using your Inbox as your to-do list, Inbox for Gmail is really designed around that idea, because when you’re done with something, you just swipe it or you click it and it goes off your screen, and suddenly it’s not in here. So it kind of turns your email inbox into a great big to-do list. It also has a really nice feature where it will categorize things. So, if you’ve got things that are specifically promotions, specifically from social networks, it’ll group those into bunches and then low priority things. So, it’s a lot—with a little training into the system, it’s really used to say, okay, I am just going to mark everything from Facebook red, and done, I don’t have to worry about that.

Ursula:                        [00:28:16] And what specifically is this, again? Say it.

Kevin:                          [00:28:18] This is Inbox from Gmail. It is an add-on if you’re a Gmail user, you enable it as—against your Gmail account and it gives you this whole new interface, this whole new way to do mail. I use it on and off, because sometimes I find it works really well, and sometimes it just drives me insane. I will say it does not play nice with email clients that aren’t Inbox from Gmail. So, if you’re using it, you’re kind of committing to using Google’s apps, and it doesn’t like—I loaded up in Thunderbird and instead of seeing my nice categories and all of that, it’s just a long wall of messages and that drives me insane. So. But that’s me.

[00:29:05] Let’s see. Oh, here’s a good one. This is from Joe.

[00:29:10] “Kevin, and Ursula, I’ve never been a productivity kind of person. For example, I had to read Getting Things Done as a new hire,” oh, I’m so sorry, “at my first software QA job, and I had Ursula’s reaction. Don’t judge me, book. No one tells me what to do.”

Ursula:                        [00:29:24] Woo!

Kevin:                          [00:29:24] “I’m pretty sure I sold it to Half-Price. It wasn’t company property, they gave every new hire a free copy. As soon as I left and didn’t have to display it in my office anymore.” Okay, that’s fair.

Ursula:                        [00:29:33] I salute you.

Kevin:                          [00:29:36] “But, I do need a system. I’m absentminded and beyond a certain number of responsibilities, it’s impossible for me to keep all those metaphorical balls in the air. At my software QA jobs I always relied on whatever CMS my employer provided.” Content-management system. “At my current job though, my roles are too varied and have been proliferating for the last year, including a recent ‘promotion’.” That’s in air quotes. “To de facto project manager.” Oh, I feel your pain, Bub.

[00:30:03] “Despite excessive note-taking and a desk covered in post-its, I couldn’t keep up. Last week, envious of your apparent togetherness and having heard you mention it on the podcast, I broke down and tried Bullet Journaling.”

[00:30:17] This is like the perfect use case for it, right here.

Ursula:                        [00:30:20] Well, we’ll see if it works though.

Kevin:                          [00:30:22] “It only took me two days to decide it was exactly what I wanted.”

Ursula:                        [00:30:25] Yay!

Kevin:                          [00:30:25] “Unlike all of the Pinterest spreads you’ve mentioned with trepidation. Mine is simple. Just the basic layout and symbols, and only one color of ink. It’s perfect, though. It gives me a unified to-do list with plenty of space to write, unlike sticky notes, lets my TDL and my calendar interact without me having to use Outlook.” Uh, to-do list, by the way. “Without me having to use Outlook, which struck me as awful for that purpose.” Eeeh. “It makes it easy to move the to-do list items forward to the next day or the next month and doesn’t wedge me into a prebuilt system that then takes me a week to customize.”

Ursula:                        [00:31:00] I feel your pain there.

Kevin:                          [00:31:00] “It works so well, I got another notebook and started a personal Bullet Journal a few days later. Long story short, you’ve inspired me to get more organized.” Woo! “And I think Bullet Journal minimalism might work for you. Or not, your mileage may vary. Thanks for the show, all your shows actually.” You’re welcome. “I’m looking forward to more.”

[00:31:22] This is what I like about Bullet Journaling. Thank you, Joe. That’s awesome, and I’m glad we’re able to help. And this is what I like…

Ursula:                        [00:31:29] He’s gonna be squeeing about this for days.

Kevin:                          [00:31:32] Eh eh eh. This is what I like about pure Bullet Journaling. You go to the Bullet Journal website and it is barebones. It is very minimalistic, it is very straightforward. I love that about it. And it is something I want to try, because it might work for me. Right now, I’ve got sort of a hybrid thing going on. But, I’m really glad it’s working for you and thank you, Joe, for writing in. And thank you for listening. Thank you all for listening.

Ursula:                        [00:31:59] Someday, you’re gonna make me try Bullet Journaling, aren’t you?

Kevin:                          [00:32:01] Oh, yeah. But just the bare bones one.

Ursula:                        [00:32:05] Screw you, I’ll draw elaborate calligraphy days if I want to.

Kevin:                          [00:32:11] Okay. All right, this one is from Alisa.

“I have a question related to productivity that I hope Ursula might, maybe, be able to answer.”

Ursula:                        [00:32:21] Oh, Jesus, all right, let’s do it.

Kevin:                          [00:32:23] “My mom is an old-school professional artist. She’s a print maker, mainly solar etchings these days, and sometimes mezzotints, who desperately needs a new computer, but has been so burned by bad experiences that she’s refusing to get one because she doesn’t want to waste money on something that will be outdated and dysfunctional in a month.”

Ursula:                        [00:32:41] Ooh.

Kevin:                          [00:32:41] “I’m curious as to what Ursula uses for her computer and how often she replaces her computers or has to buy new software like Photoshop. I also wonder if she prints any of the stuff she sells at home, or outsources that part? My mom doesn’t do digital artwork but she uses Photoshop to make cards. People really love the cards and keep asking if they can buy packs of them not realizing that it takes 20 or 30 attempts with a printer to achieve one usable card.”

Ursula:                        [00:33:08] Yeaaah…

Kevin:                          [00:33:08] “If there exists a printer available to the average mortal capable of producing a clean image on cardstock without cutting off the image or smearing it with random lines or making part of the image weirdly and inexplicably green, I would love to hear about it. So, I want to get my mom a computer that would work as an office computer, allowing her to submit photos and documents to art shows. The ten-year-old Mac my high school buddy talked her into getting has never been able to send documents other people could open, even though she uses Office and Word, and run her Etsy shop, which would also be good for printing photos. Any ideas?”

Ursula:                        [00:33:39] Oh, we’re getting into hardcore tech here. First of all, I do in fact have a printer at home that I run prints with. It is currently an Epson PhotoStylus R3000 which of course has probably been discontinued five minutes after I bought it. I have the same problem with discontinuing with printers. As soon as I buy a printer, it becomes…

Kevin:                          [00:34:03] No, because the last two were R1900s. so you got two out of that one before they discontinued it.

Ursula:                        [00:34:08] It was 1900, and then I bought an R2000, I think, and then they…

Kevin:                          [00:34:12] Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah.

Ursula:                        [00:34:14] Uh, the ink is expensive and yes, I fight with it. The smartest thing I ever did was to outsource most of my print business to Topatoco. This is not necessarily an option for anyone who is not—they do comics specifically. They did me because I went to them on bended knee and said, “Help me” and they knew who I was.

[00:34:32] What you can do is find a print service. Honestly, not Cafepress…

Kevin:                          [00:34:42] Doesn’t Moo do some of that, now?

Ursula:                        [00:34:44] Moo… maybe it’s Cafepress.

Kevin:                          [00:34:47] No, it’s not Cafepress.

Ursula:                        [00:34:47] Who’s the one who does business cards and postcards and stuff?

Kevin:                          [00:34:51] Um, there’s… well there’s Moo, and then there’s… oh, what is the name of the other one. I used to get my business cards through them.

Ursula:                        [00:34:56] Yeah, I’ve got 15 million from them.

Kevin:                          [00:34:58] They were cheap.

Ursula:                        [00:34:58] They’re cheap and they have good printers. I get all my postcards printed from them and they’re just dirt cheap.

Kevin:                          [00:35:05] But this isn’t… it wasn’t Moo, you were using. It was somebody else.

Ursula:                        [00:35:09] No, it…

Kevin:                          [00:35:11] Let me look it up on my phone.

Ursula:                        [00:35:10] I’m trying to say Cafepress and that’s not right.

Kevin:                          [00:35:12] It’s not Cafepress.

Ursula:                        [00:35:16] And there’s always like you can get eleventy million, you know, discount codes and they sell door hangers and all kinds of personalized crap.

Kevin:                          [00:35:23] Because there was the thing where if you got their… Vistaprint.

Ursula:                        [00:35:26] Vistaprint, yes. Oh, Vistaprint, yes.

Kevin:                          [00:35:28] You get the like a ton of free business cards by letting them print, you know, “this is a Vistaprint card go to Vistaprint” to get your own.

Ursula:                        [00:35:37] Don’t do that.

Kevin:                          [00:35:37] Right, don’t do that. Pay the money.

Ursula:                        [00:35:39] But, they do perfectly good cards—postcards.

Kevin:                          [00:35:44] Oh, yeah.

Ursula:                        [00:35:44] I get my postcards printed there. They look great. They’re slick and I—a pack of 100 costs, I think $8, and then as soon as you hit order, they’re like, “You can double this for another $5,” and you’re like, “Yeah, of course I’ll do that,” and then you wind up, you know, because that’s how they get you. But you still wind up with 200 postcards that you then turn around and sell for $2 or whatever, and in order to make your profit back, you have to sell ten cards, and you know, everything is beautiful.

Kevin:                          [00:36:12] Right.

Ursula:                        [00:36:13] I would suggest something like that for your mom, honestly. This will require a Photoshop and an interface. Here’s where…

Kevin:                          [00:36:22] Here’s where it gets dodgy.

Ursula:                        [00:36:23] Here’s where it gets dodgy and there is what I do, there is what other people do, and no matter what I say at this juncture, approximately a third of the internet is going to start screaming at their radio. I use Mac. Pause for screams.

Kevin:                          [00:36:41] Okay.

Ursula:                        [00:36:41] Um, all of you who just screamed, “Well, that’s your problem, you should be on Linux” hang your head and be ashamed of yourself. An older woman doing mezzotints who is suspicious of computers is not going to boot Linux.

Kevin:                          [00:36:54] And the other thing is the tools—and I use Linux desktops. I’m a Linux administrator as my primary means of living. There are good tools on there, but they’re not designed for an artist. They’re really designed around engineers and while they’re good, they’re not great. And while they can be professional grade, you have to specialize and learn a whole lot about them.

Ursula:                        [00:37:21] Honestly, if you—

Kevin:                          [00:37:22] So, all you Linux people screaming at me now…

Ursula:                        [00:37:25] Good, scream at him.

Kevin:                          [00:37:25] Yeah, scream at me, but uh, the reality is that we’re a lot closer to the Linux desktop than we were but we’re still not there.

Ursula:                        [00:37:33] Photoshop. I finally knuckled under and got their damn cloud subscription, which I fought that for years. I—

Kevin:                          [00:37:45] A lot of grumbling over this one.

Ursula:                        [00:37:46] I hissed like a vampire confronted with a cross behind a paywall, and um… because I want to own software. I do not want to pay $25 for software a month, for software that isn’t mine. Yes. There’s a whole thing there. We won’t get into that. That being said, I finally did it and it’s really fucking slick and I resent how slick it is. Like, sure, let me give you a live preview of this font. Oh, you want this here? It’s super customized. Put this here, put that there. I can make it look just like my old Photoshop and it makes me angry how responsive it is. It’s like…

Kevin:                          [00:38:35] And they’re rolling new features in really quick.

Ursula:                        [00:38:37] They roll new features in, it’s honestly, it’s pretty good. So. God damn it. I use…

Kevin:                          [00:38:49] But you have to have a machine that can run it.

Ursula:                        [00:38:50] And here’s where I’m going to hand the floor over to Kevin. Kevin, what the hell do I use?

Kevin:                          [00:38:55] So, actually you’re well past what I would consider the end of life of that machine.

Ursula:                        [00:39:01] The big one?

Kevin:                          [00:39:01] The big one.

Ursula:                        [00:39:03] Okay, the…

Kevin:                          [00:39:04] The big one is a… this is like an older Mac Pro, it’s… which has been called the cheese grater. It’s the square tower with the silver sides with all the vent holes in it, and I loaded you up on CPU and I loaded you up on memory, so it’s got something like eight cores and sixteen gigaRAM, which when we bought it almost six, seven years ago, now…

Ursula:                        [00:39:31] Oh, at least.

Kevin:                          [00:39:31] Yeah, it was…

Ursula:                        [00:39:34] Yeah, I guess it was six years ago.

Kevin:                          [00:39:36] Was, I mean it was state of the art with a lot of forward looking. It is…

Ursula:                        [00:39:40] But it’s still working.

Kevin:                          [00:39:41] Yeah, it’s still working. I think they’ve phased out OS upgrades for it, so at some point we’re gonna hit that wall, and this is something I do not like about Macs. We’re gonna hit that wall where things aren’t—where you’re gonna go, okay, I need to put the new thing on it and it’s going to be like, you need to upgrade to the new version of the OS. And you’re not going to be able to upgrade the OS on that hardware.

Ursula:                        [00:40:02] And at that point, I will cry bitter bitter tears and probably layout the money for a new one. What is my laptop?

Kevin:                          [00:40:08] Um, your laptop is a Macbook Air. No, wait, we got you the smaller Macbook this time around, didn’t we?

Ursula:                        [00:40:17] Yeah, because I had to give my mom my old Macbook Air because she needed [inaudible].

Kevin:                          [00:40:20] Right, but it’s the 13, and it’s… I made sure you got the higher end of the 13. I can’t remember the specific CPU, but when you’re buying new equipment and you need it to last, I look at it as a three year, at minimum a three year investment, so I buy the highest end piece of it I can. When I bought my—I bought a Surface book last year, which is great for me. All the productivity tools, boots Linux if I want it to. Yes, it’s Windows 10, but there were professional reasons for doing that, and I got the… I think the next to highest one on the market because I didn’t want to pay the ridiculous amount of money for like a slightly bigger disk.

Ursula:                        [00:41:07] I like Mac because it’s idiot-proof. It is much more idiot-proof than Windows.

Kevin:                          [00:41:14] Right.

Ursula:                        [00:41:14] I was on—and I have literally owned every system known to man, including Amiga and I will hear no ill spoken of the Amiga. I—Mac, PC I was PC for a long time, and the PC started to break and I realized I could not service it and if I took it to like Geek Squad or whatever they are, they would have no fricking clue what was going on with it, because it was an ancient, you know…

Kevin:                          [00:41:43] Home-built thing.

Ursula:                        [00:41:44] Home-built. Home-brew thing my ex made.

Kevin:                          [00:41:46] It’s sitting right under there.

Ursula:                        [00:41:48] Yeah. And it was a rock-solid machine.

Kevin:                          [00:41:49] It was. It was. But it was—the software requirements and the images and the resolutions of the things you were working on, you basically outgrew it. But you outgrew it after about five or six years.

Ursula:                        [00:42:02] Yeah, so I would say… five years is about my turnaround on most machines. A really big expensive one, I will—and the thing is, I will use a computer until it falls apart under me. I feel no gadget lust. In fact, I am intensely resistant to gadget lust.

Kevin:                          [00:42:20] She is… oh God it is so… it took me, I think we had been together for like four years before I finally said, oh look, here’s a birding app I have on my iPhone, and you broke down and got an iPhone over the flip phone that you had.

Ursula:                        [00:42:34] Yes. The only thing that drives me to upgrade my phone now, other than the one in my hand literally disintegrating is if they radically improve the camera, and fortunately, we’re getting to a point where they can no-longer radically improve the camera because you just can’t fit any bigger lenses in the little damn thing.

Kevin:                          [00:42:52] Right, it’s much more about improving the software processing that happens.

Ursula:                        [00:42:57] I… am very cheap.

Kevin:                          [00:43:02] So, that’s where the tradeoff comes. Because the Mac, and really, we’re getting into a lot of hardware discussions here but it is relevant to productivity, because I always go for the best I can buy at the time with the thought that it is going to last me a minimum of three years. Sometimes more. The laptop I record this on, is, I think, four or five years old now. The Macbook Air we record Hidden Almanac on is actually, I think the disk is starting to give on it, so… but I go in with the idea that I’m buying the high end stuff now knowing full well that the high end stuff will last me longer and will be obsolete in a month. It’s gonna cost more. Not gonna lie, it’s gonna cost more, but here’s the business-speak. The TCO, the total cost of ownership, the longer you own it, the less it actually costs you. And so that’s just how I’ve learned to think about it. What’s the total—if I buy it for $3000 now and it lasts for 6 years, that means it really cost me $500/year.

Ursula:                        [00:44:07] See, I think of it as ROI, return on investment.

Kevin:                          [00:44:11] That too.

Ursula:                        [00:44:11] If I make art on the machine that I cannot possibly make any other way, etc etc, I can’t run Photoshop on my lap—oh, I guess I can run Photoshop on my laptop.

Kevin:                          [00:44:21] Yeah, I think, you might be able to with the Creative Cloud version because it is a little slimmer than the old one.

Ursula:                        [00:44:28] Speaking particularly of printers which is a topic near and dear to my heart…

Kevin:                          [00:44:32] We both swear a lot at printers.

Ursula:                        [00:44:33] Printers will frickin’ kill your productivity, because, like… I fight with that thing. I had a glorious two weeks when it worked like a charm and then suddenly, it was like, “I don’t know what this thing you put in me that you’re claiming is the light magenta, but it’s not.” And, I’m like, but it worked for two weeks. And it’s like, “Nope! Don’t acknowledge it anymore.” And of course I didn’t have an old one lying around because I’d taken the trash out and I used to spend so much of my time running prints and there is something about running prints that makes one increasingly hostile and crazed and furious and maybe not everyone, but certainly every human being I have ever encountered who has fought with a printer basically is just… there’s something about the printer that puts you on this ravening edge where you’re just about to go on a killing spree within 30 seconds.

Kevin:                          [00:45:33] Not gonna lie, the hardest part about my Red Hat Certified Engineer exams, part of it is set up a print server that is going to print a test page to prove that you set up the print server and that’s the one that always makes me angry because the simplest—what should be the simplest thing is insanely difficult whether it’s… I think I spent two or three hours fighting with the print drivers on my Windows box and that’s supposed to be plug and play, right? The Mac… yeah, it’s just, printers are just the devil.

Ursula:                         [00:46:10]  Hear, hear. So, frankly, I would suggest not bothering with the home machine in your mom’s case, go to Vistaprint.

Kevin:                          [00:46:17]  Yeah, yeah.

Ursula:                         [00:46:17]  If it’s for cards, do that. If you want large prints, go find someone else who will that for you, these things can be done. But…

Kevin:                          [00:46:27]  We won’t do it for you, no.

Ursula:                         [00:46:28]  But the happiest I—the best business decision I have ever made in my life was outsourcing the prints.

Kevin:                          [00:46:34]  And how many years did I tell you you needed to do that?

Ursula:                         [00:46:39]  Moving on. Don’t we have more letters?

Kevin:                          [00:46:42]  All right. Thank you, Alisa for your letter. I hope that helps. Um, actually that’s the last of them.

Ursula:                        [00:46:47] Oh, okay.

Kevin:                          [00:46:47] So, yeah. Thank you, Joe, and Alisa, and Lydian and Jen for your letters. Thank you Jared for writing in and commenting on I guess you’ve got a cross-post going because they—I got the same comment on all three of my social media from them.

Ursula:                        [00:47:16] Oh, excellent. Maybe, thinking of printers and outsourcing, maybe part of productivity is learning to have other people do the crap they can do infinitely faster that will make you batshit.

Kevin:                          [00:47:33] I think it comes into the… part of it’s the financial argument of realizing and I’m going to go on a slight tear. Artists in particular have a… I’m not going to say a stigma attached, but I think we talked about it last week, the whole, getting paid for your work thing. In that artists tend to not necessarily think of their thing as valuable, just the thing they output.

Ursula:                        [00:48:04] That’s fair.

Kevin:                          [00:48:06] So, I mean…

Ursula:                        [00:48:07] Also, there’s a very strong, “I have to be able to do this all myself” thing. We’re practically like creative survivalists.

Kevin:                          [00:48:13] Yeah, in a lot of ways. But there was a whole thing about how much of your time—how much does your. It took a while. How much is your time actually worth. Like, the time you don’t spend writing that you do spend fighting with the printer, what’s the trade-off there. That five hours that you could have spent writing or resting or playing video games or whatever, is that…

Ursula:                        [00:48:38] And not becoming a psychotic raging wolverine of hate.

Kevin:                          [00:48:42] Exactly, you know, is it worth the profit that you made by doing prints yourself.

Ursula:                        [00:48:48] Yeah, and I mean, I still do prints myself for shows, but not that many.

Kevin:                          [00:48:51] No.

Ursula:                        [00:48:51] And, uh… yeah.

Kevin:                          [00:48:54] There’s not a weekly, I have to run prints and then several hours of printing and swearing and printing, and then the day when you go mail it all, and…

Ursula:                        [00:49:04] Yeah, because I lost a day a week going into town to mail it.

Kevin:                          [00:49:08] Yeah, it’s a lot easier now that the mail place is just around the corner, but…

Ursula:                        [00:49:15] Yeah, but I still don’t really go there. I go down to Carrie and I have a load, and [inaudible].

Kevin:                          [00:49:16] Carrie, yeah.

Ursula:                        [00:49:17] When I sell pendants, I’m like, here’s 30 of them. Bag ‘em, box ‘em, put it on my tab.

Kevin:                          [00:49:23] Right, but again, you’re outsourcing. You’re not bagging and boxing them here, and doing that. So, that’s, you know.

Ursula:                        [00:49:30] She charges me very little and then I bring her a bottle of vodka at Christmas.

Kevin:                          [00:49:33] Exactly. So, that’s that. So this week instead of an interview, we just did letters. Please feel free to comment on the blog at ProductivityAlchemy.com. Or drop me a note kevin@sonney.com. So, quick break and again, some day we will have a musical interlude here, just not yet.

Ursula:                        [00:49:57] I could beatbox.

Kevin:                          [00:49:59] That’s… please don’t. Dun dun dunnnn. We’ll work on a real musical cue.

Ursula:                        [00:50:04] Oh, you wouldn’t let me beatbox and then you dun dun dunnn. I see how it is.

Kevin:                          [00:50:10] Sweetie? I love you very much. What did your mother say about your singing?

Ursula:                        [00:50:16] Okay, move on.

Kevin:                          [00:50:19] Thank you for listening. We’ll be back next week, hopefully with an interview. The open badge code for this week’s episode is PRINTERHATE. All caps. PRINTERHATE, no space.

Ursula:                        [00:50:34] Inspired by our letter and my feeling [crosstalk].

Kevin:                          [00:50:36] Inspired yes, by our letters. Again, I want to thank Jared for their comments. Jen, Joe, Alisa, and—

Ursula:                        [00:50:44] Lydian.

Kevin:                          [00:50:44] –Lydian for their letters. You can comment on episodes at ProductivityAlchemy.com. You can email me kevin@sonney.com. We’ve got—I’ve got my first review, a good one on iTunes.

Ursula:                        [00:51:04] Yay!

Kevin:                          [00:51:04] And yes.

Ursula:                        [00:51:07] And people took away all of the business cards.

Kevin:                          [00:51:10] I should have left more at the table, apparently, but there were business cards with a special badge code on it that you could only get from the business card with a special “I met Kevin badge.” Or… you know, it’s actually, “I met Kevin (and/or Ursula).” So, you know, if you get a chance to see us at one of the upcoming events, Worldcon or Bubonicon in New Mexico. I think I’ll be at Mag Labs in September, and then there’s the—

Ursula:                        [00:51:41] Windycon?

Kevin:                          [00:51:41] Windycon in November. Ask for the card and you, too, can have the badge that says “I met Kevin and/or Ursula.”

Ursula:                        [00:51:54] I just want to say I am really smug about the design on the business cards.

Kevin:                          [00:51:56] Oh, the design on the cards is the same as the website and the art, the coverart that you see in iTunes and Google Music and I’m on—I’ve got a—I’m saying us, but I’ve got the podcast on TuneIn radio now. So, you can even say to your Amazon device to—hold on, let me kill the microphone before I do this. So, you can actually say to “Play Productivity Alchemy from TuneIn” and they will—and it will bring up the latest episode for you, which I think is really cool.

Ursula:                        [00:52:36] I heard him saying, “That’s so beautiful,” or maybe, “You’re beautiful” in the other room, and I was like, “Oh, thank you.” And he was like, “I was talking to Alexa.”

Kevin:                          [00:52:48] Yeah, um.

Ursula:                        [00:52:48] It was awkward.

Kevin:                          [00:52:49] It was a little. It was a little, but—but it was really cool at the same time. Thank you all for listening, thank you to everyone who came up and said hi at Anthrocon. I love meeting everyone when we’re out and about and I’m really glad that you’re finding this helpful or have your own reasons to email me and rant back at me, so that’s pretty good. And that’s it for this week, so we will see you next week with a real interview. We’ll talk more about Ursula and goals. And maybe even a couple more letters as we go on. I might even be able to find music by then, so we’ll see.

Ursula:                        [00:53:33] Fancy.

Kevin:                          [00:53:34] Fancy, fancy. All right. So, we’ll see you next time.