Fun. And we will turn this on, get all the things running here for our Friday. And it's interesting Kelly G said you didn't have a meeting and today's topic is all about productivity. I thought that productive, maybe with less meetings? Right? The Right. Absolutely. Let's see here. Okay. All right. Well, here we are. You know, hopefully everybody's having a good Friday. I don't know about you, but the weather has been absolutely nuts around around my house. Kathy, I see you nodding. So you experienced the same sort of craziness. What was it on? Friday, it was? No, it's just a couple of days ago, it was we had a high of 71. Or at my place was highest 71 or 72. It's February, remember, Chicagoland area 72 degrees. The low in that same day was 21. That is a 50 degree spread. And then during that timeframe, so when we woke up, it was really warm. And then by the time we went to bed, we had had tornado watches throughout the state. And there was a hard freeze. And we had snow the next day. So that is just absolutely nuts. And the way that I think about I think it's a conspiracy between the weather people, right? So they say let's have a range of 72 to 21. So that way, when we throw a dart we'll be right regardless of where it lands.
Well, you know our landmark. meteorologist Tom Skilling retired on Wednesday, so I figured that was his going away party is going from 70 to 20. All four seasons in 24 hours. That's it.
That's it. That was I think you're onto something there. I do. I think you're on to something there. All right. Well, welcome. In California, it's just really nice to get snow somewhere. Yeah, I mean, Sierras. Yes. You're supposed to get like nine feet of snow. There's a blizzard watch. And everybody that was supposed to go to the mountains this weekend skiing because there's some been some pretty good skiing, said, I know. The lifts probably won't be open. There's going to be 40 mile an hour, right. So so chances are the lifts won't be open yet. But we'll have next weekend. If it doesn't rain. There's not another there'll be some coming in. I'll be Epic's and nobody will be in the office. Nobody worried about anywhere getting out Thursday afternoon or Friday. I tell you is just bananas. It is just bananas. But welcome everybody learning rebels coffee chat here talking about productivity. If this is your first time with us in our coffee chat, please be sure to let us know in the chat itself so that way we can give you the warm welcome that you deserve. And for those of you who haven't been with us for a while like Kelly, welcome back. Always part of the family. We appreciate you guys being here. Suzanne, welcome. Douglas all about the layers that your banana emoji that like the similar to the onion. Genie is a genie Jenny. But welcome. Let's see Sandy, longtime learning rebels fan. Thank you so much. I appreciate your support. Oh, Tamaki. Thank you for coming. We she and I had had a chat earlier this week. So I'm glad that you were able to join us. Yes, Amy, welcome. Lots of newbies here today. Thank you for showing up, Amy. Thank you. Yes. And today, as I said, talking about productivity. But I wanted to tackle this from a different perspective, as you guys could tell from the newsletter that went out this week, and as well as the blog post that went out a few weeks back where we were, where I'm talking about or where we're talking about productivity from a mindset approach rather than a tools approach. Now we're also going to talk about tools don't get me wrong. We're also going to talk about tools. But I thought before we started discussing what shiny tools are out there to help us with our our productivity or managing our pros. activity. I thought, you know, let's talk about where we are in our heads. First, you know, what is getting in the way, sometimes of our own best interests? You know. And so I also sent a little short article, I think it was from Forbes, about productivity mindset. And that was in the newsletter that went out this week. And so I'm curious, what were your thoughts? Or what are your thoughts about mindset and productivity, who'd like to kick this off? Oh, and those, just real quick, for those of you this is your first time this is a no judgment zone, no PowerPoint zone. And we, we really want you to jump in, share in the conversation, you can raise your hand, that's fine. But you can also unmute yourself and have an open discussion. And this is where we, you know, support each other and contribute to each other's growth and learning, etc. So just feel free to jump on in. And also regarding your video, we do not require that you have your videos on. But as you can see, a lot of us do. And it doesn't matter. Like I said, No judgement zone, I don't care. If you're in your pajamas, I don't care if you know you're hiding in your closet, it doesn't matter to me, you know, just pop on up if you want to. All right. So the question, again, is, What is your thought around mindset as an underpinning foundation for productivity enhancement. So where do you think your mindset needs to be?
I'll jump in here, Shannon, I do have a mindset for wanting to be productive and to use productivity tools. And I will get to the point of playing with some and thinking, Oh, this is cool. I'm going to use it and then I never do. So it's my mindset truly there than to convince myself to you. It's not quite there. So I think I'm fooling myself to say I'm in the right mindset
to do that. Right. Yeah, I have the same thing. Certainly same experiences.
For my mindset is best expressed by the cartoon character. BB. Runner, Willie, Coyote fast wily Coyote, faster, faster.
But wily coyote is the one that always failed.
But he always try.
And he always tried that really? A
for effort, D for productivity, for execution. Right? He did make Acme rich though.
He did make acne rich.
That's right. I'm just a trail of Acme product products behind me that I've bought right once or twice and then abandoned.
The hard yeah, totally is all the stuff. And that's easy for myself, I find that I get I can't begin sometimes there's just too many places to begin.
Yeah. And I think that that there Suzanne, what you just said, is a big mindset issue. Right? It's, I have all of this stuff. And Lord knows I find myself in this all the time. So if you think about the Franklin Covey quadrant, or the Eisenhower quadrant there, and you've got the quadrant of let me see was urgency and planning and importance and waste. And the more time you spent in quadrant one, dealing with everything that was urgent, the more likely you were to end up in the quadrant of what they had back in the day called waste. I forget what they call it now. But it would but that means then, in other words, we feel rushed rush, rush, rush, rush, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure. And then the next thing you know, you're falling down the YouTube rabbit hole. You know, because your brain just needs a break. And so then suddenly, that's where that's where our mind goes. And then we've, we spent an hour on YouTube, and then we beat ourselves up for wasting that hour. And we go back to the quadrant of urgency. And so it becomes that hamster wheel. And then we start saying, well, I need a tool. Is it really is it really a tool that you need? Or is it is it a mindset issue that we need to address on some level? Let's hear it.
Well, in fairness, sometimes managing the tool itself becomes the urgent task. Right? So does it actually increase productivity? Or just add to the list of things you got to do? Hmm,
great point. Great point, it's almost goes with that. That whole line of thinking of, I could train somebody to do it. But I can do it faster. So I train somebody else to do it, because I can do it faster. And then you end up doing everything, because you have that mindset. So it kind of goes along those same lines is, we're busy fussing around with a tool, and that tool may be helpful, or maybe not. But we're experimenting with all these different things, trying to help us be in the right place at the right time doing the right things. But is there something else?
And sometimes there's too many, too many things to decide on, to figure out where to start. Right, like just getting started?
Yeah, sometimes that's the issue too, isn't it?
Yeah, there's, there's the projects, we have a very high level large projects we're working on. And then we have all this other stuff that is just like purchase orders and, and approvals. And, and getting back to people and, you know, like, there's this inertia of all their stuff that keeps us from making great headway on our, like big projects. And, and it's all very distracting. And so, I think that there is a, there's a limit to the human brain of what we can work on and think about. And I'm feeling like I'm reaching the limits of my human brain to track the many different pieces and things that need to be done. So that's where we go into the tool that we think maybe a tool will help us. But then sometimes you don't even have time to put it on on Asana. If this like, comes out of blue drops in my hat lap has to be done somebody else's prioritize by time. And so
I think it's like almost like, we're trying to move this stuff off our plate. But sometimes we don't have time to even like put it on Asana or a task list or something like that. So what does that so Maureen? Oh, good. You.
Okay, thanks. So I had put in there sometimes with the mindset is that in the past, when I've been maybe productive, then my reward is I get more to do. And so the mindset is kind of like, well, I don't want to be too productive, because then I'm gonna get more stuff like this vicious cycle. So it's almost like segregating, saying, Okay, well, over here, I want to be productive. But over here, like,
I mean, why it productivity? Yeah.
Well, it's the overthinking in the end, the mindset does need to get right before any tools or any skills will, you know, be successful, but it's, I'm, I'm consistently inconsistent in productivity and my mindset. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. And I've certainly been there Good lord. I've been in a meeting where they've all said, well, Shannon can do it. Shannon can do it. Shannon could do it. Shannon could do it. It's like, Jen be tired. Inhale through that anymore. Um, but I also want to touch on another thing that you just said, and what Kelly kind of alluded to which was being you know, busy, busy, busy, busy. And is some of that our own fault. Because, one, we don't delegate enough to that we're constantly working on something so that it reaches perfection mode rather than progress mode. You know, so we don't let something go when we should let something go. You know, and three, are we doing things that no one notices. And it makes us feel good to do this thing. So that I just saw a reaction from you is that
you saw reactions for me on all three of your points. And they were all in the affirmative and a little self fingerpointing to a good deal of those, right? Sometimes good is good enough, right? But it's never going to be perfect. There's always something extra that can be added. Right. But at some point, to your next point is, what I'm seeing is like, it could be like, a font issue. So something as simple as that, that nobody else will notice. And even if you change it, everybody will be like, isn't this the same thing? Had there's like, almost,
I feel seen. That's what I'm saying.
All right. But so yeah, in I think somebody put in the chat like the self saboteur, right? are we generating our own the mountain a mountain out of a molehill? Kind of thing?
Yeah, absolutely. You know, and I go back to when way, way, way, way long time ago. And when I was working in corporate America, and the lead the leaders, the managers, they all wanted this report coming out of the learning management system. And it was one of those sorts of reports is back in the day, when it wasn't so easy to draw reports, you know, you really had to pull a bunch of different levers in order to get some even basic reports out of your learning management system. And it really was a pain. And the people, the person who had to generate that report, it took them a while, and they had to do it every week and send it out every week, and I was noticing that we would send it out, but we would never get any responses. So then I stopped sending it out. I said, Let's not send it out this week. You know, we got other things to do. This is clearly not a priority to anybody, because I'm not getting a comment on it. We have other things to focus on. So that's what we did. And then nobody said anything. So I thought, Okay, well, let's not send it out again. And then nobody said anything. No one noticed that that they were not getting that report ever again. And I never told anybody that we stopped sending out that report. No one noticed. But for some reason everybody wanted it. And so to me, it was an aha moment at that moment, which was, are we doing the right things at the right time for the right reasons? You know, and I think that was that was really something that was an epiphany for me and the team at the time. And that's when we started really prioritizing the things that we needed to do. Now, I don't recommend that you guys all of a sudden stopped doing aspects of your job. And but you know, that's the, but that was the that was a moment. That was a moment for me. Not that it made me, you know, a productive or productivity expert or anything. But that was just one example of something. Where are we doing things that nobody will notice? That isn't needed? Just because it makes us feel? Good? Right. Yeah. Erica? Yeah, exactly. We're, it's they don't they don't look at them. Stop making mountains out of mothballs, Moscow on the heads and get Mo. That's a different. I like that. Good enough to move on. I really liked that. Thank you, Sandy. That's a good one. We all need to keep that one. Yeah. Yes, go ahead and go around and tell your tell your bosses. Well, I was on this call the other day. And she added said, Yeah, I don't want your emails after that. Okay, so now that we've kind of, yeah, Chief Learning rebel said. So now that we've kind of ironed out some of the mindset issues that we might have. And I'll want to get back to the delegation one real quick before I move on, because somebody in the comment said, and I expected this to come up, which was, I would delegate if I had someone to delegate to. Okay, a couple of thoughts I have about that. And I'm interested in what you think, is first off is I think sometimes we depend on ourselves because it's a crutch. You know, where if I don't do it won't get done. If I don't do it, it won't get done the way it should be. That's one thing. And the other thing is, I don't know if we take advantage enough of the help and support we have around us, regardless of whether or not it's in our department. You know, so are there. So let's think about you spent a lot of time creating images or graphics or whatever for your elearning programs or PowerPoints or things like that. Uh, is there an opportunity here to ask marketing for help? Is there a graphics design person in your marketing department that might be helpful to you? I knew this there was this person who spent a lot of time agonizing over voiceovers. And he found out that there was a person in finance that actually had a podcast who had a really good radio voice, who didn't mind doing their voiceovers for them. You know, so you're, you're spending all of this time agonizing over the sound of your voiceover, and doing that the way that you feel that you need to do and there's somebody sitting over and finance who would love to do it for you, because that's their passion. You know, so are there opportunities that we're not looking at? What are your thoughts around that?
I think that's awesome. Finding those people sometimes is the biggest challenge. So I'd love to hear how you guys found those pockets of people who enjoy some of those things.
Do you guys think?
I think an issue I have with that, like personally is like, not wanting to spread my burdens to other people, not because you're worried that they might be afraid to say no, and that you're going to stress them out more? Because I know I have issues saying no. So I tend to not get help. And people were like, Why aren't you asking?
Oh, my God. I don't know.
saboteur.
Right. Thank you so much for that, Suzanne. Because I think that we we all get there. We all do that. I'd still do that where I don't want to ask. I have a I have a VA Amanda, you guys are probably some of you might be familiar with Amanda who helps me out. And that's what she gets paid to do. And yesterday, I wrote her a Slack message saying, Well, if you show me how to do it, I won't bother you. I literally wrote that yesterday. You know, so I write. And she said, Well, I don't Okay, Shannon, but it's kind of what you pay me to do. Like, oh, yeah, you're right. I do. You know, so I think we all find ourselves there. So thank you for saying that. Suzanne. Yeah. So then it's about breaking out of that. It's about breaking out of that mindset. And speaking of vas, right, yeah, I'm fired. That's right. I'm fired. So speaking of VA, so I just want to put a little plug out there for that if, if I had had access to a VA, back in the day, that probably would have done it. You know, you're not talking about a whole lot of money an hour. And even if they take four hours off of your plate a month, doing something that is painful for you, or is time consuming for you. That might be worth something, even if your organization doesn't pay you back for it. Because think about what your time is worth. That's I'm just going to put that out there if you think about what your time is worth and what you could be doing with that time. So if you showed that person had to do XYZ, how much time and frustration? Would that save you? So just just a thought, just a thought. And then that also goes into making better use of some of the AI tools that we have. There is that. So now, let's flip the script and talk about tools a little bit. Let's, let's talk about AI tools. First, let's jump into that pool. So is anyone out there using any sort of AI tool to support some of the work that you're doing? And if so, which ones?
I've been using chat GBT to help me. Like with my. So I am trying to become an instructional designer and I'm a training facilitator. So I've been using chat up to me create, like, update my training programs.
Excellent. Excellent. Do you want to give me an example of that?
Yes. So I was tasked with creating a new orientation because so I'm the only person in my training department I work for a small company so my or my boss has a lot of experience and knows a lot of things and she basically was like, your career is your oyster. You can do whatever you want. And so to me, that's like great now I can't do anything because there's too many things but anyway, so choices She gave me one thing. She's like, Well, why don't you do an orientation? And I didn't know where to even begin because I've never done anything. And she suggested chat GPT to our whole group, the people strategy team, and I started using it right away. And I found extremely helpful in helping me get that done by just extra prompting, like, well, what's a good activity to do to break the ice? And how would I script that or make an outline? For me with this information? It's been good. Excellent,
good. Good. I'm glad. I'm glad you did that. As an as an aside, one of the things that the learning rebels specializes in is creating onboarding programs. So if you if you get stuck, shoot me an email, I'll help you get unstuck. Okay,
thank you.
You're welcome. All right, Kelly. Okay, so AI. So I was asked to, to add a paragraph to the diabetes course that we have for salespeople. And I was supposed to add a paragraph about pre diabetes. And I was like, Oh, I'm gonna have to research. I know, I don't need to research this. I said, I'm an instructional designer. And I need to explain with examples, what pre diabetes is. It wrote it, I edited it, and I stuck it in and it looks fine. Like, like, I didn't need to go research and find all this. And then, and I used a Bings the Microsoft and it gave me the references. So I was able to put the references right into the course. So if legal asks where I got the information, I have the references. And so that was helpful. And now I'm using AI voice. And, like, I'm doing a video right now explaining a process flow. And I did the whole video treatment. And this is like, and then I realized from a learner point of view, probably not the best of just gonna use a flowchart. So like, yes, you know, was it good enough? No, it was not good enough. It was confusing. So now I need to change the audio to say we're gonna go through the process, right, but I just need to add, we're gonna go through the process. So I just go back to AI voice have the AI woman say we're gonna go through the process. Stick it in there. I split the audio and, and so so I've found AI voice to be really good. I really liked well said labs. But it could not say our product name Hli Q could not say that no matter how I spelled h F x IQ. It could not say it. So I had ditch well, so lab, play play. He can actually say that. But I've heard good things about I think somebody else said 11 labs. So I think I'll try 11 lines, but it's got to say our premier product otherwise, crazy. Yeah, yeah. So is AI voice the name of the tool or is that it's it's no, the name of the tool that I'm really using right now is play HT. But I have used willsez labs and I liked Wilson's labs for anything that didn't have to say our product name.
But I'm very happy with him. And it's like $40 a month. It's not bad. And I don't have to go bug people to go do to change the voiceover. It used to be that we were like, no voiceover now I'm doing videos with in Camtasia with, with AI voice voiceovers and I'm still learning Camtasia I'm still kind of slow, but I'm getting faster each each time I use it. So that's why that's really what it takes. Right practice. Yeah, yes, yes. Yep. Let's see. I see. Oh, I see hands. Okay, Ginny.
Hi. It's actually Jenny,
it's showing. Okay, thank you. Yeah,
no problem. So I have used like thinking of productivity, but not necessarily AI voice. But I use chat GPT to write difficult emails for me. So like, when you have an email that you're going to obsess over for a little while and take too long to write it then. Like, I have actually put the problem into chat GBT as chat chat GPT to write the email for me. And then say it was like, a client missed a meeting, but I needed them to attend a meeting. So it was like, Hey, you missed our meeting, but not accusatory, and then like, but we still need to reschedule this. So it started out really apologetic and then I was like, Please rewrite this email without apologizing. And like so I got a great email and then I just made it mine and then sent it and it was so low stress, and it took me probably half the time. So like productivity and ways this things that you find difficult sometimes using AI or other tools I find can help. If
I love that. I love that. You know what I really love about what you said was about reimagining that email also that it didn't sound apologetic and coming from it coming from a woman, right? So if we think about gender, a lot of times a woman will apologize for sending a certain email, versus a man who is typically more direct about their emails, right. So we'll start off with something. If you don't mind, if you have the time, please do you know. So we spend like a whole paragraph apologizing for the ask. And so I love that you went back and you said, Okay, take all that out. Now make it more directive. So I love that you did that. Yeah. And I also use, I use a variety of different AI tools to help me do just that as well. And I kind of go between Chad GPT and Jim and I. So I the Google version, so used to be barred. Now it's Gemini, because sometimes I find that chat TPT is sounds to AI. And then if I take the, if I take the email that chat, GBT generated and then plug it into Gemini, then I find that it's all of a sudden, it's more conversational. And it's like, I like that. So it's just like one little tiny extra step that I just switch it over. But I go between the two, actually, because I like the different results. It's fun to experiment with. Okay, and I put a couple of different AI tools there that Kelly was talking about in the chat. Now, what other tools are you using to help? And we don't have to go electronic tools, right. So I've got, like, I've got my notebook, and I've got another notebook and see, here's my problem. You guys are about to get into seeing what my problem here's one notebook. Here's another notebook. I have my I have my iPad. You know,
there are some things that I want to write down and there are some things that I want to, you know, put into my iPad, I guess, Kelly? Well, I added Grammarly to my Yahoo ID and and, and when now when I'm doing rise, because rises in my window, my my Chrome window, it's now finding all my mistakes that I didn't see before. And so I'm, I'm enthralled with with it. And I'm seriously considering getting the paid for the paid version of it. To really help my writing some more I can say tell you when it can be improved. I usually can say, oh, yeah, I guess I don't need the word just in there. And so, but I that that's something that has really helped me. As you can see, when I make comments, I literally leave our articles or forget to put plurals at the end because I have some dyslexia and I don't even see what where my problems are. And so I'm always afraid to always when I put things in chat, I'm amazed that people construct beautiful sentences and I have challenges with that. So
hey, Kelly, I think Grammarly has actually added a AI to their equation as well as AI voice.
Oh, really? Okay. And the Microsoft, if you haven't, if you've got the latest version of Microsoft, you can now pilots text EQ, well, there's copilot, but there's text to speech or speech to text. And sometimes when I'm trying to write a very friendly paragraph for elearning, right? It's kind of me talking. So I might as well just tuck into Microsoft voice. And it didn't, it does a pretty darn good job. And there's little edits I need to make. But it's not that bad. And that's actually quite time saving, because I just got a new keyboard, and I'm all learning how to take retype, as, oh, my new keyboard. And so I was like, Oh, this is so frustrating. Oh, I'll just use voice to text. Yeah, that's great. And these are and I know that we're talking about AI different sorts of tools themselves. But when you put these tools in there, right in the right perspective, and you put them in your workflow, then you become more productive. And I, I think this is what the conversation is about. I know this is what the conversation is about the tools that are going to help us streamline our workflow. That's what we want to do. You know, so you don't want to be jumping from, you know, Trello to Asana to this to Basecamp did that. Right and find yourself replicating tasks or replicating actions, right, which makes us less productive. You know, so if you've got a workflow, then make that workflow work for you. So I'm curious here is, right, Maureen, what can you delegate to your AI tools? Absolutely. You know, and here's what. So here's what I've I've done. So I realized that my work is different on on a few different levels than your work. However, that said, this can work for you, too. So if I take a blog post, I write a blog post, like the one on productivity, I can take that blog post and I put it into chat GBT or Bart or whatever, Claude, whatever tool that you're using. And I can say, give me 500 words out of this blog post that I can use for a newsletter. What are the highlights? What are the important bits, and then it'll scale it down. And then I can say, okay, from that scale, write me a LinkedIn post, then it does that, right? So then I don't have to spend hours thinking about what's the right thing? And that's to Kelly's point, what's the right thing to write? Where do I find this information that can do that for you. And I also appreciate that Kelly brought up the fact that you can use these tools to help you do your research. And Chatterjee of now, this is why I also use this is why I also use Bard, is I find that the citations coming out of BART are more reliable than what comes out of chat. GPT. You know, so when I want something with a citation, I go there. And I And I'll say, Give me Give me 10? Give me 10 reference points, and cite it and give me the URL. And then you always have to go back and check. Because we're chap GPT, I would go back and check and I'd find out that the URL was broken, or it didn't exist, you know. So in Bard, it was more reliable. So those are some of the things that will help you with your workflow. Right. What else is helping you with your workflow?
Have you heard of to do heads? Oh, sorry. Have you heard of Todoist? Oh, to do lists? Yes. Yes, I find it very useful. It's very simple enough, even for a free version. And I use it pretty often to manage my tasks.
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Let me let me grab the link for that. I fell out of using that. Because it used to sink that used to sync with Slack, and then it stopped. And then I fell out of the habit of using it, I need to get back in it again. But it was You're right. It's a great tool. And I also find that I make more from a to do list perspective, I also make better use of my Google calendar. So for those of you who use Google, the task list that's associated because the beauty of Google, your email, your calendar, and your tasks are all synced together. So with your when you open up an email, and that email asks you to do something. It used to be for me, it used to be that if I don't answer this now, it'll never get answered. Right. So I better do it now. But But over the past few years, if you right click on an email, you can send it to a task. So you can create a task out of an email so I can put it, I can literally put it aside because I know, then I'll remember to get to it. So I'm making better use of those tools. Now, I don't know about what Microsoft does. I haven't used Outlook in years. So I can't I don't know if it syncs the same way. You know, but I know that actually
the same way. But you can you can grab stuff in teams. And you can have a to do list in teams and stuff will show up. And it'll give you suggestions from your email if somebody asks you for you know, some sort of deliverable will actually do that.
Yeah, so we have the tools right in front of us. We're not making the best use to put them in your workflow. You know, to help us out the best way that we can.
No, sorry. So looking all about workflow. Have you used boomerang? You can decide when to respond your emails and the way you want to follow up on some of the emails,
no what tool is that again? Say it again? Boomerang. Boomerang boomerang. Yeah. No, I haven't anybody else. No, let's find it.
Yeah, you have to, I find it. I'm still trying to figure out if I can use it for my work. But if you use Google, I think it's much easier.
Build it, here we go. There are your people, I have not heard of that. We'll have to take it for a spin and see what happens. That's right, is there's again, so many things. And the the purpose here is not to overwhelm with the different sorts of, of tools that are out there. It's the ones where you feel like you have a gap. You know, so is your gap in your productivity, where you're spending all of your time on emails. If you're spending all of your time on emails, then maybe you need to look into something like to do list, or connecting your task list with your email through Google Mail, if that's what you're using, etc. You know, so helping you with those gaps that make you feel stressed out, you know, that make you feel overworked or overburdened? You know, now, there are tools like Trello, Asana Monday, anyone using tools like those Basecamp. Kelly, I know you guys do. So we use Asana as a group in l&d, just to keep track of all the tasks that we and the portfolio of requests that some never get done and just keep are on there, but there's never time to do them. So.
And we've had it split between actually learning to development, and then administrative tasks. So we, we can keep track of because we have releases and things like that we have to do. So we use this on I've used Trello in the past. And I find that I'm kind of similar to the very beginning this that I've had, I've gone through a lot of to do lists, I still haven't found one that I really like.
And I still like taking notes kind of writing. So I'm using my iPad where I take notes on my iPad, but I still haven't found anything on like I'm using OneNote for that. But I still haven't figured out how to use my pen with a to do list in in OneNote on my iPad. So I don't know it, I think Is it me or is it the tools? I just you know, I use good notes on my iPad. Okay. Okay. And good notes has a when you go into it, it's got different themes of paper that you can use. And one of those themes is the checklist. Oh, okay. That might be helpful. Okay. Yeah, and then check, check, check, check, check. Yeah, and I think when you think about actual hardware tools, it's about finding the ones again, that are going to work for you. For example, good notes, I'm is the constant on my iPad, I use it for a variety of different things, it's excellent, because I can create different folders. I can create outlines within my folder. So if I have for like, right now I'm looking at my coffee chat notes, paper. And on that paper, I can create an outline. So all I have to do is click on my three dot menu and say add this page to the outline. So that way I can find it later. You know, it's it's so smooth. And here's the thing that really helps with that I have some of you may know this, because I've said it before, I'm in the middle of moving, hence the virtual background. Okay, so I'm in the middle of moving. And I found helpless. Countless, not Apple pencils, but other other styluses a dozen of them. So that just goes to show how many of them I went through before I found the one that actually I liked. And the only reason why I didn't buy an Apple pencil to start with was because I didn't want to spend the 99 bucks for an Apple Pencil. But when I looked at the box, I probably bought 12 If I bought one I bought 12. So how much money did I spend on cheap styluses? Before I finally said, You know what, I'll just buy the one. And the stylus itself. If you don't have an Apple pencil and you don't, you know, it is a pen in your hand. It isn't it's just like any other regular pen, right? It's a natural extension of your hand and that's why I love it. So then it's about when you think about productivity, it's about the tools again, the tools that help you with your workflow. So if I'm not Struggling to use a stylus is going to make it easier for me to use the electronic tools in front of me. Right? One plus one equals two. You know, and those are some of the basic things that I think makes it easier for us to keep track of the things that we do. And it makes it more natural. I won't say fun, but it makes it more natural. You know, to do it, any thoughts because I'm sure you all have like when you when you are writing, so this one this here, I tell you this pen, I need to like I need to change because this is my favorite pen. And I panic when this pen is not in my line of sight. And so I'm sure we all have those those favorites in front of us, right and this is just a regular GPO pen that for imprint sent me one time and I've, I've used it forever. I gotta love the gel pens. See, we all have our favorites. I mean, but I write mostly on the iPad. But when I do have to write I really love the energy gel pens by Pentel, these are my favorite. We have multiple COVID and my husband loves them. And our children steal them when they come over our adult children steal these pens, we have less pens, after they come over. This is a Sharpie gel. Ah, gel gels. The theme here, right? I love the
gel pens, but I got into the friction pens, because I use rocket books. Ah, there you go. And not only are they erasable, but when you're done with your rocket book and you've uploaded it or whatever, you wipe out your you can only do that with friction pens. But you can just wipe off the page or with the older ones, you microwave the book, and it wipes everything out. Right. And then you have a fresh clean notebook.
I'm gonna put that all know how lovely that is. Which I know, fresh no but rocket but I have not thought about rocket book in a while. And rocket book is another great productivity helper. Because I still think it does this. So you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong. Heather rocket book syncs with Evernote. And does it also sync with OneNote?
I believe it syncs with OneNote now too, yeah.
So you write it once you sync it. And then you can reuse the notebook over and over again. So you're never losing those notes as opposed to those of us who've got multiple books going on.
Can you go back to the microwave book?
Yeah, that's how you used to clear it out. I don't do that anymore.
You still can. But the new ones the pages are. They're not strictly laminated. So you still get like some texture to it. But you can just it's like a dry erase board almost. But it feels like it feels like a receipt. Actually. It's that texture.
Yeah. And you did you don't have to microwave them any more. But you use that's how you clear them. The first iteration of them. Yeah. cleared them out. Gen one
you had to microwave. These are like gen two or three, I think maybe four. And they do have planners. Now they have like regular date planners, they've got panda planners, they've got all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, cuz everybody needs to pay plan what they're doing with their Panda, right?
That's right. And
they have these cool little things. I love these. These are little reusable stickers that you can put on the corner of your whiteboard. So if you've got a meeting, you can put four of these on the corner, your stickers are on the corner your whiteboard, and take a picture of it, and it goes right into your rocket book files. Wow. So it's not just the books, you can do that they've got no cards and stuff too. So I swear I'm not getting kickbacks.
Again, it's all in the workflow, right? You have all of these tools that work with your workflow. And that's that's why I encourage you all to find. Yes, duck.
Hey, Heather, why was that? Not on the trainer gift list in December?
I don't think I realized it was there.
Maybe I didn't read that one. But
you're killing it needs to be on there. It does need to be on there. Shout out for our Christmas list every year. Yes. Yes. So going back to tools within the workflow. How old are you? Well, how much speaking Never time. Okay, we got a little bit of time left, how are you tracking your time? Let's talk about that
you set alarms, physical alarms, like on your phone on
my phone, I say, you know, press the button nice neighbor, say, like, set an alarm for however long away from the time I want to set it.
Yeah, so you're only working on a project for so
long. Yeah, if I or if I need to keep I have ADHD. So I have not the best time management skills. So I've learned to my calendar and just telling my phone to remind me to do things like even, I have to give my cat medication three times a day I say at 930 Remind me every eight hours to do something, and it does it. It's great love it,
old loving calendar. And I don't think you need ADHD to use that tool to help everybody. I'm going to give you a piece of advice that I got. Let me drag it up here first was to keep track. To keep track of your time. I use this tool here that I just put inside the chat. So that's toggle. And toggle can also go on your extension. So every time I work on something, I turn that on. So this way I know how much time am I spending on something throughout the course of the day? Because you know, it's how much time do you spend on email? Well, you might think, well, I spent probably two or three hours a day on email, well, maybe it's four, maybe it's one, you know, and knowledge is power. So if you spent, here's your elearning course that you are only going to take a little bit of time fixing, fixing. And you ended up spending four hours fixing something to Doug's point, fixing a font that nobody's going to notice, then what would you do to get that time back? Right? So but you can't work on that unless you know that that time is being spent in that particular place. And it never ceases to amaze me how much time I spend on a certain task. And that's why I started that's actually what drove me to start using tools like chat GBT and bar to help me write some of the things that I write. You know, so I don't use AI to write my blog posts, my blog posts come from me. However, I will say that I use them for an outline. So let's say I want to write something on self directed learning. Give me an outline with five points. Right? And then it gives me five points, and then I can make a decision. No, that's not right. No, that's not right. I like that. I like that. Okay, here's my jumping off point. Now. I feel like I can write where else I would have spent an hour trying to figure out where did I want this writing to go? Because writing is not that natural. I mean, I love writing. But the start for me is very hard, because I don't know exactly where to start. So using toggle then helped me determine where am I spending most of my time? And where can I use tools to help me? You know, instead of four hours trying to figure out how where I'm going to start on a blog post or writing a blog post. Maybe now it's less because before it would take me eight hours. Those of you who actually read my blog post know that I like long form I write in long form, you know, so it takes me eight hours to write a long form blog post. Now it takes me less because now I've got help with a jumping off point. Right. And so that's very valuable. Right and asking AI to ask for ideas. Absolutely. And I'll tell you how else it helps me with that. Heather. Thank you is that I have a spreadsheet that goes back several years of all of these Coffee Chat topics. I threw that spreadsheet into chat GBT and said Are there topics for learning and development professionals instructional designers that I missing? And it sent me back some ideas for okay, this is how I can keep it different and interesting for you guys. Right. But I I tell you the first thing when it comes to figuring out other other than your mindset, so we're gonna circle back to the beginning. So thinking about your mindset and what is holding you back? Then think about where am I actually spending my time. And that's where a timekeeping tool like toggle or any other one is going to help you out. And I do like the suggestion that was ood did it. Three? Here it is. Heather, Heather varney. Thank you for this Heather, which was sometimes don't put tasks in a task list, put that task on your calendar. And I've used that too. So yeah, put your task in your calendar so that way, especially the important ones, especially the big rock ones, but those in your calendar, so that way they don't get left behind.
It also helps other people see that you might be doing something. Good idea,
especially those of you with shared calendars, right. Oh, love that. Suzanne. Yep. Any? Yeah,
I believe I was gonna say, if I can jump in that choice, my Outlook calendar, like really, basically, and I just put blocks of time. So I am a consultant, I have different clients. So I need to build each of them. So I just put blocks of time. And then every so every night, and every morning, I'm well the calendar is my life. And so I, every day, at the end of my day, I'll go through and just revise the time blocks. And then when for what I actually did, right, and that helps you see what you're doing like did I spend time on the things I was planning to spend time on. But also then at the end of the month, I just go in my calendar and search the client, I use like a certain name or something for each client, right? And then I go search it. And then you get that list of all your time spent on that under that search term, but the duration beside it. And then But then I have to add up the durations to build them for the month. And that's where maybe something like toggle would be better salutely
to use? Oh, absolutely. Because it'll ask you, you can you can plug in. So you can say client XYZ. And then every time you every time you're working on that, all you do is just hit the pink button on your extension, hit the pink button, and it automatically goes. And then whenever you go back by the week by the month, it will see all the different categories that you've entered, all you do is just click on that category and it tells you boom, this is this is what you've done. And this is how long you've spent. Yeah, it's a beautiful tool. Beautiful tool for that. Absolutely for client work for those of us who have client work like that. Yep. All right. And so here we are, at the, at the top of the hour. So, again, the hour goes fast. And thank you everybody for showing up today. I really appreciate that. And a couple of things here for you is our our next Coffee Chat, which is really not a coffee chat, per se. But what I am doing and this goes to maybe Suzanne is I'm doing a workshop on about onboarding. So about turning your onboarding into warm welcome. So that is our next Coffee Chat slash workshop that we're going to be working on together. And that is not next week, but the week after that. And then the following Coffee Chat is all about curiosity versus engagement. So a lot of times we think, How can we build engagement into our training programs. And my perspective on that is engagement is the byproduct, what we need to do is concentrate on how do we build in curiosity factors? How do we make people want to actually be in a learning headspace? And if we can do that, then we have engagement. So then it's about curiosity versus engagement, though that is going to be what's on the agenda for the next couple of weeks. And I would also ask you, too. Don't forget about our, our new Sunday spark. So our Sunday Spark is about every Sunday, you receive a mini challenge via text message for you to think about during the course of the week. So it's just little mini challenges. So for example, this past Sunday, what we did is take a training concept and just sketch out a quick infographic about it. So if you are going to do like the history of your company, and maybe you would do that on a slide, but what if you turn that into an infographic? What would that look like? You know, and the one before that was, you know, what are some of your favorite learning pods? Gas and how are you going to share that knowledge with your team? You know, so little itty bitty challenges to help kind of spark your creativity during the course of the week. And so that's something new that we're that we're playing around with. And I think so far it's going okay. We've got a couple of 100 people signed up for it. So I think it's going alright. So I encourage you guys to sign up for that. And on that note, if you weren't doing anything interesting this weekend, what's happening? Enjoying the weather? Maybe I supposed to be warm again out here. I understand this weekend. Boating and working on taxes, voting I'm offered the bone want to talk about taxes? Yikes. We have a tax accountant that that sets our appointment and so we have an appointment that we have to come and we have to have everything ready. And so it is a it is a scramble to make sure that we've got you know, the 401k and the like, you know, mortgage and all that like does she have because she gives us the stink eye if we show up without you know the right paperwork like, like, the guy I love. Do we have like, don't waste my time you're gonna come to this point, man. I'm gonna do your taxes and I'm gonna save you money, but you need to have everything. So Excellent. Excellent. I love it.
I love air.
All right. Yes. And I am training baseball. Oh, wow. Try Yeah, training baseball. Well, I've watched a couple of those. I would love to go to spring training baseball game. Wonderful. It is. It is one of the best vacations I've ever been on was to go we did golf in the morning and baseball in the afternoon. And it Oh very nice. Very nice. Love it maybe after this move we'll have to plan a vacation or something. I'm going to need it Where are you moving? I'm not too far just a couple of cities away so okay. Couple of downsizing that sort of thing.
Are you moving out to the burbs?
I am in the burbs? I'm already in the burbs? So I'm moving to another Burb is what the deal is. So really, it's all about downsizing. I have this house and it's really big and it's just me and and the boyfriend finally convinced me to make the move. All right.
You want to be really nosy and ask which verb you're moving to. Oh, Crystal Lake.
Oh,
you're gonna be Northumbrian. Okay, yeah. Meldrum.
Oh, all right. Yeah, cuz right now I'm up at the end. Yeah, so I'm really north. Yeah, you are. So now I'm moving back in. But that's okay. Yeah, I'm Burb poppin. Yes, I am. Pretty sure for sure should meet
up and do a real coffee chat.
We should. Yeah. Other I'm all for it. Yes, I would love that. I would love that. We should do it. It's done. We need to. We need to get together. All right. So thank you, everybody. And I appreciate everyone else who's hanging out. So we've got got some side chat going on here. And I did put the Events page in the in the chat itself. I got Christie Tucker coming back. So for those of you who are who really enjoyed her, learn something new with twine. She's doing another one about twine and doing something different with it this time around. So that should be a lot of fun. Yeah, so she's showing us how to do simulations in twine this time. And she's bringing a project management example. So how to build actual learning simulations using the tool. So I'm looking forward to that. Hopefully, you guys will sign up and we will see you there. And Heather, be sure to drop me an email so we can get something on the calendar. Yeah, that may even Shannon out learning rebels.com
Oh, and you've got 10 more days to buy Girl Scout cookies.
Oh, are they online yet?
Oh, yeah.
Okay, I'll send
you I'll send you a link for that to your coffee. I can drill I can deliver your girl scout cookies.
There we go. There we go. Putting it in the workflow right. In the workflow. Awesome. And it's good to see you Kelly. I'm so I'm so happy to see you here today. Yes,
yes, it's
it. I couldn't believe that. I didn't have a meeting this morning. Oh, like I can go for the first time in like five months. I know in forever. It's been too long. It's been way too long. It has been but you look good. Oh, thank you. rested. You say I survived the national sales meeting. Oh, That's excellent. Excellent. Suzanne, thank you for joining us today.
Thank you so much. I really appreciated this and yeah, I met a number of islands. I'm it's noon. time
here in Rhode Island. Oh, yes. Yeah. Okay, happened.
I've been on FMLA. So I've been just spending a lot of time just on LinkedIn, trying to discover things help me get more resources. There
you go. option. We are a resource. We definitely are. Yeah, yes. Amazing. This, this is just amazing. So thank you. And then there's also there's also our community. So we have our community that you can check out. Let's see if I've got a I know I've got a link for that somewhere. But who do?
I'm going to drop off everybody. Have a great weekend? And hopefully see you next week. Okay, thanks. Bye.
I'll put that in the chat. Here. You are.
Great. Yep.
Thank you. Yep,
you're welcome. And like I said, if you need coincidentally, you know, we've got that workshop here in two weeks for onboarding. So if you're interested in that, but like I said, if you get stuck in the mud, drop me an email. I'm happy to see if I can get you unstuck. Thank
you so much. I really appreciate it. And I go back to work Monday and I try to when I don't have trainees I always try to make sure to go to these types of networking events and things so I really hope to be able to make it next time.
