Basic AF Episode xx Transcript

Intro

Jeff Battersby (0s)
Once you disappear something, it disappears.

Intro music (2s)
♪ I don't wanna know about your imperfections ♪ ♪ I don't wanna know about your imperfections ♪ ♪ And imperfections do prefer to leave you ♪

Tom Anderson (8s)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Basic AF, a Mostly Tech podcast with a couple of mostly good-looking guys.

Jeff Battersby (15s)
Mostly, and by the way, Tom, that's a big lie.

Tom Anderson (16s)
Mostly. And that's a lie. That's a lie. That's why we're not video.

Jeff Battersby (20s)
♪ Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us, happy birthday, dear Tommy, we're a year old today. Or ish. ♪

The Show Turns One!

Tom Anderson (29s)
We acted. Yes. Hard to believe, Jeff, that as this show releases, we're right about the one-year mark. So about a year ago, very first episode. Man, time flies.

Jeff Battersby (39s)
That's correct.

Jeff Battersby (40s)
Yeah.

Jeff Battersby (42s)
Right.

Jeff Battersby (43s)
Yeah.

Tom Anderson (43s)
Jeez. Well, that's to be expected. So this is episode 27. Of course, we had a bonus episode in there back in the fall. And yeah, man, it has gone.

Jeff Battersby (44s)
Right.

Jeff Battersby (45s)
Yeah.

Jeff Battersby (45s)
And, and we both look worse for wear.

Jeff Battersby (47s)
So there you go.

Tom Anderson (59s)
We're going to wrap up really quickly. And good opportunity here to say thanks to everybody that has joined us and subscribed, liked, whatever all that good stuff is in those apps.

Tom Anderson (1m 8s)
And continue to come and listen to the show. We do very much appreciate that for you putting up some of the antics we have from time to time. But we do appreciate you being here.

Jeff Battersby (1m 15s)
Mm-hmm, yeah, we're grateful and

Jeff Battersby (1m 18s)
Just a reminder, you know, tell all your friends about us. You can subscribe

Jeff Battersby (1m 23s)
at a couple of different places in your favorite podcast of a podcast app

Jeff Battersby (1m 28s)
obviously if you're listening to us in that podcast app you can follow us and

Jeff Battersby (1m 33s)
Do whatever you need to but you can also find us at basic AF show calm And you can email us at feedback at basic AF show calm. We are starting to get a little bit of email

Jeff Battersby (1m 45s)
and so please

Jeff Battersby (1m 47s)
Do that by the way, just a front-end reminder

Jeff Battersby (1m 51s)
our main show artwork Randall Martin design

Jeff Battersby (1m 55s)
We highly recommend that you check Randall out. He's killer when it comes to our work as you can see Well, you probably can't see because you don't know what we really look like But those goofy little robots look just like us. I know it's embarrassing and it's maybe a little sad

Jeff Battersby (2m 10s)
It's true and show music

Jeff Battersby (2m 15s)
Psychokinetics that little bump you hear at the beginning and the end of the show

Jeff Battersby (2m 19s)
Psychokinetics also Celsius 7 one of the front men for psychokinetics highly recommend that you check them out on

Jeff Battersby (2m 26s)
all your favorite music streaming applications

Tom Anderson (2m 31s)
Yes, we do. And we do thank them for the artwork, for the music to help us out here. Yeah, good stuff.

Jeff Battersby (2m 34s)
Yeah, definitely good stuff I dance every time I uh, yeah we start I know it's not a lie it's good tune

Tom Anderson (2m 38s)
You do? Nope. We don't lie. We may say dumb things, but we don't lie.

Jeff Battersby (2m 46s)
I don't wanna hear about your imperfections, dude.

Tom Anderson (2m 48s)
Yeah, okay.

Tom Anderson (2m 52s)
We got a lot. All right. So, if you recall, right around Christmas, we did a show with a few of our favorite things where we talked about some.

Jeff Battersby (2m 53s)
Yeah.

The Apps We’re Using

Tom Anderson (3m 1s)
Services, apps, hardware, things, uh, that we liked, uh, that didn't necessarily have to be part of 2023, but it was just stuff that we liked.

Tom Anderson (3m 10s)
And so kind of following up, uh, with that line of thinking, we thought it'd be an interesting show just to kind of talk about where we are individually with, uh, the applications we're using, some of our automations and things like that, um, to see where we are now.

Tom Anderson (3m 28s)
and then what we'll do is later on this...

Tom Anderson (3m 31s)
year maybe revisit and see if any new things have come out that maybe we've migrated to. That's always a temptation is the new Shiny app and and it could be fun but man it could be disruptive. Exactly yeah and so so where we are right now we've got a few categories we're going to go through and we picked these because they're pretty broad and most people can relate to these. I think we all use these in some way, maybe not the automatic.

Jeff Battersby (3m 44s)
Or a friction point, yeah.

Tom Anderson (4m 1s)
But the rest of them, I think that we do so.

Tom Anderson (4m 4s)
Why don't we start off, Jeff, with our messaging or communications, we could call it too, if we wanted.

Messaging Apps

Jeff Battersby (4m 10s)
Sure, yep, all those things.

Jeff Battersby (4m 11s)
Um, so yeah, uh, for me messages, obviously, is I hit you up a couple of times a day,

Jeff Battersby (4m 18s)
usually you and a few other people.

Jeff Battersby (4m 20s)
So I'm still using messages app, um, as my standard go-to for that.

Jeff Battersby (4m 25s)
And that's for all things, uh, texting and otherwise.

Jeff Battersby (4m 29s)
Um, uh, for me, I'm also using teams on occasion.

Jeff Battersby (4m 33s)
Um, I have work related things that require teams as a, uh,

Jeff Battersby (4m 38s)
communication path.

Jeff Battersby (4m 40s)
way. I'd prefer not to use it. It's kind of janky, honestly.

Jeff Battersby (4m 45s)
Uh, but I, I am using that and I'm a little bit on threads.

Jeff Battersby (4m 50s)
I have all but given up, uh, Twitter,

Jeff Battersby (4m 53s)
that thing that the other dude wants to call X.

Tom Anderson (4m 56s)
Yeah, I'm not doing too much on there either at this point.

Jeff Battersby (4m 58s)
Yeah, it's, it's lost it. But I've got to say, even on threads now,

Jeff Battersby (5m 2s)
now that everybody's migrated, not everybody,

Jeff Battersby (5m 4s)
but many people have migrated over from, uh, from Twitter.

Jeff Battersby (5m 10s)
But that, um, in Twitter to, uh, to threads,

Jeff Battersby (5m 13s)
it's starting to get as janky as Twitter was. Um, um, I'm a little,

Tom Anderson (5m 16s)
Yeah, I've noticed that too.

Jeff Battersby (5m 18s)
uh, in a little Addy, you know, a little click this, click this, click this.

Jeff Battersby (5m 23s)
And, uh, I'm not down with it.

Tom Anderson (5m 24s)
Well, and the blowhard political types have come over and well, but I know you so I'd give it a pass. But I will say one thing that I've noticed with threads, not to go too deep into that, but the algorithm there, if you make frequent use of the mute button, it'll shape it up again for you pretty quickly. So if you kind of go down a rabbit hole of stuff, you're like, I don't want to see

Jeff Battersby (5m 28s)
No, that's me, Tom.

Jeff Battersby (5m 49s)
Mm-hmm

Tom Anderson (5m 54s)
this. You can, yeah, you can kind of retrain it and it'll come back and then it gets a little weird again. I think that I forget what the guy's name is from Instagram that runs all that stuff.

Jeff Battersby (5m 55s)
You can mute it

Tom Anderson (6m 4s)
But he even did a post the other day that they, oh yeah, we kind of screwed up the algorithm and some of the recommendations have been janky lately and so forth and so on. But I'm like,

Tom Anderson (6m 12s)
no, you guys screwed up Instagram too. So I don't have much faith. This is going to stay great for too long. I mean, it's pretty good now, but anyway.

Jeff Battersby (6m 15s)
right. One of the things I will say about it, and so I tend to,

Jeff Battersby (6m 24s)
and this was also true on, uh, on Twitter, um, I tend to like to follow creative types. And so, because I do that, you know,

Jeff Battersby (6m 33s)
photographers and writers and people that are doing art and all sorts of things like that, um, because those are the people

Jeff Battersby (6m 39s)
that I'm following, you know, when I see cool photographs or things like that. Those are the people.

Jeff Battersby (6m 45s)
I am finding that that is generally where my feet goes in threads, you know, as I'm seeing that kind of stuff. I am seeing some other because I do follow some political people that, you know, that I basically were people that I was following on on Twitter that I'm now following on thread.

Jeff Battersby (7m 2s)
So I it is good in that way. But, you know, I don't know if you saw recently, and this was kind of a common thing, but, you know, there's it.

Jeff Battersby (7m 15s)
There there is this long group of of people saying, if you press this key long, it goes, you know, I don't even know what it does. But every other every other post is is that.

Tom Anderson (7m 23s)
Oh gosh, yeah.

Jeff Battersby (7m 30s)
And then the other thing is, you know, there's a moment where it's enjoyable and then it kind of gets annoying is, you know, all these hot girls coming on, going following you, you know, and when they're not.

Tom Anderson (7m 45s)
That goes without saying.

Jeff Battersby (7m 46s)
Yeah, right, right. Unfollowed as soon as I saw you, maybe. But yeah, it's. Oh, my gosh, it's still going on.

Tom Anderson (7m 50s)
Yeah, I mute all that stuff.

Tom Anderson (7m 52s)
It's so aggravating.

Tom Anderson (7m 53s)
And then the deer algorithm stuff that kicked in there for a while.

Tom Anderson (7m 56s)
And it's like, "Hey, if you do this post,

Tom Anderson (7m 57s)
it'll train your algorithm."

Tom Anderson (7m 58s)
I'm like, "Oh my gosh, really?"

Jeff Battersby (7m 59s)
Yeah, it's.

Tom Anderson (8m)
And you know, if it pops up here and there, I don't mind.

Tom Anderson (8m 3s)
But like there for a while, that was big.

Tom Anderson (8m 5s)
Like every other thing was that.

Tom Anderson (8m 6s)
And so, you know, went through and muted those.

Tom Anderson (8m 8s)
And it's, you know, it's stupid.

Tom Anderson (8m 10s)
You have to mute stuff like that to get it out of there.

Tom Anderson (8m 13s)
And then the For You page is harder to get to

Tom Anderson (8m 18s)
if you don't know it's there because they don't make it obvious.

Tom Anderson (8m 20s)
So you default to that following.

Tom Anderson (8m 22s)
If you swipe, it'll take you over to it.

Tom Anderson (8m 23s)
And also if you tap up there at the top,

Tom Anderson (8m 25s)
it'll switch to it too.

Jeff Battersby (8m 26s)
Yeah, so that's that parts. All right. I like it

Tom Anderson (8m 28s)
But I had some good discussions on there with some techie people.

Jeff Battersby (8m 31s)
Yeah, yeah, it's it it it we'll see my feeling is by the end of this year it's gonna fall off the rails

Tom Anderson (8m 32s)
And so it's been decent.

Tom Anderson (8m 38s)
Probably.

Jeff Battersby (8m 38s)
That is that is my feeling by the way. I I did

Tom Anderson (8m 40s)
It is a meta property, so.

Jeff Battersby (8m 43s)
Zuckerberg can't do anything, right?

Jeff Battersby (8m 46s)
Which means he's gonna mute this podcast. So there you go. He's pushing pushes down to the body. He wasn't listening to us. I know

Tom Anderson (8m 49s)
Nah, he didn't care about us. We're too small.

Jeff Battersby (8m 53s)
The other thing that I am using.

Jeff Battersby (8m 56s)
Is linked in, although dude, I don't like that either.

Jeff Battersby (9m 1s)
Hey, it's a little bit of messaging on that.

Jeff Battersby (9m 5s)
I am mostly a stalker, I guess I, you know, I go through stuff and look at it.

Jeff Battersby (9m 12s)
But truthfully, my main sources of communication are messages.

Jeff Battersby (9m 17s)
That's that's what I'm using.

Tom Anderson (9m 19s)
Yeah, that's big. That's big for me, too.

Tom Anderson (9m 23s)
That's where most of it happens to some on Instagram with, you know, some work people on the Subaru page that I do have kind of casually made some acquaintances there that I'll do that with here and there as they post stuff. And most of the messaging there is some type of a comment to story post or something, or something they've sent over that they thought was funny, whatever don't use.

Jeff Battersby (9m 40s)
Right. Which by the way, your, your, uh,

Jeff Battersby (9m 45s)
Subi, uh, Instagram page is great. It's, it really,

Jeff Battersby (9m 50s)
it's fun to see what people do. I have to say,

Jeff Battersby (9m 53s)
so that's a shout out to you and recommending a follow here

Tom Anderson (9m 58s)
Well, thanks, my friend! Yeah, yeah, head over there.

Jeff Battersby (9m 59s)
on, on the grand man. Um, do you have any use for,

Jeff Battersby (10m 3s)
do you use WhatsApp for anything?

Tom Anderson (10m 4s)
I don't. I know outside of the US, that thing is huge. I know there's some people that work that use it that have helped out with it. It looks chaotic to me when I see it, but I know tons of people use it. That's like the default for a lot of people is that, particularly outside of the US. So yeah, I haven't used that much. Avoid Facebook Messenger.

Jeff Battersby (10m 24s)
Sure.

Jeff Battersby (10m 25s)
Yo, dude.

Tom Anderson (10m 28s)
I mean, I go on Facebook to look at different groups and everything, so it's not like I say I don't use Facebook. It's just that I just don't want another communications channel,

Tom Anderson (10m 37s)
so I just don't start any conversations there. Sometimes, I don't know if any of them listen.

Tom Anderson (10m 42s)
Friends will send me messages there. I ignore it. So apologies if that's you, but I do.

Jeff Battersby (10m 46s)
Mm-hmm

Tom Anderson (10m 49s)
And then they usually follow up on messages anyway.

Jeff Battersby (10m 51s)
Yeah, I've got it installed in my phone and I have a couple of clients that for whatever reason actually one of them

Jeff Battersby (10m 59s)
I know he's a

Jeff Battersby (11m 1s)
in an Egyptian guy that I do work for who has family in Egypt, so

Jeff Battersby (11m 6s)
That uh, he'll he'll hit me up there

Jeff Battersby (11m 10s)
On occasion and I will immediately

Jeff Battersby (11m 12s)
Bounce it over to message [laughing]

Tom Anderson (11m 14s)
Yeah, at work, we use Slack all day, a little.

Jeff Battersby (11m 16s)
So.

Jeff Battersby (11m 19s)
Oh gosh, how do you do that?

Jeff Battersby (11m 22s)
Slack bribes me bonkers.

Tom Anderson (11m 24s)
We've been in that since like 2016, but we've got some automations and workflows tied into it.

Jeff Battersby (11m 26s)
No, good for you.

Tom Anderson (11m 32s)
So like our ticketing system, if VIP users submit a ticket, it drops the thing in there and our voicemails go in there and we've got a bunch of other stuff in there.

Jeff Battersby (11m 39s)
Really?

Tom Anderson (11m 41s)
Yeah.

Tom Anderson (11m 42s)
From the help desk phone number.

Tom Anderson (11m 43s)
Yeah.

Tom Anderson (11m 44s)
And then as the technicians at the help desk process the voicemail, like they just put a little emoji checkbox underneath of it.

Tom Anderson (11m 51s)
So we know it's done.

Tom Anderson (11m 52s)
So yeah, we use that a lot.

Jeff Battersby (11m 55s)  
• Interesting.

Jeff Battersby (11m 55s)  
• I have had to use that, and I'm telling you,

Jeff Battersby (11m 59s)
that's all thumbs.

Jeff Battersby (12m)
You know what?

Jeff Battersby (12m 1s)
All thumbs for me.

Jeff Battersby (12m 2s)
The other thing that I use, I wasn't thinking about it,

Jeff Battersby (12m 4s)
but I have a writing group that I'm in from people that I went to grad school with,

Jeff Battersby (12m 9s)
and we use Discord a ton.

Jeff Battersby (12m 12s)
And so I have a couple of other Discords that I'm on.

Jeff Battersby (12m 17s)
I'm on a Discord for the Go game,

Jeff Battersby (12m 20s)
if you're familiar with Go, which is really good.

Jeff Battersby (12m 23s)
I like that.

Jeff Battersby (12m 25s)
But I do use Discord a ton with that little cohort

Jeff Battersby (12m 32s)
of people that I had in grad school.

Jeff Battersby (12m 33s)
And it's kind of fun.

Jeff Battersby (12m 35s)
I mean, we do all sorts of things.

Jeff Battersby (12m 37s)
Obviously, it's writing-related,

Jeff Battersby (12m 38s)
but there are pet photos in there and stuff like that.

Jeff Battersby (12m 42s)
But these are friends, and it's a very small Discord.

Tom Anderson (12m 47s)
Right. Yeah, there are a couple of other apps that like craft that that app that we use there for a while. They had a Slack channel that was actually pretty good. And I think they still have it,

Jeff Battersby (12m 47s)
So it's...

Jeff Battersby (12m 53s)
Yeah.

Jeff Battersby (12m 55s)
Yes.

Tom Anderson (12m 59s)
but they've tried to move most of the community stuff over to Circle, which I've got an account.

Jeff Battersby (13m 3s)
What is circle? I've never even heard of that.

Tom Anderson (13m 4s)
Circle is a community platform, basically, where you pay, you spin up your community there and you can do groups, different types of groups and everything.

Tom Anderson (13m 17s)
Where was I going with that? Oh, the newsletter service that I use,

Tom Anderson (13m 21s)
they just started a Slack community too. Beehive, they've got one there.

Jeff Battersby (13m 25s)
Yeah, there's so many of these things, it's like too many.

Tom Anderson (13m 26s)
Yeah, there's a lot.

Jeff Battersby (13m 30s)
And everybody trying to differentiate themselves a little bit.

Jeff Battersby (13m 32s)
But Discord, I do like to.

Tom Anderson (13m 33s)
Yeah, Discord is a big one. And I think it's for live streaming stuff, like Twitch is one.

Jeff Battersby (13m 34s)
Discord, for that one purpose.

Tom Anderson (13m 42s)
I've never used that. I know it's big with gaming community and everything, but I've never used it.

Jeff Battersby (13m 44s)
One of my daughters was on Twitch for a while, you know, streaming games, but...

Tom Anderson (13m 48s)
Yeah, all right, so I think that covers all of our communications stuff.

Jeff Battersby (13m 52s)
Messaging!

Tom Anderson (13m 53s)
Although you could draw a dotted line to this email.

Email Apps

Tom Anderson (13m 57s)
I just use the mail app at home, use it at work.

Tom Anderson (14m)
Yeah, it gets the job done, is it great?

Tom Anderson (14m 3s)
No, sometimes I jump over to the Gmail interface for work, cuz that's what we use there.

Tom Anderson (14m 9s)
Yeah, I don't particularly care for it either, but the search is way better.

Tom Anderson (14m 15s)
So I used that for when I needed.

Tom Anderson (14m 17s)
really find something, but that's a try not to do any more email than absolutely need to.

Jeff Battersby (14m 22s)
Yeah, email definitely that's a major form of communication for me. So I'm using the mail app - I do use

Jeff Battersby (14m 30s)
Outlook for On my phone and actually for a long time. That's all I was using on my phone I was using Outlook instead of the mail app

Jeff Battersby (14m 39s)
But a mail for my personal stuff Outlook on my phone for work stuff

Jeff Battersby (14m 45s)
It's okay

Jeff Battersby (14m 47s)
you know, it's I don't know.

Jeff Battersby (14m 53s)
Mail is mail, it's like, I also use mailbox mail where I walk down to the end of my driveway and

Tom Anderson (14m 54s)
Right.

Jeff Battersby (15m 1s)
get that too. And it's kind of similar to that, I get a couple of things that I really want in that mailbox down at the end of the driveway. But mostly it's junk and that's the same thing that mail tends to be too. And I've got really good filtering stuff, but man, I'm telling you,

Jeff Battersby (15m 20s)
it tends to be a.

Jeff Battersby (15m 22s)
Everybody thinks that they, that they, because they have your email address, have the right to send you crapola and that, oh my gosh.

Tom Anderson (15m 30s)
And it's a ton of it. Yeah. Yep. So mail app for both. I think that's a good idea for you to do a little bit of differentiation there to keep outlook for work and personal stuff in mail.

Jeff Battersby (15m 43s)
Yeah, exactly.

Tom Anderson (15m 44s)
Yep. All right. So in terms of the next thing that we have on the list here,

Tom Anderson (15m 50s)
task management, reminders, projects, that kind of thing. So more, we'll say this productivity nerd stuff. But where are you with that?

Task Managers & Calendars

Jeff Battersby (16m)
Um, so it's interesting in the last probably three months, uh, I have decided to kind of go native, um, which is to say, I'm rolling myself back to most of the native apps in Mac iOS and iOS, I've jumped the calendar.

Jeff Battersby (16m 18s)
I've been on fantastic Cal for probably three years.

Jeff Battersby (16m 21s)
Um, I know you have said for yourself, uh, that fantastic Cal is still super valuable in terms of being able to, you know, break it into different groups.

Jeff Battersby (16m 30s)
I was starting not to see the value-add, the calendar app now uses natural language, so you can do the same kinds of things that were really good in Fantastical and not available in the calendar app.

Jeff Battersby (16m 47s)
So Reminders has replaced, I was using Anylist for a long time, and I really liked Anylist,

Jeff Battersby (16m 57s)
It was really good.

Jeff Battersby (16m 58s)
We had the ability to share.

Jeff Battersby (17m 1s)
Share those various mostly grocery shopping, but in fact, not even just mostly 100% grocery shopping now.

Jeff Battersby (17m 10s)
It's pretty easy to use a Siri to add items to the grocery list.

Jeff Battersby (17m 15s)
And so that is what I've moved to so didn't make any sense for me to pay for any list anymore.

Jeff Battersby (17m 20s)
So I have not done that.

Jeff Battersby (17m 23s)
So those kinds of things I'm using, you know, the calendar app reminders app.

Jeff Battersby (17m 30s)
I do still occasionally use sessions when I have a lot of things and I need to kind of get zeroed in.

Jeff Battersby (17m 36s)
But I know you drop sessions altogether.

Jeff Battersby (17m 40s)
And it sessions for me is really just a good way for me to be able to see what I've been working on the past.

Jeff Battersby (17m 47s)
But if I don't use it every day, it doesn't give me much benefit in that sense.

Jeff Battersby (17m 52s)
So yeah, mostly native for me saving on those subscriptions, which is a plus and that's a ticket.

Tom Anderson (17m 58s)
Mm-hmm

Tom Anderson (18m)
So like you mentioned there with sessions, I tried it out It's it's a nice app and I'm not gonna say anything negative about it. It just didn't work out for me

Jeff Battersby (18m 6s)
No, it's great. Yeah.

Tom Anderson (18m 7s)
I found that I I did like the timer piece, but I could do that with a you know the watch

Tom Anderson (18m 14s)
Yeah, and I didn't go back and look really at I mean I would look at the chart that it would give where you could kind of see where your time was split up But I didn't really look at oh my god. Do I care that times in the past? I can't do anything about it

Tom Anderson (18m 28s)
And so I just kind of dropped it

Tom Anderson (18m 30s)
but in that, you know, we heard about that in that show we did with Adam Olson on productivity there last summer and

Tom Anderson (18m 36s)
One of the things we also talked about on that show was what I was using for

Tom Anderson (18m 41s)
Like my task list and things like that and I think at that point I had moved to reminders

Tom Anderson (18m 48s)
Primarily because it's kind of got that

Tom Anderson (18m 51s)
Advantage of being so tightly integrated with Siri So if you use the watch or anything like that to set to, you know, remind me.

Jeff Battersby (18m 55s)
Yes.

Jeff Battersby (18m 58s)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Anderson (18m 58s)
need to do something when I get home.

Tom Anderson (18m 59s)
Um, but I did use it and it was okay, but the more I found that the more I put in,

Tom Anderson (19m 5s)
it just got, there's a little bit more friction there than I want.

Tom Anderson (19m 9s)
In fact, I used another app, remind me faster to do the input of the reminders into reminders because it.

Jeff Battersby (19m 19s)
What?!

Tom Anderson (19m 20s)
Yeah, because it was too clicky and it was just, I don't like the way that they've got it set up to like put stuff in.

Jeff Battersby (19m 28s)
Yeah, okay, fair.

Tom Anderson (19m 28s)
And so, I'd started using that watch, or that watch, good Lord, that app on the phone.

Tom Anderson (19m 36s)
It was actually an iOS, iPadOS app, but it works on Mac too.

Tom Anderson (19m 41s)
And so, it was just way easier on the phone to get things in if you weren't using Siri to do it with that.

Jeff Battersby (19m 47s)
Sure.

Tom Anderson (19m 48s)
But I did go back to Things.

Jeff Battersby (19m 50s)
Okay.

Tom Anderson (19m 51s)
It's Things 3 still.

Tom Anderson (19m 52s)
I haven't done a Things 4 yet, not a thing on Things 4 yet.

Jeff Battersby (19m 54s)
They haven't done a thing.

Tom Anderson (19m 58s)
And so, there's just something, they've done such a nice job of making it, you know, even if it gets loaded up, you can filter it and use tags and all that kind of stuff to slice it down to just what you want to look at.

Tom Anderson (20m 10s)
And it works well with shortcuts, which we'll talk about in a little bit.

Tom Anderson (20m 15s)
And so, I've been using that.

Tom Anderson (20m 16s)
I was using that for personal and work, but we are getting heavy into Asana at work, which which is a pretty good Teams project management app.

Tom Anderson (20m 28s)
So to really learn and understand how that application works,

Tom Anderson (20m 32s)
I split those off like you did with mail,

Tom Anderson (20m 34s)
where I'm putting just work stuff in Asana,

Tom Anderson (20m 36s)
keeping my personal stuff and things,

Tom Anderson (20m 38s)
and so I'm working on that.

Tom Anderson (20m 40s)
Like I said, I still use reminders a little bit because we have a shared groceries list,

Tom Anderson (20m 44s)
and I can use the watch to drop stuff in there.

Tom Anderson (20m 46s)
Of course, in CarPlay,

Tom Anderson (20m 47s)
if I think of something, I'll just use.

Tom Anderson (20m 49s)
You can use things with that stuff,

Tom Anderson (20m 51s)
but that always seemed clumsy to me to go,

Tom Anderson (20m 53s)
"Hey, using things remind me to do this."

Tom Anderson (20m 56s)
like man this is weird.

Jeff Battersby (20m 57s)
Yeah, yeah.

Tom Anderson (20m 58s)
And so I just kind of live with it like that.

Jeff Battersby (21m)
And that's the same thing,

Jeff Battersby (21m 1s)
that was the same thing with any list for me.

Jeff Battersby (21m 2s)
You could do that, but man, it was not fun.

Jeff Battersby (21m 6s)
The grocery list feature now,

Jeff Battersby (21m 7s)
the way that Apple's done that in Reminder is brilliant.

Jeff Battersby (21m 10s)
It works, it works really well,

Jeff Battersby (21m 13s)
really easy to get those things in.

Tom Anderson (21m 15s)
You're using the sorting. Do you use the sorting at all in that?

Jeff Battersby (21m 15s)
And as you said,

Jeff Battersby (21m 19s)
I haven't even looked at that.

Jeff Battersby (21m 21s)
I don't really care about the sorting.

Jeff Battersby (21m 23s)
So it groups everything automatically, you know.

Tom Anderson (21m 25s)
Right.

Tom Anderson (21m 26s)
Well, that's what I think what I was talking about.

Jeff Battersby (21m 26s)
Which is great.

Jeff Battersby (21m 27s)
I'll have to look at sorting.

Jeff Battersby (21m 28s)
I haven't, I don't even use it on my phone.

Jeff Battersby (21m 30s)
Yeah, yeah, the grouping, but it does that automatically.

Tom Anderson (21m 30s)
It's like, yeah, right.

Jeff Battersby (21m 32s)
So it puts that stuff in there.

Jeff Battersby (21m 35s)
And the nice thing about it is I don't walk around the grocery store with my phone out when I'm shopping.

Jeff Battersby (21m 42s)
I use my watch, you know.

Jeff Battersby (21m 44s)
I bring that up on my watch and look at it that way and have been doing that ever since I was using any list.

Jeff Battersby (21m 53s)
But the big upside is.

Jeff Battersby (21m 55s)
You run out of peppercorns or whatever it is you're, you're looking in the,

Jeff Battersby (21m 58s)
you know, and I've got a home pot right in the, uh, in the kitchen area.

Jeff Battersby (22m 3s)
So just say that and bang it's on the list. I mean, it's, it's in the moment.

Tom Anderson (22m 4s)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Jeff Battersby (22m 7s)
And that's one of the things that I really, really like about that.

Jeff Battersby (22m 11s)
So I don't have to think about it again. It shows up on the list.

Jeff Battersby (22m 13s)
And the other thing is, uh, the grocery feature, the shopping list feature in,

Jeff Battersby (22m 19s)
in, uh, the reminders app, actually, once you disappear something,

Jeff Battersby (22m 23s)
it disappears.

Jeff Battersby (22m 25s)
And it's really simple as far as I'm concerned. That's really what I use reminders for anyway, except for occasionally, you know, remind me to eat a sandwich or something in the afternoon because I'm disinclined to eat anything. So, like, I haven't even had breakfast yet. And it's what's going to be noon by the time we finish. Yeah. Oh, good for you. Can I come over? Okay, cool. What kind of pancakes?

Tom Anderson (22m 43s)
I got some pancakes coming up here pretty soon.

Tom Anderson (22m 50s)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Anderson (22m 51s)
Sure.

Tom Anderson (22m 52s)
Uh, just buttermilk.

Jeff Battersby (22m 52s)
What kind of pancakes?

Tom Anderson (22m 55s)
Yeah, classic.

Jeff Battersby (22m 55s)
Yeah, dude, all right, no blueberries, no chocolate chips, no.

Tom Anderson (22m 57s)
I got a big chunk of butter and some maple syrup.

Tom Anderson (23m 1s)
Yeah.

Jeff Battersby (23m 1s)
All right, perfect, all right, good, I'll be over.

Jeff Battersby (23m 4s)
So yeah, anyway, good things, but yeah, those are the typicals.

Jeff Battersby (23m 11s)
So what about you for writing notes, any of the office stuff?

Notes & Office Suites

Tom Anderson (23m 18s)
So, for personal stuff, I have settled nicely and I'd say pretty comfortably into the Bear Notes app.

Tom Anderson (23m 25s)
That was one of my things for the things we liked in 2023 because they did version two,

Tom Anderson (23m 30s)
which got a little bit cleaner with the markdown stuff and they added some other things to it that I liked.

Tom Anderson (23m 35s)
And so I use that, although I do, again, because of some of the limitations with Bear, like it doesn't have shared notes.

Tom Anderson (23m 43s)
There's no web version or anything like that.

Jeff Battersby (23m 45s)
Mm-hmm

Tom Anderson (23m 46s)
I think they're working on a web.

Tom Anderson (23m 48s)
thing maybe.

Tom Anderson (23m 49s)
Um, but yeah, and we, I do still news, I use notes here and there.

Tom Anderson (23m 55s)
Um, like our show notes for the show, we've got, you know, some shared folder, I guess you could call it.

Jeff Battersby (23m 56s)
Yeah, which worked great, by the way.

Tom Anderson (23m 59s)
It does.

Tom Anderson (24m)
Yeah.

Tom Anderson (24m 1s)
It works great for that.

Tom Anderson (24m 2s)
I've got, uh, like, you know, around Christmas time we had a shared list of gifts and things that we were going to pick up.

Tom Anderson (24m 7s)
Um, I don't use it a ton.

Tom Anderson (24m 10s)
Like there's, I don't know, there's still some things with it that I find kind of wonky,

Tom Anderson (24m 14s)
but um, but it's a personal thing.

Tom Anderson (24m 16s)
That's the deal.

Tom Anderson (24m 18s)
Tons of people use it, love it.

Tom Anderson (24m 19s)
It's fine.

Tom Anderson (24m 19s)
It's a great app.

Tom Anderson (24m 20s)
I think, I think it's good.

Jeff Battersby (24m 20s)
Yeah, yeah, I think and Apple keeps on improving it

Tom Anderson (24m 23s)
They do.

Jeff Battersby (24m 24s)
That's the really good thing. The only thing I find about it and I use notes all the time

Jeff Battersby (24m 28s)
Is that it can become overwhelming the organization?

Tom Anderson (24m 34s)
Right, and I use Google Docs at work here and there.

Tom Anderson (24m 38s)
Like I don't use it a ton because I just don't do a ton of that kind of stuff.

Jeff Battersby (24m 42s)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Anderson (24m 42s)
More sheets.

Tom Anderson (24m 44s)
And again, that's because of the collaborative stuff we could do with that.

Tom Anderson (24m 47s)
I'd prefer to work in Excel if it's just something that I'm working on myself.

Tom Anderson (24m 51s)
And then for personal stuff, I just use numbers

Tom Anderson (24m 55s)
from a simple spreadsheets that I need.

Tom Anderson (24m 57s)
Don't use pages a whole lot.

Tom Anderson (24m 58s)
Again, nothing wrong with it.

Tom Anderson (25m)
I like it. I just don't really have much of a use for it.

Jeff Battersby (25m 2s)  
• Yeah, so again, in our favorite things episode,

Jeff Battersby (25m 8s)
I said Highland Pro, that is my go-to.

Jeff Battersby (25m 11s)
Highland Pro being the writing app that I use,

Jeff Battersby (25m 13s)
uses Markdown, but it's straightforward, you know, text.

Jeff Battersby (25m 18s)
That's the beauty of it, transferable to anything.

Jeff Battersby (25m 20s)
So, you know, when we blow up in the apocalypse,

Jeff Battersby (25m 26s)
you know, as long as you have the ability to read ASCII,

Jeff Battersby (25m 29s)
you can see what it is.

Tom Anderson (25m 30s)
You don't have your text files.

Jeff Battersby (25m 32s)
You can see what it is that I'm doing.

Tom Anderson (25m 32s)
It's all I got left in my text files.

Jeff Battersby (25m 34s)
Yeah, right, that's all that matters, all right.

Jeff Battersby (25m 38s)
Same with me on Notes app, that's an everyday thing.

Jeff Battersby (25m 40s)
So I'm not really using anything else.

Jeff Battersby (25m 41s)
No bears, no, you know, nothing like that.

Jeff Battersby (25m 44s)
I actually have a physical whiteboard

Jeff Battersby (25m 47s)
and I use that on the regular,

Jeff Battersby (25m 50s)
particularly for larger scale writing projects that I'm working on.

Jeff Battersby (25m 55s)
That is the tool du jour.

Jeff Battersby (25m 59s)
helps me think in ways that.

Jeff Battersby (26m 2s)
know, writing things on a, on a, um, in a text app, you know, like notes doesn't,

Jeff Battersby (26m 9s)
although I do that as well, you know, uh, moments of inspiration in the middle of the night, I'll sometimes pop on my phone.

Jeff Battersby (26m 15s)
I know that's not the best idea because it wakes you up, but, um, Yeah, right.

Jeff Battersby (26m 20s)
I just pop stuff in there.

Jeff Battersby (26m 21s)
And, and lately have been able to use Siri to do that.

Jeff Battersby (26m 24s)
So, you know, because I do have a home pod near the bed, so I'm just saying, you know, something to that effect and let it add it.

Jeff Battersby (26m 30s)
And then I'll adjust it later.

Jeff Battersby (26m 32s)
That definitely is a, uh, is, is something that I'm using.

Jeff Battersby (26m 36s)
Um, I do occasionally have to use Google docs.

Jeff Battersby (26m 39s)
Some of the people I write for require that as a central tool.

Jeff Battersby (26m 43s)
So often what I'll do is write it in Highland pro and then move it to, uh,

Tom Anderson (26m 47s)
Right. Yep.

Jeff Battersby (26m 48s)
move it to Google docs because I prefer the interface, um, Numbers and pages,

Jeff Battersby (26m 54s)
not so much keynote when I was training, I used keynote a ton, you know, when I was doing Apple certified training classes.

Jeff Battersby (27m 2s)
time I taught. But numbers and pages, I do have a tendency to use. I'm stage managing a show right now and I use pages for rehearsal reports, a lot of automation, which we're going to talk about automation in a minute, but a lot of automation related to that built in. I've got some things set up which I'll talk about when we hop over there in a couple seconds. The other thing that I'm using using is numbers for.

Jeff Battersby (27m 32s)
Uh, rehearsal calls.

Jeff Battersby (27m 34s)
So I've call sheets, um, eventually, you know, coming up in a couple of weeks,

Jeff Battersby (27m 39s)
all the actors will need to be off book.

Jeff Battersby (27m 41s)
And so what I do is, uh, I have a, uh, essentially line notes, you know, when people call for lines or when, you know, they mix up the way that the lines are in the script, what I've done is created a little spreadsheet and I, uh, print that out basically and I do the same.

Jeff Battersby (28m 2s)
thing for rehearsal reports. I print it out so I have a pad. I create my own little notepads,

Jeff Battersby (28m 7s)
full-sized, eight and a half by 11 sheets that I've basically glued together like you would one of those old-school notepads where you tear stuff off. It's great. It works really well and so my assistant stage manager will, when people call for lines, will write those down, you know, what page it was, what actor it was, what, you know, where it was in the line and what it is that they've done wrong and then after every single one of those rehearsals,

Jeff Battersby (28m 37s)
I type those in, those notes in about their lines into the spreadsheet, into that particular tab in numbers and then I can arrange and group them by the actor. So I can use the sort features to say, you know, this actor, this page and then I email that out to the entire cast so they can go through, find themselves, you know,

Jeff Battersby (29m 6s)
on the page. It works really brilliantly. This is something I've done over probably the last three or four years and I know this is way more information than anybody needs about what I'm doing with numbers but it's a great tool. I use it all the time for that kind of stuff. So yeah, exactly. It works out really well.

Tom Anderson (29m 20s)
Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, that's good. Good use case.

Tom Anderson (29m 24s)
I like it. Now our next section is automations.

Tom Anderson (29m 26s)
Do you have any automations around that specific thing?

Apps for Automation

Jeff Battersby (29m 28s)  
• Yeah, I do.

Jeff Battersby (29m 29s)
So, these.

Jeff Battersby (29m 30s)
these...

Jeff Battersby (29m 32s)
You know, these all get emailed out to various groups.

Jeff Battersby (29m 35s)
So what I've done, as you know, I use...

Jeff Battersby (29m 38s)
I use Keyboard Maestro for a lot of stuff.

Tom Anderson (29m 40s)
Yeah Bye.

Jeff Battersby (29m 40s)
These are...

Jeff Battersby (29m 41s)
I know you think the interface on that's a little funky,

Jeff Battersby (29m 43s)
and I'm not going to argue with you.

Jeff Battersby (29m 44s)
It's not as clean-looking as Shortcuts is.

Jeff Battersby (29m 48s)
But what I've done is I've created a bunch of automations there that, you know, kick off the various emails that keep account of the rehearsals,

Jeff Battersby (29m 55s)
and say, for in the case of the rehearsal report that I was talking about,

Jeff Battersby (30m 2s)
it's got a table in that pages document and I copy that information and it will spit that information into a

Jeff Battersby (30m 11s)
searchable format rather than putting a PDF in the in the email it'll spit it into a

Jeff Battersby (30m 17s)
Into the email that goes all to the print to all to all of the production staff I'm speaking some other language than English presently

Jeff Battersby (30m 26s)
And and then addresses that and then sends it out with a rehearsal report number in it

Jeff Battersby (30m 32s)
Manually filling in the information other than you know A couple of things that are automated like nothing to report for a particular, you know It's like the scenic crew or the lighting crew or something like that

Tom Anderson (30m 41s)
Right. Nice.

Jeff Battersby (30m 42s)
And then it kicks that into the email. So yeah, I use I use keyboard maestro

Jeff Battersby (30m 47s)
Every day for a variety of things. That's that's my regular

Jeff Battersby (30m 52s)
Occasionally a little bit as shortcuts app, but very little

Tom Anderson (30m 56s)
Yeah, and that's something I don't use a ton.

Tom Anderson (30m 59s)
I have come up with a couple of things that I'll do with it.

Tom Anderson (31m 2s)
And I did go back to the Freeform app over the holiday break.

Jeff Battersby (31m 7s)
Yeah, Freeform. Yeah. Yeah, I did. I, you know, it's usually, I do use it to like handwrite stuff. How do you use that with automation?

Tom Anderson (31m 7s)
Yep.

Tom Anderson (31m 8s)
Yeah, see, you even had to think about it.

Tom Anderson (31m 10s)
You're like, "What the heck is he talking about?"

Tom Anderson (31m 16s)
Well not with automation per se.

Tom Anderson (31m 18s)
But what I did is I thought, well, you know, so I was working on a process for the Subaru thing that I do and I've got a news.

Tom Anderson (31m 26s)
Letter I do with that and there's part of that that's a feature of a subscriber, right?

Tom Anderson (31m 31s)
So it's like a user feature and so I've got to coordinate that with them where I send them some information.

Tom Anderson (31m 36s)
I need to know when they need to have their information back, when it's going to publish,

Tom Anderson (31m 40s)
what the edition number is, all that kind of stuff, which has been a manual process.

Tom Anderson (31m 44s)
And so I took the Freeform app because of its kind of infinite canvas there and just went crazy with brainstorming and workflows and sketching out stuff and I actually came up with a process that seems to.

Tom Anderson (31m 56s)
And so, uh, and then I, I went from that and, and along the same lines though is, so I need content for that.

Tom Anderson (32m 5s)
We need content for this show, content for the newsletter and everything.

Jeff Battersby (32m 7s)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Anderson (32m 8s)
So I made like a content farm collector of sorts.

Jeff Battersby (32m 8s)
Oh, interesting.

Tom Anderson (32m 11s)
Um, so it's a tied to the share cheat.

Tom Anderson (32m 14s)
So if I'm looking at something during the week that I see looks relative, you know,

Tom Anderson (32m 18s)
long as I could be relative to something for this or the Subaru thing, uh, hit the share button.

Tom Anderson (32m 23s)
And there are some text prompts that I've built into that.

Tom Anderson (32m 26s)
This is like the first one says, why does this matter?

Tom Anderson (32m 28s)
And it lets me put what I'm thinking about it in at the time.

Tom Anderson (32m 31s)
Um, and then what's it for?

Tom Anderson (32m 33s)
Like, is it for a newsletter, podcast, website, social posts?

Tom Anderson (32m 37s)
And I can choose all four if I want.

Tom Anderson (32m 40s)
And then finally it's like, is it for the Apple stuff or the Subaru stuff?

Tom Anderson (32m 43s)
And then the final step is it adds it to a number sheet in the correct tab.

Tom Anderson (32m 47s)
It links back out to that source.

Tom Anderson (32m 49s)
And then what I can do, and it sets the default status of it as idea.

Tom Anderson (32m 53s)
And then later on in the week, I can go back and see.

Tom Anderson (32m 56s)
the stuff I've collected, start scheduling posts out and all that kind of thing.

Jeff Battersby (33m)
All right, pretty cool.

Tom Anderson (33m 1s)
So nerdy, nobody cares, but maybe it'll spur an idea.

Jeff Battersby (33m 3s)
Yeah, well, you know, it's--

Tom Anderson (33m 5s)
Maybe you've got some process that is annoying and it wasn't very hard.

Tom Anderson (33m 10s)
Like, and I'll be honest for that one.

Tom Anderson (33m 13s)
I used a chat TPT.

Jeff Battersby (33m 16s)
What?

Tom Anderson (33m 16s)
I did cause I knew what I wanted to do.

Jeff Battersby (33m 17s)
Not you, Tom.

Tom Anderson (33m 19s)
And I was like, okay, well let's, let's see if it knows.

Tom Anderson (33m 23s)
I didn't know if it would or not, but it was like, oh yes, use this, this, this.

Tom Anderson (33m 26s)
I didn't quite use it exactly the way it said, but it got me started.

Tom Anderson (33m 31s)
Yeah.

Tom Anderson (33m 31s)
So that's the, the automations piece.

Tom Anderson (33m 33s)
Um, again, I don't use shortcuts for much more than those couple of things.

Tom Anderson (33m 37s)
Um, I think it's better for little short bits of things that you just want to do on a, on some type of repetitive basis.

Tom Anderson (33m 44s)
Maybe you want it to create a daily note in your writing app so you can log what you've done for the day or something, but all right.

Jeff Battersby (33m 51s)
All right, Tom. No, we burned another 30 plus minutes for everybody

Tom Anderson (33m 52s)
Anything else?

Close

Tom Anderson (33m 56s)
We did. It goes fast.

Jeff Battersby (33m 58s)
Yeah, it does Hopefully it goes fast for those of you listening

Jeff Battersby (34m 1s)
as a reminder if you've stuck around this long if you're if you're walk or you're

Jeff Battersby (34m 7s)
You're work out at the gym has has gone this far

Jeff Battersby (34m 12s)
As we said at the beginning like follow tell your friends about us. We really appreciate that that you can find us at basicafshow.com.

Jeff Battersby (34m 22s)
There's always a way for you to tell other people about it.

Jeff Battersby (34m 28s)
So we'd love it if you did that.

Jeff Battersby (34m 29s)
Anything else, Tom?

Tom Anderson (34m 30s)
No, I don't believe it is. I think that is everything for this one. So we thank you for being here

Tom Anderson (34m 36s)
Have a great day. Great night, and we'll talk to you next time

Jeff Battersby (34m 39s)
See ya.