#031 Productivity Applications

In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I am sharing many of my most utilized and favorite applications across my phone and computer. My hope is that a few of these recommendation help bring increased productivity, scheduling, communication, continued education, and peace of mind in the new year.

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Key Takeaways

• Audit the apps on your phone and computer for productivity, scheduling, communication, and continued education.
• The right tools should bring peace of mind heading into a new year, not more noise.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.

[00:00:00] Sport science, strength and conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show.

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[00:02:19] Hey everybody, today on the Decoding Excellence Show I am bringing you another random show, but this show is going to be centered around applications and technologies that I've been using in my own personal life to deliver a lot of value in 2019. So some of these are productivity apps, some are note-taking sort of applications or modalities that I use for there. But others are some communication tools, some project management tools, and some things that I am exploring from a continuing education standpoint to really maximize my 2019. So without further ado, here's my show

[00:02:56] On my favorite applications of 2019. Hey everybody, this is Adam Ringler and welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show. This is your first show, then welcome to the show. Hopefully I don't disappoint you. And if you are a returning listener, welcome back. And thanks for your continued support and thanks for continuing to listen to the Decoding Excellence Show. Today is a fun show, hopefully a fun show. I am going to discuss a lot of my favorite applications that deliver a lot of value to me. I have my phone in hand and as well as that, I have a few notes sitting in front of

[00:03:39] Me about some of my most favorite applications, things that allow me and my team to stay connected, to stay organized, to stay productive. And if you're going into the new year, then maybe this might be a great podcast to listen to, to give you some advice, some tools, maybe some of the very principal tactics that I use to stay connected. So without further ado, let's go ahead and just start getting into it. My number one application that I use and also have to set limits on for my own self is Slack. It's no surprise that Slack comes in probably number one of my most use applications.

[00:04:23] It is a communication app. It is my sort of form of email. It is my way of collecting thoughts. It is my way of organizing automatic pings and notifications from APIs and different workflow connectors. So it's a great way of staying in touch, although some articles recently in, I'm trying to think of what publication talks about Slack as being the productivity killer. I disagree. I think any tool that you use is all 100% dependent on how you use it for good or for bad. But the idea of Slack was a reduces email. It was supposed to be more of a form of instant messenger.

[00:05:09] If you remember the AOL days or the 56K modem that's literally on the intro of my show every single day, it was supposed to be like instant messenger, if you will. And it has invaded my world. And I love and continue to use Slack on a daily basis. Obviously you have to set some limits on it, right? So maybe some hours of the days where you don't get notifications and Slack has that functionality. You can certainly do that. But enough about Slack. Let's continue moving on. Huge list of things I want to continue to talk about. So outside of Slack from a form of

[00:05:50] Communication messenger for our team, another thing I use all the time is with no surprise, Trello. Trello is a sort of moving to do list. It's a scrum board for me. We have a lot of different work projects that all require certain attention. And what I've tried to do with the utilization of Trello is obviously invite our entire team. But it also provides us a lot of transparency of seeing what everybody is working on, what tasks and projects are being strategically placed ahead of each other. And what is our priority within the organization? So within Trello, what I've done is

[00:06:34] Created a scrum board. So on the left side of my screen, I have a backlog of strategic tasks. And as I advance over to the right, I have a to do list or a priority in strategic column. I have an in progress column. I have an awaiting finalization column. And then I have a done column. And in each of these columns are multiple little tickets. And what I've tried to do is also label these tickets either high priority, medium priority, or low priority. And this is a way that I can prioritize certain tasks one ahead of each other. I try to knock out all my high priority tasks.

[00:07:18] If I'm starting that task, I'll move it from the to do column into the in progress. And if I did complete it, I'll move it from the in progress to the done. What's great about Trello is that also interfaces with Slack. So as I move one item from column to column, it also notifies our team that it's been moved from column to column within Slack. So again, it provides a level of transparency as far as what we're continuing to work on on our team and in our projects that we all have throughout given day. So that's been a huge benefit for us as far as just adding transparency to some of the tasks,

[00:08:02] Some things that we're doing and trying to accomplish in our normal day to day, if you will. So Slack is a huge one. Trello is a huge one. But on top of that, let's let's continue to go through. I've also began to use an application called toggle. And what toggle does for me is that it allows me to time those various tasks. So in your given work day, let's just say your strength conditioning coach and you're on the floor. How many hours are you on the floor? How many hours are you answering email? How many hours are you dealing with meetings? How many hours are you

[00:08:42] Working on a particular project? How many hours are you doing workflow type tags? So one of the great things about this application is that rather than just guessing what the length of time is that you've worked on a particular project, you can actually record it. And again, what you'll see as a common theme through all of the various applications I'm recommending is that they all sort of interface with each other. So on every single one of those Trello application cards, there's now a little button in my Chrome browser that allows me to quickly toggle on and off

[00:09:27] If I'm working on that task via toggle, which is great because now if I'm working on a project related to a different department, I quickly hit the toggle button on my Trello card. Not only does Trello then notify my entire Slack team I'm working on it, but it also begins a countdown or a timer. So over the course of a given week, I can go back and look and say, wow, you know, I've worked five hours on that project. I've worked 15 hours as a strength conditioning coach. I've worked 10 hours doing the sports science project. I've worked eight hours and it just allows you to quantify

[00:10:07] Where your efforts are going. But why is that important? Why should you even begin to quantify things? Well, you know, we all have job descriptions. We all have things that we need to do in our given day. And as strength conditioning coaches, that sort of fill dual roles or hybrid roles, we might be 50% strength conditioning and 50% sports science or data scientists or whatever it might be. And if that's the case, then what we need to do is be able to make sure that we quantify where our hours are going in different projects and be able to make sure that the right

[00:10:42] Allocations of our efforts and times and attention is being utilized. So the next application I wanted to recommend is one that not only this podcast continues to utilize because it's the very best sort of calendar scheduling tool that I have since the demise of what was otherwise the very best application for scheduling, which was Sunrise, which was a Sunrise calendar was the if you ever had the luxury of using Sunrise calendar, it was the very best scheduler ever. But I believe they were bought by Microsoft in hopes of rolling some of their technology into the Microsoft calendar,

[00:11:33] Which never actually ever happened. So what's great about this calendar Lee app is that you get to in your interface, sync up the various calendars you use, whether it's I calendar or Google calendar, or Microsoft Office and the various different places of your life that you might work in. You get to sync this to calendar Lee. And what it then does is it allows others, you get to set parameters around, hey, I want to schedule a meeting and those meetings need to happen on Thursday from three to five. What this application does and what it does incredibly well is it allows the

[00:12:16] Other person to see the block of time and schedule meetings. And the UI or the user interface is really slick. And it's one of the best calendar scheduling applications I've come across in a very, very long time. So I continue to use that. I use that for scheduling guests on the Decoding Excellence podcast, but I also use it just for simple scheduling in my sort of hectic and crazy life that I live, scheduling meetings and scheduling one-on-ones if I need to sit down with somebody. So another great application. So check that one out. Obviously, I have no conflict of interest, right? No financial

[00:12:59] Incentive to recommend this application. I just find a lot of inherent value with the recommendation of these applications. So moving on through this list, then next application, I would want to recommend is a very simple one. And I've talked about it many times on the show. It's it is oak, meditations by Kevin Rose, it's a meditation app and it is really, really good. You know, in the longest while most of the the history of the show have recommended an application called Headspace, it comes as a software as a subscription model. So you'd have to sign up. I think the first 10

[00:13:40] Episodes are free that take 10 course. So you get 10 episodes for 10 minutes and those ones are completely free and their guided meditations. And then eventually Headspace turns into a subscription. So you have to pay for it monthly. If you are a student, however, it is ridiculously cheap. It's like nine bucks a year. And I think that that alone is well worth Headspace. But I've gravitated on to oak meditation, which is a guided meditation app. Like I said, by Kevin Rose, Silicon Valley, entrepreneur was the founder of dig, dig nation, moved out to New York, worked for Google at one point

[00:14:20] In time, Google Ventures. But nonetheless, this application is a stripped down very simple meditation app as a social feature as well. So you can see how many other meditators are actively pursuing their own meditation. It logs the amount of time that you've meditated and the number of sessions you've had. It is just a really well-produced application. And the best part about it is that not only is it great quality sound, male, female voice for some of the guided meditation, really great background noises and you can customize that however you see fit. But the best part

[00:15:00] Is completely free. So that alone is well worth it. And they great bridge to allow you to start actively pursuing meditation in your life for mindfulness training if you want. That obviously has had a huge benefit on my own life and practice that I continue to try to do on a daily basis. I think this next recommendation comes at a very important time with data security. And that is recommending last pass or another competitor I think is one key or one pass. I'm trying to think of the actual name of this act. One password is what it's called. I don't use one password.

[00:15:44] I use last pass. And I actually use the free version. I've used the actual paid premium version of that product. But why is this important in this modern era? When we talk about data breaches and security and password management, password management applications are huge. What we found is that somewhere in the vicinity of like 70% of people continue to use the password or a similar password or one password, even worse, across multiple sites. So what does that mean? That means that if one site gets compromised, let's say Adobe or you know, I could literally go down the list of

[00:16:27] Websites that have been owned or what we call poned, right, nonetheless. But I am looking at a list right now, ancestry.com, androidfoil forums.com. Literally, let's see, I'm trying to find some decent ones that are sort of big name ones, babynames.com. I mean, the list can go on and on and on bit.ly.com. I am continuing to search. Let's see. There's some that are random. Coachella.com. Comcast.com. Comcast of all organizations, you would think they would have better data management. But no, but nonetheless, right, I could continue to go down this rabbit hole and list all the websites that

[00:17:18] Have had poor data management or password leaks in one respects. So why last pass? Why do I recommend this? Well, if we know that a compromised password on one website exposes the possibility of being compromised on another site because of poor password management, then it makes sense to have randomized passwords across every single website that you sign up for. And we sign up for a lot, right? This is the modern digital world that we live in. So if you were to ask me, Adam, what is what's your password for? Let's just say Google. I don't know it. What about your password for your

[00:17:58] Work email? No idea. You sign up for a subscription website. And like, let's say headspace, like I just recommended, what's your login and username pass or your not just your username, which I know, but what's your password for that? Absolutely no idea. It's a randomized 30 character password. So how do you remember randomized 30 character passwords across multiple websites? Aha. That's where things like one password or last pass comes in. And that is why you essentially sign up for it. You assign it a supermass master password, maybe a string of words or

[00:18:40] Sentences or something that is something that you can remember. And then it will store and encrypt all of our passwords across all sites. And it has a really great password manager as well. So again, you can sign up and you can increase your data security just simply by using randomized passwords across all the websites. So that if one website gets compromised, it doesn't compromise the rest of your website. And perhaps the last application I will recommend is not actually a recommendation for an app at all. It is not digital is you can't find it actually you can't

[00:19:20] Find it on an iPhone, which I find kind of crazy. But the very best sort of note taking application that I've ever found is an analog version. It's called bullet journaling. My good friend that South Carolina does it all the time. I think I turned it on to him or he found it through his own means across his own sort of note taking journey. But bullet journal is a sort of analog version. We use notebooks. I use a particular brand of notebooks, but you know, you could do it with with the more skin if you want. But it was designed by a guy. There's also a great selling book too

[00:20:02] Out there called the bullet journal method. But Ryan Carroll, he was a digital product designer, lived in New York, had some was diagnosed with some learning disabilities early in his life and had trouble really organizing a lot of his thoughts at beginning. And this is all common, commonly told stories, especially in his book. But he had trouble sort of organizing his thoughts. And he would often get confused and lose dates and lose appointments and things like that. But then he turned around and he discovered his own methodology for keeping notes and keeping track of

[00:20:39] His mind, if you will. And this thing manifested out of his own need to organize his own life. But it is the most effective way I have found to continue to no capture things across your day to be able to essentially bullet journal or quickly journal for note taking. But I will always, always, always return to analog over digital for note taking type applications. And maybe my last recommendation for this mini episode would be two sort of applications. Number one, the first one is on an iOS or Android device and that is data camp. I have been

[00:21:23] Investing over the last six months nearly an hour or two of day. Many of it on the once my kids go to sleep. But some of it during the work day because it's relevant to what I do here at my current organization is I've been spending a lot of time programming in R. And what I found is that so often I tried to pull some of the data out of our database, our athlete management system that we contain. And I'd like to look at it and analyze the data through R, which is a statistical package. It's a statistical program. It's open source. It's been widely available for

[00:22:05] Many, many, many years at this point in time. But as grown as a one of the many tools that data scientists have utilized that between that and Jupiter and Python and a few other notebooks. But my personal preference has always been in R. And data camp is a sort of a subscription or service as a subscription model, SAS model that allows you to continue your education with programming with R and a number of different languages. They have a lot of different pathways that a person can take. But the reason I like data camp is because it reminds me a lot of dolingo. If you're

[00:22:47] Trying to learn a different foreign language, the application in itself has tests. It has very simple quizzes that you can take on your mobile device. And what I find is that during my commutes in and out of work, what I find is I, I use that application that takes up the 15, 20 minutes that it takes me to get in and out of a boulder. And I use that to continue my own education as a programmer or as a statistician through the use of data camp. So it's been helping me with my R programming language and my comprehension of it. But in addition, the desktop version of it, right, the actual

[00:23:25] Web URL that you go to are hundreds of tutorials and every different sort of package and pathway and career pathway and programming language. And it's been amazing. It's been a continuing education pathway, I guess, if you will, if I continue to call it that, that has been really fruitful in the month or so that I've been using it. And it has really helped me with my own programming comprehension with R. So data camp has been amazing. But there's a number of different. I'm not recommending any of these applications, right? There's no financial stake in my recommendation.

[00:24:07] It's just that I found that one to be a little bit more useful than some of the other courses and the applications that exist online. But what I would recommend is, right, start your programming language, whatever it might be, whether you're trying to learn Python R or any other statistical programming language. Begin to play with it. Once you figure out that you need more understanding of it, then go ahead and start seeking out some of the free resources. A lot of these softwares have or services have free courses that you can take just to sort of trial run and demo it and see if

[00:24:41] You like it. I've tried a number of them before I settled on making the financial investment in my continuing education through data camp. So double check, see if you like it. And maybe there's something about one service over another that really resonates with you. But for me, it was it was this, right? The desktop version of it, which has greater access to different pathways and quizzes and programming examples and videos and the mobile to continue to practice my understanding and comprehension of it from a day to day standpoint. So these are just a number of applications that

[00:25:20] I have found really useful in 2019. And we'll continue to utilize and maybe in a six to six to nine months, we'll do another sort of application show and we'll just see if if any of these applications, many of which I've used for a number of years prior to recording the show, but we'll double check to see if these applications continue to be fruitful and continue to be useful in my day to day operation. Hey everybody, that's going to be it for this episode of the Decoding Excellence mini show. Hopefully, you took a lot away from this and you got a couple new applications that you either

[00:26:05] Discovered or you might revisit for this upcoming 2019. But hopefully my list of recommendations of a few of my favorite applications that deliver a lot of value from a productivity standpoint. And just the organizational standpoint for my life, hopefully that list gave you some new things to think about in this new year. And as always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the show, right? The first thing is I have a monthly newsletter that goes out. It is located at AdamRingler dot com forward slash newsletter. And like I said in the intro, it is

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