Our technology stacks - what products we use for different problems (Kitchen Table episodes vol 2)

Inger and Jason catch up at the kitchen table... in Casa Downs this time. The sound on this one is ok, considering we were in a huge open space downstairs!

While Jack Downs washes Inger's new car, she catches Jason up on the first Shut up and Write symposium at Cambridge University. Jason tells Inger why Jack Downs is happy to earn 20 bucks by washing her car...

There's a bit of mail bag before the Work Problems segment, where the team talk about the idea of 'technology stacks', zero-ing in on OmniFocus as a project management tool.

Inger's read a shit ton of books and both have a two minute tip, for once. Happy Christmas listening everyone!

We talked about...

• If you’re interested in the idea of Bali Bootcamp, you can express interest here.
• Writing partners
• Inger’s new Volvo EX30
• Scrivener
• Zotero
• Obsidian
• Omnifocus
• Text Expander
• Tiny Take
• Buzzsprout
• ANU woes
• Omni show
• Checklist manifesto
• The art of explanation
• Extra Focus, the Quick Start Guide to Adult ADHD 
• Writing for Busy Readers
• Elastic Habits
• Paper about ChatGPT expecting you to be helpful: Usage-based constructionist approaches and large language models
• Mappify

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on <pod@ontheregteam.com>

- Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.

- See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at enquiries@ontheregteam.com

- Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here

- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).

- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com.

- If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a 'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site

Transcript

episode 71 - recording

both: Is that good enough? Yes. Does it need to just need to scroll it up.

Great. Welcome to On The Reg. This is like, 

jason: we, for a show that we have had going for five years. Yes. Right. Where we actively look at the way in which we produce this thing and talk about it. Sure. Yeah. This would have to be the 50 millionth time that we've done it differently. 

inger: I know. And like, and this episode feels cursed, but let's just keep going.

All right. All right. How many takes is this now? I've actually lost count. 

jason: We did four. Yesterday, not yesterday, day before, we're trying to figure, like we did, we did four on the coffee table before then the following day, backing that up with an hour and a half of trying to figure out which cable was broken.

And then 

inger: it ended up in the dongle and that ended up in the bin. Yes. 

jason: So yeah. 

inger: Welcome to On The Reg. 

jason: And on top of that, that was after we had originally recorded the first half of this. 

inger: On Riverside. 

jason: Three weeks ago.

inger: I just, it's okay. So we're just starting again. This is just easier. So, uh, so welcome to On The Reg. I'm Professor Inga Mewburn from the Australian National University, better known as Thesis Whisper on the Internet. I'm here with my good friend, Dr. Jason Downes for another episode of On The Reg where we talk about work.

Uh, but you know, not in a boring way, practical, implementable, productivity hacks to help you live a more balanced life. Now in this episode, the intention is to talk about our tech stacks, Jason. So we're going to talk about how to. Thoughtfully peer can combine different digital tools to get your work done.

But we're going to have a big focus this episode on OmniFocus because you've all been asking for it. Well, not all of you, but you know, yeah, 

jason: someone 

inger: did, someone did. So we thought we'd do it. but you know, you can broaden that out to any task manager. I think you're going to talk about OmniFocus, the same features, different box.

And it's probably going to be more than one episode. 

Yes. 

inger: And we are sitting here in your, it's beyond a kitchen. It's your whole living area. 

jason: Yes. It's the downstairs. 

inger: The downstairs of the Downs household. Yes. But we've got our tea tower. We've got our sound thing. I'll put it on Instagram. You can see.

jason: We've also got like hard timber floors and lots of hard reflective spaces. Sorry, Martin. 

inger: We're doing our best here. We're at least aiming our mouth at the microphone. Yeah. That's, that's the best start. So how have you been since we last caught up, Jason? 

jason: I've been good. I've been good. It's been a while. Like you've been away.

So the last time we've actually been in a space together would have been September, 

inger: October, maybe? Yeah. You've been on planes, on and off them, in fact. 

jason: Yeah, I've been doing a lot of work. It's been good. Have been up to Brisbane a few times. Uh, the good folk at the University of Queensland have engaged us to do some stuff around AI, which was really, really good.

That was interesting stuff. I went to Canberra, but you weren't there. 

inger: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. 

jason: Good. Yeah. Like we can figure that out. Where I presented at a conference for the Australian Academy of Sciences. Yes. Uh, on AI, met a whole bunch of AI nerdy type people. 

inger: So much fun. I'm so dev. I don't miss out on that one.

jason: They are scary bright. 

inger: Yeah, yeah. 

jason: Right. Yeah. Like just really, really smart. And they're doing stuff like this. I was talking to a person who's molecular biology and AI and 

inger: Speaking molecular biology. 

jason: Yes, apparently. Uh, and I got into a discussion that I quickly found myself out of my depth in when they started talking math.

inger: Yeah, see that happens to me all the time at ANU. Right, 

jason: yeah. 

inger: I 

jason: was like, what? I don't understand any of this. Okay, fine. Sounds really interesting. Yeah. So I put on my engaged conference face. Yes. You know, looked them in the eye, nodded, smiled a lot. That's very interesting. 

inger: Yes. A lot of listening. 

jason: A lot of listening.

Not much talking, because I was not that smart. Um, other than that, there's been a muddy spring in Australia. Can we just stop the wind blowing? 

inger: Yeah. Could we have a memo about that? Because I'm not a fan. Yeah. Especially when I got here on, like, got here to your house on Monday. It's now Wednesday. Yeah.

It's 

inger: Wednesday the 18th of December that we are taping this one. It was 40 degrees and blowing a gale. It was disgusting. Can I just say memo to Melbourne weather enough already? 

jason: Yeah. I haven't been able to get the tinny out. No, but we're 

inger: planning Friday. 

jason: Yes. Tomorrow? No, today's Wednesday. Yeah. No, two days.

Yeah. Yeah. So the prediction is northerly winds, less than eight knots or something, so it should be comfortable. 

Yes. 

jason: But it'll be an early morning start. Yes. We'll tootle up the yard, get ourselves a latte. 

inger: We'll drag Mr. Thesis Whisperer. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be fun. And, um, as we speak, uh, young Jack Downs is cleaning my car.

jason: He's being paid. You're very generous paying him. I would have just made him do it. But anyway the reason that Jack needs to earn money is because we went up to something called Sail Country in the long weekend in November, which is like a four day sailing regatta up at Lake Hume. And while we're up there, number one son has only just recently been given mobile phone permissions.

So we bought him a mobile phone, but not a fancy one. We bought him a like a, an old brick flip phone type thing, you know, cheapy one. So it's not very smart. Because neither is he, because what he ended up doing was dropping the damn thing in the bottom of Lake he'd only had it like literally 

inger: for two days.

jason: Weeks. It was weeks. So like less than a month, maybe. 

inger: I mean, good call on not buying him an expensive iPhone. Can you imagine how furious you'd be? He's actually coming in now. He can stay in for colour. Hello Jack Downs. 

jason: We're back. 

inger: Yeah. We had to cut that bit out because it turned out Jack Downs had like more to report than I finished scraping all the bugs off your car.

jason: I had to move cars and do all that stuff. It was a whole 

inger: thing. 

jason: Yes. But he's had to earn, I've made him earn the price of his phone back. So he's got money that he could, he could have just gone out and bought a new one. But I've refused to allow that to occur. So he has had to earn it back. Actions 

inger: have consequences.

jason: Actions have consequences. So Ingers said this morning, 

inger: Oh, 

jason: wash my car. 

inger: And I, and I said that in the ACT, we have a tipping system when you do a good job. And he's done a bloody good job, actually. When I just went out there, all the bugs are off it. 

jason: Remarkably generous. He 

inger: collected a lot of bugs on the way down.

My lovely new car. 

jason: New car. 

inger: Yes. Tell us about it. I've got an EX30 Volvo that is bright, bright yellow. Oh, 

jason: it is bright yellow. And 

inger: it's very, very fast. Yes. Yes. 0 to 103. 6 seconds, dragging off all the Teslas on the road. They're potatoes. They're 0 to 105. 4 seconds, it's nothing. So I'm really enjoying the incongruity of myself in that Volvo because it's a boxy car.

Yeah. 

inger: Like it's a slightly lifted sort of hatch, really. Yeah. It's super quick. It's bright yellow. I'm a middle aged lady professor driving the most cliche Volvo imaginable, but no one expects it from me, Jason. No. Which makes it so much more fun because they're never prepared for the yellow Volvo next to them just taking off.

So I've been pleased with it. 

jason: Well, the other day we went down the street, like you came and we went for a quick drive and you pulled off from the kerb and I'm sitting in the back and I likened it to getting on one of those amusement park rides. 

inger: Yes. 

jason: Like when you took off and to be clear, you didn't break the speed limit, but you got to it very quickly.

Very quickly. 3. 

inger: 6 seconds. Not even. Yeah. Yeah. 

jason: It, like, it really did, like, push me into the back of the seat. It was amazing. 

inger: Jack actually thinks, because I took him for another ride, just because, and Jack actually thinks this car is wasted on me because I refuse to just break the speed limit.

He's like, let's see how fast it goes.

He's like, oh, it's wasted on you. Because I only speed up to the speed limit. Like, well, I don't speed. I try not to. I don't want to tick it. I've been overseas too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I went all around. I went to Amsterdam, which is now my favourite city. I'll not be taking questions at this time. That's the best city in the world.

Okay. I just loved it. Okay. I went on a bike riding tour. I just had a fabulous time. Amsterdam, someone please invite me back. Ride to me. Someone will come. We'll, we'll work for nothing just to be in Amsterdam. 

jason: Is there a, what would be the main university in Amsterdam? 

inger: Utrecht? I don't know. Okay. One, I didn't look it up.

Maybe someone should 

jason: Google that. 

inger: Anyway, if you're in Amsterdam, you want to offer me, I don't know, like, come to your visiting, you know, 

Yeah. 

inger: For a week, I'm there. I'm just like, I just buy my ticket, loved it. Went to Barcelona, loved it, but it didn't really get out of the classroom. I loved being at I F I C I F C O.

jason: The Institute for Photonics. and something science. 

inger: Yes. Yes. It was amazing. Really international group of people. Fantastic. Um, Mr. Thesis Whisperer came and he went to the Sagrada Familia while I was teaching in the classroom. So I had a fun time in Barcelona, but it was a work time. And then we caught the Eurostar back from Brussels to Cambridge, not all the way to Cambridge, to London.

That was great. It took as long to get from London to Cambridge as it did to take, to get from Brussels to Cambridge. Wow. It's fast. 280 kilometers an hour or something. Under the channel. Under the channel. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: Yeah. And you sort of don't even notice you're going into the channel. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: Anyway, so that was good.

And then I was in Cambridge. 

jason: Did they paint like murals along the side of this? No. Sorry, it's just boring. It's just boring, featureless 

inger: concrete. Yeah. Yeah. Come 

jason: on people. 

inger: Yeah. They still had Wi Fi though from memory, so fine. That's good. It's all good. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: And then I went to the first shut up and write, uh, symposium meetup conference.

jason: Yeah. So you were telling me about this. Sorry. Speak about it again. Tell me what it was all about. Rennie, 

inger: who is the inventor of Shut Up and Write, he started a foundation, a not for profit foundation called Writing Partners. And they, for the last 10 years, have been promoting the use of Shut Up and Write around the world.

Places like prisons, things for novelists, In cities, as meetups, way that people connect, make networks. If you don't know Shut Up and Write, it's in the title. 

jason: Written on the tin. 

inger: And back to you and I, like forged our friendship. Shut Up and Write is the reason this podcast exists. You and I used to have these conversations during the breaks in the Shut Up and Write in the cafe.

You all get in the cafe, you shut up, you write. Yes. Then you chat, you eat cake, you have coffee. And you and I would be like, bleh, bleh, bleh, omni focus, bleh, bleh, bleh. And people would be listening in and taking notes and they said you should do a podcast and here we are. Here we are. Um, and so Rennie is a delightful human being, very delightful man.

And and they didn't know that the universities had taken on. 

jason: That's your car. 

inger: Is that my car? Wow. All right. Just hold here. 

jason: Pausing. 

inger: Pausing. Well, that was exciting. The Volvo thought that Jack was trying to steal it. 

jason: To be fair, 

inger: maybe he was. I mean, and look, it does a good job, bang up job of sounding the alarm.

Yeah, it's pretty loud. It's good. But when I got near it with my key, it was like mother's home. 

jason: Technology, right? 

inger: Yes. Anyway. So, uh, they had no idea that universities were using shut up and write. 

jason: And that's interesting because I had no idea that anybody other than the university, it's like 

inger: the whole world can talk to each other.

And then they met someone at some shut up and write somewhere who, I believe this is how it happened, who mentioned me. And 

then 

inger: they looked me up and they rang me up. And this is about a year ago. We had great chats. I invited them to Australia. Um, well, I said you should come to Australia. I didn't invite them so much as to nag them to come.

Close enough. And so Aaron who's the CEO came out for QPR, our conference earlier this year in April, had a great time. And I introduced him to my friend, Tyler Shores in Cambridge, and then Tyler and Aaron organized a symposium. They just invited people mostly from England and Scotland, because that's where it was being held.

Um, me and Narelle and Jonathan went. Yep. All the whispers. Chin couldn't make it, unfortunately, but but we all went and we had the best time in. I mean, I, I haven't been in a room like that with just people who care about that thing and they're just all nice. 

jason: Yeah. Yeah. 

inger: Before, 

jason: yeah. 

inger: And there was someone from the Berlin chapter of Sharp and Right who isn't an academic came along, went, wow.

All these weird academics and they were like and they said, this is great, like you do this all the time. It's just like, I'm like, yeah, but don't like judge every conference by this one. Yes, I'll do a few. You know, this is different. So it's like a day and a half, but I had a great time there. Yeah. Um, yeah.

So that's, that's what I've been doing. Wow. Yeah. Oh, that's been really good. So we've been busy. It's nearly Christmas time. So we're going to open the mailbag, are we? 

jason: Sure. And we love hearing from you all. Ingo, I'm going to take over the black bit because I screwed that up, but that's okay. 

Um, and this 

jason: is our chance to share the interesting things that our listeners share with us.

We have a shiny new email address, which is Folks you can write to us at, um, in the podcast. 

inger: Oh, yes. I should change that . 

jason: Yeah, no. In 

inger: the show notes. Pod 

jason: Pod at on the reg team.com. 

inger: Yes. Pod at on the reg team Or one word? Dot com. 

jason: Dot com. So this would be the second or third email address we've given you.

inger: It's the last one. It's the last 

jason: one though. We've, we've baked this one. It's in concrete now. Yes. So, uh, yes. Pod at on the reg team. Uh, and those emails will make their way to our mailbag, where I will categorize them, put them into a shiny spreadsheet, lift them across to our show notes, and we will then use it.

You've got a process. I have a process. There's multiple steps.

inger: Okay. And the first email is from Cameron in the US. Are you reading that? 

jason: I will. 

inger: Yeah. 

jason: Um, so. Cameron, thank you for writing to us. Hi Inga and Jason. First of all, can I just say, I love your podcast, especially the yeah, yeah, yeahs that you both do when you really get into something.

I'm working until I can start a doctoral program and the drive to work takes about an hour. So I use the time to listen to the pod and have a good laugh. Good. Excellent. 

both: We love that. 

inger: Keep doing that. 

jason: I'm submitting my grad applications now, but because I'm so type A, I've already started to get my reference and writing system ready for the writing that I'll be doing.

inger: I love this. Yeah, 

jason: I know, right? Normally you have to drag people. Um, 

inger: I 

jason: should note that I have a master's and used Obsidian while working on that thesis. So that's good. Um, I didn't use Scrivener or Zotero. But I'm using Zotero now to keep track of all the texts that I'm interested in for the PhD work.

Clever. Knew that. I love how you can create little folders in Zotero. So good. 

inger: And put it on the web and share them with people. Yeah. 

jason: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, papers is my, my heart is still with the old version. Yeah. 

inger: So like we, we grieve. 

jason: Yes, we do. 

inger: But Zotero, we've come to love you. Yeah. Your second marriage. Yeah.

jason: I looked hard. When, you know, when we had to retire papers, I did look at all of them. Zotero's great. Sorry, Cameron. Sorry. Diversion there. I didn't know how to keep track of literally all the things I read about without it. 

All that 

jason: is to say thank you for your suggestions on the pod and thank you for nerding out over Obsidian.

Very happy to know that there are other people like me out there in the world. All the best, Cameron from the US. 

inger: Thank you, Cameron. And there are other people like you out in the world, which brings me to, we've had our planning session, which we'll talk about more next episode. 

jason: Yes. 

inger: But what's on our agenda for next year is to get everyone together who's like us.

jason: Yeah. Physical, like face to face type. 

inger: Yeah. We've found a venue. 

jason: Yes. 

inger: We've got a name for it, which we'll reveal next episode. Yes. We're still kind of working on it. Stay tuned for that. I mean, you're in the U S Cameron. That's only if you want to come out, but you know, 

jason: you're welcome, 

inger: but we, maybe we bring it to the U S but we've got a format we're thinking people want to meet other people like us.

Yeah. 

jason: We've even like got outlines and all sorts of things. Yeah. Yeah. 

inger: So that'll be fun. Stay tuned for that. Um, and if we do do that, we'll bring you content from it. Yes. So even if you can't come physically, then you can enjoy it. The fruits of that. 

jason: Yeah, we'll figure out a way to distribute. Yeah. Broadly.

Because there are a lot 

inger: of people like us. Yeah. Yeah. And not just in academia, like other places. Who enjoy kind of keeping themselves organized. It's a weird fetish, but we're all here for it. 

jason: Yeah. Yeah. Did I tell you that I? Yeah. Yeah. Ended up speaking to what's one of the people that deal with broken bones and stuff.

inger: Orthopedic 

jason: surgeon, got in contact with us. Yes. Wanted to nerd out about TextExpander. 

inger: There you go. See orthopedic 

jason: surgeons because they have to write reports, 

inger: right? Exactly. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: Everyone's got

jason: problems. That was a really interesting conversation about how he was using, he was using a different version.

He wasn't using TextExpander, he was using something else. But the problems that he was trying to solve with that were the same kinds of problems that we try and solve in academia. 

inger: Yeah. So we're going to get you all together. We're going to do that. Uh, the next one is to Maddie and she's got a tip for all the non Mac users out there, cause we're a Mac shop here at On The Reg.

jason: Yep. So, like our sympathies, but never very. 

inger: Exactly. Nanny writes, Hi team, just want to recommend Tiny Take as a program for PC folk to record and annotate screen grabs. It also has a record screen function, which is really handy for talking your teaching team through the LMS functions, or how to complete a timesheet.

So when you've got to show someone something admin y on the screen. Yeah. Brilliant. I, I used to record like Excel formula things for my assistant. Yeah. Great. Maddy says, I also used its pixelate function to blur parts of the images for my digital forums research. Best from Maddy. Thank you for that suggestion, Maddy.

Maddy. Jack Downs is back. Hello, Jack Downs. Thank you, Jack Downs. I'll just pause this for a moment while we complete our transaction. 

jason: Do an inspection. An 

inger: inspection. We'll do an inspection and then we'll be back. And so he did a good job, all done. 

jason: There we go. 

inger: Couldn't find the chamois, but other than that.

jason: There's a chamois out there somewhere. There was another 

inger: five bucks in that for him if there'd been a chamois, but anyway. Yeah, sorry. He's been happy. 

jason: He'll have to go buy his own chamois. 

inger: He should, he should get himself a kid. Yes. And it's tax deductible. You could of course introduce what we call in our house parent tax.

jason: Oh, what's that? 

inger: Uh, it's the bite of anything delicious that a child has that you want. If they get upset, you just call it a levy. Okay. Yeah, because levies are not as upsetting as taxes are.

It's funny, I have a kid who understood both taxes and levies at an early age. 

jason: I like this idea. Yeah, I like this one. It's 

inger: a good one. Um, Maddy, so Maddy, screen grabber tiny tape we were talking about. 

jason: Yeah, no, it's really good. And so what I used to do, the same use case as what Maddy's got here about filling in forms, especially if you've got like a casual teaching workforce, right?

Everything's like, different and sometimes you're introducing new people to the systems and all sorts of stuff. I used to have a text expander snippet that had links to all the videos beside a YouTube channel. Yeah, right. And I would just do the screen grabbing kind of stuff for useful things. 

inger: Yeah.

jason: And then the links to the YouTube video. 

inger: Oh man, that must have saved you so much time. Yeah, 

jason: it was unlisted. So like people wouldn't stumble across it. Yeah. But if they, if you had the link, you could just go straight to the video. 

inger: Cause I used to store them in the teams folder, but that's a better idea.

jason: Yeah. And so then it was like, I'd send the email that says, Hey, welcome to the team. There's a few administrative things that you need to do. This is how you do class lists in the, Because the class lists were hard, there were multiple systems and they didn't necessarily talk to one another nicely. So timetabling systems, all of that sort of stuff that you kind of only, you use it at the start of the semester, then you don't use it again.

Yeah, and to 

inger: remind yourself, you know, like I quite often forget, for instance, in my preferred text, um, marking up program, MaxQDA, I always forget all these start up things and then I always have to remember them. So. I do little screen grabs for myself, little screen records and I have it. Just on my computer, but putting on a YouTube channel is better.

'cause then if someone else wants it's, yeah, that's it. 

jason: That's easy. And then you, you've got the text expend that top tip welcomes people to, that was a 

inger: two minute tip. Just blew it. Oh . 

jason: See above . 

inger: See above? No, I put one down there for us. You've got one. They have got one. Yeah. We've both got one this time.

It's amazing. We might even have time 'cause we're making good time. 

jason: Okay. Excellent. Next one is from Christy from Australia, who left us some fan mail on Buzzsprout. Now, fan mail on Buzzsprout is a new thing. 

inger: Yes, I turned on and didn't tell you about it. That's 

jason: it, right? Like it was just like, what's this and how does this work?

Yeah. So I'll let you talk about how it works. There's a 

inger: button that says text us or something. So it's in the show notes? Is that right? Yeah. I think it's in most podcast platforms. People can just go to the show notes and click text us. I'm pretty sure that's how it works anyway. 

jason: And so when they 

inger: do that, It goes through to Buzzsprout.

Yeah. Which is our podcast hosting. 

jason: So how does it get from Buzzsprout to Meek? 

inger: Um, It emails me, 

jason: and then you email me, 

inger: and then I email you. It's like the Twilight Bark from 101 Dalmatians, but the email versions of it. Right. But the problem with it is that we don't get your email or your identifying details.

If you send us a message, it's just a message. It's a one way. 

jason: Yeah, we don't, we can't identify like back identify. So there's no phone numbers attached to it or no return email address or anything like that. 

inger: I mean, you're welcome to include those in the text. Yes. And then we will get back to you. 

jason: But if you use this Buzzsprout thing, and a few people have used it, which is great, but they've raised some time for those questions.

And then someone asked 

inger: to do a job. Yeah, 

jason: we had someone say, Hey, can you come and do some work for us? Um, But then we've got no way of getting back to you. Yes. So, so it's good for, as Inga was saying, if you just want to leave a quick message, we can read it. 

inger: Yeah. Like I want a quick response, just leave your name, you'll end up in the mailbag.

Yeah. Yeah. It's great. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: And we had one from Christy, who's my friend from Canberra. 

jason: Right, so Christy says that you, you, us, are about to join her flight to Milan. I hope you're feeling somewhat European and distracted from university shenanigans as a result. 

inger: Yes, and Christy, we didn't manage to meet up in Europe, we were there at the same time in different places.

jason: Yeah. 

inger: Yeah, and Christy has moved to Oxford from Canberra. Miss you already, Christy. We were happy to be on the flight with you. When people tell us that we're just like chatting with them somewhere like that, like flights can be pretty dull. 

jason: Yeah. I, I, I'm about to, I'm going to splurge on myself and buy some technology.

Cause I used to have Bose headphones, you know, the noise cancelling headphones. Um, and I used them when I was doing all that traveling to Asia and. They were great, but I don't have them anymore. They ended up, eventually got to end of life. And I've been doing a bit of flying recently and I've realized that my shocks over the ear, bone conducting ones.

inger: Yeah. Not good for flying. No, can't 

jason: hear anything.

inger: No. 

jason: So I think I'm tossing up the Apple iPod, ear pod one. Mr. 

inger: Thesis Whisperer just bought a pair of those. 

jason: Did he? Oh, I must ask him then, because there's, there's two versions. AirPods 2 and AirPods 4, and I can't really see the difference much between them.

And so I don't know what to do. I think 

inger: he got the fancy pants one, but you can ask him on Friday when we go in the tinny. 

jason: Okay. 

inger: That's the plan. All 

jason: right. 

inger: Anyway. Um, yes. Uh, did I tell you that, um, side note? Yes. We did our survey of academics. I got over 1500 responses. There are so many responses about noise cancelling headphones.

Oh, really? That I need to write an academic paper just on. noise cancelling headphones and their role in academic work. 

jason: Wow. Extraordinary. I, I backed on, what's that startup, um, platform, you know, where you can back projects and kickstart. 

Yeah. 

jason: I backed a project on Kickstarter, lost my money. 

Um, 

jason: and what it did is they were manufacturing these little perspex signs and they'll plug into the side of your computer and you could say, you know, you could have any text whatsoever etched into this, into the sign that you wanted, and it would generate some lights through some leds at the bottom in the base and it would light up the sign, you see these things in shops and stuff, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah and I did that because they promised that you could then on your computer, you can turn it on and off.

You can make it change colors, like all this sort of stuff. But that's the same idea, right? Like it's like, do not, do not disturb. 

inger: Oh, so it's just sitting there on your desk, on air, do not disturb. Don't talk to me. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's what this paper is going to be about. How people create boundaries.

Yeah. And that is an essential part of the kit. So anyway, we hope you had a good, pleasant flight, Christy. We, we wish for you noise cancelling headphones. 

jason: Normally I would mute as I'm about to cough. So can you mute for that cough? I think so. Of 

inger: course. 

jason: You're going back. You're back. 

inger: All right. Okay. It isn't quite the same as having the, the cough button, is it?

No. Um, Mark from the UK sent us a message. Again, there's many ways to get us messages. Of course, pod at. ontheregteam. com being our primary way, but also from our Ko Fi page. Yes. Yes. Uh, he says, Hi Ingrid and Jason, just a quick note to thank you for all you do on the RegPod. Your content, advice, hints, tips, all dished out like delicious yogurt are extremely valuable.

It's great to have two people so closely connected with academia who aren't afraid to say how it is without any sugar coating. Looking forward to the next episode. Have a great festive season. Mark from the University of Sussex in the UK. Thank you, Mark. We are unafraid to say how it is. 

jason: Well, yes. 

inger: We don't, I don't say everything about how it is, but how it is right now, Mark, right now in Australian academia, I think it can be summed up with one word, shit.

jason: Yes. 

inger: Like everyone's laying off staff. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: There's a financial crisis everywhere. Yeah. No one seems to care. No. Therefore the word of the year for Australian academia is shit. And I hear in the UK, my friends are saying similar things. 

jason: Yeah. Yeah. And government policy is structured. or not structured as the case may be to try and fix that, um, that is so terribly broken at the moment that there's no structural change coming down the pipe that we can see that's going to make this any better.

inger: No, it's not. 

jason: So the, the terrible system that I've got at the moment continues on because the Greens and the Liberal Party got together to nix the newly drafted legislation supposed to fix that problem. Although 

inger: it wasn't going to fix it. It was kind of like it introduced a different problem. Like I was mad at everyone in that scenario, actually.

jason: Yeah, so what we've got is the worst of everything. 

inger: Yeah, like, like the, the fix wasn't going to be better than what's happening, but then blocking the fix also, you could have just done other things with that time. Yes. So everyone, I'm mad at you all. Yes. Including my own party. Um, right. Anyway, festive cheer to everyone.

Solidarity for what everyone's going through. It pretty much sucks. Okay. I'm going to play this speak pipe here if it's really shitty and doesn't turn up well in this recording, as I sort of move it slightly forward, I'll 

both: cut it in later. Okay. All right.

I should say who it's from Nicole at Curtin. 

inger: Thanks Nicole.

Hi guys. Uh, love your show. Love your work. Thanks a million. Um, and loving to hear of your new endeavors. It's inspiring me as I'm seeking to take my PhD skills out to. Uh, an entrepreneurialism. Oh, very nice. Last episode. Um, I don't have a solution to the library situation, but I do have a workaround.

Um, I used a lot of, uh, books from the library in my PhD. And you can usually download. a set amount of chapters, um, a day. So if the book is, you know, 20 chapters in a day, I might have been able to have downloaded five. And then I would use Adobe or another type of program where I could combine all those PDFs into the one document.

So essentially, I don't know, is that sort of like illegal downloading? I'm not sure. Um, but hey, again, it's not a fix. It's a workaround. It's not great for, um, authors, obviously, if they don't get those benefits. But I managed to download, like, several complete books in this way, and then I just uploaded it into, you know, Zotero or whatever, you know, reference management system I was using.

And then I would, you know, be able to have the actual text alongside my notes. Don't know if that helps. Again, it's not a fix, it's a workaround, and it's a cheeky workaround, but I've done it. It works. Okay. Bye. 

inger: Thanks, Nicole. And look, honestly, I feel, I feel, here's my thought, 

jason: yes, as an author, 

inger: as an author of 

jason: eight books, nearly 10, 

inger: nearly 10.

As an author, I would say any way that anyone reads your work is a good thing in the academic space because you don't do it for the money, because the publishers may be making money and they are, but authors certainly are not. And I would say that if libraries. Publishers cannot work out a way to help people through this very important thing, by the way, the problem being that there's no good way to keep notes on books that you read in your university library.

Let's think about that for a moment. This problem could be solved. 

Yes, it could. 

inger: If there was a will to solve it, either by the libraries or by the publishers, it would have been solved years ago. It hasn't been, therefore they get what they get and they don't get upset. Yeah, okay. As an author, I'd say. Have at it.

Because honestly, I get paid, um, library royalties. Right. So if you borrow a book from the library, I get, I get it paid. very small. And that's why I sign over the rights for the library purchases to my publisher and I don't get paid for those. Which is why the publishers charge my library a Mozart. One of my books cost my library for three simultaneous seats, 

jason: 800.

inger: Holy 

jason: cow. 

inger: Um, for a single copy, which you could buy for 30 

jason: bucks 

inger: and put on a shelf, 

jason: but 

inger: no one goes to the library and uses books in the shelves anymore. We all use them digitally. So therefore, Nicole, like if you listen to that and go, Huh, that sounds like a bit of effort. But by the way, if there's 20 chapters in a huge book that would otherwise cost me 200.

Yeah. Look, I'm just like, I couldn't possibly say whether you should do that or not, but just know that if you do it, it might not upset. 

jason: Yeah. Well, it won't upset Inga. Yeah. 

inger: It won't upset me. No, it really won't because I don't write those books for the money. Fiction writers, different story. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: You know, a lot of people confuse the two kind of.

businesses. Yeah. Yeah. And 

jason: because academic texts are so hideously expensive, right? And long and big. Yeah. The people think that the authors must be making a heap of money out of it. 

inger: They do not. 

jason: They do not. 

inger: You know, I made from one of my books last year, they sent me the royalty statement and I'd made 30 bucks.

Wow. And they said, here's the royalty statement, but we don't pay out unless it reaches 50 bucks. So it sucks to be you. Right. So you can see why not upset, like not on their side. Really, you know, 

jason: it's just ones and zeros. People like, doesn't it. You, 

inger: you choose your ethical approach through this thicket of trouble.

jason: I got approached by Cengage, I think it was, to write a, um, strategy textbook. I seriously considered it for a little while, but I was too busy doing 

inger: Textbooks are even more 

jason: Less money. It's just like, yes. 

inger: Yeah. 

jason: Yeah. It was a good bendy. Like my ego felt well and truly stroked. 

inger: Oh, look, and sometimes you do it for that 

jason: reason.

inger: Like nothing wrong with that. Yeah. 

jason: I thought about it hard and then I went like, no, no. 

inger: Good choice. Pass Jason. Well done. All right. We're at our work problems segment and it's a miracle it's 34 minutes in, which is about where we want to be for our work problem segment. Fantastic. In this part of the show, we focus on one aspect of work and we just nerd out about it.

We sometimes tackle problems we've had at work. Sometimes we discuss the themes just by listener. We always try to be practical, sharing our tips, hacks, and feel pinions, their feelings and opinions at the same time. They're relevant. And this week, Our topic is your technology stack. Now, you know in IT, well you may or may not know, I know because I'm married to a member of the IT slash computer science community.

Uh, they talk about a technology stack quite often when they talk about how they build software. So it's like a collection of different bits of tech. that they can bind. So they're not like rewriting a click box, right? They've got a little thing off the shelf that's called click boxes and they put it in the stack.

And when the program gets to that point, it launches click box, right? Um, so when they're building a website, for example, they might use HTML for the layout, then they'll use some JavaScript to make things interactive. Maybe there's a bit of Python running in the background for a database lookup, something like that.

And each page. Piece of the tech stack has its job and they all work together, combined together to make the final product. And we've totally stolen this idea to talk about our academic work and we use it in our teaching.

jason: Yeah. 

inger: For instance, we often get people in our, uh, used to be called building a second brain and it's now called notes that work.

Yes. Uh, we talk a lot in that session about how to, you know, take what information comes at you through email or conversations or whatever. Uh, There's a lot of different stuff that's being analyzed and thought and ideas and sort of creative stuff. How to capture and land that. And then how to sort of bring it through your system.

So you process. I think about those ideas and you make them into teaching notes, make them into books, you make them into papers, you make them into something else. Right? And how does that cascade through your system from the point of getting an email that sparks the thought, then what happens for that thought to finally land in a document that might be published for instance.

And a lot of the time when people draw their text stack, they realise that they have a lot at the top that's coming in. They have word at the bottom and they don't know what happens in between. The 

jason: black box. Yeah. I reckon that's one of the most, one of the, we do a lot of activities in that workshop, but that's one of the more powerful ones because it thought, because people have to draw it.

So. you know, using a different part of their brain to actually articulate what this thing looks like. Yeah. And then they have to put it down and then they have to actually step by step by step draw it out. Yeah. And when I've done it, I've always run out of space on the page. Go like, I've completely misunderstood how many steps are involved in getting a thing from input to output.

inger: And we have things for those steps. Yeah. Yeah. 

jason: Like, yeah, like 

inger: we've thought about those steps. If not even consciously, we're just going, Oh, I need a thing that captures screen grabs from my computer and brings them in or screen, you know, what we're talking about, Mattie was talking about before. You've got a tool for that in your stack, right?

It's kind of like a toolkit, but it's also a process and the order in which you use things. Yes. I think. And if I think about what a tech stack for an academic includes, there's tools for managing your research information. Like we were talking about Zotero before, note taking apps, so on.

I'm just getting that wrangling that. Stuff of creation. And then you've got, you've got tools for handling communications like emails and those handy automation tools that we love banging on about like text expander. So they fit in your stack. So there's communication sort of admin stack. 

Yeah. 

inger: So there's a research stack, there's kind of an admin communication stack, there's a writing and editing stack.

So you've got grammar checkers, our friend, Claude would be in there, word processors, even things like Dropbox where you keep things. And then there's of course, project management bits and bobs like calendars, task managers and all of these pieces sort of sit in a beautifully well oiled machine. is the dream.

And, and the key thing, and I think this is really important, the tools need to work. 

jason: Yes. 

inger: And ideally they need to work smoothly without too much lifting and shifting of information from one thing to another, which is where things get lost and mistakes happen. 

Yeah. 

inger: So you're not just collecting random apps because they look shiny, uh, we're being guilty of that, but often we're, we're collecting a new thing and we're like playing around with it and thinking, does it fit in this stack?

Is it doing a new job for me? Or is it replacing something and doing a better job? And unless it does a better job, That doesn't replace, like the core of my stack has remained pretty consistent over time. It has to actually support how you work. So I thought we could just talk about an overview of what's in our respective stacks and then you were going to go much deeper.

jason: Yeah, I thought I'd dive into OmniFocus a little bit, because, and I'll talk about the Pro version of it, because it's got this perspectives element to it that is really, really useful. And I'll talk about how I use that to keep everything moving through the pipe at the time I need it to move through the pipe.

Yeah. And so, and I'll want to talk about the. idea of a trusted system. Yes. Because of all of the things you need to kind of hand yourself over to this system. And if you don't fully hand yourself over to it, then you're just doing too much lifting. You're, you don't trust it. So you keep it all in your brain.

You don't trust the system. The system gets half updated or not updated enough. And like, it just becomes messy. And that's, I think why people don't trust it. Abandoned 

inger: their tech stack? Yeah, I think so too. 

jason: Is because they don't trust their tech 

inger: stack? Yeah, and you've got to trust what's got you. Yeah. So I'm briefly just going to go over mine and then you're going to briefly go over yours and then we'll dive into the task manager side of it and there's probably heaps more to say about this.

So you tell us what more you want explained. 

jason: Yeah. Yeah. At pod. ontheroadteam. com. Nice. 

inger: Sweet. All right. So I have to have a stack for managing research material, right? So ideas, things I've read. emails from other people. Everything can become grist for this research mill. 

Yep. 

inger: Grinding through the gears of Inga's meat computer at my brain, and then coming out as usually is writing sometimes podcasts, sometimes teaching material, whatever it is.

So I need to be able to store it and do things with it. So my stack. is Apple Notes. 

jason: Yeah, you've been like, you've been circling around Apple Notes for six months or so now. You, every now and again, you just kind of like, 

inger: I just jump it in there. Yeah. So I used to have all sorts of things like Evernote, like Omnivore, like, um, Pocket for keeping track of things I find on the web.

Like I like hanging out on Blue Sky. Talk to me, I'm there a lot. And that people share a lot of links on there. Um, and then I go, Ooh, I'll grab that, I'll grab that, I'll grab that. Or someone sends me something in email, I'll grab that. I need somewhere to, like a pocket to stuff my stuff in. But pockets become expensive and Omnivore has been swallowed by 11 labs.

And I've just gone back simply to Apple Notes. which is surprisingly robust as a way for saving red links. So all you do is you click the share to pick up Apple notes. I've got an automatic folder. Whenever there's a link, it puts it in a folder called links. And I just go through that and I process or discard once a month or so.

jason: Oh, okay. Yeah. Cause that was my question. It was, do you have one note with all the links that you save or do you have multiple notes? And you've categorized them into that folder. Yeah, 

inger: a smart folder automatically knows there's a URL and it just puts it in a folder. So, like a machine does 

jason: that. 

inger: Yeah, so I've got notes that, like I might say if I'm giving a speech through a megaphone at a union rally, for example.

For 

example. 

inger: Which I did recently. It was cathartic. I read it off my phone. Yeah. And that was in an Apple note, right? I wrote it on my computer. It automatically went to my phone. I yelled through the megaphone. I felt so good. It was that cathartic. Just do more of it. So that's one way I use Apple notes.

Sometimes I use it to just transfer information between computers and phones and things. It's very quick. But specifically with web links, it knows it's linked, sends it to a folder. I know they're all in that folder. I can search that folder. So I've just come back to something really simple to the end.

Yeah. 

inger: Um, and, and it's also under my control, so I'm not going to a cloud platform. I mean, Apple, you know, has iCloud, but that's all hidden from me. It just sort of deals. 

Yeah. Yeah. 

inger: Um, I have Zotero, so sometimes I'll send, so for instance, if I get a link to a paper that's in my Apple notes and I, sorting through my Apple notes, I download the paper, I put it in Zotero.

Yeah. That's the next step. 

Yeah. 

inger: Um, for finding other papers and kind of seeing how papers connect together, I use two programs, Connected Paper, our old friend Connected Papers, which draws graphs of papers and helps you find things, and Elicit, which is an AI tool that's built for helping you do managed literature reviews.

So both of those help me discover papers. Yeah. And bring information into Zotero. Um, I look, use, you know, Excel and Google sheets to crunch data. Obviously everyone's got something like that. When I want to do more sophisticated things with my data, I use MaxQDA. Which is a German company called Verbus, V E R B I S.

It's an alternative to Envivo. Why do I use MaxQDA? Because it's nerdier than Envivo. They've started to really build out AI features inside it. Not all of which I use because that goes to chat GPT on the back end. I don't want to compromise privacy of my data. But it will do interesting things like concordances and frequencies and, um, it understands lemmas.

Thanks. You look so excited by that. I 

jason: don't even know what, I thought they were small animals that jumped off cliffs. 

inger: If you do text analysis, you like know what limits are. So I can produce training sets for my computer scientists, collaborators, all sorts of things. Yeah. So that's my research stack. The research stack is sort of where I grew things up.

capture things, brew it like a coffee machine, and then I'm pouring it out into my writing stack. And I'm not going to go into this in any detail really, because it's another time, but Obsidian bullet journals, emailing is where my writing starts. Often I write the very best first version of something in an email to someone trying to explain something all the time, because I've got a clear audience in mind.

So I just grab it out and I put it in Obsidian. Often, often Obsidian is the place where I just keep email texts that I go, Oh, that was good. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: Nice one Inga, put that in there. Obviously Chord and ChatGPT are in the mix there. And so I'm copying things out of there, putting it in Obsidian. I usually run a colored highlighter over stuff that I get from any machine so that I've tracked that it's machine written, not me written.

jason: So in Obsidian, you're using the highlighter. 

inger: Yeah. Using the two little tubey things. Yeah. I'll just put a yellow highlighter over text that's generated by a machine. Yeah, I can track it. 

jason: Have you, have I shown you foldouts? No. Okay, let me do that. 

inger: Okay, not right now, but yeah. Not right now. See, this is why we have these conversations.

Uh, Scrivener, using less since I've picked up Obsidian, but it's still in there. It's a, uh, word programming, word program, word processing program designed by someone who was doing their PhD, was frustrated with Word, designed a program to write Um, and a Dropbox and Google Docs is also where I'll often author things.

So for instance, the, how to fix your academic writing trouble. Second edition has been written in Dropbox with Catherine Firth. We don't really write it in there. We use their word thing and I'll just do whatever their internal work. Yeah. It like, from my point of view, it sucks. It sucks balls, Catherine.

If you're listening, but I do it for you because I love you. Um, and then Google Docs, which I've just finished a, uh, literature review with a bunch of colleagues, uh, uh, systematic literature review. We all, we did it within a year, which astonished everyone. Cause I could say, I kept using roadmaps. 

jason: Uh, yes.

Yeah. And 

inger: we got it done in a year and they were introduced to the concept of a roadmap. And we'll talk about that next episode. Yeah. Um, And of course I have my admin and my project management stack. So Teams, email, OmniFocus, bullet journal, text expander, Claude and Chatty are in there as well. So that might be a good segue to you talk about your, you've done a major shift in your work lately.

So those of you who haven't been following the pod, which probably maybe some of you would have come in here cold. Welcome. Yes. Um, you were in a full time academic role at RMIT and then you went into a high level executive role at La Trobe and now you're an entrepreneur. 

jason: Entrepreneur. 

inger: And a consultant.

And you manage client work versus teaching, there's heaps of travel, and you're talking about how you have OmniFocus now set up with Fancy Perspectives, as you said. This is just your chance to like, come at that. I've given an overview of my tech stack.

Tell me what you got. 

jason: So it's remarkably similar to academic work. 

inger: Okay. 

jason: In a weird, weird kind of way. I think about it in techniques and systems that I've built to support me in my academic work. I'm leveraging in the same kind of way for this work now, which is not academic focused. So the processes are remarkably similar.

But the content varies. Yeah. So an example of this would be, I used to use OmniFocus to, I would have a semester plan and, uh, This is a few versions of OmniFlexors ago, they don't have the same autom it's a different set of automation tools now, but back in the day I had a plug in that would, I could put in a date of when the semester finished and it would, Autocalculate back based on math, all of the tasks that I had to do.

inger: So you had the end task. I had 

jason: the end, the due date. 

inger: And then it would go, okay, three weeks before this, you may have done blah, blah, blah, blah, which I was doing in a table the other day. Did you notice? I like started at the table. Like we want to have an event this day and I work, build the table back from there.

So it's a common project management approach. We should probably say what OmniFocus is. 

jason: Yes. Yes. So OmniFocus is a task management. System. It's a piece of software. It's Mac only, but it's on, that's Apple only. It's all. It's also on iPhone, iPad. And I think Vision Pro, although I've never put one of those headphones, headsets on.

inger: Oh no, I haven't either. 

jason: I don't know, I'd like to. 

inger: I, I would, but I wear glasses, so apparently you have to get them like specially customised. Ah. Yeah. They're all expensive, a few thousand dollars. I'm just waiting until they replace my eyes. I call it that, cataracts, when I have my cataract surgery, which they keep threatening me with a good time.

Right. And they'll fix my eyesight at the same time. Why wouldn't you just like That's what I said! Just do it now. That's what I said. 

jason: And those, they're like, It's too risky, 

inger: no. 

jason: But as you get older, will it not get more risky? 

inger: Yeah. They, they speak a sweet point between it being too risky. 

Yeah. 

inger: And you not seeing anything before they do it.

And I'm like, I'm happy for it now. Like, just sign me up. 

jason: Let's go. 

inger: Let's go. 

jason: Yeah. No. Okay. Yeah. But I'm waiting for 

inger: that. 

jason: They're waiting until you actually. 

inger: I'm not sure about the Vision Pro because of my hair. 

jason: Oh. 

inger: I think Apple have not thought this through, they're like, you'll wear the Vision Pro all day.

I'm like, no, people won't wear a helmet and risk on a bike because of their hair. So do you think I'm going to put this band around my face? No. Okay. I'm not going to break my leg. Okay. 

jason: You've got very nice hair. 

inger: I spend a lot of money on it. Anyway, OmniFocus, task manager on steroids. It is 

jason: a task manager on steroids.

Um, it's, uh, in terms of task management, it's the, it's kind of like a list manager. So you can have different kinds of task management ones, but this one is effectively you build tasks into a list and you can, it's got some organization. elements to it. So you can build sub lists into lists. And so if you've got a big project, yep, you can break that down into sub parts and then you can complete different parts of that when you need to and all that sort of stuff.

It's very, very powerful. It leverages the getting things done. Methodology? 

inger: I think the difference between it and other task managers that I've used is that it's a combination of a task manager and a project manager software because it sequences things, it keeps notes, it keeps links to objects, you can link things.

You know, documents, you can link, link back to an email, you know, so I turn my emails into, I send it to Omnifocus and it becomes a task. Um, but what you're talking about is, you know, sort of using it in a very advanced way. I'm a pretty basic user. I only just learned Perspective. 

Yeah. 

inger: After how many years?

Yeah. 2015, nearly 10 years. So it's one of those programs I think that's fair to say that you can get a basic grip on. 

jason: Yep. 

inger: And be super power and feel like that's enough. Yeah. For 10 years. 

jason: Yeah. And so there's four different ways that you can use this. You can set up each. um, project within OmniFocus. And the best way to think about a project is it's kind of like a folder.

Yeah. It's not actually a project project. It's just where you put all kinds of related tasks together. The advantage of that is that if you call a project, a thing, you can then just filter to that one thing. 

inger: Yes. 

jason: Yeah. Yeah. And, and the search on it's really good. There 

inger: are four types of projects. There are four 

jason: types of projects.

And you have for the last 15 years used which one? Kind? Just 

inger: the single task. It hurt your soul, didn't it? It 

jason: did. So you can have parallel projects, you can have sequential ones, and, and when I So a 

inger: sequential one is where, like, there's a series of tasks, you just tick them off as you do them. Yeah, yeah.

Like, we have to do 

jason: one before For the next There's a dependency. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, 

inger: it's just like, ah, 

jason: okay. 

inger: So I can imagine that sequential project in something like teaching, it's really quite useful because it, it keeps you on the straight and narrow in terms of one thing has to come after the other and you don't forget a step.

Yeah. Yeah. So if you were setting up your semester teaching, what you used to do to get back to what we were originally saying, you'd start saying, okay, well my go live with my start of my semester is here. Yeah. And then it would wind back. Two weeks before you need to do this, three weeks before you need to do this.

So you still have all that set up. 

jason: 24 weeks before you can start. 

inger: Oh. 

jason: So my semesters were 12 weeks of teaching, but each semester actually, by the time you go from setting up your LMS and all of that stuff, right through to finalizing results and all of that stuff, 24 weeks. 

inger: Okay, so you'd work on a 24 week cycle.

So this to me is like, I, as I said, you haven't done much undergraduate teaching really, in the scheme of my career. It's a brief period. And I was a casual teacher, so I never had the overview of things. I just came and did a class left. 

jason: Yeah. No, it's 24 weeks. It was 24 weeks. And that could even sometimes, that could even blow out in unusual, but Disappointingly.

regular situations where like a student. would get ill, um, or there would be some reason why they couldn't complete their last piece of assessment. 

inger: Yeah. 

jason: And then, then you, you would be at the mercy of whatever that illness looked like in terms of finalising their results and doing all that sort of stuff.

And 

inger: that would be overlapping with the next thing coming off. So the advantage of this project, I'm just imagining when you set it up, is that then you just, and this is what you mean by trusted system, if you know, 24 weeks before go live date. 

jason: That's a 

inger: long time out.

jason: It's a long time. That's 

inger: what. I'm having a brain fart.

Is that six months? Yes, 

jason: it is. 

inger: Six months. So six months before I go, Hey Jason, OmniFocus would say, pop up to you that day. Yep. Hey Jason, today you need to craft this piece of comms and send it to this person or fill in this form and send it to this person. And so once you sort of initiated. Okay. I'm going to do this project, which is a go live of a class.

Once you initiated that in your system, um, you would just then kind of forget about it. Follow 

jason: the steps. 

inger: Yeah. And just do what past self had set up for you. Yeah. And 

jason: so my teaching practice was, uh, industry engaged. So every semester I would have a different industry partner. And so that's why this thing was so long is because you had to, okay, Jason, you now need to start thinking about which industry partner you want for the semester, you know, like.

24 weeks in advance, sort of. 

inger: Yeah, this would be blowing some people's minds. Yeah. I have to say, because, I mean, I speak as, I start my planning for the next year in June. Yeah. And I must say, it takes six months to just stumble your way towards a list of things we're going to do. And registration sheets where people can turn up.

That is a six month process. Yeah. And you've been read into it because you've had to see what I'm doing this year. 

Yep. 

inger: And I send you a version and then I send you another version and then send you another version. Final, final, final, final, final, final. And I've never thought about doing it the way that you're talking about, where you kind of try and systemize it and go, okay, well, I need to go live here.

By which steps do I need to, you know, by this day, I'd know how much I was slipping at least. 

jason: Yeah. And the way in which I would write those tasks were almost for those very early tasks that were not a verb based, you know, do this thing today because it's an announcement that needs to go out. Um, where they were, okay, Jason, you need to really start thinking about what you're going to do.

I would write those tasks in almost like a conversation to myself. So that I'm being right at the very start is like, you know, that you have to do this because if you don't do it now, it's going to bite you in the ass. 

inger: So you used to put that in OmniFocus, like little affirmations to self, like, you know, how you're not going to feel like doing this right now?

jason: Yep. Really? Yep. And, um, did that work? Yes. Yeah, do this now because you know that it will get you into trouble if you don't do it now. 

inger: Oh, man. 

jason: Yeah. It's 

inger: like having yourself as a mentor. 

jason: Yes. 

inger: Slash father figure. 

jason: Yeah. The advantage of it was the way I came to that was because I was teaching multiple iterations of this course across multiple campuses.

Yeah. And they all had different, you know, Yeah. And so. And you're 

inger: on different continents. Different continents. And I just throw that in. Yeah. And you had, what, 600 students or something? 1, 200? Yeah. 

jason: 900 at Singapore. Yeah. You just have multiple classes and that 

inger: kind 

jason: of stuff. Crazy. Yeah. So. And what I learned was that if I didn't want to burn myself out, I needed to have a system that would capture all of that stuff.

And then I had to trust it. 

So 

jason: even though I didn't feel like on any given Tuesday, whatever, I didn't feel like thinking about Vietnam. My system would say, Jason, you now need to think about term three in Vietnam. 'cause Vietnam were on terms. 

inger: Yeah. Right. 

jason: And Melbourne And Singapore and semesters. 

inger: Oh my God.

jason: Yeah. And it's Indonesia, extra 

inger: complexity on complexity. 

jason: Indonesia was on some other kind of teaching thing, and then they wanted to introduce online and anyway, so we had nine different academic calendars. One stage I was, I was wrangling nine. 

inger: Like, you actually, the human brain can't do that. 

jason: No. That's why you need a trusted system, 

inger: right?

jason: Yeah. Yeah. And so, and OmniFocus was able to do that for me. Right. But there was lots of iterations of learning. So the first couple of times that I tried this sort of stuff, I was just capturing stuff as I went along. Um, but once I kind of got into the swing of, Teaching multiple classes and multiple locations and multiple timelines.

I started to think about it a little bit more differently. 

inger: Yeah. So I've, I, when I've had to do similar things, um, and I don't, obviously didn't have that complexity, but you saw how I was doing it yesterday when we were talking about Bali Bootcamp. Yes. Which we'd love to run a bootcamp in Bali. Yes. In October, 

jason: yes.

Is the plans. That's the plan. People, you'll hear more, we will talk about this a bit more length, but we're a lot of. Planning. But just in the back of your mind go, do I feel like going to Bali to do A writing boot camp. A writing retreat 

inger: type thing. Yeah. With, in Bali. 

jason: In Bali? Like in the Second week 

inger: of October, is that something I'd like to do?

Yeah. 

jason: Do I have 

inger: the mums, the money? Yeah. 

jason: Bali's relatively cheap. 

inger: From Australia. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: For sure. Um, it's cheaper than going to Canberra. 

jason: Cheaper than going to Townsville. Because I did 

inger: the costing on like running something like that in Canberra. And it was like It's cheaper to do in Bali. Yeah. One of my, Anna Fieldhouse, thank you, Anna, pointed out to me.

jason: Yeah. 

inger: Inga, this is cheaper in Bali. I'm like, what the, what the now? 

jason: And great Indonesian food. And 

inger: great Indonesian food. So like, what's not to love? Anyway, when I started to think about Bali Bootcamp, and you could use this to think about how you set up your OmniFocus project, for instance, is you simply have a, like a table in Word and it's got four columns in it.

One is what's got to be delivered. Right? What has to happen? So, for instance, people have to be in a room riding in Bali on the 13th of October. Yeah. So this 

jason: is the outcome. 

inger: Yeah. This is the outcome. What's the outcome? And then they have to have food. So that's an outcome. They have to have airfare. So that's an outcome.

So what are all these things that have to happen? Right? And then the next column is the due date by which that has to happen. 

jason: Yes. 

inger: And the next column is who's responsible for that happening, you know, and that may change if you're working in a team. And then there's just notes. Right. Like information for blah, blah, blah.

Each one of those rows then contains what has to happen, when it has to happen, who's got to do it. And the notes. OmniFocus will handle all of that. 

jason: Yeah. It's got. Right. 

inger: So each one of those lines in a table has a place in an OmniFocus project. So you've got the title, you've got the due date, you've got things called tags, so you sort it.

And this will get to perspectives in a bit because they're related to tags. 

jason: Yeah. So you can like, uh, you can set tags on perspectives are slightly different. We can note out about that. But one of the ways to use tags as I had people tags. Yes. So everything 

inger: I'm doing with Inga has a hashtag Inga. I have one for my boss.

And so every time I go and sit in front of my boss, I just pull up. Yep. The tag and everything. And that, I mean, there might be things that relate to multiple people. Like for instance, I'm looking at a new research integrity training package and how to implement that and everything that's tagged with my boss.

Cause I have to keep her updated, but it's also tagged admin and it's tagged director responsibilities and it's tagged. So every time that I'm pulling up those perspectives, I'm seeing all the things that relate to that. So, so if you're thinking about how you might set up, um, OmniFocus or And I said at the start, like the logic of what we're talking about can be done in many tools.

So Trello will do it a slightly different way. What other tools? I've used Productive. I don't think that's on the market anymore, but I used to use that. Um, people use Workflowy. Yep. Um, there's many of them. We prefer OmniFocus because it's just got more power. 

jason: Super powerful. And it has a defer. tag as a defer field.

But the 

inger: due date might be X, but you can defer it until, so you don't even have to think about it. You don't even have to see it. And then you don't get the mind clutter. Yeah. If you think about what you were doing there, you know, like nine different academic calendars. 

jason: You would be overwhelmed by the literally thousands of tasks that you would have to do.

So being able to hide them by saying, I don't want to see this task until I actually have to deal with it, Uh, is. Very, very powerful because it keeps your work in progress. Really. That's what that is. But more sophisticated about that idea now, um, limited. So you don't just feel overwhelmed, but you do have to review it every day.

Um, because every day a new deferred task might suddenly pop up. Yes. So you can, with OmniFocus, it's got a couple of view functions. You can see everything if you want to see everything. So if you want to cast forward and have a look for two weeks in, in advance, you can do that. Or you can just see stuff that is available to you right now.

inger: Yeah. Or stuff that is related to a person or a place. Yeah. Or, yeah, so, 

jason: so I would take, I would, and still do, toggle between those views. Because sometimes I go, I trust my system. I trust my system. I trust my system. But I'll look at my calendar and I'll go, Oh, there's a lot coming up. What's out of my mind, but in omni focus that could turn up, that might be three hours worth of work.

inger: And that's what we talk about the, um, the work freeway. Yeah. Like sometimes there's just a lot of traffic ahead. Yeah. And because you've limited the view, because you don't want to be overwhelmed by it. Sometimes you just have to pop up Google Maps equivalent and see there's a red line there. 

Correct. 

inger: And if someone's coming at you saying, can we do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

If you're not seeing that view, you might over commit. Yeah, very easily. I think about myself pre 2015 before I started using OmniFocus and what a hot mess that was. In fact, I was heading towards my first burnout episode. I think I deferred it by four years merely by putting OmniFocus 

jason: there. OmniFocus, yeah.

I 

inger: think that because I was heading for it. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: Maybe it would have been better if I'd had it then. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: Like, you just, you kind of got to have burnout to understand how fucked it is and how much you don't ever want it to happen again. Like, it is an object lesson. Yes. However. 

jason: And then you do it again.

inger: Exactly. And then 

jason: you go, Oh, that's right. You 

inger: have to have two. I'm convinced you have to have two. Yeah. Because the first 

jason: one was. Like the 

inger: little mini one. Yeah. It's not that won't happen again. Exactly. Oh, I let that happen. No, I will never let. And then the second one. 

jason: It's like, yeah. 

inger: Puts you in bed for weeks.

I mean, we can laugh about it now, but at the time it's terrible. I am 

jason: crying just a little bit. You are 

inger: crying. There are tears in your eyes. And, and you actually don't feel like you're ever going to recover. I remember you saying to me earlier this year. 

jason: I was worried. You 

inger: were scared. 

jason: I thought my brain, my brain was broken.

Yeah. 

inger: You're like, what if I can't work again? I'm like, it'll be fine. You just got to give it time. Like, trust me, I've been there. 

jason: Yeah. Like I genuinely, was concerned about my ability to be able to process thought. 

inger: Yeah, because you didn't really have the ability to process thought. No. Remember, we're still cleaning up some of the things that we ill advisedly tried to do in May, when you were in the debt slum.

We did that 

jason: the other day, didn't we? We were talking about something and I went like, I don't even recall doing that. You 

inger: actually did something really useful. You like, I said, the way that you self soothed I don't remember that at all. It was a really repetitive, simple thing. You did it bloody well. 

jason: Good.

That's the systems. Anyway, Onyfocus, um, has supported both of us. I think it was fair to say through our careers. Um, and that story about organising teaching translates really well to organising multiple clients. Right. Because at any stage, there's 57 steps between the time someone emails me and by the time one of us is standing in front of them to, to, to deliver a word.

inger: Now I used to do this by myself. Yeah. But I didn't know to the volume that we're doing. Thank you everyone who's ringing us up. We need the volume. Yes, please. Good volume. Keep the volume up. We like that. Jason needs to eat. Yes. Bye. But like I was just doing it as a side money and I'd stopped taking jobs probably March, April because I had too much to do.

I didn't realize there were 57 steps. I know that I was doing a lot of itsy bitsy, you know, kind of do this and do this little thing. Oh, I haven't done this. Oh, backtrack, do this. I didn't realize there were 57 steps. 

jason: Yeah. And I've edited down like I've, I've. What sort of 

inger: things are we talking about here?

jason: Uh, so there's like getting back to the email, then there's things like writing a proposal, sending a proposal, updating Trello so that you can see what's going on. Um, and there's a whole bunch of steps in that as well. Just that's a separate thing. Um, then there's, I'm actually sure that there's a quote has gone out.

There's a reminder to make sure that if I haven't heard within eight days from that person, that quote that I've sent out, that I need to gently nudge them. And so, because if you've. What I do is I offload off of my brain into OmniFocus and what it literally has gone from my brain at that point. Mm.

Because I trust OmniFocus to remind me in eight days that b Well, no, that Sally is going to, uh, I've either spoken to Sally about that quote or I haven't, and in eight days time, I get a little reminder about, oh, Shelly. And I can tick it off if I've, in the meantime, had that conversation with someone.

inger: Right, right, right. Yeah. 

jason: Oh yeah, I've done it. It certainly 

inger: gets back to you earlier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just a reminder. Yeah. Because if he hasn't, it's, it's a nudge. 

jason: Yeah. Yeah. And when you have multiple clients at, at different stages of that, so, so there's the quoting, there's the booking of flights, there's accommodation, there's, um, looking at materials, there's reorganizing materials, there's moving materials, which I'm very bad at.

Um, in Mentimeter from future delivery to past delivery to blah, blah, blah. 

inger: Look, no, no, uh, no judgment. 

jason: Yeah, but I do need to tidy up. I'm 

inger: not doing as many of those and I'm not moving them when I should move them. So, welcome. 

jason: Um. 

inger: But your numbering system is aces. 

jason: It works really well. Yeah, 

inger: it does work really well.

Did Claude think that numbering system up or was that 

jason: ChatGPT? I can't remember. One of them did, but it's 

inger: good. But. It works. We'd be stuffed if we didn't have client numbers. Yeah. There was, there

jason: was a, there was a lot of backwards and forwards between me and the system to figure that out, but it works really well.

inger: Yeah. In retrospect, you've actually done that fairly quickly. Because you've also been running from Qantas Lounge to Qantas Lounge to Qantas Lounge. 

jason: Yeah, I do a lot of accounting in Qantas Lounge. 

inger: It's a very conducive space, all I can say is they'll always give you a soda water with lime in it. You know, it's, you can do a lot.

jason: Thank you, Qantas. Look, I, although I, I got caught out the other day. I had a late night flight, like an 8. 30 flight or something like that, back from Brisbane. But the engagement finished at 11. 30 in the morning. 

inger: Yes. 

jason: And in my mind, I was like, Oh, it's cool. I'll just go to the Qantas lounge. 

inger: Oh no, too early.

jason: Too early. I did not know 

inger: that. Now, yeah. So yeah, you start to figure that out. 

jason: And it's like, that's shit. Now I'm stuck in Brisbane airport, which is a shitty airport. 

inger: I once got to London four hours early and I thought that this is going to be but and they looked at my face like and they were like, they just gave me a piece of paper and said go up there.

I think they just took one look at my face. Oh right. Yeah. So, I need the lounge right now. Yes. I cannot hang around an airport. No. No. 

jason: Um, the nice lady, I went to the, I'm going to be doing a lot of customer service. Yeah. And the nice lady put me on an earlier flight, which is just enough. 

Oh 

jason: yeah. And she checked my luggage, which is just enough to get me into the lounge for a few hours.

Thank you, Qantas. Yeah, thank you. That was good. 

inger: I must say, I find Qantas must have OmniFocus somewhere. Like, because their business processes. Like once I feel like I'm in the embrace of the Qantas business process, I feel like I've now offloaded, similarly to Omnifocus, these two are very close in my mind.

Like I'm in a system which is going to pass me through. And I know because you did this one, that if your luggage is checked on 

jason: and 

inger: you are not on the plane, they will eventually call you. Yes. 

jason: They 

inger: called you. 

jason: They called me on my phone. 

inger: Dr. Downs. Yes. Are you still catching this one? 

jason: Offloading procedures have begun

It's like, 

jason: oh, sorry. I'm coming. I'm coming. I'm coming. I'm running actually down the course way at the moment, like I'm on the phone. Panting still a hot mess. . Um, 

inger: we're talking about perspective, so we haven't really got to the guts of the story yet. Yeah. 57 steps. 

jason: So there's 57 steps between, 

inger: between the client contacting us initially and us standing in front delivering.

Yeah. As awesomely as we can. 

jason: And then there's more steps for client close out and then reengagement and all that sort of stuff that comes up separately. Um, articulating those, breaking them out so that you know exactly what it is that you have to do, then trusting yourself to just do that thing is really important because on any given day, I might be dealing with three or four different clients at different stages, different stages, and I have to be able to go Okay, it seems today that I need to review the slide deck or something like that.

That's what I whether I feel like it or not, like whether I think in my meat brain thinks it's a good idea or not. It's just like, review the slides. 

inger: Yeah. See, this is what I found with OmniFocus when I first started using it is that there are big things that need to get done. For instance, writing books, um, graduating students.

These are long timelines and there's so many tiny little steps in all of those things. It really astonished me when I got so much more product, if you measure productivity on output. So much astoundingly more productive after I started OmniFocus, at the same time, so much less stressed. Because before OmniFocus, I used to just wake up in a hot mess, panic in the middle of the night, thinking of a step that I'd forgotten, writing it down on the notepad next to my bed that I had to keep there, because this would always happen to me.

And then, like, going there the next morning and it made no sense whatsoever. But, and then just having the worry that something clearly important had occurred in the middle of the night and then failed to capture it. And then later on it biting me in the arse. It was my life. Yeah. It's 

jason: like, 

inger: Oh, that's what that 

jason: was about.

inger: And I, I regularly meet academics, so stressed and people listening to this, probably or not, you've got some system that you're using and you're just listening and nodding along going, Oh, I do that. Oh, that table thing might be an interesting thing for me to do. Whatever. I like an analysis of the process.

Yeah. But you're probably doing something. It's the people who aren't listening to this, your colleagues, um, who, uh, and you meet them all the time, don't you, these academics, and they really are so stressed out and people, and I'm not saying that I'm not stressed out. Like, as my husband says to me, even with all the things you do, you're still stressed out.

This isn't a reasonable job. If this, like you, if you have to trick it out to this extent. Yeah. Yeah. where your systems are so sophisticated that it's become a podcast that's gone for five years, then probably the job is not reasonable in the first place. 

jason: He's 

inger: got 

jason: good, he's got good eyes. 

inger: I mean, he's been watching me for a while and the few episodes of burnout that he had to gently nurse me through as well, which is like shit for your partners.

And I look at people and I think you're drowning. You are just drowning because things are swimming around inside your head. The thing is, if your task manager isn't producing at least a good night's sleep, it's not working properly. It's time to really think about what you're doing. 

jason: The other advantage of this is sometimes this stuff is on your brain, right?

Like, you know that you have to do a thing. Yeah. Like, because you just know, right. There is this task that does need to get done before the outcome can be delivered. But what one of the unsung benefits of OmniFocus is that if that task hasn't turned up yet, don't do it. 

inger: No, don't get ahead of it. 

jason: No, no.

Just like go, oh, okay. I know. Eventually I'll have to do that. 

both: Yeah. 

jason: But don't take time today to drag a problem forward. Do you, do you know what I mean? Yeah. Because it takes time out of the day that you've got right now. 

inger: Right. Where you, if you do have spare time, read a book. 

jason: Yeah. Do something else. 

inger: That's what I've learned over time.

Yeah. I actually have time to read something. I've got to bloody read it right now. Yeah. Yeah. And put my notes in or whatever it is I'm doing. 

jason: Because the, the, fire hose of tasks that you need to do that a university will generate on your behalf. 

both: Yes. 

jason: Is never ending and there's always, and it doesn't matter, you can get ahead of your schedule and that's not going to make a lick of difference.

inger: That's actually really profound and wise. 

jason: Yeah. So just like set up your task management system. This is why OmniFocus is so great so that you can go, okay, cool. It's coming down the pipe. I know it's trapped. It's in there somewhere when it gets to me, I'll do it then. 

both: Yeah. 

jason: And then look at people when they say, Oh, we need to do this thing.

Like your colleagues are on a, research project or whatever. And they say, Oh, we need to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, do a thing. And you go, it's caught in the system. We'll do it when it's time. 

inger: Yeah. And you become that kind of Zen like calm 

jason: person. 

inger: It also enables you in meetings with students or with colleagues, um, community meetings, whatever, to be present.

both: Yep. 

inger: like to be actually really listening and to be taking things in because your mind isn't occupied elsewhere because Omni's got 

you. 

inger: And I have a saying, if it's in Omni, it will happen, which means you have to be careful and guard what gets in there. Because I, it, it measures the total number of tasks and projects.

And that number to me is like a religious obsession. Right. It used at my peak of burnout, when burnout happened, I had 174. 

Yeah. 

inger: I realized that was too much. And I said to my husband, I don't think I can have more than 140. And he just gave me side eye. And I said, I looked at him, I went a hundred and he gave me more side eye.

And I said 50 and he went, so now 50 is my, 

jason: that's your limit, 

inger: my limit. 

jason: Okay. Can't do any more. Sorry. 

inger: And that's including personal things. Oh, wow. That are scheduled. 50. 

jason: Yeah. I've got all sorts of stuff in there, but I, I intermingle my personal. But 

inger: like my pro one project would count as one thing because that's got sequential tasks in it.

Right. Oh, so 

jason: you're not counting individual tasks. You're counting. I 

inger: am. But like, if those, if it's a sequential project where you're taking one thing off, like that's like, that doesn't, Yeah, I'm not quite sure how I do it now, now that I've come to say. Have you got 

jason: 50 projects? So one of the things that we do in one of our workshops is we ask people to think about the definition.

A project. A project and tasks. And the ones that we adopt is that a project is anything that has more than two steps, really. Yes. Two things to do. Yeah. Create a project for, um, and just work, because individual tasks are not necessarily projects. So, so that's important because if you're managing 50 projects.

inger: I'm not, it's 50 tasks, it's 50 tasks at a time. Yeah. Like some are hidden and they don't have to be dealt with. But if, if that, if that headline number hits more than 50. Yeah. then I'm in trouble. Okay. 34 is comfortable. Okay. 34, 35, 50, as soon as it starts to hit 50. So things are, because things are deferred and I don't see them, they're not counting in my 50 list.

Yeah. Okay. I've got another perspective that says, show me everything. Yeah. And then I open it sometimes and close it again. That's a lot. But if I've got 50 on my, my horizon view, that's, that's a lot. Yeah. And I should say no to everything that comes at me. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. And it's, it's, it's a role that's actually really helped.

Yeah. I introduced Narelle Lemon, Professor Narelle Lemon, friend of the pod, friend of ours. And I, I talked to I think last episode maybe of setting her up and realizing the setup of OmniFocus is not that straightforward. But it's one of those things that once you've done it, you never have to go back there unless you're helping someone else do it.

And when you help someone else do it, you're like, Oh, this is a slight pain in the ass. So like if there is some learning curve there, finding a friend who's already using it is helpful. But there's plenty of stuff on YouTube. There's like a lot. There's a lot everywhere. And there's the OmniFocus show. Yes.

Yes. 

jason: Yes. 

inger: So on podcast, if you like your pods, Andrew Mason, 

jason: Andrew J. Mason, 

inger: Andrew J. Mason runs it. We've done an episode with him. 

jason: And he's invited us back to do another one. 

inger: Which is fantastic. And we love the Omnifa. I listened to that one just because like, Oh, I hadn't thought to do that. 

jason: Yeah. I, um, the last episode of that I listened to was Professor Lynn.

Oh, I can't think of Lynn's last name. Forgive me, Lynn. Um, who is from the UK. Talked about travel lists. She wrote in to us about travel lists. Oh yes, 

inger: yes, and she was on the Omni show. She was on the 

jason: Omni show. So I was on a plane going somewhere and I was listening to her. 

inger: Oh, I didn't realise it was the same Lynne.

jason: Yeah, Ingress.

inger: Excellent. Yes. Hi Lynne. Um, right. I'm just looking at the time then. And I thought we should move on. Do we feel like, I don't feel like we've really, look, that was a bit rambly, but you would have got something out of it while you were doing the dishes slash being on a plane, long car drive, whatever it is.

jason: The, the piece that I'll just touch on this briefly and if people want to hear more about, we can have another episode maybe. is the way in which OmniFocus is not the complete answer. 

inger: No, because it's part of your stack. 

jason: It's part of the stack. 

inger: It's a very critical foundational pillar of your stack, but it's only a part of it.

jason: So the next part of it, the output part of it is when am I going to do all the tasks? So in OmniFocus, you can. You can allocate a duration that you think that the task is going to take. So if a task is going to take 53 minutes, you can say it's going to take 53 minutes. And I drag that task out into a calendar.

Um, and the calendar that I use, that app is called Fantastical. And what that does is that, honors the settings in OmniFocus. So if I drag a 53 minute duration task out of OmniFocus in the calendar into Fantastical, it'll create an appointment for 53 minutes in length. Um, and now how I estimate how long a thing is going to take is I've got a spreadsheet and I use the PERT analysis that we also teach in our workshops, um, to estimate time on task.

I just 

inger: use my timing data. 

jason: Yeah, but I use the timing data to help me to understand what my most likely, you go next level. Like, yeah, I think about it and then I'll put it into a spreadsheet and I go. I trust the spreadsheet. So when it says, this is going to take you nine hours, and my brain says, this is going to take an hour, it 

inger: doesn't, 

jason: I go, nine hours, 

inger: nine hours.

It's like past self is so much more sensible. 

jason: It's because of past self has kicked my butt so many times and said, why haven't you listened to me? 

inger: Yeah. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: Yeah. So if you're composing your day in kind of time blocks around tasks, um, then you can just drag the task on and it, it creates a mosaic of your day.

And there you go. I don't do that. I just go, Ooh, this will take. Like, I've got a note there. Yeah. This will take X number of hours and then I add all my hours together. Yeah. Like for in a four, like it might be a week or the next three days or something. Yeah. And I just put that in my calendar. Yeah. That total number of hours.

But I don't allocate it to a task. 

Oh, okay. Because 

inger: if I allocate it to a task, I get Oppositionally defiant with myself, , and I was like, no, I'm gonna not gonna do that. Oh, I do. I really get like that where if I get a nudge from Omni and it's a suggestion. 

Yeah. 

inger: Like, hey Inge, you might want to think about X, but then I'll do it.

But if it's an order and it's got this many, unless it's really urgent, I will oppositionally define, do something else instead. I just know myself. 

jason: You should have a talk to yourself. 

inger: I should have a talk to, I've talked to Claude about it. Claude has pointed out that it tends to be a bit of an ADHD trait.

Yeah. 

jason: So I've got a special calendar task calendar. 

inger: Yes. 

jason: So I have a bright green calendar 

inger: in 

jason: fantastic. Or you can have shared calendars. So you 

inger: actually have a different calendar for tasks. 

jason: Yeah. And I'm the only 

inger: good idea. 

jason: I'm the only person who can see it. So my wife doesn't see all the tasks that I have to do on a day to day basis.

So I know that. On Thursday, for example, I have to have done a thing and that thing might be 90 minutes in length. Um, I drag that task into my calendar and it adopts that 90 minute appointment, but then I can move it wherever I feel like I need to do it. In my day, so sometimes it might be, Oh, that task is actually going to require a fair bit of brainpower.

And I need to be on my game for that. I'll move that to the start of the day. 

inger: Right. That's actually a really good idea. I mean, Outlook doesn't permit that of course, because you are a person in Outlook and you're just a person and you can't have a second calendar, but you can do it in, in Apple or any other calendar you could have.

Parallel. So long as the time's blocked out, then you can have the task. That's maybe a way to have a conversation with myself in the calendar rather than get oppositionally defiant with myself, maybe. 

jason: Yeah. And so all you're really doing is filling in the blank spaces in your calendar, right? Because your calendar will have meeting with this person or this other thing.

And so it's got, you can't, you have to fit your tasks in around that. 

inger: Yeah. What I do at the moment is I just have, Standing buffer number of hours I've calculated that I need to work on other stuff as a general overview, God's eye view on everything. Yeah. And every week has got those buffers in it.

That's what I do at the moment. Oh, okay. So I don't adjust out. I'm not as fine grained, but it works. So long as you've got the buffers in there, so long as other people can't come and ninja meetings on top of you or things that you do. If you've got a thing in your calendar, like all day Tuesday, that's just like no meetings, then you can do whatever you like there.

But you could have another task calendar that actually shows you, you know, what it's very important to get a handle, I think, on what the work actually looks like. 

jason: Yep. Because you can fool yourself. Because otherwise you. You fill up with two months, like, I can't get that done in 40 hours. 

inger: Exactly. I am just noting that 

jason: it's 

inger: one hour 24, which for us is pretty good actually.

And I'm just noticing that it's also, ironically, one, it's 26 past one. We've got a teenager upstairs. Yes, we've got to feed him. That we have to feed. Shall we just zip through the rest of this? Yes. Well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation that wandered all over the place, but I found it very useful. 

Okay, 

inger: good.

Excellent. Thank you, Jason. Um, what have we been reading? I, again, like, I'm not going to dump this section again, but I just want to note that an election happened. 

A 

inger: big election. Yes. Of which the, I found personally the results of that very disappointing. Yes. And, um, enraging in fact. Yeah. And it happened while I was on a plane to Singapore.

So I got on the plane and the world was one way. I got off the plane. I'm like, well, fuck, here we go again. So I turned off all social media. 

Yeah. 

inger: I was away anyway. I'm like, fuck it. I just don't want to get into the screaming and the agonizing and the rending of gum and it's like I'm over it. 

Yeah. 

inger: So I turned it off and I actually, um, read books while I was traveling.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, and I got through, and I went to all the books that were not quite finished on my Kindle, and I bloody finished them, Jason. Good. It felt really good. I now, I've got a bunch of new ones that I have to finish, but I finished off. So I finished the Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, 

jason: which 

inger: has been recommended to me for years.

I've had it there, I realised, for maybe 10 years. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: and dipping in, dipping out, finally finished it, skimmed it a lot. 

jason: So the only thing that you need to know about that book. 

inger: Yes. 

jason: I think it's page 83. 

inger: Yes. 

jason: Where he talks about the difference between the kinds of tasks. Yes. And one is a check then do. Yes.

And the other one is a do then check. That's the only thing in that 

inger: one. I agree with that. The rest of it is stories. 83 or 

jason: 86. Which are 

inger: interesting. Yeah, yeah. But most of which are not. I read all the hospital ones with great interest. Yeah. They were all a bit gory. 

Yeah, yeah. But 

inger: then he wrote this whole long one about a building site and I'm like, I've lived that life.

I don't need to read that. It's got something to do with skin. I read the art of exploring. Explanation by Ross Atkins, which was a book that had really good copy for selling it, and was a little less than 

jason: good. It promised shiny things on the outside, and it didn't really. 

inger: Anyway, so look, it's got some interesting stuff in it, but I won't dwell on it.

Like. If you need, maybe it was too basic for me. If you are like the sort of person who goes, I need to explain complicated things to people, which is my life. Um, and I've never read anything about explaining complicated things to people before. This is the book. Okay. But most of us have probably read books about communication.

If you haven't, it's a good one to start with. Alright. Um, I finished, finally, Extra Focus, the Quick Start Guide to Adult ADHD by Jesse Anderson. Very good. Highly recommend. 

jason: Okay. 

inger: Written by someone with ADHD for someone with ADHD, which I'd I don't identify as being ADHD, but my husband is pretty convinced I am.

And honestly, if you'd spent time with us the last three days, in the way that we've worked through things, you probably from the outside looking at both of us would say, there's traits. There's a 

jason: lot going on there. 

inger: But we do get like, look at us, we actually got stuff done, you just don't get there in a linear fashion.

None. Anyway. Because it's written for a person with ADHD, you can consume it really easily. And bloody hell, I think it's like grounded in like, not everything will apply to everyone because it's like everyone's different human, but I found it very enlightening. Yeah. Um, I read, um, writing for busy readers.

Again, sucking me in, thinking, I'm going to learn something from this book about how to write. Like, I was so impressed by the, um, Extra Focus ADHD book for allowing me to focus sufficiently to actually zip through it in the end. I thought, Oh, I could do with more of this. So I downloaded Writing for Busy Readers by, um.

Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky Finch again. It was okay. Okay. But I've read a lot of books in this genre and perhaps again, if it had been the first one I read, I would have been like, this is magnificent. 

Yeah. 

inger: There's not another book I can think of that goes directly to the topic like that. 

Yeah. 

inger: So if that's something you're interested in and you just want that.

jason: Yeah. 

inger: I think it's a good book for that. But for me, again, a little basic. 

jason: Yeah. You've got expertise in this. Yeah. But 

inger: I mean, I just really read books about writing because I just like any, any extra thing is good for me. 

both: Useful. 

inger: Yeah. And you know, I'm a nerd about writing. 

both: Yes. 

inger: Last thing. Last one I picked up, which I didn't have time to finish reading.

Elastic Habits by Stephen Guise, recommended by Dr. Stephanie Zins. Hello, 

jason: Stephanie. Hi, Steph. 

inger: Who I saw at the Charlotte Upham Wright Symposium. Oh, okay. Yeah. Uh, Stephanie's a great thinker. Really interesting person. And I haven't finished reading that, but I did start. Ah, 

jason: is it interesting this bit that you've started?

Yes. 

inger: Okay. Yes. I mean, there's tiny habits. There's Atomic Habits. Yeah, there's 

jason: the 

inger: Habits. Habits Zen Habits. The Zen, like there's a lot of habit books. 

jason: Yes. 

inger: What I like about this one is that it just does acknowledge that like habits change and in fact, the point of them sometimes is to change anyway, so haven't finished it, can't give a whole review, but good start.

jason: Yeah. I often think about the. like the interstitial place between habits and rituals. 

inger: Yes, well he talks a bit about that because some are rituals. 

jason: Yeah that, that occupies a surprisingly large part of my brain. 

inger: Maybe we should do a pod on that. Just 

jason: as I walk around. You're 

inger: much more of a ritual person.

jason: Thinking about this stuff, yeah. 

inger: Yeah. Like you have your morning rituals. Oh, yeah. And you stick to things like that. Yeah. Could be an ADHD. Just saying. Okay. Finding islands of calm in a world of chaos. Um, there's nothing wrong with that. That's probably enough on the, what have we been reading? Um, short, short answer, a lot.

jason: Yeah. I've been reading, um, 

inger: Yes. Which looks good. It's got a big pink bookmark and it looks like it's halfway through the book. Yeah. You had it on the bench over there. 

jason: Heard about it on the Mac power users, focus podcast with David Sparks. Um, which was interesting. And then they also talked about one called the anxious generation.

Oh, it's that 

inger: Jonathan Haidt. 

jason: Yes. Hmm. So I ordered that one. So 

inger: many people have views. 

jason: Oh, okay. I've ordered it. I haven't read it yet. 

inger: I saw it on the table. Hmm. 

jason: Yeah. So I'll be interested to read through that and just sort of see. 

inger: With your critical eye on it, I'd be interested to see what you think. 

jason: Okay.

inger: A lot of researchers. 

jason: Yes. 

inger: Just take time out of their day to bash on Jonathan Haynes. 

jason: Really? 

inger: And I think it's because he, like a bit like Malcolm Gladwell. Like has read the stuff. Yeah. And then doesn't do with it what the researchers think he should do. 

jason: Oh, okay. 

inger: So he is very anti-social media, for instance.

Yes. And a lot of researchers and young people. Yeah. And social media. Yes. Gotta say as a parent, 

jason: yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna make number one sun reader before I give him a smartphone. 

inger: I am so like I, I mean, I know this band has been so controversial. Mm-hmm. And a lot of my good, good friends who I trust and listen to 

mm-hmm

inger: I think it's a bad idea. 

Mm-hmm . 

inger: But as a parent mm-hmm . I've got to say sometimes it's really helpful when, when you're just like, not loud. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: Like, otherwise, what tools have parents got? 

jason: Yep. That's it. 

inger: Like, 

jason: especially when you think about the way in which the school system encourages the use of devices at such a 

inger: young age.

It's wrong. I feel like my son's. Social life in high school was wrecked by phones. And I feel like his social life at university is wrecked by phones. Cause he used to, at university, meet people because he was sitting outside the room and you had literally nothing else to do that say, Hey. Yeah. Hey. Hey.

What's you up to? Do you hate this class as much as me? It was so bonding. I made some of my best friends in the queues waiting for lectures to start or whatever because you couldn't do anything but talk to a person. It's all gone. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: A third of people, I read this thing, I think, look, I don't know if it's true, but some large proportion of uni students don't make a single friend at uni now, like a huge proportion of them.

And I would have to say that's probably been the case for my son. Unlike his friends, uh. All from high school, and he's like picked up acquaintance, friends, friends at work, but not. at uni. Uni's a place he blows in and out because often it's also online and they're not even there. 

jason: And the only time you're really forced to interact with people is when you have to do group work.

inger: Yeah, which is not the best. It's not the best way to make friends, is all I'm saying. 

jason: It's not. Um, Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make Jack read it before I give it to him, but, uh, we're pretty aware of that in this family. Yes, very aware. We, we spend time looking at people on the streets and go, look at that person crossing the road without looking up.

Oh my 

inger: god, I nearly ran over someone in Cornwall. 

jason: Yeah. Middle 

inger: of the night, rain, crossing the road, reading their phone with noise cancelling headphones on. And I, it was lucky driving a car that went, Oh, person, I'm going to stop.

jason: Yeah. Death. 

inger: It's like. It's just crazy. 

jason: Yeah. Yeah. I was in Hong Kong and I took the train to Mong Kok.

So it's not a very long train journey. And I. And you can look right down the train, all the way down. And I did a quick, I did a quick study. Yes. 90 percent of the people in that train were on their phones looking down, individually engaged with their own phone and not, and not talking to others. There are others that were talking to one another, were often families, and looked kind of, it's hard to tell from the outside, but they might have been tourists.

both: Yeah, right. 

jason: So, you know, so there was adults talking to kids and that sort of stuff. 

inger: Well, it was instructive, like turning off social media, like just turning it off, deleting the app off my phone and just going right for this trip. It's just, I'm just not gonna. Like how much more time I had to read was astonishing, but also just like.

I, I, it was a good detox anyway, I recommend it, I'll probably do it over Christmas. Um, I'm going to move this on because we've got to feed Jack Downs, especially because he spent all that energy washing my car. 

jason: Yeah, but he got paid for it. 

inger: You think that's right. Two minutes here. This segment is in honor of David Allen.

I don't know where it is. Uh, there we go. Um, in his classic Getting Things Done book, he argues that if the tasks take longer than two minutes to complete, you should do it then and there because it'll take longer than two minutes to capture it. Schedule time to do it market is complete, but really, 

mm.

inger: It's just like a hack or a idea or a thing that helps, um, other podcasts. Jason would do this at the start. Yes. But we do it at the end as a treat. 

jason: Yes. 

inger: I actually have a tip. Good. I read this paper. about ChatGPT and I will include a link to the paper in the show notes. Can't remember the name of it right because I didn't, unhelpfully did not put it in my show notes.

Um, where they talked about how there is a transformer called TeachGPT. 

jason: Okay. 

inger: Um, and they kind of used that in the training of ChatGPT and before that it was sort of giving rubbish. 

jason: Okay. 

inger: And what the, what TeachGPT taught ChatGPT was to expect humans to be helpful. 

Right. 

inger: So it taught it to be both humble and helpful.

jason: Right. Apparently. I, I can, I've got a list of humans that are neither of those things. 

inger: Well, in fact, it's interesting because Ethan Mollick talks about, in a recent Substack post, he talks about a new analogy for AI as an endlessly patient and helpful co worker who forgets everything you talk to them about before, which is actually pretty true.

Right? 

both: Yeah. Yeah. 

inger: And he said the thing that's really transformative about that is that we're just not used to people being endlessly helpful. Yeah. Anyway, so chat, GPT, Claude, et cetera, expect you to be helpful. That's what makes their responses helpful. Useful. Yeah. Useful at all. Um, and it means that one of the ways to be more helpful is to use the word help in a prompt.

I need your help. 

Oh. 

inger: Okay. It makes a big difference. You know, like take a deep breath. Yeah. I don't know if it makes a difference, but it really feels like it does. Being affirming to it. Um, saying I need your help and then also explicitly telling the AI that it's okay to ask questions. 

Yeah. 

inger: Because it won't, by default, ask you questions.

Ask further questions. Unless you give it permission. 

Yeah. Much like. Tell it. Human 

inger: co worker. Yeah. You know, sometimes you have to make it okay to ask questions. Yeah. This makes an extraordinary difference to my workflow with Claude and ChatGPT. It's knowing that they expect me to be helpful and there to answer their questions and therefore give making and giving it permission.

to answer my question and using the word help. So as an example, I've got a podcast producer in court. Yes. Does all sorts of things. Yes. Helps produce outlines, show notes, et cetera. Yeah. Um, and the steering prompt goes something like this. You are a great podcast producer because why not? Why be an average one?

Yes. 

jason: Yeah. Cause this is not an average podcast. 

inger: Yes, exactly. Who helps people. So I use the word help. You know, somewhere in the prompt, put together entertaining, engaging podcasts. You have a set of show notes from on the reg, the podcast I run with my friend, Jason, our podcast is for academics and focuses on productivity techniques.

You help me with show related tasks, like putting together discussion guides and show notes. You think creatively about problems. If you're not sure, please ask questions. Use Australian English for all responses. No cliches, please. Otherwise it says good day in colour a lot. And so the prompt I gave it when I was asking for help with this episode was, Hey Claude, I'm doing a new episode at.

outline and show notes for podcasts about creating your own technology stack. We're adapting this idea from IT Speak. In IT settings, they use the term to describe technologies they put together to make an application. In our adaptation, we use it to describe the various bits of software we need to put together to get a task done in research, teaching, and administration.

Have a look at the show notes I've given you, which describe some of our stacks and systems for getting things done. Tell me if you understand what I'm talking about, or if you have questions. And it asks bloody good questions. Okay. It always asks really helpful questions, and once you've answered these questions, if you think about that whole chat is now being trained to do a task, often I can do things such as here's another one, do the same thing.

And it's just, that's a bad click, but you get my point, right? Because we've had that little exchange at the front where it's clarified the task for itself and then it's just, it's a technical term. Okay. which it just does its thing. So, um, if I could summarize this two minute a tip, use the word help. Use the word help.

So it can be something like, I need your help, Claude, or can you help me with? And ask questions. And ask, and make it okay for it to ask you questions. Bloody hell, it asks you good questions. Okay. To the point where you're like, I wouldn't even have thought that question, but yes, that is a good question. I should have asked for myself.

Yeah. 

inger: Like, I probably did wordlessly ask myself that question and answer it at some point. But it helps if it's articulated, the questions, because sometimes you think, Oh, when I explain this to another coworker, I haven't ever made it clear that what I do when I do my teaching, for instance, or my teaching is a reframe.

Right? Here's the problem of taking, of doing notes. 

jason: Yep. 

inger: Right? Other teachers would come at it as like, here's some tools to use, here's what notes are for, blah, blah, blah. But the thesis whisperer way is to say, what are notes though? 

Yes. 

inger: Right? Yeah. Notes are writing. Yeah. Like that's the writing process. So if we treat it like that, here's my reframe.

Right? Yep. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: It helped me realize that I do that. 

jason: Yeah. Okay. And 

inger: now we have conversations where I go, it goes, well, what's your reframe though? 

Oh. 

inger: Right. 

Nice. And 

inger: then I'm like, Oh, actually I have to think about what is the reframe. And then later on it starts to guess, I'm guessing your reframe would be like your thesis whisperer reframe would be X.

Is that right? Sometimes I'm like, yeah, yeah. Sometimes I'm like. 

jason: And. Yeah. 

inger: And. 

jason: Yeah. A bit more. 

inger: A bit more. So, like, that has all changed, like, my conversations just got substantially better with the word help. Wow. Understanding that it expects me to be helpful. Okay. To it. 

jason: Yeah. I'm going to try that. 

inger: Yeah, report back.

jason: It's a good two minute tip. 

inger: Yeah, thank you. It's also quick. It took way more than two minutes to explain. 

jason: You should have put that in OmniFocus, shed 

inger: you some time. You've got a two minute tip for a new product that you discovered and you've spent a whole 20 minutes with and it bloody looks awesome. It does look 

jason: good.

It does look good. So I've got a problem that I need to solve, which is to Um, design, uh, uh, design some work will be modularized. And. Big 

inger: secret. Super 

jason: secret project. 

inger: Project. Yeah.

jason: Um, and the way I would normally have done this in the past is I would start with a mind map, um, and I would work my way through the mind map.

I would generate the mind map and make connections and do all that sort of stuff. But recently my favorite piece of mind mapping technology has no longer supported. Ah, it's bloody 

inger: cloud based subscription services. Yeah. 

jason: So it, um, uh, I can't use, I could continue to use But it's not supported. So eventually it's all going to break.

inger: And then you won't be able to get your stuff out. 

jason: So I've been looking for mind mapping software for a while now, uh, and every time I kind of come at it, it's not quite right. And I don't like it. And so I abandoned it and I end up doing a lot in my Pujo, like a hand drawn mind maps and stuff, um, but recently I've noticed some.

Mindmapping software are starting to introduce AI into the software, which I think is a bloody good idea. 

inger: Yeah. Like I was unconvinced reading all these things, but just seeing it, I'm like, fucking yeah. 

jason: So this, so this morning I got up and I was thinking about this problem and I did a search for this stuff.

And I looked through a bunch of them, but I settled on one called Mappify. 

inger: M A P P I F Y. Yes. Mappify. com. net. dot something dot google dot google dot 

jason: mapify dot 

inger: s o so you can never just assume com anymore 

jason: no 

inger: no mapify dot s o 

jason: s o 

inger: yep 

jason: um and it's a black it's a piece of software, like it's a piece of mind mapping software and it does a really good job of that, but it also means that you can do all sorts of stuff with it.

But what I like about it is if you, you have a central node, then you have child nodes that come off of that. And then like little nodes underneath that sub nodes, you can go to the end one and then you can go generate more and it will continue to generate ideas and use AI to expand out that idea. Cause sometimes like you would normally have to do that manually.

And that takes time and as you think your way through it and all the rest of it. But 

inger: sometimes it's easier to react to an idea than to think it up. And like a lot of people get really upset about that and say, Oh, you can see how I get a little impatient with that. And as a person who's a trained creative, if I could just have a small rant about this.

jason: Carry on. 

inger: As an architect I was trained to be creative. 

Yeah. 

inger: Right. And you're trained with various methods to just generate shit when you're tired, you don't feel like it, blah, blah, blah. Yep. And one of the things that you're trained to do is just to react or to use a prior precedent or to just like change something that's already there.

Yep. 

inger: And to just see that as a, like a prompt. 

Yep. 

inger: And people who would look at Mapify and go, Oh, well, you're getting it to think up the next thing. You're listening, you're losing the best bit about being human. I'm like, we always do this. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: And a lot of people aren't trained. Like I'm trained. People wonder how I'm creative.

I was trained. Yes. 

jason: Um, what I like about this is, uh, you can, as you're alluding to, you can just go like, I don't like that. Delete. 

inger: Yes. But that's the human bit. 

jason: Yeah. Or move it to this other thing. 

inger: I've never thought of that. Yeah. Let me think about that for a moment. Oh, it's not quite that, that, but it is this other thing.

Like, that's just the human creative process. Like, oh, it's too assisted. You're going to let, like. nothing comes from nothing. 

jason: Yeah. 

inger: Like everything comes from something. 

jason: Yeah. And the amount of time that it saves you to be able to get to that point where you don't have to spend effort, cognitive effort, to get to that point.

inger: But I think people, that's what people think. If you are not using the cognitive effort, the value, there's that value and effort type of thing. Connection that they make and therefore if you're not going through all that cognitive effort, you're not developing your brain. Yes, in some cases, like if you're learning a new thing, yeah, too many shortcuts may be not good for you.

jason: Yeah, 

inger: but as an expert, 

jason: yeah, so when I start with a blank page with a mind map, right, like the traditional way. Yeah, I already know what the end nodes look like. 

Yes. 

jason: Like in my head, I've got, this is what I want, but I have to go through the boring, laborious step of drawing a node and then drawing a subnode and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That takes time and is really wasted effort because I already know what the outcome looks like at the other end. Where the AI is useful is you go generate this thing. See 

inger: what I'm looking at on the screen is you gave it our podcast. 

jason: Yeah, I gave it, I gave it a, a URL to a most recent podcast. The one before this one, um, it 

inger: took, 

jason: no, not the set, the URL.

It's like the buzzsprout. com slash on the reg, blah, blah, blah. Like for that episode, 

inger: I 

jason: have no idea. 

inger: Did it, it must've listened because I'm looking at it and it's pulled out. So it's like that AI and bullshit jobs. Yeah. And it's. It's done a bloody good job. Yes. It pulled out three top notes. We've got introduced duction to bullshit jobs, implications and future outlook, and AI's role in bullshit jobs.

It's exactly what we talked about. 

jason: Yes. And so what it did is, 

inger: it's also nicely graphic. Nice. We've just paid the subscription. I 

jason: did kind of go Dutch, just take my money. Um, but it will do YouTube clips. It will do podcasts. It will do, and it's all. Uh, it's got this kind of AI background that is useful. Um, and like, it does all the, I can move things around.

I can drag and drop and I can do all this sort of stuff. Anyway, two minute hip. 

inger: We're fans. 

jason: Mapify. 

inger: Mapify. Can you pull the show notes up? Cause I'm going to read us out. Cause Jack is probably so hungry that we'll have to wrangle him into the car. Like put him in a straitjacket so that he, you know, like he's a teenager.

We can't do this to teenagers. He's on the internet, he hasn't even noticed it yet. A little 

jason: bit of resilience won't hurt. 

inger: Uh, thanks for listening. Now we love reviews and, uh, last I read there wasn't a new review. But if you do leave a review, we promise to read it out. Apple, Spotify, just, uh, scroll down to the bottom.

And, um, I see you're highlighting over our old email address. Yep. Um, and give us a review. Five stars only. 

Yes, please. 

inger: Um, if you want to send us a speakpipe, like Nicole from Curtin did, it's always lovely to hear your voices. You can leave us a voice message at speakpipe. com forward slash these in Swiss bra.

Well, you know, you can speak in your phone and send it through email and we'll patch it in either way. Uh, Jason, you are sort of having a break on socials, but you pop up every now and then on blue sky and I get excited and talk to you and then you just go away. I go away. Thank 

jason: you. I just, like, I remember the last time I did this, I, with Twitter, like I got invested in Twitter.

inger: Yeah. 

jason: And now I'm looking at that. Do I want to get invested? 

inger: Yeah. 

jason: And I'm not sure that I do. Well, 

inger: no, like, mad respect for that. You'll find me though on all the socials as Faecexwhisperer. I'm only really talking to people on Blue Skies. Occasionally I pop into threads. Yeah. I hang out on LinkedIn a bit, but like, who wants to talk in front of the bosses?

No. I certainly don't. It's clear to me now they're listening. So, you know, I'm boring there. Blue Sky's where I'm at. And of course you can read everything else on thesiswhisperer. com. We also have a website 

jason: on theregteam.

inger: com. 

jason: You can look at it. If you want 

inger: to book us for a thing, 

jason: we do, we've got a, 

inger: we've got a diary.

Yep. All sorts of awesomes. Yes. We, it needs to be fuller. 

jason: Yeah, yeah, 

inger: yeah. We'd like some, we'd like it to be full on. 

jason: Book us and then know that you will be put into a 57 step process. 

inger: You'll go, Oh, Jason, I just need to launch this 57 step process. It costs us about a thousand dollars a year to run this podcast.

If you want to support the work, you can sign up to be riding the bus member, just 2 a month on our Ko Fi site, link in the show me know. Yes. Um, and no one has done that. I haven't looked. You haven't looked. People have. We will thank you next. I did not. Okay. Update 

jason: the spreadsheet. We're 

inger: so ahead of things.

Yes. Yes. Um, but thank you so much. You do keep the wheels of the bus turning. Yes. And I'm going to surely hit stop, but it's been fun being on the kitchen table. 

jason: Casa Downs. 

inger: Casa Downs. Casa. Is it Casa? Mojo Dojo Casa House. Okay. 

jason: Thanks everyone. 

inger: I'll see you later. 

jason: Bye.