[00:00:10.340] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:10.720] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:11.150] - Gordon
My name is Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:13.070] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:15.380] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With" a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have been happening in our businesses over the last seven days. Now for those who've never joined us before, sorry, for those who have not joined us before, better English, we both run our own businesses. And this podcast and vidcast is all about just basically software that we've found, or things that, little tips that we've discovered that help us with our everyday business. And hopefully we can pass that information onto you and make your life easier as well. So how has your last seven days been, Taylor?
[00:00:55.100] - Taylor
Yeah, it's been interesting. I've been sleeping downstairs.
[00:00:59.810] - Gordon
You have on this very sofa, no less.
[00:01:02.160] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:01:02.420] - Gordon
Yeah. So it's got a lot of use recently. Why have you been sleeping down here?
[00:01:07.520] - Taylor
So I have wanted to upgrade my kind of Zoom meetings and improve the background because for a long time I, in my bedroom, I've had multiple, the room's been done multiple times, I've had lots of things screwed into the wall, screwed out, taken out, you know, hammered in. And so I decided that I wanted to kind of redo everything, paint everything over, fill all the holes, and have a nice, clean, grey background for my Zoom calls.
[00:01:40.070] - Gordon
Yes. And how's that doing?
[00:01:43.500] - Taylor
It's a slow, long process. I've only been able to manage about one to two coats a day, maybe three on a push, because I've got to kind of work it around my work and all the things I have to do.
[00:01:56.420] - Gordon
And you ideally need to paint when there's light. So that means you've been working later. But, how has painting been? Because it's not an easy task is it?
[00:02:05.690] - Taylor
No, it's completely different to kind of what I do. And it kind of, I guess, a lot of respect for the people that do it because, you know, it's not as easy as it looks. And obviously, they've got their craft and...
[00:02:19.580] - Gordon
And this is quite a good lesson for people who want to design their own websites, who maybe have no experience on it as well, because, you know, it's always if you want a really good job and, you know, for painting a room, it's not really going to bring in any business for you. So it wasn't sort of high up the list of criteria as far as the business goes, but a website is. And so if you're going to have a website that you want to get business from, always best to go to professionals who know what they're doing. Yes, you can create your own website. Yes, you can have, you know, a site that you've built from scratch using something like Wix or, you know, like a...
[00:03:00.980] - Taylor
WordPress.
[00:03:01.640] - Gordon
WordPress. Yeah. But it's never going to be as good a result as if you went to a professional to get it done.
[00:03:09.350] - Taylor
The main reason is because of our knowledge. And it's, you know, the best practises, the hidden tips and stuff that we gained from it. Same with the painter you know. I've learnt quite a lot about painting from watching videos on YouTube and things like that from people that know what they're doing. And what I was originally doing wasn't what they recommended or what they said that you should do.
[00:03:31.880] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:03:32.600] - Taylor
And so, you know, a lot of stuff I probably still don't know about painting that, you know, had a professional done it, they would have been able to do that and do it with ease.
[00:03:41.420] - Gordon
And another thing is making it look clean at the end. For example, this room was professionally decorated. And when you look in the, at the edges, and you look at the coving and the bits where they join. The, you know, the paint work and the wallpapering is just perfect. The lines are very clean and it looks really good. Whereas, when we did it ourselves, when you did it and I helped you. Meh. Not so good.
[00:04:12.200] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:12.890] - Gordon
But that's because we don't have the experience and that, you know is why you get a professional to do these jobs. So, anything else you want to say about your experience as a painter?
[00:04:26.150] - Taylor
It's messy.
[00:04:27.620] - Gordon
It is messy.
[00:04:28.310] - Taylor
I have to wash my hands and change clothes every time I went to paint because I was working on my computer after that, I wanted to make sure I didn't get any paint or any dirt on my computer, so.
[00:04:38.270] - Gordon
Yeah, yeah. So you have painter's clothes now.
[00:04:40.730] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:41.170] - Gordon
Yeah. So he's already next time when I need something painted. Because as a magician, you know, painting props and keeping them up to scratch is always, getting rid of the scratches in fact, is always something I should be doing and I don't do often enough. So, now I know someone who can paint, that might be happening a bit more. So anything else?
[00:05:04.250] - Taylor
I think that was everything.
[00:05:05.240] - Gordon
OK, so I'd like to talk to you about something that came up this week that a friend of mine and colleague of mine, a guy called Sean, in fact, hi Sean! He's unlikely to watch this, he's too busy a person to watch this. But he sent me a message because he's doing some work for me, and he said, "can you please put this all into an Evernote message, an Evernote note?" Can you call them Evernote notes?Evernote...note. "Evernote" is the name of the product. And then a note is what you create within it. "And then share it with me." He said, "because I've now gone premium." So this is something that I was looking at many years ago. I bought an e-book and the plan was to sort of get yourself organised and become a paperless office. Well, that's never going to happen for me. I need paper in my life to be able to run my business. But there were several things in there that I thought was very, very important. One was to keep your computer desktop tidy, make sure you file things away or delete them if they're not needed anymore. And I had tons of things on my desktop. Yeah. Another thing was to, you know, try and get inbox zero. I'll come back to that. I'll come back to that next week in fact, I'll talk about that next week, because that's something that I've been struggling with for a long, long time. And the last thing is to put all of your digital assets and your digital notes and graphics that you might want to refer back to, and receipts, and recordings of audio. Put them all somewhere where you can get to them when you need them, but not necessarily on your computer or on, you know, a hard drive because it just takes up space. And if you're not going to use it very often, you're just going to need to refer back to it every now and then, then put it on the cloud. And "Evernote" was suggested to me. Now, I had no idea what Evernote was, so I went looking. And it allows you to basically do what I've just explained, and it gives you a certain amount of uploads per month. And there's a free version, or there was a free version, I think there still is, which gives you a very small amount of space that you can, file space, that you can upload every month and then every month that goes that gets cleared and your quota gets renewed. And if you go premium, then you get extra benefits. So you get a much larger quota that you can upload every month. You also get to access it on more devices, which means that you can have it accessible to you on a mobile device and an iPad and a computer and another computer, and you can log in via the web and you can basically access your data from anywhere, wherever you happen to be. So I went premium quite a long time ago now, and I've been moving all of my data into there. And if I have a project, then I'll create a project note and I'll put everything I need into that. And if I have, something I've been doing recently actually is, not so recently, but before lockdown, I was recording audibly all of my shows. So I was recording them on my watch as audio files, and then when I got home, I would then take the audio files and I'd upload them onto Evernote as an audio file. Give it the date, give it the job number, so that should I ever need to, I can go back and I can listen to what happened in that show and I can make notes on the show, and, you know, if anything particular happened. If I get rebooked for next year, I can go back and listen to the recording and see what I did, see what I said, see if there's anything important in what happened that I can refer back to in the next show. And I do that for my double act as well now, which is really, really good because the double act changes a lot more than my normal show as we add to it and change things around after testing it in front of a real audience. And you just have all this access without actually spending money on storage, other than Evernote. You know, Evernote is a premium product. I can't tell you what it is off the top of my head. We'll put a link to the website in the show notes so you can go and have a look, but for what it is, it's not actually that expensive. Off the top of my head, like £45 a year, something like that. And it's really good. So just bringing this full circle, Sean is doing this project for me. He's now gone premium. I then put all the specs or the login details, the URL passwords, everything that's needed to be able to do this project, into a note and then I shared it with him. Now, I could share it with him even if he was on a free package, but he wouldn't necessarily be able to go in and make changes and updates and so forth. So having him on the premium, just goes to show that he sees the benefit of using Evernote as well. So if you want to get your life organised, use Evernote. One of the things that I did with all of the files on my desktop was I either deleted them if I didn't think I was ever going to use them again, or I uploaded them to Evernote, or I put them into eagle.cool, which is my asset management package, which stays on my computer. And I now have a completely empty desktop other than four folders, which are used just to put things in temporarily, like things that I want to upload to YouTube, for example, I have a YouTube folder. They go into there, next time I'm uploading in bulk, I can do that, or from that folder, and then once they're done, I can delete them. And it makes my life very much easier. So I highly recommend Evernote. There are other versions of Evernote around.
[00:11:48.440] - Taylor
There's "Notion".
[00:11:49.340] - Gordon
"Notion." Yeah.
[00:11:50.500] - Taylor
That's quite a popular one.
[00:11:52.400] - Gordon
I don't have any experience with any of the others other than "Evernote" that's the only one I've ever used. Oh one thing I should mention. In fact, I'll leave it till next week because I don't want this episode to get too long. But, so the two things I'm going to remember next week are inbox zero and also adding an accessory to Evernote to make it even more useful.
[00:12:18.560] - Taylor
OK.
[00:12:19.070] - Gordon
That's it, I'll talk about those next week. Anything else you want to talk about?
[00:12:24.470] - Taylor
I think that's everything for this week.
[00:12:26.090] - Gordon
So there's one bit of news that I want to pass on. For those of you using "Last Pass" as your password manager, something is changing. If you are on the free package, they are changing the way they're doing things quite considerably. And it's very likely going to affect you. So, I use "One Password" and that's a premium package, which I pay for. And "Last Pass" is a free alternative. However, they are changing the rules in March. And from then, if you want to stay on the free package, which they are keeping, they're keeping a free package, but you need to decide whether you want to access all your passwords from a desktop system or from a mobile system. You can't have both anymore. So if you type in a password on your desktop, you can only access that on your desktop. It can't be accessed on the mobile and vice versa. I think the reason being is that they want to convince people to take out a plan, which is good business for them. I'm not entirely sure that this is the best way of doing it. Maybe limiting people to the number of passwords you could use is a better way of doing it. I don't know. It's difficult isn't it?
[00:13:48.050] - Taylor
Yeah, it's a tricky one.
[00:13:48.950] - Gordon
Because they've got to make money otherwise they're not in business, but I've never heard of anyone doing this where it restricts you to the platform you can access it on. So if you decide desktop, you have no access to "Last Pass" on a mobile device, on an iPad, on a tablet, any of those, you have no access. And if you choose the desktop, you have access to it on the desktop and on the web. So it's a really interesting way of restricting the free accounts. It's a bit annoying if you have all of your passwords in there and you've now got to upgrade and spend money on something that was free before. But I can understand the reason why.
[00:14:33.650] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:14:34.730] - Gordon
So soon as I heard about it, I thought I would come and tell you about it. There is an alternative that people have been mentioning which has got the word 'bit' in it "Bitwarden," possibly. I know nothing about it. Apparently there is a free version of that. Whether you can migrate over from "Last Pass," I have no idea. But, you know, go and have a look, see if that is going to be of interest to you.
[00:14:58.650] - Taylor
Sounds great. Think that's everything for this week.
[00:15:01.220] - Gordon
Yes. So thank you for joining us. As always, you can find us on YouTube and on Facebook and our recordings go up at the same time, Friday at one o'clock every week.
[00:15:13.340] - Taylor
And you can also go to our website: thisweekwith.co.uk, which has all of the past episodes on there, and you can also search for any episode you're looking for.
[00:15:22.730] - Gordon
So you can say that now because we now have the search facility based on the new new site. And thank you for those who've sent comments in and told us what you thought about the site. If you're not one of those and you have any thoughts on the site, please let us know. You can leave them in the comments below or you can email us from the website. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next week, 1:00 p.m. on the Friday. My name's Gordon, I'm from Drayson Design
[00:15:50.870] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:15:53.720] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:15:54.240] - Taylor
Bye.
