[00:00:10.380] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:10.690] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:11.160] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:13.050] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:15.510] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With" a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected us over the last seven days as business owners.
[00:00:25.870] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:00:26.220] - Gordon
That was smoothly done, wasn't it?
[00:00:28.410] - Taylor
Yeah. How did you get through that?
[00:00:29.550] - Gordon
Honestly, the number of times I've. This is what, episode 41, I think.
[00:00:34.310] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:00:34.740] - Gordon
So yeah, we've, coming up to a year now. 52 would be a year.
[00:00:39.780] - Taylor
Well, we missed one or two weeks, but.
[00:00:42.120] - Gordon
Well 52 would be a year's worth of episodes I should say. Yeah. So welcome. Thank you for joining us again. Yeah. Another busy seven days. Taylor, what have you been up to these last seven days? Anything of interest?
[00:00:57.510] - Taylor
I was my room back together.
[00:00:59.380] - Gordon
Oh yes. After your painting.
[00:01:01.020] - Taylor
Yes. So, I finally finished the painting so I put the room back together, all the different, my desk and my monitors and things like that, which took a long time because I've got lots of cables and lots of stuff in there.
[00:01:12.990] - Gordon
Yes, it is nice, though, sometimes just to sort of take everything out for the occasion of painting in this case and then only bring back the stuff that you know, you use.
[00:01:22.710] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:01:23.130] - Gordon
And, because the problem is when you have a, you know, a desk set up and you're adding a new bit of device, a new device in, you run the cables and you plug it in and it might be twisted on another cable. It might not have the best route and it might be, you know, you might have power cables going over audio cables, which is going to cause interference. So it is nice every now and then just to sort of have a spring clean, as it were. So how's it looking?
[00:01:53.280] - Taylor
Yeah, it looks really good. Nice grey background, which hopefully should be a lot nicer. And the walls are patched up, so there's no holes in it this time. So yeah, hopefully it should be looking a lot better.
[00:02:04.650] - Gordon
And the reason you went that route instead of putting a like a green screen or something behind you is just because you're, you know, you can turn around and touch the wall, it's that close isn't it?
[00:02:13.470] - Taylor
Yeah. I mean my, I've probably got about two inches, maybe not even that between me and the back of my wall.
[00:02:20.700] - Gordon
Yeah. I mean, ideally, you want to get some sort of uplighter or something there to go up the wall to give it a little bit of colour just to separate it out from you. But, you know, now you've got a nice, clear wall without holes in it, as you said, you've got the opportunity to play with that, which is great. So a couple of things I was talking about last week. One is "Inbox 0". So let's talk about that first. For those who don't understand this concept, you have email that comes into your inbox and the more email addresses you have, the more email you get. I've got about seven emails that are active, you know, that get mail all the time. And that doesn't include Hotmail and a Gmail account, which I also have. So I get a lot of email. And the idea behind Inbox 0 is to make sure that you only ever take emails as they come into your inbox and then deal with them once rather than leaving them in your inbox until, you know, they go down the list and new emails come in at the top and you deal with those and then they go down and... And you end up with loads of emails at the bottom that, you know, that they need dealing with, but they never get looked at because new emails are always coming in at the top. And I got to that point. I got to the point when I had over 1300 unread emails. So basically I'd look at email and go, "oh yeah, I need to deal with that. I haven't got time right now. Leave it unread." So this is the way I was dealing with it. I was leaving it as unread, and that meant I had to deal with it. And it never did. It never got dealt with. And there are emails that I found that I should have dealt with and I didn't. And it makes me inefficient.
[00:04:16.530] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:17.160] - Gordon
So I've now gone through all my emails. I've archived off everything that I don't need.
[00:04:23.550] - Taylor
Where did you go back to? What was the date?
[00:04:25.800] - Gordon
Oh everything that was in my inbox. Oh the oldest email?
[00:04:29.400] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:29.850] - Gordon
Oh good question. I didn't really look, but I'm guessing it's going to be eight years.
[00:04:35.670] - Taylor
OK.
[00:04:36.900] - Gordon
So, I mean the earliest email that I have in my email box goes back to 1998. That's the first email I've got, so I've got what's that, 23 years worth of emails, which means I can go back and check for things if I need to. It doesn't happen very often, but every now and then I do need to. And they've been moved from one server to another to another to another over the years. So it's actually quite impressive that I've got emails going back that far. But my way of dealing with them was always, to leave something unread and if I did read it, and I think "oh I need to deal with that," I would then mark it as unread and therefore it would show as an unread email, and that's why I got over a thousand unread emails in my inbox. I managed to get, by archiving and moving to Evernote for those that I needed to, and deleting for those I didn't need anymore, my inbox is now currently, as of this moment, 50.
[00:05:41.550] - Taylor
That's pretty good.
[00:05:42.310] - Gordon
It's pretty good. It's not there yet.
[00:05:43.410] - Taylor
That's quite a lot for me.
[00:05:44.700] - Gordon
Yeah. I mean, a thousand down to 50 is just unbelievable, really. And it's funny because I came across emails and went, "oh yeah, I remember that" not, it didn't need dealing with it just needed filing, but I hadn't got the time to do it at the time, so I left it and you know, gets filed later and it never did.
[00:06:06.840] - Taylor
So I used to do something similar to that, where I marked them as unread. And, you know, because I use Mac mail, they have an option where you can just filter by all unread. So I could then just go through and kind of find all the emails that need dealing with. And it got to a point where it was kind of unmanageable and more emails would come in. So then I started flagging them and that worked really well.
[00:06:30.930] - Gordon
Yeah, because you can set up a smart box, which will show you just the emails that have like a yellow flag for example.
[00:06:38.730] - Taylor
Yep, and that was working fine. But then there was lots of stuff going in, flagged, and then it became, you know, the same situation. So I now have something called tags and this is an add on for mail, Mac mail. And what it allows me to do, it allows me to add different tags to emails based on what's happened to them or what, so every time I send a new email, it will add the tag for, of 'waiting'. And that means that I've sent an email and I'm waiting for response, and I can easily see all of the emails I've sent and haven't had an email back from. If I get an email back from them, then it changes to a 'reply' tag, which means someone has replied to an email I've sent, so it needs looking at. And then I've also got one called 'action'. And what this is, this is kind of like my flagged where I can action.
[00:07:26.820] - Gordon
Something needs doing.
[00:07:27.760] - Taylor
Yeah. And, you know, sometimes it would just be a matter of looking at it and then archiving it or it will be something I need to reply back to or do an action on. And this helps me keep track of one, emails I've sent out because I send out a lot of quotes and things like that and lots of emails that I kind of go, "OK, I need to kind of follow up in a certain amount of time," which the add on for mail actually has, which allows you to postpone emails; so then it will pop up in your emails on the specified date you select. And it's also got things like scheduling, which, it works really, really well, because when I write emails, at you know, 2:00, 3:00 a.m. in the morning, I don't have to send them at 2:00, 3:00 a.m. in the morning, I can schedule them to send at 8:00, 9:00 am, always normally at an odd time because then it doesn't look like it's been scheduled.
[00:08:18.030] - Gordon
So what's the number of emails in your inbox at the moment?
[00:08:21.660] - Taylor
Probably somewhere between 20 and 30. However, I have a lot of emails just sitting in my inbox which are, have been dealt with. I just leave them in there I just haven't hit the archive button.
[00:08:32.900] - Gordon
Right. OK, so I like to move my emails, once I've dealt with them, into a filing system, into a folder system, so that I know who they come from, they either get filed as to the person that sent them, if it's a customer, or the topic, if it's like a club. And so whenever I'm looking for emails, they're all in a good structure. And getting that structure in place really helps me to find things and archive things easily. And with Mac mail, it actually suggests, after a while, where you might want to put that email and quite often it gets it right, so you can just do one click and it will say, "right, I'm putting it in that folder for you" once you've dealt with it. And that's really useful. So I'm not there yet. 50 emails, but I shall let you know if I ever get down to zero. Really difficult, because I get about 10 emails an hour, come in. So, you know, it's really difficult to get it down low, but at least I've got a good basis to start from now with 50 rather than a thousand.
[00:09:37.920] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:09:39.180] - Gordon
What would you like to talk about?
[00:09:40.650] - Taylor
So I want to talk about feedback and talk about giving feedback to someone that is doing work for you. So, I recently have had a client where they were quite particular about how they wanted the website to look, but at the same time wanted me to have control and freedom to design something, which was initially very challenging because it felt like they were saying, "design this, but within all the parameters I've set," which were lots and lots of different parameters, "but I want you to be creative and put your own spin on it."
[00:10:19.650] - Gordon
Yeah, it's a bit like asking for everything, but then not giving you anything to be able to do it with.
[00:10:30.970] - Taylor
Yes. So it was kind of challenging at first, so when I sent back the first draught design, you know, they weren't overly impressed and they said you know, "I expected more in the design area." And then for stuff that I had designed and changed, they said, you know, "I want it to be similar to what we had originally."
[00:10:52.440] - Gordon
Right. So they were saying, "we want it creative, but we want it the same as this."
[00:10:56.730] - Taylor
Yeah. So it was very kind of, difficult because everything I had changed, they wanted putting back, but then they wanted stuff changed. But then yeah, it was a miscommunication at the beginning. And then...
[00:11:09.520] - Gordon
I think the reason for that normally is that they don't actually know what they want.
[00:11:13.870] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:11:14.660] - Gordon
They think they'll know it when they see it, but they don't know for sure. But if they find something they do like, they'll sort of say, "yeah, yeah, I like THIS," but, you know, take that and make it different, which is impossible.
[00:11:29.130] - Taylor
Because it's never, if you change it, it's never going to be what it was originally.
[00:11:32.100] - Gordon
Exactly.
[00:11:33.180] - Taylor
But, you know, we sat down, we spoke about it, we went through, you know, they went through it and said, you know, "I like this. I like that." And, you know, she gave me a list of, a document with all the different feedback. And I went back a week later with all of the amends and changes. And she said she loved it and that, you know, we've come a long way and that she really likes the design that we've kind of we've got now. And obviously, there's still changes to make and there's still feedback. But, you know, if they're in a better direction and kind of closer to what she was looking for and she wanted.
[00:12:06.660] - Gordon
That's good. So you collaborated well together.
[00:12:09.600] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:12:09.960] - Gordon
And got something that she was happy with.
[00:12:12.780] - Taylor
Yeah. And I think it's different, a lot of the time the websites that I design, I can get a good idea based on what they give me for inspiration websites, and kind of what I can, I see when I talk to them, what they say and the things they, features they want. I can get a good idea and understanding of ok, this is kind of the style that they want to go for, this is the look and feel, these are the features it needs to have, you know, even down to whether it has rounded corners or not, that all changes the design. And most of the time I get it pretty accurate, but obviously not always. That's not always how it goes. And, you know, I got a tiny bit frustrated.
[00:12:55.710] - Gordon
Yeah, I can imagine.
[00:12:55.710] - Taylor
Because, you know, I'm normally pretty good and, you know, they normally come back and say, you know, I love this. But I guess because they had a previous developer and a previous company, she's worked with them before, she had already been through this whole process of giving feedback and then to have to start over again. She was kind of...
[00:13:18.150] - Gordon
Frustrating for her.
[00:13:18.990] - Taylor
Yeah. Giving the same feedback, which she'd give before, but not to me.
[00:13:23.070] - Gordon
And in her head, maybe she was thinking, "I've already told you this," but it was actually the previous people she'd told. So yeah.
[00:13:31.140] - Taylor
But yeah, we came to, we've you know, we're moving forward in a positive way, so.
[00:13:37.110] - Gordon
That's fantastic. Well done.
[00:13:38.160] - Taylor
But it's just basically kind of making sure that if you are giving feedback, it's either one of two ways, saying, "I give you full rein, you know, I trust your decisions," or being specific and trying to be as specific as possible, because as soon as you become a bit wishy washy with your terms, so I've had people say, "make it look sick" and "make it look cool" and you know, they don't really help me.
[00:14:05.190] - Gordon
One person's 'cool' is another, not another person's 'cool' is it.
[00:14:08.190] - Taylor
Yeah, it's very subjective to, you know, what I think looks really good compared to what they think or someone else thinks looks really good is completely different. So being specific, going, you know, I want it to be, you know, even if it's like a theme or an aesthetic, that you want to go for, that even helps rather than using descriptive words that you know are subjective.
[00:14:31.860] - Gordon
And that's one of the reasons you have a sort of a discovery phase, isn't it?
[00:14:35.070] - Taylor
Yeah, definitely. And that really helps to kind of find out where you are, and kind of decide what you want really.
[00:14:43.230] - Gordon
Good. So one other thing I'd like to talk about is something I mentioned last week, and that is an accessory to Evernote. Hopefully you've had a chance to check Evernote out and see what it's all about. One thing that I got, very early on actually, it was probably the catalyst to me buying premium Evernote, and that is a scanner. It's not just any old scanner, though, it's a very special document scanner, so it looks a bit like an old fax machine. You've no idea what I'm talking about with a fax machine, but it's basically a box with a feeder in it. It's like a printer without the print part of it, if you like, and you can put a stack of papers in, you can press the button and it will take one sheet at a time and scan it, and it will scan both sides as it goes through the scanner. It then, when it finishes or runs out of paper, it will put all of those documents into one PDF file. It will OCR them: Optical Character Recognise them, so that all the text becomes readable to the computer, not just a picture. It will then upload it to Evernote as a new, brand new note for me. And then it's done. And that's all from one press of the button. So every item of post that we get now goes through the scanner. And I've even got a, I've got a little rubber stamp that I can put on the document once it's done to say it's been scanned. And it's great because we can then search within Evernote for specific information we know was in that document or that letter. So if we've got a, you know, a...
[00:16:31.750] - Taylor
Hospital appointment.
[00:16:32.590] - Gordon
Hospital appointment for you. Yeah. Or if we've got a tax document or, you know, the, a bank statement or anything like that, they all go through the scanner. They all get put into Evernote. And I can then tag them and put them into specific workbooks, 'notebooks' I think they called. But just having the scanner just makes my life so much easier, even if I just want to send it to someone. I just put the documents in the scanner, press the scan button. A few minutes later, it'll be uploaded, it will be in Evernote. I can then take the PDF and I can just send it to someone by email, or send them a link to that note and they have access to it. It just makes life wonderful as far as getting documents in. And every time I look at it, new ideas come along because it's, all it's doing is it's scanning, at quite high quality, I can put a sketch in, I can put a photo in, I can put, you know, somebody's logo from a sticker in, scan it, and now I've got a digital copy of it. And it just makes life easy when I'm wanting to make something. I do have a flatbed scanner as well if I want to, you know, get really specific and go higher quality. But this is just a very quick and easy way to get documents into the cloud and into Evernote. I will put a link to the document scanner that I use, into the show notes so you can have a look. If you are using Evernote, you use lots of documents, as I said last week about not having a paper free office. I do have a paper, I do have paper in my office and I can't do without it, but this is a really good way of getting that paper into a digital format that I can, you know, use and search for, and it becomes a lot more useful to me.
[00:18:32.290] - Taylor
Great.
[00:18:32.290] - Gordon
That was it. That was my second point. Have you got anything else you'd like to discuss?
[00:18:37.300] - Taylor
Think that's everything. One thing is, we are now on Spotify.
[00:18:40.030] - Gordon
We are.
[00:18:40.990] - Taylor
So that was Emma Chard-Cumming who requested that?
[00:18:46.300] - Gordon
She did.
[00:18:46.300] - Taylor
So, yeah.
[00:18:48.520] - Gordon
Thank you Emma.
[00:18:48.520] - Taylor
We're now on there, if there's any others that you listen to regularly that you'd like us to be on, and we're not, then just let us know.
[00:18:55.340] - Gordon
And if we can, we will.
[00:18:56.450] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:18:57.310] - Gordon
Yes. So shout out to Emma. She is a lovely lady who is very, very good at business and we both speak to her, in fact, when we have a really tricky business situation, she always comes back with great advice. So, hi Emma, if you're listening to this in your headphones, then you know, thank you for everything you do for both of us. That's it for me...
[00:19:22.150] - Taylor
And me as well.
[00:19:23.230] - Gordon
So, as always, you can find us on Facebook and on YouTube. The links are on the show notes. We are, we go live every mo... Monday? Every Friday, at 1:00 p.m.
[00:19:37.030] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk and find all of our past episodes on there.
[00:19:42.820] - Gordon
And search for them.
[00:19:43.840] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:19:44.170] - Gordon
You can search for them. Yes. So thank you for joining us. We look forward to seeing you again on a future episode. My name's Gordon, I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:19:53.440] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:19:56.320] - Gordon
Goodbye
[00:19:56.940] - Taylor
Bye.
