[00:00:10.120] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:12.350] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:12.350] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:14.520] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:17.880] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses in the last seven days. And as you can see, we're not in the same room again. Taylor is over in Essex somewhere, deepest darkest Essex. And I'm at the home office. So we've decided to do it on Zoom again. Hopefully this is all coming through to you ok, and it's working well. And yeah, it's nice to actually see you, Taylor, because I've not seen you for a few days; you've been away.
[00:00:52.540] - Taylor
I have indeed. Yes. It's nice being up in Essex, and I'm spending time with my girlfriend so...
[00:00:59.810] - Gordon
And do you know what's really nice is the job that we do allows us to sort of go off for a few days somewhere. As long as we've got access to the internet or in your case, you have your laptop, then you can carry on with work. It doesn't have to be...
[00:01:19.210] - Taylor
Yeah, exactly.
[00:01:19.210] - Gordon
You're not sort of tethered to one place. And that's quite good, especially in the world we're living in at the moment.
[00:01:26.100] - Taylor
Yeah exactly, so yeah. How have you been this week?
[00:01:30.570] - Gordon
I've been very well, thank you very much for asking. It's very quiet here. I normally have a house full of people, and there's absolutely nobody here today. Everyone is away, even the dog. The dog has gone camping. Not on his own, I might add. He went with my partner, but...
[00:01:48.540] - Taylor
I'd be very impressed if he did.
[00:01:51.070] - Gordon
You can just imagine him, foraging for food in the forest. Yeah. Doesn't bear thinking about. So, it's been a busy seven days. Do you want to start, or shall I? What would you prefer?
[00:02:05.200] - Taylor
You can start this week.
[00:02:06.460] - Gordon
Ok. So my topic for this week is not letting email dictate your work day. So this is something that I still fall into the trap of. I have a to do list. I have a, you know, things I need to get done. I write them down, normally the night before so I know what I'm going to be doing the next day. And if not, I'll do it first thing in the morning. And I've got a list, you know this long, of things I need to do and I think I'll just check my email, see if there's anything important. And I go into my email. And because I've got so many different email accounts, I have a different email account for pretty much every business and website that I have, there's always a load of emails to go through. A lot of them are spam or junk, but there is some there that I just start reading, and it's either support issues that I have to then stop what I'm doing and deal with because, you know, for me customers come first. Or it's a new topic or something in the news that interests me and I think, "Ooh that looks interesting, I'll go and have a look at that." And then you get notifications from Facebook and you go into Facebook, then you get a notification that there's a new video that's out from someone you watch the videos from and there's a...
[00:03:32.100] - Taylor
It's like they're all trying to grab our attention isn't it, really?
[00:03:34.320] - Gordon
It's exactly it. And they're really sneaky as well because they use subject headings that make me want to click into the emails as well, which is rather annoying. And then I go and watch, you know, a YouTube video. And then I've got, you know, phone calls come in and after I've had a phone call, I then have to email people with information or a quote or, you know, something like that. And then I look at my watch and it's 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and I've done nothing. Well, that's not true, I've done lots, but I've done nothing on my to do list.
[00:04:08.920] - Taylor
And it's time to come and pick me up from school. Well it used to be.
[00:04:11.240] - Gordon
It's time to come...it used to be. Yeah.
[00:04:16.140] - Taylor
Used to be the case didn't it.
[00:04:17.141] - Gordon
It used to be the case.
[00:04:17.150] - Taylor
That's why you say 4 o'clock, because most people would say five or six, but 4 o'clock for you was kind of end of the day when school was finishing and things like that.
[00:04:25.700] - Gordon
Yeah, that's very true. For a long, long time that was the case. But yeah, my day is then gone and you know, then partner comes home and we have dinner, sit and watch a little bit of television or catch up and go to bed and make my list for the next day, which is normally not necessary because I'm just going to use the same list I didn't actually get round to doing today.
[00:04:51.940] - Taylor
Exactly.
[00:04:51.940] - Gordon
So the point of this little story is, not to let your email dictate your day, because if you do, every day is just going to merge into another day and you'll end up with this to do list being pushed forward, or back I should say, back and back and back, and it will never get done. So the way that I have found to deal with this is to go through my emails and look and see if there is anything really urgent, as in it needs my attention right now. Not something I would like to look at or read, but something that actually needs doing.
[00:05:31.560] - Taylor
[coughing] Fine. Sorry.
[00:05:31.560] - Gordon
You ok?
[00:05:33.340] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:05:33.340] - Gordon
Ok, good. So yes. So prioritizing emails is the first thing I do. I then look through the really high priority emails and deal with them. That normally doesn't take too long. The other emails I will either leave where they are and I'll mark them as 'unread' or make sure they are marked as 'unread' so I know I haven't dealt with them, and then I can come back to them. Or I can file them away in a file that says 'when I have time,' and that way when I have time and I'm not sure what to do, I'm looking for something to do, I can go to that file, I can have a look and see there's anything that catches my interest, and then I can deal with it then. But if you don't do that, you will find that your day just disappears. Do you find this Taylor?
[00:06:22.180] - Taylor
Yeah, so I have a similar kind of situation, and the way I've kind of found to deal with it is, kind of one or two ways. It's kind of, if it's something that can be done in 1 minute or less I will just do it, because I won't get it done otherwise, and it will get forgotten about. If it's something that clients sent to me and that is, for example content, or an update, or a change. If it's not something that is breaking the site, then I 'flag' it. And what this means is, it means it's something I need to look at and deal with. And I'll normally just reply back to the client going, "thank you, I've received your email, I've added it to my list." By saying that I haven't given them any sort of time frame. The client may come back and go, you know, "can you give me a sort of time frame?" If not, if they, sometimes clients send me stuff and they say, you know, "it's not urgent, just you know, do it as and when you have time." And by saying that you acknowledge that you've received their email, but you're not, you're setting the expectation. That's one thing that I've really found is, especially when, if you get the habit of text messaging with clients, which I don't recommend, you know, people want things instantly. And because the internet is pretty much instant, people expect stuff to be done then and there. So yeah, I try and just put it off or reply back to them and say, you know, "I'll get it done, but you know, it'll be some time in the future." And that's kind of the way I deal with it. And I have an add on for my email which allows me to just see the first kind of four, five words of an email and who the sender is. And I can just keep tabs on my email without having to open up the email window every single time, and I can carry on what I'm doing in the forefront. So if I'm building or working on a website, I can still keep an eye on it if anything urgent comes in, but you know, for the most part, I ignore emails until I have time to look at them.
[00:08:21.160] - Gordon
So another thing you've just reminded me is to set times when you will check your email. So emails are coming in all through the day, and if you check it every hour, then there will be something that will grab your attention and you will again lose the whole day. So, if you're the sort of person that gets caught up in emails like I do sometimes, not always, but sometimes, I will check my email first thing; it's the first thing I'll do, see if there's anything really urgent that's happened overnight. If, for example, one of my customers' websites is down, that's urgent, that needs dealing with there and then, and I don't want to leave them waiting because that's not good customer service. But I will also then check it maybe 4 o'clock in the afternoon, giving me an hour to deal with something if it's really important. And quite often they'll be just replies from, if I'm expecting a reply, I might check my email more often. You know, it maybe that I can't continue with a particular project or something that I had planned to do until I've got this particular content. So I might then be looking out for that email. But yeah, first thing in the morning, sort of 4 o'clock in the afternoon, they are two good times for checking email. But if you're going to do that, you have to be strict with yourself and not go and check it all the time and not, you know, turn off notifications. Make sure it doesn't 'ping' you every time a new email comes in because that's... We spoke about this a long time ago about if you get distracted from what it is you're doing, then it can take 15 to 20 minutes to get back into what you were doing previously. Which is, it sounds an awful lot of time, but it's about right because you've got to pick up where you were. You've got to find the point that you're at. You've got to remember exactly what you were doing. You've just got to get back into it again. So, yeah, turn off notifications. I don't have any notifications for my email anymore. It's there waiting for me when I go looking for it, but I don't have it tell me that there's a new email coming in. That's...
[00:10:41.080] - Taylor
Same with me.
[00:10:41.080] - Gordon
That's a big tip for me. So...
[00:10:44.400] - Taylor
And another one that I have is, so for example, I work normally later in the evening, just because I find that's how I work best. And one thing I have done is, some email clients do this, you may need an add on, but schedule your emails. So I write emails at 10,11, 2am, 3am. But I don't want my emails going out at those times. So have, if your email client provides it, or offers it, use their scheduling service to be able to send out your emails in the morning because they're going to be there, you know, for when people wake up, so they're going to be the top in the inbox. And also you're not going to, you know, look like, you know, people can, you know, email you at silly hours. Just because I work at that time doesn't mean I want to be, you know I don't want to be talking to clients at that time.
[00:11:34.110] - Gordon
Well, that's the reason you work at that time, isn't it? Because you aren't going to be interrupted.
[00:11:38.700] - Taylor
Yeah, exactly. But then that's the time that I end up finding myself going through, "ok, what have I actually got to do, what can I check off?" Send them an email ready for the morning for them to then see. And it works really well because I can also schedule it for, in the afternoon if I know that, you know maybe they work in the afternoon or their an international client or for whatever reason, I prefer to put it in the afternoon because I know that if they were to reply to me, you know, I want them to receive it in the afternoon when I'm going to have time to then reply. And so by giving it to them at a certain time, because I know that they're a fast replier, it kind of works in my favour, I'm not leaving them hanging in terms of, they reply back straightaway and I don't reply for 4 hours because I'm still asleep, for example.
[00:12:25.280] - Gordon
Yep.
[00:12:25.280] - Taylor
And so it kind of works to your advantage, really. You have a lot more control over your emails.
[00:12:31.260] - Gordon
Yeah. And so, just the main point of this is don't let emails dictate your work day because if you do it once you'll do it forever and ever. Don't get into that habit, basically. Taylor, what's your subject today?
[00:12:47.290] - Taylor
So I've got quite an interesting, exciting actually. So if anyone knows me or our kind of home situation with our WiFi, you will know that we have two online businesses that run off very, very slow internet.
[00:13:05.290] - Gordon
And a smart home.
[00:13:06.080] - Taylor
Compared to the UK standard. This is purely because of the road we live on. It's a private road so to get fibre optic and the super fast WiFi that, you know, all of the providers have, we would need fibre optic and we just don't have that to our house. And I've been always wanting to get kind of fast internet and we are both on Three as our phone network. And I was just having a look, I don't know where it was, I think I was on, I got an email, maybe. And it was just to do a 5G data like WiFi routers, and I thought, "that's quite interesting." Checked Three, nope, they don't have it in our area, which was sad and, I guess. And then I checked Vodaphone and they did have 5G in our area. We had a strong indoor and outdoor. So I kind of got on to the live chat and was chatting to them. They had some things that I think they can improve on in terms of their customer service, just the way that people just don't communicate between departments. So no one knows what you're talking about and every time you start a new chat, it takes ten minutes for them to get in your account and verify who you are. So I think there's some things that could be worked on, but yeah, we called up, we placed an order, and we went and picked it up the exact same day. So this was last week we ordered it.
[00:14:28.000] - Gordon
Just.
[00:14:29.000] - Taylor
Yeah, just, they were short staffed because of people being ill and so they had to shut the store early, and we only just managed to...
[00:14:36.800] - Gordon
And their systems went down.
[00:14:39.860] - Taylor
Yeah...
[00:14:39.860] - Gordon
We were the last customer, weren't we?
[00:14:42.300] - Taylor
Yeah, we were the last out of the shop.
[00:14:42.300] - Gordon
They had to let us out of the shop in fact. They'd locked up, they had to unlock the door to let us out. And this was 2:30 in the afternoon.
[00:14:50.560] - Taylor
Yeah. So it was very lucky that we got it that day. I brought it home, set it up. And we, for some reason there seemed to, I just seem to be very unlucky, and the day that I got my router, my 5G router, they were just having network issues and they were having them for over a couple of days. So I haven't actually experienced the 5G yet. However, the 4G is still probably ten times better than what we have at home. To give you a bit of a comparison we got at home, on the old WiFi, we got 15 download and 0.7 upload on a good day.
[00:15:29.410] - Gordon
Megabits per second that is.
[00:15:31.320] - Taylor
Yeah, megabits per second. And the 4G was giving me 80 download and about 20 upload, so miles miles better than you know, what I'm used to. And it was interesting because I'm used to kind of going to a page than just flicking through something else, to just have a quick browse and check before I then go back to see if the page has loaded. And with this it's kind of like, I go and type in the URL, I go to go somewhere and it's already loaded before I even manage to flick away. And so it takes a bit of getting used to, but it's really nice. Especially just uploading videos. You know, I upload videos for dad when I used to go down to the flat. So we used to have a friend who had a flat which, they did have access to superfast WiFi and so we used to use that. And then also just downloading things, downloading programmes and apps, you know uploading screenshots to Discord and things like that. So you know, screenshots normally, because of my big monitor, they're at least 3 megabytes in size, which you know, is a fair amount. And so uploading that would take, you know, 30 seconds. It's not much, but if you're uploading them regularly, it's 30 seconds every time. Whereas this was pretty much instant and very very nice to use.
[00:16:46.420] - Gordon
And hopefully the speed will get better, because we haven't actually got 5G yet.
[00:16:51.740] - Taylor
Yes, they promise it's up to one gigabits per second download, which is 1000 megabits per second. Which is, it's in theory, I actually know that we're not going to probably get 1000, but we'll get something a lot lot higher than what we currently have. And they actually said there was two types of 5G companies that install 5G around the UK, and we were on the low, on the slower one. However, the reasons for the maintenance and the downtime in the network was because they were upgrading that to the faster and better 5G towers or whatever. So that's something to look forward to when I get back home, that I can hopefully use the 5G.
[00:17:38.210] - Gordon
The nice thing is though, because it's a, it's basically a box with a SIM in it and it uses the mobile network. And because of that, all you need is a plug socket. So it is a proper mobile broadband solution. So, you've taken it with you there. I know they haven't got 5G there, but you're getting, there it is. So you're getting 4G at that location.
[00:18:01.870] - Taylor
So 4G's the second one, top one's 5G. But this is my, it's very, very small. It's, you put the sim card in the bottom, you plug it in via mains. And you can if you want, put Ethernet, although my computer, I didn't get an adaptor for Ethernet, but you can put Ethernet in and, you know, get very fast speeds, which is quite nice. And it's also isolated. So it means if anything were to happen with either of our WiFis, so either the 5G router or the home internet you know, I can always just switch between them.
[00:18:31.840] - Gordon
I have to say it's not cheap, but...
[00:18:35.940] - Taylor
No, it's not cheap.
[00:18:35.940] - Gordon
For what you do and for the reliability and speed, it's definitely worth it for you. I don't think it will be worth it for someone who just wanted a backup.
[00:18:49.530] - Taylor
It depends on what, well we wouldn't originally have it, you wouldn't really have it for a backup. But because of the smart devices, and because it's a four person house, it's inevitable you're gonna have a lot of devices. So the max devices you can have attached to one of these 5G routers is 64 devices, which you know is quite a lot if you're living in a one or two person house or flat. But, you know, we've got four people; we've got at least 15 devices just in smart tech, so you know, it quickly stacks up. So having two routers at home is quite nice. And I don't get throttled by anyone else. If my mum's watching a YouTube video or Netflix or something, I don't get throttled by that, where other times you might do, you know, you hear a lot of people, if they're playing video games they go, "oh it's lagging!" That's usually because someone else is on the internet as well and obviously you got to share the bandwidth, which obviously isn't the case with this.
[00:19:45.380] - Gordon
So that's a really good upgrade for you, and it will allow you to work faster, basically, which is, you know.
[00:19:57.220] - Taylor
Yeah, so it kind of, it works hand in hand. Yes, I have to pay more money, but at the same time, I can get more work done because I'm having to wait less time, so.
[00:20:06.460] - Gordon
So maybe we'll check back with you in a few weeks time and just see if the 5G has sorted itself out, and you can let us know what speed you're getting.
[00:20:16.000] - Taylor
Yeah, that'll be really exciting and interesting to see.
[00:20:19.280] - Gordon
And the coverage is only going to get better. It's not going to get worse.
[00:20:23.150] - Taylor
So, I mean, I looked on the map and in Essex, apart from kind of like Southend High Street, there's very, very little in terms of 5G. Most of it is in London, and then other main cities of the UK. So, yeah, I would have a check on their website. There are other providers, Three, I think EE also offer something similar. So have a look around and see who and where offer 5G. And if you can, if you need it, I highly recommend it. Because it's also portable, which is a nicer thing. So if you are paying £60 a month or whatever, for example, for your normal WiFi, if you can get the same type of speed, maybe look into it because you can then take that with you wherever you go and you're still paying the same amount, but it's portable.
[00:21:17.420] - Gordon
Very good. Is that everything?
[00:21:20.920] - Taylor
That's everything from me.
[00:21:21.940] - Gordon
Fantastic. So as always, thank you very much for joining us. We can be found on YouTube and on Facebook. The, I say, every week I say, "the links are on the screen," but I've just realized the graphics we have don't actually have the links, they just have the names. So maybe we should put the links in the future so that you can see it. We'll look into doing that. So anyway, we can be found on YouTube and on Facebook.
[00:21:46.120] - Taylor
You can also go to our website: thisweekwith.co.uk, which has all of our past episodes on it, and we have our transcriptions on there. And if you go to YouTube, I believe you can translate it into three languages, I want to say.
[00:22:02.920] - Gordon
Yep. Four.
[00:22:02.920] - Taylor
So yeah, you can, four languages.
[00:22:05.680] - Gordon
Including English.
[00:22:07.640] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:22:09.340] - Gordon
So yes, English, Spanish, French, and German subtitles are available on YouTube. So please like, share, and subscribe. That's it from us. We'll see you again next week one o'clock on a Friday afternoon. Until then, my name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:22:26.320] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker. Goodbye.
