[00:00:08.29] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.10] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:09.24] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.16] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.12] - 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 over the last seven days. And welcome back to those who've been with us before.
[00:00:25.09] - Taylor
Welcome back.
[00:00:26.07] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. We've had a busy week. We always seem to have busy weeks.
[00:00:32.23] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:00:32.29] - Gordon
I think as self-employed people, you fill your weeks with all sorts of things and work. You sometimes get to a point when you don't think you've got much to do, and then there's a lot of admin or answering of emails or whatever to do, and it just fills your week up, doesn't it?
[00:00:52.11] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:00:53.10] - Gordon
Anyway, let's get straight onto our topics. Anything you would like to say about news, first of all?
[00:00:59.13] - Taylor
No, not from me.
[00:01:00.12] - Gordon
Okay, so do you want to go first or shall I?
[00:01:02.22] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.
[00:01:03.23] - Gordon
Off you go.
[00:01:04.16] - Taylor
So, I want to talk about comparing products. I came across an issue this week where I was missing a feature or a piece of functionality that I wanted to do in an app, and so I went looking for an alternative, but the alternatives didn't do some of the stuff that the current version did or does. And so I'm in this dilemma where I'm not sure what to do, and I have to weigh up the pros and cons of both, see what features each one has, which one features they don't have, and I guess rank all of those based on priorities. The app I'm talking about is the Mail app. I predominantly use the MacMail built-in app on the computer and also on my phone.
[00:02:05.18] - Gordon
To deal with all your emails, every email that comes in and goes out.
[00:02:09.08] - Taylor
Yeah, and I have multiple different email addresses across different companies. And so I need a place to be able to manage all of those in one place, see all of them in a single inbox, but also be able to see them as separate inboxes. And the way I like to use my email is I like to have an action folder, a waiting folder, a read folder, and just the general inbox. And this allows me to get down to Inbox zero and just organise all of my emails. I also have the ability to use Apple scripts within MacMail, so I can run scripts and things like that when I receive emails. So one of them that I've spoken about, I think before, is creating a new event in the calendar when I book a Cineworld cinema ticket. But there are things that MacMail doesn't do that I have an extension called Mailbutler that adds them, which is things like email tracking. So tracking the links, clicks, tracking opens, being able to add notes to emails and things like that, and a lot of other nice little handy features. Now, the alternatives are being able to... Canary or Spark, which are the two that I've looked at. And they have a lot of things that are built into it, like the email tracking, like a lot of other things I had to use Mailbutler for, but they don't obviously support Apple script. And the reason I originally started looking for a different mail client was because I was trying to create a way to snooze emails and have them hidden from my inbox. So I use smart mailboxes in MacMail to give me an overview, and then I use tags to be able to organise them into other smart boxes, email boxes. However, the built-in snooze functionality from Apple Mail and from Mailbutler, both work on a per message basis. So if you have a thread of emails and you try and snooze one of them, then the rest of the emails stay in the inbox and they don't get moved into the hidden inbox. And this was really annoying because I really wanted to use this snooze feature a lot more, now that it's become more prominent as a feature of mail, basically. Because I wanted to basically, when I send an email, have a snooze trigger that then reminds and pops up in a week's time, in a month's time, so that I can follow up with people because it makes it easy to keep track of emails I've sent, I may have not I received an email from back. And yes, so now I'm at this dilemma where some of the other clients support this, but then they don't have things like smart mailboxes or Apple script integration. So, I'm not sure where to go, really.
[00:05:16.26] - Gordon
So we spoke about this during the week, didn't we?
[00:05:20.16] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:05:21.14] - Gordon
And my suggestion to you was that we are expecting Apple to make their announcement of the new iPhones in the next couple of weeks. I think the date has been fixed now. It's going to be the ninth of September, and the new iPhones will be announced. And if they do what they've done in the past, you'll be able to order them on that day and they'll be delivered a week later or 10 days later, that sort of time scale. But because MacOS, which they normally bring out in October, because that's got quite a few integrations with iOS, for example, being able to control your phone on your Mac, even if your phone is off but nearby. Because that's part of the new updates, there is rumours that they are going to bring that out at around the same time as the iPhones. So the suggestion I had was to wait a couple of weeks and see what happens, because we've got Apple intelligence coming and that's going to be a big part of Apple Mail and MacMail. And I think they're upgrading all sorts of other things as well. So I think what we should do is we should revisit this in a couple of weeks once we know for sure what is actually being released and what features are coming out. And then you can update everyone with what you've decided, whether that be to stick with MacMail because it's now got the features you need, or to start looking at other things and to see what you found that way.
[00:07:01.27] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:07:03.19] - Gordon
Yeah, it's... I mean, one of the ways you could do it is you could snooze the important email and then file away or archive the rest of the thread. That way it will take it out your inbox and it will move it into your read folder or your client folder or whatever, and it will still bring that email back again. And I think it will still show the thread, even though it's not in the same mailbox. I don't know for sure. I mean, that might be something you want to test. But that could be an option. That way you'll be getting them out of your inbox, but also still allowing that email to resurface a week or a month later. That might work. I'm not sure. We'll keep you up to date. And Taylor, you'll need to make a note to circle back on this and we can update everyone. Anything else you want to say on that?
[00:07:57.16] - Taylor
I don't think so.
[00:07:59.11] - Gordon
So we are coming to... We are pretty much now at the end of summer and everyone is going back to school, going back to college. Life is getting back to normal, really. So this is a time that I always think, okay, now's the time to contact people for the last part of the year, the last third of the year, last quarter of the year, whether that be for Christmas events or for corporates, that sort of thing. And I always think to myself, as soon as people go back to school, that's a really good time to then start contacting the schools to let them know I still have a few spaces left at Christmas and I'd love to book them in for a Christmas show. And every year I get to November and think, "oh, I've missed it." Once again, I've forgotten to send out these emails or these contact letters or however I choose to contact them. So this is a note to myself, really, to get myself organised for the last quarter of the year. There's lots of things that happen. Christmas is a big one for us, as entertainers. We have lots of people who celebrate Christmas and have parties or they have special events that they need entertainment for. And so now for me, is the right time to start thinking about a campaign to contact people and get this booked in. Is there anything in your line of work that you should be thinking about for the last quarter of the year.
[00:09:44.29] - Taylor
I don't do anything specific and I can't think of anything off the top of my head.
[00:09:51.02] - Gordon
Yours isn't really seasonal, is it? It's more to do with people updating their site. And when their business is quiet, that's a really good time for them to actually start updating because they can put the time into it. But also, if your site's really busy or your website's really busy, that's also a really good time to consider making changes and updates because you're already getting the traffic. And it means that you can test things like A/B testing and so forth really easily because you've got lots of traffic coming in.
[00:10:22.28] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:10:23.19] - Gordon
So, yeah, that's pretty much all I wanted to say because I just wanted to prepare myself for the last part of this year. And if you have a seasonal business, then now is a really good time to start thinking about October, November, December, because by the time you put into place a campaign for that, we're going to be mid to end of September, I would guess. And so that is the time to strike. And that is something I need to do. So I will come back to you on that and let you know if I did anything, and if so, what I did, because I don't do a lot of advertising anymore for Magic because I'm quite well known now. And in fact, I had a show on Wednesday this week and I had a show on Thursday this week, which is something that I do in the summer a lot. The one on Wednesday was a park show and the one on Thursday was a children's party. But they were able to do it at that point because people are coming back off holiday. They're getting ready to go back to school, and therefore having a weekday show was perfect because it leaves their weekends free. Anything else you want to say?
[00:11:39.19] - Taylor
I think you should sit down and figure out what your seasons are and either make a note for it or set up automations for it.
[00:11:50.11] - Gordon
Yeah, automations would be good. I agree. It's a matter of how I want to do it, though. Is it just going to be an email, which can be binned very easily? Is it is it going to be a letter that I put in the post? Is it going to be lumpy mail? It's deciding what that campaign is going to be. But you're right. I should set out the right times a year to do the right type of campaign, and decide what that's going to be. Even if it's just contacting people who've booked me in the past and saying, "we're coming up to Christmas, we're coming up to Easter, we're coming up to the summer break. How can I help with any events you have coming up?" If I have set dates to start planning the campaign, then set dates to send the campaign and put them into the diary for every year, then it will push me to get them done in time, because in our family and in our work life, if it's not in the diary, it doesn't happen. And that's so true, isn't it? You just don't do these things. They get forgotten. So putting things in the diary is a really good way to encourage you to actually do that task. That's it from me.
[00:13:04.25] - Taylor
That's it from me as well.
[00:13:05.20] - Gordon
Thank you for joining us. It's a relatively short episode for us, isn't it? We have had a few things that we've been working on, which I think we'll be able to talk to you about in the future, something that... We've got a big project that we're still working on that's probably got another month or so to go, isn't it? But it'll be really nice to tell you all it because we've spent quite a lot of time on this and it's looking really, really good, really smart. Lots of puzzles that we found solutions for that will help us in the future when we're looking at doing similar sort of things. So I won't say any more about it at the moment, but listen out for that. We'll tell you all about it once it gets released. Thank you for joining us. As always, we can be found on YouTube. Please like, share and subscribe.
[00:13:58.26] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:14:03.19] - Gordon
And all of the podcasts are available on your favourite podcast platform. We'll be back with you next week at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:14:15.11] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:14:17.29] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:14:18.14] - Taylor
Bye.
