[00:00:09.02] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.12] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:09.21] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.17] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.14] - 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 if you have been with us before. Today, we are going to go straight into our topics. Do you want to go first?
[00:00:29.17] - Taylor
I'll go first.
[00:00:30.02] - Gordon
All right, off you go.
[00:00:31.19] - Taylor
So my topic this week is making notes. So there's a couple of things that I want to talk about on this topic. The first one is when you're having client calls, so either meetings or having a phone call, make sure that you make notes. I use text edit and just use it to jot down all of my ideas or thoughts and things like that, so then I can deal with them after. And the reason for this is it can sometimes be hard to remember what was spoken about. It allows you to add a paper trail. So, I like to either add it into my task manager if it's something that I need to action or if it's something that just make sure that it was written down, I will send it to the client in an email saying, "Here's as discussed, this is what we mentioned." It's very useful for looking back and trying to find information that you might have spoken about; you having to use it if in the event you go to court, whatever, you need to prove that, yes, this is what I said or this is what I didn't say, to cover yourself. It's very much can be a he/she said argument if it's all on the phone. And the other thing is making sure you know what the next steps are. I find that sometimes I can forget. I come off a call and go, "oh, what was that thing I wanted to do?" And you can't go back to the client and say, "what was that we said?" Because it just looks unprofessional. So, I've had this multiple times where I've had a conversation with someone, a client, and then because of the workload or whenever something is scheduled for, it's being done in a month's time, for example. And by that point, I can't remember what I spoke about, I can't remember what was said. And so being able to make sure I can go back and look at the detailed notes that I made and say, "Okay, this is what we agreed to, this is what we planned," really, really helps when you come back to it. And it's something that I've tried to do more and more. And the other part of it is making notes when you get ideas or you think about things. So whether it's in the shower, whether it's in the middle of the night, if you're on a dog walk and you're thinking or you're anywhere, make sure you have some way to make notes. Some people prefer a small pocket book that they can put in their pocket and carry with them with a pencil and they can make their notes there. Others like to use a task manager or something that can just write down their thoughts and ideas. But make sure whatever tool or system that you use, make sure that you're able to write things down when you need to, it's always available. And make sure that you set it up in a way that you review all of the notes you've taken. Because what can happen is you can make notes that are very, very brief because you want to get the idea out or you want to get the comments or things like that that you've got. But sometimes they're very very brief and they mean something to you in the moment. However, coming back to it in a month's time, six months, a year, six years time, you may not know what the reference was meaning. And so what I try and do is if I get an idea, I'll write it down in text edit or something. And then after the call, I will write up those notes into either task manager or in somewhere that is a more permanent place. But I make sure that I expand on what all of the notes mean. It's a bit like if you have in a courtroom, if someone's writing a transcription, they use shorthand. Now, obviously, that's not really useful in a corporate setting, being able to read through because you just can't make sense of it. Only the person really that either understands shorthand or wrote it will understand. And so, yeah, make sure you do your future self a favour and write up the notes that are easily accessible, easily searchable, and makes sense for you in the future.
[00:04:29.11] - Gordon
And if you're on an Apple ecosystem, this is going to be very easy coming up very soon. So I do a lot of note taking on my watch. I have an Apple Watch. It's got a memo, voice memo function, and I can just tap, record and just speak into it. And I do that if I have something I want to get down very quickly. If I'm doing a show, I'll record that so that I can hear it back again. And there's ways to find out what it is I said and so forth. And if you're on a phone and you're making a phone call, the new Apple Intelligence will allow you to record a call, as in the audio, and will then either summarise it or transcribe it. And that's a really good way of really quickly getting a phone call. If you're on a phone call to a client and you're talking about a job that you're doing, I have no reason to expect them not to be okay with you recording it, just to make sure you've got it right. And then just have it all transcribed by AI afterwards and send it to them. And for your notes, you can then summarise it using AI and you can go back and you can see exactly what was said. And if you need to, hold on to the recording. Voice memos on Apple will just put it up onto the cloud and you can just listen to it anytime you like. And I think that would work really well for you.
[00:05:58.23] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:05:59.25] - Gordon
So yeah, if you're on the Apple ecosystem that is all part of iOS 18 and the upcoming Apple Intelligence, which I believe America gets in a couple of weeks at 8.1. I don't know if we get it here in October or if we have to wait till December here in the UK. It's one or the other. It's very unclear. But those settings are coming. Transcribing of voice memos, voice messages, sorry, on your phone is already available. I've had it happen once to me and it's like you can see the message being transcribed as it's being recorded because I wasn't able to take the call and it was really clever, really good. So, yeah, that's a really good thing to do. And note taking at the moment in time is a really good way of doing it as well.
[00:06:50.07] - Taylor
But also making sure you have the system in place that will trigger you and remind you to write up your notes. Like I said, it's useless if you write notes that mean something to you now but don't in six months time. So for me, I make it a task with all my notes in so that I have to go through or if I texted it, if I want to close the app, I have to write up all my notes.
[00:07:16.13] - Gordon
Transcribing will do that, won't it?
[00:07:18.05] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:07:18.19] - Gordon
Yeah. And that's a really quick way of doing it these days, transcribing. There's Mac Whisper, which is a really good application, I think we've spoken about before. That will just take an audio file or video file and transcribe it for you, and it's really accurate. I've used it many, many times for lots of things recently.
[00:07:36.06] - Taylor
Good.
[00:07:37.17] - Gordon
Very good. That leads quite nicely onto my topic. Sticking with AI, we spoke about it last week. There's been a new development, as there always is every week, and this is with Open AI's ChatGPT. They've now come out with, for some people, you've got a voice chat that that's being rolled out so you can talk to people on your phone or on your device, and it will talk back to you like a person. And it has all of the ChatGPT features available to it. So you can actually just sit there and chat to it, which is pretty amazing the first time you try it. It's like talking to a real person. It's so good. So that's really good. And just maybe gives us a glimpse into the future as to where we're going to be going with this sort of thing, because Siri is going to be coming up with this sort of chat to it, artificial intelligence type thing as well. So it's becoming more like Star Trek every day, where they used to just say "computer" and then ask it something. It's going to be just like that. But OpenAI have also come out with a new feature for those who code or who write documents, whether that be a blog post or an article or whatever. And it's called, I think it's called Canvas. So you can effectively, and this is really clever, up to now, if you had, for example, ChatGPT, write you some code from your prompt, you would then, if it didn't work, you would give it feedback and you would tell it what was wrong or what the error was. And it would then rewrite the whole of that code and give you a new version of that code, which you then test. And if that works all good, if not errors, it comes back and it will rewrite it again. But the Canvas is really good because you can have it just rewrite parts of the document. So let's look at it in a blog post situation. If you've asked it to write you a blog post, you've given it as much detail as you can. It's written the blog post and you think, "Yeah, I don't like the title." You can just select the title and you can say, rewrite or change this so that it's more dynamic or more eye catching or whatever you want, really. And it will redo just that little bit, not the whole document as it used to do before. Which will make the workflow so much quicker and so much easier. And you don't lose the bits that you actually like, because sometimes if you get it to rewrite stuff, you lose big chunks that you actually really liked and you didn't want to change. But because it's rewritten it, it's rewritten that as well. So this way, you don't have to now do copy and paste with lots of different versions to get a final document. It will just change the bits that you want at that time. And it's really good. Have you played with it at all?
[00:10:47.22] - Taylor
I haven't.
[00:10:48.14] - Gordon
Okay, it's really good. It's available on the web version, and I believe it's being rolled out to the app versions as well. So keep an eye out for that because, again, that's a big change in the way that OpenAI are doing ChatGPT, and I have a feeling they're not going to be the only ones. I think other companies that do AI will also follow suit. That's everything I wanted to say. What have you got? Anything else to say?
[00:11:17.15] - Gordon
I don't think so.
[00:11:18.04] - Gordon
Well, there we go. A nice, sharp, short episode for you. As always, we can be found on YouTube. Please like, share, and subscribe.
[00:11:26.13] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:11:31.19] - Gordon
And I should say our YouTube channel is "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." I think if you do a search for that, you'll find us. There are other This Week Withs, but there's only one "With Taylor and Gordon." We can also be found on all your favourite podcast platforms, so you can listen to us in the car, on your run, while you're exercising, however you like. Thank you for joining us. We will be back with you next Friday at 1pm. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:12:02.11] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:12:04.24] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:12:05.02] - Taylor
Bye.
