[00:00:08.420] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:08.780] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:08.960] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:10.800] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from the Creative Tinker.
[00:00:12.660] - 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. Oh, dear. I was trying to get the intro out before I sneezed. I could feel it coming. You know how you get that?
[00:00:28.790] - Taylor
Bless You.
[00:00:29.630] - Gordon
Thank you very much. Apologies for that if you were listening to this. Let's get straight into our topics. There's not any news from me. Oh, Trump is in power over in America now, so good luck to all of our Americans. He's already got big plans by the looks of it. Let's hope it doesn't affect your businesses too much. So do you want to go first or shall I?
[00:00:55.110] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.
[00:00:55.950] - Gordon
Off you go.
[00:00:57.100] - Taylor
So I was at, where was I? I've been recently, I think I spoke about it, where I split up my 'project management' and my 'doing' parts of my business. And I wanted to build an app to streamline this process. So I was using AI where I would give it my notes from either a meeting or just from notes I'd taken, and I would give it to ChatGPT in a custom GPT. It would then spit out a list of all the tasks that it reckons that I would need to do based on the list and like kind of action points. It would give me a title, description, the estimated time, and then whether or not it was a backlog, blocked, it was a to-do or in progress, for example. And it worked really well. I really liked being able to do it that way. It allows me to spend time thinking about what needs to be done first before actually doing it. But it was very time consuming to put it into my project management tool. And I came up with the idea or I wanted to build something that streamlined this, and so I built an app called 'Action Hub.'
[00:02:10.090] - Taylor
So the idea is, I have synced it with my project manager and they have an API that I can use. So I pull down the projects. So basically all of the tasks you create have to be put into a project. It pulls down the project and then puts it into a tree view, and I can then add new folders, I can add new workspaces, I can import projects and things like that. And then I can select one of the projects I want to import my task to. I can then give it the notes that I made. So what I would normally put into the ChatGPT app I just put into this text area. I hit go. It then will send that to OpenAI using their API, and it will pretty much return the same thing, but it returns it in JSON format so that the programme can parse it and it can use the data. It then will render all of the tasks into a little UI. Now, the UI I try to make as similar to the project management tool that I have. So it has things like the status, so the backlog tasks, a to-do, in progress, waiting, etc.
[00:03:22.140] - Taylor
It has the duration, so you can put it for five minutes, half an hour, two hours, five hours. And then I can set a start date and a deadline. And I basically can go through, I can edit the title and the description, which is already pre-populated from the API response. I can edit those, I can change any of the other fields, and then I can either approve it or just leave it as declined by default. Then I can go through all of those. There is a bulk approve and decline, and then there's also bulk editing. So, if I want to set the duration for all of the tasks to be the same, or if I want to set the start or deadline to be the same, I can do that on a bulk level. And then I go through approving or denying, and then I hit 'Create Tasks.' It then takes all of those tasks and creates them inside of Motion, my project manager. And so it saves me all of this time of having to actually copy and paste the title, the description. It formats everything using Markdown, and that sends it straight to Motion so that it's all formatted with bullet points and things, and it puts them in the right statuses.
[00:04:25.430] - Taylor
And it's really, really handy because I don't have to think too much about it, I can check, "does that look all good? Yeah. Go." And then I can just start getting in straight to the doing side of things. It took a while to figure out how to connect everything. I was using a tool called 'Bolt,' which is... It's an AI tool, but it has a preview of building apps, essentially. And it has a preview and it runs the development app while it's coding. And then every time you make changes, it re-runs and re-updates the app. It's probably the best tool that I found that has design skills, because a lot of AIs, whenever you say, if you give it an image, for example, and say, "build this," it doesn't do a good job. This is really, really good. I've given it an image and it's pretty much recreated it like for like, which is pretty impressive. Now, I did it this way because this for me was not a project that I wanted to spend much time on. It was a utility productivity tool. I just want to get it done, get it up and running and have it working, because it saves me obviously a lot of time.
[00:05:49.460] - Taylor
I'd spend a lot of time getting it to work and getting it in a way that is, the UI is manageable, that it's not a pain. It looks good. So again, it will help. But I didn't want to spend too much time on it because obviously the more time I spend, the less productive it is because I could have just copied and pasted the things. So yeah, that's what I've been working on and it's going well.
[00:06:13.100] - Gordon
And what's the software you use to create your app called?
[00:06:16.360] - Taylor
So it's called 'Bolt.new.' So that is the app or the web app. You can use any of the modern frameworks. So React, Vue, Svelte, Next.js, Nux, any of the popular modern Jam stack front-end framework you can pretty much use. And it has integrations with Superbase as well. So you can connect a database very, very easily with one click. It can create and connect and import the library. It knows all about the main tools that are used, popular JavaScript libraries, popular things to do anything, calendar pickers and things like that. And so it has a really, really good understanding and knowledge of common tools.
[00:07:01.880] - Gordon
Very good. Which means that when you've finished it and you export it, if you want to make changes, you need to find someone who has skills in that or just get AI to look at it and make changes, which is really good.
[00:07:14.990] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:07:15.520] - Gordon
That's really cool. So that's going to save you a little bit of time, I think. Anything else you want to say on that?
[00:07:22.370] - Taylor
I don't think so. I just was exploring and impressed at how far it's come, really. When we first I just got AI, looking back from then to now. I had a friend that showed it to me. When they showed it to me, I was like, "What the heck? This is incredible." This is better than anything else I've used up until that point.
[00:07:46.230] - Gordon
Very good. We'll have a link in the show notes. Do go and have a look. It is a paid for service, I believe.
[00:07:51.540] - Taylor
They have a free tier, and then you have to upgrade to get more tokens and things. It's all done on an API usage.
[00:07:58.980] - Gordon
Very good. And of course, you've got the OpenAI API key that you're using, which I don't have any experience on. So it'll be interesting to see what sort of expense you're going to be having to get through OpenAPI with the API key, because that's not part of your ChatGPT subscription. That's extra. So that will be very interesting. I want to talk today about making sure you have good documentation. Now, the reason I say this is because, as you know, I was doing Panto last week, if you've been listening to this podcast for any length of time, and we've now finished and it's all done. And I'm very pleased that it went so well. It's always sad when the show finishes because you spend quite a bit of time with these people and then all of a sudden you don't see them at all. You see them on a daily basis as you lead up to and do the show, and then it's nothing. You don't see them at all. We've got a party coming up tomorrow, which will be nice. It'll be good to see everyone again and see how they've all got over the pantomime blues.
[00:09:09.490] - Gordon
But you may also remember that I was videoing them, or rather my dad was videoing them, using my equipment. And that meant I had to do some editing. Now, I did the editing quite quickly this year. However, there were issues. We had problems with footage on two of the days. Two of the cameras had problems. But I've managed to sort it all out and I needed to edit two nights' worth because we have two groups of children. And it's always very unfair for one group of children to be filmed and the other group not to be filmed. So we try and be fair and film both and let them have their group's worth of video. So they've been edited. They've been uploaded to three different video services. So they're on YouTube unlisted. So I've got a backup there. They're on Vimeo, which is a paid account that I have. And they're on Adilo, which is a lifetime deal that I got. And then they go into the videos, Drayson Design system that Taylor and I built together. Now, I don't use this very often to put new content on because there's only really two main events that I do in a year.
[00:10:26.180] - Gordon
And there's about 20 or 30 people that get added for one event, and there's about maybe 50, 60 get added for the other event. So I went into this and I was thinking, "oh, how do I do this? What do I need to do." And there's also... Pardon me. There's also some automation that goes on when people make an order. And I had not checked the automation properly, and it was adding a tag in for last year's show, which is very confusing because people were then getting emails to say, "you've got a new video." It's like "No, no, you haven't. Not yet. It's not ready." So I need to add that to my documentation. Now, what we did do is on the WordPress dashboard, I put in a load of instructions to remind myself when I come back how I need to add a new customer and how I add a tag to a customer and what I need to do to create the content page. And it's really, really handy to have that. And I need to edit it and update it because there are a few things I need to bear in mind, like the form automation.
[00:11:45.850] - Gordon
But if I hadn't got that information there or I hadn't got it somewhere safe, I would have really been stuck because there are several steps that were just not clear, if you haven't done it for a while, that need doing. And if you don't do those, you can mess up the whole system and you could end up sending lots of emails to lots of people and really upsetting them all because all the emails were irrelevant and wrong. So I do use Evernote, as I have said in the past. Evernote is a paid for service, but it's something that I've been using for many, many years now. And I do keep a lot of documentation in there. I've got a scanner, a document scanner that I've got linked to it, to Evernote. So I can put a document through the scanner. It will scan the document and then immediately send it up to Evernote and store it for me, which is perfect, because if I ever get any letters through the post, they all get scanned and they get put up on this service, and then I can look back on them and search for them, whenever I need to.
[00:12:55.250] - Gordon
But, yeah, documenting your processes for your own benefit to make sure that you know what you need to do and what steps you need to take is really important. It can take different guises. I choose to put the instructions for the WordPress site into the WordPress dashboard. It's there and ready for you. You can put it in Evernote. You can create a little video for yourself and put it on YouTube. That's a free thing to do. Do a screen capture while you do the steps that you need to do. Just whatever works for you, really. But it is important because, as I said, you forget these things. You come back to them and you go, "I can't remember what we did." And even though it might be really clear in your mind as soon as you've finished creating the system, unless you use it day in, day out, week in, week out, these things get forgotten. It's muscle memory, and your muscle memory gets forgotten and lost, and you need to refresh that. Have you had any situations where you've had something similar like this that you've been really glad you've documented?
[00:14:10.960] - Taylor
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the time it's tutorials and snippets I write, I go, "oh, I really need to be able to do something like that." Then I can't remember where I've written it. I've used it for a website for a client, but I have no idea which client and which one it is. Unless it was a recent project, I can never remember. Then I end up doing a Google search for the exact issue that I have, and then my own website ends up coming up and going, "oh, I did write a tutorial for that." Things like that is really, really handy and useful. Because sometimes you know that you've got the code somewhere, you just don't know how to do it. And it's the same with sometimes documentation. You know how to do it; you just don't know what order it is or what the smaller details are. I have a love-hate relationship with writing documents and notes. I don't write a lot of notes. Most of the stuff that I do goes into my project manager, and it's normally a task to do rather than a note. I use an app called Paper, which is similar to what text edit is, but it's got a slightly nicer UI and it supports Markdown and things like that.
[00:15:29.270] - Taylor
And I basically I can just use that as a floating notepad. I'll put stuff in there. I'll create a new one if it's different to the one I've been working on. And I just leave them floating on my desk, on my desktop. I don't save them. I use them as, they're only there temporarily. I need to deal with them and put them somewhere, whether that's using the notes to create a task, using my new app, or whether it's just a matter of saving API keys that I just need to be able to reference briefly. But I need to find somewhere to store all of the notes and stuff for meetings and clients, but I haven't found a good solution yet. I don't want to store them as separate files in folders because that becomes cumbersome and it's hard to search most of the time, but I haven't found a nice tool that I like using. I'm not a massive fan of Evernote. I've used it in the past. I'm not a massive fan of Notion. And so, yeah, I'm still yet to find a solution, a system.
[00:16:34.250] - Gordon
Maybe you'll come back to us in the future once you've had a chance to figure out a system that works for you.
[00:16:41.120] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:16:41.870] - Gordon
That's everything from me.
[00:16:43.100] - Taylor
Everything from me as well.
[00:16:44.140] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. We can be found as always on YouTube. Please like, share and subscribe.
[00:16:50.160] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:16:54.360] - Gordon
And you can leave comments on our YouTube videos. If you want to get in contact with us, you can do that on the website. And of course, if you prefer to listen to us, we're on all the major podcast platforms. Just do a search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." We'll be back with you next week at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:17:16.360] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:17:18.870] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:17:21.300] - Taylor
Bye.
