Brent Warner
This is the HigherEdTech podcast, Season Four, Episode Four: Productivity Hacks.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the instructional technologist here at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here. IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. So new things, I can say for me a new thing is getting prepared for this class that we’re doing the online teaching certificate class that starts the day after this releases. So great. That’s a big new thing that I’ve spent a lot of time on lately. Yeah, that’s

Brent Warner
gonna be busy and good, kind of busy. Right. Lots of lots of work. Lots of productivity going on there. Looking forward to seeing what comes out of that. And I’ll be I think I’m volunteering and helping out with certain parts of it as we go. I can’t remember right now, but yeah, pretty good. We’ve been dealing with this Heatwave, Tim. I think we’re coming out of it here in Orange County in Southern California. Have you been holding up? Okay.

Tim Van Norman
Yeah, I’m very thankful that I’ve got I live in Aliso Viejo. So that seems to be a little bit cooler, but a little bit more humid. So. But air conditioning has been a blessing, I have to admit, then how about you?

Brent Warner
Yeah, it’s we don’t have air conditioning. Where I live, I have a little swamp cooler or you know, like a little thing you plug into the window and kind of works. So that’s kind of it doesn’t really beat the heat. It just kind of Ward’s it off a little bit.

Tim Van Norman
Yeah, we had one of those years ago. And yeah, that’s probably accurate.

Brent Warner
Yeah. So anyways, so I’m trying even on the non teaching days, I’m trying to get to campus more often, just so I can take advantage of school air conditioning, which is a benefit. make sense to me? Yeah. So Tim, today, we’re gonna be talking a little bit about productivity hacks. And we’ll we’ll jump into that. Let’s do it right now.

Tim Van Norman
So a productivity hacks earlier today, you and I were talking and you were telling me about some interesting tools and, and thought, hey, this would be actually a good podcast. So let’s go ahead and record it. So first of all, why do we care? We’re constantly hearing about, oh, you need to be more productive, and oh, I want to be more productive. Why? What is it that gets us to that point where we are looking for productivity hacks? Yeah, well,

Brent Warner
I think part of this conversation, and this comes out partly out of a journey I’ve been on, which is actually about reducing Tech, I guess, in a lot of ways. And then, and being more thoughtful with how I’m using it. And then, and then in turn, ultimately, hopefully being more productive, right? Or, or at least getting better quality of work done. Because I feel like, you know, there’s a lot for me, where it’s like, Okay, I’ve got all these different things kind of shouting at me and saying, Hey, use this, try this, do this, whatever it is. And I mean, even the show, in certain sense, you know, we do that, right? We try and help out people and, you know, the goal is positive, but also, I definitely understand where people feel overwhelmed by the amount of, you know, things that are coming at them. And then it’s like, well, I’ve got to learn all these things. And I still have to teach, I still have to actually do the core of my job on top of learning everything and so. So I’m not going to get too far into it right now. But I’ve been kind of pursuing this idea of reducing and minimizing the digital input. And basically, what that really has meant is a lot of reduction of stuff that I don’t need and reduction of things that are that are basically trying to how do I do this as passive, passive ways of using time, right. And so I told you, Tim, that I have deleted over 200 apps from my phone, and that includes all social media. I’ve also deleted all email from my phone. And we can talk about those a little bit if we want to later but, but the idea is that all of those things are things that are other people’s time, vying for my attention, right and I need to be more focused on building and creating and making things and so I I removed everything from my phone that is, I guess we can call it passive right there where it’s just like you just sit and scroll, we call the Doom scrolling right with like, if you’re on Twitter, if you’re on Instagram, and you just keep looking and looking for, you know, all of a sudden, an hour or two hours is gone, and you’ve wasted all of this time. And so that’s not productive. And of course, it’s easy to just say, well just quit doing those things. And part of that’s what I’m doing. But it’s not, it’s not actually getting to the point. And so what we wanted to talk about is today, some ways, and it’s kind of interesting, where you can use technology to reduce the use of technology to be more productive ended. So it’s kind of a slightly counterintuitive approach. But I hope that it makes sense as we talk about this throughout the day. So today, we’re encouraging people to use… less tech? (laughter)

Tim Van Norman
Less tech, and hopefully using tech a little bit better. Understand that, in this whole thing, some of the stuff that we’re going to talk about works really well for one of us and not for the other. So when we talk about certain types of contact and stuff like that, I have to be in contact while I’m at work constantly, that is my job. That said, I’m not teaching a class where students need to get to me when they happen to get to me, right. So there’s parts of this, we’re going to talk about what you need to pay attention to, when you’re make this, look at this hack and decide if you want to do the hack, and stuff like that. So

Brent Warner
and that says, Actually, quickly, just want to add into, I think we’d also like to encourage people that don’t dismiss something immediately as something that you cannot do, because I am also Department Chair, committee chair, I’ve got all these things that are pretty heavy responsibilities. And so it would be very easy for someone to say, Oh, I can’t do it, because I’ve got this going on. And that was those were my first reactions to a lot of these as well until I started implementing them and going, Oh, actually, it gives me more time to be better at doing this part of things. So. So it’s really about being thoughtful through what you’re actually using and how you’re using it on both sides. So just watch out for people. Yeah.

Tim Van Norman
And and that said, there’s a lot of times, I will do all of these things that you’re talking that we’re going to talk about, because I have to concentrate, I have to be productive. So I will lose these other. So that said, like we’ve talked about, some of these are short term, some are long term, but we’ll get into it. So there’s a couple of different areas that we were thinking of, first of all, the contact areas. This is ways of contacting you at one point, I think it was during the spring semester, somebody was bringing me yet another way that they wanted another app they wanted me to put on my phone and for me to be able to be contacted because it was ultimate, I absolutely needed to be contacted this way. And I sat down and I figured out there’s over 15 ways for somebody to get a hold of me right now that I actually, like, actively am part of

Brent Warner
Right, right. Yeah. So all the different chat things that we have access to all the different phone numbers that can reach to you the different email addresses that you know that yeah, for sure.

Tim Van Norman
I don’t get into social media a whole lot. So I didn’t even include my Facebook or anything like that. So, so 15 ways. And actually, since then, I’ve added a couple more. But at a certain point, there’s diminishing returns, what am I really paying attention to all of those. So email, text, phone, social media, all of those things just add on top of each other. Right? So sometimes you need to unplug, you need to unwind, you need to get away from some of that.

Brent Warner
Yeah, and I think what we’re what we’ll get into some of the tools for doing this later, but you know, things to consider for email, do you need to have your email on all the time, right? I think a lot of people have that. The very first and I’ve been doing this small one for many, many years is turn off the badge notifications on your phone, so that it doesn’t tell you how many emails are waiting for you to go in and look at them. Right, you can go a little bit harder on that. And you could do things like turn switching it from push to pull, you know, the the fetch option. And so it only it only accesses when you actually turn it on and use it. Or you can go the most extreme, which is on and delete email completely from your phone. There’s all sorts of parts to that. But I wanted to talk briefly about the text, Tim, because I think a lot of us have fallen into the like, oh, yeah, text is just text messaging is just another part of my workflow now. But it’s so bleeds into our personal lives, right? Yes. And so yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if you get a lot of texts on on your time off. But

Tim Van Norman
so so let’s combine a couple of things together into the text thing and let’s talk about Slack. Let’s talk about teams. Let’s talk about zoom chat. Let’s talk about Google Hangouts or anything, you know, all of that is really, unless you’re doing it for a meeting, it’s text. So I get all of those types of things constantly, right? Sometimes it’s 24 hours a day, my text, I don’t give out my personal phone number to most people. That’s my personal. So it kind of gives me that same thing that you’re talking about. So I never suggest that, for instance, faculty, give it out to their students, and giving out their personal phone number, those types of things. It’s just give a little bit of grace for yourself. And keep, keep that random thing from at two o’clock in the morning, when a student is having a problem on an exam that they should have gotten done. Three that they’ve had for days to get done. You know, give yourself a little grace and let yourself sleep a little bit. It’ll probably get done just as fast in the morning. Yeah,

Brent Warner
we have some really, you know, outstanding, and, you know, heart leading colleagues, the new share out there emails, I think we’ve talked about this in the past a little bit, but or share out their phone numbers. So students can text them whenever. And it’s like, I totally appreciate that, that high level of empathy, but it also is very draining and demanding for me to say, well, now I am a 24/7. Teacher, right? Like there is no gap. And there is no opportunity for me to take to choose that for myself. And so again, you kind of have to balance that out a little bit, right. And so there might be options for like, hey, maybe my text messages come through something like Google Voice and a separate, you know, a separate chat or chat option for them that you could choose instead of the one that might be your very personal text. Text system. Right. Yeah. So I think there are there are lots of options there. But let’s jump over to the next thing about like getting actually getting work done, because we can talk about how people can reach us. And we’ll we’ll get into some of the details in a bit. But let’s get some actual work done.

Tim Van Norman
So part of this is, well, why do I need to worry about productivity. And I would, as I said before working on this class that I’m helping to put together, you know, when I sit there, and I am fighting fires all day long, the last thing I want to do is spend an hour trying to be tween answering the phone, trying to get something productive done on a class. Mentally, I’m just not there. I can’t do it. And so that means that I get behind. And all of those things, the cycle that begins when you’re behind. And the same thing happens. I hear all the time grading, oh, I’ve got I got 50 papers that I need to grade. I’m going to spend all weekend grading and and what do you do instead is well, you know, yeah, watching a TV show. I’ll answer my emails, I’ll go through Facebook, and now you feel more behind. Some people pick the Okay, I’ll do 10. And then I’ll do something and 10 and do something. Again, those can be productivity hacks, but it’s understanding that at some point, you actually have to get work done. It’s not related to somebody contacting you, right?

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah. So I do know a few people who do, you know, hey, I’m going to grade five, and then I’m going to come back, I’m going to take a break, and then I’ll come back and do five more, if they’ve got 25 students that can get it done in five sessions. And maybe they do that across two or three days, right? There’s the Pomodoro Technique, which is similar to that. So that’s the one where you set a timer. And depending on your style, and those things, you know, it’d be like, hey, it’s gonna go, it’s gonna, it’s supposed to be the actual little tomato timer, you know, that’s the Pomodoro in Italian. But you know, it’s going to be go for 25 minutes, and then I’m going to get a five minute break, and I’m going, it’s going to space out and look at something else, and then get right back into it. And that is meant to get you into the state of flow so that you’re actually faster and more accurate when you’re actually doing the the work itself. And you’re you know that you’re going to have that break coming up. And the timer will just tell you to do that. So those can be parts. You know, a lot of people just kind of fall into the old trap of traditional grading, right? And it’s like, hey, maybe not every assignment needs to have a very thorough rubric and everything else like that. I’ve got a lot of assignments now where I’m just going complete and incomplete. Did you Did you hit the requirements of this or not? And then I’ll say, Hey, you got to complete or you got an incomplete in my case, that does let students come back to it and resubmit it to try to get that complete. So it takes me a little bit of different time to come back to the work and check it again. But at the same time, you know, I’m not stressing over individual points and like, oh, you know, Do you deserve eight points or nine points for this or whatever else it is right. And so. So there’s there are certain ways with grading, we did a great book session, a book reading session over the summer with a lot of the colleagues on a book called grading for equity, that kind of helps you reduce, or rearrange the way that you’re thinking about grading. And that can be really valuable for a lot of people to go, oh, I don’t have to do the same things that I came up as a student doing, I can do things in better ways that are more effective here as well. So that might be something for people to consider.

Tim Van Norman
Makes sense. There’s some other things that I find our time sucks. And that has to do with, when I’m working on a new class, I can spend hours designing the class. Okay, one tool that we’re going to recommend later, is a double edged sword. In this case, it does a great job it really quick, but the moment you use it, if something doesn’t go, right, it’s so easy to delete it and start over. And, you know, last week, I deleted and started over this class of four or five times other than one particular module, because, well, if I just rename it just this little different, then I can make it work in, you know, eight times over. And that just creates thanks, anxiety. And it winds up spending a lot of time doing something that realistically could have been done in the first place. And I could have walked away, I could have been perfectly happy with what I did, originally. So

Brent Warner
it’s that kind of that idea of like, you know, you can get 80% of the way there right away. And then that last 20%, you will spend so much time on but it’s like well, you’re getting you’re getting the vast majority of it done up front. Focus on that you can come back and clean up later if you’re super into designing things and doing all those things. But if you can get the core work done first and then tidy up a bit, I think that can be really valuable for people.

Tim Van Norman
And the same thing happens when you’re creating slides, or materials at all for your class. I mean, when you’re creating a quiz, okay, do I? How much do I change it from last semester? How much do I change exams every semester, anything like that just can take lots of time. I love the fact that you can copy from a prior semester, if you do things in Word, if you do things in Canvas, if you do things in Google, you can bring stuff over and tweak it. So there can be a lot of time spent on a brand new class. Hopefully, you make a lot of that back when you read when you copy that class for the next semester. Yeah,

Brent Warner
so this is what I tell my students this a lot too. It’s always the Measure twice, cut once you know, it’s the old building a building adage, right? And so you prep you make sure you’re right to go, you make sure right to go and then you execute, right. And so that is a way, you’re definitely going to save time on that far end. And you don’t always feel it when you’re building at the beginning. And when you’re preparing those things. They say, Hey, I’m going to spend that time make sure that it’s right, and then I’m gonna go. But for example, with quizzes, you know, you got these quiz banks that we start building, you go, well, it’s not going to be the same the next time around, because students are going to go, and then maybe next semester, instead of having to build that new quiz bank, again, you just add 10 More questions that are going to go into the mix. And then after a couple of years, you have a couple 100 questions that are building and working through and that can that can will ultimately you’ll say, Okay, I recognize that I’m going to spend the hour to make 10 more questions, but I’m not spending four hours building it every single semester.

Tim Van Norman
Right. Exactly. Exactly.

Brent Warner
So what else do we have here? Tim, we got some things that says, you know, we can, you know, learn other things, we got some more things that could possibly be done. We’ve been talking about deleting apps, as of one possibility, what else do we have?

Tim Van Norman
So I took a look. And I thought, okay, if I Google, and that alone can be a problem. But if I google productivity tools, what would I come up with? And, and there was 42 tools to do this. And 10 for that, and the greatest and the least of the blah, blah, blah, blah, I mean, all of this stuff. So before we get into any tools, let’s answer one question. Besides paying for tools, besides adding tools, what can we do to become more productive? So mentioned before deleting apps on your phone? Yeah, and I’m getting rid of those extra ways of contacting you or, or games. I mean, how often do you sit there and oh, well, I got five minutes. And so I play a game for 10 minutes.

Brent Warner
Yeah, absolutely. You know, you’ll find so I’m in the middle of this process right now, Tim. And it was just so fascinating for me to find how often I’m reaching for my phone for like down minutes. And we’re not getting into the big psychology of this. But I do want to point out briefly, those down minutes are really valuable to your brain, right to be like, Hey, I don’t actually have something to do right now. And I’m just going to sit and let my brain settle. Instead of keeping an active active active, even with things that I’m saying are passive, it’s still stimulating the brain all the time. And so do I need to be looking at a puzzle when I’m waiting in line at the grocery market? You know, do I need to be, you know, scrolling through Twitter, when I’m, you know, waiting for the the, the Zoom meeting to turn on? And for the host to start the meeting, right, those types of things? Or can I just sit there and just have my brain float and think so. So that gets real deep, I can recommend a couple books at the end. But anyways, yeah, that is certainly one that you want to take a look

Tim Van Norman
at. Another one is checking your email a certain number of times a day. So this is a productivity hack I’ve heard of many times. I love the concept. And it can be by the way, once an hour, you deal with your email once an hour, and that’s it or deal with your email three times a day or something like that. It’s a great idea, because email no longer controls you. And there’s very little in our lives in education that is so dire that somebody’s going to die if they don’t have an answer to an email, right. And our Yeah,

Brent Warner
I just started this one properly. I’ve tried it tried to do it by myself a few times with not successfully but but I have now set it up just today with the first time testing it. And Tim, you helped me out a little bit with testing at which is I’ve got an email, I’ve got emails coming in at 8am, at 1pm, and at 4pm. And so those are the times that I’ll be checking, or the email will be able to come in, I can go in after those times. So I can maybe I’m not available at eight, but I go in and look at at nine, I still get that batch of everything that came in before and up till eight o’clock, right. And so now I’ve got okay, I’ve got 20 emails, I’m gonna cycle through these, I’ve got the time right now to look at these. But it’s not that constant drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, right, it’s like, okay, here is a cup of water that you can drink from right now. And then you can drink another cup later, when you’re when you’re actually thirsty. Instead of having, you know, small little drips every every 10 seconds.

Tim Van Norman
One way to do that is to actually close your email program.

Brent Warner
I tried that unsuccessfully. And I

Tim Van Norman
I do that when I’m going to get into a meeting that I need to really pay attention to or something like that. I will actually physically close it close notifications, completely get out of those other things that can come up. Otherwise, I find I’m it’s not any good for me to go to an online conference. Because I’ll spend 10 minutes across two days and have no idea what I just heard. Because I’m dealing with everything else instead. Yeah.

Brent Warner
Yeah. So so it does work. I like the idea of closing it down when you’re in a when you’re in a special moment, or some sort of event or whatever that is, that does work for me. But the idea of just trying to close it down and just saying okay, I’ll open it again later for myself when you know when I’m ready. That has not been a successful technique. So we’ll talk about how I’ve dealt with that in the future.

Tim Van Norman
Right. Lose the news websites? It sounds funny, but it’s so easy to oh, you know, I got five minutes. What does Yahoo say? And and what do you do you keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling? Because there’s always something else? And oh, did I actually read that story? Is that a new take on it? And now even some of the browser’s are set. They’re set up to have new stories come up as soon as you open the browser. Yeah. So change your homepage, do whatever it takes to not have news come up for you. You can look at the news. Don’t have it be automatically coming up for you every time you are in the middle of doing something.

Brent Warner
Yeah. And I’ve also been reading a book called The Shallows recently by Nicholas Carr. And really fascinating ideas about how news websites are so completely different than reading a newspaper. And you know, one of these you know, we we’ve seen a lot of these things. Of course, there’s so many, you know, high interest, little images We’re moving pictures that can kind of like make us want to click on them. But also, you know, they’re things we’ve all seen. I’m scrolling through an article, and then you’re like, wait a second, am I reading a new article, and then you kind of see that the headline had actually changed. And so they just, it’s just eternal con content. Right? Right. And so all of this, so there’s a lot of real things that these websites are doing to try to trick us and keep us on their site and keep us engaged for longer and click on their ads. I am absolutely with you on that. And, and there are even some, you know, tools and plugins that you can use to eliminate all the extra stuff. And so you’re just looking at the text. And that might be a way to deal with it as well.

Tim Van Norman
Exactly. Checking your voicemail a certain number of times a day. By the way, you can, in a lot of cases, have your voicemail forwarded to email. It’s even better. By the way, if you can have it converted to text. Yeah, you can always go back and listen to it. But I love that feature on my cell phone, for instance, I never checked my for a while there anyway, I was never checking my voicemail on my phone, I would just read through it. And I would see what somebody said. And then I could reply appropriately to that, because I could just read it. Now I don’t have to sit and take time to listen to something and figure out what I’m going to respond. I can just read it. And they’re always going to get somebody’s name wrong or something like that. But at least it gets you close enough that you can listen if you need to.

Brent Warner
Yeah, absolutely. And then the last couple things, I think we said, you know, like, what are you focused on? I think one thing that you could say is, can you put your phone far away from you while while you’re working on? You know, something on your computer? Or can you put your Can you turn your computer off while you’re working on something on your phone? Right? I think that will be, you know, a way and so what I’ve done is I you know, just put it on the other side of the office, for example, or I you know, if I’m in class, like maybe put my phone inside of the bag, and so that I’m not tempted to be looking at them and getting myself distracted. You know, there’s a there’s a lot of stuff going on inside of us with code switching and what our brains focused on. And then when we keep switching back and forth, and back and forth, we become kind of discombobulated in certain ways. And so what what can you do to get your brain focusing on one thing, mono tasking instead of multitasking? I think we talked about that in an episode maybe a year or two ago, at this point. Right. So alright, so Tim, we talked about a lot of these ideas of like, kind of the concepts, right, what’s going on? Like, how do we look at this, but, but I will say it was really interesting to me to find that there are tools, like it’s like, Hey, I’m gonna try to get away, or I’m trying to kind of simplify, but there are definitely tools that you can use to help you get those things done, right. And so the first one I wanted to share here was boring, which is a, you can plug it into Gmail, and you can plug it into Outlook. And I just did this. So I talked about switching my emails to three times a day and boomerangs. It’s called inbox, pause, or pause inbox or something like that. And, and that’s what it does. So you actually set up the specific times and you say, Okay, it’s only gonna let emails come in from this specific times. They’re cool ways that you can make exceptions. So if you say, Hey, I can’t ignore emails from my boss, for example, you can actually put their email in and it will push their way through even during those break times. So it’s like, Hey, okay, if it’s if it’s, you know, big boss’s email is coming. Oh, you know, I know that I’m going to need to get it. And I know, I’m going to need to respond to it within the next 20 minutes, then that can be set up to come through. But you also know that we get so many emails that are my priority. And really, maybe I won’t even end up looking at it. Right. So Boomerang is a great tool. It’s a free plugin. They’re really useful for it.

Tim Van Norman
Nice. You had also mentioned one called freedom. Oh, no, and I’m not familiar with.

Brent Warner
So this one’s pretty extreme. But what it does is it you can actually set it up kind of the the, the web version of Boomerang, which is you can actually set it to say, hey, during these times, you cannot access these websites. And so you can say, all websites, or you can say specific websites that you want to choose, or you can do it in both ways. So you can say block all websites, with these exceptions, or only let me use or I can use all websites and these are the ones that I cannot go access, right because I know that I am going to infer me right? Like I’m going to jump on Twitter. I know it’s going to happen and so I need to set it up so that I’m blocking that particular site. Freedom lets you choose and you can really get into the into the weeds with it and say, Okay, this is the time that I can go and access these. These are what it lets me do. And then you can also tie it into your phone as well. So it can block off access to certain apps on your phones, if you say I don’t want to delete it, but I want to have, I want to have these times set up. You can also do some of that on your phones. Now they have all these like setups where you can kind of say like focus zones and on the iPhone has all this stuff in it now. But freedom is a really good option for if you just feel, you know, like at one time, someone I saw like on the internet was like, Why do you need this just have a little self control and go go to that. And it’s like, well, that’s not really how human brains work. Like, like there is there is levels of self control. But there’s also so much pulling at us when you say like, Hey, I’m blocking myself off from that, then that is a way for you to actually take control for yourself. And so freedom can be an interesting option for it.

Tim Van Norman
Nice. Does this next one for DM? Yeah, for

Brent Warner
DM Yeah, that one. I’ve mentioned that one in the past too, because you said all of those you know those text chat platforms, Slack and teams, and whatever. So I’ve got this one is this for Mac, I’m not sure what of what’s available. But I went in searching for this type of tool, particularly. And there were a few choices out there. But basically what it does is pulls all those chat services into one app, one application on your computer. And then all I can do all I have to do is go into for Diem. And then I can see any team’s messages that are coming through any slack messages that are coming through any you know any basically anything that has some sort of text or communication platform inside of it, you can you can kind of link your own account into it. And then all of those contacts are in one place instead of having to log into all the different places to see where they are. So for dem fer diu M, I’m not sure if there’s a Windows option. Nice.

Tim Van Norman
So one I’ve used quite a bit in the past, I’ve gotten away from it more recently, Evernote. Yes, they have a paid version. But I love their free version, just to keeping track of notes, audio notes, video notes, whatever I wanted to have just use that for a number of years really, really liked that ability to just take a quick note. And the nice part I found is I could do it on my phone, it’s available on my computer, I can print it, I can download it, whatever it is, it was just a really nice package. For handling notes.

Brent Warner
I know a lot of people really love Evernote. I’m gonna throw in one more here, Tim, the Mercury Reader. So I’ve mentioned that before that is a Chrome plugin that you can click a button on your on your bar up there at the top. And it just strips, whatever website you’re looking at, of all of the extra stuff. So it’s just the article. And it’s pretty good about just pulling out the the photos that are part of the article, but not other embedded photos that are like, you know, hey, this is an ad or whatever else it is. So it’s not always perfect, but it’s free, it’s a great way and you can just click and you can simplify what you’re looking at. So Mercury Reader is a choice, they’re nice.

Tim Van Norman
So as we’re looking at it, think about your cell phone and the cell phone. These next several can be good and bad. So this is where you’ve got to pay attention to what what makes sense and works for you. You may want to put your calendar on your cell phone, myself, I’ve got my cell phone checks, a whole bunch of email accounts, it’s got my calendar, it’s got everything on my cell phone, so that I don’t have to look at a computer I will only respond to emails really quickly on my cell phone. Otherwise, if it’s important enough, I will start I will go to my computer and actually respond to it. But I feel like I’ve at least had the chance to see it on my cell phone. And so I can spend time doing other things and, and less distraction because often I will put my cell phone on vibrate. In fact, my watch checks my phone and I get my emails and everything on my watch. There are many times I don’t notice the vibrate on my watch. And so I don’t get the information until I’ve got five or 10 of something. So I like that I like having that distract the distance from a computer otherwise I literally would be sitting on a computer 24/7 And I can’t afford to do that. Yeah,

Brent Warner
yeah that makes sense. But I’m gonna want to point out my my goal at this point in my life is actually the opposite of what you’re doing right and so I think this is what you know often good about your you and I having these conversations is like what are you thinking through what’s what’s working for you? Right and so for me, I’m really trying to get everything off of the cell phone and so at the only at the times when I intentionally sit at the computer, that’s when I’m going to be actively working on things. And so for me and my current state, and I won’t say that this will last forever, I don’t know. But what but it’s just interesting to explore and to try is to say, hey, get everything off of that phone. So that I’m not, it’s not when I’m walking around that it’s not when I’m kind of doing this. And that it’s when I say, hey, now is work time, now is the time when I’m getting into my work zone. And at that point, then I will be doing active work all the time. And so. So, yeah, different approaches and trying to see what works for you. And again, your own needs, etc.

Tim Van Norman
Exactly. So, at IVC. In Canvas, we’ve got a couple of things that we’ve done that, that are designed to save time to try to help you as a teacher. And we’re mentioning this because I know there’s other people who listen, and I definitely would recommend each of these. Obviously, we’re putting it up here. But so one thing we do is sandboxes, creating a sandbox so that you can work and you don’t have to do anything in your class, that alone can just make your life a lot simpler, a lot less hassle. Because you’re not waiting, and oh, okay, I gotta do it right now. Or I need my next class before I can do something. So we create sandboxes. For you. That’s I found, I think that’s a really nice thing. I use them all the time. Oh,

Brent Warner
yeah. They’re great. Because also your students aren’t like, Hey, I saw this thing. And then it was gone. And what is going on your turn publishing and publishing, and especially now that Canvas has the share to option, I just have my course numbers, always at hand. So I, I wrote down all the courses that I’m teaching, and they’re their ticket numbers. And so when you click share two, I can just type that number in, and it’ll just instantly share it over once I’m ready to actually put it into my active course. So yeah, sandbox is a great way to go.

Tim Van Norman
One that I really love is called adjust all. So adjust all allows you to adjust all the dates in your class, in one screen. Not very expensive for a college to buy. But it really does make a huge difference. At the beginning of the semester, when you’re just going through pounding through adjusting all the dates, you look at a calendar and right beside it, you’re you can save you hours. And so that tool alone is amazing for that. It also gives you the ability to delete things. So if you’re no longer going to use an announcement, delete it, get rid of it. You can go back to that from a prior semester or something like that, if you need it. Yeah. Love it, like clean it up.

Brent Warner
So I’m sure Tim, this is the one that you were talking about earlier. That when you mentioned that, you know you can spend too much time on it, I’m guessing.

Tim Van Norman
Design plus, yes. Specifically multitool, any of the design plus stuff, they’ve done a beautiful job, it makes your course really look good. But it’s i I’m warning you that it’s a really easy way to just spend way too much time on nothing.

Brent Warner
Well, let me follow up with that, Tim, because here’s here’s been my solution to using design plus is that I’ve chosen one theme that I like and that I use for everything. And then I just do with a couple little table, the you know, the content table things that I kind of choose a few of those basic patterns. But I never changed the theme. Like I think there’s a lot of teachers like this page is going to be looking at this and this one is going to look like that. And there’s going to be and so for me, it’s a consistent theme always, and students always recognize that they’re gonna see, it’s cool, because we’ve got it in the IVC colors. And so it just pulls those in, right? It’s always kind of that same pattern, intro text, you know, what are the activity? What are the expectations? What are the specific activities, and then you’re done, right? And so you can so for sure, people do get way, way, way down, and all of a sudden, it’s 2am. And they’re like, their eyes are red. And they’re like what’s going on here? But what I’ve found is if I don’t let myself get too into that, like, I’ll have separate times when I want to play and like explore, but what I’m just building pages and I was like, hey, I want to get this thing going for my class. Click, click, click and then it’s really beautifully designed and ready to go.

Tim Van Norman
Exactly. And that’s why I put it on the list just because it does a beautiful job. Very simple, very easily, very quickly. Right. Screencast O Matic when you want to record an edit, you’re not going to spend a whole lot of time you just want to get it done. I love Screencast O Matic is not very expensive. I believe it’s $18 a year right now, for a subscription and They did a great package, just for quick edits, you can record for hours. So it’s not like you’re limited to 15 minutes or something like that you can have really long recordings. But it does a good job. It allows you the simple edits, blur speed up, slow down, adding in another video, all the different things that you’re looking for, but it’s not going to record your voice in three tracks, and it’s not going to record, it’s not going to do a whole lot of things that Camtasia or one of the other. More complicated systems will do.

Brent Warner
Yeah, yeah. And then the last one here, Tim, I stepped away from this for a few years, but I’m actually coming back to it, which is turn it in. In particular, I think everybody knows what Turnitin does, right? You know, students upload their things, it checks for plagiarism. We know that there are a lot of teachers who kind of copy and they’re like, hey, this little section of text looks weird. I’m gonna copy it and paste it into Google, right? And they end up losing a lot of time and like trying to realize, am I a teacher? Or am I a police officer? Right, you get into that question. But there’s the new tool inside of there that some of some people have, not everybody hasn’t, I think you have to have it activated on your license. But there’s one called draft coach, right, which is built into Google Docs now. And so basically, it’s turned it in as a plugin in Google Docs. And so students can then click on it, and it will automatically check for the plagiarism inside of there through through Turnitin system, which tends to be a little bit more robust than Google’s just because they have so many years of proprietary content that they’re comparing it against. But then also, draft coach does a cool thing. That’s kind of similar to Grammarly, which is, it will let tell people where their grammar writing mistakes are, but it won’t tell them what the mistakes are, which is actually a common practice that we use in our ESL classes. So we say, Hey, this is a, you know, an article error, right, and they say, Oh, that means maybe you’re not using the article A or the or, you know, or you chose the wrong one. But it won’t tell them which word they should have put in, it just says, Hey, this is so start thinking about it. So draft coach, as part of turn it in, those are a couple of ways that you’re you can really save some time for yourself. And you don’t necessarily need to give the feedback to students, because they can go in now and click on it and see for themselves, the same things that you might have talked to them about individually.

Tim Van Norman
Alright. So moving out of Canvas, getting into some of the more popular large Programs, Microsoft Outlook itself, specifically breaking it down into a couple of different components, email, I have my email automatically file certain things, I get a certain email multiple times a day that I don’t need to see, unless somebody calls and asks a very specific question. Now, if somebody calls in ask that question once a week. So I do need to get to it. But I don’t need to see it any other time. So it just automatically files it away. And every once in a while when somebody calls, I do a search, and I find that information, and I can give it to him. I love that, automatically getting it out of my inbox. And by the way that it doesn’t show up on my phone, it doesn’t show up as a number on my inbox or anything else, it’s just gone. I’ve always

Brent Warner
wanted to do that. And I’ve never been very good at it. I’ve never sat down and just learned like the rules for you know, sorting and filtering and those types of things. But I, I very much agree that like if you get that set up, and then you’re like, Oh, you can basically have Inbox Zero, pretty, pretty close, you know, close to it and save yourself a lot of time and go, Okay, now I’m going to look at the marketing emails from school, or now I’m going to go look at, you know, any email like so for example, I wanted to set this up where any emails that come from teachers in our department, I would want to put into a specific folder. So I know, okay, I want to prioritize that, because I want to look at that as quickly as possible. But I don’t want it to get lost in the mix of all the other, you know, 100 different things that come to us. And so I think that’s a really, you know, I haven’t done it yet, but it is on my list of things to get done, speaking productivity, you know, and get those types of systems set up. Because once they’re there, then they’re good, right?

Tim Van Norman
Exactly. And that’s the thing, I set it up a couple of years ago. And now I don’t have to even think about it. It’s just done. The other thing, though, that Outlook does that I really like is you can check multiple accounts. And all you have to do is make it something a favorite. So I for instance at work have I think three or four different accounts that I automatically check. All I do is I look in the upper left of Outlook and if it’s got a number, that means I haven’t read an email there. That’s it. Some of those accounts are with other people. And so that means nobody has read it. It’s just really simple. If there’s no number there, I don’t need to look and automatic. It just comes in now using the tool that you were talking about before. or boomerang and could automatically check that every four hours or however often. But having used the tool to check all of those at once, I don’t have to go click on Outlook and change something, I don’t have to go searching for information. It’s given to be where I want it. And then I go away. Okay, nice. In calendar, using notifications. I love it. Because since all of my meetings, everything I have that is of any schedule is in my calendar, my calendar is always 100% accurate. That means it pops up 15 minutes before a meeting. And I don’t even have to think about that meeting until 15 minutes before it. Right, I can just move on. And so I know that I’m going to get that notice notification, I don’t have to worry about, oh, I’ve got a meeting in two hours. What am I looking at? Okay, it’s what time is it really going to be? It’s just done. The other thing is the way we’ve got it set up, you can you Brent can actually set a meeting with me and know that I’m available for that meeting. Okay, because my schedule, like I said, is always 100% accurate. People in your organization can actually schedule. Now you don’t know what the other meetings are that are rounded. But you can see that I’m busy. Yeah. And one of the nice parts is, if you are set up in an organization, in order to do that, you can actually put everybody in the list. And it will tell you when they’re not busy. So you don’t have to go searching and send out emails to everybody and okay, what time works for you, you can just look and oh, this time is available for everybody. The chances of it being available is a lot higher than so

Brent Warner
if you use you can use it to have their calendars properly up to date. It has its own conversation, but But I will say that I have been much more proactive in the last year or two about like having my full and accurate calendar. And it’s made my life a lot easier, because I’m like, Oh, wait, maybe I think I have something and just all the things like it’s not all just work things. It might be like, Hey, I’ve got this other thing planned. But for example, Tim, you and I record at night. And so, so so I could also see in there like, oh, no, sorry, I’ve got another night plan, then I can’t make it right. And so it really is, you know, I resisted it for a long time. And it’s like, so hold these things in my head. But it’s a lot nicer just to get it on to the calendar.

Tim Van Norman
And great agreed the to do. So one of the things in Outlook is you can have the to do automatically show up on the right. If you use it, I have never been successful with it. But you can literally drag and drop emails onto the to do there. It can go really easily for you. The other thing is if you have to do for somebody, it will come up when you click on an email for them or you’re sending an email to them, it will come up and remind you that you have a to do for that person. So that can be really useful. That can also be the opposite. It can be really aggravating to have that in there. Okay, so.

Brent Warner
And then last one is OneNote. We talked about that a little bit before Tim. And we can kind of blend this as we move into the next conversation of Google stuff as well. But yeah, having having a single source for where you’re putting things, having something that can be shareable for people can be one great way.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. So Google has some of the same things. So it’s got the Google Calendar, which can do a lot of the same things that we were just talking about with Outlook. Docs and Sheets. I love the idea of sharing, that can make by itself can make life so much simpler, rather than sending emails back and forth saying, Oh, well, can you make this change? Can you update this? It’s just done.

Brent Warner
And it’s been great for, for example, for our department, because it’s like, what do we want to talk about this next meeting? Does anyone else want to share right so that people can jump in there and add their own agenda items to meetings? Right? And that’s really powerful. Instead of like waiting, oh, send it to me, and then I’ll add it later. And then oh, wait, I close it down. Let me go find it again. You know, all those things that come up with it. So. So yeah, let’s, let’s get more shared, shared documents going on.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. And this next one slides. And in fact, I’ll add drive into that to the ability to be able to have content at any computer that’s got an internet connection. That makes life so much easier. I don’t carry USB drives anymore. I know right? In fact, I have to use one. I was supposed to use one yesterday and I’m looking at it I’m like, I don’t even know where my latest USB Drive is. And if it’s got anything on it And because I haven’t used one in probably a year. So I

Brent Warner
remember one time I had to run over to the IVC bookstore to go buy one. I’m like, oh, geez, I can’t believe I need. Yeah, that’ll happen sometimes.

Tim Van Norman
Exactly. So that ability to no longer have to have a physical drive has been really nice. And by the way, security wise, at the same time, Oh, yeah. So

Brent Warner
Geez. So Tim, we’ve only been through about 5000 ideas in the last hour about productivity. So there’s plenty of things out there. And again, I think we’re kind of zipping through it really quickly. But I just want to encourage, you know, this idea of like, am I taking Am I giving myself the time to think about what’s actually going to work for me, and what’s gonna save me some time, maybe it’ll take me a little bit more time upfront, but I will save that time in the back end. I know a lot of us are kind of, you know, we resist that, because we’re like, I just don’t have the time to get it done right now all sorted out, make it cleaner later. But, but yeah, it’s, uh, there are many, many ways you can do these things. And you don’t need to. You don’t need to go too crazy with it, right? Like, once you get started, and you say, I’m just gonna do this one little thing. And that will save me a little bit of time over over the next year over the next two years, right. And those things will ultimately add up.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we talked about productivity hacks. For more information about the show, please visit our website at the higher ed tech podcast.com. There you will find our podcasts and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner
And as always, we do want your feedback. So please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com. And let us know your thoughts. If you have ideas for future shows. There’s a link over there where you can give us your topic ideas. For everyone at

Tim Van Norman
IVC. That’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. And as we mentioned earlier, if you’re teaching at IVC we’re offering a 10 week course that starts this Friday. So both in person and available online at the same time,

Brent Warner
this Friday being for those who might be listening late. We’re

Tim Van Norman
we’re Friday, September 16

2022

2022, Yes. Hopefully again soon. But yes. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by the new IVC Training Center in a 322 or contact me Tim at tvannorman@ivc.edu

Brent Warner
and if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can still find me I did not delete these accounts, they are just not on my phone, on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn. @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman
I’m Tim VanNorman

Brent Warner
and I’m Brent Warner and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody