[00:00:08.840] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.170] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:09.330] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.320] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.460] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have been affecting our businesses over the last seven days. We missed a couple of weeks. We missed one week, I think it was, because you were away, weren't you?

[00:00:28.610] - Taylor
I was.

[00:00:29.000] - Gordon
How was your trip?

[00:00:29.850] - Taylor
My trip was very good, thank you. I really enjoyed it.

[00:00:32.850] - Gordon
Excellent. Remind us where you went.

[00:00:34.670] - Taylor
I was in Prague and it was very snowy, quite cold. I think it was minus 10 when I arrived there. But I really like the city. It's quite a small city, so you can walk from one side to the other. Not very far, not very long. But yeah, it was a great city and I enjoyed going and I made some great friends that I met there.

[00:00:57.740] - Gordon
Very good. We're both getting over a bit of illness. My throat has been very sore over the last week or so, and that's come to an end now. I've just stopped coughing over the last couple of days. You're still coughing, though?

[00:01:09.840] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:01:10.400] - Gordon
There's a lot of illness going around at the moment. Which leads me into my topic. Shall I go first?

[00:01:15.960] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:01:17.250] - Gordon
So, pacing yourself at Christmas. In the entertainment business, which I'm in, I find that December is traditionally a very busy time. I get lots of enquiries. Some of them turn into shows, and I find I'm out during the week a lot more than I am during other months. The reason for that is that I go to nurseries, clubs, businesses where they're doing fun days and Christmas days, Christmas parties, all sorts of things like this. And so I find that I'm out during the week a lot more than I am normally. I've got to make sure that I pace myself. So when I'm booking these in, I don't book them too close together. I've got to make sure I've got to leave time not only to get from one job to the other, but also to just recover. Because it's a lot of strenuous work lifting stuff and carrying stuff in, setting it up, doing the show. When you're doing the show, you've got a lot of mental stress. It's not bad stress, but you're having to think a lot while you're performing. You have to make sure you don't say something that you don't mean or upset somebody or make sure you make the experience as magical as you possibly can for your audience. There needs to be a little bit of time between the events just to make sure you're not packing into the car, rushing to the next event in the car, getting to the event, setting up and just making it in time to start the next performance, because there's no time to actually then catch your breath. The same goes with all sorts of other work as well. If you've got lots of businesses that you're doing work for, in Taylor's case, it's web design, you don't want to try and put too much on your plate before Christmas because most people traditionally have a break at Christmas. They don't want to do anything over the Christmas and New Year period. It's a good time to have a bit of downtime. But what you don't want is to have all of your businesses coming out with business Christmas specials and wanting to promote it all during the time that you're leading up to Christmas and find that you've actually got no time for yourself. You've got no time to actually do all the work that you've been taking on. The same goes at Christmas. When you've got Christmas dinner, don't go overboard, don't go too mad and stuff yourself full because we all know what happens. You're going to end up after Christmas going, "Oh, I need to go on a diet. I need to go back to the gym." Just pace yourself. And I think that's a really good thought to have in the back of your mind during this time as we're running up to Christmas, just make sure you pace yourself. Would you agree with that?

[00:04:18.900] - Taylor
I would, yeah. I think it's very important to set your boundaries so that you can take that time off and things like that. So people understand that you may not be around, you may be taking some time off and you don't get lots and lots of work in that you just can't do basically.

[00:04:37.920] - Gordon
I think you need to train your customers as well. If they're customers you have ongoing, like a website client, a lot of my magic customers are people who book me once or twice a year, so they're not so bad. I have a routine in place. I know what I'm doing. I know what the venue is like. I don't have to worry about going to a new venue and where is it? How do I get in? How far is it from where the car can be parked? All these things I leave tonnes of extra time for when I do it the first time because you just have no idea what you don't know. You don't know what you don't know. Until I get to these places and find out how it all works, it's really difficult for me to know that. I always leave a bit of space. But with your customers that come back to you again and again and again on an ongoing basis, every month for example, by training them and letting them know ahead of time that you might not be able to fit in all the work that they want done at the Christmas time. Now is probably the wrong time to be telling them this. You want to tell them sort of October time. Have them prepare for Christmas ahead of time, even if it means doing the work, but not putting it live until a certain date, which is something else that's possible, isn't it?

[00:05:58.340] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:05:59.390] - Gordon
I think you need to just make sure that they all know and they're all clear as to what's happening, so you don't get yourself into a situation where you just burn yourself out, because no one wants that at Christmas.

[00:06:10.240] - Taylor
No, not at all.

[00:06:13.010] - Gordon
We traditionally at This Week With our Christmas message has normally just been a very small one, and it's like, "Hello, happy Christmas. Thank you for watching or listening to us during the year," and that's it. I suspect that will be the same this year. So just bear in mind, pace yourself at Christmas. Keep that in the back of your mind.

[00:06:38.230] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:38.530] - Gordon
That's me done.

[00:06:39.340] - Taylor
Nice. So my topic this week is I have been using an app called Rize.io.

[00:06:46.650] - Gordon
How do you spell in there?

[00:06:49.590] - Taylor
R-I-Z-E dot I-O

[00:06:50.630] - Gordon
So rize with a Z.

[00:06:53.350] - Taylor
And this is an app that basically tracks what goes on on your computer. For example, it will track the websites you visit, the applications you use, and it will automatically tag and categorise them based on the type of app or website it is. For example, it will put your Facebook, your Messenger, your Instagram, your Twitter all into a category called 'social media.' Obviously, we know social media is unproductive. So what it does is, it tries to give you alerts to recommend you to start focus sessions. If you start getting distracted, it will give you a pop-up, a notification. And they've recently brought out this Coach, it's like AI Coach, and it tries to use the data that it's collected on you, and it's always collecting, to recommend times that it thinks, "okay, this would be a good time to take a break." "This would be a good time to start focus session." And it changes different parameters based on what it learns from you essentially. And it's something that I bought a while ago and I just left it running passively in the background. And at some point, I wanted to just use the data to put onto my website. Something that I... Well, when they came out with this Coach builder, I used it for the first time on Monday. And I probably got more done in the day than I probably have done for quite a while, but I didn't do as many hours. That was purely because I was taking breaks when it recommended them to me. Then I was also having focus sessions. So whenever I was going to try and get distracted and just write a quick message on Facebook or something, it would say, "Hang on, are you getting distracted?" It would then give you a 10-second countdown to look and re-evaluate yourself going, "Do I actually need to be looking at this website?" And then depending on whether or not you do or not, you have different options. You can say, "Thanks for the reminder" and then it will obviously close. You can say, "Disable for this session," or you can re-categorise it if it's been categorised wrong. And these helpers really... Oh, I'm sorry.

[00:09:22.510] - Gordon
It's one of those tickly coughs, isn't it? When you start talking, I had this exact same thing last week. You just get this little tickle and you have to cough again and again.

[00:09:31.840] - Taylor
These little reminders are really useful and it can help you keep track of how many hours you're working. Because sometimes we don't realise how many hours we're working. We either think we're working a lot and we're not, or we think we're working very little hours, but in actual fact, we're working 10 plus, which obviously isn't healthy. So it's been good for me to be able to reflect, look back and see how long I've been working on average each day, being able to make sure I can see if I can keep that to a good level, and then also just keeping track on things and keeping me proactive, I think.

[00:10:10.710] - Gordon
And is this a Mac-only app?

[00:10:13.340] - Taylor
No, this is on Mac and Windows. It is a paid app. There was an app similar to this that has been out for a long time, but they just haven't updated it. And this is a very modern version that integrates AI and other things like that.

[00:10:28.620] - Gordon
And is it a subscription?

[00:10:30.560] - Taylor
Yes, it's a subscription-based app.

[00:10:35.570] - Gordon
But I guess if you end up working a lot more and being more focused, you'll end up earning more money, and therefore you'll have more capacity and it will easily pay for itself over a period of time. So it sounds like a really good app to have. We'll put a link to this app in the show notes so you can have a look for yourself, see if it's something that might be of interest to you. Anything else you want to say on that?

[00:11:01.320] - Taylor
I don't think so. It's just a good way to, I think, keep tabs on yourself to see not only how long you're spending on stuff, but which websites you're spending a long time on. You may think you only spend five minutes a day on Facebook, but this actually tells you you're spending an hour and a half. But because they're two-minute slots it obviously builds up.

[00:11:24.160] - Gordon
And does it track over multiple devices?

[00:11:26.660] - Taylor
It doesn't at the moment, but it's a requested feature that people are looking for.

[00:11:31.220] - Gordon
Yeah, I can see how that would be quite useful. Yeah, because you could start watching a YouTube video because you want to know how to do something and you've got stuck with a problem and then you find that another video pops up and two hours later you haven't actually done anything but watch YouTube and it doesn't seem like that. I know when you work for yourself, you end up looking at your watch and going, "What? How did I get to that time already?" And that's a great way to stop yourself getting lost for the day.

[00:12:03.800] - Taylor
Definitely.

[00:12:04.400] - Gordon
Yeah. Well, I think that's all we have to say today. We're pacing ourselves for Christmas. A nice short episode for you. Thank you so much for joining us. As always, you can find us on YouTube and on Facebook.

[00:12:19.120] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about.

[00:12:26.550] - Gordon
Don't forget, we are going to have a different colour for our next season, which starts in January. If you think you know what colour you think we might use, make a note, send it to us. Let us know by email if you're on the website or if you're on Facebook or YouTube, leave a comment and we'll see those and we'll see who gets it right. There's no prizes. It's just a bit of fun. But have a look at the colours we've already had and see what you think we might decide upon. We haven't actually decided ourselves yet.

[00:13:01.320] - Taylor
No.

[00:13:01.720] - Gordon
I think we've got a good idea, but we'll see. Until next time, we'll see you next Friday, which is getting very close to Christmas.

[00:13:10.790] - Taylor
It is.

[00:13:11.140] - Gordon
Very close to Christmas. Might be a short episode next week. Until then, my name's Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:13:19.030] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:13:21.490] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:13:21.900] - Taylor
Bye.

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