[00:00:08.460] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:08.780] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:09.040] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.020] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.000] - 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 thank you so much for joining us.

[00:00:23.860] - Taylor
Welcome back.

[00:00:24.710] - Gordon
It's been a busy week. I always say that, but it has been a busy week. And the next two weeks are going to be so busy that I don't think we're going to be able to have an episode.

[00:00:35.710] - Taylor
Abandoning me.

[00:00:36.480] - Gordon
And I will talk about that when it gets to my segment today. Do you want to go first or shall I?

[00:00:42.020] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.

[00:00:43.000] - Gordon
Off you go.

[00:00:43.850] - Taylor
So I wanted to follow on from last week. So last week I spoke about Freedom, which is an app. And it allows you to block websites, apps across multiple devices. And I've been trying to get my routine back from what I had before, where I was getting up early, going to the gym, doing exercise, and just being a lot more productive and going to bed a bit earlier than I have been recently. And one thing that I've always struggled with is waking up with an alarm.

[00:01:19.080] - Gordon
Yeah.

[00:01:19.880] - Taylor
For a long time, I had my Alexa. Apologies if I've just triggered it. And it worked really well. It was really nice. However, one thing that I found was that I got to the point where I subconsciously was turning the alarm off.

[00:01:35.890] - Gordon
By voice.

[00:01:37.050] - Taylor
Yes, and not even realising I turned it off. I got so much into the habit of basically, as soon as I heard the alarm, I would just say, "Stop," with obviously the keyword in the beginning. And this caused a lot of issues because I said, "Oh, my alarm didn't go off." And when I looked back through the logs, because you have voice logs, it showed at one minute past my alarm time I said, "Stop." And so this has caused a lot of issues. So I decided that I wanted to find a new alarm clock. And I was thinking about ones that I could, get a physical one and put it across the room. The issue is my room is not that big and there aren't any plug sockets near where it's across from the room, so that wouldn't really work. If I did battery, obviously, then you've got the issue where if the alarm clock dies, the alarm's not going to go off.

[00:02:32.080] - Gordon
Same situation, yeah.

[00:02:33.480] - Taylor
So I decided to have a look at some apps, and I came across an app, which is along the lines of what I was trying to do with the physical one, which is basically put it far away for me to have to do something. So this app is called 'Alarmy,' and it gives you basically challenges. So there are different types of challenges. So there's one where it will ask you some maths questions. So it's very simple. It's 10 plus 18 or you can basically set the difficulty however you want. So you could do 3 plus 2, or you could do like 324 plus 628, for example, stuff like that. You can have to do a minimum number of steps. So you actually have to take your phone and you have to then walk 20 steps, for example. And obviously that means going out of your bedroom. For me, it means going downstairs. There's one where you have to scan a QR or barcode. And so if you've got like toothpaste or something in your morning routine, you have to go and scan it. There is the other one which I use, which is memorisation. So it shows up a grid of dots and you've got to memorise where the dots were and then repeat it.

[00:03:43.640] - Taylor
And you have to do this between three or however many times you set. So you have to get the repetition or memorisation three times in a row. And the catch is your alarm clock will not go off until you've completed these challenges. So for me, at the moment, I've got the memorisation, and I have to do three of them in a row, plus go for 20 steps, which means going downstairs. So for me, that's been working because essentially the alarm will not go off. If I fall back asleep halfway through doing it, just going to start going again. And then the catch to that is that after five minutes or however long you set, could be 10, 15, it will send you another notification. And this notification will say, "are you awake?" And if you don't reply to that notification within 100 seconds, your alarm goes off and you're back to square one. You've got to fill in all the challenges again. I think you can set up to five challenges in a row. So obviously, if you want to make it obviously harder and wake yourself up a lot more, then you can obviously add more challenges.

[00:04:48.910] - Taylor
And they've got a wide variety and range of different challenges that you can do. There's one that you have to take a photo of an object and it uses the in-camera OCR recognition and things like that to determine what's in the picture. But I thought it was a really clever way, and it was along the lines of what I was trying to find and just never found. There have been alarm clocks that have wheels, which I think is quite funny, where it's on the desk and then when the alarm clock goes off, it rolls off the desk and runs away from you. Obviously, if you've got a bigger room, that works quite well because then you've got to chase after it to stop it. It's a really interesting app. The only thing is you've got to make sure your phone is plugged in because if your phone dies then you obviously will not hear your alarm. But I'm so far, touch wood, I'm three for three with waking up.

[00:05:43.190] - Gordon
Well, that's good to hear because the important one for you is your Thursday morning when you do BNI, isn't it?

[00:05:48.660] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:05:49.100] - Gordon
And that's the one that is always the concern that you're not going to make it. Most of the others are, unless you've got a gym appointment, all the others are just you wanting to get up at that time, which is not so much of an issue. But you do want to get into the habit of getting up early. So this seems like a great way of doing it. Not sure I'd be quite awake enough to be able to do challenges immediately, but personally, I don't need that. An alarm will wake me up and I'll put it on snooze. And I actually set my alarm for nine minutes before I actually want to get up so that it goes off twice. And so the first time it goes off, I tell it to snooze, and then the second time I know I've got to get up. And that works really well for me. I guess it all depends on what is going to work for you, isn't it?

[00:06:40.780] - Taylor
Yeah, I think having to actually physically do something I think helps because I need to figure out, this is part of the other thing, is figure out what I want to do in the time when I wake up. If I have a PT session on Wednesday and I didn't have a PT until 7:45, I still got up at 5:00, or I woke up at 5:00, but then I was just sitting in bed. I did some meditation and stuff, but then I ended up falling back asleep. So I need to find something that I can actually be doing and be productive and...

[00:07:13.850] - Gordon
Maybe do your reading at that time, if you continue doing that from your 75-day challenge.

[00:07:18.400] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:07:18.750] - Gordon
That might be a good thing to do, get the brain working in the morning.

[00:07:22.030] - Taylor
So, yeah. I mean, it worked getting me up and awake, but then because I didn't have anything to do for two hours, I started falling back asleep. So it's something that I think I just need to continue working on and keep improving and hopefully get to a point where I'm happy with my routine and it works for me.

[00:07:40.230] - Gordon
But this is an app that's on iOS. Do you know if it's available for Android as well?

[00:07:45.270] - Taylor
I haven't looked.

[00:07:47.080] - Gordon
Okay, we'll put a link to the iOS version in the show notes, and you can go and have a look at that. I think there's a free version and then there's some extra features if you want for a little subscription. The topic that I want to talk about today is that we are coming up to the middle of February, slowly, but we're getting there, and I am off to Blackpool. Now, if you are a regular listener to this every year, you'll know I go to Blackpool in February, and so do about four and a half, five thousand other magicians. We all meet up in the Winter Gardens, which is pretty much the only place big enough in the UK that will hold that number of people. And we have lectures, we have shows, we have people who are creating magic. We can sit down, we can chat to them. There's lots of people that I know that I don't see any time other than Blackpool because of where they live in another country or nowhere near me. And it's something that I do for several reasons. It's the biggest magic convention in the world, and that's always a good thing to be there for.

[00:09:04.570] - Gordon
Normally, they have a children's entertainer or family entertainer competition, which I entered a few years ago and won. So that's a really nice thing to watch. They've got a champions show this year, so they're not doing a competition. And I've got a lot of friends who are going. So we're going to hang out and spend a bit of time chatting and putting the world to rights, I'm sure. Probably having a drink here and there. I've got a friend of mine, Marc, who has been on this channel before, and he's coming over from America. He's coming to Blackpool this year. Normally, we go to Las Vegas after because he's got a convention that he's been working on. But he doesn't need to do that this year because he managed to sell the company last year. So this year he gets to come to Blackpool, which is lovely. So why do I mention this? Well, it's something that I think is really important in your business to make sure you keep up with what's going on, trends, advancements, looking to see what's happening in your industry. And for me, the Blackpool Magic Convention is one of the places that I go.

[00:10:23.220] - Gordon
There's another one that I go to called Trix in the Stix, or it's now called Trix because it's moved its venue and it's no longer in the middle of nowhere. And that's just for children's and family entertainers. So that's a very different type of convention, but it's one that I go to as well, again, to make sure I'm keeping up with trends and seeing what others are doing and my contemporaries within the business and the industry. And we are later this year going to WordCamp, which is the Convention for WordPress professionals, people who work with WordPress and make a living from it. And the reason we go there is for exactly the same reason as I go to Blackpool, to make new contacts, to meet people you know, to spend time with them, to chat with them, to talk over things that you want to talk over, basically, things that are going to help your business. And the way I look at it is, if I get just a few things that are going to make a difference to my business, then it's well worthwhile going. And I normally come away with more than a few things.

[00:11:31.130] - Gordon
It gets your brain going, especially in a creative industry like magic. You come out with lots of ideas, having seen people talk about what they're experts at, and listening to what they have to say, and giving you different ways to think about things that maybe you already do and how to do it slightly differently; and the reasons why it might be better to do it that way. And so these are comparatively cheap, if you consider that this is what I do for a living, it's a business expense for me. Yes, there's travel. Yes, there's overnight stays in a hotel. Yes, there's convention tickets, and it's a chunk of time as well. But it's all worthwhile if you come away with just a few things that can just make your business better than it is at the moment. Do you find that when you go to your WordCamp before I came, because you went before me, and any other conventions like that, do you find them worthwhile?

[00:12:38.120] - Taylor
Yeah, it's actually good fun because I mean, a lot of my friends live around the world and so WordCamp is the biggest WordPress conference in the world. So they have them all around the world. They have continent versions. So they have America, they have Europe, they have Asia. But then they also have country and city-based ones as well, which are run locally. And it's great to meet people that you speak to every day, but also meet people that you have known of but never met. And obviously you can make connections there. If you're in the product space, then it's good to make connections with other people who own products and things because you never know what kind of connections you can make and synergy between creating integrations with other people's products and being able to promote each other. And yes, it's a really nice way to just hang out with people who have a similar interest or common interest and just chat all day.

[00:13:48.710] - Gordon
And that's the reason that we won't be having an episode next week, because I am going to be in Blackpool. And the reason they do it in February is because no one else goes to Blackpool. It's too cold. Too dark. But it's fine for magicians because we spend most of the time either in the Convention Centre area, which is the Winter Gardens, or the theatre, which is a four and a half thousand seat theatre, or at one of the hotels in the bar. That's where we spend all our time. So we're not there to see the sights. We're not there to go to the Pleasure Beach. So it doesn't matter what time of year it is for us. And the week after, I'm actually going to be away for Monday to Friday, so we're not going to be able to have an episode then because I won't be here. But as long as everything goes well, we shall have one in three weeks time. So you get two weeks off.

[00:14:46.710] - Gordon
One last thing I want to say, which has got nothing to do with this, but is something that someone spoke to me about our Facebook group and why we weren't streaming our video there anymore. And it's because of Meta changing their rules and regulations and not allowing streaming to be done on a group anymore. So only today, I have set up a new Facebook page with the same name, "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." And we're going to try and move everyone who's interested in our streams or would like to discuss things that we've talked about to that page because as far as I can see, you can stream to a page, which means that we will then be able to start putting all of our episodes onto Facebook again. The group will not be closed down, although after a period of time, I will stop people from joining it and just leave it public so that we have the prior episodes available. What's really, really daft, and I don't understand the reason for it, is you can't start streaming to a Facebook page until it's been running for 60 days or more. So it's going to be a couple of months before we get this up and running due to this particular rule. Nothing I can do about that. But I've put it in the diary so I don't forget. And when it gets done and it's up and running, I will let you know. Anything else you want to say about anything, Taylor?

[00:16:24.450] - Taylor
I don't think so.

[00:16:25.570] - Gordon
Perfect. Well, that is us done for this week. Thank you for joining us. As always, you can like, share and subscribe on YouTube. Please make sure you let anybody know about our channel if you think it will be of use to them.

[00:16:38.950] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.

[00:16:43.540] - Gordon
And we are, of course, on all the major podcast platforms if you would prefer to listen to us while you're out walking the dog or working on something or just in the car. We'll be back with you in three weeks time. Until then, my name is Gordon and I am from Drayson Design.

[00:17:01.270] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:17:04.030] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:17:04.080] - Taylor
Bye.

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