[00:00:00.00] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.14] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.00] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.29] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.27] - 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 for joining us.

[00:00:22.20] - Taylor
Welcome back.

[00:00:23.11] - Gordon
It's been a busy week. We're getting to busy season. Is it busy for you at the moment?

[00:00:30.00] - Taylor
Yeah, I've got projects I'm trying to get finished before Christmas and the new year, so.

[00:00:34.24] - Gordon
Fantastic. So let's just get straight into it. We had the budget during this week, which is definitely going to be affecting our businesses. But until we've had time to sit and look into it further, it doesn't really... We're not sure exactly what it's going to do with our businesses. So we'll come back to that maybe next week when we've had time to look at it properly. So do you want to go first or shall I?

[00:01:06.12] - Taylor
You can go first this week.

[00:01:07.23] - Gordon
Okay, so my topic today is about managing expectations. Now, we've spoken about this before, but this is slightly different. I'm having a really bad experience with a delivery company called Yodel. They are just terrible. I have a package that is on its way to me. It's some filament for my 3D printer. I'm waiting for it because it's a particular type of filament that I need, and I've got a print that I'm waiting to do with it. And the estimated date for delivery is tomorrow. However, yesterday, I got a notification telling me that they were going to deliver between 8pm and 10pm. And I thought, "Oh, that's great. Two days early. Wonderful." So I made sure I was in for 8pm to 10pm, and I waited and I waited and there's a tracking page. I went to have a look at the tracking page, and the delivery driver was being shown as being in North London. And I was looking at the time going, "well, we've got another 10 minutes to go. There's no way he's going to get to me from North London." So I spoke to WebChat and they were going, "Yes, we don't know why, but it's not going to be delivered today.

[00:02:25.04] - Gordon
It will be delivered tomorrow instead." Being today. And it's like, "Right. Well, that's not great, is it? You set my expectations, made sure that I was going to be in, and then just didn't even bother to make an attempted delivery." It's not like they tried to deliver, I wasn't there, and then they went elsewhere. They didn't even attempt a delivery. So today I got another email telling me that my delivery was going to be between 1:25 and 3:25 in the afternoon. I thought, "Right, okay, well, I'll make sure I'm in." So I stayed in, made sure I didn't plan anything or get meetings for that time slot because I didn't want to have to, halfway through a meeting, go and answer the front door. And I waited and I looked on the map and he was about a mile away from me. I thought, "oh, that's great. That's really good." And then he or she went a little bit further north and then a little bit further north again. And about an hour and a half into my time slot, they were the other side of Croydon, which for me is about half an hour.

[00:03:35.16] - Gordon
And I thought, "well, there's no way they're going to make it back in time." So I spoke to a web chat again and they said, "Yeah, well, we don't know. You have to wait until the end of the time slot." And I said, "Well, there's no chance that they're going to get here. I couldn't even do that journey without stopping." And this is the second day now that they've given me a time slot. And they said, "well, your estimated date is tomorrow." And I kept saying to them, "well, an estimated date is fine, but once you get a confirmed time slot, that then takes over. You've got a confirmed time slot. It's no longer estimated." And they kept saying, "Yeah, well, please wait until the end of tomorrow. And if you still don't have it, let us know." And it's like, no, I'm not happy with this because I've now had two days where I've rearranged my schedule to make sure I'm in. And two days, they didn't even attempt a delivery. So I called them up and recorded my call, told them I was recording it, went through their automated system, eventually, spoke to someone and they said, "well, we can't do anything. We have to talk to the depot." And I said, "Okay, well, I'll wait while you talk to the depot then." And they hung up on me. And then when I called back, it just instantly hung up. It's like they blocked my number or something. So what I'm getting from that, I'm hoping that it'll arrive tomorrow, but I'm not holding my breath. And I shall be reporting back to the company I purchased this from to let them know that if they continue to use this company, I shall not be ordering through them again because I am not going through all this hassle again. It's just that's two days worth of waiting in, two days of disappointments. And now I've got to do the same again tomorrow at some point because I don't know what the delivery time is going to be until mid-morning. So it's just terrible. So as far as managing expectations go, I had the delivery slots. I waited in for them. They didn't happen. I spoke to customer services. They had no powers to do anything. They didn't say, "We're really sorry. We'll make sure we get it out on the first run in the morning so that it gets to you as soon as possible."

[00:05:42.06] - Gordon
Nothing like that. It's, "yeah, your estimated date is tomorrow, so we can't do anything till then." And it's like, "no, sorry, you've given me two time slots now." And I was really upset. I was fuming. In fact, I planned my days so that when the items arrived, I had time to print what I needed to print. And then that didn't happen. So as far as managing expectations go, it has a knock-on effect. So as I'm the person who is receiving the expectation and it not being met, I can see from the customer's point of view how frustrating and annoying it can be. And so I'm looking at this and using it as a learning thing for me, where I'm making sure that none of the expectations that I give to my customers are falling short. And I've found one place where they are, and that is my automated emails, where I ask people if they'd like to renew or not, and they come back to me, and I haven't had a chance to then renew it before the chaser email goes out, which is again automated, saying, "Would you like to renew this?" And they're getting frustrated because they've already replied.

[00:07:00.26] - Gordon
And so that is something I need to make sure doesn't happen, because that's frustrating my customers. And it's due to this process that I found this out. So have a think about your processes and your business. Look at it from your customers' point of view. Are there any expectations that you are setting that aren't then going to be met? People don't mind if things go wrong. If the company had contacted me and said, "Look, really sorry, the driver's having a really tough time with the traffic and so on. They're just not going to be able to make it today, but we'll make sure it comes to you tomorrow." I would have been fine with that, but I didn't get that. In fact, I've had absolutely no official communication from the company to tell me that the time slots aren't going to be met. So that's now two time slots with two missed deliveries, not failed deliveries. They're both missed. And it's really frustrating. So there we go. That's what I've learnt from it.

[00:08:04.25] - Taylor
I had a similar experience earlier in the week where I had a package from Amazon that was being delivered, and I was in all day, and I didn't get any notification to say that they'd attempted to deliver. I don't even think they had. I saw them come into the car park, but I had no notification. I had no message. They didn't even try to message to say, "look, I can't get through the barrier" or whatever. And so I spoke to Amazon, and they did a fantastic job. They said, "We're really sorry that you didn't get your package. We will attempt to redeliver your package by 10pm." So my original time was about one o'clock in the afternoon. And so they said, "Look, we'll try and get it rescheduled when it comes back to the depot. We'll get it sent out again, and hopefully you'll get it delivered by 10pm." They then gave me a £5 gift card voucher to say sorry for the inconvenience because we had said you would get it at this time. I also paid extra for getting it delivered on that day. So it was the day after that I paid.

[00:09:18.21] - Taylor
And so, yeah, they did everything they could. I had somebody from their team actually call me to say, "We're really sorry about this. We've made some notes on your account so that when delivery drivers are coming to deliver to you, they know exactly where to leave it." Because I live in a flat there's a barrier, there's a door, and then there's also the actual flat door itself to get to. So they're given instructions on how to get through the barriers, where to actually put it if I'm not in or whatever. So it doesn't happen next time. And I thought that was a really really nice way of handling it. They just held their hands up. They realised it was the cost of doing business, and not every delivery driver is going to be as good as the next one, but just rectified it, and I was happy.

[00:10:06.26] - Gordon
And in the future, if I had the choice of choosing to buy from Company A that are going to use Yodel to deliver, or Company B that's going to choose a different company that I never have a problem with, like DPD or Amazon, even if the second company is a little bit more expensive, guess which one I'm going to choose? I'm going to choose the one that's going to cause me the least amount of hassle. And so I'm not going to go with the one that's going to mess me about because the delivery company is rubbish. If you've had any problems with Yodel or EVRi, they're the other ones, EVRi, they're the other ones that are potentially the problematic deliverers. I think it's because they're the cheaper ones, but that doesn't excuse bad service. But if you've had any problems with them, let us know. Leave a comment on YouTube. We'd love to see what other experiences everyone else has had. What would you like to talk about today?

[00:11:08.01] - Taylor
So I wanted to talk about Quick Capture. So quick capture is something that is part of the Notion, Ultimate Brain, by Thomas Frank, and I think I've spoken about it before. But the idea and the concept is relatively the same and can be applied to any tool or system. But the idea is that having a place where you can write down notes and to-dos and tasks and any ideas that you get in a single place that you can put them down. And then when you are at your desk or when you have time to actually go through them, tag them with whatever project it's part of, or actually move them to the correct spot and flesh out the actual task or whatever, is really, really important. Something that I found when I wasn't using something like this was that I would always have these ideas or tasks of like, "I need to do that for a client," or "I need to do that when I get home," especially now that I've got a flat, "I need to do the washing" or whatever. And it's very easy in the moment to just go, "Okay, I've got to do that later," and then forget when later comes.

[00:12:20.25] - Taylor
So what it allows me to do is I have on my home screen a button that says Quick Capture, and I can very quickly and easily add a new task. It goes into what's called an inbox, which is basically just a dumping ground for capturing everything and just a handle all essentially. And I know that if I can go into Notion on the computer, anything that hasn't been assigned a project or a person or an area will show up there. So I know, "okay, I need to deal with this." Whether that is doing the task then and there or whether it's actually scheduling it in, putting a date on it, putting it in the right location, and making sure that it's going to be there for when I need to do the task. But at least I have a place to put it and then get it out of my head and I don't forget. And I think it's something really important. Some people use notebooks and things like that. Some people use email, but it needs to be something that can't be missed, can't be grouped with everything else, because it has to be something that is separate and essentially isolated from everything else, because you need to be able to see, "okay, these need dealing with and haven't been dealt with before." Do you do anything like that?

[00:13:31.02] - Gordon
Yeah, so I have lots of different to-do type systems. I've got Todoist, which is an application which is very good. I've also got one called Blitzit, I think it's called, which is a new one. And they're great, but I think for me, it works better if I write them down and cross them off manually. So either getting a bit of paper and writing it on the paper and putting it right in front of my computer so I can look at it and go, "Right, that needs doing." And it reminds me that it needs doing. Something I saw 3D printing-wise just yesterday, in fact, is a really cool system to make a grid as big as you need it to be that you screw into the wall, it's got tracks on it, and you can then get these little rectangular blocks. They're just maybe a few millimetres thick. So they're little placards, if you like, that have got cellotape over the top of them, and you can dry wipe write on it, whatever you need to write on. And then you've got different columns for "needs to be done now" or "to do with the house" or whatever you want.

[00:14:50.10] - Gordon
And you just drop them in and they come down. And the only way you can get them off is by doing them. And it's a triangular shape on the inside. So to take them out, you just press on one side, which then pops it out. You can wipe it clean, put it back into the tray ready to write the next one. And I thought that was a really, really nice idea. And the sort of thing that you would look at and go, "Oh yeah, I need to do that." And it would get done because you don't want to see it on that board. You want to get rid of it from that board.

[00:15:24.06] - Taylor
So I mean, a lot of the part of the capturing is more about when you're out and about, when you don't have that board in front of you, you don't have your computer in front of you. So that, yeah, you can do it on the go.

[00:15:34.12] - Gordon
Yeah, that is a downside to.

[00:15:35.23] - Taylor
That was more a-

[00:15:36.21] - Gordon
To a physical system.

[00:15:37.19] - Taylor
Do you have a system that when you're out and about and you go, "Oh, I need to do that," is how do you remind yourself?

[00:15:43.23] - Gordon
Well, again, Todoist or Blitzit both have it. There's a system that sometimes works with Siri on the iPhone, so you can ask it to remind you to do something when you get to a GPS location, like home, for example. And I find that that works some of the time. It's not always right. If it happened every time, I think I'd probably use it a lot more, but it doesn't, and that's the problem. So, yeah, as you get older, your memory starts to go, you forget things, or if you just get really busy, you forget things. So it's really important to have some sort of system. And yeah, I've tried lots, and I don't really have a full safe system I'm in place at the moment, but I managed to get by most of the time. I do put it in the diary sometimes, or I do message myself. That's the other way of doing it, sending myself a text message so that I see it as unread, and then I'll go into it when I get back to the office and go, "Oh, yes, must do that." And then I can put it on my whatever system.

[00:16:50.28] - Gordon
That's a nice way of doing it. But yeah, very good. Anything else you want to say about that?

[00:16:56.13] - Taylor
Don't think so.

[00:16:56.27] - Gordon
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us. As always, please leave comments, like, share, and subscribe on YouTube.

[00:17:04.00] - 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.

[00:17:10.13] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us, then we are on all the major podcast platforms and also on your smart speaker. Just say, "Listen to This Week With Taylor and Gordon," and it will find it for you.

[00:17:24.17] - Taylor
Hopefully.

[00:17:25.13] - Gordon
Hopefully. Well, no, it should. Every time so far. Yeah, whenever I've tried it, it's found it. If you have problems, let us know, and we'll look and see what we can do to fix that. We'll be back with you next week at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:17:42.10] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:17:44.21] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:17:45.06] - Taylor
Bye.

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