[00:00:00.00] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.07] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:09.25] - Gordon
My name is Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:12.07] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:14.05] - 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. Here we are in 2026. This is our first episode of the year, and you should have seen our new colour if you're on the website or on YouTube. And even if you're not, on the podcast the colour should be changed as well. What do you think? Do you like it? It's quite bold, isn't it?

[00:00:44.27] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:00:46.01] - Gordon
It's funny because we've got to the point now where the main colours have been used, and now we're using different shades or different versions of the colours we've already used, which is weird because we're only on season seven, and you would have thought there was more colours than that. But we'll see what happens next year. So let's just get into it straight away. How's your week been, first of all?

[00:01:14.04] - Taylor
It's been good. It's been tiring and long.

[00:01:16.11] - Gordon
Yeah, same for me, actually. That's the reason why we didn't have an episode last week, and I'll be getting into that in a moment. Would you like to go first or shall I?

[00:01:26.26] - Taylor
You can go first this week.

[00:01:28.14] - Gordon
So this week is Panto Week. Oh, yes, it is! So I have been at Panto all week, as well as most of last week, and that has definitely been affecting my business. It's stopped me doing shows at the weekends because we're doing shows at the weekends. We've got another two tomorrow, which is then when we finish. And also it takes a lot of time and effort and energy to do pantomime shows. So that has definitely been affecting my business. However, I have been very busy with filming the shows, and I've been taking some photos, which I've been giving the cast to use and to look at. The videos, though, require a little bit more time and effort and equipment. So I've been using all of my camera stuff and my audio recording equipment. And the next job is to now edit it all up. And then once it's all edited, I can offer it for people to purchase. Now, the reason I do that is because it's a lot of effort, a lot of equipment, a lot of time, and I just can't do it for free. If I was going to be doing it for free, I just wouldn't do it.

[00:02:55.21] - Gordon
And I think a lot of people quite like getting them, and it's nice to have a record of the show. So that's why I charge people for them. And we have a system that we put in place a couple of years ago now for people to purchase DVDs and/or streams. And so that is something I need to set up for this new show. Not something I've done just yet, but I need to do that so that people can order them and buy them and pay for them. And it's nice to see the orders coming in while I'm editing it, because you can see what sort of money you're getting. And to be honest, it doesn't cover the time that it takes to do, or the materials. Because when you're making DVDs, you've got all the DVD media, you've got the time to burn the DVDs, you've got the cases, you've got all the print that goes onto it. There's a lot of stuff that you need to buy to be able to offer this product. So it doesn't really cover. It doesn't really give me a profit. Let's go with that. It covers the time-ish, but I could be doing more different work, and that would earn me more money.

[00:04:17.19] - Gordon
But I do it mainly because I want to keep a copy of it, because it's something that I was in. And it's quite nice to look back over several years and see videos of shows that I've been in and remind myself what it was like. And it brings back all those memories of doing the show. Because even though it's a lot of time and effort to do the show, it is very rewarding and it's a lot of fun and it's very tiring. You've actually been up helping with the show, haven't you?

[00:04:50.16] - Taylor
Yeah, I've been working backstage, moving all the scenery.

[00:04:53.26] - Gordon
That's something you do because you enjoy it, don't you? I mean, you don't have to do it. It's not something that you do for your work. It's something that you give your time freely for because it's good fun, isn't it?

[00:05:05.07] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:05:05.21] - Gordon
It's nice to be part of something. Plus, Taylor is third generation for this pantomime, so my mum was in it before me. She was a dancer in the shows. My aunt, who is my mum's sister, she was in it as well. She's still involved. She does the prompting for the shows. So if anyone forgets their words, she will tell them what they're supposed to be saying. And now I'm doing it, and now Taylor is involved in the show as well. And it's a nice little community because you do it once a year, and everyone knows what they're doing. They come in, they do what they're supposed to do. And there's no training. I guess there is if there's new people to explain what needs to be done.

[00:05:53.12] - Gordon
But it's like you've just fallen back into it, isn't it?

[00:05:57.24] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:05:58.13] - Gordon
It happened last month and you're coming back to it. But it's only once a year that we actually do this. And everyone has their little role that they do. And most times people take on the same roles again and again. And I've taken on a few roles with this. I do the website, I do the printed publicity, I do the programmes, the flyers. There weren't any posters this year. The photography is done by my dad and myself, and then the videoing is done by my dad with my equipment, and I edit it. So it's quite a lot of time and energy that we put into it. But it is very, very worthwhile because it's lovely to see all the smiles on the faces of the audience. And we do 10 shows, so that's why it's quite tiring, and that's why I might look like I've got some makeup on still because it's very difficult to get off every now and then. So, I was playing Widow Twanky this year in Aladdin. So I was the dame and got made up with wigs and everything. You were watching it from the sidelines. What do you think of it?

[00:07:05.00] - Taylor
Yeah, it's good.

[00:07:05.27] - Gordon
There we go. See, someone who sees it every day and he still thinks it's good. So, that is my week. That's how it's gone. I have managed to do some work that isn't pantomime or show-based, but not as much as I normally do. So that has definitely been affecting my business, but it's something I've chosen to do, so I don't have a problem with it. That's me. What would you like to talk about, Taylor?

[00:07:32.22] - Taylor
So as I am coming into 2026, I was looking at trying to fix a problem that I found really annoying that wasn't annoying enough that I wanted to do anything about it, but annoying enough that I wanted to do something about it. So for the past year, I have had a couple of contracts where I have to basically log my time to show where I've been spending my time and what I've been working on. I've been using a tool called Toggl, and it works. It's fine. You start a Timer, you stop a Timer, you put the company that it's for. But Toggl itself has so much more that it offers that it becomes a bit cumbersome, a bit clunky because there are so many extra buttons, so many extra features, so many extra settings that are not relevant to me because all I really want to do is just start and stop a Timer and just keep a log of that. Toggl allows you to do much more than that, do project management, be able to split it down into much finer, granular detail, which I just don't need. So, I just left it and just used it because all my other time entries were in there.

[00:08:50.07] - Taylor
However, over the holidays, I was looking at other solutions, and there's lots of them out there. But again, a lot of them have more than is required. They have project management features, they have team features, they have so many other features that are nice, but just not necessary for what I wanted to do. I came across an app called TallyHo, and it was built by a guy, I believe in Australia, maybe. He was a solo freelancer, had clients that he obviously contracted for, needed to track the hours. He basically built the app himself, the app that he wanted. And it pretty much ticked all the boxes that I wanted. It allows you to start and stop a Timer, pretty much. You put the project that it's attached to and the client that it's attached to. You can put in your hourly rate for each client, and it will actually show you how much you earned for each task that you did. And it has just a very clean interface. It only has tasks, projects, which are just the projects that you have for clients, and then insights and settings. It has nothing else. And it's a really minimal but nice tool that I can use to keep track of all my time entries.

[00:10:13.23] - Gordon
And this is important, isn't it? Because you have several contracts where you do a set number of hours per month.

[00:10:21.04] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:10:21.20] - Gordon
Do you write down with that time slot what you did during that time slot?

[00:10:28.04] - Taylor
Yeah, so I either use GitHub or Jira. I basically just put the task or the ticket ID that I was using or working on. Or if I was doing admin, I'll just put admin. But it just allows me to just put the ticket. I don't have to write specifically what I was doing. I just say which ticket I was working on.

[00:10:47.08] - Gordon
And is this for the client or is it for you so that you know how much time you've got left to do that month, for example?

[00:10:54.22] - Taylor
It's a bit of both. So it's for the client so they can see where the time is being spent, but also for me to be able to keep track of how many hours I have left for that client that month or that week.

[00:11:07.17] - Gordon
Okay, that's quite good. So we'll put a link to that in the show notes. If that's something that you might be looking for, a very simple time tracker, then go and have a look at TallyHo. Is that right?

[00:11:20.09] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:11:21.15] - Gordon
Now, just very quickly, you quite often find that with software that you use, there's maybe a little feature that you're looking for or you would like to have. And it all depends on whether the developer is open to ideas or not, or if they're a big developer, quite often they're not, or they'll put something on the roadmap and let others decide whether they do it or not. Have you had any experience with that with this app?

[00:11:49.29] - Taylor
Yeah. I reached out to... I sent him a really long email via his contact form saying, "These are a couple of things that I would like to see." Because some of my clients I bill in dollars, some of them I bill in pounds. It'd be quite nice to be able to have different currencies for different clients. I know that's probably more of a headache to implement than it's worth, but it's just one of those, if it could be, that would be cool. But there was a couple of other features that I asked and also told him that there was some weird text that was white on white. He appreciated me sharing it and he said they had a couple of other people share the issues. I actually ended up figuring out what the issue was, and it was just due to the user's browser's light or dark mode. Because of the setup he was using, some of the colours were being overridden to be light mode, or sorry, dark mode, so they were being white text, but the app only had one colour, which was a light mode. And so I shared that and said, "Look, I think I found the issue."

[00:13:04.18] - Taylor
He said, "Thank you very much," and then came back to me about a couple of days later saying, "I've fixed the issue." Then the other one was actually the currency is you were able to set the currency that you wanted to bill in, and the rest of the project just had hard-coded dollar signs. I said to him, "It's cool that we can set the currency, but then you don't ever use the currency that I've set anywhere else in the app." And again, he came back and said, "That's all fixed." So waiting to hear back on some of the features that I would like, but he was very responsive and very thankful for the bugs that I reported to him and helped him with.

[00:13:46.13] - Gordon
And it's nice, isn't it? As a developer, to get that feedback from people who are actually using your service. And if there's something that you can do which isn't going to take a great deal of time, you might as well do it because someone else might want that feature, and therefore you've just added to the reason someone would choose your product over something else.

[00:14:08.20] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:14:09.16] - Gordon
Very good. Anything else you want to say about anything today?

[00:14:12.20] - Taylor
I don't think so.

[00:14:13.23] - Gordon
Well, thank you for joining us, and thank you for coming back, and welcome to Season 7. We give our seasons a year, so it's January through to December, and then we start the next season. We just figured that was the easiest way of doing it, really. We've got a few things that have been outstanding on the website that we've wanted to do, and so maybe this will be the year that we do it. Let us know if you use the website, because if you use the website, just like the developer, we're going to be more wanting to get it fixed up and sorted if people are using it. If no one uses it, well, it doesn't really matter, does it? So let us know. That would be lovely. That's all I want to say today. So thank you for joining us. As always, you can like, share, and subscribe on YouTube.

[00:15:11.02] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.

[00:15:16.12] - Gordon
If you would prefer to listen to us, we're on all the major podcast platforms. Just search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." Just one last thing and just something to remind you about on the website, we do have the written out transcripts of everything that we say, and that is put on about a week or so after the episode goes out because it takes a bit of time to do. It's done by AI, but then checked by our TWW guru, I guess. She's a wordsmith. So thank you to Hayley for doing that continually for the last six seasons and now into the seventh. We will be back with you next week on Friday without pantomime. So until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:16:10.13] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:16:12.28] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:16:13.16] - Taylor
Bye.

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