[00:00:00.00] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.25] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.10] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:12.08] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:14.01] - 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.

[00:00:24.12] - Taylor
Welcome back.

[00:00:25.00] - Gordon
How's your week been?

[00:00:26.04] - Taylor
It's been busy.

[00:00:26.29] - Gordon
Yeah. Well, it's always busy. It's a good thing to be.

[00:00:29.19] - Taylor
Extra busy.

[00:00:30.11] - Gordon
Yeah. So do you want to go first today or shall I?

[00:00:32.27] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.

[00:00:33.27] - Gordon
Off you go.

[00:00:34.17] - Taylor
So last weekend, I built an app that came out of something that my friend Kyle did with a pen and paper.

[00:00:48.08] - Gordon
Okay.

[00:00:49.03] - Taylor
So he started writing down in a notebook on his desk, what makes today a success. And so he would write down three things of "If I got these three things done, it's been a successful day." Because it's very easy to get caught up in emails, get distracted, and having clients email you, call you, and what you actually planned and set out to do didn't actually get done. And you look back and go, "Well, I haven't done anything." But if you actually say, "Okay, well, this is what I would class as a successful day," even though you haven't got everything done, it still makes you feel like you're doing making progress. And you're also more proactive because you're actually saying, "Well, these are the things that are going to move the needle and make it successful rather than just send one email that's not that important." So I came up with a little app called MyThreeTasks, and the idea is that it gamifies productivity. And the idea is that every day you get an email to say, "log your three tasks for the day that will make it a success." And you then, once you do your task, you can check it off.

[00:01:58.22] - Taylor
Once you do your second task, you check that off. And once you've done all three, you get what's called a perfect day. And the idea is that you can create groups and have your friends in a group. And it adds a bit of a fun, a bit of competition. And you can actually get real time, basically, notifications of when somebody completes a task, when somebody completes all their tasks. And it just adds, you get a point for each task. And if you get all three in the day, you get a bonus point because you've had a perfect day where you've actually set out and done all three things that you wanted to. And so then there's leader boards and rankings. So you have a points leader board, but for week, month, day, years, and then also all time. But then you also have weekly, monthly winners, and you can basically just challenge your friends. And it adds a fun to wanting to get your task done because you're sitting there at your desk, you see, "okay, Kyle has ticked off one task" and you're like, "well, I've not done any." And then you can see, "okay, he's now just overtaken me in the leader board because he's got more points than me."

[00:03:08.11] - Taylor
So you're like, "well, I need to get mine done now." And so, yeah, the idea came from Duolingo gamification and the idea of pushing you forward with productivity and having streaks. People love a good streak and they don't want to lose it. However, the-

[00:03:26.09] - Gordon
When you say streak, you don't mean going naked across a football pitch.

[00:03:29.18] - Taylor
No. If you consistently do every single day, you gain a streak. One of the things that when I was building this, and we've got lots of ideas of how to improve it, how to make it more competitive, more fun, is making sure that we don't prioritise and reward people that work crazy hours and work all day, every day, because it's not very good for a work-life balance and having that that balance. So we actually implemented a system where you can select the working days that you work. So some people be Monday to Friday, whereas if you have a full-time job, then you're most likely going to be working Saturday and Sunday. And the idea is that if you don't complete tasks or don't add any tasks on a non-working day, you're not going to get penalised. Because one thing we didn't want to do is have somebody go, "well, if I just work, do one task every single day, I'm going to get more points than somebody who is consistent at getting perfect days Monday to Friday." And so we added that in so that people don't feel guilty and people don't feel like they have to work on a weekend or a day that isn't a day that they actually work.

[00:04:40.06] - Gordon
Yeah, and you don't lose your streak if you don't work on your non-working days.

[00:04:45.04] - Taylor
Exactly. If you work on a non-working day, it will still add to your streak, but you don't get penalised for not.

[00:04:51.02] - Gordon
Which is very good.

[00:04:51.28] - Taylor
And you can be part of multiple groups, so you can see where you rank among basically all your friends across all your groups. But you can also have rankings on a per group as well, which is quite nice. And so the idea would be that in the future, it potentially grows to be something where more people can join. I currently have 10 people, mainly friends, just testing it out while I'm still building it and improving it and adding more features. I have lots of ideas of how to make it more fun and engaging.

[00:05:23.26] - Gordon
So it's currently in a closed beta, so just people that you want to give access to. So, we won't put a link to it in the show notes for the time being. But at the point at which Taylor's decided he's going to let other people start using it, we'll let you know, and then you can join in and invite your friends. What's really clever with this is you have to be, currently anyway, you have to be invited into a group to be able to join. And I think that's a really clever idea because you can grow your userbase slowly, as opposed to just opening the gates and letting anyone register. People come in and are added to a group first, and they get to see how it works and what it's all about. And then they can then choose to create their own group or add new people. And I like that idea. I think that's a really good way of doing it. So you're not going to saturate the app just really quickly, and you can grow just with a little bit of thought behind it, if you see what I mean.

[00:06:33.07] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:06:34.02] - Gordon
Yeah, it's really good. I'm enjoying it. I really like it. It's a good idea. And there's lots of options and features that can be added to make it more fun and more interesting. And maybe linking to Slack or something like that would be quite good. If you're working on Slack and you get a notification, "so and so has done their job," and you say, "oh, right, okay, got to get on with mine." Stop procrastinating, which I think is what this is basically designed to stop, isn't it?

[00:07:04.13] - Taylor
Yeah, the idea is more about being intentional. I think it's very easy to get caught up in doing lots of busy work that actually isn't pushing you forward, moving the needle. And you're a lot more thoughtful about what you're doing. The level of difficulty will depend for everybody. For some people, it's doing a small update to a website. For some people, it's writing an entire article. So the level of difficulty is all different.

[00:07:38.18] - Gordon
It's not dependent on the difficulty, but the amount of time that it's going to take.

[00:07:42.06] - Taylor
Yeah, but it's all dependent on the person and what they believe. So I had one this week where it was follow up with one of my clients that I had a project with and haven't heard from them for two months. And I've been meaning to email them for over a month. But it's one of the things that it wasn't a difficult thing to do, but it's something that I just kept putting off. And it's sometimes the way, especially with things like when you're doing your tax return or any of your accounts, it's ones where you know you need to do them, but they keep getting pushed back. So whereas if you put it as a "this is an important thing I want to get done," you're more likely to do it.

[00:08:17.09] - Gordon
Yeah, agreed. It's very good. We shall, I'm sure, circle back to this and we'll come and find out what's been added and what's new and let you know when it's available for you to have a go. Good. Well done. Anything else you want to say on that?

[00:08:33.15] - Taylor
Don't think so. It's just been good fun to build.

[00:08:35.08] - Gordon
Good. I think my topic this week is just a couple of frustrations that I've had. So the first thing is, I was talking last week about doing the video for the pantomime. Well, that's not finished. And the reason it's not finished is because I had corruption on one of my videos on one of my cameras. And so when I was exporting it, it told me there was a bad frame. And for those who aren't aware, in the UK, there's 25 frames per second. So for every second of video, that is made up of 25 frames. And the reason for that is because of the persistence of vision and how your eyes can see movement and not see... And it looks fluid, basically. And so if there's a frame that won't export or won't render, the only way around it is to either change the video angle to something else or put some more footage in there or delete that frame. So that's what I've been doing, deleting the frame and then exporting. And it says, Oh, there's another frame that's not... And so far, I've been doing this for six days.

[00:09:49.08] - Gordon
Now, I have to export every time I do it because I haven't found an easy way to find the next bad frame without exporting the whole thing. And it's a two hour, well, over two hour video. And I'm currently just over halfway. So with that in mind, I'm doing other things as well, but it's just taking forever. And from what I can see, there's no easy way to do this. I've done some research and there's nothing to show me how to just go through and find all the frames that are causing problems, get rid of them all in one go and then export. And so this has basically put me behind because I normally sort out the videos and release it a week after the panto, which is my norm up to now. And here we are, nearly two weeks after the panto, and it's still not ready to be released. And it's really frustrating, really frustrating. And there's not a lot I can do about it. So I think it's been very frustrating. And my takeaway from this is there's an issue with something in the recording process, and it's unlikely to be the camera because the camera is fine and was fine the following day.

[00:11:07.15] - Gordon
So it's not that. It's either going to be the cable or it's going to be the recorder, which is a box with a screen on it, or it's going to be the hard drive that goes into the box and records it. Now, it's difficult for me to be able to test all of that, but my plan is I have two hard drives, so I'm going to, once I finish this project and deleted the footage because I no longer need it, because I don't want to delete it until I've finished. Otherwise, if I do need it for whatever reason, my backup has gone. And then I'm going to wipe it completely and start recording and see if I get any problems with a particular hard drive. And if that's the case, that's a reasonably easy fix because what I can do is I can replace the hard drive that's in the caddie with an SSD, and that will then hopefully fix the problem, plus give me more capacity. And the reason that's important is because I've got another video project coming up, which is a huge video project. In fact, you're coming along with me because it's so big.

[00:12:17.04] - Gordon
And we are filming, I think it's four days worth of talks and demonstrations at a bubble convention. And there's up to three events happening at the same time. So I've got to figure out basically how I'm going to do all that, which cameras I'm going to use, how I'm going to get my audio. I've got little DJI mics that I'm going to use for the speakers so I can get nice, clear speaking from them. And because they record internally, it means that I don't necessarily need to send it to the camera ,so that's good. I can just put it on them, press record, and I'm done with it. So that's good. But I need to figure out how much four days worth of footage in three rooms, potentially up to three rooms, is going to need. And I'm going to have to have a system so that I can dump it down onto a computer and offload it onto a hard drive to then clear the drives and the SSDs so I can go again the following day, and maybe even have to do it during the day and make sure I've got enough storage to allow me to do it all.

[00:13:33.20] - Gordon
So this is something that's quite important, and it's something I need to fix and find the issue with urgently. So as soon as I finish the project I'm on, then I can do that, and I can't do that until I finish the project. The other frustrating thing I found this week was I've got a lifetime deal with a company called Adilo, A-D-I-L-O, and they offer video storage, and you can then stream it to various websites, and it's got protection on it to stop people from just downloading it, etc etc. And it's been very good. In fact, it was good enough that I decided to close my Vimeo account, which was an annual subscription, and move everything over to Adilo. And I've currently got just over 500 gigabytes worth of video that I had to move across, which is a huge amount of video. And that took an awfully long time. Even on a place that had really fast internet, still took me a long time. And Adilo have sent emails out to their lifetime customers saying, just to let you know, "you have to go subscription now. Your lifetime deal is now a legacy account.

[00:14:52.16] - Gordon
We're going to close the legacy account. And if you want to continue using the services and keep your videos, then you need to pay us a monthly subscription." And it's like, "what!?" And this is causing me a lot of stress because I've moved everything over. They can't do this legally because they signed a contract to say that they would sell lifetime accounts, and lifetime, as it sounds, is for the lifetime of the product. And they're not closing the product. They have no plans to close the product because they've got too many customers on there already. And if they close a product, their business will be gone because even if they closed it and reopened it with a different name, they would still lose all their customers. They would go elsewhere. So they can't do that. And therefore, they are illegally trying to get all of the people who've purchased and paid for a lifetime account to now pay them more money to keep access to their accounts. And I had a quick look at the prices, and the prices for their subscription is more than Vimeo. And with Vimeo, you get a higher bandwidth and more storage, etc etc.

[00:16:10.16] - Gordon
And so I've been speaking with AppSumo by email to say, "what's going on?" And they're saying "we're still dealing with it. It's a legal thing. We have to do it as we can and wait for replies and so forth. We'll let you know once we have a resolution." And my Adilo account is saying I've got 13 days before they're going to close my account. So I'm in a bit of a situation, really. Now, I don't think they'll delete my videos. I think that would be a really bad business move for them. So if they do close my account, then they're going to have to let me have access to the files so I can download them. And then I'm going to have to move them all across to Vimeo again, the opposite way around to what I did before, which is a huge waste of time based on the fact that I just recently moved them all over. And I hope Adilo come to their senses and see that legally, they have an obligation to these customers who purchased a deal with contract that said that they would have access for lifetime and understand that they can't just close it down.

[00:17:24.10] - Gordon
But even if they did, do I then stay with them because they've already tried this once? Are they going to then try and shaft me another way? It's really difficult. So it may be that trust has been lost or will be lost with a lot of customers. I have a feeling that if they do close people's accounts, they'll end up with a huge number of negative reviews all over the internet, which is going to damage their business severely. So I can't really see a win-win for them. They're saying they have to do this to survive, but well, you should have thought about this before you offered lifetime deals, because you can't offer someone a product, have them buy it, and then go, "Oh, actually, we've changed our mind. You can't have that anymore. We're going to take it off you. We're not going to give you any money back, but we're just going to stop allowing you to use the service." It's just not on.

[00:18:24.25] - Taylor
No.

[00:18:25.07] - Gordon
This is one of the risks you have with lifetime deals. They will, and sometimes do, close, and you may not get your money's worth. Other times, you get a huge value from it. And it's a bit of a gamble. And that's why you get the deal you do. You pay a certain amount of money, you get certain service, but you don't know how long you're going to get that for. So, yeah, that is one of the upsides and one of the downsides to running lifetime deal software. That's pretty much everything I would like to say today. Anything else you want to add?

[00:19:01.01] - Taylor
Not from me.

[00:19:01.29] - Gordon
Well, thank you so much for joining us. As always, if you're on YouTube, please like, share, and subscribe.

[00:19:08.19] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.

[00:19:13.11] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us on the train, in the car, on a dog walk, wherever you happen to be, then we are on all the major podcast platforms. Just do a search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," and we're also on your smart speaker as well. We'll be back with you next week on Friday at 1pm. Until then, my name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:19:36.19] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:19:39.01] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:19:39.14] - Taylor
Bye.

This Week's Topics

Show Notes