[00:00:09.03] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.18] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.06] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:12.02] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.24] - 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 7 days. And thank you very much for joining us. I just noticed there's a bit of a microphone here if it looks a bit weird on the video. That's what it is. Right. Let's get straight into our episode. Any interesting things happen to you this week?

[00:00:38.08] - Taylor
No.

[00:00:39.04] - Gordon
Nothing interesting happened? Okay. I had lots of interesting things happen. The most important, or not the most important, the one that affected my business the most is the fact that my internet went down. You remember that internet I had installed about 2 weeks ago? Yeah. Well, it went down.

[00:00:55.04] - Taylor
That's not good.

[00:00:56.04] - Gordon
No, not at all. It went down on Thursday night, or Friday morning, in fact, about 2 o'clock in the morning. And when you call them up on Friday morning, first thing, they say, "oh yeah, no, they'll look at it within 2 days." And that's 2 working days, not 2 days. So they didn't include the day that I used to tell them there was a problem. And then we had Saturday and Sunday. And then we had Monday, Tuesday. And I called up on Tuesday in the morning to say, you know, just checking that they are coming. And they said, "oh yeah, no, the fault's inside your property, not outside as we previously thought. So you're going to need to be in. We'll get an engineer there tomorrow." Which was Wednesday. So the guy turned up on Wednesday and eventually managed to— well, not eventually, he did a very good job. He found a fix and it was down to a botched install.

[00:01:55.22] - Taylor
Not good.

[00:01:56.08] - Gordon
No, not good at all. So yeah. The other downside of it is that I managed to use up all the data on my mobile while I was trying to do things without any internet.

[00:02:08.29]
So everything was down. When you have a smart home, this is something you need to consider, how many cloud items you're using, because I had no access to any of that and that stopped my doorbell from working. It also stopped my telephone from working because my telephone is now through the broadband. So yeah, all in all, it was quite disastrous. So let's get straight into our topics. What would you like to talk about today?

[00:02:39.07] - Taylor
So this week, I want to talk about reflection. So I have kind of been, I've been in a good place with my business, my personal life. And one thing that I wanted to do was ask people that I'm close with and friends with and talk to regularly one thing that they thought I did well, you know, whether it's business related, whether it's personal related, and one thing that I can improve. And I wanted it to be, you know, very honest. You know, I didn't want them to have to worry about hurting my feelings or anything like that. And yeah, I kind of, I asked them earlier in the week and some people kind of got back to me and said, "look, can you give me a bit of time?" Which, you know, I appreciated because it meant they actually want to think about it properly and give me actually good feedback. And I'm trying to take an open mind to the feedback, essentially. I don't want to be defensive. I don't want to be annoyed by it. I just want to acknowledge it and see if it's something I can improve on, but also take it as a way of how people see me.

[00:03:52.29]
You know, when you present yourself, I think it's really important that, you know, you put your best foot forward kind of thing. But sometimes we don't see how we are perceived. You know, we think we are perceived in one way, but other people may actually see it in a different way. You know, what you think you say and what you think you mean could be misinterpreted. And again, that could come down to it being over text. It could come down to the way that you say it, the way that your voice sounds, the kind of tone. There's loads of things that could affect it. And I think it's something that to, yeah, kind of think about and, yeah, I guess reflect on.

[00:04:35.06] - Gordon
Did you ask any family members for this? Because I know I didn't get asked. But did you find that the people who sent you feedback, do you think maybe if they had been given a way to give it anonymously, they might have said something different? And further to that question, do you think it makes a difference as to who said what? So if you know the person that gave you that feedback, does it give you more or less sort of gravity with what they're saying?

[00:05:15.00] - Taylor
I think that the feedback kind of depends on what the feedback is, you know, if it's a specific situation or if it's, you know, a situation you've only been in with one person. A lot of it is how you come across, and you're only going to know that situation if you know who the person is. And again, it helps you understand a bit clearer, who or how you're coming across, and what you thought you came across as, you didn't, because obviously they took it in a different way. So I think there's positives and negatives to both sides to it, both getting it anonymously but also having it from somebody that is, you know who's given it.

[00:06:05.19] - Gordon
And give us one of your positives. What did someone say?

[00:06:08.08] - Taylor
I haven't actually had any feedback because I only did it during the middle of the week, but that's kind of my guess of what the kind of feedback would be. But you know, I can, hopefully, if I've got results by next week, I can give an update on what people said.

[00:06:27.07] - Gordon
It's a very interesting concept. I wonder if— it's a bit like getting feedback from a customer, isn't it? It's like asking for a testimonial from a customer, but these are friends and colleagues. So, yeah, it's very interesting.

[00:06:40.14] - Taylor
It makes it a bit more vulnerable, I think. I think the biggest thing is the, you know, what would you change? What would you improve? And, you know, not limiting it to any specific area. Obviously, you could limit it if you wanted to, if you wanted to just improve your personal relationships or your personal side of your life, but also if you want to only improve the business side or your work life. But I think giving it kind of open free rein. Again, some of the people I've asked are, I've met through business, but I would still class them as good friends. And so it's an interest— it'd be interesting to see what kind of feedback they give, whether it is actually as a personal, like, "as a person, like, this is what I think," or if it's a, you know, "I think you could improve this in your business" or whatever. So yeah, something I was really interested to find out because we, I don't think we get enough feedback, and people sometimes feel that they are going to hurt your feelings, or they don't want conflict, or they don't want to be a downer on the situation.

[00:07:48.26]
But I think it's sometimes good to acknowledge it and just accept it. Like I said, I'm not coming at it as a defensive point. I just want to see what people kind of have to say.

[00:08:00.26] - Gordon
It's quite a scary and brave thing to do because you don't know what the feedback's going to be, the negative feedback, something you're not good at. And the other thing is you've got to make a decision, probably before you get the feedback, as to how you're going to let it affect you. So if it's something that you don't want to spend time, you know, with it festering around in your head for a long time, you just want to deal with it and get on with it, then you've got to make that decision ahead of time. Because very easily, if someone says something negative, you can sort of walk around and get depressed.

[00:08:36.14] - Taylor
And yeah, I think it'd be interesting to see if any of the answers— because I've only asked like a handful, small handful of people, and people that I would say I'm close with and I trust, and I'm, you know, if they have a similar thought, a similar opinion.

[00:08:54.27] - Gordon
To someone else.

[00:08:55.16] - Taylor
Yeah, because that kind of would then suggest a trend to say, you know, that a lot of people think this kind of thing about you. And I also think that regarding whether or not you want to make, you know, make a decision on, you know, doing something about it, I think again it just comes down to, whether or not, you know, like you said, if it's worth investing the time into it. But also understanding that obviously it was enough of a reason for somebody to say it.

[00:09:32.01] - Gordon
And it's only one person's view, or maybe, you know, a couple of people's view if you get the similar feedback from elsewhere.

[00:09:38.06] - Taylor
But I think the personal, you know, the close connection, I think, is the important bit. Because it's very easy for somebody you're not that close with to potentially say something mean because they— but they don't understand, you know, you're— the personal side of your life, you know, where, you know, I have a couple of people I talk to every single day, and they know pretty much everything about what I do, what I get up to. And there's people that I talk to maybe once a year and don't really know anything about me.

[00:10:02.03] - Gordon
Yeah.

[00:10:02.18] - Taylor
And so from their side of things, they may say you might be lazy or whatever, but then they don't understand that, you know, I could be working, you know, loads of hours or, you know, I could be doing really well or whatever it is. They don't know that in, kind of, in depth.

[00:10:18.11] - Gordon
Yeah. It's a very interesting experiment. If you get a chance, maybe we'll hear couple of items of feedback next week.

[00:10:26.12] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:10:26.22] - Gordon
See how it's going. Anything else you want to say on that?

[00:10:29.16] - Taylor
I don't think so.

[00:10:30.13] - Gordon
So my topic this week is about sort of planning for things that don't go right. So one of the things that happened is that when I lost my internet, I didn't really have a backup plan. I sort of did, because I can hotspot from my phone, and I could use that for a little while, but I've got a limited amount of data on my phone, and the other side of that is that I use the data when I'm not on Wi-Fi. So, for example, when I'm in the car and I'm going somewhere, I'm using it for Waze, and if I don't have any data, then I can't go anywhere without the data being able to show me where I need to go. And so I ended up using up all my data and having to purchase like a booster for the month. And sadly, my limit started just a couple of days before - my renewal started a couple of days before my internet went down.

[00:11:37.23]
So I've managed to use up all the internet from this month, whereas if it had happened like a few days before, yeah, I'd used all the internet from my, previous month and then still had the whole of this month's worth left to use. But, it didn't work that way, as always. But it also got me thinking about what would I do if I lost data, or my computer stopped working or whatever. And we've spoken about backups in the past, and there's the 3-2-1 sort of guidelines really for backing up. Do you know what the 3-2-1 is?

[00:12:17.19] - Taylor
I've heard of it.

[00:12:18.28] - Gordon
Ah, okay, right. So I'll go through it. I think we've done this on "This Week With" before, but I'll go through it again. Backing up for anything that's really important needs to be backed up in 3 places. 2 of the places need to be, sorry, 2 of the backups need to be on different media. So that could be cloud and hard drive, for example. And the one is offsite. So you want to keep one backup offsite. That's a 3-2-1 plan. So basically you've got 3 copies of the really important data in different places, one offsite, and 2 on different media.

[00:13:07.20]
And that should then cover you for any sort of normal eventuality. You know, if for whatever reason your computer catches fire and you lose the hard drive in it, well, you've still got 2 other backups.

[00:13:22.19] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:13:23.02] - Gordon
That's the important thing. One of them offsite. You know, I hope you never have a fire, but, you know, if you don't plan for it, then you will lose all this information that could be quite important. Now, it's not something you can do for all data because if you were to back up all the data you have, you would end up spending a fortune, either on external hard drives or cloud storage, which is not cheap. And so it's only really the important data that you just cannot live without. What I do is I quite often, my videos are the biggest thing that I do, because I did a video this week and the final edited video file was 128 gigabytes. Now I can't back that up online because that's just madness. That's going to cost a fortune. What I can do is I can put it onto a hard drive. In my office, and they are the source files. The finished rendered video, which I then compressed down, was only 4.8 gigabytes, and I've put that in 3 different places. So I sent one to the client, one to YouTube as an unlisted video, and one to Vimeo.

[00:14:46.17]
And I've also got it on my hard drive as well. I've kept it on my on my NAS drive so that I've got, you know, 4 copies if you like. And it means that I don't necessarily need the source files unless of course there's going to be a change. So I've put it in sort of a temporary storage area, which is a separate hard drive, not my main hard drive, that I can't edit from, but I can transfer it back again onto my computer to then make changes. Just in case the client comes and says, you know, "I'd like to make a little change here and there's a bit of a problem here." And then, you know, after a period of time has passed, I, my plan going forward is to ask the client if they would like me to store the files for the future. And in which case, there's going to be a cost attached to that because it's going to cost me money to store the files, wherever that storage is. They have the finished files, which I have in several places. But if they don't want, if they choose not to have the files stored, then if they come back to me in the future and say, "you know that video you did for me, can we just tweak it a little bit?"

[00:16:02.21]
I can very easily go back to them and go, "well, we can, but not with the originals because you chose not to have those kept. But we can do it with the finished file, which does limit our editing capabilities, but you know, we do have that option." And I think that's probably the best way of doing it because I don't think you want to start backing up all these huge files at your own cost just in case. I think, you know, depending on what you're charging the customer, we've got this with Pop, for example. I need to... What was that? Shh. I need to talk to the client for Pop. And say, "look, would you like to keep the files?" I think there's, again, it's nearly 2 terabytes worth of data, which if they then come around and say, "no, no, we're done with it now." I can delete that and free up the space, which means I've got space for new projects. But if they say, "yes, we want to keep it," then I'll charge them for an external device and put all the files onto that external device and then put that somewhere safe.

[00:17:12.23] - Taylor
Could always give it to the client to store themselves.

[00:17:18.24] - Gordon
Yeah, I don't like doing that because I keep the copyright on videos. And if you hand over source files, they normally don't mean anything to the client because they don't necessarily have the editing software that you've used or the plugins that you've used to render stuff. And they're not that useful sometimes. And, you know, what I don't want is for them to go off and, you know, start using these files and making their own edits and stuff and claiming that, you know, if anyone knows that I videoed it, that could reflect badly on me because it's not my work, but it's the project that I worked on, if you see what I mean. So it's, yeah, it's difficult to say, it's difficult to know, but yeah, this came up originally because you don't back up your main laptop, do you?

[00:18:14.16] - Taylor
No.

[00:18:15.02] - Gordon
And we spoke about potentially getting an external device that you can use Time Machine on, which is a Mac technology, which basically updates and keeps copies of files that change on a daily o weekly and possibly a monthly basis. I can't remember, it's been a while now. But you can then go back to files and sort of restore them from a past date, which is quite nice. And it just keeps the changes in the files rather than multiple copies of the files. So yeah, that's something I think you're going to be thinking about. But that's pretty much everything I wanted to say. You just need to lose your internet in my case to make you think "Have I got all bases covered?" And if I haven't, what do I need to do to make sure they are for the future? That's it. Anything else you want to say?

[00:19:07.13] - Taylor
I don't think so.

[00:19:08.17] - Gordon
That's it from us. Thank you so much for watching or listening. If you would like to leave a comment, please do so. We're on YouTube. Please like, share, and subscribe.

[00:19:17.25] - Taylor
You can also go to our website, thisweekwith.co.uk.

[00:19:21.14] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us, then you can do so on any major podcast platform or your smart speaker, just ask to listen to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," and our latest episode will play for you. Just a side note, if anyone lives anywhere in the Croydon area, a couple of weeks' time, I'm in a play. We're doing "The Diary of Anne Frank," and it's going to be really good: parlourplayers.co.uk, there you go, a link to where you can purchase tickets. If you do come, let me know. That's it from us. We will be back next week at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:20:02.23] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:20:05.03] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:20:05.17] - Taylor
Bye.

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Show Notes