Dave and Gunnar Show #243 - Transcript Attendees David Egts, Gunnar Hellekson Transcript This editable transcript was computer generated and might contain errors. People can also change the text after it was created. David Egts: So Gunnar. It feels like we haven't done an episode in like forever. Gunnar Hellekson: It feels like, it feels like it's been a year. David Egts: Yeah, at least. Yeah. And, and like, you know, like we're slowly but surely getting to 250, we need to do a pull as the, you know, like how they often do like, when, when a baby's gonna be born, the pool of when it's going to be born, they could do,… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. David Egts: you know, see what the Vegas line is for when we hit 250. Gunnar Hellekson: Well, you know the joke would be on them because we're gonna ask some tautically approach to 50. We're going to do like 249 and then 249 and a half and… Gunnar Hellekson: then 249 and a half Chapter 3 and then David Egts: Yeah. Oh no. David Egts: I I thought it would be like a denial of service thing where it's like we space it out like like we doubled the length of the of the the time between episodes to the point where but we can do it that way. Gunnar Hellekson: Do like a double binary back off. Like that guy. David Egts: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, right. But it's nice to be,… David Egts: Yeah. What's new with you? Gunnar Hellekson: it's good to be back in the scene. David Egts: Yeah, yeah, long overdue. So what's going on? Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Uh, let's see. Made it through the latest Texas weather disaster mostly unscathed, which is nice a little bit of tree damage… David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: but otherwise just fine. Everyone is happy and healthy and I hey recently had a, you know, you know, you started a new year Dave and you you one of the things I like to do is I like to hose out my my task system, right? Just give it a nice scrubbing, and so there, I was on Christmas break and, and I had it to do with breakthrough. You want to hear about it? David Egts: Okay. Yeah, hit me. Gunnar Hellekson: All right. Gunnar Hellekson: So, I realized that what I should be doing with, with my, with my task lists is, I should kind of, you know, milestones for the year, I've goals for the year both personal and professional, and it seems to make sense that you should have all those goals in Todoist. And then when you create tasks, you kind of know whether you're aligned or not to your intended goals, right? Okay. So indeed, I did. I took my whole todoist thing, I wiped it clean through all the fish on the table restarted, all the fish and got myself into a new todoist, structure driven by my goals, in my milestones, in my personal ambitions for the year. And and… David Egts: Ah, okay. Gunnar Hellekson: I so eager to do is I got back to work on the first day and I was okay, I'm all ready to go. And Gunnar Hellekson: within 90 minutes, I realized that I had made a terrible mistake because,… David Egts: Oh no. Gunnar Hellekson: While that structure makes sense for me individually, it does not make sense for how my work happens, which is going from one-on-one to one-on-one or… David Egts: Right. Gunnar Hellekson: team meeting to team meeting. And when I'm in that meeting what I need to know is What is this person need to talk about? Or What do I need to ask this person about, right. And it is fiendishly difficult to have that workable and keep track of, who's doing what, and all the rest of it in this way. So, Gunnar Hellekson: uh, that night, I went back dumped, all the fish back on the table and resub the whole thing and went back to A system that was organized entirely around individuals. So each person that I'm working with has a project,… David Egts: Okay. Gunnar Hellekson: they are the project themselves. And inside that project are all the things that they need for me or I need from them. David Egts: Okay. Gunnar Hellekson: And so I automatically have an agenda, every time someone calls me, even if even if it wasn't planned, you call me. And I have a Dave folder and it's, oh, these are all the things I need or… David Egts: Nice. Gunnar Hellekson: want to talk to Dave about very comforting to have this And then I said, Well, I've got this. But I don't, but I know I've lost my goal setting and objective setting thing, and then I realized that many of my goals and objectives are relying on other people to do. Or teams to do and I need to be in what I should be doing is holding other people individually accountable for these outcomes. And so using this manager trick,… David Egts: Yes. Gunnar Hellekson: I realized if I'm holding some individual person accountable for these outcomes then that goal belongs in their list. David Egts: Yes. Gunnar Hellekson: And if that is in their list, I can specially flag it for things like Q1, q3 Q4 and… David Egts: Mm-hmm. Gunnar Hellekson: so on. And I can, I can tag these things and I can know what goals I gave them. They know what goals, I gave to them, and I can actually track work in this way. So, kind of merged the two ideas together, primarily organized by individual, who I'm holding accountable, and then secondarily organized by kind of goals, and objectives, and so on. And I'm delighted to announce that this has been going out for two or… 00:05:00 David Egts: Okay. Gunnar Hellekson: three weeks and I've never been better organized. Gunnar Hellekson: Because now I can do things like, Hey, Dave could you could you go publish the show notes for later on Perhaps I would say. So I go to my day folder and I say Dave owes XYZ show notes and then I put a waiting tag on it and now I know that I'm waiting for Dave to do something and in my morning list of things to do, I have a whole section just for waiting items so I can see all the things that I'm waiting for other people on. It's great. David Egts: Mmm. Okay. Gunnar Hellekson: I could I can now. I feel like I can now run a clinic on how to how to run Todoist to do a system. So, and… David Egts: Wow. so, Gunnar Hellekson: perhaps I have a second career, Dave, as a to-do list evangelist David Egts: Yeah, yeah. There you go, there you go. And, and but does that you're not talking though? That the, the customer or I'm sorry that the that your people with your? Projects have to have to do it. Gunnar Hellekson: No, although now that I'm doing it, I've shared it with them, even though they are not to do a subscribers themselves, they can still see the list that I gave them. David Egts: Okay. Ah, okay. Gunnar Hellekson: And so, if they want to, they can go participate in the system with me, but I don't need them to and… David Egts: Okay. Gunnar Hellekson: that has worked out extraordinarily. Well, it's great. It's great. David Egts: Yeah, I was about to say that to do is, people would love it if you get some referrals and and more subscribers, everybody using to do it. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Mmm. Yes, I think I've got a future career. I've got a second career in in this, I think. Yeah. Anyway. David Egts: Yep. Yeah, they should be a sponsor for all the air time we get them. Gunnar Hellekson: It's true. It's true. It's a I should probably just go ahead and get it to do a tattoo. David Egts: Yeah, there you go. There you go. Put it on your list. Make it a goal. Gunnar Hellekson: Speaking of speaking of bad ideas, what's going on with you? David Egts: Oh yeah, so let's see. I got a new router and… Gunnar Hellekson: Okay. David Egts: it was Yeah. So it's like like I'm a fan of the open source routers and you know, open Wrt and Dwrt and all that and and it's like wouldn't it be great if you got one that was like, Gunnar Hellekson: Sure. David Egts: Winds up. There's a fine company called Gli.inet or our GL Dot. I net and so I got their model, the Flint model and it was like under 100 bucks and it's like super fast faster than what I had before much more stable. And, and what's interesting is it it's I guess it's using newer hardware. So it's like very, very close to open wrt and I think their goal is to get enough stuff upstream so they don't have to maintain it so it, you know, to get it as stock to open wrt as possible. So it's like, that's super cool. It also has like a home like I forget what they call it ad block or something. That ad guard. I think is what they call it. So you actually do the ad blocking at the at the router level. David Egts: And, and what's interesting there is that I could do the logging and like you think your network is like kind of quiet when like, nobody's home and nobody's really doing anything. And I was like, looking at the logs and it's like holy cow, there's so much stuff like phone and home and, you know, between the phones and the roku and all the different things that it's like, amazing. How much like how chatty always devices are? Gunnar Hellekson: Right. Right. Well, that's cool. David Egts: And not. Gunnar Hellekson: Right, right? David Egts: Well, a lot of it isn't for my best interest either, right? Gunnar Hellekson: Like a roka the roku sending back here biometrics and what have you? David Egts: Yeah, telemetry and and you know and it's like, you know, you know, check it in and there's probably some app that's phoning home to, you know, help optimize my ad experience and… Gunnar Hellekson: If? David Egts: all that stuff. so, Yeah. Yeah, and so highly. Highly recommend it for people to. If you need one, try out, not expensive and you know it's Wi-Fi 6 a lot of fun. And then, you know, everybody's talking about chat gpt have you got into that at all? Gunnar Hellekson: I have I have, you know, my use case for jazz GPT is Helping start awkward emails. So If any? David Egts: To make them more or… David Egts: less awkward. Gunnar Hellekson: To get them. Gunnar Hellekson: Well, to get them started in the first place. David Egts: Okay. Okay. Gunnar Hellekson: I have, I find, I have a blocker, you know, do if I have to do, you know some emotional labor on an email, I find it difficult to find, a difficult to get started staring at a blank page, but I find that if I could just give chat deep prompts or you know formulate the current prompts it'll write an email that's like 80% of the way there and then I'm just copy editing,… 00:10:00 David Egts: Yes. Yes. Gunnar Hellekson: right? And that's great. Yeah. David Egts: Now, I I haven't done that yet but I've played with it in terms of You know. Like like things like that. I like, you know how it it goes up to 2021 in terms of it's knowledge. And so it still thinks I'm at Red Hat and and I actually had it create some articles under my voice, based upon, what's out that I wrote on the Internet and it's like David Egts: Some pretty. I would say close articles of not my best. Work is what they came up with. Gunnar Hellekson: It. David Egts: So but it was fun, you know? But and like I like you said it's I think it's a good brainstorming thing to get past writer's block and to come up with ideas and be a water test, some stuff. So yeah, but to me, that whole thing is fascinating and it, I guess this week is, we're recording, you know, rumor has it that Google's gonna release theirs because they're worried that Chat GPT is going to get all the mind share and all that. So it'll be neat to see the competition going on and… Gunnar Hellekson: Oh sure. David Egts: and also the How things can horribly go wrong? It's I can imagine by rushing this stuff to market, too quickly, it could be bad. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, right, right. That's right. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. So, but we got, we got plenty of good stuff on the show, other relevant news, it's making headlines. So yeah, well, we'll be talking about mastodon. See, if see if you're into that and what I've been learning about it. We'll be talking about white noise and be talking about meetings. And and so That's gonna be fun. Gunnar Hellekson: I love a good meeting episode. This is gonna be great. David Egts: Mm-hmm. Yeah yeah. Can't beat meeting hygiene. So yeah, so where should we send people to get links to the referral link for Todoist and all that? Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, they should go to Dgshow.org. That's a D as in Dave G as in Gunnar's Show.org and… David Egts: Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: on Twitter at Dgshow Dot Org and… David Egts: Yeah. We need to do that. Gunnar Hellekson: do we have a mastodon handle yet? David Egts: I need to get the the intern on that. Yes, for sure. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: All right, all right so and soon to come on, Mastodon. All right. David Egts: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and cutting room floor. We have some classic old-timey pictures of Dr. Gustav Zander steam, powered exercise machines. so that Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Which are a delight, they're a delight. David Egts: Yeah. They look super dangerous. Everybody's wearing a suit while they exercise. It's wonderful. David Egts: And then the other thing we came up with or we saw was that, you know, the the lorm Epsom, you know, things like that, there's a hipster Epsom. So if you want it generated in hipster, there's another one for back to the future called Delorean Ipsum. So in generate back to the future themed ones. Gunnar Hellekson: He? David Egts: But did you know what that the whole entomology of the the lower mipsum thing is from Gunnar Hellekson: No, I I thought it was just a lower that was passed on from typesetter to typesetter. I didn't realize Yeah. David Egts: Yeah. Or a spell or something? Yeah witchcraft. Yeah. So it's Roman philosopher Cicero's work defibitness. Alone at Malorum which is on the ends of good and evil is is his work and it's a lot of his widely used phrases. And so, the original passage at the beginning, they learn Epson blah, it's no one loves pain itself. Seeks after it and wants to have it simply because it's pain. Gunnar Hellekson: Well, that's that's sound advice. That's right. David Egts: Yes, and it's that's great for work presentations, and stuff like that. So, David Egts: It still has legs. Gunnar Hellekson: That's great. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. So You know, that's the other thing since we talked last Twitter keeps getting crazier and crazier. Are you still doing the Twitter? Gunnar Hellekson: I punched out a punched my ticket. I'm out. Deleted the account. David Egts: Yeah, so you deleted it. No way. Wow. Gunnar Hellekson: Deleted it. Gunnar Hellekson: It's absolutely deleted it. I've all I reached my absolute limit. David Egts: Wow. Gunnar Hellekson: There was a there was always been a diminishing return on time spent there and the the pain outweighed, the pleasure. And I finally decided just to rid myself of it entirely and it's been great. 00:15:00 David Egts: Yeah. Wow. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Don't miss it. Yep. David Egts: yeah, did So, what are you doing with all your free time now? Gunnar Hellekson: Uh oh, you know, I'm I'm volunteering. I help out those in need contributing to my, you know, local charities and reading more reddit. David Egts: Oh, okay. Okay. So that's that's your new source, I guess. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, that's my That's my temporary distraction tool of choice now is reddit. David Egts: Okay. Yeah, so I've been I've been poking at massadon which is kind of fun. And what's what's interesting about that? I saw somebody describe it as the way, social networking used to be before it got all like commercial and like You know, the feed was You know, more in your control as opposed to whatever the company thinks would be pumped to you plus all kind of ads. You know, you engage more and, you know, the toxicity and all that and… Gunnar Hellekson: Right. David Egts: and they somebody else described it as not being performative like it is on Twitter which I thought was a good description. Gunnar Hellekson: Oh yeah, yeah. Let me says… David Egts: Yeah. Right. Gunnar Hellekson: because you're not going for the clicks. David Egts: Yeah, yeah. And and yeah, And so and like, are you familiar familiar with that? The Protocol Activity pub? Gunnar Hellekson: yeah, I remember that back from the back, when back, when we had an Internet that we controlled there was an activity pub quite popular, David Egts: Right. Yeah, yeah. So it's kind of like RSS if you remember it from back in the day. Gunnar Hellekson: Mm-hmm. David Egts: But what's interesting about that is it like Mastodon uses Activity Pub? David Egts: And the other thing is that the different mastodon instances can, they can have different rules in terms of like Oh this instance I'm you know, anything goes this other instances like no hate speech or whatever. The other thing that the instance can say is that I want a to be 500 characters or 2,000 characters and all that. So that's kind of interesting. But the other thing that's interesting about activity pub is that like,… Gunnar Hellekson: Yep. David Egts: you know, you would have these walled gardens like like YouTube and David Egts: Instagram and Facebook and you know, in Twitter and you would have to go to the individual apps to be able to see the content But with Activity Pub, you can have your say like your mastodon account and inside your mastodon feed. You could subscribe to a peer tube channel. So think of it as like a peer-to-peer YouTube. And so somebody puts out a new you appear tube episode,… Gunnar Hellekson: Okay. David Egts: it will show up in your mastodon feed. Gunnar Hellekson: I see. So this is like, so the better way to think of a mastodon is not a Twitter replacement… David Egts: You yes. Gunnar Hellekson: but more like brand new plumbing for social media and so you can conduct any kind of social media, kind of experience you want. Got. David Egts: Yes. Yeah. And and you could have somebody like unfriendika, follow you on Mastodon and you know, like all that stuff. So it's it's really cool. So you can have like one account and you're following all this stuff from all over the place and one is more video centric. The other is more image-centric, the other one's more, you know, short form. There's another one that does blog posts and and so you can have an entire blog post in your feed if you want that is like thousands of words long, if you want Gunnar Hellekson: This reminds me of and I'm gonna have to go find the define that there was a blog post slash essay on the top on the concept of Intertwingling. Do you remember this? So it was it was right about the same days when everybody was getting excited about RSS feeds and this idea of like personal publishing and… David Egts: Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: this notion of intertwingling was, Let's build ours, an app that can consume calendar information, emails, all different kinds of messaging, IRC, whatever, and present it in a single interface and… David Egts: oh, Gunnar Hellekson: it would and the sounds the way you're describing mastodon. Now, it sounds very similar, just maybe a little more sophisticated implementation on the back, but Gunnar Hellekson: The idea here was that you would have all of your inputs kind of munched together and you would be able to sort through it and find it and search through it but it would all be in one place. Which is as a kind of a data hoarder, I find this extremely comforting. David Egts: Yeah, yeah, it's all aggregated. So it's it's sort of like Google Reader. 00:20:00 Gunnar Hellekson: Yep. David Egts: You know that it's it's one location, you go to, but you're pulling in all kind of stuff. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: That's right. David Egts: And the other thing that it's like, it took me forever to figure out what To get started in terms of like picking the right masted on server because that's what you got to do. And a lot of the servers are quote Unquoteful and they, you know, they don't, they're not accepting new signups. And so like, if, if you go to Mastodon Social, which is sort of like the main mastodon site, you can't get an account there directly and, So you got to go to another one and I was always worried, that's half. I picked the wrong one. What happens? If that site goes weird and, you know, it's, it's not representing my values or whatever, you can actually go to another site and basically, you know, pick up everything and and get redirected to the other site, which is kind of cool. But for those it's like you want to David Egts: Look like you're like Og mastodon and you want to have like a mess on the social account? it winds up, you can have somebody on an existing mastodon server invite you with an invite link and so for you and for Everybody listening on the show in the show notes, I put a link to an invite for me if folks want to get an account there. So and it doesn't matter, but you can. Gunnar Hellekson: Very nice. That's great. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing to help people move and here's where it stinks is it? I don't know if you saw the other news with Twitter that They're not having a free tier for the API access anymore. And yeah,… Gunnar Hellekson: Of course. David Egts: so they want to monetize that. And so there were a couple tools that were out there that like one of them was called Move to Dawn,… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. David Egts: which it's like you basically go to this web page, you authenticate on both servers and it will figure out who on Twitter has a mastodon account and lets you follow them on mastodon. Gunnar Hellekson: Okay, yep. David Egts: Yeah, and then there's another one called It's like, Moa Dot party. And what it does is it, it can either do it, one direction or bidirectionally that if you post something on mastodon it gets posted on Twitter. And if you post something on Twitter, it goes on to mastodon. and, so it's sort of like copies it and… Gunnar Hellekson: Right. David Egts: then it's like I'm reading it and it's like, you got it and with both of them, you got to give access to your Twitter account and it's like, Okay. And just weighing the risk and everything and it's like, I know I, my passwords are separate. I do the multi-factor authentication. It's like, I think it's low risk. If somebody wants to like hijack, me and and hijack, my Twitter account. I'm not that worried about it, you know, compared to my banking, or email account. The thing that really took the, the thing with melodic party is it if you go to the Web page, it tells you that it's like it's an open source thing that lets you do the cross posting and everything. And it it comes right out and it says no bamboozle. David Egts: So it's got to be legit, right? Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, yeah because it's got a clear, no, bamboozle policy. David Egts: Right. Yeah. It probably has an important blue check mark. David Egts: So anyhow, yeah, it it may be the kind of thing, you know, check out mastodon it could be a it's it's a sort of like a quiet I guess. You know, depending upon all the people that you follow and stuff, you know I don't think you'll be able to follow course light or anything anytime soon but But it may you… Gunnar Hellekson: He? Probably a feature. David Egts: a lot of What's that? Gunnar Hellekson: Not a bug. David Egts: Yes. And and so, you know, it's like, who knows about, you know, the publications that are going to start posting there, but we'll see how it goes and… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. David Egts: I've even seen some like publications, they stand up their own mastodon server for them to, you know, so they have control over their server to publish stuff on it, and they only make it like available to their employees to post on, but anybody could subscribe to A feed there, which is kind of compelling, right? It's sort of like we're in your own mail server. Gunnar Hellekson: Mmm. Yeah. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. David Egts: So, try it out. And in so or you're still a Spotify guy, right? Gunnar Hellekson: I am. Yeah. Yeah. David Egts: Yeah, yeah, I never got into it. Like, I'm the kind of guy that likes to listen to albums over and over again. And I have very little variety and so for me, it's like I like buying the music and Listening to it over and over. But but anyhow, like, you know, Spotify is getting into podcasts and all that. They also, I found out they also can do like, play white noise and I found, I saw an article. There's one guy that's making 18,000 a month by doing a podcast for white noise. 00:25:00 Gunnar Hellekson: So, he's just juiced the, the search algorithm, or whatever. So that he's the number one, white noise hit, David Egts: I I guess and well and what he you know it's like like he's been doing it for a while and any, you know he quit his job in 2009 to focus on an app called White Noise and then in 2019 he launched a podcast. That was a white noise, sleep sound app, and You know, using on Spotify and all that. And I guess there would be like ads at the beginning but not like in the middle of, you know, there'd be like, hey, this white noise brought to you by course light or whatever, but then it just does the the white noise, right? And and so it's he gets 50,000 listens a day and that ranks him in the top 25% of all podcasts. Gunnar Hellekson: Wow. David Egts: For white noise. and, Yeah,… Gunnar Hellekson: Good for him. David Egts: and and he has a Five employees and contractors. David Egts: Like like to me,… Gunnar Hellekson: Amazing. David Egts: I'm like, like okay. What do you're making white noise? You know, And it's like, How many employees do you need, you know? And But I guess that, you know, he has an app and it's a subscription plan and all that. And then there's an ad supported one. But let's see. Yeah, so the anchor messages at the beginning of the white noise, it's 12 dollars and 25% or I'm sorry 12 dollars and 25 cents per thousand listens. And then so for him he gets 612.50 a day and then that's up. And so you do it for like a month and that that totals over 18,000 a month. He's pulling it. Gunnar Hellekson: That's amazing. Good for him. Yeah. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. Just to think we talked to create our podcast. It could we could just be doing think of the time we'd save with with just doing a white noise podcast. Gunnar Hellekson: as a well, it's, it's sobering to think that, that we,… David Egts: Yes, yes. Gunnar Hellekson: this would be a lot more lucrative if there was no, if there was no content, David Egts: Ironic isn't it? Um yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Yes, it is. David Egts: And and who knows people made me use our podcast as a sleep aid and consider it white noise as well. So yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: That's true. That's true. So I guess, I guess the lesson learned here is less is more. David Egts: yes I guess or white noise is profitable but yeah, so Yeah, last thing I had was the an article called The Rise of the 15 Minute Meeting. And so, you know, there's the work management, platform asana, you know, project management whatnot. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, sure. David Egts: You know, they're always doing research and experiments and stuff like that and so I guess, I guess it was with asana workers or somebody they partnered with, but they're asked to assess the value of the time, they spent on meetings and to delete all recurring meetings that have five or fewer participants and then, then they were supposed to have You know, after that sort of like calendar Armageddon, they're supposed to let it sit for you know, don't add any more meetings for 48 hours and just sort of like let that soak in for a little bit. And then if you want, start adding back the meanings that they saw as valuable. David Egts: And yeah and the result was it the employees had shorter meetings of unconventional links so the 30-minute meetings went down to 15 minutes and the cadence was less frequent. So like a weekly meeting maybe a monthly meeting and then they they calculated how much time they were saving by not being in meetings and the results were they saved 11 hours a month which equates to 17 days over the course of the year or three and a half weeks. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That checks out. David Egts: Yeah, and yeah. And that's where yeah, and that's what they're saying. Like, asana did a survey of 10,000 employees. And 40% were spending more time on video calls compared to last year and they said that 52% admit to multitasking during meetings. No surprise. 00:30:00 Gunnar Hellekson: Yep, that's right. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah, and then, you know, the other notice of prize is it almost half of the workforce and Britain and Australia. And over a third of the United States workers, said that their workday that at the end of their work day, they were feeling mentally and physically exhausted. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, that seems like separate but related information. Right. Yeah,… David Egts: Yeah, it will contributing I think but yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: yeah, that's right. Gunnar Hellekson: That's right. David Egts: Yeah. So do you think 15 minutes or… David Egts: the 15 minute meetings or the answer? Gunnar Hellekson: You know, maybe you know, as you were rattling off the statistics there, I was thinking to myself, There's a there's a countervailing force here which is that in a meeting intensive like the one you and I are accustomed to living in, Maybe Dave, maybe you do this. I have lots of zombie meetings, not lots. I have a certain number of zombie meetings or meetings that I know aren't going to last the entire time allotted. So you… David Egts: Yes. Gunnar Hellekson: if I've got a one-on-one with somebody and we don't have a whole lot to talk about neither of us, are another of us are to precious about just ending the meeting early, right? Get the time back. David Egts: Yeah, getting the time back. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: And so I feel like that happens a lot especially if you feel like you have to defend your time and I think so. Some of these savings are, in fact already being harvested informally, it's just not represented on the calendar. You know what I mean? David Egts: Yeah. You're right. It's it's like the way I think of it is that if David Egts: You're meaning, your default meeting. Length is say An hour. You're gonna have it most eight meetings a day… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Yes. David Egts: but then I was like, I know what I'll do. I'm gonna switch to half hour meetings and I'm gonna get half my time back. No, I ended up getting 16 meetings a day. Right. and… Gunnar Hellekson: That's right. Yeah, exactly. David Egts: then yeah and then all sudden you're gonna go from, you know, 15 minute meetings and it's it's just you know in in its more and more exhausting, you know it's it's like you know, just like a boxing match of round after around. Gunnar Hellekson: It's yeah, yeah that's right. That's right. Dave, do you block off time on your calendar in order to do real work? David Egts: Yeah, I I used to use clockwise to do that and it was helpful and, you know, because it could like defragment my calendar and move things around and stuff. And I found that to be helpful. But fortunately, in with what I'm doing now it's like I don't have as many meetings, you know, like, you know, being owned by Salesforce. You know, we do a lot with slack and so like I don't even get a lot of email like I don't even have email filters really for which is amazing, you know, it's like everything's done in slack and so it's, it's been pretty good. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, yeah, that is good. So the slack story is true. I realize you're paid to say yes. But is it is it true that? Yeah. David Egts: Yes, slack is amazing. No. Gunnar Hellekson: That's great. That's great. David Egts: now I I you know it's it was interesting you know coming from You know, Google chat at Red Hat to Slack, it's just a more featured thing, and like I know. Last year. David Egts: A Google Chat didn't have threaded meetings by default. And to me,… Gunnar Hellekson: He? David Egts: it's like threaded, meetings are the way to get or not. I mean not threaded meetings, threaded chats. That's the way to go. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. David Egts: And and to the point where I, I get an allergic reaction when somebody doesn't do, you know, threaded chats to like, you know, change the subject, you know what I… Gunnar Hellekson: Hmm. Yeah. David Egts: It's sort of like getting a an email with a different subject and it's not all, you know, clumped together, you know, and and… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. David Egts: you could unsubscribe, or follow certain, you know, threads and stuff like that. And I found out to be really helpful, you know, the other thing that I've learned too is, like, doing a lot with EMOJI for like voting and, and signaling. You know where you know we always have the mailing list where somebody does like a reply all on any mailing list of your 20,000 closest friends right they do a reply all with just plus one you know and… Gunnar Hellekson: He? David Egts: it's like seriously it's like you just generated and interrupt for 20,000 people whereas you could do a plus one emoji right in there and… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. David Egts: it's you're sending the same signal but you're not generating that interrupt. Gunnar Hellekson: Right, right? Yeah. That makes sense. David Egts: And, and I've seen people do voting, too. I don't know if you've seen that too where people would use Emoji for for voting on stuff. 00:35:00 Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. It's very clever. David Egts: Yeah. I like that. I like that. And yeah,… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. David Egts: the other thing that I've seen as well is you know, just, you know, you would think Chat would be for synchronous communication, but it's oh, it's also, you know, you can use it a lot for like asynchronous communication and like for sending announcements and things like that. And as opposed to sending it to an email list or, and I've seen people, too, like, you could like, pre-record a video and send that video to the room of an instead of like, Yeah, I'm gonna do a That all hands meaning of, you know, 300 people and you know, it's like it's that's expensive, right? But… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. David Egts: if it could just be a five minute video where you're just giving an update, you know, to me I think that's pretty helpful. Instead of like a monthly,… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. David Egts: all hands meeting, it allows you to be closer. And it'll let it also lets people David Egts: like communicate or collaborate on that video like you could comment on it in a thread. And so I found that to be pretty cool too. Gunnar Hellekson: He? Gunnar Hellekson: I mentioned going to be careful about the kind of topics you want to address some thinking about the My own All Hands meetings. And, you know, there may be things that are Sensitive or controversial or some otherwise like emotionally charged and… David Egts: Yes. Gunnar Hellekson: you don't really necessarily want that conducted on chat, right? You actually want that to be live,… David Egts: Yes. No,… Gunnar Hellekson: right? Yes. David Egts: that's right. And it's like it's like to me, it's like sending a video of like, you know, hey, you know, just a pep talk of its end, a quarter and let's let's close strong and I'm, you know, I'm proud everybody everybody's doing and and you know so you can convey that like in in a video format without having it to be like you know, wait till the end of quarter or whatever. It's it's just, you know, and it's also the kind of thing as a leader. It's like, is everybody's remote now, it's not like you could just run into them and see them in the hallway. It's it's a way to get in front of people and you know, manage by wondering around I guess Gunnar Hellekson: People. Gunnar Hellekson: Right. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Cool. David Egts: Yeah, well, good stuff. Gunnar Hellekson: It's a great stuff. What an age we live in. David Egts: Yes. Yes. Yeah. For sure for sure. Yeah, so if you wanted to, if our listeners want to get into the David Egts: White noise podcast space. Where should we be sending them? Gunnar Hellekson: Oh yeah. Yeah. If they want to get into the the whites, the white noise podcast game or if they want to get a mastodon invite from from their dearest friend Dave X, they can go to Dgshow.org that's d and Dave, she's in Gunnar Show.orgy David Egts: All right, nice and on Twitter for now I guess and I guess soon to be massive on,… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. David Egts: I got it. I got a I'll send a video to my intern and see what he could do. Gunnar Hellekson: That's right. Yeah, Twitter on a DG show. Dot Org. David Egts: Yeah, excellent. Alright, Gunnar. Well. Hey Good talking with you and, and we're slowly, but surely getting the 250 and thanks everybody for listening and… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. David Egts: being with us on this way. Gunnar Hellekson: That's right, that's right. Happy New Year, everyone. David Egts: All right. Good times. Gunnar Hellekson: All right. It's good times. That was great. David Egts: Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: All right, I gotta go get dinner started. David Egts: I got to get dinner, eaten Yeah. All right. We'll take it easy, good seeing… Gunnar Hellekson: YouTube, you know. David Egts: As a highlight of my week. Gunnar Hellekson: That's good. Okay good. Gunnar Hellekson: I'm glad. Okay. David Egts: I don't get out much. Gunnar Hellekson: All… David Egts: that's, Alright, Gunnar. Yeah,… Gunnar Hellekson: Well, see you next week? David Egts: take it easy. See you later man. Bye.