Time for another personal productivity and effectiveness podcast (brought to you by Maplytics by Inogic), and the goal of this episode is “limit your WIP (work in progress). With due credit to Personal Kanban, WIP is a concept from Kanban that refers to the number of things that you are working on at any one time. In your personal life, it can be easy to say yes to too many things and overestimate your capacity. This can increase your stress level and make you ineffective, and result in poor quality output.
This ties into re-evaluating what you are currently doing, as your priorities may change over time. Something that is low value now might be higher value tomorrow. This is one of the reasons we have changed our focus and release cadence at CRM Audio—by reducing the number of series and episodes we are producing, we can hopefully increase quality and value of the output.
We also discuss some of the latest updates to some of our favorite productivity tools. OneNote desktop is back from the dead, and Matthew is excited about the Microsoft Fluid Framework and its promise of making office documents and applications work better together.
We have discussed Microsoft MyAnalytics and how it can help you quantify how you are spending your work time by analyzing the digital dust of your meetings, emails, and conversations. But if you haven’t checked it out for a while, it has become significantly more useful—it will now proactively discuss focus time and block it off on your calendar, help you plan for upcoming meetings and see how what percentage of attendees have accepted and if you forgot to insert a web meeting link, and will block off time on your calendar to prepare for meetings or review documents that have been sent to you.
We end with a review of one of our most frequently used tools, Snagit from TechSmith. You know how great it is for making screenshots, but did you know that you can also use it to record video screencasts? And that it is easy to take high quality screenshots from your video?
