Bonni: [00:00:00] Today on episode number 201 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Dave Stachowiak joins me once again to talk about frictionless systems.

Production Credit: [00:00:11] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:20] Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:47] Today I welcome back to the show Dave Stachowiak, that last name may sound a little familiar to you and it’s because I married into it. Dave, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Dave: [00:00:59] I’m glad to be back. Hello to everyone and congratulations on 200 episodes.

Bonni: [00:01:02] Thank you Dave. When I was recording the intro I had to redo it, as you already know because 201 just fell out of my mouth in an awkward way because that’s amazing. That’s amazing. Two hundred and one episodes. I’m going to have to get used to that.

Dave: [00:01:15] And a thank you to everyone who’s been so supportive of the show. It’s so fun being a small part of the Slack community and talking to some of the listeners regularly. So thank you, it’s been so fun.

Bonni: [00:01:29] We decided to record today’s episode because things have been a little bit nutty and I have been just coming out of a pretty intense task force that I was a part of at my institution. And Dave, I know you have quite a bit going on in terms of the Leadership Academy new enrollments that you’re just starting up. And you’ve been having some website issues and I’m redesigning mine.

Bonni: [00:01:53] We’ve been like two ships passing in the night, some of the time, but we still manage to connect because it’s important to us. But we thought we’d spend a little bit of time today talking about systems that help reduce the friction in our lives.

Bonni: [00:02:08] And Dave, I don’t know if you want to start out with one or kick it over to me first but what is something that reduces the friction in your life?

Dave: [00:02:14] I think a lot of us who think about productivity and are learning and growing and listening to podcasts are always thinking of better ways to do this. And so I’m no different in that way, I suppose. One thing that I have started to do recently is to get a little bit more intentional about what are things that are in the incubation stage and what are things that I’m thinking about and then what are things I’m actively working on.

Dave: [00:02:39] And what is different and what I was doing is I was being pretty intentional for a while and planning out projects that I wanted to complete in a 12 week increment and I was using a book called The 12 Week Year and I’m still doing everything in the spirit of that. But I’ve actually cut my time frame down quite a bit. One of the things I started noticing is with my own project schedule and also with our kid’s schedules now that they’re both in school full time with them having winter breaks and spring breaks and 12 weeks was actually not working great because I’d get four to five weeks me and then all of a suddent the kids are off school for a week. Like hm I will have to manage around that somehow.

Dave: [00:03:19] So I’ve started I’ve actually significantly reduced my timeframe for how you think about projects and I’m changing the time frame every season. So sometimes I’ll set out my projects for four to five weeks for like a sprint and then sometimes I’ll set it out to be eight to nine weeks depending on family schedules and project schedules.

Dave: [00:03:36] And so I just finished a three week sprint actually before the kids had their spring break. And what I’ve started to do now is just be really clear on what I’m working on during that two to three weeks. And I call those my plan. So I’ve got a text document that I keep that I just have listed out exactly what plans I’m working on what projects I’m working on for that timeframe.

Dave: [00:04:00] And if it’s a very short period of time like it was for this last sprint then I’ve only had two or three things that I wanted to accomplish. And so I had those listed out and if it’s a longer sprint that I’ve got more things on that. So I’ve got that, so I’ve got the projects I’m actively working on. I also then have another text document where I have listed out what I think is going to be on the next sprint. So there’s you know already four or five things on my list for next time. And so I’m in the back of my mind. And as I’m working on projects and as I have some spare time I’m thinking about those things pretty actively.

Dave: [00:04:36] And so when I think about something related to those, I have disciplined myself to just open up that text document and put it into that project and then close it. And so that way I don’t have to worry about taking action on it. I don’t have to you know. But I want to capture that idea or that thought when it comes in or if someone mentioned something to me or I get an email or it’s a survey or something like that.

Dave: [00:04:55] And then I also now have a third text document that’s just called possibilities and those are things that someone mentioned something or I read an article or I’m in the shower and I think about an idea and I don’t pull up the text document in the shower just to clarify.

Dave: [00:05:10] But you know there’s something about- I saw an article recently about that thinking about social media and all these things that we’re all pinged with with, you know the shower is still the one place for most of us though we have access to like no inputs and no way to connect with the world. And so it’s no surprise that we tend to think about things because like the one time of the day that sometimes we stop and actually think for a moment about what just happened, what’s coming up for the day. And it really is a time right, I will come out of the shower with like oh there’s three or four things I’ve thought of that I should probably be moving on. Those tend to go on the possibilities list for me. And most of the things on the possibilities list don’t end up happening anytime in the near future. But those are the starting points for things that will get on that second text document. So I’ve been disappointed myself to do those things and that has worked out really well for the last the last month or two since I’ve been using that system.

Bonni: [00:06:05] What has been the biggest difference that you found in separating these things into the three distinct areas?

Dave: [00:06:13] I am a doer and achiever. I love to move on things. If I get excited about something, I will spend an afternoon working on it, in the past. And this has helped me to be really intentional about here is what I am working on in the season right now and if something else comes in or that comes up as an idea, it’s helped me to be very disciplined on putting that in the nope, that is going to be next quarter or next month list and put it there.

Dave: [00:06:40] And just by having that list- because it can go somewhere, I don’t end up sitting there and thinking for 15 or 20 minutes like oh should I do this today should I not? That’s a really good idea. All of those places now have buckets and so they go there and they sit there and they are ready when the time is right. But they don’t distract me at the moment from doing the work that I really need to be doing.

Bonni: [00:07:01] And the book that you referred to called the 12 Week Year. I’m going to state the obvious, you plan instead of planning over the course of a year, you plan in 12 week increments and then there are a week in between that to kind of regroup and reflect and that. And you’re saying that 12 weeks was in some cases too long for you and you needed to shorten the duration so that these sprints could really drive your focus and productivity and help you achieve goals even faster. I think if I’m understanding.

Dave: [00:07:31] Yeah I think there will still be times where it will be 12 weeks. Like I know you do a 15 week plan because it’s for a semester which I think is supersmart for faculty to be doing if you’re on that traditional semester system.

Dave: [00:07:43] So I think it just depends on the person. Like my schedule is much more fluid than yours, like I might have four weeks that I’ve got a good time frame to work and then you know the kids are on spring break or whatever like just happened. And so there’s that reality of trying to work around that schedule so for me it’s not working any less intently. It’s working more focused for those those times, if that makes sense.

Bonni: [00:08:06] And I wanted to mention Robert Talbert has a great post that I’ll link to on his. He’s actually the one who inspired me to make this move to tri-mesterly planning. And he talks about, he does a tri-mesterly review and so he’s got his spring semester, his fall semester and he’s got the summertime. And that those really are different seasons and I’ll link to that.

Bonni: [00:08:26] And one of the things Dave that I’ve also still continued to get so much benefit from is doing weekly reviews and just that ability to step back once a week and I can’t say I do it 100 percent of the time but every time I do it, my weeks just go better I am more productive. I have a better sense of what I’ve committed to, what’s important on a given week and what’s not important on any given week and really how to manage stress well during busy seasons.

Bonni: [00:08:54] And I can put in time where things that may otherwise may not come up as even just making sure I’m exercising and taking walks, getting outside scheduling time intentionally to do something meaningful with our children. I mean that’s just a wonderful time for me to reflect and look at that coming week. I also look at the prior week too and I can catch what they call closing loops. Oh we had that meeting. And I you know I forgot to get that in my task list or I actually didn’t hear back. And it can really be helpful to do that.

Bonni: [00:09:28] And I also of course still do monthly reviews looking out at the next month that’s coming. Anything big I really need more than a week to plan for and also looking back at the past month too see any open loops that still remain there.

Dave: [00:09:42] Can I say something about that too, that was actually part of what drove me to do shorter sprints on projects. And by the way I stole this idea from someone who mentioned it who stole it from the base camp, th e people who run base camp. They apparently do this their company I’m sure they stole it from someone else but I was spending way too much time on weekly reviews and I was not spending- it was sometimes taking me a couple hours to like plan out everything I want to do that week because the time frame was too long. Like 12 or 15 weeks for me it was getting to be too long. And I was finding I was having to re-juggle stuff. Even though 12 weeks is a lot shorter than I was doing years ago.

Dave: [00:10:17] So now I’m doing less time each week where I’m planning things out so I’m still planning out my time but I’m focusing on that three or four weeks of planning that well once. So the Weekly Review is more like half hour 45 minutes just put in time slots into place and that way I find that it’s more relevant. I don’t have to spend as much time thinking about it.

Dave: [00:10:39] And then once the weekly reviews done I am on autopilot. Well autopilots maybe not the right word but I’m just following the plan for the week. So I’ve got my times blocked, I’ve got all the things I’m gonna accomplish and I don’t have to get into the office in the morning to think about what am I get accomplished today because I’ve already, I’ve already defined them.

Bonni: [00:10:59] Another book that talks about some of these things is called Agile Faculty and the subtitle is Practical Strategies for Managing Research, Service and Teaching and the author is Rebecca Pope-Ruark. I have not read this book yet but it was recommended by Katie Linder and so it is on my list of books to read and I feel like we shouldn’t move off this conversation Dave until mentioning this book because one of the things they talk about are these sprints but also the idea of agile and scrum.

Bonni: [00:11:30] So agile is instead of trying to have the perfect plan. And we update our software I think of it in the software world. You know once a year it is these shorter sprints and scrum of what are we working on and how are we going to plan around our sprints? And it’s just wonderful because it’s written in an academic context. So I’ll be linking to that book from the University of Chicago Press books in the show notes and hopefully I’ll get to reading it as well. I think it would be helpful for me too.

Bonni: [00:11:57] Closely related to this, for me Dave, has been having a current list of projects and I know you referenced that in terms of having these three different ways in which you express where a project’s lifecycle is. But for me, I haven’t done quite what you’ve talked about but even just having a list of projects such that I do tend to- I think many of us work in cultures where it’s kind of that just in the moment, hey send a quick e-mail, can you do this? Can you work on this?

Bonni: [00:12:27] And I’d just like to be able to not be someone who constantly says no. But also not be someone who constantly says yes. And I’m just at the mercy of what comes in over e-mail or what has caught the eye of somebody at a higher level in the organization than I am. So just being reflective and being able to have good conversations about here’s what I’m working on, I can do this but when I look at this list these are actually priorities that to me seem like they should have more of my focus and just being able to say no better because I’m informed by this current list of projects and I’m regularly reviewing it and regularly doing my own assessment of priorities by having that.

Bonni: [00:13:07] And one of the things that really helped me with this, as I mentioned just coming out of this task force which was about 15 hours a week of commitment, I couldn’t couldn’t keep up obviously at the same pace that I normally do. And it really helped me hone in on the most important things and the projects and how to move each one of them forward or intentionally put them on a little bit of a hiatus but not forget about them completely and be able to return back to them.

Dave: [00:13:35] And that’s something that a bit of planning saves a lot of time and frustration and a question you and I both get from our listeners is you know, how do you manage it all? How do you keep it balanced? And one huge piece for me is just being realistic about what I can do. So every second or third week, I’m in Academy sessions all week, Bonni as you know. And on those weeks, I’ve learned to plan very little other than the facilitation that I’m doing because I know that rightfully so I should be devoting my full time and attention there. And if I set myself up for thinking I’m going to do more than that, I’m going to either end up doing too much and wearing myself out or perhaps worse feeling a sense of just not not having accomplishment at the end of the day.

Dave: [00:14:23] And I’ve realized the importance of ending the day well and having a sense of accomplishment is really important. So, being realistic about time and resources available while somewhat depressing, while you’re planning. Because when you plan things out, you realize like OK I only have four hours in the next three weeks to do whatever. That’s really kind of depressing when you come to that realization. But it’s better. I’ve learned that it’s better to go through that depression in the planning stages and get through it and then OK how am I going to realistically handle this? Versus spending the next three weeks kidding oneself about what you think you could do but you’re never actually going to get done.

Dave: [00:15:06] And then just feeling that sense of not ever get anything done over the course of trying to do work over weeks or months or a semester however long it’s going to be.

Bonni: [00:15:14] I started out on this task force totally unrealistic with my Mondays. Mondays tend to be the day where there’s almost always multiple meetings that get scheduled. And I also have a 3 hour class that I teach on Mondays and I’m in my office a lot besides those times and so lots of people stop by. There’s a lot of really good positive interruptions but interruptions nonetheless.

Bonni: [00:15:37] And I would schedule two hours of reading as if somehow I just was going to have no interruptions and things wouldn’t come up and meetings wouldn’t get scheduled and so I finally just took it to where Mondays were just blocked off. I was not going to put anything on there and if it seemed like I was going to have a kickback day, well I could always do reading and do something a little bit early or get caught up on another project. But I really had to get real with myself about just Mondays are out. Don’t try to put any sort of isolated work on your schedule on Mondays and then I just stopped feeling so guilty about it. It really worked well for me.

Bonni: [00:16:13] This next way that I know both of us, Dave, reduce friction in our lives in a daily, hourly, dare I say minutely- is that a word? Minutely?

Dave: [00:16:23] It is now.

Bonni: [00:16:24] Is through a piece of software that’s actually a sponsor for today’s episode and that is TextExpander and as those of you that have been listening for a while know, I only recently started on taking sponsors and it’s only ones that products or services that I would have talked about and recommended anyway. And in fact, I can truthfully say that here with TextExpander if you listen back to Episode 114 I actually did already recommend it.

Bonni: [00:16:51] I wrote about TextExpander in my forthcoming book The Productive Online Professor that will be coming out in September of 2018 as you are listening to this. So I wrote about it already a lot and blogged about it but want to share a little bit about it today. I mentioned I use it every day all day. I can’t. It’s one of the first things I install anytime I get a new computer.

Bonni: [00:17:12] And the most basic way to think about this family of applications is that it saves you time typing. You type in a little shortcut, what they call a snippet, and instantly what gets returned back to you it could be your signatures, it could be the current date. For me, I never remember my work phone number. I never remember the link to get to my zoom meeting room so instead I just type in ZOOM and what gets returned back to me as soon as I hit space is the link to get to my zoom meeting room. I never have to remember that link.

Bonni: [00:17:45] I use it for auto correct. There is of course auto correct built into most word processors today, in most of our phones and things like that but specialized auto correct can be helpful and those of you who have been listening for a super long time remember when I was talking with Ken Bain and actually the auto correct changed the Minerva prize to the manure prize so I could use this snippet if it ever got corrected to manure prize could change it right on back to Minerva prize if that were to happen saved me from years of embarrassment.

Bonni: [00:18:21] I use it for reference letters, I use it in response to a request for a reference letter. I use it for the podcast show notes so I can just type in TiHE show notes and this is a really great one because not only does it just give me the notes but I can type in variables so a little window comes up on my screen and says What’s the episode number? Who’s the guest? What category does it belong to? Because our podcast editor Andrew will then know what podcast category to put it in. What’s the description of it? And the description automatically populates the guest name because that’s the first thing you see in the description of any episodes.

Bonni: [00:19:04] So TextExpander is just enter goal to my workflow. A few other ones a P.O. box because I don’t ever remember our P.O. box address. I mentioned my work phone number and then one last thing I want to mention, and Dave I know you’ve got one to talk about as well, is that they have TextExpander for teams. So you could set this up so that you could really improve the quality and consistency of writing and professionalism across an entire team. And Dave, what do you have to share with us about TextExpander?

Dave: [00:19:35] I’ve been using text explain her for probably the better part of a decade and we have a client that I’ve worked with for years that has a very specific process for tuition reimbursement for courses and every month or so I get an email from a participant in the course tha there’s some version of that process didn’t go well. And it’s not often, but it happens enough that you know I have to type out and it’s a long convoluted process of exactly what they need to do when this doesn’t work.

Dave: [00:20:08] And so what I used to do is every time this email would come in, every couple months, I’d go back and I’d find the last time this happened and go in and make all the adjustments and I finally got smart and I put it in as a TextExpander snippet and now I’ve got, now when I type in Z the name of the system and then fail. So I get the email every couple of months, I type Z the name of the system and then fail and it automatically populates in the email window the response of here are the four things you should do in order, it’s a long like several paragraph email because unfortunately it requires that for the complex system and then it gives me a field to put in that person’s name and the name of that specific course because that changes. And every time something changes, I just go in and update the snippet, every six months or a year, every time the process changes. And it has saved me hours of and I’m able to get back to people quickly because it used to be when these came in I’d like oh my gosh I got to put together the whole email again and they’d sit for a day sometimes because I didn’t want to do it, have to go and track down all the information.

Dave: [00:21:21] So it’s just been so helpful for me in saving time. And it helps me to be a lot more responsive to participants and students in classes that are going through a tough situation with the system. So yeah, like you, I install it the first time I get a new device and it has been a game changer for me on productivity and efficiency.

Bonni: [00:21:40] Sometimes people think of it as really impersonal, you know using a form letter to respond to someone. And I’ve really changed my own thinking about that in that it just frees up time to really focus on true personalization of messages so just because- like I have a thank you that I’ll send to podcast guests. None of them are 100 percent the same but there is always going to be a component that says Hey thank you so much for being on the podcast. Here’s a link to the episode you were on. I don’t need to type that every single time I can save the time I would have spent crafting the entire email and leave it for, let the basics get plugged in there and then really add something personal that I really took away from the show or if I’ve heard from people already who got something out of it, I always like to copy and paste those messages over, if someone tweeted about it. That is where I’d rather spend the time than on something that will be the same every single time the episode number and the link.

Dave: [00:22:46] We have a saying on a team I work on “Let’s automate all the things we can automate so we can spend more time doing the things we should never automate” and so TextExpander for me falls right into that sweet spot.

Bonni: [00:22:57] And since I mentioned that TextExpander is a sponsor of today’s show, they have an offer for you for 20 percent off your first year and you can go to a textexpander.com/podcast And we’d love it if of course you’d select teaching in higher ed from the dropdown list of where you heard about TextExpander from and that will get to 20 percent off your first year so we hope you’ll take advantage of that. That will also be in the show notes at teachinginhighered.com/201.

Bonni: [00:23:26] I just have a few more to mention Dave and then we’ll pass that over to you in case you have a few more. I really get a lot out of using a plain text editor. If you’re on Windows that might be something like Notepad++ or Sublime Text, those are popular ones on Windows. I’m on a Mac and I use a plain text editor called Ulysses. They all work relatively the same, working in plain text is really freeing for me. It just allows me to focus on the writing and not have to worry about the formatting. I won’t go into this too much right now, but there is a language called markdown that might be worth looking at that allows you to keep everything in simple plain text but transfer it over later on, whether it goes somewhere on the web or whether it goes back into a word processor with headings already identified and different types of styling like italics and bold and that sort of thing. So I’ll just mention, if you hear about markdown, markdown is commonly used within these plain text editors to have formatting within them.

Bonni: [00:24:34] Another one that I really make use of is an email manager called SaneBox. I have just completely transformed the way that I handle email in that SaneBox has trained my email program to only show me the most important messages in my inbox. I and similar to what Gmail does, but I think it’s even better. It will have separate email folders for emails that are less important so SaneBox is a really big thing for me.

Bonni: [00:25:06] I use an alternate email client instead of the one that’s built into my Mac. The one that I use is called Airmail. I also use an alternate calendar app it’s called Fantastical. I’m mentioning these just because when I think about frictionless systems, the people who really go out to build the best calendar app or the best email client, they’ve typically put so much thought into it and it’s worth researching to find out if there’s another one out there that might be able to meet your needs better than the one you’re doing.

Bonni: [00:25:38] And Dave, I have two more and then I’ll give you a chance to mention one or two things. So the next thing is recipes. As Dave is well aware, I am quite happy with my purchase of the InstaPot which is a pressure cooker that is all the rage. I keep my recipes in an app that is available on Windows, Android, the Kindle Fire tablets, on iOS and on the Mac called Paprika.

Bonni: [00:26:05] And it’s amazing, you go to a Web site a Web page that has a recipe on it. You copy that link into Paprika and it sucks all the fields over into the right place so the directions go in the right place, the number of serving go in the right place, the ingredients go in the right place. And of course if you want to double the number of servings it makes all the adjustments for you so it’s great. And then Dave’s got it on his phone. Dave’s got his computer so he can also add recipes to our collection and cook off of one central family recipe collection.

Bonni: [00:26:37] And then I also have a Pinterest board for meal prep and for my InstaPot recipes and sites take them from Pinterest and often move them over to Paprika once they become a favorite. Dave, what are some things that come to your mind that we haven’t talked about yet that are helping you reduce the friction in your life?

Dave: [00:26:54] I echo everything you’ve said. The other thing that I try to do and we do as a family is really run paperless as much as we can and keep everything digitally. I’m the person in the family who tends to handle bills and tax returns on paper coming in through the mail and all that. And so one thing that has been hugely helpful to us is a scanner that’s called the ScanSnap scanner, it is a document scanner. There’s two different kinds of scanners for those of you who’ve had any experience with scanners, one is a scanner like a flatbed scanner where you would use it to scan really high quality photos. This is not that, this is purely a document scanner, it’s really designed to capture documents and digitize them. Most people would do it in PDF, which is what we do.

Dave: [00:27:38] And so anything that comes into our house that is a bill, mail, a document, receipt we’re going to need for tax returns eventually, all of that goes through our ScanSnap scanner. It PDFs it, it gets it on my desktop and then I file it into a digital folder and you know shred the original and that has really been helpful because I do more than this. But what you could do is- that’s all you really need to do and you could just save the files in whatever folder you save them in because the scanners today, the modern scanners like ScanSnap OCR everything, The optical character recognition.

Dave: [00:28:19] And so as long as it’s in the text of the document you’re scanning, you can search for that later on whatever platform you’re using it on. So I use a Mac and so I can if I want to track down a bill from nine months ago I just type in the name of the company and it’ll come up with all the receipts. And it’s very easy to track that down. I do a little more anming just to make it easier for me to track something and find it. But it’s really powerful and I certainly encourage you to check it out.

Dave: [00:28:48] There’s also for those of you who have iPad’s, there is a really good book called Paperless by David Sparks. He talks through this process of like turning your household into more of a digital digital paperless lifestyle versus trying to track lots of papers and keeping file cabinets as many of us have done over the years. So I certainly recommend Paperless as a starting point. You can read it on the iPad and he has a PDF version of the book as well. And it’s definitely worth the investment if you want to get a lot of paper out of your life and just have a very frictionless digital system.

Bonni: [00:29:21] We also recently got me ScanSnaps scanner too and I’m enjoying it quite a bit and so is my son who’s just fascinated by it. It’s funny because it hasn’t been sitting on my desk too long so every time he’s up there he wants to open it and close it and try to press the button but it will become more he can ignore it again once he gets more used to it.

Bonni: [00:29:39] Dave, this is the point in the show where we each give some recommendations. And I wanted to give my thanks to Ian Wolf who we talk a lot back and forth on Twitter and I want to thank him for sharing some new music with me. The group is called Delta Rae and I’ve been enjoying every song of theirs that I’ve listened to. But I am going to play a little clip of Delta Rae’s version of Blackbird.

Bonni: [00:30:39] The harmonies are just so beautiful in that song and I love it and again I love all of their music and pass it on to my parents and they love it too so thanks again to Ian Wolf for recommending Delta Ray. Dave, what do you have to recommend for us today?

Dave: [00:30:53] I’m feeling like maybe I mentioned this a long time ago but it’s worth rementioning if I have have mentioned it before. I use a service called Feedbin for my RSS reading. I know many people read their news and information on websites and blogs through RSS and one of the challenges I’ve found, it’s a good problem to have, is there are some wonderful email newsletters that I subscribe to that I love to read and I love to get but end up filling up my email box and so I’m a big fan of good, welldone email letters but at the same time, I don’t really want that in my inbox and yet there’s a bunch of them that really only publish by email and it just doesn’t make sense to subscribe on a web feed for whatever reason.

Dave: [00:31:43] The thing that I love about Feedbin and by the way this is a paid service it’s not something you can get for free like some of the other RSS readers. But the reason I think it’s worth paying for and I think it is $5 a month. But the great thing is if you get an account, it does all the normal RSS things. They also give you an email address so you can do one of two things with that email address. The way I have it set up, is I have my email accounts set up where any time I get something that’s a newsletter, I’ve set up a rule in my inbox to say every time I get an email from this particular person that’s a newsletter, I don’t even want to see it go ahead and delete the email and forward it to this address and so it automatically forwards it to my Feedbin account and it goes into my RSS system.

Dave: [00:32:31] The other way you could do it is you could just sign up for newsletters on the email address that you get from your Feedbin account and it would go right in there. And what I’ve been enjoying is at night when I do my reading, both books and RSS feeds, and I’ll pull up my iPad in the evening. I can just go through and I can read the newsletter emails and they’re not there bothering me and catching my attention during the workday in my inbox. But they’re there to really dedicate the time to read when I’ve got the time to read. So I just found that to be a really helpful hack to get some of those valuable emails but things that I don’t necessarily want to see during the workday day off my radar screen. But still in a place that I can enjoy them when I’ve got the time to read.

Bonni: [00:33:13] Recently I kept braiding all these articles about the resurgence of RSS because it seemed like it had kind of gone out of style recently and now people are starting to discover just how convenient it is to have all the different news sources, peoples blogs the want to read all coming in to one place and then being able to press that mark all as read when it gets to be a little too large of a list and you want to start over again.

Bonni: [00:33:39] Before we close out the show, I do want to say again a big thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring today’s episode and for making such a great piece of software and service that saves Dave and I and so many others so much time.

Bonni: [00:33:53] And Dave, thanks to you for being back on the show today and for sharing your ideas about reducing friction and our lives.

Dave: [00:34:00] Thanks for the opportunity to be here. It was fun.

Bonni: [00:34:03] If you have yet to subscribe to the Teaching in Higher Ed e-mail, speaking of e-mails, you’ll only get once one week and it will have the links to all the things that Dave and I talked about and the most recent blog post that I wrote as well.

Bonni: [00:34:18] You can subscribe at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe.

Dave: [00:34:23] I should probably set it up so your weekly e-mails go into my RSS feed too, I had it set up like that before somehow they still come to my inbox so.

Bonni: [00:34:35] Maybe you just want to know right away when it comes out.

Dave: [00:34:37] Well that’s why I have had them go to my inbox but now I think I’ll probably read them sooner if they go into my weekly thing. Probably we don’t need to figure out in the closing for everyone.

Bonni: [00:34:45] Probably not. I will say there’s some great episodes coming in that just the two hundreds are just going to keep on being great with Teaching in Higher Ed. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.

Dave: [00:34:55] Take care everyone.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.