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Transcription of interview with Steve Dotto on November 11, 2013.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
Steve Dotto is the host of the television show called Dotto Tech.
He teaches people about technology and how it’s really useful.
He also teaches the course called Inbox Zero and Upgrade to U2.
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Dotto on Arutz Sheva
Radio.
Douglas Goldstein: What is U2?
Steve Dotto: The productivity paradox is hitting us almost squirrelly between the eyes.
All of these tools that are designed to help us get more out of our day often just get
in the way of us actually getting things done and we get caught up in the technology and
we don’t actually get on with the job.
I don’t know if you experience that.
You think about the cost that we pay for free.
If you think about the amount of time that you spend on whatever phone platform you have
in their store, downloading a free app that’s going to make you more efficient and then
trying that app for 3 or 4 days realizing it really doesn’t do it so looking and finding
another app that you download for free.
They are all free so nothing’s lost.
The kind of the modern productivity paradox is this pursued productivity that tends to
get in the way of getting things done.
Douglas Goldstein: Do you feel a lot of people actually worry about that or is it different
between business owners and people who work for a company?
Steve Dotto: I think people look at it in different levels.
I think when we’re busy, we think we’re being productive.
So as an individual doing any work that you’re doing, if you’re spending time even just
kind of fooling around on your phone trying to make something work, you think that you’re
doing something that’s productive.
You think you’re moving the ball downfield when you’re not really.
As a manager and business owner, if you’re looking at that person from a distance, you’re
recognizing the fact that they aren’t indeed engaging in what’s moving your enterprise
forward.
It’s all based on the lens that you’re looking at it through I think.
Douglas Goldstein: Have you find the way to teach people about this who may not be the
business owners?
Steve Dotto: It doesn’t take a lot.
There’s “aha” moments through any of this stuff as you talk to people how they
use this because the bottom line is we’re never taught to use email.
When you started in your first job, they might have set you up with email, you might have
been taught something but you were taught how to access your email, how to download
your email, how to send an email.
You weren’t taught how to manage it, how to organize your folders and organize your
timer on email.
You weren’t taught what good email add it is as far as addressing and using carbon copy
and blind cc in responding and whether or not you should be responding and engaging
in conversations.
You were never taught of any of those techniques and for what is really the most important
communication tool that we have today.
Everybody is at a different space.
It’s at a different place because we’re trust into the job, we start using the tools
without really understanding how the tools work.
We make them fit based on what we’re doing at that particular time as we start to engage
with them then we developed habits around that.
It’s not that we’re lazy or stupid, it’s just that we develop bad productivity habits.
Douglas Goldstein: Are there companies like major companies that will bring in trainers
for their new staff to teach them even the basics?
Steve Dotto: I don’t know if there are major companies that are doing a lot of that.
In researching my own webinar which I deliver which is called Three Steps to Inbox Zero
which is kind of this process that you can go through to get control of your inbox, I
interviewed and talked to a lot of different productivity specialists, some of whom are
engaged on a regular basis and brought into companies to deal with their email culture,
because training new employees is one thing but you train new employees who come in, if
you don’t change the culture that’s existing within that organization, they’re going
to be trapped into the same conversations that everybody else is.
You really have to look at system wide but each of us can do it individually as well.
You can just choose to be far more efficient, far more productive and far more strategic
with how you deal with your communications and save yourself.
At the end of the day, that is going to benefit everybody.
Douglas Goldstein: What are some of the ways that people like to do that?
Steve Dotto: I don’t know if you have read the book by Dave Allen, Getting Things Done.
He is the kind of the guru of modern productivity and everybody who talks about productivity
and getting things done in this [DNA age] is a disciple in some way of Dave Allen.
He really led the way with some really basics, dealing with things responsively, handling
things as you get them, prioritizing, creating a list of priorities.
But set against all of his tools is the fact that the technology today can really make
a big difference as well.
Anybody who is using Gmail as their main email client, most of us are still stuck in this
in the metaphor of putting files inside the folders inside of other folders to create
organizational structures so that we can find things later.
That’s yesterday, today it’s search.
Gmail comes from Google.
Who are Google?
They are the search guys.
Just archive your email without bothering to put it into any folder at all, you can
still find everything.
So all of this organization and dragging things and a lot of us wait to organize our email
because we want to drag things into the folders and then when we’re looking for something,
we click on folders and we look through folders and digital spaces that we’re looking through
a file folder in physical space and we spend an enormous amount of time looking for something
whereas if you just learn to use search properly.
Gmail you can search everything, find anything in instant and have it at your fingertips.
So all of the time that we waste just making everything nice and neat and putting it in
file folders instead of just slamming it into archive as you read it and moving on, that’s
complete time wasted.
Douglas Goldstein: I watched a video that you did on a program called Asana which is
a web-based project management program and for years, I’ve been looking to deal with
this.
Everything I realized that we do is some sort of project.
One thing I like about Asana and something that you brought up in the video was how you
can break things down into their components and then follow step by step.
Doesn’t that sometimes seem to be so amazingly large?
How do you coach people to deal with that?
Steve Dotto: It’s really about mastering tools.
You’ve obviously taken a step into the little of the deeper end with the product like Asana
which by the way is an amazing application, up to 25 users for free so for most of us,
it’s a completely free service.
It’s a completely collaborative tool meaning that you can create to do lists or tasks and
you can share them with your team and you can assign tasks, you can assign dates, and
it will email people reminders.
It’s a great step into the productivity space which doesn’t cost you anything.
But just because it’s free, it means that you have to dive in and you have to start
to really explore the tools.
Back when I did my TV show, for 15 years we produced a show showing people how to use
technology in Canada and the first thing that I would do in every app is I would right click
on everything I could find in the app.
I want to see what the context sensitive menus give me, to see what options I have and that
gives me a framework for how to use the tool.
Many people only left click the mouse on everything and only do what they see on the screen and
they don’t bother figuring out how to integrate it, how to fit it, how to make this tool work
for them.
The bottom line is people don’t bother to learn to use the tool and to explore the tool
and embrace the tool.
They almost look at a lot of technology as a yoke around their neck that they put on,
they drudge their weight through the day not enjoying and not embracing it and then take
that yoke off at the end of the day and not worry about it.
That’s wrong attitude.
You’re never going to get the fullness out of any experience by not exploring what the
potential of that tool is.
So you with Asana, you’re discovering new wonderful ways of making it fit in your life
and some people take that same metaphor, they bring it home and they force their wives to
start taking things like that.
Maybe not so popular but still at least they’re looking at what the tool can do then and understanding
all of the different assets that it brings to the table.
Douglas Goldstein: What is the number one productivity tip that will save people time
each and everyday?
Steve Dotto: The place that we lose the most time everyday is email.
The number one tip and people will blush is they will open an email, they will look at
it and will think “I should do something about that” then they’ll close that email
and they’ll go on to the next email and then a little later on the day, they’ll
put that first email again and look at it and said, “ I should do something.”
Here’s the number one productivity rule.
Open something once and then you have 5 things that you can do with it: you can respond to
it, if it takes 30 seconds or less, you can throw it in the trash, you can archive it,
you can delegate it to somebody else or you can plug it into your system to remind you
to work on later on when you have time.
If you don’t do one of those 5 things, if you don’t take action on every single email
that you open, you lose time and you cost yourself money every single time you open
an email.
Douglas Goldstein: How can people find you and learn about some of your courses?
Steve Dotto: You can find me at www.dottotech.com.
I have a weekly podcast which I produce which talks about general technology issues.
I do free webinars on things like getting controlled with your email, Three Steps to
Inbox Zero and one on massive productivity coming up fairly shortly.
Go there, look for the dates, sign up, take the free webinars which are usually about
an hour long and you can learn some great tips.
Other than that, if you’re interested, we teach some courses downstream.
Just come sign up for the newsletter and have a look at Dotto Tech, we’ve got a lot of
interesting things happening.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host
of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show (Monday nights at 7:00 PM on www.israelnationalradio.com.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S. and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA,
SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE/SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered
at: www.profile-financial.com (02) 624-2788 or (03) 524-0942.
Disclaimer: This document is a transcription and/or an educational article.
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