Back when smartphones first came out, some (including Francis) asked the question: is a smartphone superior to a knapsack full of gadgets? For example, was a sack with a camera, pda, phone a functional equivalent? If so, did it offer more than convenience? Was there a real improvement in productivity? Since then, the question has been answered by apps which rely and interact with multiple other apps, but the question is still valid. Just because a technology allows something to be done more easily or conveniently, may not mean that it allows for a bona fide improvement in personal productivity. What does a material productivity improvement look like? How can it be measured? (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/116 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you’d like to continue discussing Convenience: Personal Productivity Enabler, or Not?, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Convenience: Personal Productivity Enabler, or Not? Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Art Gelwicks Francis Wade Show Notes | Convenience: Personal Productivity Enabler, or Not? Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vQVofN3YIY How I’m Getting a Smartphone, While Avoiding Crazy Habits Do You Need New GTD Contexts?. Or do you need to stop using them… | by Francis Wade | 2Time Labs Raw Text Transcript Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place. ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your host Ray Sidney-Smith and gousto been out with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:22I’m Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:23I’m Francis Wade. Art Gelwicks 0:24And I’m Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. And in this episode, I’m going to turn it over to Francis to lead us into the conversation. Francis, you had a topic that you wanted us to talk about related to convenience. And so can you explain to listeners your experience and what we’re going to talk about today? Francis Wade 0:46Sure. I’m a I was a late adopter to smartphones. I didn’t have one for a long time. And everyone was raving about how great they were. And I asked the question, why do I need a smartphone. And my initial observation was that the smartphones at the time, which was the early 2000s, mid 2000s, I argued that they were no better than a knapsack of gadgets. So if I had a knapsack with me, and I carried it everywhere, and it had a phone, PDA, GPS, a recording device to record audio, and record and a video camera, the smartphone, which combined those elements into one, my argument was that that wasn’t more productive than my knapsack of gadgets. It was more convenient. And just because they were no bundled into a single device, did not make people more productive against capital P productive, although the convenience could not be argued with. So all the time that the argument was resolved, because there were lots of apps that came out in doo, doo, doo doo time that that had multiple connections between the dif…