 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Aloha, this is Matt Darnell, as usual joined with Greg Jackson. We're with Compto.Cloud, a local IT company specialized in Microsoft deployments and voice over IP and take care of networks. Today is the final part of our series on managing email inboxes and keeping those under control and have that. So if you missed parts one and two, definitely go and check those out. A lot of great info. But as usual, we're going to get started with current events here. And the first one, I thought this was really interesting. And it's about ASUS on the motherboard, because there's been talk about Chinese had, the Chinese manufacturers had put some spy chips, so to speak, on in-computer so that they could take remote control and do all kinds of things. And it ended up being a lot about nothing. But this has actually been proven that a manufacturer on the board without asking anybody, this motherboard, which is the main part of your computer that does the thinking and storage, will install software without you knowing. So you buy this, you install your windows, you get everything going. And without even you knowing it, they're going to be putting software on there and they don't really tell you about it. They'll tell you what it's going to do, how it's going to work. And I just think this is the beginning of every manufacturer doing those kinds of things. Have you worked with some of the old laptops that used to have like a mini OS that you could kind of, it was like a pre-boot OS? Probably about ten years ago. I thought that was going to be the new hot thing. Sounds like that. My first laptop, I was a crank on the side. A magneto? Yeah, you had to do that to get it going. The closest thing I can think of what you were doing was, this was back in the day and you could watch a DVD without actually launching the operating system. Yeah, so it wouldn't have to boot up into windows and do all those kind of things. I don't know if it was a separate co-processor, because that would do it. Linux would be great for that. Absolutely. Just have a little subsystem, doesn't use much battery, doesn't use those kind of things. But to me that's scary, that all of a sudden this program shows up. They don't prompt you, they don't do anything, it just shows up. So business computers... We will take care of you, and never mind those droids. Well, and that's an apple. An apple kind of mentality that we know what's best for you. Don't ask questions, just go ahead. We will take care of you. And here's an example of just the world. We can't start to show because my pencil's got a charge. It's got nothing to do with the apple, but it's just ironic. My pencil's not working. Oh, it's not charged. I thought you were going to use it to fan yourself. That too, but almost like back in geometry class when you run out of lead for your mechanical pencil and you're trying to bum a little stick of lead off people. But yeah, so that's really scary. So if you are the kind of person that builds PCs, definitely look at their reviews at the motherboards. And even some hard drives. When you buy a USB hard drive from Costco or from Best Buy or anywhere, you plug it into your computer. It tries to launch and put their program on there. Yeah. And then once they do that, of course, they're going to set their homepage to their website and they're going to use their browser and their search engine, those kind of things. I think I understand kind of why they're doing it, right? I mean, you want to be able to launch, you would install this thing, not have to go search and spend a lot of time for drivers. My guess is they're just embedding a bunch of drivers into a RAM chip or something. But should there be some kind of notification that we are doing that? I'm not saying it's good. I'm not saying the software is itself. It might be the best thing since sliced medication is key. Yeah, absolutely. So I thought that was really scary. Now, this next thing, it's got to be the next step, right? I mean, thousands of people in Sweden are getting a chip implant in their hand and their wrist in different places or where they want to have it. And they use it for identification. And it's the same, you know, animals get chipped all the time. I mean, that's very commonplace. An animal will get chipped. So you take them to the vet. The vet just does a scan. They can, you know, for lost dogs or lost cats or anything like that. They can tell who the owners are. But these bio implants, you know, so when you go to Starbucks, instead of, you know, taking your phone and doing it over the thing, just put my hand down. It's not fingerprints. It's not anything like that. It's just that chip that I have. I read this article and I'm thinking, you know, 4,000 people get this. How many people are in Sweden anyway? So I looked and it's like 9 million, right? So it's like, you know, less than half of a half of a half of a percent or something. Really interesting, but I don't, I won't be volunteering anytime soon. No. I watch maybe, I mean, you know. Because why? I want to, you know, I don't want technology inside me. I mean, because it's RFID. Yeah. So as you walk down the mall, you know, it's not real difficult. If you get close to something, they can just buzz you and ping you back. Well, what happens, I mean, look at now. You have a lot of these DOD contracting locations. They make you turn in your cell phone. Why wouldn't they, you know, at some point, I mean, in the military, they say you're a government property. Are you allowed to do that for your, you know, your health records? I don't, I think it's going to be a tough hill to climb to get everybody on board with it. Well, I mean, and that's interesting what you just said, because, you know, I go to the facilities all the time and you've got to put your phone, your keys in this little lock box and have that there. I think they don't want, you know, they search my laptop bag, you know, USB sticks, you know this, so that all I can bring is a laptop and the thing, I take out any SD cards. Sometimes they take your screwdriver. That has happened. But with this kind of technology, how much data can be stored on there that I could download whatever I wanted? I mean, on this, from my screen, you know, through, you know, somehow I get the data onto the chip. I'm walking it out. Exactly. So just this, the storage is just getting so crazy, small and dense that, that, yeah, I mean, the things that, I mean, whether they have a microphone in there and they're able to record and somehow it's able to be powered through the, you know, through our nervous system, you know, we're electrical here in our body. Well, they had the shoes out before. They were actually powering devices as you walked. It would charge. Really? Just like the heel of something would be a, no. Yeah, as you walk, as you walk, you would, you would actually produce some kind of power. You'd store it and then you'd use it for like wearable electronics like glasses. I mean, that stuff's been, that's almost ready for primetime by now. So it's just a wire going up your leg, in your eye glasses. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, that's all we, I mean, well, in the movie, The Matrix, you know, I forget the person, but you know, she calls them copper top. We're all just big batteries, you know, that's all we do. Just keep us fed and we will produce electricity. Okay. So now, let me start this video here. If we could keep the screen on the video. This was one of the company and I showed this to both of my sons and I said, on a scale of, you know, one to 100, how real do you think it is? The younger one said it was probably about 80 to 90, but the older one said, man, which one of these two is the computer generation? When you look at the facial, some of the things, you know, but like there's a laugh here coming up that is, I would have swore it's just a low-res camera. Right. On a person, the way that they're able to do this now, I mean, actors got to get worried. I mean, if you can have, I mean, you know, I don't know how much you have to pay someone to get this, but pretty soon you're going to be able to do this on your watch, you know, to have the kind of rendering power for that. So it's just so amazing, you know, what they're able to do with AI and impersonate people, you know, and all those kind of things are just going to be just crazy easy. This took, you know, 20 computers up in the cloud, you know, rendering this for a month, but next year it's going to be, you know, five computers in a week and soon it's going to be real time. This reminds me a little bit about the, when I worked in the casino business many years ago, they had a stream of slot machines and they would, when you wanted like a drink or you wanted to book a hotel or something, they would have a call button on the slot machine and then a camera would come up and they'd basically have a call center, a video, it was a one-way call center, you'd hit a tendon or whatever the button was and then you'd see them on your slot machine screen and then you could book stuff. I don't think it ever took off, but imagine if you could do that for like, you know how you have bots today, right? You might go into Sprint and ask a question and you're like, oh, do you have a question about billing? And you know, you might be six, ten texts in, you're like, wait a second, this is not a human. So I could see this definitely being the new MatriD. Well, they had that now. I mean, it's what they call it, a Turing test, where they, you know, you need to figure out is that a human I'm chatting with or that, but when you couple speech synthesis with that kind of real time, it's just... Disney should be all over that. No, I mean, I can see coming up, you know, into a building and you just got a screen right there and then eventually, you know, you can, you know, ask for an attendant, but this is the automated center of the future. You know, have a note of those kind of things. Well, Conica Minolta's got one. It's on wheels. It'll actually follow you around the office and that's pretty interesting. Like the mail bot. Yeah. All right. So this was huge news in my household. Huge news. My son came home and said, YouTube is down. YouTube is down for an hour. So I don't want to, I mean, this is all the pay channels. This is YouTube. It was nighttime though, right? It was right after school. Well, our time, it was three or four years. Okay. I mean, in the mainland, it was definitely prime time and it's amazing that one of the interesting... I encourage you to go out there and insert that article. There's a bunch of them out there. But what ticked up, what websites ticked up because YouTube went down? Because people literally, they didn't know what to do with themselves. I mean, Facebook went up. Twitter went up. I mean, every other site on the web went up. That's being nice, right? No, I mean, so I'm sure it costs millions and millions and millions of dollars and they're going to give credits for that. But nobody went outside. I remember when the power went out, when I was back in the day, we would go outside when the power went out or that type of thing. So YouTube going down in my household was, oh my God, YouTube's down. I mean, they get their homework assignments. The teachers do things on YouTube and they have to do research on YouTube and science, you know. So it was pretty shocking to me how, you know, I have a ninth grader and a sixth grader. How they reacted. How does this happen? How can YouTube go down? So I thought that was really interesting. Did you see any of the stories about why it went down? I haven't done that, no. Did somebody kick the plug? No, I haven't heard anything from like ICANN problems because a transfer of, I guess, domain stuff and then I heard something about the moon trying to hide life. It's just, it's right. The Russian hackers. That too. They're just getting ready for election day. This was like a preem... Snowden told us about this, didn't he? It was a proof of concept to have that there. But yeah, that was scary. Okay, last thing real quick. So this phone here, and we're looking at some of the prices, you know, it's over $2,000 for this phone and with the 512 gigs of storage there. I mean, how much will you pay for a cell phone that's wrapped in leather, got a high-speed processor, four cameras? I'm not the right person to ask. I paid $1,000 for mine. Right? But I mean, that's the crazy thing. I mean, $1,000 for a cell phone. And when you think of what, if you go to Costco and you buy a nice laptop for 600 bucks, right, screen ten times as big, battery, full-size key, you know, all of those things. I mean, so it's like Apple with the iPhone got us convinced that that's okay to spend $1,000 on a cell phone. And so when is this going to be a $2,000 phone? I mean, and so... How much is this one? This one's over $2,000. It's like $2,000, $23,000. How do I get one? How do you get one? I mean, here's the money, right? Make it rain, make it rain! But absolutely. It's, this one was... Huawei? Huawei, or how do you say that? Huawei. But it was, it's a Porsche design. It's a conjunction with Porsche. Oh, if you're buying a Porsche then. You should just throw it in with the car. It's easy, it's easy, it's easy. Yeah, so I thought that was just interesting. That's, now there's a $2,000 phone. And this isn't like Diamond Crusted, you know, $10,000 Vanity phone. I mean, this is just, I guess the materials, they thought they thought they could get that. So that was interesting. So again, this is Matt Darnell and Greg Jackson with Supporting Your Tech. We'll be back in a minute and help you organize your inbox. Aloha. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. If you're not in control of how you see yourself, then who is? Live above the influence. That's you. I want to know. You watch my show. I hope you do. It's on Tuesdays at one o'clock and it's out of the comfort zone. And I'll be your host, R.E.B. Kelly. See you there. Hello, this is Matt Darnell with comfort.cloud, again with Greg Jackson. And you saw the commercial right there, R.E.B. Kelly? It's just not bad. She's got this whole Think Tech thing that doesn't make her million. She could sing for a living. If you ever want to clear out a room and get me to start singing, it will be cleared out. Okay, so what's your favorite song? What's my favorite song? If you had to sing one, what would it be? My Way by Sinatra. That's a good song. That's a good one, right? That or We Are The Champions by Queen. One of the two, right? I paid my dues. Okay, so let's talk about email inboxes. So far, we have an acronym, MOP, right? And the M was Minimize. The O was Organize. So what does P stand for in our email world here? Prioritize. So we've heard... I've been kind of in management for a good chunk of time. And one of the things we used to talk about was how do you prioritize work? And oftentimes, in the technology world, it was urgency and impact. And Stephen Covey talks about urgent or important or not urgent, not important. Did you ever have one of those million-dollar Franklin Covey organizer things? You want me to go get it? Yeah, it's in my Jeep. How much did that cost? I think, you know... It's like anything else. We don't get you on the leather-bound part. It's the fillers. Every year, right? You got to buy new calendars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. That was probably... A couple hundred bucks a month, right? Easy. Do you still use it? No. A lot of people, for some reason... I really like manual paper, but for some reason I write too much. So I need more space. No, I don't run out of ink. I've got a special pen that doesn't run out of ink. Yeah, but can it write upside down? Yes, it can write upside down. I'm sorry, I just drive you too. Yes, I like my pen. So I usually stick with the regular pads and I write stuff down. I try to stay away from the technology. Prioritize. So the thing is that when we talk about not important and urgent, it's the same thing applies when you're looking at your email. There are things coming in. There's got to be a way to direct traffic. So when you're... You could use the 5Ws to do it. I wrote down a few things here just for some notes. Who is it going to affect? I'm from Vegas, so I would use the term whale to be VIP. Some of our customers... Basically me. You would be a VIP. Absolutely. A whale would be a customer and it would be a chunk of our revenue stream. Sure. Those things really matter. You can set up alarms so when the emails come in, they can go into a box. We talked a little bit about that, how you organize it. But really that prioritization process allows you to dump things either directly into a task or into a specific folder in the mailbox. It allows you to... So when we talked about, now you've got all these folders, prioritizing and you stick them in buckets, your ability to prioritize is dictated by how you prioritize those buckets. So if you have a bucket that says boss or boss 2, most of us have two bosses, one at home, one at work. And then we've got other things like customers. I'm pretty sure if the IRS sent you an email saying that they needed your credit card so that you could pay a bill, a phishing scam. So those are the types of things. If you get a .gov email, there's lots of ways to organize it. But the reality is you do it already. How do you do it? If you don't do it, start doing it. Make sure you prioritize. Use that matrix. The cubby matrix is everywhere on the internet. You can look that up. I use part for the technology part for the important slash urgent. You combine it. It's either one or the other. And then if it's urgent and important, you do it now. If it's not urgent, not important, then you do it in your free time. That's the problem though. Not important, not urgent. Generally, for most people, it means doesn't get done. And the person sending the email, one thing I learned a long time ago in business, asking somebody to do something is 10% of getting it done. The other thing you can do with email is once you send it, when do you follow up? How do you help? From the other side of the thing. Beside marking an urgent or putting the subject yell at all caps, how do you help prioritize other people? Because you don't want to be the boy of Crud Wolf. This is so important. I need to jump on this right now. How do you gauge because there's one thing that emails I want, but if I'm sending the email, how can people do that part? There's different ways. We talked a lot about culture. When you are a part of a building or a part of a culture, it's a lot easier to manage what you're talking about. But if you're in company XYZ, I don't control your schedule, I don't control anything about you, other than I know your email address and I can send an email. We talked about this a little bit but it's really going to depend on if you are trying to elicit something from the other person, you have a couple different options. One is if you don't have any previous history with them and you haven't had a chance to train them this is the best way that I know how to communicate, this is what works for me, then you've got to really reach out to them and say how would you like to be communicated with is email. That's really one of the things that prioritization is that you've got to understand if email is going to be the best way for you to convey your message. I did make a mistake last week, communication is what the listener does, not what the speaker does. There's a whole philosophical argument about why that is, but the reality is that you're waiting for a response back. If you think somebody's going to respond back and you haven't told them that you're expecting something, then that's the feedback you're getting so the communication is, and you can't really make stuff up, you can't assume anything, so when you send something out and you're expecting something back here's the task or here's the idea or the concept and then the response is hey if you have anything to add, please let me know. You've got to say something especially when somebody's not part of your cult you've got to be able to communicate that. It sounds like a lot of work. Hey, if I've got to tell people how to well yeah, you've got to tell people how you communicate. The same thing happens in our technology where you have two end pieces and they're shooting light at each other, you've got to be able to tell them okay well what's, what rate, what frequency, how are we communicating? Yeah, and the one thing I found is that when I send an email, the more people you put on the email it's almost like if you put 10 people on an email, there's three in the two and seven in the CC, it's like they each take a tenth of it. But if you send it to one, if it's really important, I try to, if I wanted to need to tell five people something important, I don't generally create one email and put everybody on. I will send five separate emails because people know hey this is why, this is just for me because I will devalue something. If I'm one of 15 people in the CC column I mean literally without even reading the email, how important is that for me if it's such a shotgun kind of a thing for an organization I'm a member of or that so that's huge. You've seen some of the work I put into really simple cable jobs I'm sitting there putting pictures, I'm writing stuff down. I don't want there to be any confusion so the tip I'd have for that is it's a project management tip which is who does what by when. You've got to start dropping names. You've got 13 people in there who has the action. So let me ask you, do you use smart folders in our outlook? Smart folders? Smart folder B, it's like it's almost like a rule you create a rule so like in my favorites in the left hand side I have all my folders I have a favorite section up on the top and so I say any email that comes from you just automatically it's still in my inbox but it's sort of automatic so I have a Jackson folder all those types of things and I have one that's all my unread. So if I click on that smart folder then you only see your own only my unread. How do you like it? That helps a lot because one I'm searching and I have another one that says with attachments and so if I know somebody sent me an attachment I wouldn't go it's easier we email so much if you sent me an attachment two weeks ago it's going to be easier for me to find it by going to my attachments all emails with attachments and then I can just look for have that there. I find that helps a lot with sorting things because I really do try to by the end of the week zero out my I keep my inbox there because I've one of our customers does and just print them all out and then file them. Absolutely that's next week right I got to buy some stock in a tree company but I like to get my unread to zero. You wake up in the morning and you get all those marketing emails and those kinds so I skim through those and then at the end of the week I do one last skim through that control A I don't delete them I just mark them as red so we do that so I'm real vigilant on that and the main reason that I didn't like the deleting it and emptying out the inbox was searching because if I wanted to find something that you sent me a month ago is it in the deleted items is it in other folders because as soon as you switch from search justice folder to a responsible boss I've seen someone to go Greg send me that email again because you can't find it but yes that's great instead of just saying as soon as you say don't search the folder search the entire mailbox I have like 40 gigabytes in my it just takes forever I don't know if I permanently deleted anything in the past 15 years there's never been a need needs to have like 250,000 things in my inbox before I started on my zero inbox thing and I had that there some of the large organizations they steer away from it because of risk management they don't want to hold on to stuff that's true our retention policy is 7 years 7 years in one day I want that thing electronically shredded because they're worried about subpoenas and that kind of stuff so if the lawyer asks for it here's our retention policy we do not have any written copies we don't have any electronic copies I've done a restore of a couple exchange servers back and those can get really complicated so there's another reason for getting flushing stuff out I can imagine that because you've got to load the right OS so the last 45 seconds tell me if you had to sum everything up of the mop what would if someone was going to list a 45 seconds how would they manage their email inbox first of all let's tell them what we told them so we're going to minimize we're going to make sure that we're not using email for everything we're going to organize it so if you're going to keep it you're going to collect the work putting it in the right type of categories make sure you're putting it in the right kind of folders make sure you're doing the right action with it either get rid of it do something with it and the last one of course is prioritizing it the stuff that you're going to do something with it are you doing it now or later who are you doing it for so at the end of the day this is a communication tool and it's not everybody's first it's not everybody's first go-to tool to use so make sure that you're using the tool according to the people that you're communicating with and then of course lastly it's all about culture your culture, your organizational culture and the people that you're working with absolutely, okay great again this is Matt Darnell and Greg Jackson you can find this on the internet or the web web at cometel.cloud in the sky have a great day