Episode transcription

(Be aware this transcription was done by AI and might contain some mistakes)

Anne Trager (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to the Human Pulse Podcast where we talk about living well with technology. I'm Anne Trager.

Fabrice Neuman (00:06)
And I'm Fabrice Neumann.

Anne Trager (00:08)
We are recording on March 9th, 2025.

Fabrice Neuman (00:11)
Human pulse is never longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.

Anne Trager (00:16)
So Febrice, I had a conversation the other day with some people about tech in the home, IOT. One person was a total minimalist, like with nothing but a phone and a wired computer. And then I started listing our devices, the computers, the screens, the routers, the Siri, the Apple TV, the damn vacuums, which we talk about in one of the previous episodes, the smart locks, the smart cameras, and I'm sure I've forgotten some things. So this got me thinking about how much I actually love technology and also about how much I really kind of hate it sometimes. You know, those moments when I slip into that minimalist, give me a broom mode. And again, I refer you to the previous podcast episode where we talk about that. We will link it to show notes.

Fabrice Neuman (00:57)
Yeah

Anne Trager (01:10)
So today I thought we could talk about some aspects of this tech love, tech overwhelm thing that happens. And I'm sure it doesn't only happen to me. I mean, I see it in my coaching practice a lot. I see that technology everywhere is really breaking down weird limits between time and space. It's changing our expectations. It's changing our behaviors.

And it's providing us with this endless flow of information. It's also disembodying interactions. There are also things like new technology showing up absolutely every day and changing how we interface with the world. So that's a lot.

Fabrice Neuman (01:50)
Yeah. Well, so first thing I'd like to ask you, why the heck did you try and list all the technology things we use at home? Because obviously it's a lot, partly because I love tech too and it's even so it's my job, right? So I test and review stuff and even as you described, I love it too and I get frustrated sometimes because I, know, like for I mean, in a period nowadays, like these days, I'm juggling between three or four different phones and it can be a pain, you know, because I don't have all the same information on every phone. So, okay, that's what I do. I can deal with it. But the thing is I can see what you describe also in my customers who try to juggle a bit with their... tech because they use a phone and just changing the phone going from one phone to the next can be to say the least or just get the right password for the right service. So it's hard and I think you hinted at the fact that on top of that it changes ever so rapidly.

And I don't think it's gonna change so I think we need to ready for that.

Anne Trager (03:13)
You're right. And one of the things that is happening is this super rapid pace of change, change. Things are going faster and faster and we are not going to escape it. We don't need any statistics at all to actually feel the uptake in that pace of change. I don't think, I think everybody in business, in personal life, wherever is feeling that things are going faster now. And that we need to learn new tools and we need to do more online and we actually need to understand these new technologies. That said, I thought I could put it into perspective. It took 2.4 million years to control fire and then to use it for cooking.

Fabrice Neuman (03:49)
Yes, please.

Anne Trager (03:56)
It only took 66 years to go from the first flight for humans to then fly to the moon. Okay, that's a pretty big change in pace. And it took a mere 10 months to double the number of organizations using Gen. AI regularly. And that statistic dates from last year, so I'm sure it's shorter than that now. People are using it all the time. It's going really, really fast, so much faster that... I can barely comprehend it and it makes me feel a little winded. So tell me, how do you keep up?

Fabrice Neuman (04:31)
The best answer I have to that is that I don't. Because you can't. For me, it doesn't mean that the cognitive load is that much lighter, just to know that you can't. As an example, as for the generative AI tools we talk about a lot, I made a point to use only one after losing so much time trying to...try them all, right? We talked about that already and what it meant was that I had to accept the fact that sometimes I would get not the right answer or not as good an answer as I could get using another tool instead of the one I want to focus on. So I don't know if you have this kind of reflexes as well.

So there was a point like starting, you know, basically we all started all being the tech geeks we are, followed all the Gen.ai tools appearing and tried to test them—chatgpt and perplexity and Claude and deep seek and Mistral and what have you. And then you want to try them and compare them and see what, which one is the best for which task. For example, you always said for that, that Claude AI was, you know, from Anthropic was better at writing. And so you use that more for writing.

But then it's such a load to try and think first. So which one would be the best for the task at hand? I retreated from that. So I said, okay, I told myself I'm going to focus on chat GPT. So on top of that, the idea behind it was for me to make sure that chat GPT learns from me, knows me better after a while. And so it can actually use answers that are better suited for my needs. I'm still on the fence whether it was a good choice. I don't know. I will report back maybe in a few months.

Anne Trager (06:41)
Well, you bring up two points. The first is FOMO, fear of missing out on something. We want to try it all. We want to make sure that we get it all and get the best. And I actually have a trick for that, which I will mention a little bit later on. So please listen all the way until then for the FOMO tip. But there's something else that you talk about, which is choice. And choice is something that I connect with filtering.

Fabrice Neuman (06:46)
Indeed.

Anne Trager (07:08)
we all need to make choices at some point we need to choose what we're going to focus on. Our mind does this on a regular basis because our mind is actually faster, more energy efficient than a lot of these computer tools we're using. We do not have access to the same database but our minds are really incredible and we are filtering permanently because the amount of actual data that our sensory organs take in every second is huge. so one of the things the brain does immediately is to filter through it, to pay attention only to what's important. And basically, if I simplify tremendously, what our mind does is that it's going to first filter based on survival. So anything that could be perceived as a gets first attention always, and it always will. Thank goodness, this is how we survive.

Fabrice Neuman (07:59)
Hmm.

Anne Trager (08:02)
Then going to, the second level filter is based on our goals. So as soon as we set goals, the brain knows where to put its attention.

I think we've all had that experience where, a child in our circle of friends says, I want to have a stuffed purple unicorn dog, whatever. And you're like, yeah, OK. And you walk by that toy store once a week, and you've never seen a stuffed purple unicorn dog.

And you're like, what am I going to do? Am I going to have to make it? Where am going to find it? You want to make the kid happy, right? And then all of sudden you go to the park and you see that seven kids with a stuffed unicorn purple dog. And you walk by the store and you see it there. And you go to another store and you see it there. It's not that it didn't exist before. It's that you weren't looking for it. It wasn't among your goals. So as soon as we set a goal, well, the brain adjusts and starts seeing things. That will help us reach those goals.

And this is really important when there's so much going on. I think with regard to all this tech, it's the same thing. We have to be careful what our goals are. The other day I sat down to hash out a blog post idea I had. And I obviously wasn't clear enough in my own mind to begin with about what I wanted to do because it's a week later and it is no longer a blog post. It is an entire offer, new offer for my clients that's...

I'm hashing out because I went down a rabbit hole because I wasn't clear enough with myself about what I wanted to be doing there and and I came up with so many good what I the help of the AI generative AI tool I was using came up with all these really incredible ideas and I just wanted to go and go further doesn't do it all so then it comes back to me and I wanted to work it out and make it better and turn it into something that really adds value. And here I am, it's not finished yet.

Fabrice Neuman (10:05)
Hmm.

Yeah, that can be quite the rabbit hole, which I think we shouldn't dig any further. But it happens to me too. The thing is, falling into a rabbit hole, it happens all the time, whether you're using AI or not, right? So sometimes you start, you think about something and then, it could be also called the, hey squirrel. Because you're trying to focus on something and then all of a sudden your mind, you know, escapes and, and, and go somewhere else. So sometimes the best way is to actually follow the squirrel a bit. So, so you are sure you put it aside, right? So AI can be, can, can do that. I'll give a, an example. So at the end of this podcast of, what AI can do to help us. think there are several examples of things that we can do today or soon, hopefully, and we'll see how it goes.

Anne Trager (11:10)
Well, in addition to this, you know, rabbit hole syndrome or follow the squirrel or whatever, we should come up with some kind of very clever name for that?


Anne Trager (11:24)
Yeah, I don't know. Very funny.

That's a great. So in addition to that, there's also something about the multiplication of tools that is

Well, that can lead to overwhelm. That's what I'm seeing. If we just talk about communication channels, there's a multiplication of communication channels. All over the place you have email and text and, you know, let's see, Slack and, Signal and telegram and I don't know I don't use them whatsapp. I don't know I don't use them all because I get so overwhelmed so quickly this is me. In trying to actually where to put my attention we talked about earlier that part of where you put your attention is through the goals that you have and then if everybody you're communicating with for work and your personal life is using another communication channel what do do?

Fabrice Neuman (11:56)
Heh. Heh.

Anne Trager (12:20)
So in another group of people, we were talking about privacy and Signal came up as a potential good messaging tool in terms of privacy. And I don't think we want to go into that here today. However, was like, sounds, the arguments were very convincing. I was like, maybe I should go to Signal. And then I'm like, wait a second.

Who do I know who's on Signal? That means I have to, that's another place I have to look. I already have, seven different email and addresses and I have a bunch of people on WhatsApp and then there's a bunch of people on Slack and then if I add Signal, mean, what do I do? my goodness. And then some people actually communicate on social media. Actually, I do too because I communicate on LinkedIn. So that's another one. Even with the Gen AI.

Fabrice Neuman (13:07)
Hmm.

Anne Trager (13:12)
Gen AI assistant. I don't even know if you can do that with a Gen AI assistant, you know? Well, and what I want to connect all of my personal communication and professional communication to a Gen AI assistant so that I could keep up. I don't know what the real problem lies in this. This endless flow will not only in the endless flow of notifications.

Because that's the way people handle it is they get notifications, but you get notifications all the time. It's interrupting you all the time. It's a constantly, it's constantly dividing your attention. You can never do anything. So if you look at all of your notifications at one time, well, there are so many of them because you have so many different kinds of communication. mean, it's just overwhelming. People are overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed.

It's hard to concentrate. It's hard to know where to put your information. I mean, where to put your attention in order to get the information. And then when you do get the information, there's just way too much of it. So anyway, my dream has always been of this kind of centralized hub or dashboard for all of my communication and for everything all in once. Now I've managed to consolidate email inboxes a long time ago. That's actually pretty easy to do. And you know,

Now I was thinking as I was thinking about this episode, like that I would love to have all the social and messenger apps all in one place so that I could actually turn it off and on as I choose and not have to deal with an endless flow of interrupting notifications. So I did some snooping and I found out that there are apps out there that do this. Cool. You know, all in, you know, where you can have all of your chat apps all together. And then, and then what happened to me, and this is

Fabrice Neuman (14:43)
Hmph.

Anne Trager (14:55)
Perfectly exemplary of tech overwhelm is I started looking at the apps and I was like, this one does 10 different kinds and 70 different services and 24 different services. And so first of all, I was like overwhelmed immediately by the list of apps that do this. And then I said, well, I should try some for this podcast. And my hands started to sweat and my heart started to beat a little faster. Okay. This is, you know, definite signs of immediate stress and overwhelm.

Fabrice Neuman (15:07)
Yeah. Yeah.

Anne Trager (15:26)
So I'm like, well, actually, I'm going to stop right I'll think about it. And then, then as I sat down and I started my deep breathing, exhaling a little longer than my inhale, all of these things that I do to manage my stress, I made a nice little list for everybody here. I'm going to list them out. I'm going to name them so you can go and check them out. You have something called beeper.com where it says all of your chats in one place. Okay. Another one is meet France F r a n z dot com and it says get back on top of your messaging. Love the love the message. Okay. Another one is, plus dot I am. Okay. It says one app for all your So these things exist. There's another one called shift.com, which is your power browser, reduce your cognitive load. It's like, it's talking directly to me with a browser that connects all your apps and email accounts in one window.

Fabrice Neuman (16:18)
No.

Anne Trager (16:23)
Okay, it's starting to lose me already. Just reading that sentence increases my cognitive load. I'm like, how am I going to do that? How? Because I know I have to connect them all. And then there's another one, which is called text, text, t e x t s dot com. Again, all of your messages in one inbox. Nice. And this one addressed another concern of mine, which is it says privacy first.

Fabrice Neuman (16:29)
Yeah

Anne Trager (16:50)
Okay, privacy. So it got me thinking about privacy. Another one called allinone.im says all messages in one app, same thing, same message, and it's free. And then I'm like, whoa, whoa, it's free. So what's the business model? What are they gonna do with my messages? So it comes back to all of these issues that we're talking about in these podcasts.

Fabrice Neuman (16:54)
Hmm.

Anne Trager (17:14)
Privacy we really have to think about it. What's the business model? What are they doing with my data? Is it safe? How do they connect the text messages? The reason that I use these messaging apps is because they're encrypted So are they still going to be encrypted what information is being shared and I go on and on and on I I I actually sat down again to say no I really am going to test one or two of them to talk about it and and I started reading a privacy policy and

Fabrice Neuman (17:32)
Yeah.

Anne Trager (17:43)
and I didn't get any further. So there we go. That's for today. I'm not saying these apps aren't safe for their privacy. I haven't figured that out yet. I don't know which one to recommend. And if you want to in one place, well, why not? I don't know. What are your thoughts, Fab?

Fabrice Neuman (17:44)
Well, so many things to unfold here. First of all, I don't want to be the downer, but none of these apps work the way you think they do. Also, as a side note, you need to know that beeper and texts.com are the same app now because they were bought by Auttomatic, the makers of WordPress, in the hope of actually...proposing this offering this kind of all-in-one messaging app. I would say that I'm not sure it's a good idea to try to have all-in-one because thing is sometimes, so the different channels also have a purpose sometimes. So you have a channel or probably more commonly several channels for your professional life and several channels for your personal life. And sometimes you want to be able to shut out one of those, you know, part of your life so you can concentrate on the other one. So if you have everything in one app, then it would require to go deep in their settings to make sure that depending on the time of day or the day of the week, you get notification for this and not for that and stuff like that. It's way more efficient, I would say, to just close one app or a couple of apps than trying to go into those deep settings. As for privacy, I think your concern is very valid because messaging app like Signal, obviously, is very well known.
by and recognized by everyone that it's a very secure channel. But if you go through another app, then you basically have to give your credentials to an intermediary so your messages can go through. So I don't think it's a good idea either. To as another side note, the conversation we had in that group, know, it's within this Tech Connect Europe group that we host every Thursday.

I will put a link in the show notes. One of the participants said, yeah, so I wanted to make sure that all my messages were really private. We had the discussion as you mentioned. But then my question was right away, okay, is there being more private? if a bit, maybe even more because you won't be able to communicate with everybody.

So it's private because you'll be alone basically. And so this is always balance to find between privacy and also how to be able to use the tools with the people you want to communicate with.

Anne Trager (20:49)
So my big takeaway is to be yourself.

Fabrice Neuman (20:51)
Well, there was a quote unquote social media app called social.ai where you can have different conversations with several other quote unquote people which are characters, personalities, which are all AI. So you're always alone in that social app. So you might want to try that.

Anne Trager (21:17)
You know, in my head, I have a whole bunch of different personalities too.

Fabrice Neuman (21:22)
So all of this to say that the all-in-one thing never works, I think, also because all those messaging apps, they all want to create silo for you to stay in because that is their business model. Having you using their app so they can know a bit more about you, somewhat use your data even though a whole lot of those apps, are end-to-end encrypted as you say, so they cannot read the content of your messages, but they know where you are, at least the country, when you're using the app the most, so not during the night, but maybe blah blah blah. So it's always some kind of pieces, even small pieces of information that they can harvest and use for their own... advantage because all those tools are always makes me think, to end on that subject, I don't know if you know the XKCD website. And so they produce every week or several times a week. So comic strips with stick figures. So you can go to xkcd.com and you'll see what they publish, but this one that stuck with me for years, it probably has been published 15, 20 years ago, I don't know. And you have like three boxes in that comic strip. The first one says situation there are 14 competing standards. And then you have two stick figures talking to each other. 14, how ridiculous. We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases. The other stick figures say, yeah, let's do that. And then soon after that, the situation is there are now 15 competing standards. And that's the history of technology we're talking about. So it's the number 927. I will put a link in the show notes as well. So it's always like this, you know, and as far as messaging is concerned, it's really too bad that we don't have one standard. The only one standard that really exists is the SMS standard, but it's very limited. It's now slowly replaced by RCS, which gives a bit more features like group messaging and higher definition photo sharing and stuff like that, which basically those two features are the reasons why we have all those other messaging apps because they wanted to go further than SMS, which is a very, very old standard. So maybe RCS is one way out to get, because RCS works everywhere on every smartphone. But once again, it's another standard on top, or in addition to all the other ones.

Anne Trager (24:11)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's another standard and we're not only talking about communication on smartphones, we're talking about all of these messaging apps that we have through social media and through, you know, on the desktop and work related and whatever. Okay, well, so what do we do about it? You know me, I'd like to have my practical, how do we deal with distraction and information overload? Because that's what we're talking about.

Fabrice Neuman (24:35)
Yes.

Anne Trager (24:57)
I take away from this that it's not necessarily having another app that I can play with and go down into the depths of the settings in order to make it work the way I want to work because I would never do that. I'm not that interested in the details. That is more about controlling. Well, it's about the off button. My favorite feature of any app of any device is the off button. It's just to turn it off when I don't want to be overwhelmed. That's it.

Best feature ever. Second point then would be to have really clear goals as to why you are going to do whatever it is you're going to do and clear up the goals before you start your activity. And the third is my famous how to deal with FOMO. But I want to do it all. But I want to do it all. I want to be distracted. We are distraction machines. We've talked about it in a previous episode.

So what I like to do is to actually give myself time on my calendar to play around. So when I feel like, I want to go down that rabbit hole, I can say, well, no, I'm not going to do it now. I will do it in my designated FOMO time or in my designated distraction time. And that allows me to actually calm down that feeling like I'm missing out on something because I'm not going to miss out on it.

Fabrice Neuman (26:10)
Yes.

Anne Trager (26:21)
I have too many things I want to play with and so I have to set a clear goal and then focus in on whatever it is that I want to play with and that's okay because just the time of waiting, knowing, you know, calming down the fear of missing out, I actually don't really care so much about what I'm going to miss out on.

So that's the third one. The fourth one is this whole thing about cognitive load. There are a lot of different ways we can reduce our cognitive load.

Not having so many tabs open can help. So closing tabs, closing windows, reducing clutter on your desk, simplifying your processes, simplifying what you're doing at any one time, so monotasking, turning off the news. All of these are ways to reduce our cognitive load that don't depend on integrating a unified messaging app.

Another way you can do it, and that's I find really helpful for myself, for my clients, is to batch communication. I've had people who will set a time for communication where they, rather than doing it all the time, they set specific times during the day. One of my recent clients said that that saved her one and a half days of time in her week, I asked her to estimate how much time she saved. So what she did, what she was doing before is she was, you know, responding to messages all day long and responding to, that's everybody else's agenda all day long. And she didn't have time to do her actual job, part of which was responding to the messages, but not all of it. And because she was distracted all the time, she wasn't getting as much done.

And so when she started batching her communications and responding to bids at a set time, I don't remember if it was once or twice a day, whatever it was pertinent for her job situation, she was able to recuperate time to actually do her job because she wasn't interrupted all the time. And she estimated it as a day and a half worth of work that she was now able to get into her week.

Fabrice Neuman (28:29)
Hmm.

Interesting. Yeah, that's incredible. I would add to that just one thing, which is to accept just that you won't be able to know it all or to do it all. I'm reminded me of a conversation I had through Blue Sky with someone.

Anne Trager (28:38)
That's pretty incredible by just one shift.

Fabrice Neuman (28:52)
Who said that he was happy that a new app will soon come to better manage Bluesky and asked him what it meant. He said, well, so because the Bluesky already has an official app and he says, well, what's missing is that I cannot have a synchronized.

Timeline between all my devices when I read my blue sky feed whether I'm on my phone or my tablet Because what he meant was that I want to read it all he's a completionist and I think What a load you know because

Anne Trager (29:29)
Yeah.

Fabrice Neuman (29:31)
You always think that, as soon as you're done reading, there's new posts, so you have to go back. will leave him do that, and I'm not doing that. And it's been a while now that I've...told myself that's okay I can't read at all that's all right maybe to finish on a positive note I wanted to and well I'll put the link in the show notes as well to call your attention on to a YouTube video so it's a video from a youtuber called the tech chap and mind you it's so it's a sponsored video by the smartphone brand Honor. And it's from, know, so he was in for a mobile world congress. I was there too. so Honor is this integrates AI in their phones. In what he, at the beginning, just watched the first couple of minutes or something. He's in a taxi cab and he talks to his smartphone saying, so,

I have time for lunch. Please find me a table and book a table for me for lunch in not so far from here. And he stumbles a bit and like near whatever place. and a Spanish restaurant. And you see on the screen that the phone does it all and he gets there and the reservation is made. This is what AI could offer, right? So obviously in this video, it works somewhat flawlessly because it's a sponsored video. So he probably made several attempts, but still this is the goal to have an AI assistant actually helping you instead of digging the rabbit hole for you.

Anne Trager (31:19)
Well, I'm really looking forward to that and I watched the video until the end and it's really interesting to see what the possibilities are and it sounds really, really wonderful. And again, for now I haven't experienced that and I would love to have an assistant who does that for me. I would want to put in more specifics about the kind of restaurant that I'm looking for and presumably you can do that. So it sounds wonderful.

Fabrice Neuman (31:25)
Yes.

Anne Trager (31:46)
Well, that's it for episode 13. Thank you all for joining us. Please visit humanpulsepodcast.com for links to this episode and past episodes.

Fabrice Neuman (31:57)
And thank you for subscribing, reviewing wherever you listen to your podcasts. helps other people to find us.

Anne Trager (32:03)
And please do share this with one person around you who may or may not be having tech overwhelm. Maybe they have a really good solution for it. I'd love to hear it. See you in two weeks.

Fabrice Neuman (32:14)
Bye everyone.