I hear from people all the time who are confused about which tools to use and how they all fit together. In this day and age, most of us rely on a collection of tools and services to organise our tasks, plan our time and to actually do our work. However, things get tricky when you consider that some tools are quite similar and it's not always clear when you should use what. To help clarify some of these issues so you can get a better handle on your own “technology stack”, I've called in my good friend, Kia (pronounced “Kay”) Kamgar.
Listen to the interview here:
Kia (a.k.a. the Marie Kondo of the tech world) is a member of my VIP program and we first connected on one of our group calls. Since then, he's been an incredible contributor to the group and has a wealth of knowledge to share. Kia is the face behind MacJunky.com where his goal is to “Keep IT simple”. He works with individuals and business owners who are overwhelmed by their tools and helps them to create a simple and effective system.
I had a great conversation with Kia where we cover:
- Introduction to Kia's background as “the Mac Junky” and his rebranding to “Tech Minimalist” (3:29)
- What's do people have with technology that you try to solve and what types of people do you work with? (13:10)
- How to know if your technology is overly complicated (15:20)
- “The frog in boiling water” analogy applied to technology (18:00)
- What are the “essential” parts of a good tech stack and best practices people should follow? (20:21)
- The difference between G-Suite and GMail (30:46)
- “If you don't pay for the product, you are the product” (32:37)
- Using Zapier to automate stuff (37:40)
- How to get started simplifying your tech stack (47:32)
- How to balance your work and lifestyle and why Kia only works for 3 hours a day (52:20)
If you'd like to simplify your IT and would like some help from Kia, he's very kindly offered listeners 30% off his discovery session. Just go to macjunky.com/pmp to get started.