On a brilliant fall Saturday morning, with both my heart and my belly full after visiting six local bakeries with my daughter — Harrisburg Bakery Crawl for the win — I wanted to listen to some music on the drive home.

Instead, Apple CarPlay, which streams music and podcasts from my phone to my car, crashed. Hard.

No tunes. No satisfaction. Plenty of cursing.

Technology is harder to use than it should be. It always crashes at the least opportune moments.

So while I did eventually fix the connection, the morning glitch had me bristling even before I saw the Zoom subscription renewal email that afternoon along with a $10 increase.

It felt like the universe had decided to pile on.

So I began questioning the Zoom account.

What do I really get for $170? Is there another option which may serve me better? And is it worth the effort to switch?

Because with almost unlimited services to choose from, making a good decision requires choosing which lens to see through.

Simplify The Workflow

I’ve done this same calculus twice in the past month: does a tool or service meet the need, and is it worth the time, money and effort?

After getting a Calendly renewal email in October, I searched for another online scheduling option. I quickly landed on Cal.com which provides a fully-featured free tier that solves some of the challenges I wrestled with in Calendly.

I, and likely you, have multiple calendars to juggle including personal, professional, family, and others. Calendly can check availability on multiple calendars, but it would not work with the calendar associated with my email platform.

To implement it, I needed to create a new Google account and go through a bunch of ancillary contortions. Availability kind of worked, but it required me, when I had personal commitments, to then add blocking events to the business calendar.

Cal.com handles that by checking multiple calendars of my choice. I could even connect it with the Fastmail CalDAV profile which syncs all my calendars so the extra step to block time is now eliminated.

While it took some time to migrate then change all the booking links on the website, the decision to move was almost a no-brainer. Less expense with a fuller feature set carried the day.

What took more time turned out to be landing on which transcription service to use.

Accuracy Matters

I bought a Plaud Note Pin S last April after seeing many people at The Uprising conference use it. They raved about it and how they’d come to rely on it for transcriptions in their own businesses.

At home, though, and no longer in a room filled with AI-curious, tech-minded marketing leaders, I struggled to pin the device to my shirt or hang it around my neck at an event. It felt awkward and off-putting, so I typically didn’t use it.

What I did use, more and more, was Granola. As I wrote in another post, its free service works very well, and, to boot, it launched an Apple Watch app this year which allows me to capture thoughts on walks around the neighborhood.

So I put them to the test and transcribed the same recent conversation with them. Claude then analyzed the output and surfaced that Plaud paraphrased instead of simply capturing what was said, reversed meaning in a couple of places, and got more proper nouns wrong.

Plaud did capture and save the audio, which was helpful to check a few things. For where I’m at right now, though, for how I need the tool to work, and because I can check the transcript soon after a call when my memory is fresh, I’ve landed on Granola.

Which Lens To Use

How am I going to resolve my Zoom conundrum?

I have a couple months to land this plane. So I am going to gather some data and make an informed comparison.

Two options I’m considering are Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace. I pay for Microsoft now, and Workspace is a platform I’ve become very familiar with through work I just completed for a client.

And while I have been very clear how I feel about Google, considering the number of small businesses which use Workspace, there may be clear upside to becoming more fluent in it.

I’ll share where I land when I make the decision.

In the meantime, if you’re wrestling with similar technology riddles, I can help you implement this approach to your tech tangles. Either schedule 30 minutes with me to talk it through, or send me a note.

Now, which of the five pastries will I enjoy first?