What’s On Your Phone, Nick Pozek?

Nick Pozek is the Manager of Museum Digital Strategy at Asia Society, an internationally recognized nonprofit that focuses on educating the world about Asia. AMT Lab Contributor Mandy Ding recently talked with him about what his favorite apps are and why.

1. What are the apps you use every day and why do you like them?

To celebrate the 2015 Asia Game Changers Awards, Ronnie Chan, the co-chair of the Board of Asia Society and the chairman of Asia Society Hong Kong Center, presented the global Asia Society staff with Mi Bands from Xiaomi. I’ve been using the Mi Band in conjunction with the Mi Fit app to monitor my sleep cycles and physical activity.

I regularly use the Starbucks app to place an order before I leave my apartment in the morning. That way, I can skip the line and quickly pick up on my coffee on the way to the office.

My work often straddles the cultural and business sector, so keeping abreast of trends in both industries is necessary. I use iOS’s News and Podcasts apps to follow the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, BBC, Al Jazeera, NHK, the Economist and other major news sources.

At the Concordia Summit in September, Donald Rumsfeld talked about his partnership with Javelin and Churchill Heritage Ltd. to develop Churchill Solitaire. I’ve since become thoroughly addicted to this game. It recreates a diabolically challenging version of Solitaire devised by Winston Churchill and demands a combination of persistence, innovation and lateral thinking from the player. All proceeds from the app support military charities in the USA.

At Asia Society, many of our projects are very collaborative. Engaging all key team members can be tough, especially working between different time zones and across our 12 Global Centers. Recently, we’ve been experimenting with Slack to manage the asynchronous threaded conversations. It’s been interesting to see the ways in which this has shifted our overall communication dynamic.

2. Is there an app that surprised you with its usefulness?

Since I reluctantly defected from Blackberry to iPhone in 2013, I’ve been using the Outlook app for my email. Outlook is surprisingly effective at separating my “Focused” mail from “General” mail, which makes it easier to identify important messages.

3. Is there an app you think developers should be working on?

I find out about cultural events, such as receptions, art fairs, lectures, performances, and conferences, from personal invitations, mailing lists (both email and print), social media, and by regularly checking organizations’ websites. Finding and adding these events into my calendar can be time-consuming. I’d love to have a central repository were I could find all this information aggregated, so that I could focus on prioritizing my schedule, rather than filling it.

4. If you could recommend one app to arts managers, what would it be?

As a manager, you live and die by your resources, and in the cultural sector, personal and professional networks are thoroughly permeable. Sustaining these relationships requires diligence. Using a constituent management system (such as my go-to, CircleBack) can help you keep track of your personal contacts. By streamlining the administrative tasks, you can focus on cultivating relationships through meaningful interactions.