IBM Offers Lotus Notes For Apple’s IPhone

lotus_notes_on_iphone.jpgEditor’s Note:  This just in from DOW Jones…

IBM Offers Lotus Notes For Apple’s iPhone

Sep 30, 2008 00:01:00 (ET)

SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)–International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) said Tuesday it was making its Lotus Notes tools, including email and calendar applications, available for Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iPhone.

Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM said that the latest version of Notes would allow customers to access the software via the Safari browser on the iPhone.

The iPhone, which is still primarily a consumer device, has begun to attract the interest of corporate customers as a competitor to Research In Motion Ltd.’s (RIMM) BlackBerry device, since Apple launched a software developers’ kit allowing anyone to develop applications for the phone and making it easier for the phone to be connected to corporate IT systems. Network operators have begun offering corporate tariffs for the iPhone.

When Apple launched a 3G version of the iPhone in June, the company’s chief executive, Steve Jobs, said that 35% of the Fortune 500 companies had signed up to trial the phone.

Other business software companies including Oracle Corp. (ORCL) and SAP AG (SAP), offer software for the iPhone.

Click here to go to Dow Jones NewsPlus, a web front page of today’s most important business and market news, analysis and commentary: http://www.djnewsplus.com/al?rnd=ssOOQJa0bVq17iQhEhuI6g%3D%3D. You can use this link on the day this article is published and the following day.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 30, 2008 00:01 ET (04:01 GMT)

 Image from TechShout.com


Feelin’ Guilty ’bout Not Bein’ Green? Dr O’Connor Wants to Know.

goinggreenguiltily.jpgDr Lynn E. O’Connor, one of our contributors, sent me a note last night asking for our help with one of the projects that she’s working on with one of her doctoral students.  Basically they are interested in evaluating how much feeling guilty about not doing enough to help protect our environment motivates people to act in a more altruistic way.  Or, as she succinctly puts it:

“Volunteers: We’re inviting you to participate in an anonymous online study of emotions and the environment: http://www.eparg.org/wright/green/  Please join us.”

As you probably are aware, I’m a big believer in anything that can help us stave off the impending climate catastrophe - certainly looking at what can motivate people to take action ought to be near the top of the list.  I urge you to join me in helping Dr. O’Connor and her student gather additional data to help them better understand the psychology at work here.  You can do something that can potentially make a difference and who knows, perhaps you’ll learn something about yourself in the process.


Some Exclusive GTD News From Our Friends Across the Pond: David Allen to Conduct Roadmap Seminars in Holland, Germany in ‘09

more-time-for-fun.gifIf you’re a GTD’er (or want to become one) and you happen to live overseas, your opportunity to learn from the master has just come much closer to home.  Nathaniel Stott, a contributor to GTDtimes has reported that he and his associates at Life Architect have been working on the details for months and now, finally, they are ready to release the information.

From Nathaniel:

“Life Architect is about helping people get more done. Achieving more with less stress. More time for fun! And the things we love to do in life. With this in mind we (started the company) invited David Allen to Holland and Germany to present his GTD Roadmap seminars on 17th and 19th February 2009. We are jointly organising these events with the David Allen Company. Its about getting your blueprint to a new life. Getting things done is the foundation on which Life Architect intends to continue building.”

This is less than a month before the GTD Global Summit in San Francisco so a lucky group of people might have the chance to use the Roadmap in Europe as a tune-up and then could follow David back across the Atlantic to join us for the grand-daddy of all GTD events on March 11th through the 13th of 2009.

GTDtimes would like to congratulate Nathaniel on his big news and wish him much success with Life Architect which is going live today.  Be sure to check it out.


There’s a Time and Place for Long Prose - Email Is Rarely It

numberedlist.gifI love reading good prose, particularly a good narrative. Sometimes prose is called for in an email — to tell a story, explain your reasoning, provide some depth regarding your feelings on a topic, etc. Some people prefer the phone or face-to-face for those things, but in many situations, email is sufficient.

But many of the emails we send and receive every day aren’t this kind of content. They are instead heavily task-oriented — all about coordinating our work with other people. For these kind of emails, straight prose is generally a much less effective form of communication.

Over the years, as I’ve worked with people on communicating more effectively via email, I’ve observed that when people include more than one topic (even just two) in an email, all too often the recipient only replies to one of the topics. Then the sender has to reply back asking again about the overlooked issues.

Most people scan their email — they don’t read it closely. As a result, if there are action items, or items for which a specific response is expected from the other person, that needs to be clearly communicated in the email in a way that will still be effective knowing the recipient will likely just scan the email.

The solution? Numbered lists.

List each item that requires response or action with a number in front of it. You can then write a whole paragraph if you need to, but the numbered list accomplishes a couple of things:

  1. Recipients are clearer as to what’s expected of them in terms of actions and responses. They can’t claim that it was buried in the email if it was specifically enumerated.
  2. Recipients are less likely to skip an item when they respond. With the numbers, it’s easier to check for completeness of our response. If there are five items in the email, there should be five items in your response. I don’t claim this to be scientific — I just know it works.
  3. If they skip an item, it’s easier to communicate back to them about it.  “Thanks for your response, but what about item #2?” No retyping — just a single simple question.

A few tips:

  1. Numbers work better than bullets. I don’t have quantitative data on this, but I can tell you that both for myself and with my clients, I first tried using bulleted lists, and that was a noticeable improvement over prose, but people still tended to skip items. But with numbered lists, skipped items in responses fall to almost zero. Apparently, without the numbers, our brain kind of loses place. Also, you lose advantage #3 above.
  2. Bolding the start of each item helps. Whether it’s complete sentences or just a phrase as a pseudo-header, bold-facing the beginning of each item improves scannability.
  3. Two items constitutes a list. How often have you sent an email with two questions for the other person and they only reply to one of them? It happens, and numbering them helps prevent it.
  4. One list item = one action item. It doesn’t do much good to create a list if each list item has two or three questions or separate actions. Break it down.

This clearly isn’t appropriate for every email, even those longer than a paragraph, but in the proper context, this has been a great tool for me and my clients in reducing email traffic and confusion. Try it for yourself and see.


John Kendrick Explains How He Implements GTD

jksweblog.jpgJohn Kendrick, the author of the blog by the same name (and not to be confused with the James Kendrick from JKonTheRun.com) has authored a post on how he implements GTD that anyone just starting out is sure to find incredibly helpful.  Among the things that John suggests: reading the book “Getting Things Done: the art of stress free productivity” by David Allen, faithfully performing your weekly review, and keeping a journal so that you can capture things when using an electronic device might be impossible or inappropriate.

You can read the rest of this great post here.


Further Thoughts on the Recent Fortune Productivity Coach Comparison

success_coaches.jpgIf you haven’t seen it already, you probably ought to check out the September issue of Fortune Magazine featuring a great comparison of three approaches to personal and professional productivity; David Allen’s GTD, Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits and James Loehr’s Human Performance Institute.  In case you missed the article, Rob Thompson of Rob Thompson.com has gone to the trouble of making it available online here.

Like Rob, I felt the piece was well written and generally fair to all three coaches.  Unlike Rob I have direct, personal experience with two of the three coaches and have read the books and purchased the products of the third.  This gives me a little bit of additional insight into the coaches and their methods which might be of value to anyone considering applying these methods to their own lives.

My greatest personal contact is of course with David Allen and I am a follower of his Getting Things Done systematic approach to personal productivity.  It wasn’t an easy thing to get me to embrace this approach but perhaps my unwillingness to take other’s word for it that this approach works lends even more credibility to my conviction that it does work so long as it is diligently applied.  Of course this would hold true for all three systems but in my experience diligent application of the principles  of each of these approaches does not yield equal success.

The difference with GTD is that it is eminently practical.  Every part of the process yields concrete and measurable results.  You don’t have to be a believer to be an achiever.  You simply have to DO what David lays out as the appropriate thing given your context and the material you are working with.  It  is quite simple from a simplistic viewpoint:  Collect, Process, Organize,  Review, Do…it really is straightforward and like Rob says in his review you don’t need any fancy equipment to implement GTD - in fact keeping it simple might be one of the best ways to successfully implement GTD in your own life.

From my personal perspective no other approach can deliver so immediate a change in your outlook by giving you such a significant change in your environment.  There’s a lot to be said for David’s bottom up approach - take it from a converted non-believer.

As far as James Loehr is concerned, Rob wasn’t too familiar with him and neither was the author of the Fortune article.  I, on the other hand, am intimately familiar with his work.  It has been a part of my life for over 20 years.  That’s because James spent some time at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs in the mid 1980’s and I happened to be a resident athlete at the time.  His focus was on mental toughness training for sports and he even authored a book by the same name. (I highly recommend this to any athlete, by the way).

Most of my fellow athletes thought that this was a joke - they simply didn’t believe that lying in the dark and doing breathing and visualization exercises had any chance of making them better athletes.  Well, it’s been said that the brain is the most powerful muscle in the body and based upon my experience with James Loehr’s strategies I have to agree.  While my contemporaries where yucking it up and making life hard for the not-yet-famous Loehr, I was deeply focused on learning his methods.  The payoff is not immediate but it is profound.  I learned over time that the more consistent I was in my application of his exercises and the more deeply I was able to visualize myself performing perfectly the more capable I became at actually delivering perfect performances.  In other worse, his ideas are legitimate - or at least they are as far as I am concerned.

The problem is that it takes a significant investment and a lot of conviction in order to apply his teaching.  This is not a see it - do it- reap the benefits process.  It takes time and effort to learn how to apply James Loehr’s techniques.  And from my experience in the executive world, time is the one thing that we all find in short supply.  From where I stand James Loehr’s approach is probably more useful to athletes than to executives - some exceptions might be trial lawyers or professional speakers that need to “perform” (surgeons also might benefit from Loehr’s techniques). If you’re a golfer and you want to hit par, James Loehr might be the guru for you, however.

Last but not least is Stephen Covey, the only one of the three coaches that I don’t know personally. I imagine that just about every performance oriented executive has looked into Seven Habits and for some I am sure that this approach is exceptional.  The problem for a lot of us - or at least for me is not that I don’t know what I want to accomplish, but rather that I get lost trying to get there.  It’s hard to have your head in the clouds when you keep on tripping over books on your office floor.

Personally, I think that Covey’s system is better for people that are naturally good organizers but who aren’t sure what their mission or even their long term goal really is.  For people like that I imagine that Covey is like a sliver bullet that can almost miraculously put them on their life’s path.  They don’t need to know how to go somewhere, what they need to do is figure out where it is they want to go and this system is probably ideal for helping to solve that problem.

Ultimately, there are significant benefits to every one of these approaches.  Mostly how well any one of them works comes down to the individual and how serious you are about putting any approach into practice.  Like most things in life you’re going to get out of it what you put into it. Whether that output will be realized tomorrow or a year from now depends largely upon which system you choose and how you go about putting it into effect.

Of course I know that most of you reading this are believers in GTD but have any of you tried the other two approaches?  What about another system that we haven’t mentioned?  Please share your experiences in the comments!


Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet, Talks About How Startups Can Survive the Financial Crisis

 Editor’s Note:  This is a re-post of an article I received from Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet, parent company of Zoho. He tells of his experience with the dot-com bubble and how it wiped out most telecommunications service providers.  He explains what he did to help his company, AdventNet, weather the storm, and offers some tips that we would all be well advised to heed at this time of such significant economic instability in our entire market right now.


September 22, 2008

zoho.jpgSurviving the Financial Crisis

Sridhar Vembu
CEO
GigaOm has a guest post on how start-ups can survive the financial crisis. We have some experience at AdventNet with this, which I want to share. First a bit of history: AdventNet was born as a bootstrapped company in 1996, and our initial business was selling software to network equipment vendors. By 1999-2000, there was a raging bubble in networking and telecom; while the media focused on the flashy dotcoms, it was really telecom service providers and their equipment suppliers that had, by far, the bigger financial bubble — amounting to over a trillion dollars of capital eventually written off, split between debt taken on by service providers to finance new network construction and the venture capital raised by their equipment suppliers. For every dotcom that raised $5-10 million dollars, there probably was a SONET or WDM start-up that was raising $50-100 million dollars. There must have been a hundred of them just in the San Francisco bay area; but Boston, New Jersey, RTP in North Carolina, Dallas and Toronto all had their fair share of bubble companies, and I must have visited each of these places at least five times during 1999-2000.
I had a really good vantage point on the bubble because I personally must have visited 80% of those equipment companies as a software supplier. Fortunately for me, I was aware of the Japanese bubble of the late 80’s (when Japan was going to take over the world) and its painful aftermath in the 90’s. So, even in the middle of the telecom bubble as a supplier, I could not help feeling it was going to end badly. There was a point when I realized that the same exact pitch was being made by dozens of companies, yet most of them didn’t know so many others existed, pursuing the same exact business plan.

Having said that, I have to admit even I wasn’t mentally prepared for the extent of the carnage to follow. In 2000, I would have thought approximately 20% of the start-up companies would survive. It turned out maybe 3 out of 200+ survived. By 2003, over 90% of the companies we had supplied to in 1999-2000 had gone out of business. That is something to keep in mind regarding the magnitude of wreckage bubbles can cause — for those keeping score in the bay area or in Chennai for that matter, it is worth considering that real estate prices in Japan eventually fell 80% from the peak they reached in 1990.

So how did we overcome that shock? Here are the things that helped us. In 2000, there was a venture capitalist who was offering us $10 million for a 5% stake in order to enable us to grow faster. After careful consideration, we turned that money down, because we felt the industry was going to shrink, not grow, and we didn’t want to commit to a growth projection when our instincts told us to get ready for contraction. We felt if we were to be honest to ourselves, we had to tell the VC we expected to shrink; yet the money was coming in at such a high valuation, it needed growth as far as the eye could see to justify it. One of my friends in venture capital did tell me I was a fool — but that folly saved us.

We didn’t expand our headcount in line with revenue in 2000. We simply banked the cash — which came in really handy in the subsequent nuclear winter. Indeed, it was that cash that enabled us to diversify in 2004 and ultimately led to Zoho.

It seems clear that we are heading into another nuclear winter, led by housing and financials. It is going to impact the tech industry, but this time as suppliers not as direct bubble-blowers. Companies that have a strong balance sheet (we prefer zero debt) and the ability to adapt and flex will survive the wreckage. Customers are hurting, so attractive pricing is a must — there is going to be price deflation in tech. These are the rules we live by at AdventNet and Zoho.

Sridhar Vembu is co-founder and CEO of AdventNet, parent company to Zoho, the most comprehensive suite of affordable, online productivity tools for today’s knowledge workers. You are invited to publish this commentary in part of in full, or we welcome you to join in the discussion on the Zoho blog at http://blogs.zoho.com.


Make it Up and Make it Happen; an article excerpt by David Allen

Editor’s Note:  This is the first part of an article by David Allen.  The rest of the article can be found in GTD Connect which is a product that requires a subscription.  However as part of our efforts to expose people to this great GTD resource we are offering a free 14-day trial of GTD Connect for anyone that cares to sign up.  Not only will you get the full article below but complete access to an unparalleled collection of GTD information including original articles and videos by David Allen, the member’s only forums and so much more.  To register for the free trial click here

gtdconnect.jpgMake It Up and Make It Happen
By David Allen

There are only two problems in life. Isn’t that nice to know? You only have two things you ever need to be concerned about. Not only are there only two problems – they are really quite simple. Ready?

Problem #1: You know what you want, and you don’t know how to get it.

Problem #2: You don’t know what you want.

Anything you can define as a problem can be reduced to one or both of those statements.

Now, since there are only two problems, it follows that there are only two solutions that you will ever need….

Link to full article on GTD  (remember this requires registration for the free trial of GTD Connect)


Video of a GTD User’s Office

Did I Get Things Done, a great GTD blog that you should add to your aggregator if it’s not there already has put up a post today that I think you might find interesting.  It features two videos showing the office setup of GTD practitioner Jimmy Yukka.  If you’re in the process of setting up your workspace to be more GTD compliant this is probably something you will enjoy watching.  Check it out:

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Another Great Source of GTD Content: GTD Blogs Toplist

blogstoplist.jpgIt never ceases to amaze me how much good GTD content has been scattered around the Internet.  There are so many smart people employing GTD in their daily lives and discovering new ways in which it can be implemented that there is virtually an infinite number of posts and articles that cover David Allen’s systematic approach to personal productivity.  Today I came across another very nice compendium of GTD content that consolidates a huge amount of new material in one convenient place; the GTD Blogs Toplist.  This is a site that’s sort of similar in concept to one of our favorite cumulative GTD resources, Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop for GTD.

Unlike the Alltop GTD section, the GTD Blogs Toplist is organized by individual posts rather than based upon the most popular sites that cover GTD.  I’m not sure what the site’s selective criteria is for appropriate posts but it sure seems to have some nice content aggregated - content that I hadn’t seen previously myself.  It is definitely worth a look.  And if you have never taken a look at the Alltop GTD section that one is a must add to your aggregator too - after all if GTDtimes is listed you know that they’ve got it together, right?