Oliver Starr is the Editor in Chief of GTDtimes. He is a well known blogger and technology evangelist as well as a serial entrepreneur and former professional athlete. Oliver is best known for being the founding blogger for MobileCrunch, a TechCrunch Network Blog as well as for his prolific writing and speaking on mobile technologies. You can learn more about Oliver and read some of his personal writing at his own blog, StarrTrek, which as he says “goes where no blog has gone before…”
I’ve just finished reading Dave Crenshaw’s “The Myth of Multitasking” and have to say that this little book was both a pleasure to read and offered some very practical advice in the form of a modern day fable. Basically the point of the book is to convey the idea that multitasking is a lie. As a GTD’er, you probably already know this and if you’ve been to a David Allen seminar you’ve heard him say it. Humans simply cannot do two things that both require concentration at the same time. We may think we can but in reality we’re “switch-tasking”, not multitasking.
The problem with this, as Dave explains in his book, is that each time we switch from one task to another we lose valuable time. This is because we have to reset our mental processes to deal with the changing task and we have to figure out just where we were before we get started again.
For those of you that think this rule doesn’t apply to you, I strongly suggest you take the self test that Dave explains in the story and provides for you to give yourself at the end of the book. The results are sure to suprise you and wake you up to the truth - that - as both Dave and David have said; multitasking is a lie.
If you want to test yourself now you don’t have to wait: Dave and his team have created a multitasking test you can take online right here.
BONUS: For the first three people that write to me and include their addresses, I have extra copies of this book to share. There’s a caveat though, after reading it you promise to come back here and post one new way this book taught you to eliminate interruptions so that you can focus on one task at a time - fair enough?
If 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!
I’ve been coming to CTIA and other similar events for something like ten years now. During that time I’ve seen plenty of developments and more than my fair share of truly creative solutions to many of the challenges that have presented themselves to the developers of software for mobile communications devices. Like every industry the mobile telecommunications industry has its own cyclic nature. In the case of wireless it seems to me that this cycle consists of new technological ground being broken, early entrants race to bring their solutions to market, the most successful solutions achieve positions of market dominance, the largest players in the industry either acquire or duplicate the market leading technology and those same leading companies further affirm their positions atop the growing market.
This final stage in the innovation/consolidation cycle seems to have been the dominant theme of this year’s CTIA. Over the past several years there have been a number of technologies that have been moving towards a more mature state - the principal one being mobile video. While still to a certain degree being the province of the early adopter, mobile video has now matured sufficiently that it is reasonably accessible to just about any consumer in a primary market.
There are two different aspects to mobile video that have been maturing independently from one another; streaming video (and also downloadable video) distributed to mobile end-points via both specialized as well as undifferentiated services an example of the former being BlueApple.mobi while an example of the latter is YouTube.com, and live action video captured by the phone itself and they either broadcast in real time or uploaded to a number of websites for later viewing and archiving.
The second aspect of mobile video is somewhat less mature but still has a number of companies that are firmly on the road to becoming both ready for prime time as well as reasonably ready for a prime mainstream user experience. Characterized by companies like Qik and Flixwagon they are making it possible to stream live video directly from one phone to another (via the Internet) as well as from phone to PCs, Macs, or any other device with a fully functional web browser.
These interactive applications even let the viewers communicate with the person creating the video stream by allowing a sort of return instant messaging feature. In the case of Qik a program that I frequently use to stream conferences to the web so that people can see them in real time, the software not only streams the content live, it also archives that content under my username and allows me to determine if I want to keep it private and allow only those people I expressly specify to view the content or make it public and allow anyone interested to view it.
Both Qik and Flixwagen allow individual videos to be embedded in other locations for example on your own blog or other personal page. Neither of these applications allows you to deliver video of incredible quality and in my experience the audio is marginal at best but considering the amount of compression that must be taking place for this to work at all it is a pretty extraordinary thing to have turned your regular phone into a webcam a video camera or even a video telephone when you stop and think about it.
Aside from the above mentioned video end of things the only big change that is worth mentioning is the sheer number of developers that have begun to focus heavily on developing software for the iPhone. The iPhone App Store is in many respects the biggest revelation in the mobile realm this past year even though it isn’t a true revelation at all with both Nokia (via their “Download” application) and the iPhone Dev Team with Installer.app both being earlier entries into this space. Even though both Nokia and the iPhone Dev Team were there first and in the case of the Dev Team basically had developed an identical solution (in my opinion Apple took huge amounts of functionality and copied it exactly from the Dev Team’s work) the difference was that Apple had the ability to directly insert this new software into the millions of devices that were already in consumers hands as well as put in on the iPhone 3G in advance.
This gave them a huge bump up in terms of the number of people actually looking at installable third party applications for the device. When combined with a brain-dead simple installation process for every application in the App Store, plus billing to your credit card exactly like the familiar iTunes this was a sure winner and this has been proven quite obviously with over 100 million applications downloaded and nearly $50,000,000 in revenues generated in just about three months.
The one key thing missing from this year’s CTIA was the one that everyone is anxiously awaiting; Google’s Android. The first phone is slated to debut on September 23rd, courtesy of T-Mobile and HTC. With a totally open, open-source operating system that purportedly allows the developer unfettered access to virtually every aspect of a device expecations are very high that we will see some truly remarkable software available for Android devices in short order.
I suppose this bodes well for the next CTIA coming in the spring of 2009. I sure hope so anyway. Going to these events and seeing the same tired hardware, the same tired booths and the same tired vendors gets…well…tiresome and leaves me feeling like I could have been doing something more productive then looking for something new and exciting when nothing new and exciting was in the offing. At any rate, I am pretty certain that the next CTIA will be considerably more interesting that this one was. Between Android,the iPhone 3G’s new applications once the developers have had more time with the SDK and some pretty cool stuff I’ve heard Nokia has up their sleeves, I am optimistic that 2009 will reverse the consolidation not innovation trend and I can start my report with the headline Innovation not Consolidation at Spring CTIA. Here’s hoping anyway…
TC50: I’ve seen the future of email and it’s on the desktop. Maybe. Postbox is a new company launching today here at TechCrunch 50. The application - and make no mistake about it, this is a full blown, download and install it desktop application - has set for itself some incredibly ambitious goals. From the demonstration of the software, in addition to the standard functions of send, receive, store, search, spell check, attach files, and the other things a typical email client does, Postbox also offers some truly interesting additional features. Features so compelling, the site - which the founders announced was open for a limited beta - was instantly knocked offline due to so many simultaneous download attempts from the people attending TC50 plus those watching TC50 streamed to their homes or offices.
Features? Like What?
In seeking to describe the nature of the improvements that Postbox seems to offer the best general descriptive term I can come up with is semantic auto organization. Just great, another confusing acronym, right? SAO. But what makes this new acronym worth remembering is what it means to you, the user. Postbox founders claim (and demonstrated) that their software is capable of automatically grouping messages by topic.
If you’re interested in confectionery, model boats, knives and hedgehogs Postbox will identify these divergent interests in without any intervention on your part it will actually group the messages for you. What’s more, it will go far beyond a mere gross grouping of the messages themselves. The software is capable of identifying the various multimedia components in these messages and retaining them in individual galleries. Imagine it, an end to peering into email folder after email folder or worse, message after message trying to find that one image you just know is there…somewhere…
In fact, based upon the demonstration I witnessed I think it’s safe to say that what we’re looking at here with Postbox is one of the first iterations of a truly semantic application or perhaps email. 3.0. It’s tempting to say Web 3.0 but I’m reminded that this is not a web based application and probably won’t likely be one any time soon.
But Wait, There’s More…
In addition to making your mail contents much more broadly available as a reference database, Postbox offers a comprehensive suite of authoring tools that enable the creation of email messages and other documents that are a much richer experience than the email messages we craft today. Not only does Postbox make it possible to embed audio or video in an email, you can also search the web (from within the application) and again embed these results right into an email.
From what I understand Postbox also has a fairly tight integration with certain Adobe tools however I didn’t see this functionality demonstrated so I can’t tell you what to expect in this regard. What I can say is that from the demo alone this appears to be a truly profound change in the way email can be used, managed and created. That it will open up heretofore inaccessible realms to the user when it comes to data that you have already acquired but previously could not find or access in any reasonably convenient way. Likewise the way in which searching the web and embedding results in messages is allowed within Postbox will, in my opinion, increase the value of both resources to the user.
Finally, by stealing a few notes from Google’s playbook and eliminating folders and replacing them with their semantic organizational structure plus some truly advanced searching and grouping functions Postbox brings even the most massive message stores into a much finer focus. By getting rid of the silos and exposing the critical information in each email along with its relationship to other email, Postbox brings the information contained within each stored message closer to the user where it can do more than simply take up space on a hard drive. By adding options that previously didn’t exist to the creation of email messages, Postbox has created an entirely new doc-type that has the potential to improve various communications, speed up decision making and review processes, and by developing an application that appears to offer these previously mentioned services as the result of semantic information, it appears that Postbox has begun the new era in applications. 2.0 is dead, long live 3.0!
During the GTD Application Panel discussion at the recent Office 2.0 Conference David Allen revealed to a rapt audience his recent revelations about software applications designed to support the implementation of an individual’s GTD system. Summed up eloquently as the Five “I’s” they are as follows:
Interception: the software must support the process of capturing ideas as they occur to you. A premium is placed upon the speed, ease and context appropriateness of this process.
Interpretation: David says that interpretation relies more upon executive function than any other aspect of the five eyes. What he looks for is an answer to the following question: Can the tool help me to make a decision or keep it in my face until I have made a decision about i?
Integration: David considers this area to be were the software (or the person using the software) needs to determine what the next action is. For example, is it a phone call, some other action - this can also be seen as list management
Investigation: According to David the software should help you quickly locate those things that are critical to performing a particular task at any given moment. For example, I have a call with Micheal and I have five things that I need to talk to him about. The software should make those five things immediately available.
Implementation: This is where the rubber meets the road in a next action.
One of David’s comments about software is that so much software fails because it forces the user to think too much on the front end about what they need to do with something. He stressed ease of use, flexibility, and context appropriateness. He also mentioned the difference between input and interception. (interception is the actual capture of a thought whereas input is the process of taking some already captured information and placing it into a particular trusted system).
So, based upon the above, what applications are you using and how well do they meet David’s “Five I’s”? Please let us know in the comments.
If you’d like to see the full video, go here: David at Office 2.0
Don’t forget that tomorrow and Friday we’ve got the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. David Allen, the creator of GTD will be opening the conference in a joint keynote interview with conference founder and staunch GTD proponent Ismael Ghalimi. In case you missed this, it is already available online via event sponsor Veodia. Just check out the links below for resources that will allow you to see all the action at the Office 2.0 conference in real time.
The next GTD related event will be the GTD Applications Panel Discussion at 1:30 This afternoon. I (Oliver) will be moderating the discussion. Panelists include David Allen, Doreen Hartzell of Enleiten, Neil Mendelson of Mindjet and Kevin Merrit of blist .
To view David Allen and Ismael Ghalimi during the keynote please click here. For the GTD Applications Panel this link will get you to the page with the Veodia video.
Online Attendees
Anyone can participate in the Office 2.0 Conference 2008 online using the following resources:
Every day it seems we spend more and more of our time in front of a computer screen. Whether it’s a monitor on a desk or a tiny hand held display on our phones, computers are such an essential part of our day to day lives that for most of us they are almost as indispensable as oxygen. Given that so much of our time is spent in front of these machines, it behooves us to learn as many ways as we can to do our computer aided tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible. Or, as David Allen said upon learning that he’d been awarded the “Golden Slacker Award”, “the laziest people come up with the coolest ideas.”
With this in mind it occurred to me that we could create what could possibly be the ultimate list of online time-savers ever compiled. Basically what I was thinking was that each of us has probably discovered at least a couple online resources that we now find indispensable to our daily routine and what I am hoping is that with all of your help we can catalog these into a truly exhaustive list that can then become its own page on this site and serve as a truly exceptional reference for GTD’ers and Lifehackers of all stripes.
To keep the list focused I thought I would establish a couple of criteria to narrow recommendations down a little bit. Thus, for inclusion in this list, the application must result in an actual time-savings of some type- whether by virtue of reducing keystrokes, condensing multiple tasks into one task (or at least fewer tasks) , by eliminating the need to do extensive navigation with a mouse, by automating complex actions or by virtue of eliminating the need to navigate to a site to obtain a query result from said site. Second, the time-saver in question must be free and generally available. (No closed betas allowed although open betas are fine). Third (and this one should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway) these time-savers must work on a Mac or PC or Linux machine, a PDA, a mobile phone or a tablet computer.
Please provide your time saver in the comments and what I will do is regularly update the list by moving the time savers up to the body of the post. If/when we get a number of time savers sufficient to justify creating a unique page for the list I’ll create such a page and provide a list of credits to those individuals that have taken the time to help us expand this list.
I’ll start with a couple of my favorites. Incidentally, contributing a time-saver is more than just saying “I like xyz”. We need the application, the URL, what it does and why you like it. If if is a particularly complicated time saver an example would be helpful too.
Here we go:
1. YubNub <http://yubnub.org>
This is my all time favorite time saver and one that I probably use a hundred times a day. Primarily because it is incredibly versatile and is actually thousands of unique time savers rolled up into one slick Ruby on Rails application. In essence YubNub is a command line for the web. What it does is allow you to harness the power of thousands of different web servers to do specific tasks by using the URL bar of your browser (or a widget or a stand alone application) as a command line.
What can you do with YubNub? Almost anything you can think of. The limits are your memory and/or your imagination. Some examples: (after opening a new tab (or clearing the contents in the URL bar in an existing tab) I could enter: g David Allen GTD. The results? This command would yield a Google search for the terms David Allen and GTD. The savings? Instead of first going to Google and waiting for the page to load and then typing these terms into Google I did this with one keystroke. Okay, maybe that’s not that spectacular but what about this? ebay Green Laser. This would give you the results of an eBay query for green lasers; again, saving the navigation first to eBay. Still not impressed? How about this one? gimyim Chewbacca. This little query would result in a split screen that contains image search results for Chewy in both Google Images and Yahoo Images (this one usually wows even the most jaded LifeHacking experts cause they’ve never seen split screen queries using two different search engines at the same time).
There are literally thousands of YubNub commands; everything from reverse number lookups to langauge translations to code checking, to site-specific searches. Need to search TechCrunch for something? Just type “TC” and your search string (leave out the quotes) and YubNub will find the terms assuming they actually appeared in the popular blog. Plus if you want a command that you can’t find you can make your own. The “create” command allows you to build your own YubNub command instantly.
I am constantly amazed by the power and versatility of this online time-saver, it never fails when I try something that simply seems intuitive and it does exactly what I thought it might. What, for instance, do you suppose the “gmap” command plus a location would yield? From my own experience at least, YubNub is hands down the most powerful, useful and utterly indispensable application I use. I don’t think I could live without it.
2. Fluid <http://fluidapp.com/>
Attention: For Mac Users Only! Are you a tabbed-browsing junkie? Do you regularly use web applications like Gmail, Google Docs or WordPress? Have you ever had your browser crash costing you hours of work as a result? Then Fluid is for you. This application allows you to create site specific browsers. In other words, Fluid allows you to create a browser that acts like a stand alone application. Each one runs as a stand alone Cocoa app meaning that if your browser crashes it doesn’t touch what your doing in your SSB’s that you created with Fluid.
Fluid even lets you create a Dock icon to launch each specific SSB . Fluid can also be converted to a MenuExtra SSB (sits in the Title Bar at the top of the screen) and in spite of running in a separate instantiation of Cocoa each SSB still retains the full functionality of the parent browser (bookmarks, spell check, etc.)
I love fluid for using web applications like Gmail. I don’t lose my work nearly so often and when I’ve got forty tabs open I don’t have to hunt for the ones I use most often. If you’ve got a Mac I highly recommend you try Fluid unless you’ve got nothing to lose! (get it?)
Okay, so that’s a start, now it’s your turn. Please send in your favorite Time saving web applications and together we can compile a page that equals thousands of saved hours for everyone!
Having seen the enormous success that Apple has had with the App Store and the way in which it appears to have single handedly altered the landscape of the mobile phone software market (at least in the US), Google has wasted no time in announcing their answer to Apple’s very successful offering, the Android App Market.
From a cursory view it looks like the guys and gals at the iPhone Dev Team not only did all the hard thinking for Apple when they created Installer.app and the infrastructure of the application environment that allowed users of jailbroken phones to find and load applications on their devices, but from what I can see it appears that they did most of the htinking for Google as well. I hope they get credit for their hard and innovative work.
At least this partially answers one of the big questions that developers had about Android applications; how they are going to get paid - which was a question I asked in a piece I authored for the Register Developer several months ago.
Of course how successful this will be depends upon the execution of the market. It will be difficult to top the ease of use that the Apple App Store delivers, if for no other reason than the standardized platform that the App Store services. How Google will make it as streamlined and user-friendly as the Apple product while still providing a way to differentiate between different handsets is still an open question. Another is whether the market will be as attractive to developers as Apple has become. When developing for Apple, developers know up front the potential universe of customers and they only have to write an application once. With Android the market is still fragmented which means, among other things, that the developer knows up front that either they are going to have to author many iterations of their applcation or be accessible to only a fraction of the possible market. Neither choice is appealing and both come with obvious costs.
For the end user though this state of affairs isn’t all bad and as competition heats up between the iPhone and other devices it is likely that one way that the manufacturers will try to make each platform that much more appealing is by offering more and cheaper applications. Clearly, the winner here is going to be the end user so long as the applications that are being developed are actually worth downloading. At this point I have enough iPhone flashlights and versions of sudoku to last me into the next century. What I don’t have is a decent graphing calculator, an alarm clock with a loud enough buzzer or a way to actually record a call on the iPhone from the iPhone. When will the developers actually tackle these tougher problems and when, for god’s sake, will we finally get cut and paste?
Corporate Travel = Sound of Piggy Bank Breaking
If you shudder when you pull up to the gas pump these days, or swallow hard before you tear open your utility bill every month image how your company’s controller must feel. If you’re in a start-up or any small business and especially if you’re not cash-flow positive yet these times of soaring energy costs and economic uncertainty border on the downright terrifying. Under such circumstances even the most financially stable enterprises are taking a hard look at expenses and trying to determine areas in which costs can be cut without reducing the quality of service or their future business prospects.
One area that is coming under the budget-crunch knife at nearly every company on the planet is travel. Right now just about every aspect of travel has increased in price. Airfares are skyrocketing and the new ancillary charges - since when did it become reasonable to charge passengers $50 for bringing along a single checked bag? What’s next? Charging for inflight air? Or perhaps pay toilets? One thing is certain, flying is not only a hassle it’s also expensive. From your CFO’s perspective anything that can help you avoid the cost and headache of another flight - and especially one overseas with the sinking dollar effectively doubling that cost - is going to be worthy of serious consideration.
Buy the Ticket, Ride the Ride…
The flip side to this is that some meetings really require that both parties see one another. Sure, conference bridges are good and shared desktops like GoToMeeting are useful for certain things but sometimes you really need to look someone in the eye in order to move things ahead. Traditionally that meant hopping on a plane and that usually meant at least a thousand bucks drawn down on the company coffers (and lot more if more than one exec needed to travel or if the trip required crossing a continent or an ocean). That’s a lot of expense for one short meeting. And until recently there was nothing that could be done about this but bite the bullet and break out the plastic.
GTD Connect is David’s members-only website. Ordinarily there’s a monthly fee of $40 (based on an annual subscription) but right now - if you act quickly - you can get a free fourteen day trial of GTD Connect with just a few clicks of your mouse.
Even if you read GTDtimes religiously, you’ve never seen a GTD resource with as much information as you’ll find on GTD Connect. Here’s a sample:
Eight times a year you’ll also receive an audio CD delivered to your door (and available as a download) entitled, “In Conversation”; David’s interviews with leading thinkers and achievers who are part of the GTD network. You’ll benefit from rich conversations with successful people Getting Things Done.
Connect members also get 25% off the price of any David Allen seminar and 10% of merchandise from The David Allen Company Online Store.
If you want to try GTD Connect for free don’t waste a minute. Visit this special page and sign up for you free trial subscription!
