Who wouldn’t want a new high resolution display with thirty inches or more of real-estate upon which to spread your work? Imagine the joy of having your entire spreadsheet visible at a glance and not having to futz around with freezing part of the pane. Think of the pleasure of having two full pages displayed side by side, at a reasonable resolution no less, while editing your latest feature article. Personally I find myself salivating at the idea of looking at the HD imagery from the Apollo missions and from the current ESA and NASA craft orbiting distant worlds.
Not that my intended use will help sell anyone’s boss, but if you’d like to turn the wistful daydream above into a practical reality for yourself, a recent report by Pfeiffer Consulting may actually have the ammunition you need to get that Apple Cinema Display you’ve been craving.
While most people would probably agree that one of those sexy big displays exudes uber-geek success and is the province of Avid and Final Cut Pro maestros everywhere, what is less well known is that these larger displays can boost general productivity using many more mundane applications.
Pfeiffer Consulting’s report called “The 30-ince Apple Cinema Display Productivity Benchmark” was intended to measure the real world productivity impact of using a larger size display. The key underlying question they asked was:
Does this added comfort translate into higher productivity? To provide clear, activity-based data to answer this question was the aim of his research project.
In essence they wanted to do a clear comparison using more typical applications and see if the use of larger monitors yielded sufficient improvements in productivity that over time these increases generated a significant return on the investment (ROI).
The specifics can be found in the report which is in PDF form and can be downloaded for your reading pleasure. For those of you that have better things to do that read a half a dozen pages of highly specific benchmarking detail, I suggest you print the report out for your boss and incorporate these quick summary findings into the email that briefs him on the wisdom behind your request for the glorious new display:
From the Report:
High-resplution displays such as the 30-inchApple Cinema HD Display can result in measurable productivity and efficiency gains.
Productivity gains were present in not only professional design and publishing, digital imaging, and digital video, but also in general productivity and office applications such as word processors and spreadsheets.
Cumulative productivity gains linked to a large, high -resolution display can lead to a return on investment (ROI) of several thousand dollars per year.
I swear I did not make a word of this up. Scout’s Honor.
Should you find success with this approach and become the proud and oh-so-productive new owner of a sexy HD display, don’t forget who shared this little tidbit of useful information with you and come and leave us a comment. Better yet, when your friends come and jealously eye your new desk accessory, tell them how you got it and where you got the info…
No, the headline is not a typo. It is possible to read a thousand or more different web sites each day. If you know the secret,you know I’m telling the truth; if you don’t I’m sure you find this hard to believe or even impossible to imagine. Well, for those of you that know what I’m about to divulge, move along, nothing to see here - for everyone else, please suspend your disbelief for the next five minutes and you will be generously rewarded for your mental flexibility.
The Secret to Reading 10,000 Blogs
What I’m about to share with you is a technology so incredible that once you take advantage of it, your entire online experience will be transformed and made more powerful, more productive and more efficient by an order of magnitude or more. In fact, it is possible to become so efficient at scanning the web for the information you crave that you could become as efficient as one individual I know who routinely scans more than 10,000 different sites a couple of times a week. I swear I am not making this up.
Three Little Letters: R-S-S
The technology that makes this feat possible and which will turn you into the speed browser you never dreamed you could be is known as RSS. This is an acronym for “Really Simple Syndication” and it is a protocol that enables publishers to quickly and efficiently post content in chronological order and to notify something called a pingserver every time they’ve updated their sites.
For the other side of the equation, the reader (that would be you) accesses this content using something called a “feed reader”. There are dozens of different feed readers available - the differences between them are subtle and personal preference more than functional attributes will ultimately determine which one you use - incidentally, nearly all of them are free so you can try a bunch until you find one you like.
The most popular readers include “Google Reader“, “Bloglines“, “MyYahoo” and “NetNewsWire” which is a down-loadable, Mac-specific product from a company called “Newsgator ” that itself also offers an online reader. As you might have surmised, there are web-based and installable readers and there are even add-ins for other software making it possible to add feed-reading capability to familair software like Outlook.
Everybody, Syndicates!
In each case, what these readers do is allow you to “subscribe” to the content that is being published or syndicated by the content producers. These producers may be bloggers, photojournalists, podcasters, vloggers, or even news sites like the BBC or Reuters - all of them - I should really say all of “Us” since the GTD Times is also a feed use the same basic set up tools to publish our material and to keep it organized and accessible after publication.
Okay, so now I’m sure you are scratching your head and wondering what the big deal is and you’re maybe even thinking that I suffered too much oxygen deprivation during my cycling career and all the neurons aren’t firing at full potential. Bear with me, you’re about to get the payoff…
When you’re browsing the web there are two things that take up an incredible amount of time - even if you have a super fast connection; going from one site to the next waiting for each to load, and visiting a site only to see that the information hasn’t been updated making the visit and the time it took to make it a waste. The problem of course is that you have to “go” to each site - at least metaphorically within your browser. You also have to do this in real time. The site loads after you click a link to go there and it isn’t until you’ve taken these steps that you learn that the second installment to that juicy gossip still hasn’t been posted. Grrr….
And Now, the Web Comes to You!
Here’s why feed readers will rock your world. Instead of you having to go “visit” the sites you find interesting, by using a feed reader those sites actually come to you. What’s more, once you’ve “subscribed” to a site you can tell at a glance if there’s new content up there or not and - get this - that information will have populated your reader before you even seek the information and in fact, within mere moments of the time when the publisher put it up live on his site.
Your reader can aggregate the RSS feed from as many sites as you want to keep track of; you’ll be able to see in an instant which sites have something new to check out, what the headlines of that new material is, a couple of sentences of each post can be displayed either at the same time or by clicking a link that will expand the text or open up the full post - again, all within your feed reader meaning it will open instantly, and backtracking is just as quick.
(clicking the image brings will bring up a full sized version so you can see the elements clearly.)
As you can see, there is a ton of information contained in a fairly condensed space. This is the Google reader. Note that the sites that have new content are bold so they stand out clearly. In many ways, this is organized like email with the message in one area and a preview pane in another, however, unlike email, you aren’t risking getting a virus using a feed reader to view these sites. That isn’t to say that all sites you could come across using a reader are benign, but compared to reading your mail using the preview pane in Outlook, for instance you are far, far safer.
Subscribe to the Whole Internet if you Want to
Adding feeds to your reader is a simple affair. I’m, sure you’ve seen the little badges like the MyYahoo or Google Reader or any one of the several dozen you can see displayed at the top of this post. All you have to do is click the badge that corresponds to the reader that you’re subscribed to and the software will do the rest. Then, all you have to do is navigate to your reader if it’s web based, or instantiate the program if its installed on your computer.
I’m sure you’ll see by the end of your first session that a whole new world awaits you now that the web is coming to you - having been largely tamed, courtesy of RSS feeds and your trust reader. All that’s left for you to do now is grab another cup of coffee, turn off the phone and get cozy with the several thousand sites you’ve always wanted to check out but never had the time. Now you do - all the time in the world.
That is, until you decide this feed stuff seems pretty simple and maybe instead of reading them all the time you’ll start writing one too…
For those of you that are visually inclined, this delightful YouTube Video by Commoncraft gives you the lowdown on RSS too:
One thing I’m learning as I get more and more involved in the GTD community is the vast array of activities to which people are applying David’s principles to improve their ability to perform at the highest level possible. Hardly limited to work, we know that household management can be radically improved using GTD tactics, while my own “ah ha!” moment came at the recent Road Map Seminar when I suddenly saw GTD through the eye of my old athlete self and realized that it was much like a periodized training approach to work and life.
As novel as those are, they pale in comparison to Mark Crump’s very creative approach to something that may be quite unfamiliar to many readers; the world of Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games or MMORPGs. If you’ve never heard of this before, ask your kids if they have and you’re sure to get that eye roll that can only mean “get a clue, dude, you’re like so totally out of it”. MMORPGs are incredibly popular. So popular in fact that were the economy in one of the most popular games, World of Warcraft a real economy, it would have a GDP greater than all but a handful of the world’s largest and most powerful countries.
There are entire companies devoted to helping build up powerful characters that can then be purchased by well heeled but time-shy participants who are likely to watch that expensive purchase be summarily disemboweled by a precocious 11 year old female who, lacking the bucks, has been building her character organically since she was nine.
Given that time is something that we all agree is at a premium, any strategy that can help an individual be more efficient at anything, from pedaling a bike, to getting the kids off to school to slaying dragons is going to be highly valuable. What’s interesting also is that if you take the time to read the comments on Mark’s post you’ll see two things; the number of people that are using some kind of list to help keep themselves organized for better play and also that a number of people were so intrigued by the GTD approach that they commented as much with more than one even saying that they were planning on using the GTD system in their “meat-space” environment as well.
Do YOU have a unique way in which you are using GTD? Or perhaps you have a unique job or lifestyle in which GTD figures prominently? If so we would love to hear from you. Tell us how GTD is helping you in your every day life. The most interesting and novel uses of Getting Things Done will be written up here and maybe, just maybe I can find some interesting prizes for the really “out of this world” uses of GTD.
