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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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This book has grabbed my attention. I am going to stop and pick it up while I am out today.

Used properly, a humble napkin is more powerful than Excel or Powerpoint. It can help you crystallize your ideas, think outside the box, and communicate more powerfully than any traditional business presentation.

Consultant and lecturer Dan Roam argues that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, even those who depend mainly on their left-brain analytical skills. The problem is that most of us — especially in the business world — are never encouraged to develop our intrinsic ability to create pictures. Roam teaches business leaders around the world how to look, see, imagine, and show — with immediate results.

Check out Dan Roam’s website The Back of the Napkin and watch the videos.

Amazing.

(No affiliate link, I will post one after I read and review it for you all)

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6ahqd2. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Drew McLellan has a new challenge:

Calling all authors — time to exceed Age of Conversation!

Yup, you heard it here. We want to make our second book even bigger and better than Age of Conversation. No small task. But we’re confident that together, we can do it!

A year ago, we hadn’t even conceived The Age of Conversation. (Read about its creation) So Gavin and I are feeling pretty good about this early jump. Here’s the skinny.

The Age of Conversation is a fascinating book, written by a group of 100 thought-leaders, that discusses how New Media is being used by people in all walks of life. You can read more about it’s genesis here.

There is also a big article (with lots of great links) by Tim Leberecht at frogDesign Mind:

This conversation age is different. It is the first one that is being commercialized, enabled, and propelled by web 2.0 technologies. Gavin Heaton, who is currently working on an open-source e-book about the so-called “conversation age,” writes: “Technology in the guise of social media is giving rise to not virtual connections, but real conversation.” This kind of conversation, according to the definition of Lois Kelly, the author of “Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word of Mouth Marketing”, is characterized by the following qualities: It is person to person and uses common language instead of corporate lingo. Both sides talk, and what one says is dependent upon what the other has just said. Both parties are engaged in joint problem solving; neither is trying to win or prevail. Conversation is designed to allow people with different views to learn from one another.

Granted, conversations’ value for marketers was discovered a while ago: the Cluetrain Manifesto pioneered the notion of brands as conversations long before the triumphant rise of the blogosphere. The idea of the “Architecture of Participation” has been known for a while, too. But now, the conversation economy seems to have reached enough critical mass to become a new business paradigm. Nick Rice writes: “Customers have always talked about brands, products and services. Today, through web technology, they can influence 100X the number of people with very little time and effort.” As traditional media are losing their power, micro-messages fragment public opinion into the opinion of various dispersed mini-publics. Smart mobs have replaced mass audiences. Advertisers, used to set the tone, are now held accountable by consumers who use social media platforms and sampling tools to raise their voice. In the words of Chris Anderson: “the ants have megaphones.”

So what is the new book going to be about

Visit Drew’s blog and vote! The choices are:

• Marketing Manifesto
• Why Don’t People Get It?
• My Marketing Tragedy (and what I learned)

Why should I care?

Because I may be able to contribute a chapter this time around! How exciting is that? I am really looking forward to this writing project, and want to say thank-you to Drew for inviting me. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions for a point to be sure to include, leave me a note in the comments.

Some more folks are getting in on the act:

• The Engaging Brand The 2nd Age of Conversation
• Sticky Figure Age of Conversation Revisited!
• Purple Wren Age of Conversation 2.0
• Customers Rock Customers Rock!
• Daniel Honigman Tidbit of the Day: Age of Conversation 2 author list…so far
• Converstations The 2nd (St)Age of Conversation - Brilliant, Inspiring, Generous
• Angela Maiers The Age of Conversation - Across Disciplines
• Drew McLellan,
• Luc Debaiseieux,
• Ryan Karpeles,
• Greg Verdino,
•  Lori Magno,
• Gavin Heaton,
•  Connie Reece,
• The Kaiser,
•  Katie Chatfield,
• Tim Jackson,
• Doug Meacham,
• C.B. Whittemore,
• Becky Carroll,
• Gordon Whitehead,
• Daria Rasmussen,
•  Jay Ehret,
•  Jasmin Tragas,
•  Jamey Shiels,
• Organic Frog,
•  Bill Gammell,
• Nathan Snell,
•  Stephen Landau,
•  Stephen Collins,
•  Mark Earls,
• Steven Verbruggen,
• Neil Perkin,
• Brett Macfarlane,
•  Dino Demopoulos,
•  Chris Wilson,
• Asi Sharabi.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5b9lxs. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

I have completed the PDF version of this excellent journal, and it is available at Lulu.com.

I ordered one for myself afterward, so that I could see what it looks like in “real life”. This morning I received an email that it has been printed and spiral-bound. The package has been delivered to UPS and its estimated arrival time is Monday, 7 January.

That makes one week for manufacture and shipping, not too bad.

As soon as it gets here, I will post some pics and then we will have a contest where I will give this book away. I have a couple of ideas for a competition, but I would like to get your input as well. What can you do as readers to get your hands on this five-year journal? Click here to see a preview.

Leave a comment!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6gn2wr. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

I have just completed a project that I have been working on for a couple of days, which I call the Book of Days. Click on the pics to go to Flickr for the full-sized images.

The Book of Days is a five-year journal. There is one page for each day of the year, with room for five entries - one per year from 2008 to 2012.

I made this set of three books from blank 5″ x 7″ journals from Barnes & Noble. The customized covers were created by printing a “perpetual calendar” image I found online onto parchment paper. This paper was glued to a 5″ x 7″ piece of cardboard, this cardboard backing was in turn glued to the kraft cover of the journal.

That was actually the easy part of this project, luckily I am pretty “crafty”. The time-consuming part was laying out the pages and creating the table of contents.

Each Month is in Three Sections

This is the Table of Contents for Volume I:

Introduction
Table of Contents

January Goals
Daily Entries
Monthly Review

February Goals
Daily Entries
Monthly Review

March Goals
Daily Entries
Monthly Review

Quarterly Reviews
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012

April Goals
Daily Entries
Monthly Review

May Goals
Daily Entries
Monthly Review

June Goals
Daily Entries
Monthly Review

Goal Setting

Each section begins with a page set aside for writing down my Goals for the month.

These goals will include both personal and professional subjects. I believe that it will be interesting and instructive to be able to look at what my goals for each month were as the years go by.

In fact that feature is, for me, the greatest appeal of this type of journal. I do keep a journal that I write in most days, mainly a collection of ideas, free-associations and rambling thoughts, not so much a record of anything. This journal is also difficult to use as a reference due to its free-form nature.

Daily Entries

In contrast, this journal is designed to become an ongoing record of my personal development, with tags and pointers to other resources. Each day gets 4 lines per year, where I will record brief notes on the weather, work projects, current events, and a general impression of the day.

For example I may make a note of an interesting blog post or book that I read, with a “link” to a quotation in the Commonplace Book, or a website, or a notation that identifies a file in the archive where I put the printed article.

The Monthly Review

The third part of each monthly section is a spot for a summary of the Monthly Review. One full page is set aside for each year. Over the course of the past year, as my GTD practice has grown and evolved, I have found that a summary of this kind would come in handy for the Quarterly Review.

Likewise, at the end of March, there is a section set aside for a Quarterly Summary. This summary will focus on progress made toward long-term goals and larger-scale projects.

As the journals only have 240 pages, I had to break the Book of Days into three volumes. The second contains the entries from July out to November, and the Quarterly Reviews for June and September.

Volume III will be the record for the December daily entries, the final set of Quarterly Reviews, and the Annual Review Summary. I will be including an Annual summary for 2007, as there is plenty of room and I am eager to get started.

Fresh Focus on Productivity has an interesting take on a similar idea, the Completion Journal. Check it out. (And if making your own is too much of a hassle, you can get a spiral-bound version here - the Book of Days on lulu)

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5k7wc6. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen