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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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Please contact me via e-mail: stephen @ hdbizblog dot com

There have been quite a few new subscribers over the past couple of weeks, so I thought that I would roll out the red carpet for you all. Thank you for subscribing, I know that your time is valuable and I work to provide value for your investment of time.

Links to GTD Basics

This blog is a record of my Getting Things Done practice, as well as commentary on Leadership, New Media, Web 2.0, and the Future of Work. Here are a few links that go back into the archives, discussing some of the basic features of Getting Things Done productivity:

• The complete set-up
• Tickler File
• Create your own Organizer
  
• Weekly Review
• Goal-setting
• Changing Your Habits

Guest Posts and Book Reviews

HD BizBlog is proud to be host two great guest columnists every week, Al from 7pproductions on Mondays, and Mike St. Pierre’s GTD Cafe every Wednesday. There is always room for additional writers who would like to get involved in the HD BizBlog community. Please send an e-mail ( stephen [at] hdbizblog [dot] com ) if you are interested in contributing.

I have reviewed a handful of books and productivity gear, you can see those efforts here:

• How, by Dov Seidman
• Made to Stick, by Chip & Dan Heath
• The 360 Degree Leader, by John C. Maxwell
• Everyone’s an Expert, by Seth Godin
• Also, my thoughts and inspirations via The Cluetrain Manifesto, the most important business book of the past 20 years!
• The Bubble Planner, a new vision in planning and organizing.
  
• Rollabind Notebook

This is only a short list of what is available. Please take a look around at your leisure, and feel free to contact me with any questions or suggestions.

The Sidebar

There is an awful lot of information in the sidebar, including Microchannels on the assorted category tags, links to other productivity blogs, Resource pages, a list of books on productivity and personal growth (via Amazon affiliate links), and the GTD System lens at Squidoo. The lens has a Plexo with a list of top GTD and Productivity blogs where you can vote for your favorite, or add your own to the running. (There are also some ads in the sidebar, a necessary evil for defraying the hosting costs. Clicking the links helps me help you, it can’t hurt!)

“Coming Attractions”

Some of the posts and projects that I am working on include:

• More on The Art of Productivity
• A set of “How-to” e-books and training courses
• A new theme and organization scheme
• A 2008 version of the GTD Calendar (full- and half-page) (Click here, it’s ready!)

Thank you again for reading and subscribing, I am looking forward to seeing the community continue to grow. Please, leave a comment, I would love to hear your feedback.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/68wa4e. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

A review of Seth Godin’s e-book about the search for meaning online.

This e-book is mainly an exposition on using Blogs and RSS to create a new online experience, secondarily it is an “infomercial” for Godin’s Squidoo.com Lens Portal.

Everyone is using the Internets to find something, and “Search” has become a billion-dollar industry. However, when you are searching for something on any of the various engines, you are likely to find thousands (if not millions) of results. In which case you haven’t really “found” anything! Having too much information is only a little better than not having enough. It takes a long time to seft through all of those search results to find a meaningful answer to your query. To quote Godin:

“The engineers who built the Web believed that if they presented the ‘right’ answer, intelligent humans would be pleased. In fact, before you get it, before you discover the meaning, there is not right answer.”

The Unfulfilled Promise of Web 2.0

The promise of Web 2.0 is creating networks of meaning through conversation, a two-way interaction. It is about the construction of user-generated Networks which are easily found, searched, and navigated. The entire purpose of these Networks is to speed up the process of actually finding what you are searching for: a meaningful answer. Godin calls this network “a place where one can go for instant context on their search“, he calls it a Lens. The purpose of a Lens is to answer the question,”What do I need to know?”

“A lens gives context. When it succeeds it delivers meaning. A lens can tell you which books, records, and websites are the best way to appreciate Miles Davis. A lens can show you the ten most important things you need to know about copyright on the web. A lens can highlight the key players in the hospital crib business and give you the confidence that you need to go ahead and buy something - without worrying about whether you missed a key player or didn’t understand a critical choice.”

The Lens Points to Content

The idea of the Lens-driven Network is to make a particular lens your starting point when you are searching for something. Because a lens provides context, rather than content. The lens is an aggregator of “pointers” on a particular subject. The components of a lens: Links, RSS feeds, Adsense Ads, all are things that “point” to content - Blogs, Websites, and even other lenses that contain trusted and meaningful information.

Here is the good news (quoting the Squidoo main page):

• Squidoo is free
• You can earn royalties $$$
• You can generate more traffic to your blog & website
• You can build credibility as a trusted guide
• Improved SEO rankings

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? In fact it is good, and it is working. Affiliate programs have popped up all over the place on the Squidoo servers to drive more traffic and make more money.

It is also not working, in a sense, as there are quite a few people creating lenses that either do not have the time or skills required to invest in making a truly useful lens. I spent some time looking around for a meaningful Getting Things Done lens, and didn’t really find a thorough one. In fact, many of the lenses, on any given topic, do not live up to their potential. My impression from reading Everyone’s an Expert was that the lens would be a tool for creating a more meaningful experience, starting a new conversation and increasing the power of the Internets. Not just another sign that says “Look at me.”

So I built a lens. Yes, it does have a link to this blog, but the main purpose is to give the lens value through context. The information is about Getting Things Done, and for creating your own global microbrand. I have designed it to be a (somewhat) open system, with links to several other blogs that I have found to be interesting and useful.

The Lens is Collaborative

You can go to the GTD System Lens and see the resources that have been assembled, consisting of blogs and sites that I have found, others that were suggested to me, and still more that have volunteered to join the Community. There is a fun feature of the Squidoo system that allows you to create your own Mini-Digg with these site. Visitors may rank them by voting, and add sites to the Plexo that I may have missed (feel free to add your own!). You can even get the Plexo as a widget for your own site (see sidebar) and increase your exposure that way.

The idea of the GTD System Lens is to create a community, and give valuable information. The Ultimate Getting Things Done Index is a lens of sorts, in that it pulls together all of the RSS feeds for every blog that discusses GTD. The GTD System Lens is designed to create value, credibility, and context for the various resources that exist for Getting Things Done.

Go ahead and download Everyone’s an Expert here, and get to work on your own lens. Then come back and tell about it!

Related: Doc Searls is talking about linking and the search for meaning too:

What matters most is relevance, especially if what you want to do is constructive. I don’t know how to bring relevance to the fore, but I think we need to try. To its credit Google Blogsearch defaults to sort by relevance (they also sort by date, the current default at Technorati), but it misses many of the results that Technorati catches, which is why I tend to use Technorati more. Also, I’m not sure what Google means by “relevance” is actually what’s most useful for the reader’s purposes.

We still need that.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6sby5n. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

IF you have not already added the Foxmarks plugin to your FireFox browser, what are you waiting for? The author is going to add a new search service this year that looks to be spectacular: (from TechCrunch)

[Kapor’s] popular Firefox plugin, Foxmarks, has been downloaded 700,000 times and has 350,000 active users.

All those users create some very well organized bookmark data. Unlike Del.icio.us, where people throw thousands of bookmarks for later reference, users tend to have fewer, but more important, bookmarks linked directly from their browser. And they spend more time properly annotating those bookmarks, Kapor says. So far, Foxmarks is tracking 250 million bookmarks, from 20 million unique URLs.

And now Kapor, along with his partner, Todd Agulnick, are going to use that data to launch a new search engine. Expect it to debut in a few months.

This is very exciting, as more user-generated data (in the form of tags and other meta-data) is becoming available to increasing numbers of users. In fact, TechCrunch mentions this specifically:

The Foxmarks search engine is based entirely on user bookmarks and the associated metadata. Don’t expect pages and pages of results like you get with Google. But you will get a few results for most queries that are highly relevant and on target. When returning and ranking results, Foxmarks takes into consideration the text in the title of the URL, the names of any folders people have put the bookmarks in, and any descriptions added by users. All of this information is shown in the results.

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

The GTD-o-sphere has been buzzing lately with posts about how to capture, plan, track, and display Projects and Next Actions. The ideas range from simple lists to hPDA templates to Circa-fied inserts to your organizer. Take a look at these mini card post-its from 3M:

Simple, yet powerful, these cards let you think in a dynamic, visual way that creates connections and possibilities.

They stick to vertical surfaces, not each other, so they’re just as easy to organize in your hand as they are to display. These sortable cards also easily sort and shuffle, so you can organize them in your hand and on the go!

Use the handy headers to categorize information by topic, difficulty, priority or deadline. And with several sizes and colors to choose from, Sortable Cards make it more convenient than ever to organize your important thoughts, lists and tasks.

These little cards (2-7/8″ x 3-7/8″) are just the right size for the notes that you may need for a small project or listing your Next Actions. There is a colored border at the top with two spaces for writing, with lines beneath. The back of the card is also lined and has a marvelous Post-it adhesive strip. The adhesive is bounded by two plastic “stripes” at the top and bottom. This is the feature that makes these note cards so remarkable, as it keeps the cards from sticking to each other. This way you can sort and stack the cards just like your beloved 3″x5″ cards, yet the card can be stuck into your planner or where-ever you would stick a Post-it note.

But what precisely should you use them for? Well Corrie had an idea and made her own:

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been keeping track of my various “projects I’m working on” in the extra margin space of my weekly planner sheets (in the photo above, it’s the space between the day-boxes and the binder rings, under the cards). However, I found myself copying over unfinished projects from week to week. This got annoying.

I thought about Getting Things Done and began to see the wisdom of having a master “project list,” which was essentially what my week-to-week list was. So, I tried using a paper “bookmark” (about the width of the margin) as a project list-keeper. That worked okay, but I found myself having to look up other pieces of paper, emails, and online to-do lists related to each project.
This is about when I started scheming a cooler way to keep track of my projects AND some of the critical to-do’s for each project.

Here is a pic of what Corrie created:

Now there is a very good idea. But my projects aren’t really like that, nor do the lists of Next Actions fit on little cards like that. What I do like is the idea of the Most Important Task, from Leo at ZenHabits:

Three MITs. Here’s your planning system each day: write down your three Most Important Tasks on a sheet of paper (I write mine in a Moleskine pocket notebook). That’s it. Check off those tasks when you finish them. Devote your entire day, if possible, to those three tasks, or at the very least devote the first half of your day to them. Your MITs are basically the Big Rocks you planned for this week, and any other MIT that you need to do for today.

The new calendar pages that I am designing include a section for Big Rock planning. The mini-cards can be Circa-punched and kept in your organizer for more detailed notes on these tasks. This set of cards with the MIT becomes your “script” for the day, in fact that’s exactly what they call it at Micropersuasion:

Scripting was pioneered by legendary San Francisco 49er’s coach Bill Walsh during the team’s Super Bowl streak in the 1980s. It’s now utilized by many NFL coaches who run the West Coast Offense.

Rather than plot out the offensive plan for an entire game game, these men “script” out just the first 15 plays - and then they stick with them no matter what. It’s grown more complex too as coaches prepare themselves for different situations.

At its purest, scripting helps teams know their initial plays inside and out. This minimizes mistakes, establishes momentum and dictates the flow of the game. It also gives the coaching staff an opportunity to run “test plays” that are designed to generate a reaction from the competition - e.g. the defense. They observe their opponent’s tendencies - and then exploit them.

Football of course isn’t business. However, there are parallels. I am not advocating the abolishment of planning. It certainly has its place. Still, nimbleness matters today and by scripting, learning and adapting, you can succeed more quickly.

That post pointed me to this article at Fortune about Marissa Mayer (VP, Search Products and User Experience, Google) and how she schedules her day:

To keep track of tasks, I have a little document called a task list. And in the same document there’s a list for each person I work with or interact with, of what they’re working on or what I expect from them. It’s just a list in a text file. Using this, I can plan my day out the night before: “These are the five high-priority things to focus on.” But at Google things can change pretty fast. This morning I had my list of what I thought I was going to do today, but now I’m doing entirely different things.

So I bought a pack of these cards (very inexpensive at $0.90 for 80 cards) and punched them with my Circa punch. Each evening I will jot down what my Important Tasks are for the next day on one of the 3″x5″ cards I keep by the bed. Then, in the morning, when I am plotting my plan for the day, I will transfer the Most Important Tasks to these little cards and stick them into my organizer at the front of the Next Action section. By the way, if you have downloaded the Beta calendar pages, I would like to get your feedback on how you are using them and suggestions on making them better. This project is getting larger than I ever thought it would.

Leave a Comment.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/66banz. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen