Welcome back! It's good to see you again. Please note that I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: In Context Blog

I have a guest-post up at Slacker Manager today, check it out. [link]

Being a successful manager depends on taking responsibility as a leader, and one of the duties of a leader is to make decisions. Making good decisions can influence morale, for good or ill. Your decisions can solve or create problems. Some days all you manage to accomplish is to make decisions for people.

Many of the decisions that you make take little effort, based on your skills and training. Others may lie at the edge of your authority or your experience, and will take some thinking. Read more…

[Editor’s note - This post is an excerpt from my forthcoming e-course - Project Planning in Context ©. Read through to the end to learn how to get the premium E-book (no charge!).]

Affinity Diagrams

Organizing Ideas Into Common Themes

Is it ever a bad thing to have too many ideas? Probably not, but if you’ve ever experienced information overload or struggled to know where to begin with a wealth of data you’ve been given, you may have wondered how you can use all of these ideas effectively.

When there’s lots of “stuff” coming at you, it is hard to sort through everything and organize the information in a way that makes sense and helps you make decisions. Whether you’re brainstorming ideas, trying to solve a problem or analyzing a situation, when you are dealing with lots of information from a variety of sources, you can end up spending a huge amount of time trying to assimilate all the little bits and pieces. Rather than letting the disjointed information get the better of you, you can use an affinity diagram to help you organize it.

An affinity diagram helps to synthesize large amounts of data by finding relationships between ideas. The information is then gradually structured from the bottom up into meaningful groups. From there you can clearly “see” what you have, and then begin your analysis or come to a decision.

Affinity diagrams can be used to:

• Draw out common themes from a large amount of information
• Discover previously unseen connections between various ideas or information
• Brainstorm root causes and solutions to a problem

Because many decision-making exercises begin with brainstorming, this is one of the most common applications of affinity diagrams. After a brainstorming session there are usually pages of ideas. These won’t have been censored or edited in any way, many of them will be very similar, and many will also be closely related to others in a variety of ways. What an affinity diagram does is start to group the ideas into themes.

From the chaos of the randomly generated ideas comes an insight into the common threads that link groups of them together. From there the solution or best idea often emerges quite naturally.

Affinity diagrams are not purely in the domain of brainstorming. They can be used in any situation where:

• A single, best solution is not readily apparent from a series of choices
• You want to reach a consensus or decision and have a lot of variables to consider, concepts to discuss, ideas to connect, or opinions to incorporate
• There is a large volume of information to sort through

Here is a step-by-step guide to using affinity diagrams to show how the process works. Read the rest of this entry »

(Moved to the top) Good day all. I have just posted a new topic in the PKM Forum, regarding the future of Productivity Practices and what may lie ahead for us. Please take a look, and share what you think.

I have also put together a survey for my readers (that means you), that should help me focus on the topics and issues that are most important to you. Please take part in both community activities!

Take the Productivity in Context Survey

I have created a survey in which I would like to solicit your opinion on the direction that Productivity in Context should take during 2008, what types of articles you like, and which ones you do not. Please click here, or on the “Focus” knob at the top of the left sidebar, to participate.

There are only 6 questions, it should just take a minute, and it will help me provide you with the top-quality content that you are looking for. All answers are confidential, I can’t find out who you are. A few of you have taken the survey, and I thank you. I am working very diligently to provide the very best resource for Productivity and Leadership.

New Conversation in the Forum

Here is part of it:

• How is technology affecting productivity practices?
• Where will it be in five years?
• Will changes to the economy affect the way people view productivity?
• Established markets are in a state of flux, where is this one headed?
• What practical issues present an opportunity, or perhaps pose a threat?

And my answers:

1. I believe that web-based productivity tools will become more powerful and ubiquitous. As a new generation of programmers enter the workforce, and the open-source community grows in stature, I foresee more collaboration on creating these types of applications to manage not only productivity, but merging it with Knowledge Management and personal data access/security. Productivity practices such as GTD, DIT, and the 7 habits will be parsed and iterated until a new generation of workflow management appears. The next generation will utilize connectivity tools and personal electronic devices that we probably can’t imagine today, any more than Marvin Camras envisioned the CD-ROM or the iPod.

2. Five years is a generation away. Will there be a new David Allen or Stephen Covey to burst on the scene? Or perhaps a breakthrough software application? Maybe. And if so, how can we position ourselves to drive that change?

3. The economy of the West will continue to move through the Service-based model into the Information-based model. In the Pacific Rim, who can say for sure? Modern productivity and technological practices have leap-frogged the step-by-step implementation of the US and Europe. I believe that the European economy is…(click here to read the rest!)

Today’s guest post is by Al at 7P Productions.

For those of us who are warriors of the Information Age, we use the email and calendar applications like a sword and shield. For the apps, the usual suspects include Microsoft with MS Outlook and Google with Gmail and Google Calendar (gCal). Because I do much of my work on Linux, I cannot use MS Outlook, or any other Microsoft-based app for that matter. My primary browser is Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla’s second-most popular application is the Thunderbird email app.

One of the reasons why Firefox is very popular is because of the vast amount of useful plugins (my favorites include AdBlock, Screen Grab, Read It Later, and PicLens). Thunderbird also has a library of useful plugins, and one that I recently tried out is Lightning. One of the commonly cited drawbacks of Thunderbird was that it had no calendar feature, but Lightning addresses this shortcoming by integrating the Mozilla Sunbird calendar app into Thunderbird.

I’ve been following the Sunbird project for a while, and although the earlier versions did not impress me, the current version (v0.7) has shown much improvements to the point that I am now a user. Having a separate email and calendar app is tedious though, but the Lightning plugin takes care of that.

I Sync, Therefore I Am
I mentioned in an earlier post that having multiple calendars over-complicated my organizing system. My PDA uses the Pocket Outlook version, and this calendar is my primary one. However, I sync up with my Google Calendar for a couple of reasons: (1) it serves as my backup/emergency online calendar, and (2) it helps to sync my Outlook to Lightning.

Although my primary calendar is my PDA’s Pocket Outlook, my primary inbox is with Thunderbird, which made trying to manage my schedule between my email inbox and my PDA calendar a bit inefficient. Having a combined email/calendar app was something Outlook had for a long time, so the Thunderbird/Lightning combo isn’t earth-shattering news to the staunch Outlook users. However, for those who are considering Thunderbird or are currently using it, Lightning is a must-have. Lightning has streamlined my email/calendar management.

The Setup
The following is how I sync my different calendars (Lifehacker has various methods to sync Google Calendar with many different calendar tools as well):

• I use the free version of SyncMyCal to sync up Outlook with Google Calendar. I am currently considering upgrading to the paid version as well.
  • Alternatively, a free open-source software (FOSS) called Remote Calendar is available that does something similar.
• Lightning is synced up to Google Calendar using the Provider plugin (thanks to this Lifehacker article for helping me find out about this add-on). Installation instructions can be found here.
  • An alternative to Provider is GCalDaemon, which works for Lightning as well as other calendar apps such as iCal.

The setup works pretty well. To demonstrate, I created an event on Google Calendar, and a separate event on Lightning. Here’s proof that syncing was successful on Lightning:

… as well on Google Calendar…

… and afterwards syncing Outlook to Google Calendar was also a success.

About the author: Al writes a blog about the 7 P’s: passion, purpose, planning, pursuit, progress, power, and peace. He also recently adopted the GTD system and frequently shares his personal experience with it here.