David Seah reflects on some of the feedback he’s received about his uber-cool Printable CEO:
“One of the commenters on BSAG noted that he‚Äôd hate to have the PCEO applied to him; indeed, that‚Äôs a scary thought. On the other hand, it might be the basis of an interesting work contract: management would be forced to come up with a clear, succinct list of what work is considered productive, and it would be written down.”
Microsoft has announced its proposed Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) which is a very very simple protocol that takes RSS and makes it bi-directional:
“SSE defines the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely cooperating applications to use RSS as the basis for item sharing‚Äîthat is, the bidirectional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items among two or more cross-subscribed feeds.For example, SSE could be used to share your work calendar with your spouse. If your calendar were published to an SSE feed, changes to your work calendar could be replicated to your spouse’s calendar, and vice versa. As a result, your spouse could see your work schedule and add new appointments, such as a parent-teacher meeting at the school, or a doctor’s appointment.”
If this were to be adopted by a few other key players (Yahoo, Google, et al) it could finally be the simple, extensible idea that gets all of our apps talking to each other no matter who wrote them.
Of course the motivations for having things not work together has always been a little bit stronger and when combined with the technical difficulty of doing so we have been left with what we have currently - a mess of incompatible apps.
Can SSE change that?
“And, wow, is Microsoft starting to get with it. They‚Äôve released it under Creative Commons license, the same license that covers the RSS 2.0 specification. Anyone can remix, tweak, and build upon the specification even for commercial reasons.”
When I was a kid, I developed a habit of reviewing the current day’s events and listing all the things of importance or things I wanted to remember for the next day. I would do this while lying in bed. It was a quick mental exercise. When I had accomplished something, I would think about it briefly. This gave me a good feeling. Then I would think about the things I wanted to do tomorrow.
If there was something extremely important that I really, really did not want to forget to do… ok, this next bit sounds dumb, but it worked for me 100% of the time… I would write that thing on the outside of my head with my finger, backwards, so my brain could read it forwards. It took a bit of time and concentration to properly sketch the reminder like this on the outside of my head. The exercise worked foolproof, because it caused me to summarize and prioritize the important stuff. I always remembered the words I traced out on the side of my head.
Maybe mental lists are not for everyone, but there is a certain freedom in them. You do not need any extra equipment. Just your finger and your skull, and a few minutes before you go to sleep.
The first Moleskine inspired movie. Check it out!
I’m playing around with Jerry Brito’s Moleskine GTD tabs hack:
“The first section is “next actions.” I don’t label it because it is the first thing you see when you open the book, and I use the cloth bookmark to indicate where the list ends. Halfway into the book I separate ten pages for projects and ten pages for someday maybe lists, and the rest is for article ideas.”
Slashdot has a good excerpt from Scott Berkuns The Art of Project Management:
“One myth of project management is that certain people have an innate ability to do it well, and others do not. Whenever this myth came up in conversation with other project managers, I always asked for an explanation of that ability‚Äîhow to recognize it, categorize it, and, if possible, develop it in others. After discussion and debate, the only thing we usually identified‚Äîafter considering many of the other topics and skills covered elsewhere in this book‚Äîis the ability to make things happen.”
Dave Taylor on LinkedIn Etiquette. LinkedIn is maybe the one truly useful social networking sites and this is a good article on some of the things not to do there.
DIY Planner has a good article on setting up your own Hipster PDA using the DIY templates:
“Now, notice that the most striking thing about the system is its inherent simplicity: it’s just a stack of cards and a clip. I want you to remember this: when you start making things too complicated, scale things back. The more complex your system, the less you’ll use it. Got it?”
Janice Fraser has this excellent guide to setting priorities on a non-trivial project:
Step 1: Make a “Big List of Things To Do.”
Step 2: Organize your list according to Dependencies and Baseline items.
Step 3: Have the appropriate coworkers score each item.
Step 4: Graph the overall scores.
Definitely check out the entire article - lots of good ideas here.
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