Business & Client Expectations – The Arena of Technology

One of the realities of client – company relationships is that, not infrequently, clients may not understand the meaning and significance or processes, protocols, technologies, and media that you must use precisely to maintain an efficient and effective set of client relationships. This can be especially true, if they or you work in a single-person or small office environment, or work from home. The other thing that can happen is that you and I may not understand the significance and meaning that clients have associated with technologies. We’re each working with  our own assumptions, and there’s a disconnect between business assumptions and client expectations.

In the area of technology, this is particularly common. The now classic book net.wars discusses how the internet came to be initially as a community of people who had certain protocols and standards for interaction that prevailed until online services (chiefly AOL) opened their gateways to the internet, spilling the first wave of people into the net who hadn’t played a role in creating these protcols, and largely weren’t aware of them. The best example is, of course, SPAM. It was AOL users, when first gaining access to usenet groups, that began to flood them with the first SPAM, starting a mutation of what was previously a more open and purely collaborative community into one that was necessarily more restrictive and protective. The F.A.Q. is a less negative example. The protocol for interacting in any forum, BBS (bulletin board system), or newsgroup has always been to first read the Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.) before posting new ones. This both respects the users – keeping their attentions from being flooded with repetitive material and demanding redundant and wasteful effort in a collaborative environment – and also conserves storage, bandwidth, and general traffic over networks. If you came from an online service, however, it was provided initially by a corporation, not a collaborative community per se, and your expectations may have been to be able to post your question without reading anything at all, and to get an answer back from a customer service person. When the paying users of online services were let loose onto the more or less free internet, one of the things they brought with them was the view that discussion forums, newsgroups and the like were “help” forums, not *collaborative* communities.

The rules for each are different, obviously. In a collaborative community, you take into account everyone else’s time, attention, and interests before you post. The emphasis is on sustainability, more self-sufficiency and self-directed learning, and new questions and discussions should do what created the net in the first place – add to and extend what has gone before – grow it – further the development of the community itself and the technology that sustains it. In a help forum, the goal is to get your question answered quickly by an expert, regardless of whether it has been asked before by someone else. The result of these differing expectations was, as you can expect, that the original netizens (a term reflecting a sense of citizenship and civic-community responsibility – adherence to sustainable protocols for behavior) – the original netizens often viewed the newbies as uncivilized, arrogant in their demands to be spoonfed assistant by what are essentially volunteers and in the continual complaining over how things work, often without a lot of understanding of why some things are in place. The ‘newbies’ from the online services often viewed the original netizens as arrogant, “techno-geeks” who think you’re inferior or unintelligent if you don’t understand things, and too arrogant to “help” when there’s a document somewhere that explains the answer, and another document that explains the terminology used in the first document – which is of course, quite natural if these documents developed naturally over time, contributed to by a growing community of people who gradually learned their way around in a new society rather than paid $25/month (in 1993) for fast “walk-throughs” from large corporations like Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL.

It’s no secret where my sympathies lie. I think you don’t barge into a community and demand it accomodate you as you pitch tent on people’s front lawns. And of course, having been involved relatively early, I have a strong respect for self-sufficiency – for people taking responsibility for their own needs to learn more – and for people who make an effort to learn instead of just demanding “walk throughs” all the time. But of course, I’m glad there’s a demand for training – I just insist that it be something we pay for rather than treated like something everyone else owes us. Community is where you collaborate by trading value for value – in that sense, you’re paying there, as well. If you just want the answer, not the community, and don’t want to contribute, then it’s got to be dollars.

A lot of the online communities have been transformed under the sheer pressure of humanity onto the internet, but a few exist now as services with paid memberships, precisely on the theory that if you pay, you’ll freeload less, though they work very differently than the service-oriented ones of the past. I’m thinking of a particular community that is mostly West Coast.

How does all this apply to business and work? Well, it’s precisely differing expectations that have to be managed in client-business relationships, and technologies and assumptions of protocol are the arena for working that out.

E-mail: Those of us that came from the world of typewriters and faxes, may not be aware of the many protocols. I have a colleague who used to try to treat it as chat. If I refilled my coffee before replying to an e-mail, I got back a bewildered response, a mere three minutes after the previous message, “Are you THERE?!?” Most of us know better, but a lot of people treat it like a walkie-talkie. Ever gotten or sent an e-mail that just says “OK”. Not every statement needs a reply. Then of course, there are people who don’t reply when they should. You make a substantive point and just never hear back from them. “Well, you didn’t ask a question.” All-caps is another one. It’s difficult to tell if it’s for emphasis, or if you’re shouting. So we end up sticking emoticons (smiley faces) on everything to make up for shouting. That piece of netiquette is well known. In corporate life, everyone loves to make fun of the person who hits “reply-all” to an e-mail from the CEO for a one-word response “OK” that then goes to all 5,000 members of the organization. It’s even worse when someone puts you on their “mailing list” and includes your e-mail address in the TO: or CC: line along with everyone else, effectively handing that ready-made “mailing list” to all the multi-level marketers he knows. Ever get that joke someone you know mails out to everyone in their address book? You know, the one containing that virus you got? Same thing.

Telephone: A much older technology, of course, but it has in fact evolved greatly. More and more of us are ditching land-lines for cell phones, or ditching cell phones for SIP phones (SIP is an internet protocol for telephony), etc. I make all my outbound business and personal phone calls in Skype. My inbound calls come to me as transcribed e-mails, allowing me to not interrupt my workflow. I don’t have a land line. And my cell is for emergencies, or for calling Google to get a phone number or address, if I’m away from home. But the way people talk on telephones has changed, too. My wife is a hair stylist, and a lot of her clients prefer to make appointments via text message. Cell phones are creating massive causes for car accidents, too – the mobility of communication is changing the protocols people follow. Some people think nothing of driving in two lanes while they chat about who is dating whom, or talking in a loud animated manner about things you’d expect to see on Phil Donahue when they’re inches in front of you in line for a cashier. I don’t even bother calling most clients on their land lines anymore – they don’t know why they have them, and neither do I, since they don’t answer them. The land line is more like “the voice mail line”. If I need to get through now, it’s the cell. But how business is expected to use the phone, even small business, is largely shaped by large corporations and paid subscription services. Sometimes people wonder that I don’t answer the phone 24/7 or have a staffer doing it. I can have someone do it, but you won’t get the expertise, so it’s just an appointment booking mechanism, and then the price of our services to the client has go to go way up. The overhead of having that staff around the clock as well as making all those appointments, and then hiring someone of equal talent and experience to keep them or else to do the work we’re doing for clients, means we now pay five salaries instead of one, just to answer the phone.

I figure not every client is my client, and just don’t do it. It keeps our costs to the client lower, my headaches fewer, and that’s a win-win for our target audience. As a small business, I don’t let large corporations set all the standards for me. After all, if we copied the way they build web sites, our clients’ marketing would suck. Small businesses have more flexibility to be more responsive than the large corps, and their advantage is in using it, not tying on tons of dead weight just to be “respectable”. If you want that, quit your business and go get a job. If you want to run your own shop, run it like your own shop. But you see, that involves considerations about how to manage expectations between company and client, specifically in the area of technologies. And should we, you may ask, put so much emphasis on technology as the arena for working this out? Yes. Yes, because what is contemporary technology in business all about? Primarily it’s about interactions and interactivity. From Twitter to live documents (like Google Docs) to Skype, it’s about connectivity, community (there’s that word again), and sociality (made that one up), and yes between company, client, and actually the rest of the world at large. And when that’s the case, when it’s a revolutionizing set of changes, as I believe it is, all these questions about our assumptions – our expectations – the protocols – the “rules” (as I like to frame them) – of our interactions come up. One of the things I’m continually talking about with my clients is how to be successful doing internet marketing in social media. The prime protocol – the primary rule – #1 – is don’t spam your audience. Don’t pitch them. Don’t confuse marketing with advertising. The surest way to alienate them and find twitter and facebook “useless” (which is something you convince yourself – not something that’s really what it is), is to keep telling them what you offer and how to get it. Instead, the protocol for social media – for the new Web 2.0 communities – is much, much more like what it was before 1994, than what it has been from 1994-2007. It is to give something of value away. To contribute by giving away your insight, analysis, information, expertise, and build a community through social contribution, drawing on your background and experience, earning you the place of resident expert. People who do that have no trouble ‘finding’ clients – the clients find them. The people who spam, find themselves in a pulpit without a congregation.

My advice, read two books. Tribes by Seth Godin, and net.wars edited by Wendy M. Grossman. Get yourself the picture of where we’ve been and where we’re going. It’s strongly related, because people are social animals, even the least social of us.

IM (instant messengers): Ever been in the middle of a really important thought, or activity, or finally trying to shut down, and up pops that <beep> instant message with “Hi. I saw you online”? Yeah, me too. It’s why I stay invisible all the time. Synchronous communication is for the absolutely lowest level of support in your organization. That’s why there are automated chat clients that do “automated support” for you, using artificial intelligence. If the chatter asks, “How do I reset my password?” the chat client dutifully responds with the link to the instructions along with some nice verbiage – “I have it right here, sir.” (it gets your gender from your client file, or guesses it from your name). If you have time to play that role in your business, by all means, put up one of those “Talk to me instantly” widgets on your site. I find synchronous communication to be a workflow-destroyer and, while it’s easy for clients to add me, I don’t use it for clients, I use it for staff. With e-mail, I can keep some structure and flow in my life. As an asynchronous communication form, it lets me have more than one client at a time, which is necessary to survive at all. I eliminate the expectation of instant responses, and usually set a standard of a reply within 24hrs. Ever seen those auto-responders that say “I’ll get back with you asap?” I don’t use them, but I understand why they are there. For one thing, the worst thing you can do to spam is auto-reply to it, thereby confirming your address as a sale-able part of the list, and exponentially increasing the likelihood of further spam in a never-ending snowball of e-garbage. Think before you automate. Some of us who have automated other things have, occasionally made mistakes, only to come back and find a serious mess on our hands. Wow, I can’t even tell you about a couple of things I’ve totally &*^%$-ed up that way. Automated payments, too. Remember that thing you thought you cancelled a year ago? Automate the expense, automate the payment, automate the renewal – argh! Anyway, managing client expectations for communications – synchronous vs. asynchronous – response time, times of day, etc. is key.

One of the things I always struggle with is how you make sure your clients know you work with multiple clients at once, so no you can’t stop and do six hours of straight work on their project on demand, just because they took the day off to focus on it. You may have six clients’ projects to touch that day. My best solution right now is to focus on turn-around time and response time. By conveying average turnaround time, up front, I am leaving myself free to have enough clients at once to survive, and hopefully communicating, at least subtly, that one client’s project is not all I’m doing today, one at a time, etc. If you’ve got good ways to get this across to set client expectations, please comment and add your advice.

Reminders: I send out action items frequently, and reminders if I haven’t heard anything in a few days. It’s interesting, because large corporations do the same thing, of course – I find the majority of clients appreciate it. Sometimes, if they’re feeling harried by other work obligations, and you’re dependent on them for deliverables to complete the project, they can feel pressured. Moreso, actually, because you’re a smaller business, your reminder is more personal, and it altogether seems more personal. This can prompt another exchange over it not being pressure, but just being what one client termed “due diligence” – staying up on it. We do what we can to manage the feelings of the recipient, but there are limits. If you’ve got ideas, please share them.

Online Documents: One of our solutions to the above issue is live, collaborative, online documents (like Google Docs). We’ll share a list of action items and other project documents that we maintain online in a secure environment, so they can at any time see the updates. The challenge is, of course, not everyone is yet used to live documents. Most people still think of documents as something you possess, that may be on your hard drive, rather than an interactive construct that you share and collaborate on and maintain. The former is the Microsoft mentality, who finds themselves haplessly trying to copy Google with Live Docs, though without the fundamental reasoning behind it, and the latter thinking – much more in tune with Web 2.0 and with how businesses really need to work to be efficient and effective – is Google’s. I’ve seen large corporations struggle, to much amusement, with sorting out and exchanging and collaborating on different versions of documents as e-mail attachments, meaning no two people can work on the same document at once (it’s “checked out” to use Microsoft’s early term when they first tried this), or else you can, but then you have to have another person who reconstructs a new version of the document out of the pieces worked on by each team member. That’s 2009 productivity for ya! So many useless jobs that technology gives us a way to live without. All it was waiting for was the motivation to waste less money. The only comforting thing for those of us that compete with big corps, is the assurance that they’re just finding different things to waste it on – it’s moving the peas on the plate, not making them disappear. Anyway, if you’re really, really not experienced with much beyond e-mail, the concept of a shared document, and even creating an account or logging in to see it, may be new to you. A lot of people get stumped, so it’s not the only solution. We fall back to e-mail until those clients’ own companies’ needs demand that they catch up.

Filing: That brings up e-mail again. Ever been asked for the same e-mail again and again – the client can’t find it, or deleted it, or doesn’t know what folder he put it in, etc.? It slows him down – he has to e-mail you to get his e-mail. And of course, it takes a bite out of your productivity and efficiency. This is why you’ve got to charge a substantive fee for your work. Because you’re going to serve as either tutor or efficiency triage for a percentage of your clients – one or the other. I’m not trying to pick on clients. I like my clients, and you probably like yours. What I’m saying is that we also have to talk about, and they about their clients, how you manage those expectations and what are the results. If my client is a real estate appraiser who is constantly having to stop during the day and take “What’s the status?” calls from his clients, he’d benefit from pro-active status updates – which is something my company uses, too. You get your clients started, then when they call, you wean them off of the phone, “Oh yeah. I sent you the status this morning. Did you get my e-mail?” Not an accusation, just always including the point that there’s another process already in effect, that they’re being taken care of. In the same way, we provide pre-designed tutorials at the completion of every project. And the tutorials indicate that custom instruction is also available for a reasonable fee. That sets the expectation. Before that, some clients would wonder why hours of custom instruction weren’t included in the spec. Now, we set the expectation by being proactive and also offering alternatives. That’s not all we do, but it’s enough to make the point here. Offer self-sufficiency and self-directed learning – offer the F.A.Q., so to speak – but make the “walk through” available for a fee. That’s the hybrid of the two protocols we described at the beginning.

Calendar Items: We send these and not everyone knows what to do with them, which is to be expected. They’re a protocol in corporate life, or in large offices with shared networks (server-installed e-mail/calendar applications like Outlook) where lots of meetings take place. Still, it works more than it fails. Some clients treat it as a confirmation, some as an invitation, and some as a calendar item. We love it. Rarely, but still sometimes, we get back “what am I supposed to do with this?” or the client gets confused over time zones. More commonly, because the client isn’t using these productivity tools in his own office, the client forgets about the appointment and is surprised at our call, which is exactly why calendar items were invented. Whether you are a one-man shop, a contractor, or working in an office of two people, calendar items can increase your productivity and minimize disparities between business-client expectations. I recommend Google Calendar. It’s faster and easier than Outlook (time is productivity), it’s compatible if your recipient uses Outlook, Lotus Notes, and a host of other e-mail/calendar applications, and it offers extra features if you’re a Gmail junkie like me.

Attachments: Ever ask for a .jpg or .gif and get a word document? Sometimes, you can’t even pull the image out of it without Microsoft reducing the quality down to garbage. Ever send an attachment, and your recipient has trouble viewing it? That’s why PDFs are helpful. Send a .jpg or .gif which is smaller and quicker, and your client might open it in Microsoft Picture Viewer which comes with Windows. Not only is the size it shows not real (it scales it without telling you), but your client might have trouble even finding an application to open it. What if it opens in Paint for them? It can be slow, and confusing. In the area of graphics, for that matter, it’s a very large number of people who can take photos but can’t locate them on their hard drive to attach and send to you, let alone crop or resize them (especially if Picture Viewer is displaying an scaled down size, when the real size – if they take photos at full resolution – is bigger than the wall behind their monitor). Attachments can be a pain. What I do is keep an eye on what my clients use every day, in their own profession, and that’s the format I prefer for that client group. If in doubt, I send PDF. A PDF printer driver is essential. Without it, your Word doc is going to open in Open Office, or vice versa. Your .jpg or .gif may be hopeless. Your Excel sheet may open in Excel, but if their default template is messed up, all the columns might get reset to standard width or something like that. What if they’re on a Mac, and you’re not? It’s not worth it. I manage client expectations by sticking with a cross-platform file format like PDF.

Social Media: What about Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn? I’ve had friends write things on my wall that I’ve had to delete, because my clients see them. I’ve had clients spam me, just like I’m one of their clients, because they’re hitting their entire contact list. It can be confusing if you haven’t learned the protocols and netiquette of being a netizen to graduate to understanding effective use of Web 2.0 social media. That’s why we teach this stuff, and provide consulting on it, etc. It can be used effectively, and it can be frustrating if you charge in not knowing how to do it effectively. I set up a blog for a colleague who promptly created an ideological flame war with it. I knew it would happen, but it was actually a good learning experience. You bring the assumptions of what you’re familiar with in other venues, and have to discover that “how the world works” isn’t really how it works – it’s just how it works in one place, at one time, among one group of people. The world is big. And if you see the world as big, the world is bigger. Remember, as we wrote about personality types and personality-based marketing, you are not normal – 75% of your clients are specifically *not* like you – they have a different set of assumptions, needs, and a different focus and direction. If you market to yourself, you sell 25%. Better put, you rule out 75% up front and pitch to a quarter of your audience. If you market to everyone, you’re at least reaching all those that are currently in your auidence with your message – then whether you grow your audience, and how they respond, is about the other things. The world isn’t the “how the world works” – that’s just my version – the quarter I’ve carved out. The world is also the 75% you don’t know. Anyway, after eventual frustration, the blog became an abandoned blog, like so many. But now the opportunity exists for him to rebuild, taking lessons learned – not overreacting by restricting discussion – monoblogs are overrated – not simply dumping the entire medium – “social media doesn’t work for me” – no, you weren’t working for social media – it’s you, not it, that must adapt, or else yeah, you’re tossing that audience away – that’s ok, more for the rest of us. Not to be cute, the point is that it’s a learning curve. Social media, whether for you, or your clients, is not Web 1.0. It’s not a “web site”. It’s not waiting for you to charge in with your existing assumptions.

It’s like 1994, when AOL allowed their users access to the internet. Do you go in and alienate the people that are already there, or do you choose to humble yourself, learn, and gradually come to understand the rules – the protocols of community in the new environment. Do you park on someone’s lawn or do you check into a hotel, visit the diner, and get to know the local vibe? Social media is a great venue for learning once again to learn, to become more self-sufficient in technology and, if you do that, you get to build amazing business potential. Rember the first spammer, who saw the gateway to the net as a license to blast every Usenet newsgroup with advertisements for multi-level marketing? That could be you, also. Ever seen a blog that was a series of ads? Or just a huge portrait of an otherwise boring personality? Here’s my favorite color this week. The rule is value. Give it away. Contribute. Focus on that, and only that, and all the rest follows. Your brand isn’t your logo, it’s what you say and do, folks. Social media is a great clarifying process. Your brand is who you are. It’s the substance too, not just the image. It’s the man and the mask – it’s both.

That’s it. Yeah, I know my writing style is unusual. It’s not wrong, tho. It’s part of the delightful incongruity that is me. As always, I hope it was helpful.

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Google is My Hero

You know, we’ve written a while back about how Google stood up to the Chinese totalitarian government by refusing to turn over dissident information on demand, while other companies like Yahoo bent over and dropped their shorts, handing those kids over to decades-long prison terms without even a cough. I’ve sent out gmail invites to all my Yahoo contacts with just that info. Some switch, some don’t. With Google’s motto, “don’t be evil” and Screwhoo’s model of secret prisons, torture, and rewarding free speech with reporting on its members, you get two kinds that stick with Yahoo – the ignorant and the indifferent. Which are you?

But now Google’s doing it again. While other companies never peep a word about government hacking into mail accounts, Google blows the whistle and points out an ongoing pattern of hacking from Chinese government IPs. It’s doing this in the face of censorship demands that, so far, everyone has honored to some degree. Google’s now saying ‘enough is enough’, and we’ll pull out altogether (leaving you in the dustheap of information history – you farks) before we’ll cave. And in fact, they’ve stopped censoring results in China.

If we spent as much time studying the heroes of information ethics as we do heroes of ancient Greece, Google would be our Hercules. As a member of the Google nation, I feel more affinity with her than with my own body politic. More a part of her culture than the culture at large. What’s this got to do with work and the world of work?

Everything. Ethics is everything. Righteousness is everything. The world of work could use a healthy dose of righteousness. Not self-righteousness. Think Microsoft there. “We have done this, so we are entitled to what we want.” That’s entirely different. That’s the culture of expedience. But goodness, we need, for our work to be a font of joy, for it to be a primary vehicle of meaning, to be like Google. I meet people all the time who “love their jobs” and “find meaning” in them, but sometimes when they describe what they’re talking about, it seems to be the ability to afford Starbucks every morning, or eat $15 lunches, or to be thought of well in society. They’re not describing meaning or joy at all. They’re describing gratification and convenience, but not meaning and joy. And there is a distinctive difference.

I’m convinced that joy in one’s work comes partly from doing it well and partly from one’s work being a legitimate contribution to the wellness of the world. To wake up and work dishonestly cannot convey those things, regardless of the shifty guys that tell you they’re OK with it (that’s a commentary on their absence of the basic moral equipment, not a commentary on work). To wake up and contribute nothing, to neither lesson the agony of the world nor contribute to the mercy in it, cannot convey meaning. I don’t mean the cheesy substitutes of just making people feel good. Junk food makes people feel good. It also makes people obese, shortens their lives, and contributes to their suffering. And I don’t mean doing whatever for a corporation that “gives something back”. The fact that there’s an annual United Way drive or toys for tots walk or whatever, while good, aren’t the same thing. Nothing wrong with that – we’re just saying that the work itself should be a contribution too.

Work, for us to really feel it like we were meant to, like we’re built to, must shape the world into wellness through our day in and day out activity. The Christmas bonus doesn’t make a lousy job great, and the annual drive doesn’t grant the employees of an otherwise morally useless entity the kind of meaning in their work that they are designed for. To wake up and be a force for righteousness in the world, that’s a necessary path to the meaning derived from work. Substitutes need not apply.

Life is too brief to look back and ask why we’re clinging to something, to anything, if we can’t derive the primary experience from work that we’re  meant for. If it’s just an income source, or just something to be endured, or if it’s about as subtle in its attempts to compensate as an oil company that gives a few thousand to rain forest funds, we’ve got to change directions, don’t We? Look at Google. That’s what heroes are for. They’re there to give the rest of us an icon of what we want to be like.

Have you told your kids about Google yet? I’m serious. Why not? I’m talking about what Google means in the world. Microsoft puts people into bankruptcy for treating the software someone buys like they own it. Google frees people from prison by protecting their files from torturers and totalitarian regimes. Who’s the best example?

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Simple Green Productivity – Hibernate

How many nights have you gone to bed and left the computer running. Not because you were downloading some file – how long does that take anymore, in an era of broadband? But because you had a number of things open and needed to pick up where you left off?

Actually, the original way that most of us tech types did it was to leave the PC running 24/7. In the old days, you put more wear and tear on the hard drive (which was then considered the central part of the machine – now it’s the cloud – the internet itself) – more wear and tear by starting up than by leaving it running.

I got my electric bill last month and while the main PC contributes only a bit to it, it’s enough to notice the nights I left it running. Why the heck aren’t you using standby or hibernate, you ask? Exactly. I could kick myself for all the months I didn’t. But I’ve started up again and now I’m using both.

Standby just puts it in low power mode. It *seems* shut down, but it’s really using just enough juice to keep your place. I launches faster when you come back in the morning, but if you have a power loss, you may be in bad shape. Hibernate stores everything the way it is (I would still advise saving any office documents that might be open – you can leave them up – just hit save, in case there’s a problem). It comes up a little slower, but a power outage may not lose your work.

If it’s just browser tabs, standby works. After all, good browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome will know if you have shutdown improperly and offer to bring the tabs back or, in Google’s case, just do it. Google is smarter than Firefox currently. You can set it to *always* bring back the last tabs that were up. Neither browser does one thing that would help a lot, though – allow you to hit a button and save current tabs for next boot. You’d think, but none of them do that, yet. You can bookmark all tabs to open at once, but then your bookmarks get cluttered up with temporary work.

So, in my office now, hibernate or standby are the rule, not shutting down, and not leaving it running. What are your green productivity ideas? Comment on this post.

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Action Items: The Joys of Slicing Cheese

A colleague and I are constructing a new type of organization, and at times at the outset I felt overwhelmed and a bit paralyzed. It comes with having an enormous vault of ideas, and a need for speed, while needing also to quickly put up an infrastructure (in this case a marketing infrastructure) that is woven piece into piece. This weekend, I revisited my part of the plan, and used a GTD (David Allen) principle: I converted everything into action items. Nothing was left without a verb. If it was going to stay on ‘paper’, it would have a specific action and an assigned person. It’s the equivalent of something we’ve quoted before – when you read, don’t make notes, make action lists.

I came away with a feeling of calm and clarity. What was a pile of building blocks became a highway – a direction paved with specific, achievable, measurable exertions. Action items are the joy of achievers. It feels like swatting a mountain until everything is action items. Once that occurs, it’s more like slicing cheese.

Not only are action items good for me, they’re good for clients. It’s something borrowed from effective business in the corporate sector. Provide your client a list of deliverables you’ll deliver, and a list of specifics they need to deliver. All projects depend on both, because sound projects are ultimately collaborative. Then convert your own list of deliverables into specific actions. Don’t leave them alone as outcomes – list the steps, for yourself, to complete them. After that, it’s just a pot of tea and your favorite background noise, with clear direction on a clear day.

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Starting a Business Blog That Doesn’t Suck

“I’m a landscaper or plumber – how do I start a business blog? Who would want to read it?” Exactly. Or maybe. I hear that a lot. It’s a reasonable question.

“And if I write it, and I don’t know what I’m doing, won’t it suck.” Probably not. It could, if you don’t keep an open mind. But it won’t otherwise.

So how is it done? That’s the first part. Let’s give a couple of different examples:

Let’s say  you’re a plumber who does gardening on the side: You might do a plumber blog, but you might add more value by doing a niche blog on your related interest – gardening (both are vaguely related to home ownership), and then have a sidebar offering your plumbing services, and linking back to  your main site. Or if you’re interested in home maintenance or remodeling or handywork over all, you could go down that path. What drives blogs is “passion” for something in particular, consistency (these two tend to be deeply related), and perhaps a touch of presumption (the willingness to treat your most recent observation, whatever it is, as something that might have value for other people).

I’m a self-employed internet marketing consultant. I write a blog about work. I didn’t really know, at first, what I wanted to blog about. Like a lot of people, I ended up changing the name of it as I settled on a theme. In fact, it used to just be my personal everything blog, until I realized what I was doing with it, and split it in two, and then I split it again, and started another blog on my corporate site. Now this site is very thematic. Areas where I do a lot of thinking or have a lot of observations are prime blogging areas. I started out blogging about whatever, inserting whatever I was thinking about when I was in the shower or driving, and then I noticed a pattern starting to form that clarified my mission. My blog is about work, especially self-employment, contracting, freelancing, free agents, and the culture’s misconceptions about work. These topics sort of bleed over into my business though (my clients are often entrepreneurs), and that lets me add value. One doesn’t have to start several blogs – one will do, but I mention it to show how, over time, one tends to carve out a niche.

EXAMPLE: You’re a real estate appraiser and you want to focus on a search engine optimized blog on your main site: Ok, so you need several things. 1. the content has to be original. Cutting and pasting will not only get you in legal trouble, it’ll get you drowned in Google. Don’t do it. 2. the content has to be relevant and search-term rich (you need all your various place names – towns and counties you serve, and all your various services – divorce appraisals, estate appraisals, as well as words like appraiser, appraise, appraising to show up over time in various blog posts). 3. you have to be consistent. A blog post a month is a search engine and social network marketing death sentence. It’s a blog-coma. So how do you do that well? You give yourself an assignment that every other day, busy or not, tired or not, turned off the computer already or not, you’ll sit down and ask yourself what you thought about today, and pick something from a list like this one and write one 200 word post, or at least write for 10minutes.

• A common misconception is… (clarification)
• A little known bit of information is… (fact)
• A service we offer that is often underused is… (option)
• Something happened locally today that affects all of us… (news & analysis)
• Today, I was thinking about… (insight)
• Here’s a tip for those of you… (advice)

So those are a few examples. You might have different ones. But you get the point. But “I sound awful, and write worse than that”, you say?

In other words, how can it not suck?

The failings of most small business blogs are that:

• they try to sound corporate instead of personal. Don’t compose – it’s not prayer – just write like you talk on the phone or when you’re comfortable. Use a conversational tone. People don’t want to read an essay, so don’t write one.
• they’re just a lot of sales copy. It doesn’t have to be badly worded to suck. It can pass legal, HR, and Stunk and White’s style guide, and still be crap. Give something away – don’t horde your thoughts, don’t pander, and don’t just keep shlepping your services (“we offer… we offer… we offer…”) – people are getting enough offers – you’ve got to add value. What were you *really* thinking about today, related to what you were doing? Now why would I care? Or how is that related to your work?
• they have little expertise in your area or interest showing through in their writing style – can happen when you hire someone other than you to ‘keep up with it’ (some of us are professional bloggers who specialize in research and flair, but just getting your nephew who is computer savvy is usually a bad idea). The best blogs though? They’re written by you. Heck, I don’t even spell check a lot of the time. Yeah, I know, that’s unprofessional. That’s why I usually do spell check. But sometimes I’d rather be genuine, responsive, and dash something off in the moment than impress you with the fact that I too have an electronic spell checker installed.
• they aren’t updated consistently – happens when you don’t carea about what you’re writing (you’re writing the wrong stuff) – or, honestly, when life gets out of whack – when something hits you hard (sickness, a flood of business, whatever) and you don’t stop to eat, shower, or blog. If you want to be really successful? Don’t shower until you’ve done  your blog post. Or no coffee until you’ve posted. Or you’re not allowed to brush your teeth… you get the point. It’s 10minutes – it isn’t that you don’t have time.
• they aren’t updated at all – happens when you convince yourself you can’t generate 200 intelligent words, but still managed to get certified in whatever you do for a living. Is that too blunt? Good. Because even you wouldn’t believe you. If you’re able to answer an e-mail, or respond to a phone call, you can shell out a readable paragraph. Besides blog content (which just means dynamic, original, relevant content) is not just an option if you intend to market seriously online -it’s a requirement. Anyone that tells you different either isn’t paying attention or is selling you something I wouldn’t wish on an enemy.
• they aren’t original – lots of copied content – bad for you (legally), bad for searches (Google will bury you – they don’t get where they are by presenting duplicate results), bad for readers (it’s a snoozer)

But the number one failing of all time? They aren’t creative enough. Before you get worried that that means you have to be Woodward and Berstein, just make it interesting to others. Usually, the reason it isn’t is because you are not actually interested in anything (or won’t tell us what it is that you’re interested in). In other words, the blog sounds like dry lumber, because you’ve chosen a topic you don’t really care about. Perhaps you’re not thinking outside the box – you’re falling back on that culture that says anything with character hanging out of it might risk someone not liking your business. Folks? To *Hell* with that one. If you’ve not had your head buried in the sand for the last few years, you’ll know that blogs, Facebook, and Twitter have changed all of that. A little edge, a little scruff, some rough sides hanging out – those are now exactly the reason lots of small, up and coming business are getting attention and corporate blogs make you want to scratch your eyes out from boredom. The answer is somewhere between shock jock and school cafeteria food, but the message is Stand Out!

Are there people who get annoyed, because they don’t want to hear the real answer one of my blogs is giving to a key question they have? You bet. For every one of them, there are three who are glad someone said something, anything, beyond “There are many solutions to these complex issues. Which one you favor will depend, invariably, on you.” Zilch. That’s zilch. No one digs that kind of glop, especially not in a post-blogging online world.

But it doesn’t have to be controversial, if you’re not an idea person. There are excellent, well-followed, highly-popular blogs on gardening, deep sea fishing, vintage motorcycles, or whatever you want. If you have to, do what I did. Start a blog about nothing. Seinfeld was a show about nothing, and it only stopped making new seasons because Jerry Seinfeld wanted to go out on a high note. Your blogging won’t be about nothing for long. I made my blog an avenue of self-discovery, self-knowledge, and self-understanding. What I got out of that was direction and meaning. If you’re done with self-knowledge, I don’t want to tell you. I figure if you’re there already, you already know enough to know what you want to write about, what passion drives you (and hopefully you’re working in or around it), and you don’t need my advice. And for everything else, there’s Mastercard.

By the way, some people get hung up on the word “blog” or “blogging” as though it were some sort of subculture (it started that way, and now Chrysler and Pepsi and Oprah are doing it).  If you want, you can call it dynamic site updates – or constant additions to your website content. Whatever you call it, it’s not enough to do some back-end search engine optimization, anymore, if you want to maintain an audience. It hasn’t been enough for years, now. Front-end search engine optimization is about frequently updated original, relevant content. It’s just that no one came out and made the announcement. It’s sort of information that’s leaked out into the reluctant culture a little at a time, like e-mail.

The first and most important step in starting a business blog that doesn’t suck is [drumroll...] starting a blog. If your site isn’t equipped with one, it can be added. If you want to start it off-site and work it for a while until you’re comfortable, you can do that too. My company, Market Moose, is happy to help set you up, and provide consulting and training. But if you feel comfortable setting it up on your own, what are you waiting for?

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Technology: The Sword between Personal and Corporate Life

The contrast is startling. Average of 5mb/sec internet connections in the US – average of 60mb/sec  in Japan [source] for about $25/month. South Korea, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Portugal… basically most countries that might deserve the term “wired” have faster, better internet.The US, birthplace of the personal computer and the internet, now ranks 28th in internet connections speeds. In terms of internet infrastructure, the US is to Japan and South Korea what North Korea is to the US. Likewise, the most wired country in the world, South Korea, which should have 1Gig/sec speeds by 2012, has 60-70% of private homes with broadband. They were there already when the US was at 34% – now 57%.  How does it feel to know that the “Rome” that is the greatest intersection of the information superhighway isn’t the home of Coke and Pepsi, but is on the other side of the known world – in fact, the home of sushi and Pokemon? Of course, if you add text messages and argue that we have superior skills in using the internet, the US looks like number one. But of course, that just begs the question – if we’re so good at using the internet, why don’t we have more of it, and a better internet infrastructure – instead of this dragging piece of junk. It underscores a couple of things – we can be frivolous and self-obsessed, and we think we’re wonderful, but we settle for technology that is to the rest of the world what the Yugo is to the Toyota. In fact, one is cautious to even discuss the quality of Chevrolets and Fords anymore, even if they are assembled in Canada with parts made in Japan, Korea, and China. In fact, the report claiming we’re “number one” – something we never tire of hearing – base part of the argument on the notion that we make better business use of technology.

Statistics schmatistics – supposedly, we’re first in class in technology in the workplace. But it doesn’t feel like it, does it? Not if you’re the least bit technically savvy. I’m not counting the people whose first experience with decent technology was in their company. I’m talking about if you’ve ever had say moderately good tech at home and compare that with the technology at use in the average US workplace. If you’ve experienced the slow PC purchased at 300% of  it’s street value, with some other corporation’s badge on it, plugged into a single monitor (how do these people do anything – once you’ve worked with two or three monitors, and have realized 300% increase in productivity, going to the average corporate office in the US is like a slap in the face – again, if the best tech you’ve known is at that office, I’m not counting you – you just don’t know) – and then to have productivity-draining software installed (from cripplingly-slow antivirus to ridiculously lame e-mail software – like Lotus Notes), and to have that pc plugged into a slow network, and then locked down with draconian security controls – blocking online productivity apps, tools and utilities, and even reasonably good e-mail – if you’ve experienced these things, you know that this – this sluggish, luddite, scared, ineffective and inefficient corporate version of being wired does not make anything number one. You go home, turn on the three monitors, boot a PC with enough RAM and other characteristics to fly into full throttle, and you know that the corporate US has got something terribly wrong. You work from home whenever you can, because frankly, you have better technology. If not, why not? You can build a box for $300 that beats the one on your desk in a corporate office. Of course, then you get on our speed-throttled US broadband environment, where ISPs charge you outrageous fees to lesson tinker toy limits on an unlimited-speed medium (fiber optic), and you’re dealing with the dichotomy: the corporate office is to your home computer what  your internet connection is to what a 12-year-old has in his bedroom on the technologically civilized side of the world.

These two disparities, though, may not be unconnected. In fact, contrary to what a Canadian professor claims puts the US on top, I venture to suggest that the barbarically mundane, prehistorically inefficient,  and backwater-slow level of technology we associate with our workplace and therefore with our work, in the US, is precisely why we remain in the virtual dark ages of broadband speed and penetration.  Two things are the driving force in our consciousness when it comes to technology – work and play – and frankly, it is work that usually pays the bills for us and for technology.

At the office, you’ve got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete messages after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company’s internal Web site feels like being teleported back to the pre-Google era of irrelevant search results.

At home, though, you zip into the 21st century. You’ve got a slick, late-model computer and an email account with seemingly inexhaustible storage space. And while Web search engines don’t always figure out exactly what you’re looking for, they’re practically clairvoyant compared with your company intranet. — [Wall Street Journal, November 15]

The Wall Street Journal ran the above article on November 15th asking the question “Why can’t we pick the technology we use in the office?” The article points out that instead of locking down the capability of installing software or using cloud-based software, virtual machines (which have been around since the mid 1960s, and incidentally are not only inexpensive but have often been provided by Microsoft for free), allow users to install whatever they want in a way that is hard-pressed to affect company security. You want to use a macbook or use your own graphics editor or paint program, you can. Virtual machines are like bringing your own hard drive, except it’s insulated from the rest of the environment. Better yet, if you hire people you can trust, let them bring their own hard drives. Most companies that don’t allow this, while officially banning USB thumb drives, would be hard pressed to find a manager’s desk or pocket that didn’t contain at least one. The WSJ journal cites ignorance and cost concerns during this economy as the barrier – but cost concerns should be driving the demand for more creative solutions to enhancing productivity, not less. In fact, I find it more likely that the barrier is psychological – the need for control, the parental attitude of the corporation itself – “we can’t “let” people do whatever they want or there will be chaos”. “Chaos” is the word corporations use to mean “too much freedom” – which makes the argument circular – ‘we can’t let people do whatever they want or there will be too much freedom’. The article laments the time lost waiting on bad search techology – like using windows to search a shared drive, or using Outlook – miniscule storage (I would say because one corporation that is not technically specialized thinks it’s safer to store it’s own data than partner with a company that is technically specialized to store it for less in unlimited space – after all, your corporation’s network has never gone down, has it?). Time to clean out your darned e-mail folders again. Add to this bad technology purchase decisions – not just in hardware but perhaps especially in software. Corporations are routinely buying fairly useless, anti-productivity (top-down design), and obsolete software – requiring not only retraining but further productivity loss to learn how to use the new productivity loss.

All good points. The cloud, of course, we’ve talked about before. You continually hear bird flu warnings about how a company lost it’s data in the cloud, and yes it’s possible. I wish someone would track all the companies that are losing data every day because they (mis)manage their own technology. The cloud isn’t just up and coming technology, it’s up and soaring. At the very least, all the naysayers should admit they’ve been using cloud technology for a long, long time – whether it’s aol, yahoo, or gmail for their mail. They just aren’t used to thinking about it for storing documents – and they should be, because the documents are far less likely to get lost into a searchless oblivion, get version-hosed or overwritten or wrongly moved or renamed, or be inaccessible just when you need them than cloud docs. The last corp I worked for sentenced us to Lotus Notes and the smart people hooked up a gmail account and simply set it to send mail from the web. Yeah, gmail is SSL, so it’s secure enough for prime time. Given all the hacking and viruses they’ve experienced on their internal mail network, it’s likely far more secure. Gmail not only automatically scans all attachments for viruses before they are opened, it does an unparalleled job of weeding out spam containing those attachments in the first place. Besides which, it has google as the search back-end, a state of the art filing system that makes folders obsolete, and virtually unlimited storage (because it keeps getting larger over time – by the time you use that much, you’ll have more room).

Regardless of the technological prescription one prefers, or even the political or economic one, what has to change is the prevalent attitude in the US about work itself. Those comfortable with the level of technology prevailing in offices are the equivalent of those comfortable with the level of productivity in the US automotive industry in the early 1980s (the K-car era). Increasing the level of technology at work won’t work. What will, the WSJ article correctly assessed, is providing a platform where people can contribute their own technology understanding and choices. The era of the all-knowing parental corporation must face up to the fact that it can’t blog to save it’s arse, can’t effectively handle e-mail, security, or searches (unless you’ve bought a Google server or are using Google Enterprise) better than AOL did a decade ago, and has grown accustomed to reinventing the wheel and then using it for purely ornamental purposes. It must let go – not entirely, but not a little – it must let go a whole lot. And it must favor technologies which favor letting go over management attitudes that don’t. It must, in fact, re-envision management models, team structures, and definitions of collaboration that enchance technological choice for the sake of productivity and for the very security and cost savings it has always referenced to justify it’s stranglehold on the electronic desktop. Corporations must redefine, as well, the workplace cubicle not int terms of the file cabinet, the telephone, and the pencil sharpener, but in terms of the wired and wireless desktop. It must, ultimately, like Jet Blue, go farther and tear down the cubicle walls, in favor of home workers, open environments that don’t suggest the hoarding and protection of office supplies – a gesture mimicking the secretaries of decades past – but rather the interaction of technologies, eradicate the emphasis on personal space in the form of portable felt walls – mimicking the corner office mentality of executives from the Mad Men era, and create an environment where productivity is combined with connectivity to achieve ubiquity – not the “face to face” of the every Wednesday team meeting, but the “any time we choose” of useful chat systems with video conference call capability (like Google Talk and Skype) and the truly collaborative document environment (e.g. of Google Docs). Stop flying contractors around, putting them in hotels, and taxi-ing them to the office to spend most of their time in a closed room using a laptop, and let them work from a technological cockpit whenever possible, saving money and increasing effectiveness. That “little something” you get from being able to stick your head in and talk to them is just your pre-Skype nostalgia talking – it’s a myth, already put to rest by effective distance learning in the academic field.

People seem to think that technology is unconnected to the other aspects of corporate life like the cubicle and the collared shirt. But this denies that the workplace has meaning, just as work itself does. I worked at a corporation that filled the building with so many file cabinets that it couldn’t find places for people to sit, and ended up shrinking the cubicles and jamming people in like egg crates. Most of those file cabinets stand empty, or contain boxes of analog office supplies like white out. What are we in the seventies? But can they keep the network up? Oftentimes, no. Can they equip people to work at home when it goes down? They’re starting to ask the question, but come on – does it have to be one or the other? Technology is connected to how we think about what makes a team a team. Is it people who order bad pizza together once a week, or is it people that collaborate with maximum efficiency and keep the company they want? If it’s the former, then you have to jam a lot of computers onto an overloaded network and force everyone to use the same tech just like you force them to get lunch from the same vendor for that warm, fuzzy once a week get together. Technology is connected to how we think about management? Is it the micromanager who hires someone to book his appointments (a relic of eighties), or is it the team traffic control operator who facilitates effective application of resources? If it’s the former, you’ll have to be where he or she is, instantly accessible in person, and you’ll spend most of your time commuting to and from work, eating at work, and staying late into the evening and coming in on weekends. Who *goes* to the office on weekends? Isn’t that a commentary on the shackles that lock our technology to our desk, us to this albeit obsolete technology, and convince us that this is the world of work, because we’re all in it together?

Being effective in technology requires, as a matter of principle, creating a work environment in which workers can be trusted with nearly any responsibility that is within their realm of competence, in which superficialities take a back seat to productivity (I’m reminded of the coworker people complained was “weird” who, upon researching his stats, it was revealed he was 500% more productive than any of them) – since when did a collar, a clean shave, and a complete absence of personality make you a better contributor to the team. And in which the shroud of control, of domination, of mistrust, and of outright implied condescension (“we can’t let them have that much freedom, because then we’d have to give it to everyone”) is left behind in favor of expressions and measures of results that make technology the ally instead of the enemy. It’s almost as if some companies are suspicious that too much use of technology makes you a dangerous nerd who’s going to seize control of the system – and from themselves. Let go. And, if you want to be successful, the president driving us to faster and more ubiquitous broadband, by itself, won’t be enough. You’ll need to let go more quickly, let go of more things, and change yourself – change the very definition of what it is you do for the company, what your work is, and what it is for others to work for you.

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Skype Culture & Cell Future

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Case in point: I thought of spending $60/year to set up a regular phone number in Korea that rings on my Skype, wherever I happen to be located, and on whatever computer I happen to have it turned on for at the moment. A little more for voicemail, in case I’m absent. But what’s the point? My brother over there has Skype, and he’ll just call me free through Skype. So, the only people who would need to use such a phone number are people who must call me on the go (from their cell) or who aren’t necessarily skype-savvy. Clients, in other words. And I don’t want clients reaching me instantly. And neither do you – it’s pretty hard to multi-task (to get much real work done) if someone always wants virtual face-time on demand.  Customer service lines are overrated – they mostly give you feel-good buddies, at a premium cost. I have most business lines set to go straight to voicemail and e-mail me the wav file.

Image via CrunchBase

This whole phone number system is predicated on the land-line model, which is more or less predicated on a postal address model. It’s like that company that’s trying to virtualize mail by assigning an e-address that exactly matches the physical address of every site in the US. What’s the point of that? They tell you it’s so businesses can sign on w. them and send statements etc. to a virtual address. Sounds like e-mail. You won’t send statements through e-mail, but you’ll send it to some virtualized street address on the internet? I’m still trying to get various banks and utilities to stop sending me their darned paper – so who knows – they’re still in the Jackie Gleason era – they probably dial the operator to ring up a customer.

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Google’s Ultimate Information Manager

I’m deliriously happy.

Happy to be wrong, that is. The other day I said Google didn’t know how to do “to do” lists properly. They don’t. But that’s beside the point – it seems google has figured out  that I don’t yet know how to do “to do” lists. In the same way, I used to think documents were slow-moving, local objects that you protect on a hard drive, and now I think they’re collaborative ‘events’ that you share on the internet – that expand, connect and relate, because of that. I was telling Google that to do lists are like emails to yourself. Google already has it figured out. I don’t know if they realize it, but their new PIM turns e-mails back into “to do” lists. If it’s not an action item, folks, honestly, in the world of work, what is it? Someone said that when you make books, write to do lists, not “notes”, otherwise you’re reading the wrong books. Why would it be different for e-mail?

Google recently added two glorious features to gmail – the best app in the world (we don’t capitalize it around here – it’s your OS in the future). By far, the best new feature is multiple inboxes (it’s in your settings) and a close second is the ultra-fast “move to” dropdown. The inboxes change the meaning of the application, turning it into a book of work, and the “move to” feature is like a rotary sander vs. a wood block – with the one you have a business – the other is just good enough for a quick job.

I spent a good chunk of time cleaning up my giant inbox, before I found these. I had about 270 messages, and I just was never going to find out what I’d forgotten to do on page 3. So I started backwards, processing, doing, eliminating… I made it to about 170 messages, when I got really tired of it and went fiddling w. my gmail settings.

Within a few minutes, I had several inboxes on one page. I didn’t even know how to do it right – I just named them, and it automatically used the names to categorize messages, so I instantly saw my schema – the picture, at a glance, of what I’m doing and care about right now. I was floored. But it works particularly well when you base each inbox on a label. So I started cleaning up my labels. I got it from about 40+ labels to about 10. The 10 that matter to me, now. Consolidate, consolidate – that’s the rule. Don’t have a label called “information”. Is it information for its own sake? If so, it’s the wrong information. What are you going to *do* with it? Assign it a purpose or an action.

In cleaning up labels, I discovered the instant “move to” function. Holy wow! That wasn’t there, before! Put these things together, and within a few minutes – yes, minutes! – I had separate inboxes for Clients, Contractors, Business Partners, Accounting, and yes… To Do. Ta Da!. It was so good that I added some GTD by creating To Do Right Away and To Do Eventually. Google, I need room for one more inbox. Hell, just give me 10. Paired with making decisions right away, as to whether something will get further attention, this is an effective time-management tool. It’s a life-management tool – after all, just categorizing something based on an action represents a decision.

My gmail is now a PIM (personal information manager). Combined with my sidebars showing my calendar items, google docs, and chat, it’s about 10 times the app it was just a little while ago. It’s gmail raised to an exponent. Needs twitter integration tho. Google, just go ahead and buy them! You know you want to. Yes, Twitter, it’ll hurt a bit, but it’ll hurt so good. Put my Twitter and my Facebook wall in there, Google, and you’ve got an even bigger winner.

I nearly said “woman”. Google, if you were a woman, I’d… Anyway, it’s fantastic. For those of you that think I’m gushing, needlessly, look, technology has given me arms and legs. I was a mere mortal before technology, and now I’m batman. I walk by and kick sand in the face of small tasks. Google has given me a toolbelt fit for a superhero. Thank you, Google. I’ll use it all. Including my Google Notebook – you can have my Notebook when you pry it from my… on second thought, you can’t have it, even then!

By the way, I’m a Firefox fanatic. And I’ve got Flock, now. Flock rocks. But fastest browser? Google Chrome. Just launched all three and I was typing this before the others opened. Googlepress? Hmm.

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Much ToDo about Filofax & Web2.0

Image via Wikipedia

My Filofax is back! I confess, I’d let it sort of decline. Partly when I got really busy and started spending 18 instead of 16 hours online – and partly because I fell in love with my netbook and cloud computing. Still am – deeply – but they just don’t do it all for me yet.

So, all right, I go for simplicity, when it come to “to do” lists. I make lots and lots and lots of them. And I usually use .txt files made in notepad. In fact, so much am I dedicated to this that, when I use Linux, I usually install and run notepad.exe under Wine. Yes, that’s the extreme. It doesn’t stop there. I used to use mininote.exe – a tab-based notepad, so I could have more lists open at once. Before that, if you visited my house, you’d notice in all kinds of niches, and all over the dining room table, that I had piles and piles and piles of post-it notes, box covers, grocery sack fragments, and completely penned-over business cards… I could go on.

Back to .txt files. I probably have 20 or 30 in a “mess” folder of my hard drive that had just gotten so old that I tossed them into folders to be sorted through some day when I stop thinking of new things. There are probably an additional 40-100 or more that aren’t called “to do” or “immediately” and those could be anywhere in my drives. Yes, they’re backed up. Then there are all the ones I have online. Yes, there are more, and more and more. I have them in e-mail. I have them in google’s new Tasks feature. I have them in google notebook, and google docs.

[For you purists, I'm sorry, but I've given up capitalizing google. When it comes to the web, that would be like capitalizing the word "reality".]

Anyway, yes there are more. There are to do lists in still other e-mail accounts, and other various online venues. There are to do lists under every screenname I have. Then there are all of the paper to-do lists that still exist from back when I wasn’t paperless. I’ve scanned all those, and they’re stored on hard drive space. The ones that aren’t in bound editions.

Yes, I’m amazing in my capacity to think of things to do. And, before anyone starts, I do quite a lot of them. More than anyone I know. And I’ve tried every online and electronic “to do” widget or environment that I can think of. But it comes down to this:

• It’s not with me while I’m driving.
• It’s not there the second I step out of the shower.
• It’s not instant, always on, with me in any setting, etc.

Netbooks are getting there. They’re the closest thing. But it’s still not fast enough, yet. It’s coming. The always-on device that’s as thin as e-paper (like a film negative) with billions of cells of resolution and becomes keyboard, screen, and mouse, all as one thin-as-2D surface with embedded storage and wirelessly connected to the cloud, where all its applications reside – it’s coming. No fan, no heat, waterproof, and a vein-like fiber battery that charges from human touch or any ordinary light source. Don’t believe me? See me in 20 years. I’ll be writing a blog post with it, on it, and about it – I’m old-fashioned like that. And mine will be the one that tucks into my Filofax, along w. the other ring-hole-punched paper in there. Now that’s a netbook!

So, thinking ahead, I’m also thinking back. What has been there for me, when even my lightening-fast, low power, ultra-portable, super-mobile netbook hasn’t been. My Filo. You see, technology is not about gadgetry, or what something can do – it’s about processes, and the meaning of things. It’s about the underlying ethos of work, human thought, and collaboration with creation that lets us extend ourselves not for the sake of extending ourselves, but so that we can see and image greater things. Gadgets are failed experiments at helping us get there. Tools – now, tools are the glorious machines that transform a Bruce Wayne into a Batman. They make us scale building, and fly between rooftops.

I don’t mind playing with gadgets. But when it comes to work, this work, the work of my life, I want tools. So, for now, the netbook is going to be paired with the Filofax (they’re roughly the same size), and I’ll just bundle them with some kind of ingenious quick-release strap. A gigolo strap for my technologies, so they can whip out their power at any moment. But I’m going to stop trying to cram the Filo into the Netbook, until it really makes sense to do so.

This helps a lot. The Filo is a ToDo list organizer for me. That’s all it is. Screw the calendars and the currency converters. Lined paper. Simple lined paper. Or graph – my father taught me a fondness for graph. It’s about purpose. The conceptual problem with every other todo list system I’ve tried, is that it’s embedded in some other kind of functionality, whether it be the machine itself or some other application. Gmail shows the most promise as the ubiquitous core-application (Google gets this fact – the core is a collaboration platform – while Microsoft still thinks the core is an Operating System [brief pause for us to collectively roll our eyes]) but even Google still can’t conceive of the right kind of todo app and how to make it really effective by pairing it inside gmail. I wish they’d hire me to conceptualize and test that. I could tell them a thing or two about todo lists and integrating them with gmail (best application in the history of applications). I wish google would understand that todo lists are, properly, closest to e-mail than anything else. A todo is an e-mail to yourself. Google hasn’t figured out how to interface that, though they’re half way there with the way they’re archiving threaded chats. Google, call me. Let’s talk.

Anyway, the Filofax. It’s now my single to-do organizer. I confess, it’ll be a real challenge while I figure out what goes in Filo, and what in notepad (e.g. links). I wish technology would hurry up. I know, some of you are wanting to scream “Blackberry”. No. Just, no. I’m sure it’s great for the occasional scribble. When it comes to the kind of volume I can churn out – someone who can send 40 e-mails in a few short minutes – those little gadgets just can’t keep up.

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Work in The New World

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The Beginning: The post-WWII generation embraced and inculcated into their children a lifelong quest for acquisition – acquisition of specific things. Some cultures even refer to them as the keys to success: university degree, respectable job, respectable house, reliable car, supportive spouse. Increasingly, though, these either matter less, don’t matter, or are being reconsidered and redefined.

It’s Over: There’s a film depicting Bobby Fischer, child chess prodigy, holding out his hand and offering his chess opponent a draw. The opponent says, “The game’s not over yet.” Bobby replies, “It’s over. You don’t realize that it’s over. Twelve moves, or you can take the draw.” The world has changed like that.

The House: Location matters far less in a global economy, so owning a house isn’t carrying with it the esteem it once did. It isn’t the sign of wealth and accomplishment that it was after WWII – it may actually be a sign of being behind the curve, if you’re tied to it, and it represents the sum of accomplishment. The mortgage crisis underlined this: a house is a balance sheet item. If that $500K would earn more in another investment, when you subtract the cost of renting, then it’s bad business.

The Car: Cars are losing their romance. Places in the world that depend on cars as the primary transportation infrastructure may eventually seem like they still drive covered wagons. What about going to work? Perhaps fewer of us will be doing that. “It’ll never change. There will always be cars on the road.” You can just hear the reassurances of the status quo. We also heard, “There will always be fax machines. Cell phones will never replace landlines. I’ll never use e-mail.” Before that, our recent ancestors heard, “Air transportation has no commercial future.” and “These horseless carriages will never replace a good mule.” Etc. The recent crunch has slowed car sales, and fuel use, indicating that we can indeed do with less. We won’t, collectively at least, forget this.

University Education: Education is now just socialization and information. The age of transforming individuals into great thinkers went the way of traditional universities, following the mediaeval model (one I happen to like). What’s left is accessible online, and often for free. Even the Ivy League can be had just as easily in Dubai as the US. Great thinkers are not those who excel at going down the well-beaten path of tradition, but will be found among those who turn tradition on its head.

Retirement: Retirement made sense when labor was back-breaking, physical, non-automated, dangerous, dirty work that took a heavy toll on the body, and eventually broke it. Now the worst thing for your body is sitting in an office eating candy and lunching on fast food. In the emerging economy, we’re not breaking our backs from labor, we’re straining them from getting fat. Retirement hasn’t made practical sense in some time. It doesn’t make vocational sense, either. With this much ubiquitous opportunity, why would anyone spend 60 years doing something they don’t particularly like, in order to spend their twilight years (the age which begins at the exact statistical point that a large number of us begin to die) doing what they want. In an age of continual access to information, opportunity, and every imaginable experience, why defer the life you want? Besides, work, not some far off cessation of work, is supposed to be the primary vehicle of meaning in our lives. Instead of postponing our lives while we work, we have immense opportunities to do the work we want, or at least use reasonably delightful work that can subsidize lengthy stretches of even more meaningful activity. It’s not really that hard to spend a month in Korea. The culture of new technologies and economies encourages pulling life back off of the shelf and putting it into play now. We were once told we were being responsible by deferring life – now, perhaps, we’re just being dull.

Marriage: The initial stigma associated with getting a date online is gone, except among those who just can’t absorb the implications and benefits of technology fast enough. Eharmony made it mainstream. Marriages that were once arranged at grange dances among partners no more than 50-miles from their birthplaces, are now frequent among those 5000 miles apart.  The jury is still out on the results, but one thing is certain, the search is easier, and the implication is that marriage can’t easily retain its status as a major meritorious accomplishment.

In Sum: Knowledge is no longer unavailable to the “slow students”; epistemological speed is often measured in how fast and effectively you can Google something. Being clever is generating more value than having a degree – which may represent your creativity, or may just as easily represent your ability to get a guaranteed loan and follow general instructions that are repeated over and over. It’s now possible to conduct a serious business out of a backpack while living in a hostel. Getting around is easier than ever – the car you own, depending on where you live, may be the last car you ever need to own. Ubiquitous WiFi and cellular has made social networking the basis not only of romance, but of business. In other words, the old system – degree, job, house, car, wife – is being met with the extended hand of a cultural Bobby Fisher, and the tremors of change are being felt and mistaken for a momentary financial setback or two. Where it isn’t dead, it’s being redefined. Where it isn’t useful, it’s going the way of the dinosaur.

Life Modification: One of the key results of ubiquitous internet and global placement of fiber, is the personalization of individual existence and subsistence. Life modification is now the rule. The idea that we all follow a herd-like model is replaced by a culture steeped in continual self-expression (e.g. blogging) and pervasive communication (e.g. Skype). The new entrepreneurs who thrive in this environment will break the rules – they will be, inherently, heretics to the old way. Most will keep it for themselves, perhaps, but the social entrepreneurs will even make the world better, and perhaps help to save it. Work is too interesting now to be just a way to get useless stuff. Besides, stuff has to be stored – more bloat, less mobility, less flexibility, less adaptability, less stuff. Smart life-modders will go lean and live strong.

The Heels of Culture: The .com bubble demonstrated that a technology update waits for a cultural update. Technology itself doesn’t increase productivity, expand options, or empower individuals. Technology requires a commensurate culture shift, and you can’t learn that from a degree-granting institution, because the world is changing far faster than they can catch up. For the “freaks and geeks” from two decades ago, this is a very good thing. “Success” is not only no longer measured the old way, it’s not dispensed the old way, and its economic and social meaning is radically altered.

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Work As Therapy, not Disease

Image by stuant63 via Flickr

So much of what passes for “professionalism” in a corporate environment is dysfunctional in life as a whole. In fact, when it begins to be believed, as a principle for life, it actually becomes mental illness.

Neurosis: includes the inability to separate perception from reality. “My perception is my reality.” You hear it in corporate staff meetings. The inability to distinguish subject from object – the objectifying of experience. It leads to every manner of megalomania, pride, and fundamental bewilderment, and yet it’s such a simple error. You can’t run a business that way – you can only ‘belong’ to one – you make a good cog when you can’t tell real from feel. This is treatable, but it’s going to take heavy doses of a different environment. Neurosis populates most office communications with the ever-present obsession with perception. Reality, long ago, took a back seat – which is why, in performance based cultures, you just get more done with less.

Cognitive Dissonance: knowing a thing is so, but choosing to live as though it were otherwise. The ingrained pretense at work in so many corporate environments leads us to praise mediocrity, reward mere presence, profess affection where bitterness and strife exist, feign respect where respect hasn’t been earned, pretend interest when time is being wasted for everyone, proclaim devotion to the current corporate platitude or HR dogma- even when it’s patent nonsense… The list pretty much never ends. It’s an unending exercise in unreality, and it’s a form of illness that does lasting damage to the soul. This disease not only infects organizations, it unravels individuals. One of the reasons I like Google is that, fundamentally, how they live and what they say are transparent and in agreement.

Fear: it’s the key tool in power-based relationships and top-down structures. “Cover your ass” is the catchphrase. Where rewards are based on preference rather than performance, on pleasing the priviledged rather than producing results, fear is the natural keeper of order. The contemporary cubicle city is a virtual hot zone of phobias that grip workers like grim diseases sloughed off of the virus of terror. Do x or y will happen, don’t do y or x will happen – that’s the theory of motivation that “leaders” have embraced to the point that it’s systemic – it can’t be repaired, because the promotion and reward system preserves and extends its influence. Fear makes people care less about whether a project succeeds than whether they can’t be blamed for its failure.

And to all these sicknesses, we say a resounding NO. Without needing to be shrill or pugilistic, there are a cadre of us, living within the culture, though not of it, who work in and around it, near it, but never capitulate to the infection. Our safe suits are the hard strength of our own wills to exist as whole creatures. Psychologists refer to the phenomenon as “integration” or “integrity” – by which they mean the ability of the individual person to exist whole and in himself despite overwhelming opposition, temptation, coopting, and all the other advances of the culture against the man. They refer to the opposite state as “disintegration” – the fragmentation, fracturing, and despair of the persona’s parts turned against one another by conflicting demands and competing epistemologies, by pressures to accept the unreal over the known, to exalt experience to the place of objectivity, to substitute terror and inhibition for freedom.

In fact, the sick don’t even know what freedom is anymore – the word sounds like a misty ideal. The experience of it is as alien as courage, by which likewise, we mean fearlessness, not merely momentary bravery. See how even our virtues are compromises, coopted, and redefined by corporate existence? Made fluffy and hollow and glazed over like a doughnut in the break room on Friday.

Disintegration is the result of the disease, but work is not the virus that causes it. It is rather a particular kind of work culture. In fact, work is the cure. The work of one’s life. Real work. The work that gives life not just to the body, when someone hands you a wad of cash, but the work that feeds the whole person, that defines their relationship with the world. Work should be the therapy, not the disease, the healing force in our lives, not the devastating one that leaves us frail and shaking like bed-ridden invalids.

If you haven’t experienced both kinds of work, then you are either enormously blessed or enormously tragic. Some of us have known both. There is hope, there is meaning for us. It is more often difficult to see, because of what our work has made of us, than it is impossible to obtain. The goal, in my experience, is always to see – and liberation follows. If you can articulate the problem – if you can define your enemy – you can overcome. It may be at great cost, but it will be to lasting reward, as well. In my experience, it’s so worth it. It’s not even a question.

The hardest thing is when you don’t see any other options. I could say that you have to create them, but it would just sound like a platitude, and we get enough of those on posters, don’t we? All I can tell you that may be of value, if you feel trapped, is that you can begin thinking through it. Thinking is a kind of light. I think, though I cannot promise, that if you respond to the light you are given, you will receive more light. If nothing else, light is its own reward. I contemplated the world outside the cage long before I set foot in it. It was just a dream, almost an unreality. And now, I will never be caged. But that’s me. Your situation may pose more hurdles. Still, you are a human being, worthy of liberation and dignity, if you will make yourself a person of integrity and decency. Don’t give up – not ever. Standing taller, a little at a time, within yourself, is too its own reward. All I can say is that I think it ultimately is the right road, and the way of darkness is letting others and circumstances define all that there is to you, which is really what these sicknesses are about. We all like to deny it, but we either bleed ourselves away a little every day, or we find ways to heal our wounds.

We’re going forward, you and I. I’ll see you at the end.

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When it has to be there Tomorrow

You’re filling a sudden order to bang out a Powerpoint presentation for 500 people by morning, and need to walk in looking rested and in control. You need to launch a web site yesterday, because your new client already mailed out their secondary marketing, and their own servers just died. The mobile headquarters of your social action group has twelve hours to get an underground newsletter together and get it into key places before the start of business in the morning.

You’re doing rapid prototyping. Frankly, I love this stuff. Combine virtuosity, brainstorming, and fingers flying so fast on the keyboard that they’re invisible, with a near impossible deadline, bragging rights at the end, and showing off the next day (which consists in just being done and effective), and I’m so there. The sense of accomplishment is immense.

Some key helpers for rapid prototyping:

• Go lean – if twelve slides can be one, make it one. The genius is in the layout and arrangement.
• Gang up – work fast and furious with a symbiotic team – some of the best stuff is clabbered together in smoke filled rooms with papers spread out on the floor, someone at the keyboard, someone at the whiteboard, and someone making the coffee runs, making notes, and giving things another eye.
• Focus on the big picture - get a working model up and running – if the broadstrokes are wrong, you’ll just end up starting over – the details can be nitpicked afterward, and it’s amazing how many opinions that get absolutized when you’ve got lots of time (which word, which phrase, which color arrow to use) don’t seem so contentious when you’ve got a reasonable time frame left to flesh out the details. Again… at the risk of being redundant… if the concept is wrong, you’ll be starting over – know what you want to deliver and why – don’t get sidetracked by tweaks.
• Everyone matters – don’t underestimate any of your team members. Often, the one who’s got his feet up and only refills the coffee pot now and then ends up having the key idea that’s responsible for the most successful chunk of your work. Everyone should be operational, but not necessarily doing what we think – besides, remember the Pareto Principle. 20% of the people will seem to be doing 80% of the work. It doesn’t matter.
• Have organized messes - sometimes it’s cut and paste and two or three mockups before you get it right, and the trash bags in the corner are your best friend. Make a mess, but have piles, and keep your ideas up on the whiteboard. If you don’t have a whiteboard, write on the wall. It’s faster to re-paint later than be at Walmart for 30-minutes with that one cashier they have left at night.
• Take micro-breaks – don’t try to justify 15 minute breaks for two cigarettes, video games, and bags of Cheetos. If you’re doing that, you’re not serious. A break is a 3-minute walk away to relieve yourself. You keep your momentum, but there is where you have some of your best summary ideas. If you take 15-minutes, you lose 35, so don’t.

What if you’re doing it alone?: Then you have to stop periodically, and become your audience, and look at that way. Then again, and become your stakeholders, and look at it that way. If you’re doing it alone, you have to be ingenious. And, you may need to set an absolute drop-dead time for sleep, based on the minimum that will sustain you, because very likely that’s what you’ll get. If you’ve got a friend or colleague that can grasp the immediate needs, deal with what (for some people) feels like pressure, and contribute to rather than drain your productivity, make the call. If your friends are just as likely to slow you down or distract you or need tons of looking after on mundane tasks, do it alone. Create the team in your head.

This isn’t meant to be a master-guide to rapid prototyping, just a few comments. If there were more to say, there’d be less to do. The key points: it’s fun, there are some good tips, and you can do it alone if you have to.

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