If you're interested in the future of collaboration, location-independent productivity, and how technology will make life better, you should take a look at what's going on at the Office 2.0 conference, which is coming up September 3-5 in San Franciso.
The conference is the brainchild of Ismael Ghalimi, who already uses all sorts of online tools to be productive no matter where he is in the world, as long as he's connected. I recently heard David Allen interview Ismael, and I think he really has an excellent grasp of the direction of collaboratoin and productivity.
The Office 2.0 conference sounds excellent - you can check out the agenda, speakers, etc. at the Office 2.0 site at the link above, or just click the logo to the right.
Good news and some savings
If you are interested in attending, I have some good news - I was trading email with Ismael this weekend and he sent me a link that will get you a discount on conference registration! Click this link to get a 10% discount on Office 2.0. Maybe I'll see you there...
Other cool things about this conference
- They are using an awesome collaboration tool from some friends of mine here in Portland: Jive Software's clearspace. If your business wants to increase collaboration inside your company, Jive's worth a look.
- They have a novel approach to making the conference more interactive, and providing course materials. Every year they give out a "gadget" that you get to keep. Last year it was an iPod Nano with all the materials pre-loaded on it. This year, it is an HP 2133 MiniNote PC - way cool.
Read More A long time ago, a man named Harry Beck came up with a way of cleanly mapping London's Underground station network. It was revolutionary in that it hid complexity by focusing less on details and more on the big picture. Beck's method has become the standard for clarity, efficiency, and effectiveness in public transit.
As I was waiting for a train this morning and saw our local "Beck style" map, I wondered how this applies in corporate settings.
When organizations communicate vision, direction, initiatives, etc. how often do we confuse people by being too detailed, accurate, and "busy" in our maps?
Our challenge is to come up with a map of our organization's vision that Harry Beck could be proud of.
Read MoreWhen life gets busy (or my curiosity gene kicks in), it can be hard to focus on what's really important. As you've seen before (see "Related items" at the end of this post), I often turn to tools like PowerPoint and Mind Manager to make my life easier.
As for focusing on priorities, I have found that PowerPoint's "Smart Art" tools are particularly useful for creating a "Top 3 Focus Areas" list each month. On this one-page cue, I add my top 3 focus areas, and my top 3 desired outcomes for each. Essentially, these become my "must get done" items for the month.
I then print out the page, carry it around with me and make notes on the page to help track my progress, update my boss & peers, etc.
This is amazingly simple and very effective. I happen to use PowerPoint 2007, which has some snazzy templates (I often change them around just to make life more interesting - a couple of examples are shown here).
Give it a try, and see if it helps you focus.
Related items:
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Thanks to Dustin Wax for an excellent resource list on Lifehack.org, called "50+ Productivity Blogs You've Never Heard of Before (and about a dozen you probably have)". And double thanks for including me on the list (#18).
Though I was familiar with quite a few on the list, at least half of them are new to me - and after sampling about a dozen of them in the last 30 minutes, I like what I'm finding on his list.
Check it out and go exploring. You can also see Dustin's personal blog at dwax.org.
[Update: Dustin has just added an OPML file that you can import into your RSS reader that will automatically add 62 of the 65 named sites - talk about easy! Just scroll to the bottom of the list and look for the link to the OPML file]
Read MoreI have been playing around with Scour today, and it's pretty interesting. Scour is a very powerful search aggregation engine, in that it will search for terms, images, or video across the top 3 search engines and weights your results according to Scour's own algorithms. What? You know of other search engines that combine results from multiple sites?
Let me tell you why Scour is different. When you search, you're given the chance to sign up as a member. If you choose to do so, you become an advisor to Scour, which means:
- You can review and provide feedback (by voting) on the quality and relevance of the searches you received. Scour then folds this feedback into the mix for future searches to make them better.
- You can earn points for ever search, comment, or vote you contribute to the site.
- You can invite others to join, and get points for the stuff they do on the site, as well.
- You can redeem your points for Visa gift cards.
It seems pretty cool so far, and it's free. One nice thing: if you're busy and just want to use it as a search engine, there is no pressure to do more than that. And you still earn a minimum of 1 point per search.
Sound interesting? Click here to sign up for Scour and start earning points for searching (if you use this link, I'll get some points for what you do). And once you're signed up, you can invite other people and get points for their activities.
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