SAY GOODBYE TO TRADITIONAL EMAIL

Email has literally changed the way we communicate with the people in our network.  Sure we have Facebook, Twitter, and more IM accounts than we know what to do with, but email, that ability to essentially take the old pen and paper message model and make it almost instantaneous and available anywhere you have a connection to the internet, was truly a revolution.

However, that revolution was thought up around 40 years ago, and the people who invented the system and principles by which email would primarily stick to through the birth of the internet.  Sure we have our IMAP and POP3 and folders and flags and all the rest, but the foundation still lives.

This foundation, which actually parallels the way snail mail worked, makes sense because it is the way we have been sending and receiving information since the ancient Persian king Cyrus the Great thought it up back in 550 BC.  Sure that statement doesn’t account for the many great advances we have made over the least 2,500 years, but it leads to the point that maybe, just maybe, email or communication would looks somewhat different were it invented today, with all we know about how the internet can work for us.

So, Google has sought out to look into this idea of a better email.  The guys who developed Google Maps have been going after this problem for the last two years and from what I can see they have a very interesting spin to put on communication via the web.

It should be a goal of anyone who wishes to manage their time optimize their resources to spend less time reading emails and more time acting on what they have learned.  Its more about performing the task than it is about reading the assignment.  The problem with the way email works today is that, like traditional mail, you send block of text to a user and that block is un-editable once it leaves your house, machine, phone, or whatever.  Not only that, but if new information comes into the equation, it is difficult to relay that knowledge before the receiver has already sent you back their static response.

If we have learned anything about IM, Twitter, message boards and the like it is that conversations work the best when they are both instant and dynamic.

Instant meaning that there is no delay between the sending and the receiving, and dynamic meaning comments are easily changed, supported, updated, correlated, cited, and decoded in real time by one or more users.  These two factors help virtual communication approach face-to-face communication.

Google has just announced their new product, set to launch later this year, called Google Wave.

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Watch the demo video below, sign up for updates and learn more about how to develop with Google Wave.

Take the time to watch the demo portion of this video to see these sorts of ideas in action.  The video is long, last 2/3 of the video are more for the developer types in the audience.  Wave may not be the answer, but it validates the question of whether or not email as it exists today, is really what billions of people should be relying on for their communication needs.  Food for thought if nothing else.

Filed under: Focus, Productivity, Email, Facebook, Google, Google Wave, IM, Productivity, Social Networks, Twitter, Wave

SIT DOWN AND MAKE SOMETHING

Sometimes the hardest part of the creative process is that part where we have to lay down the other things we have occupied ourselves with and just make something.  A common misconception about creativity in general is that it is some mystical you’re-either-born-with-it-or-you-aren’t quality.

Being creative has more to do with being disciplined.  When you decide you are ready to create something, do it.  The reason we put so many other distractions ahead of making things we are proud of is because it is always easier to do nothing than to do something worthwhile.

Whether your time vampire be video games, Facebook, twitter, movies, TV, etc. – they all fit this bill.  They are familiar and therefore they are easy.  Easy is easier than hard.  Mix this with the conception that being creative is extra super-duper hard and you have a recipe for sitting on your butt and being complacent.

So, the next time you have a great idea for a new creative project, act on it.  That could be as simple as writing down some notes on a piece of paper, making flow chart, emailing your self a reminder, or scheduling a time to think more on the idea at a later time.  Whatever you do, don’t do nothing.  If you make that first step down the creative path, the rest will come much easier.

Filed under: Focus, Lifestyle, Creativity, GTD

CONSOLIDATION AND ELIMINATION OF SOCIAL NETWORKS

There are so many great tools online these days.  Tools that allow us to share, connect and experience in ways that a decade ago would have seemed like science fiction.

A pitfall associated having so many social networks so readily avaolable is that they all have something unique to offer and they are all very compelling.  So whats the problem?  If you are like me, you NEED every one of these service.  They are all so useful and free that at every opportunity you drop in your email and password and you are off to a new social network that is going to TOTALLY change the way you use the internet, right?

Here is the thing, about 90% of the stuff we sign up for will do more than waste our time for a few hours, and then we will never re-visit.  Why?  Generally it isn’t that these services aren’t the useful tools we thought they were, but usually they don’t fill a need.

The reason these services exist in the first place is to fill the needs of the user, but we all have only so many of these needs to fill with solutions.

The next time you stumble upon the next great thing, stop and think:

1) What problem does this solve for me?

2) Do I use something that serves a similar purpose?

If it doesn’t solve a problem you have noticed before, you should probably move along.  A service doing something you never though of as a problem before doesn’t mean that it is something you need.  If it is a problem, but you already have a solution in place in your workflow to manage the issue, then you should decide which of the two meets the need best.  Keep one and delete, remove, or unsubscribe from the other.  This will keep things simple while still serving the purpose of keeping you connected.

Ok so you have your ONE twitter, facebook, flickr, google reader, etc application set up you still have to make multiple clicks to get at all of that data.  Sure you get the info you need but it takes time and might not be the most efficient way to manage these things.

Let me introduce you to EventBox.  This application allows you to bring all of your social networks such as Flickr, FaceBook, Google reader with sync, Twitter, last.fm and more into one application.  You then have a single “Unread” box where you can see all of the new information from all of your feeds, tweets, and friends’ status updates in one location no matter their source.  You can of course look at all of that information individually, but I find that this single box lets you see whats happening at a glance in your important social networks without requiring you to launch 5 applications and visit other sites to boot.

You can give this program a try for free for two weeks athttp://thecosmicmachine.com/.

I think you will find that by weeding out the services you don’t need to keep checking and consolidating the ones you do into a single location you will waste less time browsing your networks and more time creating your best work

Filed under: Focus, Mac, Applications, Focus, Mac, Organization, Social Networks

“HOW TO LIVE WITHOUT THE CLOCK”

I was browsing along today and I came across an article on ZenHabits that I thought was truly fascinating.  It is about trying to worry less about how much time our projects are taking and living more for the moment.  It also deals with listening to your body when it comes to taking breaks.  However, the most interesting portion for me was about setting “themes” rather than goals.  If any of this sounds interesting to you I’d encourage you to take a look.  Enjoy

Filed under: Focus, Lifestyle, Focus, Lifestyle, Productivity