Scobleizer » Productivity

What a day. Yesterday I spent 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. with Michael Dolan, a coach who works for David Allen’s company and helps busy people get their careers to the next level through David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology which most of us learned through his book of the same name. For a taste of David Allen, you might see his interview with me from last year. David also just released his new book titled “Making It All Work.”

For those who read productivity sites like 43 folders or Life Hacker this methodology is well known to you.

At the urging of Lenn Pryor back when I worked at Microsoft I read David’s book and later went to one of his seminars with Lenn. Found it useful to step up my game and keep up with an increasing flow of stuff in my life.

Lately I’ve been feeling under water and have been getting distracted by life and Twitter and friendfeed and needed a recharge.

Also, I wanted to get back into the system before the Getting Things Done Summit, which starts in about two weeks.

Translated: I was off the wagon and my life was a bit of a mess and needed to take a fresh look at my life, where I was headed, and I needed a system to deal with the hundreds of emails and tons of Tweets, friendfeed items, blogs, facebook messages and wall posts, and all that.

I was apprehensive, though, for a while. I had never had a coach sit down and look through my life and my email.

Would he admonish me? Would he find some new way to torture me?

Turned out my apprehension was misplaced.

We started the morning with a little interview that I filmed. I was expecting to do a lot more videos during the day, but turned out that I had so much work to do to get me more productive that we focused only on that.

So, what happens during such a coaching?

First Michael did a session where he reminded me of the basics of the Getting Things Done methodology. A refresher course.

Then he took out a yellow pad and had me write one thing at a time that I could think of that I needed to do.

Things like:

**Talk to Seagate about sponsorship next year.
**Buy power supply for camera (I left mine in a hotel in Davos).
**Plan next month’s interviews.
**Get oil changed on car.

We ended up with a stack of about 50 of these before I started running out of things that I could think of to do.

Then he customized my Outlook’s task system. He went so fast that I didn’t take good notes about what he did, but when we’re both at the summit we’ll sit down and talk about some of the changes he made so we can get them on video. But the things he did are pretty similar to what I’ve seen many people report on the web about how to set up Outlook for GTD.

It’s weird, I’m embarrassed to admit he taught me a TON about how Outlook works. Why am I embarrassed? Because I’ve been using Outlook for more than a decade and just hadn’t discovered all sorts of weird ways that it can be customized to build task lists.

Anyway, I have a ton of work to do to continue what I learned yesterday, so we’ll talk more about how this changed my life in the upcoming weeks.

Personal Dashboard perfect mobile app for tough economy

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:28:00 +0000

Have you checked out PageOnce on your iPhone yet? In just three months they are one of the top 10 productivity apps and 200,000+ have downloaded it. Here’s Guy Goldstein, CEO, telling me about the company and giving me a demo on last Friday’s WorkFastTV show.

One thing I learned is that this week they are shipping a version of this popular app on Blackberry mobile phones too.

What makes it a great productivity app? It lets you see all sorts of personal information. Your bank balances. Your stock plans. Your credit card accounts. Your Netflix account. Your favorite airlines. And a lot more. All in one screen and it warns you when you have bills due. Great stuff for keeping up to date on your finances.

How much time are you wasting on Twitter?

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:57:53 +0000

They bill themselves as the “anti-Twitter.” What is it? It’s RescueTime, a service that keeps track of what you spend your time on. Here Tony Wright, CEO, tells me about the new service. This was part of our trip up to see interesting startups up in Seattle.

Here’s the discussion of this video over on FriendFeed.

I’m scared to use this tool because it would show that I’m spending too much time on Twitter and FriendFeed.

The community wins

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:46:35 +0000

One neat thing about being on FriendFeed is that the community gives you a TON of feedback. I’ve found that the community there is really constructive, even when giving pretty harsh feedback. Anyway, tomorrow on WorkFastTV we’re making a ton of changes. It’ll be interesting to watch FriendFeed tomorrow to see what people think of the show, especially since the changes that got done came from there.

Anyway, tomorrow we’ll have Matt Rissell, CEO of TSheets, a Boise-based provider of online timeclocks used by employees and consultants. Here’s his blog. All that is pretty cool, but what I found interesting is that he went on a mission to determine what made the most productive people successful and interviewed tons of CEOs. His surprise: Tools didn’t much matter. His discovery: There are 10 rules that the 75 successful people he surveyed all followed. We’ll talk about those tomorrow.

I bet that one of them is “listens well to feedback.” See you at FastCompanyTV at 10 a.m. Pacific Time tomorrow. We won’t have a chat room during the show (that’s one of the many changes that we’re making) but will be interactive after the show. We’re doing that so we can give our guest our full attention during the show and this way we’ll be interactive, but at the appropriate time.

Let us know what you think.

BestBuy gets more productive on WorkFastTV

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:40:50 +0000

Every week we film a live WorkFastTV show at the Revision 3 studios in San Francisco as part of our FastCompanyTV family of shows. It’s where we cover how work is changing thanks to the Internet. Last week we had BestBuy, one of the world’s largest retailers, on the show to tell us how they are using collaborative software to make themselves more productive and better train their employees. That video is now up, some really interesting things they are doing with their 140,000 employees.

This week? We’ll film Thursday 10 a.m. Pacific Time because of the Fourth of July holiday here in the United States. Guest? New York Times Bestselling author Tim Ferriss (he wrote the 4-Hour Workweek). That should be lots of fun as we find out what he’s been doing to avoid working too much.

Who should we have on future shows? Coming up soon is David Allen, too.

Now that we’ve done a month’s worth of WorkFast, what do you like or hate about the show? How could we add more value to it for you?