Blog for Research

One of the largest parts of talking about productivity and work practices is gathering material and keeping up-to-date on new ideas, reports, and trends.

Finding and looking at the the information is pretty easy to do - Google search and reader help me with the vast majority of the heavy lifting here. The real difficult part is in storing, sorting, and organizing both these finds and my thoughts on them.

For me, an ideal storage method would be easily accessible, searchable, tagable, and cross-referenced. Like a blog. In fact, like this blog.

The blog you're reading is my research file. In case you haven't noticed, this blog has comparatively few articles that contain original content. This is by design.

I'm gathering what I feel is the best content that fits my work philosophy (simplified GTD), and indexing it for my use as research fodder. Likewise, when I have some ideas that I want to capture, I'll add them to the blog. Everything is tagged and searchable through the search box in the upper left corner of this page, and I can access all my research from nearly anywhere on the planet. For me, this is the ideal data repository.

If you have a large, ongoing research project, I recommend a personal blog (you don't have to make it public like this one) or if you don't need universal accessibility, a personal wiki like tiddlywiki is an excellent choice.

blogger.com - free blogging service and hosting
wordpress.com - free blogging service and hosting
tiddlywiki - free personal wiki (wikipedia article)
tiddlyspot - free online personal wiki hosting

image: wikimedia commons

One List to Rule them All

A bit of meta for your Monday morning:

Zen Habits has a list of the 20 best productivity lists.

Don’t read these all at once. It would ruin your productivity. But I’m hoping this will be a resource you come back to every now and then when you feel you need it. Bookmark it for later!

Zen Habits' The List to Beat All Lists: Top 20 Productivity Lists to Rock Your Tasks

Email bots to the rescue?

In this month's Wired Magazine, Clive Thompson discusses email overload and a new class of software to help deal with it: bots like Xobni.

It's a fairly breathless piece and most of the features seem like minor improvements over what Outlook can do out of the box, with the possible exception of this:

It also endows you with superpowered sorting. If a work-related thread goes off the rails — like when colleagues hijack a project discussion to argue about Lost — you can zap it. From that point on, new messages in the thread are filtered out and deleted automatically.

This sounds neat, but I can't think of a discussion I've been a part of that has gone this far off the original intent.

For me, the most interesting part of the story is Thompson's explanation of the slavering beast that email has become in modern times:

Why has email spun so badly out of control? Because it's asymmetric — incredibly easy to send but often devilishly burdensome to receive.

For example, in one minute I can send an email to a thousand coworkers asking them to review a document. Let's say each recipient spends five seconds disgustedly discarding it. Boom: In just one minute, I've wasted 5,000 seconds — 1 hour, 23 minutes — of my organization's time.

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Noise Generators

Work in a cube or shared space? Too much noise? Need to actually concentrate?

Lifehacker discusses several white noise and binaural beat generators:
In-Browser:
i-Dose streaming and downloadable binaural beats
Simply Noise in-browser white noise generator

Downloads:
Noise (mac) - waterfall pink noise
ChatterBlocker (windows) - configurable: pink, white, chatter

via lifehacker

Seth Godin: Three laws of great graphs

I've been posting a lot of Seth Godin's ideas lately, but here's another: the Three Laws of great graphs.

1. One Story
2. No Bar Charts
3. Motion

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Dumb Little Man: 8 ways to avoid unproductive meetings

Dumb Little Man provides this excellent discussion of how to avoid pointless meetings:

Have you watched CareerBuilder.com’s hilarious "Donut Jungle" commercial? The one where naïve employees are lured with delicious deserts into attending pointless meetings? The commercial is hilarious because it contains a hint of truth: many meetings, especially in larger organizations, are utterly pointless and devoid of usefulness.

The phenomenon of chronic, pointless meetings is also known as the Dilbert Meeting in some circles. Dilbert Meetings happen every day, wasting people's time and patience.

Meetings can be quite productive, but most organizers simply don’t take the steps to guarantee that a meeting will be useful. Here are 8 things you can try to help make your meetings more productive.

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Seth Godin: speedy shouldn't equal impolite

Seth Godin makes the following observation:

At a restaurant yesterday, the maitre'd, who is paid to be busy, looked up our name in the reservations book and then said, "over there against the wall," while he pointed. He repeated this approach with at least three other parties.

How much longer to say, "Welcome, we'll be ready for you in just a second. Would you mind waiting over there please?" Amazingly, saying that while smiling takes precisely the same amount of time.

In the rush to be busy, what simple pleasantries and social lubricants fall by the wayside? If you ignore them too long, you'll be even less productive.

An example: while we suggest everyone should try keeping their emails to less than about 5 sentences, sentence #1 should always be a personalized pleasantry.

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