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Getting things done, on the Internet

Bill French, Information Age

09/06/2005 16:02:20

Associates, colleagues, and customers frequently ask me how I get so much done with (seemingly) little effort. This is not easy to answer because I've taken every aspect of my Internet work to a level of productivity that's second nature to me. Indeed, to quote a term that Alan Kucheck (a Borland VP) used when I worked for him at Starbase - "you've developed muscle-memory". Perhaps this explains part of my intense productivity, but muscle-memory is more about your hands and fingers repeating a process without exerting mental energy, than it is about the tools and techniques of higher productivity.

Beginning this month I hope to write about my Internet productivity techniques in a five-part series that will cover applications, creating repeatable processes and leveraging your efforts and knowledge in less time and with better results. To begin this excursion, we'll focus on picking applications to achieve greater productivity. In future parts of this theme we'll also spend some time discussing content mediums (ie, where should you put stuff?) because the choices you make about information storage, tend to dictate productivity outcomes.

How Is more important than what When faced with any information-oriented task, one of the most important steps is to choose how to do it. One wrong move and you could waste valuable time. This involves some thought and maybe a sub-task - perhaps some time to research and reflect on how best to accomplish the primary task.

Last week an employee at MyST Technology Partners was faced with a seemingly complex task: to figure out how much we owed an outside salesperson. This was a bit nasty in that our accounting records were not complete and hadn't been fully configured with the types of data and transaction tracking necessary for this kind of analysis. The employee, who also has a solid accounting background and fairly good knowledge of QuickBooks, immediately chose Microsoft Excel and began compiling the data from sales reports. This is one way to completing the objective, and a fairly logical choice.

An alternative approach (one that occurred to me almost instantly) was to spend some time to see if this data could be extracted from QuickBooks. We also knew that this task would need to be repeated many times; a clear indicator that a little research before tackling such an objective, may be time well spent. As I expected, with a little QuickBooks configuration effort and some spackling in of missing sales rep data, the report simply fell into our laps in one-fifth the time it took to create the spreadsheet. The moral of this simple example - pick how you accomplish your tasks very carefully, especially when repeatability is likely to provide time-savings.

Connecting with people I engage in conference calls all the time. Our own offices are geographically dispersed so this is a common occurrence. And because it's common, I've invested in a process that is quickly and easily repeated. I spent a fair bit of time trying to decide how to do this and while the service I use may not be the best, it meets specific requirements.

Prior to taking this issue seriously enough to automate, I noticed that I spent a significant amount of time calling and e-mailing people to comunicate the call-in information to the conferencing service. I also spent some time creating the calendar items for calls and trying to cipher time-zone differences for everyone invited to the call.

I chose FreeConference.com because their service allows me to create repeatable call configuration data, but there are many services available. With FreeConference I can create a new meeting by simply setting the time and selecting the group - the application does everything else. It calculates the meeting time (adjusted for time-zones) for each attendee in the group. It e-mails notifications of the meeting; it manages the call in number and security code; it even attaches an Outlook calendar item that is instantly saved into your e-mail client. It also asks each attendee to RSVP (with a single click).

Many people use FreeConference but few take the time to establish the configuration data necessary to set up new meetings in the blink of any eye. Again, deciding how much time to invest in repeatability is up to you, but I recommend thinking about it. There are also other features in this application that allow you to streamline the meeting process. For example, some of the conference features are optional (like announce bells when an attendee joins the call). You can set these options with default behaviours, thus avoiding answering questions about them each time you create a new meeting.

Weaving the process into your desktop With every application I use for increasing productivity, I also integrate it into my desktop to shave a few more seconds off the process of utilising the application. Since conferences are likely to occur in many contexts, I've spread the link to FreeConference to many areas of my digital environment.

My digital environment includes online (Internet) applications like BackPack and MasterLink (a free MyST service) as well as client applications including Outlook and Onfolio. By including FreeConference links in all of these applications I'm easily able to create a new meeting from all of these applications. Since the majority of conference calls occur through an e-mail interaction, I've take the time to create a toolbar button specifically for this action.

Everyone's digital environment is different so these ideas may or may not resonate with you, but the benefits add up. My productivity gains for establishing conference calls are very small, but in the course of a year they represent hours ( perhaps days) in time savings. Improving your digital environment

In terms of productivity, enough cannot be said about your environment and how you configure your computing work space. This is a critical aspect of getting things done on the Internet and it's largely comprised of many personal decisions concerning your tool selection and how you like to organise information. There are also many dimensions to your digital environment - your degree of mobility, your Internet connection speed, operating system, number of monitors, and indeed the business you are in.

In future articles I'll bring you a number of applications and ideas that have proven successful for me. However, your own environment will vary and the most important thing to remember -- the job of improving your digital environment is never finished.

Here are the primary components that (presently) help me get things done on the Internet. § A blog system § A teleconference system § A link manager § A desktop search system § A FAQ publishing system § An RSS publishing system § A mobile information system § An Internet-based whiteboard § A trend discovery system

In the coming months we'll drill into each application and reveal the benefits and techniques that help me achieve greater productivity.