Weren't we already spending too much time online?

Today's SmartBrief from The Business of News reports:

Tablet owners' daily Web usage is 48% higher

• Tablets appear to increase by nearly half the amount of time their owners spend online and double the amount of time they spend on mobile devices, including phones, according to Knowledge Networks. In all, tablet owners spend 38% of their daily screen time on mobile devices. The data suggest marketers need to pay attention to mobile and the kinds of campaigns that work on these platforms, said Robert DeFelice, vice president for client services at Knowledge Networks. MediaPost Communications/Online Media Daily (10/3)

Facebook & Twitter & LinkedIn... Oh My!

If you're reluctant to get on board with social media sites, fearing a complete loss of privacy and having your free time sucked into some magical vortex, relax.

You can sign up for Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin without fear:

1. On each service, control your privacy settings. It takes less than ten minutes to read and understand your options. Start by limiting your 'friends' to only the people you know.

2. Write useful comments at least once a week. No need to write every day, or to respond to other people's comments. It's not expected, so don't make it more work than you want.

3. Use a single interface to view all the traffic/feeds/comments on your collective social media sites:
-- Use Hootsuite.com to post to all social media sites at once, and update on your schedule

-- Use Echofon.com for a fabulous way to keep up with Facebook and Twitter. It's literally a little dot in your browser. Click daily to view the new stream of tweets, and you're done.

-- Don't get scared by the thought of using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to amass all the sites and chatter you desire into a single site, such as your Google Reader page.



Find more help understanding the development of the social media craze in my Social Media Handbook.

A teacher purchased 30 copies yesterday for her classroom!

About the power of time off

I saw an interesting video from the TED conference today. (TED hosts 'riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world').

Stefan Sagmeister, a New York designer takes a year off every 7 years. Haven't we all though of a sabbatical at some time? Here's the clever reasoning: Sagmeister figures we spend:

25 years learning
40 years gathering (perhaps: information, family, money, skills, experience) and
15 years in retirement.

He decided to deduct some of those 15 years from the end by retiring every few years, for just a year, to recharge and reflect. As he returns to work, he finds that everything he designs in some way came out of that year of time off. Additionally the result of the year off feeds back into the world, instead of becoming time only spent with a grandchild or two in later years.

If, like me, you can't exactly take a year off, we can at least take a weekend to slow down, unplug and do something creative. Even replacing an afternoon in your desk chair with an hour in a deck chair might be enough to recharge, at least for a while.

That's where you'll find me on this beautiful Spring day.

Highlight and save web page text

Have you ever wanted to grab a useful paragraph from a web site, to save?
If you cut & paste, where will you put it, how will you find it?

The answer is WebNotes, which lets you highlight, save organize, preserve links, and retrieve at your own WebNotes page. Think of it as smart bookmarks...

Getting Things Done: The David Allen way

I'm a fan, but not a practitioner, of David Allen's (GTD) "Getting Things Done." I often feel technology should be doing more to help us get more done in less time, but as Dave points out in this web excerpt, the obstacles are generally bigger than technology. Yet, he does acknowledge using tech to keep organized can help us feel we are mastering the multitude of obligations tearing at us each week:


Critical Behaviors in the Crunch

It's a perfect time to capture, clarify, organize, and reflect; and to decide what's really important, what you now want to have true, and what you need to maintain. What you really need to do, in other words - now, and next.

Here are a few GTDisms that might be particularly useful in a crunch:

Capture. Get the data. Acknowledge what's true. (We have ____ in the bank. Our expenses are ______ . I feel insecure and apprehensive. There are no debtors' prisons.) And clean up. This is when it's super-important to identify and get a handle on all the open loops pulling on your attention.

Clarify. Identify the outcomes and projects you now need to focus toward, and of course, what actions you need to take. (Re-do personal budget; talk to partner re: asset inventory.) Get all your attention-grabbers processed. And leverage the heck out of the two-minute rule. Being an instant executive is the best cure for transcending a funk.

Organize. Get your lists and systems current and complete. Your psyche needs the freedom that affords to concentrate and direct your thinking.

Reflect. You may need to do Weekly Reviews daily. You must keep situational awareness vital and present to be able to trust your intuitive responses, which you will be calling on frequently. Regularly engage in forest management (instead of tree-hugging), so you can see smoke from a distance.

Engage. Keep moving. Pick an action and do it. Don't get hung up on priorities. It's much easier to control a boat that's got way (momentum through the water) than one simply at the effect of the currents. It's easier to know your priorities by taking an action that's not so important than by stressing about them.

Allen says: "This is where getting control morphs into gaining perspective, and the Horizons of Focus come into play. Obviously goals and plans and job descriptions may need a recalibration. But, in addition, give yourself permission to acknowledge and take advantage of the deeper conversations with yourself and other key people in your life that will undoubtedly come closer to the surface in rough seas. For at least a year after 9/11, everyone I know and every organization I dealt with operated with an increased infusion of 40-50,000-level content in their consciousness. (Why are we really here? What's really important to me/us? What are we really trying to do, and is it worth it?)."

Addendum-2/01/09: Wonderful writer James Fallows, in Atlantic Monthly, summarizes the reason GTD is such a success:

"In earlier times, Allen says, work was more physically exhausting than it is today. But it produced less anxiety, because people could easily tell what they had to do and whether it had been completed. Either the wood was chopped or it was not. The typical modern day, he says, is a fog of constantly accumulating open-ended obligations, with little barrier between the personal and the professional and few clear signals that you are actually "done." E-mail pours in. Hallway conversations end with "I'll get back to you." The cell phone rings. The newspaper tells you about movies you'd like to see, recipes you'd like to try, places you'd like to go. There are countless things that everyone really "should" do more of—exercise, read, spend time with the family, have lunch with a contact, be "better" at work. The modern condition is to be overwhelmed—and, according to Allen, to feel not just tired but chronically anxious, because so many things you have at some level committed to do never get done."

Read Fallow's full 2004 article "Organize Your Life" here: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200407/fallows2

Happy New Year ~ 2009

Greetings. With over 6,000 visitors to this blog, I want to wish everyone a very Happy New Year and a quick recovery from a difficult 2008. If, like me, you have a desire to hunker down with a good book this winter, or spend a little more time with friends & family, and less time on the computer, well, that's alright by me. The time we sink into technology is irretrievable, so if the quality isn't there, take a break and enjoy other pursuits.

As T.S. Eliot said:

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

So, here's to good times in 2009 with friends, family, great books and movies to enrich our spirit.

Wherever you are, please remember to support your local economy. The merchants and stores support you with tax dollars, employ your neighbors, and invest in your community. Show your appreciation by supporting their business.

Early winter warning: Fight procrastination

Here are my five best procrastination busters.... as originally appeared in Work Home You magazine. I hope these suggestions help keep you on track this winter.

Digital writing on Bamboo tablet....

Now that I have your attention, yes, it's true. There is a new digital pen tablet device that converts your ideas, drawings and signature to your computer.

The Bamboo lets you write emals, ideas, lists, and notes, working from anywhere. Learn more at Bamboo.

Oh, and the best news may be the $79 price tag! And it works on Windows XP, Vista and Macs.

Whoa! Is that a scanner in your keyboard?

Here's rare news of a new product worthy of your attention. In a world of cluttered desks, KeyScan, a developer of hardware and software scanning solutions, unveils the only computer keyboard with built-in full-page color scanner.

It converts a scan to a searachable pdf, even multi-page pdf files, or Word, just to name two options, and the document is ready to email or save. What's amazing to me is that you don't have to touch anything or issue any commands: Just insert the photo or document into the keyboard slot and watch it work.

The KS810 keyboard-scanner carries an suggested retail price of $159 and comes bundled with KeyScan’s exclusive NoTouch-AutoScan software.

The KeyScan KS810 integrated keyboard and sheet-feed scanner occupies the same footprint as a standard keyboard. It quickly and easily scans black-and-white and color documents from business cards up to 8½"x30". It takes about five seconds to scan a full-page, 300dpi, grayscale document.

You can watch a brief demo on YouTube here.

Can you take a "Tech-No" vacation?

Budget Travel has an article featuring vacation destinations where you can really unplug. Could you do it?

Could you go to The Running-R Ranch in Texas, where there is no internet access, and no cell phone towers?

Would you pay $150+/night at the Sheraton Chicago if they confiscate your Blackberry? Trade up to a paper walking map of Chicago and sign up for their 48-hour Blackberry Detox Challenge.

The Canadian Spa Eastman, an hour from Montreal advertises unplugging as part of their philosophy. Cell phones? Leave 'em at home.


The Tassajara Zen M0untain Center in Carmel Valley has only one public phone, no cell phone reception, and no Internet connection. In fact, don't plan on bringing any gadgets that require charging: Only a few of the cabins have the electricity you'll need to stay in touch. Even more discouraging for tech addicts, the center charges $10 an hour to recharge devices. So how will you fill up all the time you'll be saving by not answering emails? Take a relaxing soak in the bathhouse with water from a local hot spring, or sign up for a retreat covering such subjects as yoga, gardening, and cooking. Failing that, you can just hang out and do nothing: The Tassajara Zen Mountain Center is a functioning monastery for serious students of Buddhism, with free meditation instruction at 4 P.M. daily, but you're free to do as you please.

If you go -- send me a postcard!!

Is Google a Brain Drain?

Jump on over to my writing blog for a report on The Atlantic's views on Google. Is it taking the nation by storm, or draining our ability to concentrate? Read the full article and let me know what you think.

Getting Things Done takes on Multi-tasking

For fans of David Allen's book "Getting Things Done," he recently shared this news about two Belgian researchers, Francis Heylighen and Clément Vidal, who recently published a significant report on the scientific and psychological bases for the effectiveness of the GTD method:

Productivity Principle no. 81

A single focus is infinitely more productive than a split one.

Commentary

Much like decreasing the diameter of a pipe will increase the strength of the water flowing out of it, the ability to think and do is optimized when focus is concentrated. Trying to focus on two things at once will diminish the results by much more than half. "Multitasking" only works when all but one of the "tasks" is on automatic, such as driving home and wondering when you got there who actually drove! Rapid refocusing (which is what really happens in knowledge-work environments – from email to phone to interruptions, etc.) does not hinder productivity, as long as there is a clean break from one task to the next, and you are not retracing steps. Work is diminished when the focus is split, or when refocusing requires having to repeat the reframing of context and content for the next task (as in rereading sentences you've already read to find your place again).

So, keep that in mind when you jump from task to task.

Email Overload: top three survival strategies

Coping with email overload is tough, between the worry of missing something important, and the fatigue that comes from scanning the same messages over and over. Try these tips to conquer the bulging Inbox:

1. Think of email like regular paper mail: reply / file / or toss, the same day it arrives.

2. Adopt the Lifehacker.com strategy: Use three folders below the Inbox:

1. Follow-up (or Current)
   
2. Archive
3. Hold

3. File more. Instead of rereading messages and thinking "I should do something about this. I'll get back to it later." try filing the message in an appropriate folder. Either make a folder below your Inbox, or save the message in a project folder. Just click File / Save As and drill over to the project. Then your email correspondence is filed in the same place as documents, budgets, and spreadsheets.

Email: Out with the old

We lived without email for generations, but now that it has been in common usage over ten years old, we see signs of wear and tear: that's "tear" as in crying, not ripping up.

We try to get rid of messages once read and file those we need to keep, but they keep pouring in and, as we all know, it's hard to find what you're looking for in a mailbox full of bits and bytes.

My manual solution is to:

Prioritize
File
Archive

Yesterday, a friend told me about a unique strategy you can start doing today. Ready for this?

For each email you receive and read, get rid of two.
So, as she said: "If I get 18 messages, I have to get rid of 36."
What a great way to start slowly conquering the overflowing mailboxes. Thanks JB!

Another wonderful thing about technology is that people are always working on new ideas, and there will be smarter email tools in a couple years. What's in the works? It's a concept called Categorization Technology. Think of it as "tags" or the tagging process that shows instantly how many web pages (or in this case, emails) contain certain words.

Tools like SenseClusters, Digitality, and my favorite name: Pigmail, are underway. We'll soon see which rises to the top and helps conquer email overload. One of the companies working on this has obtained the 3000 Enron emails released by the courts and are using them to create the classification models. If you want access to that file, email me!

Life - stored in computers

Computers are fantastic for data storage, but there's so much more than can do. I've long followed the work of Gordon Bell, a 72-year-old Microsoft engineer who is gathering all the elements of his life into a digital storage system. His project, My Life Bits, is sponsored by Microsoft. Bell's biggest challenge is to come up with a meaningful use for such a powerful collection of life's flotsam.

You can read a fresh account of this project by Alec Wilkinson in the 5/28/07 New Yorker. More to the point, it might get you thinking about what you'd like to log as the memorable events of your own life. From the compulsive diaries of Samuel Pepys, the attention and introspection of such records is surely a noble effort, but I fear, one that I'd be incapable of stopping once started.

Another Microsoft researcher, Eric Horvitz, has intriguing ideas about creating a computer that could think like us. His Lifebrowser project uses a computer to do so much more than we've ever thought of. When computers are still, he feels they could be put to use to understand our minds, catalog and organize our memories, and " help you be a better you."

My personal commitment is on a much smaller scale. Using a Palm LifeDrive I'm able to capture more than 4 GB of data - all contacts, calendars, photos, books, business files in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, accounting, wi-fi, email, web pages and more more more. I'm listening to MP3 recordings of a conference I attended last month, simultaneously taking notes and researching web sites of the speakers.

It's a fantastic adventure to stretch technology and my mind til they converge in a smarter place. We live in a marvelous age.

Multi-tasking: Enough already !

I wrote previously about the London study indicating multitasking had the same effect on the brain as marijuana. And, not in a good way.

Another study explains that drained, confused feeling we all experience... can't focus, lose details, fatigue easily - it's not iron-poor blood, it's technology, if not used well.

A study by FirStep Inc., Pennsylvania business strategists, says U.S. office workers get interrupted on the job as often as eleven times an hour. Cost to businesses? It's a staggering $588 billion/year.

Read more:

• Add in the distracting lure of checking e-mails, surfing the Internet and chatting by computer, and workers interrupt themselves nearly as much as they are interrupted by others, experts say.

• "With instant messaging on your desktop and alerts and e-mail notifications, you set yourself up for it," said John Putzier, founder of FirStep Inc. business strategists in Prospect, Pennsylvania.

• A typical manager is interrupted six times an hour, one recent study showed, while another found the average cubicle worker is interrupted more than 70 times a day.

• Other research has found office workers getting interrupted every 11 minutes, even as another study said nearly half of workplace interruptions are self-imposed.

• A study by Basex found office distractions take up 2.1 hours of the average day - 28 percent - with workers taking an average of five minutes to recover from each interruption and return to their original tasks.

• Still another study found a group of workers interrupted by e-mail and telephones scored lower on an IQ test than a test group that had smoked marijuana."

Feeling worse now?
A large part of the problem, and the problem with email in general is that we have no way to separate the critical from the comical. At first the sense of busy-ness and jumping from task to task might feel good. You're getting a lot done, staying on top of what matters, but there is something terribly seductive about being plugged in. Soon it turns into overload and as you keep pushing buttons, switching gears and jumping among topics, you don't realize your effectiveness drops rapidly.

Don't embrace the over-connected nature of technology if it is wearing you down. Control the intrusions, and enjoy greater satisfaction. Imagine: Start a task and finish it without switching to five or six other non-urgent interruptions.

Like any good habit, it takes practice. Give yourself two weeks over the holidays to break the cycle of always-on, and stop responding to every interruption. Let me know how it works for you, and remember you can ask questions anytime on Computer Clarity's forum at http://www.cclarity.com/questions.html .

But remember... Just because it's up 24 x 7, you don't have to be.

Happy Holidays,
Helen

Staying productive away from the office

We’re great at tuning out distractions when working at home, but a hotel room or internet café is often not conducive to conducting business. If you tote your laptop along and can’t get a free wireless connection in your hotel, stay organized to make the most of your time as a café-squatter.

While working on the plane or in the hotel, keep a running list of web sites you need to review, emails you want to send once you’re online, and reply quickly to all the new mail you get, so people will know you’re in touch while out of the office.

Use your Outlook or Act calendar to create one giant “to-do” item of all these things so you don’t waste time wandering through files looking for names, numbers and bits of information.

Because you have greater security risks on any public connection, especially wireless, limit your time online to the essentials, and don’t use it checking bank account balances or for buying airline tickets or any credit card transactions.

While traveling on business this week, I’m witnessing the frustration and lost productivity by business people trying to use a Marriott hotel business center. Because Marriott doesn’t offer free wi-fi, dozens of people every hour are wasting time waiting for one of two computers, or plugging their laptops into a potentially unsafe network to read mail, then switching to web mail to send replies. And I’m telling you from experience you can waste 20 minutes and a cappuccino just trying to get onto an available connection, even at a café with free wi-fi.