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All through my professional life I have observed a set of truths that invariably end up introducing misunderstandings and underestimations.  It has never failed that when I look at what someone else has to do I find myself asking, "How hard can it be?  All she has to do is ____."  Or "Why does he say it will take him so long to get that done?  He only needs to _____."  I usually find that I am vastly underestimating the complexity of what I am requesting. 

I have this done to me all the time as well, much to my annoyance and consternation.  The lout who calls at 4:45 PM on Friday and asks for three days of research to be done and ready by Monday morning generally rebuts my annoyance, "All you need to do is _____."  No, Mr. I'm-Going-to-the-Beach-this-Weekend, what you asked for takes more than 15 minutes. And asking for something on Friday that you want done Monday is not "giving me a week to get it done."  I'm also not bitter, so stop calling me that.

This is one element of what I want to call Jackson's Law: People tend to underestimate the complexity of the tasks they themselves will not be required to complete.

A corollary seems to be that any task you are taking on for the first time requires more steps and takes longer than you assume.

I'm still working on these, and I welcome thoughts and advice.

I have a strange sense of humor. As evidence of that, I think the Barack Roll video is funny to a degree disproportionate to how funny it probably is to normal people.

Jon Lowder of the Competitive Intelligence Marketplace blog had some excellent suggestions on alternative business models for giving away conference content.  These are some excellent alternatives to my own suggestions from my previous post:

• Make certain videos free from the get-go.  Just one or two to keep the buzz of the conference going.
• Make all videos free to SCIP members behind the SCIP firewall, similar to what they do with magazine articles.  Perhaps there's a 3-6 month delay in doing this so that there's still a premium for attending the conference.  It's always a good idea to have more membership benefits.
• If you're going to charge for the video then forget what I said about lower quality being better than no video at all.
• Sell sponsorships of each presentation, and by extension the video.

Sadly, Jon was not able to post his suggestions in a comment to my own blog.  Previous run-ins with crazy volumes of SPAM led me to be perhaps a little overzealous in limiting readers' ability to comment.  I have made some changes to the blog srttings and hopefully have fixed this as an issue.  Just know that any offers for herbal Viagra you see posted in the comments of this blog do not come with my endorsement.

For one of the side projects I'm working on, I'm trying to sell the notion of giving away what could be considered "premium" content as a mechanism to raise interest and broaden an established brand among interested non-consumers.  Specifically I am trying to make the case that giving away some audio recordings of presentations from an annual professional conference will stimulate interest in the following year's conference.

In reality my concept is more nuanced than simply giving away content.  The conference will be held next April, and I am advocating that we make audio recordings of the sessions that will be presented (pending presenter's agreement, of course).  Paying attendees will be given access to the recorded content for no cost following the conference.  Those who did not register for the conference will be able to purchase the content as a price well under the cost of conference registration (I'm playing with price points between 1/10 and 1/5 of the cnference registration cost).  Three to four months before the next year's conference (set for April 2010) we would make some (probably not all) of the recorded content available for free.

Today a great example of using free content to broaden the appeal of a brand was brought to my attention: Tom Friedman is giving away audio recordings of the third edition of The World is Flat for free.  The audio book is being made available with an audio preview of Friedman's next book, and is likely part of a strategy to build anticipation and promote sales of the new book.

We've seen in the past years that diverse customer segments will pay varying prices for what is ostensibly the same product.  Almost every one of us have paid for a bottle of water often enough when tap water is generally conveniently available for free.  When the 9/11 Commission Report was published it became one of the best-selling tomes of 2004 despite the fact that the contents were freely available on-line.  Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have both demonstrated the benefits of giving away content or letting customers name their own price for music downloads.

With these and other examples in mind I'm not as concerned that freely-available content will cannibalize paying attendees.  I've been watching presentations from the TED conference for several years, and would still be thrilled to attend the event in person if I got the chance.  The real value of most conferences is in the face-to-face exchange of ideas, and you really do need to pony up the bucks to get the full benefit of a conference.  Hearing the quality of the material from last year's conference would, I am convinced, raise the interest of those who might not otherwise attend.

I'm very interested to hear what others think about this.  Help me make the case to a skeptical audience.  If you're skeptical, lay it on me so I can refine or revise this concept.  If you're sufficiently convincing you might get me to change my mind.  If you agree with the general concept of giving away content to spur interest among non-consumers then give me your take on this to help me make the case.

Earlier today I posted a comment to my friend Kevin Dewalt's blog about his finally getting on board with the Getting Things Done personal productivity framework.  I wanted to double-dip with that entry and post some additional comments here because I am overdue for a blog entry.

Kevin was specifically wondering aloud about the value of "inbox zero" and the concept that a person would empty his or her e-mail in-box every day.  I do confess to be someone who at least endeavors if not always succeeds at having an empty work and personal e-mail inbox at the end of each day.  To expand upon my reasoning I am going to do a very lazy thing and copy, verbatim, my comments on Kevin's post:

A good place to get some practical advice on using GTD is the 43 Folders blog started by Merlin Mann (hotdogsladies from YLNT).

For the e-mail in box I have to admit I find real peace of mind from emptying it out every day. I try to only check e-mail at certain times of the day (top of the hour, bottom of the hour, whenever) as opposed to responding to alerts that new messages have arrived. My infrequent time spent in my in box is like a triage to determine what needs to be handled immediately, what can be deferred, what can become an item on my to-do list and what irrelevant messages can just be deleted.

My archive in my work Outlook client consists of one folder into which all e-mails I am going to keep are filed. I don't bother with any sub-folders. I was inspired by G-mail's excellent archive and search functions. Outlook has a long way to go in this regard, and I still find it easier to look for individual messages in the archive folder instead of trying to remember which folder I might have stashed it.

I like having an empty in-box because it helps me avoid that nagging feeling that there's something I need to get done but haven't addressed. One of the ironies for me is that while I only check my e-mail at most once an hour, coworkers have commented about how refreshing they find my responsiveness. Many colleagues inside and outside my company jump like Pavlov's dog at the "You've got mail" ding, have thousands of old messages in their in-box and still manage to respond only very slowly if at all. I feel like the cognitive model modern corporate e-mail imposes on users is that of a treadmill that they can never get off. The GTD framework has given me the ability to get off that treadmill.

When I was getting ready to start my MBA, I knew that I was really going to have to step up my time management skills if I was going to balance full-time work, full-time school, engage in some level of professional development and still have a small sliver of life to retain a degree of sanity.  So I picked up David Allen's book and chose a number of aspects of the GTD framework that I thought would give me some mastery of my productivity: inbox zero, a revised approach to information filing, the physical invox and the "tickler file."

One of the best things that GTD gives me is a mechanism to be productive in my procrastination.  One of the leadership assessments in the MBA program provided a set of "executive derailers."  I was not surprised to find one of them was "leisurely."  If I am not genuinely personally engaged and interested in a task, it is very easy for my mind to wander. 

With GTD I have a ready list of action items (bite-sized tasks that can generally be performed in a few simple steps).  Each action item is attached to a project (the larger goal that needs to be completed) and a context (a place I need to be or set of resources I need to perform the task).  Projects are broken down into these small chunks, which makes them much less daunting.  "All I need to do is get done this next action item and I can take a break" keeps an unappealing project from becoming overwhelming.  I also have a handy list of actions that I can do that progress some other project towards completion if I should find myself just desperately wanting to do something else for a few minutes.

When it comes right down to it one of the productivity tricks for me has not been to stop procrastinating but rather to learn how to procrastinate right.  Now I just need to find away to turn those other executive derailers on their side...

As the vice-chair for SCIP's 2009 conference planned for April 23 - 24 in Chicago, I am happy to report that the call for proposals has finally been posted on the SCIP web site.

In the past I've had the pleasure to both present at a SCIP conference and serve on the program committee to choose the sessions that will be presented in a particular track.  If a CI professional has a topic that they would like to promote or explore, a session at the SCIP conference is a great way to do that.

We've tried to put together an innovative set of tracks and meet the needs of both new conference attendees and old hands.  The new tracks are as follows:

• CI Offense/Defense
• Professional Effectiveness
• Critical Skills
• Entrepreneurial CI
• Intelligence R&D
• Active Dialog

I'm happy to field any questions propsective presenters might have here on this blog or in e-mail.  At a high level I would recommend that you choose an interesting topic for which you can demonstrate an in-depth or unique knowledge.  I also highly recommend taking the time to put together a strong and detailed proposal.

Good luck!

Wordle is a web site that creates very pretty word clouds from blocks of text or web site URLs.  I could see this being a very, very fun way to waste a lot of time and produce some very attractive zeitgeist.



A Wordle cloud of this blog



A Wordle cloud of my del.icio.us feed.

So last Friday, July 11th, I left the house at about 5:30 AM and joined the line about 30-people strong at the AT&T store in Ashburn, Virginia to wait in line for the chance to get my hot little hands on the new 3G iPhone.  If absolutely nothing else I was excited to finally get rid of my Treo 650, a device that never lived up to its promise.  I was too much of a telecom snob to buy the first generation iPhone despite my Apple fanboy status-- the lack of 3G was just too limiting.  Having lived with the iPhone for nearly a week now, I can definitely say that it was worth the wait.

Being a true ENTJ on the Myers Briggs framework, one of the things that I was most looking forward to was integrating the organizational, GTD brilliance of OmniFocus on my Macintosh into a handheld device.  This has been a great improvement over the "To Do" list on the Treo because I can look at action items based on projects, context (i.e. where I am or resources at my disposal) and what is due soon or even (shudder!) overdue.  OmniFocus also brings a To Do application to the iPhone, something the first generation phone was sorely missing.  So sorry for the Windows users out there that I don't think there's an OmniFocus for Windows, but a person could probably use OmniFocus exlcusively on the iPhone.  Next up in the life hacking effort is to use Jott and Evernote.

The transition from my .Mac account to MobileMe was not without its delays and hiccups.  The synchronization of bookmarks, contacts and calendar events has gone pretty well once I got the service up and running over the weekend.  So far, so good on that.  I can see the potential for MobileMe, despite the awful brand name, to build on the so-so offering that was .Mac.  I'm enjoying the AJAX-y goodness of the MobileMe calendar most of all, so that I can access a pretty full-fledged calendar from within Firefox at work, home and then using the Calendar application on the iPhone. 

The top item on my MobileMe wish list is synchronization with Microsoft Outlook, the clunky productivity suite we use in my office (and pretty much any corporate environment).  Microsoft hasn't taken a real look at Outlook in at least a decade, and that bad boy is really showing its age.  I'll stop there for now because I could wrote a whole blog rant abotu everything that's wrong with Outlook.

In summary: iPhone good.  Fire bad.

Have I ever mentioned what a useful tool I think RSS can be? I think I might have mentioned that a time or two. RSS makes it possible to broaden our information networks and manage a tremendous flow of information. When I talk about RSS to competitive intelligence audiences I call it "drinking from the firehose."

As I've been working to rebuild this blog I've begun exploring ways that I can improve my own use of RSS to share information, and indirectly exploring the potential of RSS to allow teams to collaborate. I'm trying to figure out how to best incorporate RSS feeds of the news items that I find each day into this blog, and I'm impatient for my Movable Type and CSS knowledge to improve. I don't get the chance to sit down and write blog entries as often as I would like, but I am constantly sharing items in Google Reader (my RSS aggregator of choice after years using the NetNewsWire client on my Mac-- a program I still think is terrific, actually). I'd like to figure this out so that short of writing a full blog entry I would like to be able to say "Hey, take a look at this!" several times a day.

So let me take a stab at this: here is an embedded feed of my latest shared items from Google Reader. Let's see if this works with the page layout (one of the challenges that I'm having.

I have been very frustrated, nay, annoyed, about the intermittent performance of Twitter.  The web 2.0 flavor of the month (several months ago) actually has a lot of potential.  The technical infrastructure has been unable to scale to the demand placed upon it by the Twitter user community.  I have alternatively heard the technical shortcomings attributed to an inability to deploy servers quickly enough, database issues and front-end software choices.

Twiter reminds me very much of Facebook.  It's a web site that, once you see the value potential of the site, you begin to see great potential.  Once the hockey stick of rapid adoption hits the site, though, the infrastructure is completely unable to keep pace.  Because web 2.0 platforms like social networks (Friendster) and micro-blogging sites (Twitter) rely on both the number of users and number of social transactions they can enable.  As the number of these transactions is capped, users begin to look elsewhere.  For Friendster adoption brought extremely slow performance and database errors.  For Twitter some convenient methods for sending and receiving messages (particularly IM) become unavailable on a regular basis and for extended periods of time.  The first-to-market innovators show others how to duplicate the promised user value and highlight some of the tecnical pitfalls to avoid.  Friendster users went to MySpace and Facebook.  If Twitter cannot get their act together where will the Twitter users go?  Jaiku?  FriendFeed?