ToDoOrElse.com

A small, tiny favor to ask: vote for me.

You may have heard about the upcoming Business of Software Conference (10/29-30, San Jose, CA), and my first (extremely, horribly bad) video effort to win through your votes a speaking slot there.

It was so bad it would have been banned by the Geneva Conventions (assuming we still follow them). So bad, I asked Neil Davidson if I could replace it with a new effort. Neil was kind enough to let me take the old video behind the digital woodshed and send it to a better, happier place and put up my new video, which I did yesterday.

The new video combines cutting edge images - supplied by other people - with little tiny words that work on television with a new plan of what I can talk about during my 18 minutes of fame: how to write a blogging plan for your software company or product.

In the process of retiring my first video effort, my score (fairly) got reset to zero, zip, zilch. And because it took me a month to get up the guts to point a camera at myself again, there's only a few short days before voting closes.

So here's the small favor I'd like to ask you:

Go to http://www.businessofsoftware.org/softwareidol.aspx, find my video, click the rightmost star under it and vote for me. You might even want to spend two minutes watching it - others braver than me say it's actually quite good.

After the conference I'll post my presentation here as a series of major posts with more detail and the presentation itself if I can at YouTube.

I hate to ask for favors, but I'd really appreciate it if you could take a minute and vote for me now.

Clear Blogging is now out!

Just a quick note that my second book, Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them, is now out. If you’re wondering what this whole blogging thing is, or how to do a blog for your micro-ISV successfully, or how to connect to and tap into the power of the Blogosphere, I think this book is for you.

You’ll find more info on Clear Blogging at my blog, http://clearblogging.com.

Tags: ClearBlogging

Questions for Alvin Toffler?

I'm going to be interviewing Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, The Third Wave, Revolutionary Wealth and other futurist books next week for the book I'm working on. If the name doesn't ring a bell, Toffler is a futurist who 30 years ago saw the world we now live in, and the world we're going to be living in.

Anyone online is living in the world Toffler foresaw a quarter-century ago and wrote about in Future Shock and The Third Wave; the whole world is living in now what he foresaw in War and Anti-War.

If you've got any questions you'd like me to ask him, comment them here. No guarantees, but this is as close to having a genuine crystal ball on the future as you or I are likely to get.

Some of Toffler's books:

Dealing with Microsoft Attention Pickpockets, part 1

Poking round my 80/20 charged RSS FeedDemon reader this morning, I read a solution to an attention pickpocket that has been with me so long, I’d stopped realizing I was being robbed each and every day. What’s more, this particular thief has been at it for a decade, stealing a bit of attention here, a little more there, from me and every Microsoft Windows user on the entire planet.

I’m talking about being forced – hell, encouraged – to have a messy, distracting desktop when we all know that a messy physical desk steals attention, diminishes productivity and generally makes it harder to get things done. But, because some nameless UI designer 20 years ago decided it was just fine to have a cluttered desktop we’ve all been stuck with this productivity drag.

I’ve watch people who run Fortune 1000 companies, stern-faced executives who would fire on the spot any employee who worked in a pigpen of a cubicle, hunt and poke through an entire screen of attention-draining clutter every time they wanted to do something – anything – on their pc.

I – like you – accepted this state of affairs as some sort of physical law - that there had to be icons on my pc’s desktop, each a tiny little attention leech, pulling me off purpose every minute of every workday. And I – like you –deleted the crap my laptop’s manufacturer put on the desktop, and dug around to get rid of the Internet Explorer icon. But as much as I wanted a clean desktop to go along with my clean desk, I could never get rid of that damned Recycle Bin, and so it was joined by this current file and that current file until my desktop was buried with icons.

Every so often I – like you – revolt and dump everything off the desktop into a folder. Ah! A breath of fresh air. But then the insidious process would start all over again, lead by that damn Recycle Bin icon. Over and over and over, from one pc to the next.

No more.

Thanks to that post at AJ’s blog (Desktop Zen – Reducing Visual Clutter on your Desktop), I was able to completely clear my desktop. No more Microsoft-sponsored attention pickpockets on my desktop, no more attention surcharge on every thing that matters to me, no more kowtowing to some idiot artiste UI designer idea of productivity.

My desktop is as clear as the view from a beautiful tropical isle; my productivity and focus have soared; Lord, I can see again, praise be!

Here’s How:

1. Create two folders in My Documents - __Downloads and __Working and move your files off your desktop and into these folders. The underscores sort these folders to the top and underscore that these folders are working areas not storage. As you work, save to __Working and download to __Downloads and process these files to where they should go by day’s end.
2. Move application shortcuts off your desktop – they don’t belong there. Think about that. How many doorknobs do you need to use a door effectively? One. How many shortcuts do you need to access an application? One – if it’s in the right place. You can put shortcuts on three different parts of your start menu, or on the Quick Launch toolbar. See AJ’s post for details if you need them.
   
3. Now the secret sauce:
   create a Desktop toolbar. Briefly, right click the taskbar and select Toolbars>>Desktop. Shrink the Desktop toolbar down and click the chevron “>>” to see the Recycle Bin, My Documents, and several other useful system icons. Want more visibility for your Desktop toolbar until you get used to it? Drag it to the top of your desktop.
   
4. Right Click your desktop, go to “Arrange Icons By” and de-select “Show Desktop Items”. That’s it: your desktop is clear.

Life is beautiful again.

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Your 80/20 Productivity Matrix

If you're like me, you have way too many things to do and not enough time to do them. How do you choose what  gets your attention and what doesn't? Getting Things Done is great for corralling all your tasks, but then what? That's where the 80/20 Principle can really help you decide which tasks and projects should go forward.

If you haven't heard of the 80/20 Principle, it’s a simple idea: about 80 percent of the value comes from about 20 percent of the inputs.  For example, 80% of a company's profits comes from 20% of its products; 80% of productivity comes from 20% of your activities. And 20% of your tasks and projects are going to yield 80% of the value while the other 80% of the stuff on your plate makes cauliflower look good.

Here's a simple, low-tech way to apply the 80/20 Principle: make a Productivity Matrix:

Ignore for the moment my non-existent freehand illustration skills. Along one axis, there's Value from low to high. What's "Value"? Money works (well!). So does personal satisfaction, alignment to your higher values, what your boss wants from you; whatever floats your boat. Along the other axis there's Effort, again from low to high. Effort is trying to write something others will want to read when it's 4am, working till midnight or beyond, e.g., work.

Now, make a list of your current top tasks or projects, say 1 to 10, and then write them into your Matrix. Interesting things tend to happen – most times there will be 2-4 items in that good High Value/Low Effort quadrant and the rest elsewhere. That's the 80/20 Principle at work again. Focus on getting those Few tasks done first so you can collect most of the value, then worry about the rest. Better still, get those done then repeat the process with the next 10 tasks or projects on your plate.

If you want more info on 80/20, check out Richard Koch's site, http://www.the8020principle.com/ or his new book, Living the 80/20 Way. He's the guy that has been really working this for years. You'll also find two other applications of 80/20 I'm posting today at http://codesnipers.com and http://mymicroisv.com .

Technorati Tags: Productivity, 80/20
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What's your CI?

Stowe Boyd over at /Message has coined a new metric that I think micro-ISVs would benefit by adopting: the Conversational Index. Start with your micro-ISV's blog (you do have a blog, right?). Tally up you posts, divide by the sum of comments plus trackbacks (posts/comments+trackbacks): That's your CI.

A CI of < 1.0 tells you your prospective customers are not just passively listening to you, but care enough about what you say to say something back. A CI of say >4.0 means you need a major change in direction because no one is interested in what you say enough to comment or post about it.

Now, Don Dodge calculates CI a little differently, but the point is the same: your blog to be effective needs to be a conversation, not a monologue. And, this metric needs to take into account RSS, but I expect as more data becomes available, how CI is defined will be tweaked to take RSS into account.

My CI? 1.62. Good, but definitely has room for improvement. So what should I be writing more of, or less about? And while you're at it, what's your CI?

Technorati Tags: micro-ISV, CI, blogging

Writing for the Web well

Whether you're a micro-ISV or just trying to get the last blog post out for the day (ahem), here's a short and sweet article with good tips on how to write well for the web:

How to Write Successfully for the Web

It is part of the wikiHow project that Google promotes as one of the contents you can add to your personalize Home page. Well worth the read.

Technorati Tags: GTD, micro-ISV, blogging, Clear Blogging

Tag, you're it!

You may have noticed that I've started adding Technorati tags to nearly every posting. I recently interviewed David Sifry, founder & CEO of Technorati for my next Apress book, Clear Blogging, and David was kind enough to explain to me just how valuable these tags are for boosting readership.

If you are a micro-ISV blogger, I strongly recommend tagging your posts in addition to whatever categories you are already doing.

Here's a little web tool at ICE - Improving Customer Experience that will generate html to create one or more Technorati, Flickr, Del.icio.us or Furl tags for you. Very nice!

Technorati Tags: micro-ISV, technorati, Sifry

Finding good stock images for your web site or blog.

Garr Reynold's Presentation Zen has up a good list of low or no cost stock images for use at your micro-ISV's web site or blog; my free favorite source is Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons Pool (869,989  images and counting).

There are several different levels of CC licensing. The right one for this kind of usage is the Attribution License. It lets you use specific images posted at Flickr in any way shape or form you want so long as you provide attribution (a link) as to where you got it.

Although I haven't used it myself, Garr recommends iStockPhoto.com, for low cost royalty free images, and I plan to tap this source extensively in an upcoming makeover of my micro-ISV's site. I especially like the use of AJAX to let you both see a page of images but be able to get a closer look at any one image instantly.

(Technorati tags: Micro-ISV)

Stop wearing the "illiterate moron" sign online.

This morning, I got up, sat down at my PC and promptly put on my "illiterate moron" sign by getting a wee bit sloppy with my choice of words in the previous post.

Now, I'm a writer: sometimes I write code, sometimes I write words (all the time I write bills): I can usually navigate this messy grammar, punctuation, spelling (GPS?) stuff well enough to satisfy everyone but Kim, the copyeditor.

But today, I hung the stupid sign on my back and "Nix" promptly gave me a swift kick for using "you're" when I meant "your".

So what, you say? You are known by the words you use, especially online, and it pays to have a Getting Things Done process in place so you don't borrow my sign.

Here's my new Checklist for every post:

• Write it.
• Copy the text to Word and let it spell/grammar check it.
• Correct the copy back in TypePad.
• Read the post again.
• Especially check for my two usage pains: its/it's and you're/your.

Yes, TypePad has a spellchecker, I think they must have bought it from WordStar or MultiMate or some defunct word processing company that died last century: it is worthless. So, for now, that's the plan.

What's yours?

(Technorati tags: Micro-ISV, GTD)