Getting Things Done: Scotch Box Hipster PDA

I tried a few different setups for GTD. For a while I used a binder, then I used Moleskin, but nothing has worked better than my Scotch Box Hipster PDA.

I decided to use a scotch box as my covers because I had it handy, the box was the right size and it looks cool.

Essentially it a collection of 3×5 index cards with a hole, a loose leaf ring, Avery writing tabs and 3 cardboard covers.

Benefits:

• Fits easily in my pocket.
• It is cheap.
• You can have the context you are in on top laying flat. For example if you are in a grocery store, you can have the grocery page as the top page.
• Easy to expand and take out cards when they are done (unlike a moleskin).

 

The only difficulty is punching the cards. Luckily at my work they have an industrial hole maker so I can put a hole in 100 index cards at a time, but a hand punch will work just as well.

 

 

 

I used another carboard to separate out my extra cards.

Hope you find this useful.

Check 43folders.com for more GTD setup information.

How to Spot Disruptive Innovation Opportunities

Harvard Business Review IdeaCast
has an interesting video regarding innovation, specifically disruptive innovation. They define disruptive innovations as products or services that enable more consumers in that market to afford and/or have the skill to use the product or service.

It was an interview with Scott Anthony, President, Innosight. An example he gave was the Nintendo Wii and how it made console gaming accessible to traditionally non-gamers.

Link to video

They have some tips for looking for disruptive innovations:

1. Look for markets where some constraint that inhibit consumption, such as:

• Don’t have skills
• Don’t have money
• Can’t access the solution
• Sometimes it takes too long.

1. Identify where people have important unsatisfied jobs to be done. Where there is a problem that the customer cannot adequately solve. Find that customer and ease their suffering.
2. Don’t focus on making an existing product better, but doing it simpler or cheaper, more accessible more affordable.
3. The customer can rarely articulate the things that they need. You have to trust your intuition and judgment to put things in the market place and see how things play out. You cannot rely on data because data deals with the past. You need to trust yourself and create your own data.
4. Focus is not on customers that are demanding but customers who are undemanding or not consuming anything at all.

Optimizing your Google Search Rankings

The Polymorphic Podcast had an interesting show on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to get better rankings on Google. Michael Neel takes us through some good tips to optimize your site.

A few things stand out from the interview:

1. Meta tags are almost useless.
2. Don’t try to fool Google with CSS chicanery. Using white text on a white background to inject search terms on a page may get your site black listed.
3. To optimize your results, focus on four areas.
   1. URL – try to get appropriate wording in the URL.
   2. Title – make sure the title tag contains text which is appropriate and specific as possible.
   3. H1 – make sure you have only one and it clearly is targeted to the result you want.
   4. Content – of course the content should be relevant to the search ranking terms.
4. Use Google’s webmaster www.google.ca/webmasters/ tools to find errors and optimize your results.
5. Make sure that don’t have different URLs that point to the same page. Google may think you’re gaming the system.
6. Creating a Site Map Xml (see www.sitemaps.org ) to tell search engines where all the pages are and what priority they have. The meta data on the XML file is useful to the search engine and will increase your trust with the search engines.

Amazon EC2 Service is now ASP.Net friendly.

Big news announced this week: Amazon will be offering Windows Server 2008 as an option in their EC2 service. This enables you to use ASP.NET, IIS7 and SQL Server in the cloud.

Currently I am using SoftSys Web Hosting with relatively good results, but I will check out what Amazon has to offer if Darwiki.com takes off.

How to take on Google

Google is colossus. Many of their services such as search and maps have a ubiquitous quality that makes it hard for entrepreneur to complete against. However it is possible for innovative companies to release products that compete directly with Google by being inventive.

Check out http://sh.edushi.com/ with their 16-bit take on maps. If this had an English version, I might switch from using Google Maps. Inspired.

 

Stagnation

 

Paul Boag has an interesting article on site stagnation and the life cycle of sites.

Sites he surmises that sites enter a state of stagnation after an initial period of high growth, when all of the obvious sites’ quick fixes and features are done. After sites obvious problems have been implemented, things get stagnate.

The interesting thing about the article is describing how most sites deal with stagnation. Typically they handle it by making the site more complex. They listen to any criticism or feature request and immediate move to implement them.

Instead, he argues, you should move to simply your site by removing features not being utilized and making the user interface less complex.

You can read the article here.

http://boagworld.com/business_strategy/overcoming_stagnation/

Reducing Site Bounce Rate

Every web entrepreneur should actively think about the bounce rate on their site and how to reduce it. The bounce rate essentially represents the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

I heard somewhere that if a user can’t figure out what the site is in 15 seconds they will hit the back button. A lot of sites don’t make it easy for a user to answer the question “What is this site good for?”.

On my site I am hoping that front page will reduce the bounce rate by effectively telling new users what Darwiki is, in simple text and a short video.

 

Below is the video. Not sure if it interesting and cute or unprofessional and boring. I copied the video style for Twitter.com but theirs is definitely more polished.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

David Allen Video on YouTube

Found a good video on GTD.

The Importance of Urgency

Harvard Business IdeaCast had a great video on the urgency and how it vital to making change. The video features John Kotter, Professor Emeritus, Harvard Business School talking about his book, A Sense of Urgency.

While the video and probably the book focuses on companies, it got me think about the Getting Things Done and personal change. Like John says “Urgency is a combination of thoughts, feeling and actual behaviors. The thoughts are that there are great opportunities and great hazards. The feeling is a gut level determination that we are going to do something now and we are going to win. The behavior is a hyper-alertness to what is going on. It is a sense of coming to work each and every day with a commitment to making something happen on the important issues. It’s a sense you give off to other people that we got to get going on this..”

He convinced me that for successful change you need a sense of urgency or else everything gets bogged down.