On my personal blog I wrote of my hopes for 2008; here I’ll explain how they relate to “lifestyle design,” a concept made popular in The 4-Hour Workweek. I mention them to you as I hope you can look to 2008 as a chance to not only accomplish things but really make life easier and more fun.
To buy fewer books (and better figure out what I should be reading for fun and work)
A trip abroad
To entertain every other month
For my work and dreams:
5000 users of AwayFind by 2009 (still in private beta)
To be invited to speak at a national, non-local conference
To have someone else handle the majority of sales and proposals for SET projects
To blog (or have someone else working with me to blog) three times per week (mostly on technotheory.com)
Sense of completion: The first ambition is my most important one–every day I need to feel that I’ve accomplished things. There are times when responding to emails, managing others tasks, and making phone calls gets in the way of thought-intensive, tangible accomplishments. If I don’t have something concrete I’ve finished, then I’ll typically keep working and working and never feel good about it. Shutting out the outside world to get more accomplished sooner should help me with that immensely…and I’ll be a much happier person because of it. Here’s some advice for how to pull this off…
I’m really glad that the tech-savvy internet community did some self-policing this past month when it harped on the Facebook Beacon privacy issue. But I must sadly agree that most Facebook users have no idea about the severity of this. It bothers me to no end that they would take advantage of their users. A conversation this morning reminded me of what their more typical user is like, and how Facebook is abusing them:
Me:
Not sure if you’re aware of your privacy settings. You have Beacon enabled…
Today was spotted with conversations from friends who want to save the world but just don’t know how. They’ve followed the path–good schools, grades, and jobs–but haven’t felt they could make a difference. My advice for them: new media.
I’m not going to lie–I’d long stereotyped marketing, communications, and public relations as necessary evils, at best. They’re rarely attention-grabbing, not usually great writing, and brand awareness is about as far as most of them get. But my opinion has somewhat changed in the last few years, especially since I heard Seth Godin speak (and enjoyed Purple Cow). Godin’s creative approach to marketing made it fun for me…and the internet is what made it much more accessible and effective.
I’d always seen the internet as a place to find your voice and to be heard. I’d always seen web design and web development as the tools to get online and make an impact. However, understanding and applying the connectivity of the internet–its inherent community–is what can really make a change. If someone wants to make a difference, they ought to learn how to use the web to spread their message. Continue reading…
I keep updating my tools, profiles, and sites. Why do it–is it worth it? Is it helping my life or my business? What’s next?
Today I’ve decided to begin moving all my photos to Flickr (well, it’ll be some time). We’re launching a web application in the next few months. SET’s website redesign (with almost all new content) will be completed by year end.
In January of 2006 I moved to WordPress (from Blogger, and before that just HTML) for dancingwithwords.com, redid the layout, and launched technotheory.com (also WordPress). I also sorted through about five thousand photos from My Image Gallery and kept about a thousand, which were then migrated to Coppermine.
I can spare you from the discussion of how I made it to My Image Gallery from Dreamweaver’s photo pages and of my failed conversion to Greymatter and/or B2′s blogging software. And of course the moves from Friendster to Facebook, the trials and tribulations of MySpace, and the simultaneous development of relationships on LinkedIn.
This stuff takes a lot of time. Why do I do it?
My online participation is primarily for three reasons: self-expression, maintenance of relationships, and business. When I put up a website in ’95 and a blog in ’00, it was for self-expression (and having a technology project seemed like the thing to do). Over time it became a way of keeping in touch. In just the last year I’ve started to see business come out of it.
Thank you to Kendra Marr and Zachary Goldfarb for taking the time to talk to so many of us and offer a small glimpse into a community that’s thriving and energetic.
My only hope was that they might make it easier for people to latch onto some of the groups and join in–so here’s a quick mention of a places to look if you happen to be coming here from the Post:
The group that gets and deserves credit for having the biggest events and starting the longest ago (well, at least so far as the new groups)–Refresh DC
My guess is that there’ll be some more technology press soon, given the New New Internet Conference on Thursday in Reston. But either way, hat’s off to so many fantastic organizers for really bringing vibrancy and stability to a community that was just dying to get started.
DC Startup Weekend is almost over, but our launch is just underway. Over seventy passionate and talented people have come to one place to build a web application and a business over the course of fifty-four hours. That web application, which we had never even discussed or planned to work on prior, became HolaNeighbor.
We voted on an idea. We composed a business plan, architected a user experience, designed a beautiful website, developed a very-involved web application…and put it all together. Many of us didn’t know anyone, but after a little bit of a rocky start, the chemistry, cohesion, and excitement of our product launch paralleled that of any other. Maybe we rushed a little, but that was par for the course.
I’ve always felt the best way to meet people is in a setting where you can really offer your best, so they can learn what you bring to the table while contributing to something meaningful. Startup Weekend accomplished that, and accelerated the process of building some great relationships.If you’re curious about HolaNeighbor, Continue reading…
Argument 1,297 why you need to let go of control and delegate, outsource, and do the things you should…
Don’t dream about how you yourself are going to change the world–that’s naive and way too difficult. You may very well leave your mark, but if you want it to be a large or lasting one it’s going to have to involve others. And the first step to involving others is the hardest one–recognizing that you are not special.
Thomas Friedmann captured the essence of this in The World is Flat when he quipped that “in China, when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.” While you may not feel it reading the headlines in the Post, there are a lot of brilliant folks who know how to get things done just as well you. Accept that.
Some times there’s just the right confluence of factors for a perfect week. That was last week for me–at the twentieth annual Consultants’ Camp in Mt. Crested Butte, Colorado. This was my first year in attendance and it will most certainly not be the last.
Rarely are design problems just about design–and it’s a challenge getting clients to understand that. At the 2007 User Experience Week after party, Doug LeMoine and I had a long discussion about how clients don’t see the functional/engineering/technical components involved in making something “attractive.” While my company is solving design problems on a much smaller scale than his (Doug’s the Director of Design Communication at Cooper), it’s clear to me that this is a systemic misunderstanding throughout the business community.
For just over a year I’ve been lucky enough to have an incredible graphic designer working with me, and that’s led our company to be solicited as much for design as for development and training. Quite frequently we’re asked to “give a facelift” to some Excel report, PowerPoint template, or Word proposal. But while aesthetics may be what they’d like at the end of the day, there are a number of steps to getting there. Giving the client what they want in a design requires helping them to understand what they really need.
Let’s take an Excel project we’ve recently completed. The client sought to illustrate to their prospects the advantages and disadvantages of various employee benefits packages. Their existing report creation process was as follows:
Take data from a number of places and paste it into various cells and formulas throughout an existing Excel workbook
Edit a few formulas to address some of the variations in this new set of data
Edit the source range of the Excel charts and graphs to the newly pasted data so as to fit it within an appropriate range
Reposition the graphs as Excel often moved them around in the process of updating
Print or email the reports to clients
The existing process required deep knowledge of what the input data meant, of how Excel formulas worked, of how the final design should look, and of how a mistake in the reports might appear (manual processes like these rarely work on the first try). In short, it required a lot of expertise and a few hours worth of time.
Could we improve the attractiveness of their reports? Sure. Would that design hold up as their data shifted? Not so fast… Continue reading…
Since I’ve actually been on top of things lately when it comes to work, I’ve thought a lot about what’s the best use of my time. I have no trouble finding “things to do,” but when I don’t have a critical deadline looming there are many options…and paying bills or processing digital camera pictures isn’t the answer. Heck, I’ve already cleared my inbox. So what next?
My list is likely to be very different than yours, as it comes from the perspective of the technology company businessowner. Still, as I put out later in this article, you ought to know at least what your #1 is. Here’s my list:
Get billable work for employees to do
Make a tangible step toward your product ideas
Do something billable
Build reputation or strategize to help with 1,2, or 3
If you’re not doing 1-4, find someone or a technology to perform this task in the future
The point of this list is that my business needs to make money, but I shouldn’t be one of the primary revenue-producers. Rainmaker? For now. Worker-bee? No, thank you Continue reading…
Is there any doubt that email is a serious timesuck? I've built a small web tool that helps you to get the heck away from email—so that you can do real work on the job, or vacation in peace. If you like what I write about here, I think you'll enjoy AwayFind.
about technotheory
I am Jared Goralnick, Founder and CEO of AwayFind, a web startup that helps people to stop checking their email.
Productivity, the future of email, and building ecosystems are my passions. I organize Inbox Love & Ignite DC, and mentor at 500 Startups & Founder Institute. I'm open to speaking opportunities.
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by Jared Goralnick
