Still, it’s worth pausing to look into what BlackBerry brought to mobile email, and to point out how iPhone and Android users can replicate some of RIM’s best features.

The Core Difference Between BlackBerry and iPhone/Android: Email

In full disclosure, I began writing this post after a bunch of former BlackBerry users moved to AwayFind.  I started digging deeper into what AwayFind had to do with BlackBerry, and it all made sense: BlackBerry is a server-to-server enterprise email tool with a mobile device serving as the frontend.  Android and iPhone are mobile computers with email clients as one of their applications.

What these different architectures mean for smartphone users:

• The BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) sits behind a corporation’s firewall and talks directly to a mail server, in realtime.  It stores all the mobile device’s settings, and thus only communicates with the BlackBerry when there’s something it needs.  The BES is designed to make email on the BlackBerry as fast and efficient as possible, and utilizing the phone (and its battery) only when necessary.
• Android and iOS devices check the email on their corporation’s mail server directly, over the internet.  This happens in one of two ways, either the phone asks every few minutes, “is there any new mail?” or the phone does its best to maintain a connection with the mail server(s) directly, waiting for a change in the inbox.  In either case, it takes up battery life, and is neither as quick nor as reliable.  Without a server in the middle, the phone does the hard work.

The reason for this is simple: BlackBerry is an enterprise email device; Android and iPhone are consumer devices with software that checks email.  If you’ve ever traveled with a laptop, you know that email software sometimes works great and sometimes works unreliably—email isn’t at the center of the universe on laptops.  And the same is true on Android and iPhone.

Without a server-to-server mail environment, iPhones or Androids will never perform the same as BlackBerry devices, but the gap in capabilities is narrowing.  There are now both native and third-party ways to bring the worlds together.

In case you’re curious: the parallel to AwayFind is that the AwayFind server talks directly to the mail server and only notifies an iPhone or Android device when necessary, similar to BES.  Since AwayFind uses the push notification service provided by Apple/Google, it’s usually faster than SMS.

Features that BlackBerry Users Miss on iPhone and Android devices.  And how to replicate them…

AutoText / Word Substitution

BlackBerry has a robust shortcut-> common phrase tool, that even lets you insert variables like the current date/time.  For instance “lmk” can automatically turn into “let me know.”

With iOS5, this is now relatively easy…but Android still hasn’t quite caught up.

On iOS, go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Shortcuts.  Type the full phrase in the “Phrase” and the abbreviation in the “Shortcut.”  You can see some of my examples to the right…

On Android, you most likely won’t find Auto Text with the keyboard that comes pre-installed.  Even Swype (the most popular third-party keyboard) does not include it.  Auto Text Keyboard is one the most popular apps for this.  Just be aware that when installing a tool like this, you are changing the entire keyboard on your phone, and not just adding Auto Text.

Once you have Auto Text available, I’d recommend taking a couple minutes to insert common phrases.  As you can see in the image above, I have shortcuts for my email address and common phrases.  For instance, “afloc” transforms into “I’m at 169 11th St, SF — http://bit.ly/sfawayfind” (which is my office address).

Blinking Indicator for New Emails

BlackBerry is perhaps best remembered for its multi-colored blinking LED, which let you know of various states for the phone.  By default, red means “new message,” green means “low battery,” and blue means “bluetooth.”  People were particularly keen on the red display (more on this in the next section, in the video especially).

On Android, there are many applications that allow you to customize the color and behavior of the LED, however not all work on all phones.  One popular application is called Blink (pictured to the right), which can display a particular color indicator for an SMS or phone call.  While this won’t let you know about new emails, you could use a program (like AwayFind ;-) that converts an email into an SMS to accomplish this.

On iPhone, you can navigate to Settings > General > Accessibility > LED Flash for Alerts and turn it On.  If you place your phone face-down on your desk, you’ll see the LED flash light up once for any notification.  There isn’t a way to set a persistent blink (without jailbreaking it and using a program like FlashEnhancer).

Notification of Only Certain New Emails

On BlackBerry, one can even further customize their LED to only blink for emails from certain specific people.  This is one of the most popular BlackBerry features, since it can be distracting to see a blinking light every time an email arrives.  A quick story about why BlackBerry users love this this:

If you use Gmail and Android, you have the ability to send specific senders to specific labels.  Then on the Android Gmail app, you can set specific labels to trigger a notification.  (On the Android Gmail app, Go to Settings, click on your email account, and then click setup both Email Notifications and Labels to notify.

At present, iOS does not offer this.  However, on iOS6, they’re introducing an Email VIP feature where you can star specific people.  Then, when those people email you, a notification will appear with the context of the message.

Even with these features, this need is one of the main reasons people come to AwayFind.  AwayFind offers this for both iPhone and Android, integrates with Exchange, Outlook, Gmail, and Google Apps, and can be deployed throughout a company (even for non-smartphone users through SMS).  It’s also much faster than the push functionality built into the iPhone and Android OS because AwayFind talks directly to the mail server.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Compose

On the BlackBerry, it’s always quick to create a new email. From the Home screen, you need simply press C (since there’s a physical keyboard!) to create a new email or SMS. There are all kinds of shortcuts for similar things.

While this might be possible with iOS’s new AssistiveTouch, it’s definitely not designed for this, and I wouldn’t recommend trying. Fortunately, tapping the Home button, clicking Email, and pressing Compose shouldn’t take more than 2 seconds. The Compose button is available from every email display view (except when you’re already composing an email).

On Android, it can take a little longer to navigate to Compose (about twice as many clicks in some cases), but you can use a gesture to navigate straight to the Gmail application. My Gesture Shortcut Launcher is one application to try, which will at least cut a few steps.

BlackBerry vs iPhone and Android for Email

If you spend all day replying to emails on-the-go, BlackBerry will be faster.  But not because of the above features—it just comes down to the keyboard.  Swype for Android may help, and the iOS keyboard is pretty good, too…but nothing beats a physical keyboard.

On the other hand, if you spend more time reading and processing email, then the bigger screens and easier navigation will make the email experience more pleasant, and perhaps as productive.

And, it goes without saying that iPhone and Android have a much larger array of both productivity applications and games.  From multimedia to news to task management, and even just keeping the device in sync (with things other than Enterprise mail), BlackBerry still needs to catch up.

How Have You Found the Switch?

While many individuals made the switch a long time ago, a lot of enterprises are going through the jump just now.  If you’re running into difficulties getting your users moved over, I’d be curious what challenges you’re experiencing?  Maybe there’s something I can help answer in the comments or in a future article…  Feel free to respond below or email me at jared A technotheory.com.

Here’s a review of 2010—but feel free to skip to “slogging to speediness”—those changes are what got me through 2010 and may help you, too.

Sink or Swim…treading water on the critical path

I began the year with the goal of simply making it through the year—as my theme was to swim.  In 2009 I had set a lot of things in motion, and I suspected that 2010 would determine whether those things would prove fruitful or not—whether I’d sink or swim.

The first half of the year was swimming—treading water, actually.  I waited a long time for the big things to come through.  Claire, Yvonne, Tim, Paul…you all heard me go on and on about how things were going from a 20% likelihood to 50% likelihood to…FINALLY.  July ended up being the magic month—when I got a big check for selling SET and raised the first big bit of money for AwayFind.  Prior to that, it was a long, and at times cruel, waiting period.

And then everything changed.  Sure, I was ready for the changes, but they couldn’t have come too soon.  I up and went to San Francisco.  Or, first I went to London and Barcelona (had some fun goofing off with my friend Maria, to the right), and then San Francisco. 

I’ve re-learned a lot this past year—the power of patience, what it means to focus on one thing and give it everything, where I have skills and where I don’t, the power of bringing people together, and that you can never give too much but you can give enough.  I hope to write more about those lessons in the coming year.

I don’t think there was another path to where I am today, and I couldn’t accelerate it.  There are also opportunities available to me now that weren’t a year ago, and I know in a year there will be more opportunities.

What that means to you—it takes forever to get to your dream, so you’d better be working toward it.  As 2011 approaches, I really hope you have an idea of your critical path, and that you’re ready to both work and wait it out.  I don’t mean to be cliché, but take it all starts with a first step.  Take it.

Some People and Places

When you look back at a day, it feels like nothing happens.  But when you look back at a week, a month, a year, there can be so much.  I know I checked some more boxes, grew a business,  danced with beautiful girls, and grew up a lot.

• People have given so much to me this year.  Nevermind our investors (thanks, guys!), people like Paul Singh (to the right), Lauren Jacob, Dave McClure, and Chris Gordon have made this year possible. Others, too—but you four above all.
• I visited Buenos Aires twice.  I have several coworkers there, and while I really enjoyed the city, I fell in love with my work again.  My team has grown into such a great group.
• Along with Paul, I put on the biggest event I’ve organized to date, Bootstrap Maryland’s second conference, which lit a fire under a lot of startups in the area
• I organized my second panel at SXSW.  And like with last year, that experience led to some great relationships.  Jay Cuthrell became an advisor at AwayFind, and Daniel Raffel became a good friend out here in San Francisco.
• From Snowmageddon to rainbows at Golden Gate Park to drives down the Coastal Highway I’ve seen so much beauty every day.  And I’ve begun to take out my camera again—I took this with my phone today after a dance at Golden Gate Park just today…

I could go on with these kinds of highlights, but I realize that that won’t help you a lot.  Sure, I had another good year, traveled, grew my business, yadayadayada…  but this blog isn’t about Jared’s adventures.  No, this blog is about how I can apply my experiences to help you and your business.  So…

What Really Happened in 2010 – slogging to speediness

What really happened in 2010 is not the exciting stuff, but a series of frameworks, processes, and routines.  So much has changed that I’m pretty much living a different life.

Take yesterday—I uploaded photos from March thru November (yes, I had gotten behind).  Though it was a ridiculous delay, the process yesterday was wonderful—it was smooth and fast.  Over several weekends I’d been architecting a process for editing and uploading.  So yesterday it was a joy.

That’s kind of like what this year has been.  I haven’t so much been iterating on the tangible, but on the intangible.  My biggest personal accomplishment for 2010 was probably the routine I built and managed to stick with. 

In other words, the real accomplishment for this year was all the processes that made it into my life and my company’s day-to-day.  It means that things have gotten a LOT easier, and will continue to.  It’s been a slog to make these changes, but the light at the end of the tunnel is bright and beautiful.

In the event that it might help you, here are some changes I’ve made to my day-to-day…

• I’ve eaten well nearly every day
• I’ve adjusted my diet so that I consume more protein and fiber, and very few carbs for breakfast and lunch, which has led to so much more predictable energy for me
• I’ve run at least 4 miles over 95% of the days that I’ve woken up in San Francisco
• I’ve woken up before 7am (and made it to work before 8:30) just about every weekday here in San Francisco
• I’ve found an environment that really contributes to my daily productivity and happiness—working at Parisoma has been a huge boost to my quality of lifeeverything.
• I achieve Inbox Zero every day, in no small part due to the tools below

These tools have changed my life:

• Thanks to Flickfolio for Android and Lightroom 3 for my computer, I can sync my Facebook, Flickr, and mobile photos without doing anything twice, thrice, or even storing things in separate places.  This has literally made me want to reinvest in photography as it made a huge burden into a great experience.
• I’ve switched my calendar over to Tungle, which has made scheduling so much easier.
• I switched from Exchange to Google Apps early this year, which meant that my mobile integration, particularly with Android, was way better.  And that meant fewer mistakes and less time spent looking things up.
• I switched to Google Tasks and installed some great sync apps for it on my Android and iPhone.  I feel so much more clarity in every day now.
• I switched to a secure password manager that syncs across my machines and phones, and now I feel much safer.
• Thanks to Pulse, I now read my RSS again.
• Thanks to Tweetdeck and lists, I once again enjoy Twitter.
• Upgrading to fancy noise cancelling headphones, and then to the best ones out there has helped my concentration a great deal.
• I managed a week at my new office without a big monitor.  Talk about a way to kill your productivity, if you don’t use a monitor in addition to your laptop’s then you’re simply crazy.
• And with my team, we’ve switched from Basecamp to Trac, which integrates with Subversion.  Nevermind the details, but this change means I now know and am able to manage the priorities of the whole company pretty quickly and clearly.

You know, for a few years I ran a newsletter about the tools I use, and I’d stopped that.  But this list makes me realize that I ought to go into depth about each of these in the near future..as I do believe they could help you, too.  Feel free to comment on that below if this was useful or I can provide more tips like these.

Wrapping Up

This has been a fantastic year.  I sold a company.  Moved across the country (roommate, Lauren, who is one the four people I mentioned above, is to the right).  Ran several large events.  Raised some money.  Acquired over 1,000 businesses and 10,000 individuals as customers for AwayFind.  And worked with some really awesome people along the way.

But in writing this post, I realize that these things are in no small part due to the changes to my workflow.  That’s crazy to me, because I’ve been writing about improving your workflow for years, and yet apparently there was a ton of room for growth for me.  And I already have a really big workflow change I’m excited about for next year…

Addendum

This post came in at over 1500 words.  But it only took a couple hours.  I’m not going to edit this as much as I usually do—for instance, now that I know the highlights, I’m not going to just place them at the top.

I want to write more often in the new year.  Expect more content from me, and hopefully a willingness to just sit down and purge, without holding back.  I move too slowly sometimes but I want to just get some stuff out there—so I can help you and share more—I won’t ever waste your time, but I need to show up more, even if that means less reworking and more quick content.

I won’t be writing posts this long much, but I will be writing more often.  I hope you’re in for the ride.  And I hope you had an amazing 2010.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.  If you’ve learned a lot this year, feel free to share those tips (or a link to them) below.

Tomorrow at 6pm EST, over 300 people will phone in to Jason Drohn and I go through the top seven productivity killers—and offer solutions.  It’s free, too.

I’ve been delivering productivity training for 8 years now, but never remotely to a completely open group. So it seemed like a fun opportunity to try it out, do it for free for a lot of people, and make it really really practical.

–> You can sign up here: Productivity Killers Sign Up – not sure what the attendance cap on the line will be, but I think we’re close to that limit, just fyi.

The content of this talk will have a bit of overlap with what I delivered at WordCamp MidAtlantic (Baltimore) and TECH Cocktail Conference (Chicago), and it may go through many material on the blog.  All of the content will focus on immediately actionable steps.

Examples of some of the productivity killers Jason and I will discuss include: interruptions, social media, email, meetings, and web ADD.

If you get to the site and see a sales page, don’t worry, I wouldn’t be leading you astray.  This is going to be my content and I believe it’ll be worth a listen.  Sign up here: Productivity Killers Sign Up.

If you can’t attend the session and you sign up then you’ll get the audio recording sent to you after the call.

Go have an awesome week, and I hope to catch you at 6 tomorrow.  If you have questions you’d like me to address on the call, feel free to leave a comment below.

Flickr photo credit: ashley_dryden

There is a time to sprint, and not just because you want to work harder.  Consider this:

An Exercise in Human Resources

Assuming 9 months of work to create a product, which would be the best hiring strategy?

1. 1 developer working for 9 months
2. 3 developers working for 3 months
3. 5 developers working for (just under) 2 months
4. 9 developers working for 1 month

I’d bet most people would go with the middle options, but why?

• Their gut would tell them to dismiss the first option: 9 months seems too long to wait, maybe the market will have changed, perhaps having only one developer would put them at risk
• They’d probably dismiss the last option: 9 developers is probably really expensive, and it’d likely be difficult to catch a big mistake and alter it without spending too much on rework

The last option is a bit extreme, and for all but the most experienced of project managers with the most firm and well-thought specifications it’s likely unreasonable.   Chances are the middle two are the best options.  Both for the reasons above (which you likely considered) and also for a set of reasons that I want to stress below.

But I will also come back to this…as I’d be willing to bet most people (who aren’t answering this as a purely intellectual exercise) have actually chosen option 1 (solo entrepreneurs who build your own product, this is especially true for you).  Now let’s talk about all the reasons this is a bad decision, and in what cases the last option might even be the best one.

A Month Costs A Lot of Money

If you don’t know your monthly burn (the monthly expenses for your company) then, well, figure them out.  Depending on the size of your company, you might want to include your personal expenses in these numbers as well.  Anyhow, hold onto this number.

If you’re like most companies, you’ll find that a lot of this number comprises money that just seems to disappear every month—most of it may be salaries, but a lot of it is fixed/variable expenses you wish didn’t exist (insurance, office space, transportation, food, infrastructure, etc).  Maybe it’s just 2,000, maybe it’s 6,000, maybe it’s 12,000…but whatever it is, it’s significant.

Nevermind interest fees.  Or the fact that it’s a month of your life.

And of course there’s the the frustrating fact that you can’t put your head down and focus for too long (1 month?  2 months?  4 months?) without allowing the real world to haunt you with its responsibilities, risks, and bills.

Consider this: if you could cut three months of (non-payroll) expenses out of your project by making the project three months faster, how much more would you have available for developers?  How much sooner would your project be ready?

Solos: if you have $60,000 to work with, and gave yourself a year to build your product, consider how much faster and more relevant your product would be with other people on your team…and how much sooner you’d realize whether you were going down the right path and…

Time Flies By…and So Does Your Competition

If you’re in a competitive or quickly changing industry (like, say, web applications) then time matters.  I’ve learned of dozens of companies that have “validated” our market since I started working on AwayFind.  If I decide to slow down for a while, many of our core features would no longer be novel, let alone remarkable.

Cutting edge is no longer a quaint thought.  Every 6 months there’s a metamorphosis in which technologies are available (and which businesses are making money of them to do what you want to do).

Time Commitments Take Time

If you’re still chipping away at the same problem a year from now would you feel good about it?  If your team members also lacked that sense of completion, would they still be there?

When time goes by, there’s a chance you’re going to wander off.  There’s a VERY good chance someone in your team will move on.  So it’s in your interest to get as much done as possible while you have them.

But What About Slow Growth and Learning?

My team worked on AwayFind for a very long time, not putting many hours into it in the beginning.  These are our actual hours (Y axis) over 2 years (X axis):

This shape represents a company that wasn’t so sure how much time it wanted to put into its product, particularly when there was another (i.e., a real ;-) source of income (our consulting business).  It also shows a company that incubated a lot of information before realizing how to respond to customers and try again.

Let’s just assume that I didn’t have another business.  If I were paying 5,000 per month in fixed expenses then that would’ve been $5,000 x25 = $125,000.  If we had moved faster, I could have had access to some of that money.

I will admit that I learned a lot about building a web application and grew many relationships over this two year period.  While the purpose of AwayFind hasn’t changed (escape interruptions while still being responsive), its technology and experience are the difference between MS-DOS 2.11 and Windows 7.

But there are periods on this graph where we could’ve and should’ve moved faster.

So When Do You Sprint?

If you look closely at that graph, you’ll see the last dip before the hours went pretty-much straight up (the dip was May 09).  From that point onward we’ve mostly been chipping away in product development.   Leading up to the first launch we also could’ve beefed up our product development, much more than you see here—it would’ve saved us months and probably $15-25k.

In the last few months I’ve hired 2 full time developers, a Director of Communications, and worked with several consultants.

I couldn’t have just tossed those people in at any time, but as soon as it became clear that there were multiple months of work for a new person, I’ve added that person.

Right now we’re sprinting.  We need to improve the UX on a number of areas, we need to better connect to certain email providers, we need to finish our marketing site.

I see very clearly what needs to happen on the product side, so I just want to move as quickly as possible to get there.

Back to the Exercise from Before…and the Right Answer

The more crystal clear your specifications and needs become, the better in a position you are to divide the tasks amongst multiple people and move as quickly as possible.

Of course, this assumes that you can find the right people for the right price, and that you know how to manage them.  All those things are easier said than done.  But those are relationships and skills that every entrepreneur can benefit from.

We all have a fundamental understanding of how to “control costs.”  But we don’t always know how to “control time,” particularly in relation to how time affects costs and our position in the market.  Next time you’re ready to sprint, do it–you’ll save a lot of money, hit your market, and have a better chance for success.

Flickr Photo Credit: johnthescone

Normally $50, I’m able to offer both mine and Joe’s analysis, along with the survey results, as a free PDF to Technotheory readers.  Read on for a couple snippets and a link to download the full article.

Creating the survey was fun, though I wasn’t surprised with the direct survey results, so I wanted to see if there were any correlations in the data.  Since I know little about regression analysis and sample sets, I contacted Zoë Thorkildsen (an economist/statistician who is looking for full-time or contract work right now—contact me for info on getting in touch, she’s in DC) and we discovered some fascinating correlations like this one from page one of the article:

Users with more than 100 messages in their inbox are…

• Less satisfied with the quality of their finished projects
• More behind on their projects
• Less likely to know what tasks they need to work on at the start of a workday

There were other interesting correlations about the way people prioritize their time, when they finish projects, and how much time they spend working after hours.  You can download the full article from Cutter Benchmark Review here (my article is pages 13-19 and all of the survey results are included.  Joe’s article, which really digs into the data, is also included).

                                  Download it here! – use code PERSPROD

While I think you’ll love the article (it’s amazing how much an editor can improve one’s writing!), here’s a snippet I wanted to make sure made it to Technotheory.  It’s my explanation of The Critical Path, a topic I’ve been meaning to explore here:

–The remainder of this post is from the article.  For much more, download it!

When analyzing the research data above, I touched on the urgent-versus-important prioritization.  A technique for visualizing and clarifying the most important items is plotting out the critical path.

Urgent tasks are ones that ought to be completed in the immediate future, like a memo due this afternoon. Important tasks are ones that will have a serious impact on your position or your company, like migrating staff to a new accounting system in which your company has already invested. There are times when an important task becomes urgent. There are times when an urgent task feels important. But to get my head past these nuances, I like to think of a third category called critical tasks.

My company has a software application, and if we don’t launch its next version, then we will go out of business. Thus, my critical objective — my most important goal as the company’s leader — is that we launch and that we do it in the fall. The tasks that get me much closer to launching our application are what I consider to be critical, as they’re on the critical path to the company’s (and my) success. It’s important to identify both your critical objective (or if you have two or three, what they all are) and the tasks that will get you there. Your critical objective is likely the accomplishment you’ll write down on your résumé some day as something you’ve done. It’s the item that takes a lot of work but will be transformative for you or your company. To determine your path to your most critical objective(s) follow these steps:

1. Grab a sheet of paper and spend five minutes brainstorming every task that you need to complete. List the small things and the big things, crucial tasks, and incidental tasks. List everything.
2. Grab another sheet of paper, this time lengthwise, and write out your most critical objective on the right side in the center (see Figure 1; while for ease of reading we’ve presented an example in a more formal way, yours may certainly be handwritten). If you have two critical objectives, write them both (one at a third up from the bottom of the page and one two-thirds up).
3. Draw an arrow (or arrows) from the left side of the paper pointing to the critical objective(s).
4. Using the list of tasks you brainstormed, plot the ones that will get you close to your critical objective on the line. Treat it like a loose timeline, with the tasks that must be completed first further to the left.

What you’ll likely find is that there’s a very small percentage of your responsibilities that are essential enough to be on your critical path. Every day you’ll want to make sure you make some progress on those responsibilities. They’re not just important, they’re necessary. What you’ll notice is that on the days where you address those critical tasks you’ll feel like you’ve made progress; you’ll feel like those are the best days at work. On the days where you get things done that aren’t on that path, you may actually feel worn out because, to some degree, you didn’t get the bigger project closer to the end point.

I’d suggest keeping that piece of paper near you at your desk. If necessary, you can draw up a new one every month as your responsibilities shift. You’ve probably heard of the concept of the “critical path,” but time and again I’ve seen people’s eyes light up when they actually grab a sheet of paper and go through this exercise. Visualizing your tasks and identifying those tasks that will truly move you forward can really change your perspective.

–

Do you have any thoughts or questions about identifying your critical path?  If you’re interested, there’s much more in the Cutter Benchmark Review article (with more awesome illustrations), download it here.

Flickr photo credit: CarbonNYC

It’s because the internet has no order, but we’d like to think we do.  Guess again: using an orderly approach to storing and retrieving is similar to paying full price for airline tickets: it made sense twenty year ago but is a costly decision today.

Here’s how to file and find things in the next decade.

Bottom Up vs Top Down

Storage and retrieval ultimately fit into two methods: top down and bottom up.  A top down approach is to come up with categories, and perhaps sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories…and then to place each item in exactly one place.  For instance, my residency might be classified as United States:Maryland:Prince George’s County:College Park.  From a legal perspective that’s the only place you’d find me today.  This is how file cabinets and hard drives have been setup forever.

However, in a bottom up system, one places all items into just one bucket—that means all residents aren’t classified into countries, they just get adjectives (or tags).  They have their name and their adjectives, some of which might conflict.  For instance, I could be a resident of both DC and Maryland in a bottom up system, of both the United States and Spain.

In the physical world it would be impossible to find anything if it were all lined up next to one another, but with fast servers and intelligent algorithms, you can search for “Jared Goralnick” without having to narrow your search to any geographic criteria.  This is helpful, because I identify first with DC, second with Baltimore, and not really at all with College Park.  So if you met me you might have trouble looking me up in and old-fashioned (top-down) phonebook—you might never look in the College Park edition.

There are numerous reasons why bottom up storage and retrieval are better than top down approaches when it comes to digital information:

• When filing something, there’s only one place to put it.  Tags are optional.  No choice means a heck of a lot less time filing
• When retrieving something, it’s better to use a (very fast) search tool…rather than guessing the right folder to look in first
• If an item relates to two projects, or is from an old friend but relates to business, etc…there are times when it’s tough to know where to file…or to retrieve it.  In a bottom up system, you just archive it in one place and search for it later.  End of story
• With tagging, one can tie one item to many categories.  So something can be tied to two projects without one having to copy it into both folders

Applying Bottom Up Approaches to Email

Not everything in the world of technology is ready for a flat, bottom-up architecture.  But email is, at least if you use Gmail, Outlook 2007, or Postbox.  I presume Mail is the same (feel free to verify in the comments).  The fewer folders you have, the faster your filing and retrieval will be.

That is because these modern email clients/web email sites use search indexing, the same technology that allows sites like Google to search the web so quickly.  With Outlook you can even search within the body of the files that are attached to your emails.  And it’s all instant.

That being said, you may still want to have folders for broad categories, but if you do, I’d suggest that you ensure that you can see all the folders on the screen at the same time.  That means that if you have more than a dozen you’d probably better rethink things.  Try to have fewer than five.

You may be thinking that having fewer folders feels less organized.  But in reality there’s less to deal with: fewer places to go, fewer places to look, and less time spent filing or retrieving.

Applying Bottom Up Approaches to the Rest of Your Technology

Data is becoming more bottom-up friendly every year.  The search features in Windows have been pretty good since Vista, and get some helpful improvements in Windows 7.  Same goes for Mac’s Finder—it gets faster in Snow Leopard.

For a long time you’ve probably paid attention to metadata (which is a fancy word for the tagging taking place inside a file) for your music collection—your artist, title, track, album, and other data have been associated with your music files.  That trend is going to be carried through to everything over the next ten years.

So I’d suggest that you think seriously about it the next time you do some reorganization on your computer.  We have more files than ever before (even if they’re online).  So labeling and tagging will be more relevant.  With photos, this is especially true.  But all documents deserve better labels, not better folders.

As we’re surrounded by more and more data, bottom up filing and sophisticated searching will be the only approach for us.  We need to start shifting our mindset and getting ready for it.

You can start now, with email.

Flickr photo credit: John Pannell

Fortunately there are still people fighting the good fight.  The following are clips about the current state of information overload, as well as possibilities for the future.  And don’t miss the Information Overload Research Group’s upcoming conference in September!

First, the conference.  I had a great time at the Information Overload Research Group’s inaugural conference (my lessons learned).  And now the next one is being held at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on September 13 and 14.  I’ll be moderating a panel on email solutions, and there will be a host of great speakers and ideas.  Check it out here.

Now, onto some videos.  This first outlines the problem of information overload with  interviews from IBM, Siemens, Network World, the European Patent Office, Research in Motion, and others.  If you’re looking for excitement, you won’t find it here…but this proves the point about the problem of Information Overload at big companies.  Kudos to Basex for putting this together:

On a lighter note, I want to share with you a video of how Microsoft looks at the future of productivity.  It’s not just addressing information overload, and it’s worth a look:

I’ll keep fighting the battle of overload myself, particularly the filter failure issue that Claty Shirky brings up.   How about you, have you come across any great tools or technologies to combat the ever-present digital overload?

The following is a video of me from WordCamp Mid-Atlantic talking about both productivity at work and balance in life.  Though the presentation was initially geared toward blogging, there are 13 minutes I’ve highlighted that I hope you’ll enjoy.

Below the video I’ve listed out the timestamps to skip to, as well as some articles that cover the concepts in greater, actionable detail.  And below that, the slides.  Enjoy!

First off, I hate that I look like Steve Ballmer’s monkey dance at the beginning, but otherwise I was pretty happy with this (huge thank you to Joe Corbett of iStrategyLabs for filming this!).  Here are the hotlinks:

Blogging Tips: 4:45 – 24:20.  I talk about things like using visual text editors, applications like Texter and Q10, etc.  If you write a lot (even it’s not on a blog), there should be some useful tips in there.

The meat of the presentation about BALANCE starts around 24:40 / slide 17 and goes to about 37 minutes:

• Purge your mind: 24:40 / slide 17: how to make a big ass list
• Masturbatory statistics 25:20 /  slide 18-19
• 50:10 Time management 27:25 / slide 20
• Social media fame vs. real life 29:00 / slide 21: avoiding online popularity
• Unplugging 29:50 (and some talk about SF vs. Barcelona) / slide 23
• In the stream, how to deal with Twitter, etc. 31:15 / slide 22
• Batching email and a cone of silence 32:00 / slide 24: AwayFind
• Identifying your critical path 33:45
• Circadian Rhythms – scheduling around your energy 34:50 / slide 26
• When you’re done with work, go home 35:50 / slide 27

I hope you enjoyed the video : ).  If you have any tips on balance, feel free to share.

Flickr photo credit: SashaW

If you want to get yourself out of trouble and be more efficient in Gmail, installing these takes about 60 seconds.

To find these features, login to Gmail and then click Settings, Labs:

I’ve broken my list into three parts, those that just take one click and that everyone can save time with immediately, those that take a little more setup, and those that have less to do with productivity but I still wanted to mention.

Gmail Labs Time-Savers that Take Zero Time to Install/Use

Forgotten Attachment Detector – if Gmail detects language indicating you meant to include an attachment, and there are no files attached, it’ll warn you before sending the message.

Vacation Time! – We often forget to turn on or off our vacation auto response messages.  With this, you can now set start and end dates for your vacation message…so it’ll automatically turn on and off during the dates you select.

Send & Archive – When you respond to a message, the next thing to do is archive it.  But we usually forget to remove it from our inbox until much later.  This adds an option to both send a reply and archive the message thread at the same time, saving you the trouble to come back later and file it.  I LOVE THIS.

Undo Send – Did you ever press the send button and then realize right afterwards that you forgot something or that there was a typo in the subject or perhaps  something much worse?  Undo Send gives you a short amount of time (assume 5 seconds) to press a new Undo hyperlink before it mails out your  message.  So if you made a mistake, you can fix it before the message is delivered.

Title Tweaks – Sometimes I click over to the tab for my email just to see if I have new mail.  That’s because the count of messages often gets cut off by the number of browser windows I have open.  This fixes that by placing the message count earlier in the title.  If you use Google Apps for Your Domain this is a MUST feature.  Note the difference in the picture below (new result shown before old result):

Suggest More Recipients – When you start messaging a group of people, Google intelligently selects who else you frequently send to along with that group.  This is incredibly helpful.  For instance, in the message below, Melody and Tim are usually involved when I’m messaging Genie and Jessica.

Gmail Labs Timesavers that Take a Little Bit of Thought

Email Addict – Adds a link to your Gmail menu bar called Take a Break.  Clicking on it will force you away from email for 14 minutes.  Not for everybody, but it’s sure a great help for me!  (sadly you can get around this by opening the account in another tab. Shoot, I shouldn’t have said that!)

Offline – this is the only one that requires an installation, but it’s also pretty amazing to be able to read and respond to email while you’re offline.  If you find yourself on a train, plane, or generally without internet access, this can come in handy.

Tasks – For email to get out of your inbox, you either need to respond to it or save it for later.  To save it for later, you need a task list.  While Gmail’s task list is not the most robust in the world, it gets the job done.  Once enabled it will appear on the bottom right of your Gmail window.  When expanded, it appears like this:

Gmail Labs that I Use But You Might Not Need

Signature Tweaks – I don’t like my email signature going at the bottom of the email, I much prefer it just below the message I’m sending.  This takes care of that.

Advanced IMAP Controls – Since I use Postbox on my desktop I like to be able to control which labels (i.e., folders) are synchronized and which aren’t (I find the “All Mail” label to be redundant).  This lets me do that.

–

Other Gmail Labs or Gmail tools you find to be particularly helpful?

The following are some of the key points that came up in the sessions.

First of all, thank you to so many of you for coming out and sharing your ideas!  I’ve never organized an event of this magnitude, and you’ve encouraged me that it was worth it.  I just hope a few people got a little push toward starting and succeeding in business.  Now, onto the panels…

What you need (and don’t need) to get a technology business started

In this first session, I moderated a panel with Greg Cangialosi, Scott Harris, Haroon Mokhtarzada, and Paul Singh.  We discussed some of the lessons picked up over the years in the several business endeavors we’ve been involved with:

• A business plan helps to get you thinking about where you’re going with your company, formalizing your thoughts, etc.  But most of us have had to change direction within 30 days and, at that point, the business plan often began to collect dust.  Key point: think hard about starting your business, and write out your overall strategy, but don’t get mired in the details of a fancy schmancy business plan.
• It’s important to cover your ass(ets).  But doing that right isn’t that important until you’ve proven that your idea has legs.  In other words, if you have a product you want to launch, worry first about getting a prototype and later about whether an LLC, S-Corp, or C-Corp is more important.  After all, there’s no shortage of lawyers who can change your business type later.
• While your legal status is not that important initially, it is important that you discuss ownership with any co-founders early on.  You need to get in the habit of having these conversations when the money isn’t already on the table.  Whatever you do with equity, just be sure that other team-members have to earn their equity rather than starting with it…otherwise underperformers can ruin the distribution of equity and create a difficult situation.  This is called vesting.
• Don’t assume that you have a market.  Spend serious time talking to your perceived market and showing them what you plan on creating.  You’ll learn very quickly that either the product you want to create or the audience you want to sell it to aren’t the best options.  That’s okay—let yourself fail in your assumptions early and instead continue to validate both your product and the market as you move forward.  Read Eric Ries’ blog for a continual reminder and tactical advice on this.
• Paul Singh talked a great deal about using Google AdWords to test ideas for just a few dollars.  See if the conversions are there by testing if people are interested in your ideas.  If they’re not, move on.  I mentioned another way to research markets is to take the first few days of the 30 Day Challenge where they teach about using Google’s market-testing tools with Market Samurai, but do it with a disposable email address.
• You don’t need to have $25,000 in the bank to start your business.  None of us had that in our first ventures.  The best time to start a business is not when you have lots of assets but when you have fewer liabilities.  So if you’re in your 20s that’s probably a damned good time.
• Haroon Mokhtarzada made the point that enterprise experience rarely translates into startup expertise.  So don’t worry about having a background in a big company or hiring people from that background.  Instead, focus on being scrappy and finding others with that mentality.
• If you’re building your business while working for another company, be sure you know whether your current employer has ownership of what you’re working on.  Often there’s a clause in your employment agreement to that effect.  Be careful!

How to market inexpensively with social media, events, and creative public relations

Energetically moderated by Mario Armstrong, this was a fun session with Aaron Brazell, Peter Corbett, Frank Gruber, and Kaitlyn Wilkins.  They talked about what to expect with marketing and how to do it through social media and other channels.

• Peter Corbett set a great tone for the session when he pointed out that social media is not free.  It’s a huge time commitment and, without that commitment, it’s just throwing time away.  But when done right it can be rewarding.
• If you’re a great writer, write.  If you have great presence, speak.  But learn your strengths early when it comes to spreading the word and play off those strengths.
• Niche.  Niche.  Niche.  Differentiation.  If you’re not differentiated you’re not memorable.  And if you’re not memorable you’re already forgotten.
• If your brand is all about solving a specific problem that’s a good start.  But if your brand is about a bigger idea, a cause, a lifestyle…then people will have a reason to come back to it, to hold onto it, to engage with it.
• While marketing is great, nothing happens if you don’t make a sale.

Sorry, I had to run around organizing lunch stuff during this session so my notes are more sparse.  Check out Russell Heimlich’s and Justin A. Brown’s notes.

Workshops and exercises in small groups

Tim Grahl and I organized breakout sessions where the 16 groups discussed their own businesses and the various revenue models of eight TechCrunch50 finalists (as a case study). 

While it’s difficult to capture that online, it’s important to explore and be familiar with various product-oriented revenue models.  The following links explain each of the models in more depth:

• Freemium
• Licensing
• Advertising
• Physical Product Sales
• Revenue Share / Affiliate Sales

Getting your technology right…and what people are using to develop today

David Troy led the next panel, which was about understanding certain key ideas around technology…especially if you’re planning on launch a tech company.  M. Jackson Wilkinson, Mike Subelsky, Amy Senger, and Andrew Turner shared their insight:

• One of the most important points discussed was understanding the differences between a programming language (the most flexible), a framework, and a content management system (CMS) (the fastest to deploy).  As a business owner it’s important to recognize that flexibility and speed of deployment are inversely related.
• Along the same lines, it’s important to recognize some of the most popular frameworks and to ensure that your development team is familiar with them so that they’re not reinventing the wheel.  Examples of popular frameworks include Rails (for Ruby), Kohana, Symfony, and CodeIgnite (for PHP), and Django (for Python).  If your team is developing in one of these languages, be sure they’re aware of the frameworks out there.
• There was a great deal of talk about when to use agile development methods and when not to.  Given the audience of my blog, suffice it to say that if you’re leading a team of developers it’s important to be up to speed on agile so that you can make decisions for when it’s most helpful.
• A couple salient points came up in relation to hiring tech people:
  1. Communication skills and initiative are as important as technology skills.  The best programmer in the world that continually builds the wrong features (and doesn’t suggest alternate ways to approach things) will get you nowhere.
  2. When choosing between open source and proprietary development environments, it’s important to consider what type of culture you’re looking to foster at your office (I’m still debating this one in my mind as my personal experience refutes it)

Introductions to local groups and events

The following groups presented.  Visit their websites to learn more.

• Baltimore OpenCoffee
• Greater Baltimore Technology Council
• Refresh DC
• Refresh Baltimore
• BarCamp DC
• BarCamp Baltimore
• NetSquared
• SocialDevCamp
• BeeHive Baltimore
• Baltimore Angles
• TECH Cocktail
• Ignite Baltimore
• Ignite DC
• WordCamp Mid-Atlantic
• DC Tech Events 

Success stories and lessons learned

Matthias Broecheler, Martin Ringlein, and David Troy shared their mistakes and talked about the different forms of entrepreneurial success in the final panel, which I moderated. Some of the topics discussed:

• Martin Ringlein spent some time discussing the different definitions of success, and how we all have to understand the importance of impact, family, lifestyle, and money.  For instance, if you work until midnight every day but don’t get to relax, have you truly achieved success?  Needless to say, I blog about this a lot, but the point of balance is not just for happiness…it relates to our core opinion of our own success.
• We all talked about the merit of having service-based businesses, especially when getting started.  For one thing, one can become cash flow positive in a service business right away; for another, one will learn very quickly what customers want when they’re working directly with them.  And of course, having a service business is a great way to bootstrap the building of a product company (that’s what I’ve done with SET and AwayFind).
• It’s unfortunate that geeks often get the impression that they need people with a business background to launch a company.  They absolutely do not.  It’s much easier to teach a geek about business than the other way around.  This is proven time and again in the most visibly successful companies, large and small.  kthxbye.
• Doesn’t matter how big your company is or how much you formalize the process, you need to talk with your employees one-on-one to discuss each other’s performance at least twice per year.  It will get a lot of information out into the open that you might not expect.
• If there’s even an ounce of negative emotion in an email, sleep on it before you send it.
• If you’re in a family business, draw very clear boundaries between work time and personal time
• If you have a business process and you decide to take on a project with a friend, don’t bend the rules or you’ll slip up.  Follow the same business process when dealing with a friend as you do with clients.
• Whenever possible, avoid taking credit cards.  The reason: you’ll never win a fight with VISA.  (This is especially relevant with high dollar transactions with people you don’t know really well.  Less important for low-dollar transactions)
• If a project is still holding you back, and you’re a tech person, consider turning it into an open source project (if you have the time ; )
• And for the next steps:
• Write down all the things that are holding you back.  Are these surmountable?
• Do your best to be around (virtually or in real life) the people who are where you want to be.  You’ll soon find yourself there.

In Conclusion

It was a rockin’ day with a good vibe and great ideas.  Thank you to all the speakers, small group leaders, sponsors, and of course the University of Maryland for making it all happen.  When I have them I’ll either post or link to the videos.  But in the mean time, here are the photos from me and Bobby Saini (we shared my camera, and he took most of the photos shown above).

Thank you and hope this all helps : ).