Category: Practices

Automating the GTD Weekly Review

A nice example of getting your tools to do more of your work for you. And Michael Hyatt’s Working Smart blog looks to be another good resource. There is also an RSS feed.

Automating the GTD Weekly Review.

Michael Hyatt, whose blog is a must-read if you practice Getting Things Done, has provided a great Outlook macro script that automates the process of setting up a weekly review task list. I am a Visual Basic novice and it took me about three minutes to set this up (including creating a custom icon).

I figure I ll save ten times that amount of time every month because now I can click a single button and my Weekly Review is all set up.

Great stuff.

[The Office Weblog]

Subverting the folks in marketing

If you haven’t already started reading Beyond Bullets, you should. Perhaps, more importantly, you should encourage the folks in marketing who set up your templates to read it as well. That will do double duty; getting them to improve their templates and getting them hooked on weblogs.

Thinking outside the grid in PowerPoint.

Cliff Atkinson s Beyond Bullets discusses one of the most frequent design mistakes made in presentations today. I ve really come to value Cliff s insights. Although he focuses on PowerPoint in his blog, a lot of the advice he presents can be easily adapted to other publishing and presenting activities.

Clearly, putting your logo on every slide increases the risk that you will communicate the wrong message, and presents an unnecessary obstacle in the way of your corporate goals. If you say your presentation should be all about your audience, your logo on your PowerPoint template shows the opposite, because there you are on every single slide.

[The Office Weblog]

Snap those Meeting Notes

A lot cheaper and a lot more portable than those big electronic whiteboard. Another way to get some value out of my Sony DSC-T1

Snap those Meeting Notes.

Passed along from David, a pointer to ClearBoard. It cleans up pix you’ve snapped of whiteboards or flipcharts, turning them into relatively clean graphic images reasonable for putting on a team website to augment meeting notes.

Looks like a nice application of edge-finding and contrast-enhancing. Nothing that probably couldn’t be done in PhotoShop or whatever, but this does it automatically and quickly. Simple. Smart.

[Steven’s [Mostly] Tech Notebook]

The Personal Petabyte, The Exnterprise Exabyte from Jim Gray

This is a big powerpoint file. On the other, and more important, hand it contains some fascinating ruminations about what some key trends in performance improvement in storage technology and network speeds portend for us as knowledge workers and inhabitants of a digital world. Jim Gray is one of the supersmart folks at Microsoft Research who is thinking a few years out about the world we will all be inhabiting soon. Worth the time to look at and think about.

Jim Gray: The Personal Petabyte, The Exnterprise Exabyte (PowerPoint). [Hack the Planet]

More from Tufte on sparklines

I rarely live up to Tufte’s excellence in graphic design, but I figure it’s worth trying.

Tufte teaches about new word-sized communication vehicles.

Edward Tufte has posted a major update to his “Sparklines” chapter from his upcoming book. What are sparklines? Intense, simple, word-sized graphics.

I wonder how I could use Sparklines here on my blog?

Tufte is doing some deep thinking about information design and how it communicates.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

If It’s Urgent, Ignore It

Differentiating between urgent and important is the trick though isn’t it? After the fact, it may be easy but in the moment it can be devilishly hard, especially in a world that treasures action over reflection.

Perhaps one heuristic would be to simply ignore any decision (excepting immediate threat to life and limb) that claimed a need to be made immediately.

If It’s Urgent, Ignore It. If It’s Urgent, Ignore It — From Seth Godin at Fast Comany…

“Smart organizations ignore the urgent. Smart organizations understand that important issues are the ones to deal with. If you focus on the important stuff, the urgent will take care of itself.

“A key corollary to this principle is the idea that if you don’t have the time to do it right, there’s no way in the world you’ll find the time to do it over. Too often, we use the urgent as an excuse for shoddy work or sloppy decision making. […] Urgent is not an excuse. In fact, urgent is often an indictment–a sure sign that you’ve been putting off the important stuff until it mushrooms out of control.”

Obvious, but worth repeating from time to time. [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

Organisational Story-Telling

Steve Denning did some excellent work using stories to drive change when he was at the World Bank. Here’s a pointer to an interview with Denning summarizing his key arguments about the role and value of story in driving organizational change. If this catches your fancy, you may want to look at Denning’s book, The Springboard : How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations.

Organisational Story-Telling.

Steve Neiderhauser points to an interview with Steven Denning. Excerpts:

People can’t absorb data because they don’t think in data. They think in stories. If you give people a story, then they can absorb the meaning of large amounts of data very rapidly….

The good news is however that we are all storytellers. We’ve simply been browbeaten into thinking that this is some kind of arcane skill that only a few people have. As Jerome Bruner has documented, we all do it spontaneously from the age of two onwards, and go on doing it throughout our lives. When we get into a formal setting, we succumb to what our teachers have told us and start to spout abstractions. But once we realize that our listeners actually want to hear stories, then we can relax and do what we all do in a social setting and tell stories.

One of the things I have done in some recent presentations is not to use a presentation aid. I have just stood up and talked, trying to weave a tale around the points I want to make. I have found this much more effective personally – I tend to speak with more passion, and the audience is listening to me, rather than looking to the presentation. While this may not work in all settings, this approach is something which definitely needs more thought.

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

The power of questions to create knowledge

Lilia has been on a roll lately with lots of great posts on her blog. Here, again, she raises important points and offers her usual insight.

Too often knowledge management initiatives are sold and implemented around prospective benefits. They try to collect and organize knowledge assets of one sort or another on the notion that they ought to be useful to someone, somewhere. You can pretty much guarantee that these efforts will fail, regardless of how clever an incentive or punishment system you contrive.

Absent real questions, the materials contributed are stale and lifeless. With real questions in context, however, you get answers. I can’t recall a time when some expert hasn’t given me a helpful response to a sincere question in context. Sure, sometimes the response is a series of further questions that demonstrate that I don’t yet know enough to ask an intelligent question. But we get a dialog started that ends in new and deeper understanding. Sometimes it even ends in answers.

This is the magic of vibrant weblog communities that excites those of it who see their promise as a knowledge sharing tool. Unlike email, a community of weblogs and webloggers creates a space where those knowledge questions turn into the seeds of new knowledge creation. It isn’t likely to be neat and orderly and engineered. Instead, like the real world it will be messy and organic and fertile.

Knowledge flows are powered by questions.

Don’t know if this piece will survive in the paper I write, so post it here. This is pretty much what I think on “why people share knowledge”.

One of the goals of knowledge management is to improve knowledge flows and knowledge reuse in an organisation. While there is much discussion on knowledge sharing, motivation and culture, the demand side of knowledge exchanges seems to get too less attention.

I believe that knowledge flows are powered by questions: in many cases employees do not mind to share their knowledge, but do not do it because nobody asks them or because they are not sure that others need to know. This could be one of the explanations behind the success of on-line communities where knowledge bases fail (e.g. in Shell EP case, see Petersen & Poulfelt, 2002 or ask Andy): many communities work in a problem-solving mode, where knowledge sharing starts with a question or problem. In this case knowledge is shared to help others, and it is rewarding. In contrast, submitting a document (for example, “lessons learnt” from a project) to a knowledge base doesn’t have an immediate question behind it, but more of an expectation of future questions that may never arise, so the motivation to share is much lower.

And, as I wrote before, asking is more difficult then answering and reinventing is more fun then reusing.

Guess what my conclusion is? KM is about motivation to learn 🙂

[Mathemagenic]