Archive - Jan 2007

I've been trying out LinkedIn's new Answers feature in the two obvious ways (asking and answering) to see if a) I can help people, b) establish myself as an authority, and c) open myself up to networking and potential clients. So far I've asked one question (How did you get clients when you started your consulting practice?) and answered a dozen or so of the deepest or most interesting ones.

In this post I'd like to share some of my answers (more next week). None were voted "best answer," but hey - maybe folks found them helpful.

The current spate of RSS feed-reading tools is missing a major feature: None of them (Bloglines, Google Reader, NetNewsWire, etc.) provide help with answering the major focus problem, "Which feeds should I pay attention to?" They are great at collection (one of the five GTD workflow phases I teach clients - gathering new feeds, and sorting them by source, date, number of unread, etc.) but that's just creating a bunch of haystacks. They still require us to laboriously look through each to find the needles (i.e., to assess value).

In October I asked your advice about using a digital voice recorder for transcription, primarily to smooth out my reading workflow (see How to read a lot of books in a short time). I bought one and I've been using it since mid-November. Following is a report on my experiences and recommendations.

WS-300M: A nice product

It's official - I've given my two week notice and I'm quitting my research programming job to put full effort into my workflow coaching practice. Joining the ranks of the self-employed is exciting and frightening, and I'm sure it'll increase my rate of lessons learned per day (see Some thoughts from tracking "lessons learned" for a year).

After hearing the news, a friend asked me why in the world I'd risk leaving a stable job - with great people, fine pay, retirement, health insurance, etc. - for something with no guarantees, especially as I'm a parent and husband. The best answer I came up with: I want to know how the story's going to end, and I can't do that without a major commitment.