Induced personality disorder, or: I tried it, but I'm not proud of it

(Update: The title should more accurately read "Induced personality disorder, or: I tried it, but I'm not proud of it I didn't like it.")

As part of my continuing development of the power of treating everything in life as a personal experiment [1], I applied recently the idea to marketing my consulting business. In spite of Richard Koch's admonition in The 80/20 Principle to be "unconventional and eccentric in your use of time," I decided (with tracking [2], of course) to try conventional (and reasonable) approaches including:

• Visualizing my ideal client,
  
• Creating a clear value proposition,
  
• Focusing on a specific industry (indeed specific companies in it),
  
• Tapping my network to get leads,
  
• Making warm calls (I now prefer "cool (as in not warm) calls"), and generally
  
• Studying marketing workbooks that promote these ideas.
  

NB: 1) These ideas are sound, and I respect experts who teach them, 2) I'm very far from being knowledgeable and principled in applying them, 3) I executed as well as I could, but with limited discipline, 4) I applied the ideas for as long as I deemed useful [3]. So a huge YMMV. The problem?

It didn't work.

I realize I'm an odd duck (my umbrella description is ultimately "philosopher;" check out other Cool Job Descriptions), but I got poor results from this "push" [4] approach ("I have something valuable, so I'll find prospective clients who agree"). It felt awful, and lead to an insidious change in personality and a rather mercenary perspective of others. Specifically, what I lost sight of was:

• People shouldn't be a means to an end: I was treating my business connections (and friends in some cases) as mostly a source of potential value to me. I forgot to ask "How can I help her?" [5]. This can also poison relationships: "Shoot! Here comes Matt. He always wants something and he's going to bug me about not responding. I'll avoid him.") That feels very bad. Related: "palm down" networking; see How To Help People. Question: What are the exceptions to this?
  
• Give freely, but avoid "Free for all": I was accepting every opportunity to talk or meet with someone, but not all (few, actually) of these connections led to business. Put another way, never give everyone equal attention [6]. Question: What do you think of "targeted giving?" That is, should generosity be carefully parceled out? Certainly not in the cases of noticing immediate need that we can offer help with (e.g., someone with hands full having trouble opening a door).
  
• Stay open to opportunities: A major problem (and contradiction) related to this is filtering out possibly useful relationships. For example, a stranger reached out to me after finding my post What GTD And Weight Watchers Have In Common, and wanted to talk about weight issues he has. My attitude (now corrected) was "If you're not a prospective client, I don't have time for you." In this type of case, as a result of a recent shift in how I see this blog's purpose, inquiries from readers are again now welcome and accepted. Question: Is doing the right thing (giving attention) for the "wrong" reason (forming relationships that lead to business) OK?
  

What can we learn from this [7]? A few take-aways that come to mind:

• Don't be afraid to try new ideas that (temporarily) change your personality,
  
• Ask if it's changing you into a person you like (hint: watch for shame), and
  
• Ask if it goes in the direction of feeling right.
  

Questions for you

• Have you tried any personality shifts like this?
  
• What did you learn? What are your general take-aways?
  
• How do you go about setting up personal experiments, evaluating them, and learning from the results?
  

References

• [1] Proposed title: THINK, TRY, LEARN: A scientific method for discovering happiness. It's in our agent's hands as of this week :-)
  
• [2] See A Key To Continuous Learning: Keep A Decision Log.
  
• [3] Giving an experiment a good, fair shot (i.e., experimental design) is crucial and personal. (Fun fact: This entry starts with a 1747 experiment in curing scurvy. Shoulders of giants...)
  
• [4] Much better for me seems to be to adopt a "pull" one - cast it out there through the net and let the work come to me. (I've received a good percentage of clients this way with zero explicit SEO effort, so the potential is there.) I'm not sure about this, but I want it "embarrassingly easy." Is this lazy? Is it an example of lazy entitlement stemming from having it relatively easy for so long?
  
• [5] A variation from Stephen Covey: "Seek first to understand and then to be understood." And one from The Fred Factor: How passion in your work and life can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary: "Be interested (not just interesting)."
  
• [6] I couldn't find the reference. I believe it's from Koch or Alan Weiss. Related: Carl Sagan, the author of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, and one of my heros, is said to have had a rule about face on mars questions. "Is this about the face? I can give you five minutes."
  
• [7] See Some Thoughts From Tracking "lessons Learned" For A Year.
  

Simple project planning for individuals: A round-up

This is my one of my favorite kinds of posts:

• I've been asked for help by a client,
  
• I really want to know the answer, and
  
• I need to write a blog post!
  

And as you know, I love pulling these kinds of things together. (Side note: What if every action you took during the day accomplished multiple objectives like this? We need a name different from "killing two birds..." Anything pithy [1] come to mind?)

I'll do two things. First, I'll present the common elements of (i.e., my take on) the approaches I looked at. Second, I'll provide my lightly-edited notes from the sources, for those who are interested. There are some good ideas there.

Questions I'd love to hear your answers to:

• What's omitted here?
  
• What's superfluous?
  
• What approach do you use?
  
• How is it different from these?
  
• What's the largest project you've planned out?
  
• How much planning do most of your projects take?
  
• How do you guarantee learning from projects?
  
• How does your work integrate with others, including sophisticated project management software?
  
• Has anyone read Managing Multiple Projects? It's at the top of my Candidates Library, but I haven't read it yet. Thoughts?
  

Enjoy!

Common elements

Here's my quick take on what they all have in common:

1. Decide purpose/objective: Write a list of specific goals and deadlines. What are we trying to accomplish, and why.
   
2. Brainstorm all activities needed to accomplish the objectives, factoring in constraints, obstacles, etc.
   
3. Organize and break down into categories, tasks, and subtasks. Who will do what specifically by when?
   
4. Estimate task durations [2] and work backward from deadlines to create a progression (sequential or parallel) and timetable, including check-points/milestones.
   
5. Execute the project using individual tasks and calendar, monitor using tracking sheets/software, and adjust as you learn!
   

(Gosh, seems anti-climatic after hours of research. Actually, that's probably a good sign.)

Sources

Here are the books (and one site) I looked at:

• Getting Things Done
  
• Mind Tools' Project Management Techniques
  
• Organize your work day in no time
  
• The organized executive
  
• The personal efficiency program
  
• Seize the Day!
  
• To do doing done!
  
• The 25 Best Time Management Tools & Techniques
  

From "Getting Things Done"

David Allen's Getting Things Done has a widely-covered planning model. His description of how our minds naturally do this is crisp:

These five phases of project planning occur naturally for everything you accomplish during the day. You have an urge to make something happen; you image the outcome; you generate ideas that might be relevant; you sort those into a structure; and you define a physical activity that would begin to make it a reality. And you do all of that naturally, without giving it much thought.

Here are the steps:

1. Defining purpose and principles (principles: boundaries of your plan) - "Why"
   
2. Outcome visioning - "What"
   
3. Brainstorming - start of "How"
   
4. Organizing (components/subprojects, priorities, and/or sequences of events) - more "How"
   
5. Identifying next actions - final "How"
   

From Mind Tools' "Project Management Techniques"

As usual, Mind Tools has a solid section on Project Management Techniques, Scheduling simple projects in our case. Simple projects (those involving a few people over a short time with few inter-dependent tasks) often require only timetables and action plans to coordinate and implement them. They suggest creating a workback schedule, starting from the project's completion date and listing all tasks in reverse order with due dates. Use these control points (with deliveries) to monitor the project's progress and take appropriate remedial action. The action plan is a project-specific list of all of tasks (in order) needed to achieve the objective. They have a related section on time estimates, something common to other methods.

From "Organize your work day in no time"

The "Managing projects effectively" chapter of Organize Your Work Day In No Time defines a project as "a planned undertaking," with the key being effective planning. Steps:

• Determine objective and purpose
  
• Create a consolidated bulleted list of goals
  
• List all action steps. McCorry lists many ways to accomplish this, ones both informal and formal.
  
• Don't omit the final steps, e.g., write final reports, send thank you notes, process bills/invoices, etc.
  
• If necessary, sub-divide major components so that each task takes less than 4 hours (say) to complete.
  
• estimate time and due dates for each action step to establish a sequence.
  
  
  
  • Determine exact/optimal due date for entire project.
    
  • Estimate approximate/optimal deadline date for each action item within the overall project time-frame (backward planning)
    
  • Calculate a total time needed each week to get the project completed on time, and build in "margin" time.
    
  
  

She has you use a simple form to track projects. For the project itself list: name, due date, and purpose. For its tasks list: name, due date, approximate time, budget, person assigned, resources, and news/updates. For sub-tasks list: name and due date.

From "The organized executive"

Not unsurprisingly, Stephanie Winston has detailed advice in her The Organized Executive: A Program for Productivity, esp. from her chapter, "Project Mangement." The three case studies in particular are helpful in understanding how to apply the ideas to differently scoped projects.

Winston says project design and management requires seven steps, regardless of the task:

1. Set a specific goal. What is your purpose? Make it a concrete (e.g., numerical) objective.
   
2. Set a final deadline.
   
3. Break project down into subtasks, and group related subtasks into working blocks.
   
4. Organize subtasks into an appropriate progression, either a sequential line of development (tasks handled one at a time) or a parallel line of development (tasks handled simultaneously). For the latter, begin the project by selecting two or three core tasks from each block.
   
5. Set subdeadlines for individual tasks and steps. Establish periodic benchmarks for the evaluation of overall progress.
   
6. Delegate specific tasks or groups to subordinates and/or outside consultants. Add your own tasks to your Master List [3], feeding them into your Daily List as appropriate.
   
7. Monitor less complex tasks with calendar, tickler files, and referral folders. For more intricate projects, use a task sheet or tasks-by-levels analysis.

(Interestingly she mentions these rules apply to any project and originate from the PERT/CPM Navy Polaris project - see here, for example.)

From "The personal efficiency program"

In The Personal Efficiency Program (I've written about it elsewhere) Gleeson provides criteria for whether you need project planning (vs. back of the napkin):

• It is complex.
  
• It seems difficult.
  
• It involves several staff.
  
• It is a new activity.
  
• There are critical deadlines.
  
• You are coping with changes.
  

The book has you plan using a mind map to:

• Brainstorm about all elements of the task,
  
• Identify the critical elements to success,
  
• Group ideas into categories,
  
• Incorporate these into an implementation plan.
  

The plan itself is a list of tasks with: estimated number of hours, people involved, target date, and actual completion date.

From "Seize the Day!"

His process from chapter 6, "Planning," is what "turns goals into activities." He points out planning is generally pretty simple, but it's not easy. His process:

• Write out the goal, as clearly and specifically as you can.
  
• Brainstorm to come up with the required activities to achieve it. Write as many as you can think of that bring you closer to the goal. Don't worry about the quality or possibility of each one; write as many as possible in the shortest time.
  
• Break down activities into sub-activities if large, then eliminate unimportant or redundant ones.
  
• Break down activities as much as possible into months, weeks and days. Sometimes hours and minutes. He says to be flexible in how much detail you plan out. "Use only enough structure to get the job done."
  
• Finally, come up with a daily schedule of prioritized activities (your to-do list).
  

From "To do doing done!"

The "Making project completion easy" chapter of To Do Doing Done sketches out Snead's VPIC model:

• Visualize (create a project vision statement). What does it look like when it's done? Why are we doing it? Output: overall objective. SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-dimensioned)
  
• Plan (break project into manageable pieces). How will we achieve the objective? Who will do what tasks? When and where will they do them? How much will the project cost? Output: manageable pieces. Here seven-step planning model:
  
  
  
  1. Constraints. Universal ones: quality, schedule, resources.
     
  2. Hot spots.
     
  3. Hunks (major pieces), chunks (minor pieces), and bites (tasks - verbs).
     
  4. Forms (enter sequenced tasks onto forms - parallel and dependent tasks).
     
  5. Who.
     
  6. When (can plan forward if no deadline is set, or backward o/w).
     
  7. Cost.
     
  
  
• Implement (monitor and control - communicate, delegate, document). Communication, coordination, monitoring, and controlling needed to keep the project on track toward successful completion. includes adjustments
  
• Close (evaluate the project). Tie up loose ends, compare outcome with intended results, celebrate/honor/reward. I like that she highlights it's an important learning opportunity. As she puts it, "Projects are almost always a learning experience."
  

From "The 25 Best Time Management Tools & Techniques"

Complex goals require planning backward. The problem with planning forward is that it focuses on actions. Planning backward focuses on results and provides structure to get the thing done in the right order and at the right time. It helps you keep momentum, even when you're not in the mood. Here are the four steps on how to plan backward:

1. Pick one goal. If it's big, subdivide it into smaller goals. Pick the first one you need to achieve.
   
2. List the mini goals or milestones you need to accomplish to achieve your goal by the deadline you've set.
   
3. Draw a time line from left to right. Put the current date on the far left and your deadline on the far right. Insert each milestone with a date, starting from your deadline and working backward
   
4. Once your milestones are in the right places, list underneath each one the actions you'll need to take to achieve them. Keep your plan handy and do what you planned.
   

References

• [1] I've been collecting great quotes and possibly-useful phrases for a while. I've also started trying to come up with my own pithy quotes, with my models being Benjamin Franklin, Dorothy Parker, and Mark Twain - a very high bar. So far the results are rather pithiless.
  
• [2] Are you often underestimating how long something will take? Me too. In fact, a client pointed out that apparently all of us have trouble. See Planning fallacy, esp. the paper "Exploring the planning fallacy: why people underestimate their task completion times":

  This study tested 3 main hypotheses concerning people's predictions of task completion times: (a) People underestimate their own but not others' completion times, (b) people focus on plan-based scenarios rather than on relevant past experiences while generating their predictions, and (c) people's attributions diminish the relevance of past experiences.

  Now why would that be, as a species, beneficial?
  
• [3] Her "Time and task management" chapter is interesting from a productivity implementation perspective. She has a single "Master List" notebook which acts as: capture, s/m, tasks, and projects. You review it daily, dividing projects into components, eliminating and delegating tasks, entering deferred tasks on calendar, immediate tasks on Daily List. Compile tomorrow's Daily List the night before - choose 10 tasks. Rank each 1/2/3 depending on priority and level of demand on you. <- ideamattblog: Many thoughts here - the mixture of uses, having to review, not separating projects and actions, etc. Fun! Related: Extreme GTD: How Low Can You Go (or: Can We 80-20 GTD?)
  

A dozen important productivity blog posts that haven't been written yet

As I write my weekly posts I try not to cover topics you can easily find elsewhere [1], including (with a few resources):

• Myths of time management (Productivity & Organizing Myths Recap)
  
• Being productive while traveling (Possible things to do when just standing around???)
  
• Capture tools and habits (Tips for GTD's Ubiquitous Capture)
  
• Desk layout (Just how organised do I have to be? and What's Right With Your Messy Desk)
  
• Handling too many To Dos (10 Tips For Pruning Your Next Action List)
  
• Media diet (Bit Literacy Tips on Managing Your Media Diet)
  
• Procrastination (Good and Bad Procrastination)
  
• Records retention (How to Free Yourself from Paper Clutter)
  
• Interruptions (Top Ten Sources of Interruptions)
  
• Meetings (Meetings considered harmful)
  
• Decision-making (Decision Making Techniques and Decision Making Skills)
  
• ...and so on.
  

These are all important topics but they've been covered widely. Given that, I'll take a stab at the productivity meta post [2]. This is a close cousin of my "There is no one tip" (non)answer to What's the ultimate productivity tip [3]. But there's some bad news.

These were suprisingly hard to come up with. Actually, given the amount of blog coverage in the field, maybe that's not unexpected. (Related The Real Reasons For The Modern Productivity Movement.)

So in an effort to stimulate thought [4] I present 12 productivity ideas that haven't been nailed yet. This post is a bit loose, but I'd like to put it out there to hear your thoughts. Has a solid meta post been already written? What's missing from the list? What's already been addressed? Cheers!

• Difficulty adopting new productivity habits: Why is becoming more productive so bloody hard? It's certainly not for lack of information. There's a ton of it on the web (guilty as charged), and most (other than mine :-) are easy to read, so that's not the problem. I see two issues. 1) Changing any habit is difficult (there are posts on that too!) 2) We're apparently not prepared "out of the box" to handle our modern pace - that onslaught of communication, commitments, and information that we all face.
  
• How to know which trick/tip/technique/method you need: While Allen's Getting Things Done methodology is extremely popular in productivity geek circles, people have been writing about time management for centuries [5]. But we change, our work changes, and our lives change, so our personal self-management systems need to adapt and keep up. That means we need a regular process that takes this into account and indicates when and what we should change.
  
• You already know what you should be doing: ...and it isn't a time management problem that'll be solved by a two minute "25 tips" post. Oftentimes we what work is important, and what to do next, so sometimes we just need to hunker down and do the darn thing. Is it painful? Sure! In fact that's one definition of "work" - important + difficult. But I like how Pressfield puts it in The War of Art

  The athelete knows the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. He has to play hurt.

  Is this true for you?
  
• Why productivity changes don't stick: Let's face it, adopting a principled new approach to how we work is not only hard to start, but hard to sustain. This is partly because changing habits is hard, but also due to the brittleness of most methods (one of the 10 GTD "holes" I identified). What are the typical obstacles, and how do we address them?
  
• Why the big interest in productivity? Again, see The Real Reasons For The Modern Productivity Movement.
  
• How much does personality matter? Many time management books and practitioners start with an up-front assessment of personality type. Are you convergent/divergent, do you like working with a busy physical space (i.e., cluttered desk), etc. I don't do this. Partly it's due to my engineering "process solves everything" thinking, but also because I can get away with it (why be coy?) I'm taking a cue from David Allen on this, who similarly skips an initial time analysis. (Side note: I dislike the idea that four letters say it all about me. Bunk!)
  
• Why no "build-a-meal" productivity menu? "I'd like one 'Schedule It All' calendar, a color-coded filing system, and a helping of delegation tools. Hold the tickler." I provide this as needed, but a book covering all options along with guidelines for using them would be very cool.
  
• Productivity blogger field guide: Since there are many of us, with our own take on the field, why not a fun little categorization of us all? How about "25 tipper" and "GTD regurgitator" for starters? (Related: Types of Twitter users [6].)
  
• Metrics: How do we know whether changes have had an impact, and how much? I made a stab at this in How Do You Measure Personal Productivity? but I know there's a solid analysis there.
  
• Underlying psychological concerns: In addition to lack of skills there are deeper reasons why we have trouble doing all we want to accomplish. How about a canonical list of them? One of my readers put it this way:

  I, like lots of people, have skeletons in my closet. Why, for example, did {comedian running for Senate in MN} not pay his workers comp? Why do people avoid Big Things? What impact does this have on productivity? What are the psychological effects of living in society today? What do people need to do to address skeletons in their closet? Go to therapy? Revival like seminars? Religion? Seems to me this is something that is critically important and never addressed in the drier books (like GTD etc) -- though I could have missed it, not being schooled in this subject.

  
  
• It's (not) all been written before: I've read a lot of time management books, and - really - a lot of this isn't new. From Doug's comment on Why Blogruptcy Is A Great Idea But Doesn't Work, And Why SPAM Is Easy To Fix And Information Overload Isn't

  I would argue that the most recently written material on a subject is not necessarily the best... I also think that as intellectual citizens of the blogsphere we serve a greater purpose by knitting together the best material

  Whew!
  
• Definitive bottom-up vs. top-down guide: I've grappled with this a while: When is it better to start with adopting a personal system (ala Allen) rather than doing a goal-driven analysis (ala Covey)? Talking with some of my interviewees has clarified this some (short answer: it depends, and it's a cycle spiral) but I'd love to see some principled advice.
  

Got a good one? Let me know!

(P.S. The folks over at simple·ology have kindly picked up my article Add, Subtract, Multiply, and Divide: Productivity Lessons from Basic Math on their blog and newsletter. While there you might check out their productivity approach. They've put their own spin on the ideas out there. Thanks, folks!)

References

• [1] But, not surprisingly, I do track them.
  
• [2] A post about productivity posts. I admit - I love the term "meta." Meta, meta, meta. Partly because I cut my AI teeth on a Space-cadet keyboard, and partly because I like thinking about thinking about things. It's also why I'm considering calling what I teach metawork.
  
• [3] Alternatively, decide which tip you currently need.
  
• [4] I've been working on a tagline for this blog, with my current favorite: The "made me think" blog. A "Good Blogging" sidebar: I should have given some more thought to my blog's title, something other than "Matt's Idea Blog." Why? It turns out that picking a good one is a very important thing to consider when starting a blog. See What not to name your blog. (Follow up: This might actually have been a fine name. Stay tuned.)
  
• [5] You might enjoy 10 Ways History's Finest Kept Their Focus at Work and The Productivity Promisers.
  
• [6] Help me here. A few starter ones: "Look how successful I am," "I just used the potty," and "Replying to my followers but not actually saying anything myself." :-)
  

Check out the Men's Health November 2008 issue

If you happen to pick up the November issue of Men's Health Magazine, turn to page 26 for some tasty advice from yours truly. My thoughts were in response to the reader question When I'm Driving To The Office, Is It Better To Jumpstart My Brain With Talk Radio, Or Chill Out With Music? I'm always enjoy contributing to these, so feel free to send reporters my way.

And having Barack Obama on the cover? I was quite happy to make room for him :-)

As an aside, if you haven't seen it, you might enjoy the short New York Times article Obama on Vacationing and Time to Think in which he says:

...the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking.

Just what I tell my clients!

Use gimmicks to get an NPR story, a book tour, and speaking gigs

While listening to an NPR story on a couple in New York City who had "gone green" [1] (that is, living outside our normal consumer society, at least a bit) I was struck by a thought. If you want to get famous, gimmicks can get you some serious attention. Given the dire economic times [2]and forthcoming radical changes (at least here in the U.S.), I thought some get-famous-quick ideas might come in handy if you're considering a rapid job change ;-)

Note: I mean to use the word gimmick in the positive sense, as the Wikipedia entry puts it,

However, some seemingly trivial gimmicks of the past have evolved into useful, permanent features.

So my definition is "novel, quirky, and useful."

IMPORTANT NOTE: You must be the first on the block because the novelty factor is king. First some examples of successful ones, then a few of my ideas for new ones. Have fun!

Gimmicks that rock

Clearly almost anything goes. My test of a good gimmick: One that gives you a unique helpful perspective on the world, and that keeps on giving (i.e., "has legs"). For example, anyone practicing a personal system like GTD will probably tell you they can't look at work the same way again. Or take my "life as a scientific experiment" approach - I now see courage, fear, and risk much differently.

Here are some good ones I know of, starting with the "thing." Care to share your favorites?

• Toilet paper: The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. They have a thing (toilet paper) with a marketing spin (so to speak). Fun variation: Dick Cheney Toilet Paper. On sale, I notice. Much like our banks ;-)
  
• Paper clip: one red paperclip. This one is a double win, because he has a thing (a paper clip) plus a unique use beyond simply riffing off the thing: trading it up to a house. Brilliant!
  
• Post card: PostSecret.
  
• Nametag: HELLO, my name is Scott! I interviewed Scott a while back. Smart guy, great idea, great use of it.
  
• Tattoo: Like the paper clip, this is more what you do with it (put it on your forehead for $10,000) than the thing itself. (Interestingly, my favorite end-of-the-world peak oil financial market dude Jim Kunstler doesn't like tattoos. Made me think!)
  
• Pixels: The granddaddy of novel ideas turned into income, The Million Dollar Homepage - Own a piece of internet history!
  
• Napkin: Back of the Napkin. A lovely idea of turning quick problem sketches into solutions. (Of course the NASA engineer in me loves this one. It reminds us that numbers are secondary to ideas, a point that Lewis Thomas makes in his sublime Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony).
  
• Duct Tape: A general-purpose thing, it applies both to construction (wallets, say) and marketing (Guerrilla Marketing). Quasi-related: Guerrilla Marketing. Opportunity: Guerrilla's carrying duct tape who teach marketing? Nah.
  
• To Do List: Waaaaaay overdone, but I liked this twist, in the "found objects" category - Handwritten lists: To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us. It's also a blogs-to-books example (original blog here).
  
• Buccaneer: Talk Like A Pirate Day. This one cleverly capitalized on an affectation that's common here in the states. You can certainly see how to spin this for business - "Pirate Productivity" or "Innovate like a Pirate," for example.
  
• Business card: Cards are cool, and I have a thing for them. Witness my Personal Productivity Playing Cards and my on-going love for MOO's MiniCards, for example. I even played with turning a cube of them into a workflow tool (A GTD WorkFlow Tool: The Five Stages On A Business Card Cube. A couple of twists come to mind, with my favorite being cartoons drawn on the back of them. The trend may be rising - see The Gentleman's Guide to the Calling Card and May I Offer You My Calling Card?.
  

Gimmicks that could rock

Given these successes, what's waiting to be tapped for the Next Thing? Here are a few ideas - what are yours?

• 2x2 Matrix: Surely you didn't think I'd let this post go without mentioning my long-standing infatuation with the lowly foursquare matrix, did you? Taking a cue from the brilliant Demetri Martin, who has a genius for hilarious business-style presentations (videos here), how about an entire lecture based on them? I've already pointed out the pricey The Power of the 2 x 2 Matrix: Using 2x2 Thinking to Solve Business Problems and Make Better Decisions (arriving, it turns out, as a birthday present from a reader :-) but I don't think the gimmick has been really nailed.
  
• Favorite tool or web site: This idea is general, and has been done for plenty of sites, but why not turn your fanatacism for a particular tool, game, or web site into your thing? The recipe: Make yourself the world expert in this thing (undying love for it is required), then start writing about it. As you gain momentum your influence will grow, drawing in more readers, industry experts, and, soon enough, Bob's your uncle. Examples abound: Google Blogoscoped, AppleInsider, iLounge, and Twitterforum.com. Or how about a site about whether a site is working or not (Twitter Status - though granted it's an official one). Question: What to do when there's an official one, e.g., Official Gmail Blog or GTDtimes? If you're good enough and well established enough, it probably won't matter. Heck, you might even be invited to participate or work for them (How I Got to Google, for example).
  
• Go without: Like the NPR story mentioned above, make a public show of going without something common and fundamental for a year. For example, go on a radical media diet (Tim Ferriss has played this a bit) or stop shopping at big box stores. There's a lot of opportunity here - got any good ones?
  
• Go overboard: At the extreme other end of the spectrum is adding an excessive amount of something to your life. Super Size Me (junk food) is a terrific example - loved it! Another is Just Do It: How One Couple Turned Off the TV and Turned On Their Sex Lives for 101 Days (No Excuses!). Nice!
  
• Sticky notes: While there's been a ton of books on these ubiquitous wonders - Origami and Problem Solving) I have the sense that a productivity-based shtick could work. (Related: In One Way To Enjoy The Ride - Celebrate Surprise! I mentioned Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes - fun read).
  
• Self experimentation: Here's one I considered: Read a book a day for a year, write up what you learned, then write a book about that! Another example is go a year always saying yes to anything put at you: Danny Wallace's Yes Man (via On Saying Yes - 3 Possibilities: Always Yes, Always No, Or Only When You Really Want To).
  
• Same name: Here's something has to have been done, but I can't find it: Spend a year travelling around the world meeting people with your exact same name. There are tools on the net to make this straightforward (the ones I found required registration - samename.com - or only gave a count - How Many of Me), so it's only a matter of time, determination, and money. Again, if it's not been done already. Side note: When I created my web site (matthewcornell.org) I naturally first tried matthewcornell.com, but it was taken. So I thought I'd take a little chance with an experiment: I called the guy! Turns out we had a nice conversation, so you never know!
  
• One-page hot-topic sites: My final idea is a pattern that can be applied to any short-term hot topic. An obvious one would have been http://tinafeyforveep.com (I considered it!), given Tina Fey's recent spot-on imitations of Governer Palin (I mentioned Couric/Palin Open in last week's A Late Adopter's Productivity Experiment With Twitter, Plus Some 140 Word Humor). Again, key to this is being first. The ultimate classic is in politics: Bush/Zombie Reagan 2004. Don't forget to vote!
  

What do you think?

References

• [1] I'm sorry I couldn't find it. The closest one I came across was Life Without Goods Made in China. You get the picture, I hope.
  
• [2] In addition to the tips I gave last week (How To Stay Balanced And Productive During Uncertainty And Crisis) injecting some good news and little surprises into your life can give you hope. For me it might be catching up on things working well for friends, downloading a $0.99 iPhone app, receiving a book order (via local library or Amazon), or seeing a good movie. In the latter category I really enjoyed seeing Bill Maher's just-released Religulous (official site here). Maher is one of my heros. His show (Real Time with Bill Maher) almost makes me wish we had cable ;-) His blog is here.