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Feb 01 2010

InBox ZERO is MINE! Today is Feburary 1st, and I am an InBox ZERO Hero!

Category: executive learnings,how do i?,speed the web — jmacofearth @ 10:48 pm

Screen shot 2010 02 01 at 6.08.52 PM InBox ZERO is MINE! Today is Feburary 1st, and I am an InBox ZERO Hero!

I know it's early in the month, but hey, every little bit helps. What power comes with seeing your inbox at ZERO?

Don't take my word for it, hear what the fellas at 43folders have to say about it. Here is the Inbox ZERO series of posts from Merlin Mann that started it all March 13, 2006.

To streamline GTD into an email process, you must become an email ninja. Respond without hesitation. Do what you know is right. Be direct, be specific and be brief. Most of all, if you have a REQUEST, highlight it and make it clear when and what you are asking for.

Next plan, do all of your communications in 140 characters. If you can do short stories, project management and hyper-specific tweets, you can do the same with email.  Ninja trick #2, try and do it all from your mobile phone to avoid Outlook all together. This might be easier on a BlackBerry or a phone with a real keyboard, but hey… If you don't open Outlook you won't have to hassle through all it's problems. And you will be very succinct I can tell you.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/zero-my-hero

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Dec 28 2009

Uber.la 2009 – The Year In Review: Renewing My Commitments for 2010

Category: about me,executive learnings,lifestreaming,social media,trust & reputation — jmacofearth @ 8:00 am

Beginning my evolution from 2009 to 2010.

In 2009 I dove into producing Uber.la full-time. My confidence coming out of Dell's global online team, was that I would easily land somewhere before my severance ran out. Of course, things don't always go to plan. And to share only a bit of the struggle, I am so glad I did not spend any severance on a new computer (17" Macbook Pro – Deceptive, Confusing or Am I Just a Dork? – Buying a 17" Macbook Pro) or a cash-for-clunkers trade. We went into conserve mode in May/June as the economy continued to chill.

As part of my blogging/journaling/writing I began exploring the value of putting my top-line goals up front and center on my blog. In two posts I attempted to define and refine my goals for 2009. Starting with this post  Communicate unceasingly – Your passion, vision and strategy* and revised upward with this post  Accountability and Action in the BIG GOALS of 2009, and Puttin Up the BIG GOALS of 2009 – Mid-Year Update in Progress In all of these I laid out some fairly abstract "do better" goals as well as some more practical goals. I attempted to refine and refocus each time and return to my commitment.

Here is my initial goal list I wrote on Jan. 26, a few days before I retired from Dell.

Here are my objectives for 2009:

  1. Simplify my mental tag cloud
  2. Control, filter and capture the important bits of my personal infostream
  3. Share my personal growth and journey with new ideas, processes and technologies
  4. Gain Velocity and Agility
  5. Let go of the stress and overwhelm associated with information overload
  6. Examine spiritual simplification as part of this overall life way (cause the Social Mesh holds the future in many ways)
  7. Open my processes to the communities I haunt and ask for other virtual pilgrims to join the call for agility
  8. Do better

Now rounding the corner on the closing of 2009, I am re-reading my priorities posts and looking at the changing landscape of my personal and professional life. And it is time to renew a few of the goals and recommit to improving all aspects of my life in 2010. And even more importantly, to improve the lives of others through influence, action, honesty, and passionate expression of joy, inspiration and connection.

So here are my uber-goals for 2010. Many are the same, but I think the focus is refined, in my mind, and the list has been simplified.

jmacofearth, my taxonomy for 20101. Simplify my tag cloud. (To the right you will see my newly streamlined category list on uber.la, which serves as a taxonomy for my writing. Everything must fall into some category, and after a year this is the structure that has presented itself. While the "about me" is pretty high with 142 posts containing some biographical information, the clear focus of my writing has been in Social Media and Technology Opinions.

2. Be infinitely more patient. (I think I say it pretty good here: Losing Patience & Trying to Find it Again : Repeat)

3. Strike hot ideas with the goal in mind. (I launched approximately 20 blogs last year and purchased over 60 domains. My idea was that launching a blog was as simple as falling off a bike. Some of my efforts were focused and some were JFF and some were about wanting to create a community with close friends to challenge and push each other to "do better" in all our efforts.)

4. Balance work and life a bit more. (I think the best indicator for w/l balance is having your financial house in order. While we will be paying some back taxes to get caught up for spending some time in the self-employment line, my family is entering 2010 with a pretty good base from which to grow out balance. When I am personally stressed about money, the creativity is one of the first things to show the duress. This usually results in an abnormally quiet presence within my social media networks. This year I hope to level the hyper-participation with more time away from the screen.)

5. More optimism and less stress. (Again, for me, optimism is an essential part of my plan. While you can't always plan for adversity, the way you look at it is often much more critical and important that the adverse event itself. I know if I had come out of Dell with FEAR rather than CONFIDENCE I would have had a much harder time establishing my initial consulting practice. So we can all work on optimism. And we can try and take action, or often non-action, based on a larger view of life as good, rather than life as hard. We can't keep the hard away, but we can choose how hard it feels. <Wow, that was an amazing statement I just wrote. An Ah Ha for sure.>)

6. Do better. (I recently read a book by a tennis player who suffered a broken neck and lost his father in the same year. During his struggle to rediscover his motivation for living as well as playing professional tennis, his motto became "Getting Better." That's it. No matter where we are we can do better. We can turn over one more act of patience in the face of stress. We can slow down on the highway when we feel the tension building and anger rising. Basically we can all do better. The motto of "Getting Better" seems to contain the whole nugget of truth for me and expression of the goal. It is not about arriving at the top of the mountain, it is about seeing and feeling the entire path on the way up. After all, the peak we see is just the closest one. At the top of this one we will see there is another, even higher, peak ahead.

So finally, I would like to show one more self-reflecting graphic. This is my TweetReach graphic for the last 50 tweets. Suffice it to say, however, that this ratio captures the essence of my participation on Twitter.

tweetreach for jmacofearth, twitter statistics

What I see is that nearly half of my tweets are @replies. Or tweets to someone. "A conversation."

About one quarter of my tweets are ReTweets, or RTs. When someone just RTs and does not generate any new content they are not really participating, in my opinion.

Finally, about one quarter of my tweets are original content. Either I have found something of interest to social media folks, or I have found something that made me laugh outloud, or I am expressing some epiphany or laugh of the moment. I have not ever tweeted a coupon code or a teeth whitening ad. And no one has ever tweeted on my behalf.

So for you, I hope 2010 brings lots of wonderful conversations. And perhaps they will be conversations between you and me. And I hope you are successful in creating your work/life balance and building joy and optimism into your everyday experience.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/goals-2010

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Aug 10 2009

Accountability and Action in the BIG GOALS of 2009

Category: about me,social media,teaming & leadership,trust & reputation — jmacofearth @ 8:44 am

Summer is hotter than ever. In Texas we have had more days over 100 degrees than under. How do you stay motivated to get out there and do it when it's so DANG HOT?

In that spirit I also want to be brief in this mid-quarter, heat of the moment, update. Here is my BIG GOAL update for August.

1. Simplify my mental tag cloud: My focus has been very solid. My concerns are when I spend a day focused on writing content and building graphics that don't lead to income. At the moment the consulting work is harder to come by. My pipeline is not full.
Action: ROI (return on interactive work), I need to focus on what helps pay the bills not what floats my boat.

2 and 3. Control, filter and capture & Share my personal growth and journey: Uber.la has benefited from my acceleration on these goals. And I feel my work has been rewarded with over 4k per month visitors to my various blogging efforts and my nearly 7k Twitter followers. They aren't coming for nuthin. The more value you provide the more people will continue to listen.

4. Velocity and Agility: My focus is as good as I can remember. I have been using Hyper-focusing to GTD. Staying on a task through the burn/boredom level and getting it done.

5. Stress and Overwhelm Release: While there are still too many variables up in the air with income and finding the next team to join, I have not been allowing the process to get me down. I have not been needing as much coffee in the afternoon. I have not be gravitating towards naps, for the most part, and am enjoying still having energy and focus to burn into the deep 3's and 4's of the afternoon. (My usual slump time is 3ish.)

6. Spiritual simplification: my spiritual life is rich and full. Perhaps my improvement here could come from stepping away from the computer-as-creative-partner and getting back into the guitar, actually playing guitar. Get back into walks in the woods, or get the mountain bike tuned up. The heat is stifling at the moment, but swimming is always an option. And I have made trips to the stores to get the goggles and snorkel and fins that will help me do more types of swimming. So I could easily add this in. But as far as spiritual, well… my daily meditation has been fairly random. Perhaps I do the old 30-days-without-fail, in order to build a habit.

7. Open My Processes: I have been invited to 4 new community efforts. 1. I am now the social media chair on the board of directors of the Austin Interactive Marketing Association. 2. I have been invited to teach several tracks to a professional entrepreneur class in the coming months. 3. I was invited by Whurley to be the Get Real Officer on his crowd-sourcing plans for the city of Austin web site development, called OpenAustin.org; 4. I was asked to be a guest editor of inSocialmedia.com. I'd say from these gifts and the continued traffic and comment success on my blog that I am doing a good job of putting myself out there.

8. Spirit: Here's how I described it in my previous post, "I'm going to call this GOAL to the carpet and LABEL it as BIG. When I am creating music I am pretty sure that I am executing at my highest level."

So two weeks ago I took my family to California and played a live show at the Orange County Fair. That's pretty ACTIVE!

I could be doing more. I have two projects in the works that I am not making too much progress on. But my AC is busted in my music studio (whine) and I have not found the right repair shop to come fix it. Even though it's a GE, the GE service guy says they don't work on those kind of units. It's called a High Wall Split System. I have a different guy coming out next week.

9. Health and Fitness: a new break out category to serve up my procrastination and successes with getting on with the workout and losing a few pounds in the process. What I can say is I have upped my tennis play to 3 times a week. And I have no problem playing for 2.5 hours in the early evening heat so my actual fitness is fine. It's the weight that's less than fine.

Several things I have done more recently: I stopped eating any added sugar for a month. (No noticeable change, but I really liked how easy it was to say no to sugary deserts.) And I had an amazing breakthrough (two actually) with the back pain. First the big one: I was having some crippling, late night wake-up pains on my right upper and mid-back. My trapezius muscle on the right side was in constant pain. Here's what I learned last week after returning from California and having no back pain.

Once I returned to the pool with my family my pain returned with a vengeance. Hello! I was being really hurt by the twenty or so one-armed throws of my son into the deep end of the pool. "Like a 60-pound shot put," a friend said yesterday.

Overall aches and pains due to tennis. The days following on of these 2+ hour matches I am often struggling with stiffness and pains and require a small ibuprofen regimen over the next 24 hours. What I learned from a massage therapist who works on a lot of professional tennis players at Andy Roddick's academy is this. All tennis players deal with ongoing pain. Twenty-year old tennis players have personal trainers (hey maybe that would help me…) physical therapists and massage therapists to get them through their workouts and practice sessions. And what this woman told me was they all have pain management issues.

So my icing, heating, using ibuprofen, getting massage is similar to what the tennis players do when it is their full-time job. And last night I played another Men's league tennis match and smoked my opponent 6-3, 6-0. A nice, very nice, finish to the week. Not that winning is everything. But a trouncing is pretty fun. [Oops. Back to balance work for me.]

UberGoal: Do better. I'm awake. Happy. Working on stuff I love with people I care about. My family is happy and I am happy. It could be better, but it's pretty good right now.

Next Right Action: Persistence and accountability in all goals. Tangible results and tracking of exercise program.

That's the best I can do.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/big-goals-AUG

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Jun 03 2009

Review, Reset, Action: the BIG GOALS of 2009 (Being Accountable for Our Own Actions)

Category: about me,community building,lifestreaming,social media,trust & reputation — jmacofearth @ 9:02 pm

As your little boat struggles through the ocean ways, you will pay… you will pay tomorrow… /
Oh, save me, save me from tomorrow, I don't want to sail with this ship of fools /
– World Party, Ship of Fools

This song seemed like a good kick off to REVIEW the BIG GOALS of 09 and RESET them for ACTION over the next 6 months of 09. [Yes, Toto, we are really heading in 2010, the year of Arthur C. Clark's return to the ideas of 2001: A Space Odyssey.]

For the full overview you can check out the Q1-update. But the summary from that update is as follows:

  1. Simplify my mental tag cloud
  2. Control, filter and capture the important bits of my personal infostream
  3. Share my personal growth and journey with new ideas, processes and technologies
  4. Gain Velocity and Agility
  5. Let go of the stress and overwhelm associated with information overload
  6. Examine spiritual simplification as part of this overall life-way (cause the Social Mesh holds the future in many ways)
  7. Open my processes to the communities I haunt and ask for other virtual pilgrims to join the call for agility
  8. Do better

REVIEW, RESET, ACTION

1. Mental Tag Cloud
Reset: The tag cloud is refining itself nicely.

OUT: Clear Green Technologies (lack of start-up funding); Social Media Video Show with NIV (we're both too busy); TEDx spec work (no time for spec); SXSWi panel (completed in April).

IN: Consulting practice on Social Media (see SocialMedia Innovation Group and Fluent Search); Music (moving from RockBand to real drums and real digital recording); uber.la (gaining momentum and readers, even picking up some work via word-of-mouth); Random consulting, silly blog launches, helping other for free (brainstorming with my housekeepers husband about two websites to establish his landscaping and tile work businesses – let me know if you need any of those services); supporting others (myfriendjoey.org may not be very active, but the connections continue around the website and the health of my friend Joey)

Action: ROI (return on interactive work), I need to focus on what helps pay the bills not what floats my boat.

Mid-Year score: 90 of 100 (Q1 score: 85 of 100)

2. Capture and Control the InfoStream
Reset: I have written a few posts of a series called InfoStream Strategies. I am doing well with this one. Current thinking: WordPress for everything. Post ideas? Start a new post in WP. Tangential brainstorms? Post on one of my alt blogs. Or launch a new idea site. Twitter fatigue? Tweet less.

Action: On track. More simplification above will refine my infostream and make more time for other priorities.

Mid-Year score: 98 out of 100 (no change from Q1 update)

3. Share
Reset: If anything my simplification and capture systems have made it easier to share. I have definitely improved on this one.

Action: Quality focus time leads to quality posts. David Winer had a great post about what exemplifies great blogging:

  1. People talking about things they know about, not just expressing opinions about things they are not experts in (nothing wrong with that, of course).
  2. Asking hard questions that powerful people might not want to be asked.
  3. Saying things that few people have the courage to say.

Two additions or (b) add-ons would be:

  1. (b) In addition to #2 about ASKING the questions, ANSWERING the questions is also the quality of a great blog.
  2. (b) And holding yourself accountable to your own standards and ideas is another challenge of a great blog. If you say it, do it. Thinking it and writing about it dosen't count if you don't follow through. (I am trying to do this one on a regular basis.)

Mid-year score: 90 out of 100 (Q1 score: 85 out of 100)

4. Gain Velocity and Agility
Reset: I'm still task switching too much. And dropping a few commitments. But overall I am happy with my performance.

Action: To improve I could take back some velocity by GTDing some projects better. Stay focused for a period of time without ANY interruptions.

Mid-year score: 90 out of 100 (Q1 score: 75 out of 100)

5. Let Go of Information Overload
Reset: Pretty good at the mono-task. Didn't get my 17" MBP. [Oh well!]

Action: Cull dead services. If I'm not using the app/tool/social media site, let's delete it from the tag cloud all together.

Mid-year score: 90 out of 100 (unchanged)

6. Spiritual Simplification
Reset: My spiritual life remains fairly calm and unfluttered. My work/life balance however, my main fail in Q1, is still way out of whack. ;-(

Here were the 2 major complaints from my earlier self-assessment:

  1. If things are right with my world, would I have ongoing back pain? Yes I’m playing a lot of tennis, but something is out of whack.
  2. Would I be heavier than I have been since major bummer days in high school?

Ouch!

Revelation #1: I am lying on an ice pack as I type.

Revelation #2: My dress slacks are a bit tight.

What I am NOT doing is SOMETHING! Something every day. Yoga. Tennis. Walking. Even a good 20 minute session of RockBand drums can get my blood flowing.

As a consequence I am not seeing my weight come down. I assumed less stress, less fast food, and a flexible schedule would lead to effortless weight loss. Well, at 46, I guess there ain't no such thing.

Action: I must, I must, I must put my exercise plan in action. It is not that I am not exercising: I am playing tennis 2 – 3 times a week. (Note: I just entered the men's singles ladder at #14) AND it is not that I am overeating: I estimate I have desert or 2nds about 15% of the time.

Strategy to address weight: system of rewards for 5+ exercise sessions per week. (I'm not sure what the reward will be, but I think that would be a good motivator.) I will put up a chart to track my DONE days and figure out what the reward is (besides the better fitting wardrobe) in a bit.

Mid-year score: 55 out of 100 Needs improvement. (Q1 score: 45 out of 100)

7. Open My Processes to the Community
Reset: Doing well on this one. Having a virtual stand-up meeting tomorrow as part of my guest editor position on inSocialMedia.com.

Action: Keep at it. Follow up on the global consulting project from Italy.

Mid-year score: 95 out of 100 (Q1 score: 90 out of 100)

8. NEW CATEGORY: Spirit

Outline: Music, poetry, non-tech or blog-free writing. When my hierarchy of needs begins to get met my energies bubble up to my "more to life than…" projects. Some how, I left MUSIC off my goals for 09, and my parting observation from that Q1 Review captures where it fits in, pretty nicely: "Oh, boy. How did I leave out Music? Cra*! So I am moving patiently forward on buzzie.com and martiandustdevils.com my two musical projects. I guess they could go under RockBand above, but they have a little more spirit than that. Okay, gotta see how these fell off the radar. I'll check in on that in a later post."

So rather than spin this "creative" work under another category, I'm going to call this GOAL to the carpet and LABEL it as BIG.

When I am creating music I am pretty sure that I am executing at my highest level. I am listening to the whispers of creativity that get left on the type-a table of work and progress. Poetry is another, seemingly goal-free process. The goal is not to publish, get recognition, or sell. More likely the goal is to capture an idea/feeling/moment in words that move beyond prose or explanation.

Funny tidbit: I recently launched yet another self-centered blog: john.mcelhenney.com | song : poem : moment. In a Facebook status update where I reported my launch: "Just put up a ton of my unpolished music and even a book of poetry (i hear groans) at http://john.mcelhenney.com"

Comment #1 was from a real poet, "cool poems." Comment #2 was from a tangential "friend" someone who I had recently added but who had never commented or interacted with me online in any way. He said, "Poetry???? Okay, I'll groan."

So one was a connect. The other was a … what? An attempt at a connect? A joke. My response internally was, "meh." On Facebook I wrote: "not a reader?" So the one time this "friend" chose to connect was in sarcasm about my poetic expression. Ho hum. I just find it funny how that struck this person as a way to interact.

I UNDERSTAND the sentiment. I even put the bait out there for someone to groan. I didn't expect it to come back so plainly. But in fact the groan I was expressing was how long it had taken me to publish (republish actually) this little book of love/loss poems I wrote back in 1987. And the exposure of a bunch of songs in their "unfinished" process form.

Summary: I have a number of musical projects underway. My solo/band project Buzzie has 2 CDs in process. The first, On the Inside, is an EP of 4 songs. I am expecting to finish this one any day. See the cover art here. The second CD is a full-length disc, Admitting There's a Problem, will take a bit more time to wrap up. But I expect it to be done in the next 6 weeks. So that… drum roll please…

I am playing a the International Pop Overthrow gig in California on July 26. And the more CDs I have the more likely I am to pay for my trip. I would like to have wrapped up both discs by that time. And I hope to have pressed copies of my first 2 CDs which are out of print. But this puts my Spirit Score pretty HIGH. The only thing I could do more openly is start rehearsing for the show and playing a few open mics to get prepped. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. (grin)

Action: Two open mics before the end of June to boost my score to 100.

Mid-Year score: 95 out of 100

Uber Goal: Do Better
Reset: In the broadest sense of doing better I am keeping most of my high marks. While I did not rectify my Spiritual Work/Life (Overweight) Balance, I did add Music back to the plan in a big way. I have made strides to continue my consulting and virual/open teaming practice. I am continuing to provide help and assistance to others for free. And I would rank my overall happiness in the high 90's. But i'm still uncomfortable in my comfortable slacks.

My overall energy score would also be in the upper 90's. I'm awake. Happy. Working on stuff I love with people I care about. My family is happy and I am happy. It could be better, but it's pretty good right now.

Action: Persistence and accountability in all goals. Tangible results and tracking of exercise program.

Mid-year score: 80 out of 100 (down one point from Q1)

That's a wrap. I'll keep you updated as I go along. Thanks for staying with me on this. And if you have hints, encouragements, corrections or ideas I am happy to hear and share them.

Oh, one more thing… One of the most helpful processes I have been learning and returning to is patience. Patience with myself, patience with the process, patience with others. So even though I am hammering myself a bit in this post, especially #6, I am pretty easy on myself. I did not gain this extra weight overnight, and even in the best of exercise programs, I will not drop the weight overnight. So I get back on the horse each day, put up my goals and give'm another go.

That's the best I can do.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/big-goals-09

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Next Page »

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future posts

∴ A Collaborative Space: WebEx, Go-To-Meeting, Skype, Basecamp (Teaming/Meeting Tools)
∴ Twitter Problem: How do you find enough interesting people to follow? Then how do you keep up with them?
∴ The Agile Mind: Construction, Evolution, Care, and Feeding Instructions for Mental Flexibility

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