The IBM Lotus Technical Information and Education (LTIE) community holds a web meeting every month. Their upcoming August session will feature eProductivity's president, Eric Mack.
Eric will be sharing how eProductivity has turned the Lotus application distribution model upside down. Instead of new technology being solely introduced by the IT department, end users are now able to find, try, purchase, and use new apps for Lotus Software. Using apps like eProductivity has in turn allowed end users to achieve higher performance.
Eric will then share 7 general considerations for creating self-serve Lotus Notes apps.
We invite you to join us for this event. Details below.
Reference items are non-actionable pieces of information that you want to hang on to. Everyone has plenty of reference items!
In my experience, digital reference items tend to come in three different forms: emails, webpage URLs, and documents (e.g. PDFs, Word documents).
For storing emails, email folders are a logical choice. For webpage URLs, many people favor web-based tools like Delicious. For documents, the My Documents folder or a network drive are common destinations, with Dropbox being a popular web-based alternative.
But I find that consolidating my reference items into a single tool works best for most of my items. (The exceptions are things like my music and picture files, which are fine in their current My Music and My Pictures folders). Too many storage locations leads to items becoming "out of sight, out of mind" and the reference items lose their value.
Instead, I prefer a single "digital filing cabinet" that I can put everything in and see it all in one place. Here's some of my criteria for picking a digital filing cabinet:
Stores any kind of file or media
New entries are easily created
Entries can be assigned to multiple categories
Allows an unlimited number of categories
Provides full-text search for finding items quickly
Accessible across different computers and mobile devices
Integrates with email
For these reasons, I'm not bashful in saying I favor the eProductivity Reference Database (available as a free download). It fits my criteria well and most importantly, it integrates well with my Lotus Notes email system. This is critical because I find most of my reference information comes via email, and I can simply drag-and-drop the email into my Reference Database to create a new entry - very slick!
The bottom-line is, I have a place that I store everything in, so stuff isn't scattered across my computer.
Another popular reference system I hear mentioned is Evernote, although I've never personally used it.
Do you have other reference tools that you use? Any tips on choosing a reference tool? Please share them in the comments!
We just kicked off a Summer Savings promotion that includes great deals on various eProductivity licenses. If you don't yet own eProductivity, make sure to take a look.
eProductivity can help you save enough time so that relaxing on the beach in one those chairs, sipping on a cool drink, could actually happen for you this summer. :-)
Telecommuter. Remote Worker. Digital Nomad. Road Warrior. These are but a few of the names used to describe people who don't regularly see their co-workers face to face. I'm one of them. Perhaps you are, too.
The names can imply different things. A road warrior is someone who takes frequent business trips while a remote worker is (usually) someone who works from home. Measuring how many people telecommute is difficult.
Regardless, telecommuting comes with it's own set of opportunities and challenges. Let me share some things I've learned.
3 Things I've Learned -
Find the Right Noise vs. Isolation Balance
Communicate Frequently with the Office
Know When to Quit
1. Find the Right Noise vs. Isolation Balance
Common advice for remote workers is to "eliminate distractions". I want to dig a little deeper.
I find I need a balance between noise and isolation. Too noisy? I can't think. Too quiet? I start distracting myself with the desire to be near the action. I hate total isolation and I prefer instead to find the right kind of noise.
Having people around me creating LOW-volume noise is great because it makes me feel connected to life. Playing music between phone calls and even singing loudly can be great for my focus - it's a special Gen-X skill. ;-) Plus it's a perq for working from home!
Less ideal noise is my family deciding to blend a smoothie...right next to my desk. (My workspace is close to the kitchen and not very sound-proof). The point here is that I find a certain degree of noise to be a productivity boost. The trick is figuring out what noises personally distract you, and which ones help.
As a side note, I find coffee shops to be an ideal mix of low-level people noise and I'm usually very productive in that environment.
2. Communicate Frequently with the Office
Geographic distance from co-workers can lead to getting out of touch with priorities. I might be churning out work, but it is it the right work? To be effective and not just efficient, keeping a strong communication flow to the office helps me stay on track and get excited about what I'm doing.
By communicate, I don't mean just checking email. I find it's vital to have regular phone calls (and video calls) to ensure my team is moving in the same direction. My colleagues and I practice the GTD method of maintaining Agenda lists leading up to our meetings. Then when we meet via phone, we can plow through the everyday items that require our mutual attention. Perhaps more importantly, we try for regular strategy meetings where we discuss the bigger picture.
Another trick we use is regularly CC'ing and BCC'ing each other on communications we send to other people, such as clients. (Private emails stay private, of course.) This way, everyone gets a better pulse on what's going on for our company. The key is that any email from colleagues that has a BCC or CC is considered "FYI only, just read and delete."
3. Know When to Quit
One of my greatest challenges working remotely is finding the right work-life balance. It's not so much that I'm getting communications from my co-workers at all hours. It's that my work is constantly available and I know there are always important projects needing finishing.
What I'm finding is that I'm noticeably less productive after a certain number of hours in my chair. I start to mark time rather than really do work. So I (try to) break for a while, because it's more important to get things done than it is to log a certain number of hours.
One trick we use is setting our Skype status indicators (online, offline, away, etc.) to communicate our general availablity. Give yourself the freedom to set your personal status indicator to "offline" on a regular basis so you have the energy to be effective during your "online" hours.
What have you learned about telecommuting? Any tips or tricks to share?
We ran some fun giveaways during today's highly successful Getting Things Done with Lotus Notes webinar. Thanks again to everyone for their participation!
Our winners are:
Julie Manning
Jonathan Pop
Tom Scanlan
YC Tan
We also awarded prizes to our 800th and 900th registrants for the event. Those folks are:
This year, unfortunately, I couldn't make it to Lotusphere in Orlando. After 2009's triumph there with the eProductivity team, I was disappointed not to attend. But, all was not lost. Today I attended the Lotusphere Comes to You roadshow, and this time I didn't have to fly half-way round the world. It was taking place in Barcelona, at the Hotel Juan Carlos I hotel, and a 20 minute walk had me arriving just before the 09:30am start.
So, how was it? I would say a 'roaring success' judging by some comments from my fellow-attendees (a crowd of around 150 attended).
The highlight for me was certainly Ed Brill's talk on the direction of Lotus collaboration. In Spanish! Well done Ed, your effort and enthusiasm were appreciated by one and all. eProductivity got a nice mention, as did yours truly (Eric Mack must have warned him of my presence). Thanks Ed. The 5-minute Project Vulcan video that Ed included left me inspired. You could almost feel the sizzle in the room, as the new tools that Lotus are building looked great. Looks like exciting things ahead for IBM Lotus software.
Ed's slide showing eProductivity:
Luis Suárez also did a very nice job of explaining the social software improvements being made in the Lotus family. Sametime, portal, mashups, social enterprise, Lotusphere prizes and case studies followed-on and, without going into any detail, rest assured that it really does show the strong offering that Lotus has.
At this year's Lotusphere, IBM Lotus VP of messaging and collaboration, Kevin Cavanaugh presented the Technology Keynote. Kevin talked about the Lotus product strategy, roadmap, and of course, Project Vulcan.
Kevin discussed how Lotus applications bring a flood of information to the user, and he pointed out a key problem that this can cause: information overload.
"... we don't need more calendars... we need a way to consolidate and adjudicate between competing events. ... we don't need more ways to capture text; we need ways to reduce the stress of unfulfilled commitments and organize tasks for action... As an industry, we're kind of guilty of multiplying lists, with no real method for how those lists of tasks might be managed. However, there are some great counter-examples..."
Kevin proceeded to talk about David Allen's Getting Things Done® (GTD®) Methodology and how eProductivity is a solution developed by Lotus Business Partner Eric Mack and David Allen to 'GTD Enable' Lotus Notes. (See the video for more).
On a related note, one theme that came out of Lotusphere was how CIOs feel that they've extracted all the cost cutting value they can from IT budgets. There's not much left to pare down. CIOs are instead focusing on making workers more productive. (Read the conversation transcript at Escape Velocity, a blog by Nathan T. Freeman)
Lotus has introduced many new improvements and enhancements to their products that can help, but at the end of the day, value creation ultimately happens at the individual level. It's at this level - increasing personal productivity - that the next great opportunity exists.
With that in mind, it's exciting to see Lotus exploring ways to increase worker productivity. One way they're doing that is by looking beyond Lotus software to the best practices of GTD and software tools like eProductivity that complement Lotus offerings and help users get things done.
Lotusphere 2010 is just over a week away (wow!), and here at eProductivity, we're pretty much swamped getting ready. It's going to be a great event with lots of exciting opportunities for eProductivity.
If you're coming to Lotusphere, please, please get in touch with us. We always enjoy meeting folks face-to-face. So far, the eProductivity team will be Eric Mack and myself. Now that you've got our pictures, you stand about 1% better odds of picking us out of the yellow-clad masses.
If you want to be certain to meet us, get in touch with us via email, phone, smoke signal, and let us know that you'll be there.
If you're new to eProductivity, the eProductivity tutorial is the single best learning tool that we offer.
(Click image for larger view)
The tutorial lets you play with eProductivity's features, and gives you guidance and tips along the way. There is nothing to install, you just open up the tutorial file and away you go. It's that simple.
If you want to get started quickly with eProductivity, I recommed using the tutorial as your first step.
One of my roles here at eProductivity is spreading the word about our software, so I love hearing your stories. It's great to see that eProductivity really works for people.
You can help to speed things along. We're offering to give your company lots of free licenses. You just need to tell them about it.
And since you, our pioneers and early adopters, have paved the way at your company, we want to refund your original eProductivity purchase. It's our way of saying thanks and putting a little extra cash in your pocket for the holidays.
Our popular webinar series is continuing thisThursday, December 10th at 10:00am PST. This will be one of the last webinars for the 2009 year, since we'll be stopping presentations for the Christmas holiday season.
Again, webinars are completely free and open to anyone. If you'd like to know more about eProductivity and what it can do for you, we'd love to have you attend. Even better, bring your eProductivity questions and ask them live. You'll get answers straight from eProductivity experts and you'll benefit the other attendees as well. To learn more and register, go here: www.eProductivity.com/webinars.
Thanks again to everyone who has attended a previous webinar! Your active participation has helped to make them successful.
To everyone who hasn't yet attended...we hope to see you soon. :)
Does this cheeseball (Butterball?) ad get your attention?
(click for larger image)
We sure hope so. After all, eProductivity Premier and Professional licenses are 50% off this week! Gobble this offer up because it ends in a few days and there won't be any leftovers.
So don't wait. Grab your friend's wallet and buy yourself a new productivity tool. The ultimate Lotus Notes productivity tool, in fact. Doesn't an empty inbox sound nice heading into the holiday season?
If you already own eProductivity, buy it for the friend whose wallet you pinched. That's called generosity! They should benefit from eProductivity too.
If they keep their wallet well-protected, at least be kind and tell them about the offer.
Taped in David Allen's office, this is an intriguing look at how David sets up his personal GTD system. The video is fairly old - created in January 2009 - so you may have seen it before. I, however, just ran across it for the first time while perusing the web and decided to share it with you all. :)
No mention of eProductivity, which he uses as his GTD software tool of choice, but that's understandable. He didn't focus on software in this particular video.
I like how he consistently advocates using a physical inbox. Letting me know I needed an inbox was the first big way that GTD has personally helped me.
We've been offering free public webinars for a few weeks now. They've definitely been a success and we've received great feedback from attendees. Thanks everyone! However, if you didn't live in the Americas, our session times may have been a little inconvenient.
That is no longer the case. We're now offering webinars at more international-friendly times.
Anyone located overseas should appreciate the changes. Although we think an Australian getting up for a 3:00am Saturday morning webinar shows great dedication - and we really appreciate it! - we want to help you get your beauty sleep too.
Bruce Lill is a Lotus Design Partner and now recently, an eProductivity user. Bruce blogs at www.brucelill.com. He has given us permission to repost some of his thoughts on eProductivity that were initially posted on his blog. Enjoy!
(Remember to click the small images to get a larger view)
eProductivity in Use - my setup:
The mail opens to the Today view shown below. The navigation lets you view all your projects, action, list and reference databases from one place. You can now really live in your mail file. The folders are from the choices you make on the eProductivity preferences. For me the projects are for internal use, clients or Lotus ( the redbook, etc). I spend most time with this navigator open as I can do almost all functionality. I use IBM's Swift file so I can put emails into folders easily. The only thing I miss is to have the "replicate now" button on the navigator. I added it to my old mail template and will probably add it here also. It is on the action bar but you have to scroll to get to it. As I work local all the time, I tend to like to refresh my mail.
My mail file's navigation after installing eProductivity.
Here is the Today view with my actions and any meetings listed. Luckily today there aren't any meetings today, so I'm doing this blog entry.
Here is what a project looks like. This one is important, it's to become more productive!
I have only 3 - project types. Projects is for internal work such as this blog, Projects - Clients is for billable projects and Projects - Lotus is for projects that I do with Lotus such as the Domino R8.5 Deployment wiki. I'll end up with more projects types as I get a better feel for how to manage my tasks. You can take emails and link, embed into tasks & projects or move then to the reference database.
I've always used database to store information, I have a customer, development, administration, and office dbs. I use the customer db to track projects, proposals, general information and correspondence. I've added code to my mail template to let me drag selected mails to a modified document library and all the email information would be stored there. This let me centralize the information and when working with others, share it.
Now it's gong to be trying to use the eProductivity Reference database instead of mine. I have moved all the emails with license and registration numbers to the reference database.
I do wish the Action list in the project form could be longer, as you can see from the image of the form, only 3-4 items are visible. you can scroll or go to a view to see more. I'm now adding a action to my project to build a list of "Nice to have" features that I will post here.
One caveat I found was creating an Action and forgetting to link it to a project. When you change folders or open your mail you will be prompted to make it a project. I hit yes and ended up with the task as a project, not what I wanted. You can't demote it, only delete it and re-do it. I'll know next time. I do wish it let me have a choice to make it a project of link it to a project.
I have found this error was do to having a context call "S/M - Projects", it seems that the Projects in the name was the cause of the problem, Easy fix. The title or subject of the Projects and actions can be formatted to appear categorized in views. I just figured this out this morning as I was updating my projects. You can group projects together by first selecting the format in your preference then for the Project title do "category - project name". In the view the project will be group by the category. here is my Lotus Projects (Project - Lotus is a project type):
Do plan for time to setup, get use to it and to adjust it to fit. You can easily change your preferences such as add project type and the left side navigation will be updated with your new choices. Really nice job.
Next post will be on using it for the deployment redbook. Go and give eProductivity a chance to change how you approach your mail.
Over on the Notes on eProductivity blog, Eric Mack riffs on some of the fundamental problems with Lotus Notes archiving options. Basically, between the (poor) options that Notes gives for archiving and the typical way that system admins configure those archiving options, the chances of users getting burned by unfortunate archiving practices are very high. In other words, archiving may cause them to lose their data and hate Notes for forever. It's pretty hard to trust a system that steals your data when you're not looking.
As a sidenote, we're working hard to give our eProductivity users an archiving method that they can trust and just simply works. Here's a screenshot of the eProductivity archive view:
We recently held two free drawings for GTD Productivity software valued at over $2,000!
We invited everyone to download and explore eProductivity for IBM Lotus Notes. Everyone that did, got their name entered in the drawing. For those people that took the time to send us their feedback, we entered their name a second time. No purchase was required.
We met many interesting people as a result and it was a great way for people to experience the productive benefits of eProductivity and have fun, too.
Six names were selected in each of two separate drawings held on June 2, and June 15, 2009.
We enjoy reading the blogs of enthusiastic eProductivity users. Here are some eProductivity blog posts. If you know of a blog that is not included this list, please let us know and we will add it.
We're giving away licenses and subscriptions to some of our favorite GTD productivity software.
Inspired by this week's GTD with Lotus Notes podcast with GTD Coach, Kelly Forrister, we've decided to take a short break from showing people how to get more done and held a drawing to equip them with a way to get more done.
Here are some of the software applications we're giving away:
Why are we doing this? Because we know that you like cool productivity tools as much as we do. And because when people try out eProductivity, they quickly understand the benefits.
In just over a week, we will hold a drawing for free GTD & productivity software. The drawing will be Monday, June 15, 2009. That's only 10 days away, so hurry and enter.
Help us spread the word. Do you blog or Tweet? Do you think this offer would be of interest to your friends? You know what to do. (Thanks!)
Several bloggers have recently shared how they are using Lotus Notes as their system for Getting Things Done using David Allen's GTD Methodology. This weekend, Jens Bruntts wrote up an extensive blog post with screen shots detailing how he's using Lotus Notes and eProductivity as his GTD Solution. Not much I can add to this except that it was really neat to see eProductivity running under Linux (thanks to Lotus Notes cross-platform support). I'm aware that many people are using eProductivity on Mac and Linux but I have only seen a few screen shots.*
* Yes, I'm a Mack and yes, I'm Mac challenged. But I did make sure that eProductivity would run cross-platform so that I can switch at any time. The hard part will be finding equivalents for GyroQ and ActiveWords.
A blog by and for productive people who get things done with IBM Lotus Notes
We recently held two 
