Some BRILLIANT news from Microsoft. They have made OneNote available on all platforms for FREE! This includes for the MAC for which I have been waiting for so long. Not having OneNote on the MAC was a huge limitation for me given I use it so much.
What Microsoft said was:
We have some exciting new developments for OneNote to share with you! In short these include:
1. OneNote for Mac is available for the first time and for free! With this, OneNote is now available on all the platforms: PC, Mac, Windows tablets, Windows Phone, iPad, iPhone, Android and the Web. And they’re always in sync.
2. OneNote is now free everywhere including the Windows PC desktop and Mac version. Premium features are available to paid customers.
3. The OneNote service now provides a cloud API enabling any application to connect to it. This makes it easier than ever to capture ideas, information and inspirations from more applications and more places straight into OneNote.
So if you haven’t experienced the joy of OneNote, now there is no excuse not to be using it EVERYWHERE!
I’m installing on my MAC as we speak and will report shortly on what I find.
Tag: Productivity
Two sound suggestions
Thought I’d share with you two sound ‘suggestions’ I’ve come across recently.
In my never ending search for methods to be more productive I’ve tinkered with different types of background sound to help improve my focus. The best I have found so far is Focus at Will.
There are free and paid options as well a number of different sound tracks you can listen to. At the very least I urge you to give it a try and see if it does help your focus as that is what the tracks have been specifically designed for.
The other thing you may not have seen with Chrome is that when a tab is playing something a little speaker icon appears on that tab as shown above. This is great when you a lot of tabs open and some annoying ad starts making noise. A quick search of the tab headings in Chrome will allow you to locate that quickly and easily so you can deal with.
Love to hear what results you get with Focus at Will, because it has been very effective for me.
Better utilization
Although I am not one for New Year’s resolutions I am certainly one for settings goals. One of the ideas I have been mulling over of late is the ineffectiveness with which I have been approaching the resources I have access to.
If I stop and look at all the tools I have access it would be rare that I use even 20% of their full features. Many things, I suggest I would use even less. It is so easy to get distracted and lose focus with so many different options today but I started wondering how much more use I could make of what I already have if I simply spent some extra time learning what features are available and try and move the utilization of that tool closer to 80%.
One the other side of the coin, there are plenty of things that I have signed up for or access occasionally that I really don’t make good use of. If I don’t and I can find such features elsewhere I really should stop using that tool and simplify things.
So with those ideals in mind I am going to try and dedicate myself to looking more closely at the resources I already have and whether I can use them better or whether in fact I shouldn’t be using them at all. Basically optimization if you will.
My approach is going to be to focus more on something when I do use it the next time and try and learn a little bit more about it rather than just using the defaults as I always do. Hopefully, this will move me more towards my goal of 80% utilization along with reduction in the number of things that I do in fact use. I have already found it somewhat frustrating to spend that extra time dedicated to learning about something in depth rather than just moving on to the next item, however in the long run I believe it will pay dividends.
So the my question for you is, how much of the stuff you are doing now could be done better if you just looked a bit deeper into the tools that you use? Even a few percentage points more utilization I believe can yield significant returns.
The second fundamental difference between Office 365 and Google Apps
If you haven’t read what I believe is the first fundamental difference between Google Apps and Office 365 then you’ll find it here:
https://blog.ciaops.com/2013/08/the-fundamental-difference-between.html
The second fundamental difference is that Google Apps does not understand collaboration and here’s a few reasons why.
Google Apps and Office 365 are mainly about a suite of products. The main product most focus on is email. You know what? Email is a commodity. So many suppliers do it and there is not much real value or differentiation you can apply to email, in, as long as a business gets their emails who generally cares beyond that right? From a functionality point of view email is email and thus a commodity. Therefore whatever email functionality one provider has is generally the same as another provider so let’s agree to say hosted email systems are pretty equal.
What I will tell you is that email is an ‘old world’ technology. Today’s world is all about sharing and making information public so that it can be shared rather than siloed in someone’s inbox never to be seen again. Why do you think Facebook has over one billion users? Today people want to SHARE information. As a business I need to collaborate on all sorts of information quickly and easily including, files, folders, calendars, contacts, tasks and so on.
I will also tell you that those entering the work force now have little concept of traditional drive letters. They have no concept of C: and D: drives. They have no concept of network drives. They have no concept of mapped drives. To them it is simply data and the technology that gives them access is search. So the concept of files and folders in ‘traditional’ folders is really old world stuff.
When you take a look at how Google Apps approaches data they seem to me to still be locked into that old world of files and folders.
When you put files into Google Apps it goes into it’s own separate drive area. This is just like my old C: drive right? Can I add more columns or metadata around these files? Not from what I can see. Sure you can add a star but what about if I want to categorize files by customers? Again, just dumb old files and folders. How is that ANY different from what I did on my PC XT in 1984 in DOS?
SharePoint by contrast provides a single web location for files AND folders AND calendars AND tasks AND everything in ONE PLACE in what is known as a Team site. In the repository within the SharePoint Team Site that holds files and folders you can add as many columns as you like to describe your data. These columns can be text, numbers, dates or your a set of your own choices. You can sort and filter on multiple columns. You can create multiple views of the same data. For example you can change what file listings actually display to be just the file name if you want.
That is collaborative thinking not simply migrating old world thinking to hosted storage as what Google Apps have done.
In Google Apps if I want to move from Drive to my Calendar I click Calendar from the menu across the top. That opens a new browser tab with my calendar. But wait, isn’t that similar to opening a new application on my desktop computer by double-clicking an icon? Yup, it is. What happens if I return to the Drive tab again and click Calendar again? Just like double clicking on a desktop icon again it opens ANOTHER browser tab to show my calendar AGAIN, even though I ALREADY have a calendar tab open. Now I have two calendar tabs open. Again, old world thinking now just brought to you in a browser.
In SharePoint, click on the team site calendar you are taken there. Click on tasks, you are taken there, just as you would expect in a modern web environment!
Now let’s say that I want to create somewhere dedicated to a project. This will need a location for files and folders, calendar, contacts, emails, tasks and so on just for starters. How do you do that in Google Apps? I can go into another area and create a Google Site but then how do I get a common calendar there? How do I display my files? How do I create a shared tasks list? Again, old world thinking being one app for one job. I NEED collaboration not just storage.
Ok, so let’s take something that Google should be good at, search. If I am in my Google Apps Drive area and I want to search for an item in a calendar I can’t, I can only search in my files. Why is that? If I need to find something I want to search from anywhere and find it. Again, I don’t want to be constrained in a siloed ancient world. I NEED collaboration. I NEED to get to my information from anywhere as I might not know where it is.
When I use the Search option across the top in Google Apps I end up searching the whole web not just my data. This reinforces my first fundamental difference concept between Google Apps and Office 365. Google Apps is provided by an advertising business, who are principally seeking to maximise advertising revenue.
Look at what is the top result when I attempt to search in Google Apps. IT IS AN ADVERTISMENT! Again, see my first fundamental difference.
If I need to find something in SharePoint I go to the top right and and enter what I am after in the search box. Bingo, as you can see from the above I get results from file name, file contents, calendars, contact, tasks and basically everything on that site. I also get a preview of some document content embedded automatically on the page. With a few clicks I can expand that search to every SharePoint site I have access to. I can filter the results by file type, author, date and so. Isn’t this what modern collaborative search is all about? I should be able to search across everything I have access to in one hit. I also don’t see ANY results or options to search any information but my own and I don’t get advertising unlike with Google Apps.
As I said previously, the new world is all about social. What happens when I try to be social in Google Apps?
I am asked to join Google’s public social network Google Plus. What happens when I join there? Is my information private? Nope. Am I pushed more advertisements? Most likely. Without question, failing to integrate your environment with social abilities is really old world thinking.
SharePoint by contrast has private social networking built in. It allows the integration with Linkedin and Facebook out of the box if desired. Microsoft is integrating the enterprise social networking product Yammer into SharePoint and Office 365 every day bringing more and more social functionality to their products. Why? Because social is the new way to collaborate, it is how things will be happening going forward in the modern age.
I could go on and on with example after example of how Google Apps just isn’t a modern collaboration platform. Likewise, I could mention in contrast how SharePoint has inbuilt automation with workflows, how it allows you to work with groups of documents known as document sets, how it has inbuilt eDiscovery and more, oh so much more. Microsoft has been developing SharePoint since 2001 as a modern collaborative platform because it understands what collaboration means. Google Apps is still no where near a modern collaboration platform from what I see. They have a long way to come to even be in the ball game. When you boil their solution down, it is just like a normal desktop PC just with a different storage location. Old world stuff I am sorry to say.
Now honestly ask yourself which product understands and supports the concept of true modern collaboration? Which product is continuing to modernize their collaboration platform with the way that people will work in the future? I hope you understand why I can honestly say with my hand on heart that only Microsoft does because Google Apps just doesn’t understand collaboration, or as they would say in Hollywood:
Google has brought email to a collaboration fight.
No work at work
One of the best books that I’ve read this year is Rework. If you haven’t read it then you should no matter whether you run a business or not. I’ve also posted previously about how the authors are focused on improved productivity, unlike so many other businesses these days. Thanks to Hilton Travis there’s now another video of Jason Fried where he talks about how most people say that the office (i.e. work) is not the place they go to actually do work (i.e. be productive).
You’ll find the video here:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/12/05/fried.office.work/index.html
and it is only 15 minutes or so long but well worth the watch if you want to begin to understand why being at work destroys your productivity. Jason also provides some suggestions for boosting the productivity of the work place by not having meetings and having a period of silence to allow people to concentrate. Now that’s novel eh?
It is amazing to me how many businesses, large and small, are still struggling to be more competitive. My advice? Take a look at your environment and see whether you are actually allowing your employees to work. If you are an individual I challenge you to closely examine how much uninterrupted time (no emails, no phone calls, no interruptions, etc) you allow yourself in a day. If you are honest about it then I think you’ll find out that you really are just spinning your wheels.
If you want more free time I say then you need to commit to being more productive. Until then you are simply in denial.
A distraction on distractions
Following from yesterdays blog post on distractions here are some more articles worth reading if you are interested in productivity:
Blunt the e-mail interruption assault
The average information worker — basically anyone at a desk — loses 2.1 hours of productivity every day to interruptions and distractions, according to Basex, an IT research and consulting firm.
Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows
But after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.
“They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Everything distracts them”.
Booher’s surveys of clients have shown that 58% of workers spend up to three hours a day on e-mail. Though some of that e-mail time is undoubtedly related to getting their jobs done, she says, much of it is a waste because messages are either poorly written or have little or nothing to do with business.
So the more distractions you can eliminate the more work you’ll get done. Simple eh? But how many people are actually doing this? To me it seems like they are adding more and more distractions.
If you want to track your productivity I’d suggest you have a look at RescueTime, ManicTime or Wakoopa. They all have free options so there is no cost and if does at least allow you to better understand how you are spending your time that is still a good thing isn’t it?
Growth vs efficiency
It seems to me that one of the biggest fallacies of modern business is the idea that you ‘have to grow’. Especially in the small business end of the spectrum, why is it that I always hear how critical (and yet difficult) it is to grow? Apparently growth magically solves everything! The bigger your business the more money you’ll make, the less time individually you’ll have to work and everything will just coast along once you get to a critical mass.
So the question then becomes what is that critical mass? At what point will you know that you’ve reached ‘easy street’? I’m sorry to say that in my experience not only is this a moving target but the chances of success actually decrease the bigger that your business becomes. Why? Because unless you have refined your systems beforehand you are simply building any growth on the weak structure you’ve had as a small operator. This is a recipe for disaster.
It would seem to me that a far more intelligent pursuit would be striving to become more efficient. In essence producing at least the same amount of output with less amount of input. When you are not able to become more efficient then, and only then, should you consider growth as an option. The problem is how many businesses do you know that are constantly looking at ways to improve their efficiency? Not many I’ll bet.
The smaller you are the leaner you need to be simply because you don’t have the resources. You should spend your time firstly determining what you do well. Then you should determine what you don’t do well and either outsource it or stop doing it. Sometimes it is hard to stop doing something you shouldn’t because you truly enjoy it, however if you are running a business and not a hobby then the choice is straight forward.
Formula 1 cars don’t achieve the speed and performance they do by adding more, they become more and more efficient. The teams invest vast amounts of time and energy looking to squeeze the tiniest improvement in performance but it is exactly this that makes the difference between outright first and the first of the losers (i.e. second). Formula 1 is a business and those who don’t perform end up on the scrap heap.
Ask yourself whether you are a Formula 1 car or simply a lorry trundling along with stuff overflowing the sides. Efficiency is all about doing more with less which is difficult in a consumer world where the emphasis is always to ‘buy more stuff’. That however is the reason why not everyone goes Formula 1 racing, if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it.
So set aside some time to do some planning on how to become more efficient. Work out where you are spending your time. Look at ways to automate and outsource. Efficiency requires constant work and fine tuning but in the end is far cheaper, faster and easier to implement than any growth strategy. Just because people ‘say’ you need to grow doesn’t necessarily make it the correct strategy. Being efficient will always yield results where growth may not. To a business person the choice between the two seems obvious to me.
Are you addicted?
A recent article in the New York Times made me wonder whether in fact it is possible to be addicted to technology. The article is well worth the read and it harps back to what I have said many times about how multitasking is a myth. Is the real issue here that people have become ‘addicted’ to technology?
Addiction actually turns out to be something rather hard to define specifically. Everybody ‘knows’ what addiction is but few can actually satisfactorily define. I like this definition from Robert West (Theory of Addiction) –
‘syndrome at the centre of which is impaired control over behaviours, and this loss of control is leading to significant harm’
Unfortunately this definition also requires us to define what may constitute ‘harm’. For this case let’s consider that we have no more precious resource than time, for once it passes it is gone forever. Thus, let us consider harm as being anything that reduces the time we have.
Let me now ask you, when was the last time you totally unplugged from technology? When did you simply turn everything off for a day or two? Most people probably shudder at the mere thought but doesn’t being unable to do so indicate a loss of control? Doesn’t it indicate an impaired control over your behaviour? In short, doesn’t that indicate addiction?
Sure, there are plenty of great things that technology provides however as I have said before, your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness. The secret is control which when it comes to technology we seem to have less and less of. The distraction virus is a growing problem facing individuals unable to control their dependence on technology. You know these people, there the ‘gunnas’ (i.e. going to do this, going to do that) or those who are always ‘so busy’ when in reality they are living in denial because it is all just an excuse.
This lack of control is causing us to focus on the wrong priorities, it is making us overlook the important, resulting in wasted time. Thus it is causing us harm. Therefore many are addicted but sadly many probably do not even realize it.
At the end of the day it is all about results. Most people don’t care how you get the result they simply care that you get the result. Technology can certainly be used to get results faster and more efficiently but likewise it can also lead us down the path of distraction and even perhaps to addiction. As the article in the New York Times talks about, an obsession with gadgets and technology could be altering your behaviour and if you can no longer control that behaviour then it sounds to me like you may be addicted. If you don’t believe me see how long you can go without checking email.
CIAOPS 