Disrupting Innovation

No matter how good you think you are - you can only work on one single thing at any one time. And that one thing you decide to work on is the highest priority item to you at that time. Somehow in your decision making process you have come to the conclusion that the particular item is the highest priority possible. I

Get a notebook and do the following:

i) First thing in the morning, take 5 minutes and write down all your outstanding tasks on a piece of paper

ii) Rank each task with the following letters
a. A - is the urgent and important items that need to be taken care of
b. B - is the medium and semi-important tasks
c. C - is the low priority items that are not urgent nor important.

iii) The "A's" are the tasks that need to be completed first.

iv) Rank all the A's with a number 1, 2, 3, ... And down through the B's and C's too.

v) Your Priority list is now ranked as A1, A2, ...An, B1, B2, .... Bn, C1, C2, ... Cn.

vi) Complete you tasks in order throughout the day in the order they are in your list, and add new ones as they come up

vii) Always carry your paper task list with you to meetings etc to have it handy.

viii) The next morning, start over. Take 5 minutes and write down all outstanding tasks and rank them as A, B and C, etc...

Enjoy it and be more productive from tomorrow !

In order to better manage with your full inbox you need to know the 4 Ds of Email Management.

For each email you receive you have to do one of the following 4 actions:

1) Delete it = it isn't relevant to you or should be deleted after a quick scan

2) Do it = Do it now - before you read the next email. Any item that takes less than 2 minutes to complete should be done now.

3) Delegate it = Have somebody else do it - so forward on the request

4) Date/Time Action it = This is the most difficult scenario to manage! Not all emails can be actioned immediately, nor should they be. It may be an email related to checking on a status of something a month from now, or will take a significant amount of time that needs to be reserved in your calendar. Most people take the approach that outstanding mails would be marked as "Unread" and hopefully checked again tomorrow (I am one of them). But most become buried in the sea of incoming emails the next day and lost or not actioned. To deal with these emails read the next posts.

Like the "one laptop for a child" campaign, this is a fantastic, disrupting, useful innovation.

Professor Joshua D Silver, while studying mirrors, discovered a new way to change the curvature of lenses. He applied this to create a new form of liquid-filled corrective lens, that could be easily adjusted by the wearer to correct the vision of over 90% of people requiring correction. This is particularly useful for people in developing countries where specially trained optometrists are not available.
This kind of glasses cost as much as 20 US$, but when in production their cost could go down up to 1$.
Check out the video on YouTube.

YouTube, hoping to counter the competition from sites like NBC and Hulu, has started running full-length episodes of CBS programming.

Executives at the Google-owned video site told Reuters that CBS would handle ad sales for its shows and share the revenue with YouTube. In the meantime, CBS does not have a programming deal with Hulu, although the video site does direct users who search for that network’s shows back to the CBS site.

CBS has one of the most subscribed channels on YouTube, with 83,000 users signed up. The channel debuted two years ago and has recorded 4.2 million views. There are only four CBS shows currently available in the full-episode mode on YouYube-- Beverly Hills 90210, StarTrek: The Original Series, The Young and the Restless and MacGyver.

You can access the episodes from here, but geographic restrictions applies (US residents only).

The title says it all.

WorldMate Live: check your flight on real time
WorldMate Live will manage your full itinerary, including travel arrangements and business meetings, making all details immediately accessible on your mobile device, and ensure smooth as possible trip by pushing alerts regarding imminent events.
Free features available include the My Itineraries function, which stores information on flights, hotels, meetings, public transportation and car rentals on BlackBerrys. The application also lets users export travel information from booking confirmation e-mails, corporate calendars and more, directly into WorldMate Live, and it automatically assembles their itineraries.



Google Maps: Mobile Mapping With Satellite Imagery
Google Maps for BlackBerry is a mobile mapping application that provides location-based information and services to mobile handsets with or without the use of GPS. The "My Location" function employs nearby cell towers to determine rough locations of mobile phone users so no information needs to be entered. The application also provides satellite imagery from the Google Earth service and can deliver driving--or step-by-step walking--directions with real-time traffic alerts in some 30 major U.S. cities.

The author is unknown, the story is amazing, enjoy it :

An American businessman was standing at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish.

"How long it took you to catch them?" The American asked.
"Only a little while." The Mexican replied.
"Why don't you stay out longer and catch more fish?" The American then asked.
"I have enough to support my family's immediate needs." The Mexican said.
"But," The American then asked, "What do you do with the rest of your time?"

The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life, senor."

The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds you buy a bigger boat, and with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats."

"Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own can factory. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise."

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But senor, how long will this all take?"
To which the American replied, "15-20 years."
"But what then, senor?"

The American laughed and said, "That's the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO (Initial Public Offering) and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions."
"Millions, senor? Then what?"

The American said slowly, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos..."

This is taken from a Martin Luther King speech:

“I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”