Genuine Curiosity

A resource for the travel-weary

I can't believe I never knew about it, but I just found out about a wonderful resource for frustrated air travelers. This is particularly handy for those of us in the northern hemisphere, since we're getting into the height of over-booked, under-experienced travel: summer vacations.

The resource I learned about is the "Coalition for an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights" (CAPBOR). They can be reached in the US by phone at 1-877-FLYERS6 (1-877-359-3776), and they are staffed by volunteers who specialize in helping you deal with problems you encounter during air travel. Add it to your address book, just in case.

CAPBOR helps you understand your rights, formulate your requests in the best way to circumvent rigid airline policies, and if you have a canceled flight they will even help you find out flight status / alternate flights, help you book hotels and car rentals, and find out weather information.

You can find out more about CAPBOR and their mission at flyersrights.com, and learn about the services they can offer. They also have an excellent blog at strandedpassengers.blogspot.com. Both are well worth checking out.

---

Related items:

• CAPBOR's Stranded Passenger Survival Guide
• Things to do in the middle seat (6/28/2006)
• Packing without wrinkles (11/17/2005)
• LifeHack: Knowing whether you've got good airline seats (9/5/2005)

On the trail to learning

You may not have noticed it since I 'pre-wrote' some posts here that went live automatically, but last week I was on a 200-mile horse trek with my son and a bunch of other folks. It was an awesome learning experience, with no phone, no email, no electricity, etc.

There was pletny of time to work hard, reflect, enjoy the scenery, and recharge on that trip. There was also a ton of new things to learn.

I had the chance to share a few insights from that trip in this month's "Rapid Fire Learning" roundup at Joyful Jubilant Learning (JJL). Click through to JJL find out what I learned, and please share your top 5 learnings for June in the comments of that post.

Back of the Napkin - free teleseminar

I just found out that there is a free teleseminar coming up on July 9th for Dan Roam's book, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. Joining Dan on the call will be Seth Godin, Anil Dash and Rich Sloan so it will be very good, I'm sure.

If you recall, I reviewed The Back of the Napkin last week and I think it's awesome (that's Dan over there on the left).

You can register for the free seminar or find out more at Dan's blog.

Yapta gets more amazing

Yapta (Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant) which I reviewed in the past, is launching some new capabilities today. To refresh your memory, the things Yapta is best at are:

1. helping you track airfare prices to get the best deal (you get alerts when the price drops) and
2. helping you get money back from the airlines if the price drops after you buy your tickets (again, they alert you and provide instructions for how to get a refund or a voucher from the airline)

I've been using this for a while and, thanks to "best" #2, I've gotten several hundred dollars back form United when my airfare dropped on one of my family's vacation trips.

What's new today?

In the past, you had to use a browser add-on to get Yapta's functionality, which meant you used a bunch of other web sites to search for flights and used the add-on to "tag" the trips you want to watch.

Now, they've unified several capabilities into a web experience that doesn't require a browser add-on. You can, through their web site:

• quickly search for the cheapest flights based on your saved preference profile,
• start tracking price fluctuations for a number of routes and flight combinations all at once (great for planning trips that are a good distance in the future), and
• get alerts via email when fares drop or fall below a "target" price that you can configure.

After you purchase your ticket, the site will alert you when you're elegibile for a travel credit from the airline. That's how I got my vouchers from United - and it was dirt simple, since I followed the instructions Yapta included in their email.

They've also added some other convenience features like storing your frequent flier numbers, information on your unused tickets, and information on your travel credits.

There's much more than I've described here - check it out yourself -- for free -- at Yapta today.

The Back of the Napkin

The other day, I was on a conference call with Cliff Atkinson (author of Beyond Bullet Points) who was training a group of folks on How to Create Your Graphics LIVE on a Tablet PC, Whiteboard or Piece of Paper (one of his weekly e-Lessons). One of the tips he gave us to get better at ad-hoc presentations was to read Dan Roam's book, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.

Seth Godin's review (see the diagram at right , from the dust jacket of the book) says it all. This is a very interesting book, and I've already applied some of the concepts from the book to improve a couple of whiteboarding sessions at the office.

The gist of it is to use drawings instead of dry slides or wordy diatribes to explain your ideas. Instead, engage the audience by creating simple diagrams to illustrate your points. The big problem I have: coming up with good graphics to illustrate my point. I am finding that a) practice helps, and b) if I am planning to do a talk, part of that planning should include brainstorming how I can tell the story better with pictures, and deciding which pictures to use.

The book is full of examples, along with techniques to help you come up with visual methods to present various topics and problems in a compelling way. For example, you'll find chapters on:

• Pictures that solve a Who / What problem
• Pictures that solve a How Much problem
• Pictures that solve a Where problem
• Pictures that solve a When problem
• Pictures that solve a How problem
• Pictures that solve a Why problem

And even if you don't choose to do everything in pictures, you'll find techniques that will help you structure and simplify your message for greater effectiveness.

This book isn't just for people who do presentations all the time. I bet you'll find that the skills you'll develop by studying and applying the approach in this book will dramatically increase your effectiveness in meetings, and improve your ability to "sell" your ideas to others.

Smart To-Do List software

If you're looking for a straightforward way to track your to-do's, organize projects, and keep yourself on track, you might find what you need with "Smart To-Do List." This Windows-based application helps you create projects, track progress, rate task importance, and filter your tasks.

The software is intended to be "GTD Friendly" so you can manage projects, priorities, and contexts all from within the tool. For example, you can tag tasks @Office if they need to be peformed at your office, and you can filter based on these tasks. Pretty neat approach.

The product does a nice job of segmenting tasks by projects, as well, and I found it very easy to change projects or contexts and quickly refocus on what I should be doing.

For me, the only drawback is that all of my task information "lives" in Outlook, and there is no automatic synchronization. This product does offer import/export capabilities, but they are manual as this is really a standalone application.

I am experimenting with using To-Do List as the UI for a couple of projects to see how a blended approach works. Basically, I put a "pointer" in my tasks list in Outlook for a project, which reminds me that the project 'lives' in Smart To-Do List so I can manage it from there.

I've been trading emails with the folks at the company, and they are really passionate about this product and committed to ongoing enhancement of the product so I'm optimistic the product will be even better in the future..

The publisher provides a free, 30-day trial so you can download Smart To-Do List figure out if this is a tool you want to adopt. By the way - if you decide to evaluate it, be sure and read the help file - while you can start using the product immediately without it, the Help system introduces some advanced features that are not obvious from looking at the UI.

Review: Divide or Conquer

Management books typically aren't riveting. This one grabbed me from the start.

It's Diana McLain Smith's "Divide or Conquer," and the thing that grabbed me were the stories / case studies presented in the book. The first "meaty" one analyzes the "Steve Jobs and John Sculley days" of Apple, and does a phenomenal job of breaking down the dynamics, dysfunctions, errors, and blind spots that caused all kinds of turmoil at Apple, ultimately ending in Steve Jobs being removed from his job.

The interesting thing about this case study and some of the others in the book is that Jobs and Sculley were friends in the beginning, but parted with bitterness and frustration. This kind of thing happens all the time in business and personal relationships, and this book seeks to help us understand why and suggests ways to prevent it from happening.

I see dead people

The first key is to be able to recognize the signs when things are on the wrong path. Smith provides some great models, examples, and techniques to help you here. More importantly, she provides some tools to help you push the reset button and try to get things on a healthier trajectory.

Brilliant stuff, and very practical.

Not navel gazing

A lot of books about improving communications and relationships seem very touchy-feely and don't seem like things that would work in the world I live in. This book's not like that. Sure, there are plenty of things about feelings and emotions, but the approach is a bit more logical / clinical than I usually see in these sorts of books. I really like it because it deals with people's egos and insecurities, but in a way that seeks to find out what's going on behind the actions, and provides suggestions for how to improve and change the situation, rather than just getting better at sucking it up.

In short, this is an excellent book if you are trying to improve the dynamics of your relationships - particularly work relationships where you are dealing with lots of egos, turf wars, and things of that sort.

Updated: Free presentation creation seminar

[Note: This post previously announced this seminar - now it tells you how to access the archive]

This morning, I saw an online seminar by Cliff Atkinson (author of Beyond Bullet Points) called: Creating a 15-Minute Presentation in 1-Hour. It is a very useful walk-through of the process from start-to-finish, and illustrates the concepts from Cliff's book very effectively.

You can access the content by clicking the link above (may require a free registration at Microsoft Office Online).

Take advantage of this Freebie if you have any interest in improving your presentation creation skillz.

Cliff's seminars never disappoint - I'm a member of his Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) community, and it is worth the price of admission - he does weekly e-Lessons on various topics, including soliciting topics from volunteers in the BBP community. He actually creates presentations with the volunteers, based on their topic - cool stuff.

---

Related items

• Beyond Bullet Points (11/1/2005)
• *Beyond* Beyond Bullet Points (11/16/2005)

Eluma opens it up

Last month, I wrote about Eluma 2.0 (Eluma: Browse, organize, and share) which is a pretty cool tool for organizing, sharing, and tracking web-based information (web sites, RSS, web clippings, etc.) on Windows XP and Windows Vista. At the time of my original review, Eluma was in private beta.

Good news: Eluma has unleashed the hounds, and Eluma 2.0 is now in public beta. You can find out more about Eluma and download the beta at their web site. They also have a useful blog that discusses how to cope with information overload (using Eluma, of course).

Here is their video fly-by:

There is a lot of new stuff in the new version, and it keeps improving.

---

Technorati tags: personal productivity, gadgets, gtd

---

Improve your productivity: Establish your operating principles

Last week, I posted about some excellent analysis by Tim Ferriss ("You wouldn't like me when I'm unproductive...") comparing the "fighting styles" of various productivity gurus. If you aren't familiar with Tim's work, he is the author of "The 4 Hour Work Week," which is chock full of ideas to change you life. It certainly changed my mental models in a significant way.

Anyway, browsing around Tim's blog, I stumbled across his Flickr photostream where I saw the photo at right. It depicts a set of operating guidelines he developed while working with a department in a Fortune 500 company.

I really like this concept, and my colleague Matt and I are just beginning to experiment with our own variations of this approach. If you break down what's on the board, it has an excellent set of guidance embedded in it:

• Throttle back on email. Don't check it constantly, and don't do work email away from work.
• Focus on a few specific, high value activities per day.
• Record your results - and if you're on a team, let the team know what you're doing (I love that they are using a Wiki for that).
• Minimize unproductive chatting.
• Focus on one thing at a time and avoid the overhead of multitasking. (My buddy Gene and I use the analogy that even though an air traffic controller has lots of planes queuing up, each one should only land one plane at a time.)
• Get out on time. I think this has a good psychological effect for driving better focus, and helps prevent tasks from expanding to consume all the available time.

I'll keep you posted on how it goes with our experiment. I don't know if I can go quite as "purist" as what's on this board. For example, given how my work is structured, it's unlikely that I'll totally eliminate all after-hours email in the near future, but I can certainly do less of it.

Even so, I definitely think establishing some operating guidelines like these will help me and the others on my team.

Total Workday Control

In my continuing quest for methods and tools to make me more productive, I've been reading and applying Michael Linenberger's latest techniques from the 2nd edition of his book, Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook. As I've chronicled here in the past (see "My GTD Odyssey" - Parts 1, 2, 3, 4), I have been a follower of Michael's methods for a long time.

One of the reasons I liked them is that they were more prescriptive than -- but still philosophically compatible with -- David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) methodology. I found Linenberger's instructions to be more actionable and specific, and they helped me sustain my productivity better than GTD alone. As I mention in my GTD Odyssey posts, with GTD I missed the "go to the list; get next task" feel that I remember from my old Franklin/Covey days - and Linenberger's method feels more comfortable in this regard.

"Manage Your Now"

In this second edition, Linenberger has raised the bar again and introduces more techniques, workflows, and Outlook tweaks to help make things easier. He's even moved beyond "Total Workday Control" to establish a methodology he refers to as "Managing Your Now" or "MYN" for short (I suppose everybody's gotta have a 3-letter acronym, or TLA, these days).

The book walks you through a step-by-step sequence for setting up Outlook for better email, task, and calendar management through the use of customized views to help you filter the information you must deal with to get your work done (the book's example of the Task view is at right).

MYN involves managing to a "Now Horizon" and segmenting your tasks. Basically, you are able to create several tiers of priority:

• Critical-Now: the 1-3 tasks that must be done today
• Target-Now: high priority items that you would like to do today but are not urgently due
• Opportunity-Now: medium priority items that need to be done soon, and could be done today if the right opportunity presents itself
• Over-the-Horizon: items that are on your lists, but you've consciously pushed them out for future consideration

This filtering and sorting method has made it much easier for me to become more methodical about working through the tasks on my lists, and the views described in the book provide a sort of "at a glance" cockpit to help you pilot your day. Find out more in the sample chapter available on the book web site.