Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Control for team projects

I've been test driving a web-based project management tool called Projjex, and it is pretty cool. I'm using the free version, which is limited to a single project (but supports multiple users/participants for that project). Even with the single-project limitation, the free version of Projjex does a nice job of showing off the UI and features of the tool.

The user experience is very straight forward, and I can see myself using this to track progress on more complex personal projects, as well as using this for group collaboration.

Easy setup

Projjex makes it easy to set up a new project, add users, and begin adding and assigning tasks. If you want to migrate from an existing project management tool, they offer easy imports from Microsoft Project, Basecamp, or a CSV (comma-separated value) file.

The most common functions are easily accessible from within a project, via a straight-forward Edit menu (at right).

There are also so very good video tutorials in the product so it's a snap to get going.

Easy management

Projjex provides a clean dashboard to monitor the "next action" or "next in line" tasks and their owners (click the image below for a larger view - you may have to click it again in the window that pops up to get it to fully zoom).

The dashboard makes it very easy for a project manager to use for tracking and bugging people with due or overdue tasks.

There is also a good interface for scheduling and timing meetings, including distributing attachments along with the meeting invitation. However, I wish it had a bit more functionality to record meeting notes and associate them directly with meetings, as well as providing built-in functions to track open and resolved items, meeting objectives, etc. Perhaps in future versions... (though you can probably work around this with their powerful, collaborative Notes features).

Room to grow

For more projects and additional features (like time & cost tracking, and more disk storage for storing and sharing documents), you can upgrade to a higher level package. There are 4 fee-based subscriptions available (Team, Professional, Corporate, and Enterprise), each with a progressively higher monthly fee so you can scale up as you begin to use Projjex for more projects.

Check it out for free

As with many other web-based apps, this one is easy to try for free. Head on over to Projjex and sign up for your free account, or at least go through the Projjex overview tour if you have projects to manage. And you might want to keep an eye on these folks - they seem like they know what they're about.

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The Parking Lot Rules

I've just finished reading a book I wish I'd had when my first child was born. It's Tom Sturges' book, Parking Lot Rules & 75 Other Ideas for Raising Amazing Children. This book is a set of pragmatic "rules" to help provide a safe, nurturing environment for kids as they grow up. Some of these techniques would have saved me some stress if I'd known about them 15 years ago when I first became a father!

To get a flavor for the excellent advice in this book, check out the rule the book was named for, Parking Lot Rules:

"In a world inhabited by cars the size of small houses, the parking lot can be an incredibly dangerous place. The drivers of these SUV's are in another world: watching their own children, talking on their cell phones, listening to the radio. The last they they are looking for is your brood. Teach your children that they need to be right next to you whenever you are in a parking lot. There is to be no trailing behind and no racing ahead. The moment you near a parking lot, call out "Parking lot rules," and your children will know that they absolutely must be by your side. This rule can also apply to any time you perceive a danger that your children have missed: perhaps raised voices or the sound of broken glass or a stranger acting erratically. It beats yelling, "Look out for the crazy guy!"

And this is only one example - just about every rule hit the mark for me, and they're very practical (I love the Bon Jovi Rule, the Truth Reduces Punishment by 90% rule, and The Power of Forgiveness).

This book is ideal for parents of young children, but most of the rules still apply for older kids and teens. I think Parking Lot Rules will become one of my default gifts for new dads. It's a beautiful collection of advice.

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Executive Stamina

In another example of a book that comes into my life at an opportune time, I have been reading a book designed to help you systematically achieve higher productivity and better "balance" in life. The book is "Executive Stamina: How to Optimize Time, Energy, and Productivity to Achieve Peak Performance," by Marty Seldman, PhD and Joshua Seldman and I am hooked.

This book is similar to another book I've read and liked (but never reviewed) called "Find Your Focus Zone." However, I find Executive Stamina to be more "prescriptive" -- and its focus and style resonated better with me.

One of the authors of Executive Stamina is a clinical psychologist who's done corporate coaching, and the other is a respected cycling and fitness coach. They combine their respective disciplines in an interesting way, producing a guide that is designed to help people manage the natural peaks and valleys of mental and physical energy.

Stop the Thrash

This book is more than just an energy management guide - it also presents some very powerful exercises to help you improve the results you get in life.

Essentially, Executive Stamina seeks to keep you from "topping out" in your career - reaching that point where you hit a performance / interest plateau from which you cannot recover. As shown in the diagram at right, from the book's introduction, the key is to avoid reaching the point of diminishing returns in your work - avoiding what I like to refer to as "thrash."

The book is divided into 5 major sections, each focusing on models and assignments to deal with a specific aspect of your life - resulting in a combined set of skills to keep you out of the Danger Zone shown on the chart. Here is a brief rundown of what you can expect in each section:

  • Work / Life Alignment
    • This section focuses on introspection and answering hard questions about your priorities, values, etc. with the goal of helping you reach your career sweet spot.
    • This was by far the most difficult section for me, since it prompted me to revisit past situations in which my choices probably weren't well-aligned with my values. For the same reason, this was also one of the more impactful sections of the book.
    • My favorite tool in this section was the "Minimums and Shifts/Drifts" model, which is a tremendous focusing tool to drive specific action towards goals, and identify shortfalls quickly while you can still do something about them.
  • Building Your Stamina
    • This is a very prescriptive section, primarily dealing with stress management, exercise, nutrition, and other aspects of physical health & stamina.
    • I had a lot of favorite tools in this section:
      • the Lifelong Fitness Plan
      • the instructions on Meditation and Breathing Exercises
      • the comprehensive guide for "Workday Yoga" which includes yoga exercises designed to be performed at work.
  • Optimizing Job Performance and Results
    • This section focuses on getting better at finding and focusing on high-payoff activities - increasing your win rate, and raising the value of your output.
    • The tools in this section are very simple, and very much aligned with many of the productivity/time management frameworks I know and love. I particularly liked the portions on "Dealing with Toxic People" and the tips and techniques for overcoming procrastination.
  • Career Management
    • In this section, the authors focus on the fact that there is a big difference between high productivity and reaching your peak potential. With that in mind, they arm you to tell the difference between the two.
    • This section is still about personal elements of your performance, and provides a lot of guidance on preventing career mis-steps. However, it goes further and pulls in tools to help you look outward to figure out when other people are discounting your achievements, so you can prevent them from hampering your progress.
    • My favorite tool in this section is the one on Organizational Savvy, which includes the "Org Savvy Chart" to assess your strengths and weaknesses in this area.
  • Personal Relationships
    • The final section of the book emphasizes that personal relationships are a thread that winds through all of the previous chapters - personal relationships play a significant factor in reaching your peak potential.
    • Interestingly, this section describes how you can apply the tools from previous sections to systematically set goals and improve your relationships by focusing on high-payoff aspects of those relationships. Very cool.

Hopefully this gives you a taste for this book. It's smart, actionable, and well written, and I think it is a must-have for any executive (or anyone who aspires to be "master of their destiny").

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Xobni - a very interesting Outlook tool

I have been kicking the tires on a product called Xobni for the past week or so, and am fascinated by this useful tool. Xobni (inboX backwards) is a "plug-in" to Outlook that integrates seamlessly with Outlook, providing a real-time "dashboard" for Outlook (you can see what it looks like in the video preview at the end of this post).

Xobni provides some very cool capabilities, such as:

  • Very fast email search.
    • It's limited to items in Outlook, but it provides some very robust (and visually clear) search results.
  • Email analytics.
    • I'm a stat geek at heart, so I was jazzed by the reports you can get about your email habits (example graph below - click for larger view).
    • A particularly interesting aspect of their stat function is it ranks your senders based on the volume of email sent and received (and it shows their rank along with the picture form their contact record, if you've got a picture in there).
  • Discover the "network" of people related to your contacts.
    • Xobni analyzes the other people cc'd on your emails to & from others, and gives you a view of the other people in their email network.
  • Quickly see good information about your contacts.
    • Xobni will pull phone numbers out of peoples signature blocks and show them prominently in its sidebar, and will call out people assistants and other useful information.
  • Quick attachment summary.
    • If you can remember who sent an attachment to you, simply click on an email from them, and you'll see a time-sorted list of attachments in one of Xobni's panes - then you click on it to open.
Check out this video walk-through to Xobni - it is pretty amazing. And, in real life, it works just like the video.

Xobni is free (used to be an invite-only beta but it's wide open for a free download now) and supports Outlook 2003 and 2007 on Windows platforms.

I really like this tool, and will keep using it for a while. The only gripes I have are that occasionally slows my system down, and it doesn't fit too well on my laptop because I have a lower resolution display (1024x768) - however, it is easy to collapse or turn off the Xobni pane without impacting the other functions of the product.

If you try it, let me know what you think.

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Eluma: Browse, organize, and share

I do a lot of online research on a variety of topics - work, personal, etc. However, I'm not very methodical about cataloging the links I find. As a result, I have a lot of unruly bookmarks (favorites) that I've accumulated. I save some of them "just in case," others I intend to check periodically (but often forget), and still others were bookmarked for a short term need but they hang around even though I'll probably never click on them again (tracking pages for orders, for example).

I recently found a tool that seems to be helpful in taming these bookmarks while making it easier to organize and share the "finds" I unearth while online. The tool is called "Eluma," and it's free.

Organize as you browse

Eluma makes it easy to flag, file, rate, subscribe, tag, and "compartmentalize" the sites and pages I discover, by providing a user-friendly toolbar.

Additionally, you can attach notes to a page for later reference.

From a higher level organizational perspective, you can organize your information sources in a number of ways - by source type, by topic / category, you can use tags, and you can create your own Collections. The Collections aspect is very useful - more on that later.

Track and get reminders

I follow a lot of topics - some by looking at web pages, some by subscribing to RSS feeds, some through searches, etc. The challenge is remembering to look at all these things so I don't miss something I'm interested in. I have solved some of this by using things like Google news alerts and that sort of thing, but the problem is that I still have a number of things to check - email alerts, an RSS reader, manual perusal, etc.

Eluma makes it easier to bring all of these different sources together (plus a few more) and set up customized searches and alerts so I am notified when something new comes about in one of the sources I'm monitoring. I've only been using Eluma for a few weeks, but the aggregation and alerting features have already saved me some time.

Read about the topics you're following

In this area, Eluma is quite a bit like any other reader - you click on the source you want to read, and it presents you with the latest information from that source. It will track what you've read, what you haven't, and you can configure the time horizon to tell Eluma how long to keep the news items.

One thing that is nice - it collapses into a "mini" mode, which reminds me of an IM client (see screen grab of the window, at right). When you click on a topic, it creates a "sidecar" windows that contains the content associated with what you clicked on. This is a nice compromise of using minimal screen real estate when you're not actively using Eluma, but expanding to give you lots of on-screen data when you are using it.

As I've mentioned in the past, one of the criteria for a suitable feed reader for me is that it must handle offline reading so I can catch up on my feeds when I am on a plane. I'm happy to say that Eluma handles this pretty well, and I've been in touch with their developers and they have plans to make this offline functionality even more robust and flexible in the future. The added functionality will allow you to flag a feed for special treatment so that Eluma will not only cache the feed content, but will cach a certain depth of links beyind the feed items, as well.

Share what you've found

One of the cool aspects of Eluma is that it is associated with a sort of "community" of other Eluma users. As you find interesting items and information sources, you can rate them and share your ratings with the rest of the community. This can help separate the wheat from the chaff when you're diving into a new topic, and tap into the power of the community.

I mentioned Collections earlier. This is a notion that allows you to create predefined "groups," filters, and profiles of information sources. You can, of course, use these to help you organize your information flow, but you can also publish these to others - either the whole community, or to individuals you invite to share them. This is pretty nice - I'm just getting into them, but I think this could be one of the power features of Eluma, transforming it from an organizational tool to a collaboration tool.

Way more than I can cover here

My summary here is just scratching the surface - Eluma is a very feature-rich and flexible tool. It's free to try, and I rcommend it if you're someone who likes to follow a lot of online information and are tired of turning to a huge number of tools to get the job done. Find out more at Eluma's web site.

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