Entries Tagged 'Webgeeking' ↓

This will happen to you eventually, if it hasn’t already.

A while ago I reached the point where I’ve been reading the blogosphere long enough to identify sufficient numbers of really smart people blogging about stuff that really interests me, that more is published by them in any given hour than I can actually read in that hour. I’m inclined to call this my “information saturation point”, where I must forever give up on being able to absorb all the information I would like to absorb, because it appears faster than I can read it. Filtering out junk is no longer sufficient. Even filtering out boring is no longer sufficient. I have to filter out the interesting stuff, and that’s hard.

Now, I’m not a real fast reader, and I do have rather a lot of interests, but I suspect everyone is going to hit this point eventually, simply because the volume of posts on any given topic is is constantly increasing, and the net helps you find more topics to be interested in, while the available daily reading time of the average human remains more or less a constant. Skimming, and simply learning to read faster, will only get you so far.

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Getting Things Done. It’s a mantra worth paying some attention to. Dave Allen started it - he wrote a book, mainly for managers I think, but it’s given a huge number of time-poor project-rich geeks a new lease on life as well. Just google for GTD and you’ll find a lot of them blogging about it. Some of the tools Izeal is working on are going to help people Get Things Done, and I’ll certainly let you know about them after we launch.

Here are my first two GTD hints.

First hint: If you haven’t done so already, read the book! Reading people blogging about the book is insufficient! It really is worth reading cover to cover, particularly if you feel you don’t have time to read it!

Second hint: If you have already read the book, are comfortable with writing in WikiMarkup and are looking for a cool, free, browser based tool to help you manage your stuff, try this one, or this one, or this one. Actually, try all three, and stick with the one you like. The good news is that they’re all adaptions of TiddlyWiki, which means that moving items from one to another isn’t going to be too difficult.

So, I guess people have been wondering where I’ve been. My circa 1998 homepages are long gone. Webfoundry is off the air. Apposite consulting has been shut down. I haven’t posted to my LJ in over a year.

As some of you may know, I’ve been buried in the Canterbury Innovation Incubator since mid 2004. I caught the innovation bug around the turn of the century, and have been pushing one business plan after another ever since. Sadly I got into the internet startup game just as the investors were leaving, and Christchurch has never been the best place to launch an internet startup (although a few of my friends have managed it). In 2000 I was having some innovative ideas about CMS’s. I came up with a pretty good set of ideas in 2001 that involved DHTML based Instant Messaging and a few other bits of cleverness (a lot harder to implement back in the pre “opensource AJAX library” days). In 2004 I started pushing some ideas concerning large scale machine translation, those were the ideas that got me into the Incubator, but eventually we started to make rapid progress on a little sideproject that looked even more promising to explore, and that is where much of our energies have been focused for over a year now.

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