Good title right? Let’s just say I have been productive in many other others besides keeping CoolNerd updated. Well, I will do better this year. Okay enough of the guilt trip, I want to throw out a quick blurb about what I have been working on personally and professionally when it comes to being productive and managing projects and life in general. I will put out this disclaimer that I am not attempting to compete with the hords of productivity blogs and sites that are out in the WWW cloud.

About a month and a half ago, a friend of mine told me about Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen, and that it was changing his life in so many positive ways. I got the audio book and started listening to it to and from work. Little by little I started to see great advantages to many of the concepts he coaches on. There are loads of good sites on getting started with GTD, which a simple StumbleUpon or Google search will lead you too.

Here’s how I am doing GTD:

1. Treo 700wx – I know paper is a recommended way to get started, but I have my Treo with me all the time so that made an easier transition.
2. Pocket Informant 2007 – nice for the Treo to customize categories, lists, and a whole bunch of other cool features. This isn’t a necessary piece however to run GTD using the Treo.
3. Jello.Dashboard – very cool Outlook plugin that is very easy to install. I like Jello because I see at a glance my next actions, Inbox, contexts, projects, and calendar.
4. An In Basket on my desk
5. A Review Basket on my desk
6. I am in the process of building a tickler file system, but it is not at this point a highly critical piece to my GTD system because I don’t use paper that much.

That’s it so far for my GTD experience. There are tons of other things that I could be doing, but I figure I will ease into them as I create new habits and abilities. I will say, as most other GTD’ers do, that the weekly review is painfully hard – not because of my ability, but because I get so many distractions right during the time I have scheduled. I am gradually educating my co-workers and boss that I have a standing 2 hour block on Friday afternoons wherein I don’t want any interruptions.

Here are a few of the links I have found helpful:

• Getting Started – 43Folders.com provides a simple overview and steps to begin GTD.
• GTD in Windows Mobile – JeffKirvin.net outlines using GTD on Windows Mobile – very simple and easy to understand.
• Tons of GTD references – this site on zenhabits.net is jam-packed with great links to learn about GTD. I haven’t even covered the entire gammut yet, but many of the references on this site have shed light on how to cater GTD to my way of functioning.

Well There you have it – my simple post on GTD adding to the ginormous hay stack GTD references.

Happy New Year! Let’s make it the most productive year ever!

~CoolNerd

Recently I came across one of the sweetest online tools for screen capture and screen video casting – it’s called Jing. This amazing little utility, built by TechSmith, makes it easy to capture the screen image, but the video screen recording is what I really keyed in on as a product manager. Often as a product manager we need to explain to our developers a random bug that occurs on the software or website, but when they go on to replicate it they don’t get the error so the developer will shrug and say “sorry, try to figure out how to replicate it and then let us know” – argh! Now with Jing and its connection with screencast.com, I can easily capture video and audio of anything that is on my screen. So I capture the bug or screen that I want and send a link to the developer and they are able to see what happens and from there they are generally able to fix the problem. Granted there are commercial, more robust screen video capturing software such as Camtasia, but this way my whole team (product managers, content writers, even customer service support) are able to capture the video and provide a link to easily show the dev team what is happening.

The whole video capture with Jing is awesome, but then the other day I started to play with the image capture piece in conjunction with Flickr – wow! I love using this feature! Now I can capture an image, edit the name, and share it on Flickr. Now with Flickr I am able to use the Flickr editing and notation features (Picknik) to indicate aspects of the image. I am using this for both bug issues as well as for doing research on the site.

The other day I was stumbling around and I came across this site with some great quotes about Product Development. One of my favorites from this list is from Seth Godin: “People don’t steal ideas. Ideas are cheap. Implementation makes the difference.”

One thing that is crucial for Product Managers is the ability for using communication when leading the product development. Often there are times when I try to be too diplomatic about a situation, and sometimes that is necessary depending on the circumstances and project. The most successful product managers use a the art “influencing, negotiating, relationship building and other similar similar skills” to make sure the product proves to be successful.

One thing I definitely need to focus more heavily on this year is to focus on the details more. Not sure exactly how to do it, but I am going to find out.

As a product manager I have been seeing more and more variance between this role and what a project manager is supposed to operate as. I’ll admit that until recently I saw very little difference between the project manager and a product manager. Was I ever wrong! I started to poke around the with this question and a slough of great resources was opened up to about this differentiation. Since my world evolves around web technology primarily I needed to find some specifics on web product management. With a few Google searches I found a great blog Rob Grady. He explains on a very simple level the importance of taking a web product beyond a short term project to a point where management continues through the entire “product lifecycle.”

From what I gather, the primary difference between product and project management is that project management is focused on getting the project launched on time and within budget and oft times with no regard to what features are removed to get it launched. However, for the product manager, the customers or users of the product take priority number one and they concern themselves with even the smallest of details. Product managers realize that the cumulation of many small issues can make or break the site and cause users to stop using the product.

With the coming of the new year I will be taking a “cool nerd” approach to Product Management and will be providing periodic updates on what I discover through research and application.