December 19, 2011
"Get more done with a prototype week
Forget about an ideal week—I’ve never had one, but zoning your time definitely helps for organizing your projects and getting more done.
Productivity geeks often talk about enforcing an ideal week. If your projects have people involved in them, your week is probably less than ideal. Complicated deadlines, last minute changes, emergency meetings… If you’re going to carry a heavy load at work, love your family well, and stay healthy it’s going to take a strategy. If you take 5 minutes, I think it will be worth your time. Please share it with a friend if you find it helpful. Like City Zoning
There’s a reason that cities have zoning laws—they want their city to get the most value out of limited resources. Grouping factories and warehouses makes sense, high density residential and commercial is smart. Let’s apply that lesson to your calendar. Time Blocking
After you get done with this post write down all of your big responsibilities at home and at work and personally. Group them together by location, energy level, need for focus, etc… Get those groups on the calendar—you can see that the way I do it is that I set themes for the whole work day. It helps to make sure that when I need to focus for a long period of time, I can do it without getting interrupted by meetings. Rhythm
By blocking large blocks of times for different genres of task it lets you set up a weekly rhythm that is manageable and can let you keep your energy level high. Bring form to the chaos
When your project load gets huge or you’re in a particularly energy intensive season at home it can feel like life is absolute chaos. Zoning out your time helps to feel a regained sense of control. Prepared for your blocking to fail
Time blocking is good because it makes sure that you have time to take care of emergencies when they come up you have time to deal with it. After you’ve given it a shot, I’d love to hear how it goes."

Get more done with a prototype week - time management tip Mike Anderson

December 19, 2011
Free Productivity Tool: BetterTouchTool

October 20, 2011
"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. “Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” – Steve Jobs, Wired, February, 1995"

swissmiss | Steve Jobs on Creativity

October 5, 2011
My important life moments with an Apple

When I was a kid my dad was a consultant for Apple. I’ve had an Apple computer for longer than I can remember.

Here I am in ‘85 or ‘86 cruising around on a Mac.

Here’s me on my first portable computer. Probably around ‘88 or ‘89. After my dad upgraded to a PowerBook (probably around ‘91) he gave me this computer. I used to take it to school with me as a 2nd grader. It actually had a handle on it and you could carry it like a brief case.

Here I am at the hospital for my brother’s birth. This was Feb ‘90—I’m looking good in all white. I’ll bet money that I was playing Civilization in this picture.

Fast forward some years—my beautiful Jen. We met in 2003 and got married in 2007. I love this woman.

In 2008 I was given my dream job to serve at Mars Hill Church with social media and web strategy. This was one of my first ever meetings with the creative team. Since Jesus saved me, I’ve been eager to tell people about him.

Above is the Resurgence volunteer team hard at work. Getting to serve with these folks has been a privilege. 

I can’t believe that I’ve been blessed to serve at Mars Hill. I’m thankful to have candid moments like these showing some of the things we’re working on with Pastor Mark to great men like CJ Mahaney, Brian Chappell, Danny Aiken, and others.

Here she is at our house last Christmas. In this picture she’s a couple months pregnant with our first baby.

Jen took a picture of me in the hospital as we waited for our first baby to be born. This is not a very flattering picture, but it’s funny to look at the similarity to the picture of me waiting for my little bro to be born.

Here we are in the hospital with our brand new baby Violet. Jen is so excited she’s texting every one she knows pictures of her.

Here’s baby Violet on mommy’s lap. I think she’s the cutest ever… you can read about Violet here.

I’m thankful for the tools that Steve Jobs made. I’m drafting a post with some deeper thoughts that should be on the Resurgence soon.

October 3, 2011
Watch and learn from a masterful story teller

This short video draws you in and the narrator, Hans Rosling, uses infographics to show you how the world has changed in his life time.

If you like this video, I’d love if you shared it with someone.

October 2, 2011
Be careful of what you love

A very interesting article in today’s NYT called “You Love Your iPhone, Literally“—here’s an excerpt.

“But most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain [when presented with an iPhone], which is associated with feelings of love and compassion. The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member.

In short, the subjects didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction. Instead, they loved their iPhones.”

“One of the great evils of idolatry is that if we idolize, we must also demonize” said Jonathan Edwards in his book ‘The Nature of True Virtue’.

When you love stuff, the stuff will take over. It will push things that really matter out. This is an important Sunday message to pay attention to what you love.

12:09pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZdHvbyACOqSs
  
Filed under: iphone idol 
October 1, 2011
10 Tips From 10 Entrepreneurs

 

The VP of Marketing at Virgin America, Porter Gale, posted these top ten tips on her Huffington Post page:

  1. “Hire slowly, fire fast.” —Bill Clerico, CEO of WePay
  2. “The Brand is The Amusement Park, the Product is the Souvenir.” —Nick Graham, CEO of Fresh Happy People and Founder/Chief Underpants Officer of Joe Boxer
  3. “Trust your gut, keep your sense of humor, surround yourself with adult supervision, and know that starting and running a growing business is filled with adversity and challenges. I doubt any successful business was easy.” —Lily Kanter, CEO of Serena & Lily
  4. “Never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn’t do.” —Guy Kawasaki, author of Enchantment and former Chief Evangelist of Apple

Click here to read the rest

September 30, 2011
Not just a little better…

This guys has had his video viewed 11.6 million times. It’s because this video absolutely reorganizes everything I thought was possible. If you can figure out a way to blow away people’s expectations, you will be listened to.

September 29, 2011
Things I thought were cool this week

Each week I save things I think might be inspiring in an app called LittleSnapper.

Have you seen anything cool this week that you’d share in the comments below?

September 27, 2011
Find something you love & throw yourself at it

This graphic comes from the latest issue of Fast Company.

This chart is horrible news for people who just want to do their work and go home.

It shows that low skills jobs are growing slightly, and high skill jobs are booming, but medium skill jobs—kiss stability goodbye.

The best way to become highly skilled is to find something you love doing and throw yourself at it. Learn everything there is to learn, meet everyone there is to meet, think, discuss, read, write, prototype…

I love that I get to tell lots of people that it’s all about Jesus through all sorts of media. It’s something I can throw myself into. Work isn’t drudgery, it’s joy.

What are you passionate about?

September 26, 2011
Avoid failure & Sieze the year!

This is a guest post from Jesse Phillips—I think his new calendar is a really smart tool that you should think about buying.

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”

Planning is an after thought. It’s work we put off—so we forget stuff, we get lazy, we prioritize the urgent over the important, we often don’t think & plan something out. 

So when it comes time to pay the bill, make the decision, or turn-in the report—too often many of us fall short.

Great things don’t just happen! Your house did not just appear on a whim. Your iPhone did not invent itself. Your company does not hope for a good product & customers – it plans for it. All that to say… 

PLANNING IS ESSENTIAL TO SUCCESS

Look, not ALL things require planning. You don’t have to plan to eat ice cream – you want to do that. But complex or difficult things DO require planning. Things like projects, writing a book, holding an event – things with many moving parts.

Some friends and I recently put on a big networking event. We had lots of things to plan: find a venue, procure sponsors, decide on food, create and execute a marketing plan, partnerships, website, emails, etc, etc. This event never would have happened without making several, related decisions.

PLANNING IS MAKING DECISIONS

That’s all planning is, making decisions ahead of time, deciding a path, deciding a cut-off. Looking at your options & many necessary decisions, seeing how they affect one another, and deciding accordingly.

Therefore, clearly, nothing interesting is likely to happen unless it is planned-out. Your book will go unwritten, unless you make a plan to write it. Your project will go unfinished, your vacation un-enjoyed, your dream unrealized – without planning. 

HOW TO PLAN

Planning is not so hard as we make it. It requires thinking, weighing options & deciding (execution is the hard work, but it’s MUCH EASIER WITH PLANNING!). The main challenge with planning is not getting overwhelmed by the size of whatever you’re trying to do. The ambiguous project will often discourage me & I’ll avoid it. But when it’s planned out, decided, I have a much easier time doing it. Here’s an easy method I used to plan my projects:

  1. On a piece of paper, write down the name of the project and the deadline.
  2. Under it, brainstorm the various components – discrete areas of tasks that must be completed to accomplish the project. Like for our event: Marketing, Venue, Invitations, Food, etc. And make buckets of tasks under those areas.
  3. Now having a sense of the scope of the project, get a calendar, put your deadline on there. Looking at how much time you have, make sub deadlines for each of your buckets. For example: Fliers must be printed 4 weeks out (so they must be designed 6 weeks out). The flier will say the venue, so it should also be decided 6 weeks out. 

Now that you have tasks & deadlines, you can get to work! This is a whole nother subject, but your work is much easier now that it’s planned!

RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE JOB

Speaking of planning, having done much of it, I’ve found myself wanting some better tools for planning – specifically a better calendar. I’ve wanted something bigger, showing me the whole year clearly, that’s easier to plan across months, and that looks nice.

In an effort to address those problems & help fellow planners everywhere, I’ve designed a calendar to meet all of my above requirements. And I’ve launched it on Kickstarter.

September 20, 2011
Creating high bandwidth communication lines

The importance of communication within a growing organization cannot be understated. 

This quote is from an interview with Seth Sternberg, on the lessons he’s learned as the CEO of Meebo. This interview was very helpful as I’m thinking through very similar problems right now…

A lot of this empowerment comes through information, which of course needs to be communicated in some way. Counterintuitive as it may seem, ensuring that communication lines are very high bandwidth within the company is one of the top things you can do to empower people. Well…that, and not be a micromanager.

Third, you need to make sure you’ve clearly communicated the mission to your folks. If your leadership team doesn’t understand the mission or strategy, then neither will their respective teams. Watch how quickly progress will grind to a halt without a clearly articulated strategy in place—it won’t be pretty.

Fourth, you are your company’s chief recruiter. If one of our teams needs me to sell a candidate, I’ll get on the phone day or night, weekday or weekend. Heck, I’ve even flown out to see a candidate or two if they’re someone super special. Your company lives or dies by its team, regardless of whether you’re 2 people or 200. Attract the absolute best and brightest to work with your team and you’re already winning.”

September 19, 2011
What you can learn from 3 men who take on 15 lions

A small coordinated team of African hunters have the audacity to take on a pride of lions. Some would say they’re foolish—I think they know a secret.

Small teams that work as one can be incredibly effective

The hunters know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve planned, they’ve talked, they’ve swallowed fear, and they’ve decided—they are taking on a crazy task.

“Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people.” —Steve Jobs

Observations

  • This small team was out looking for it’s next opportunity
  • Larger and seemingly more powerful opponents are not always an obstacle, but often an opportunity
  • Boldness can be intimidating to even the most ferocious opponent
  • They started very close together as one and spread out to appear larger
  • They had a small weapon that was ready if things went wrong—it wouldn’t stop the opponent, but it would make them think twice about attacking
  • They watch out closely for their opponents next move
  • They move quickly and get out quickly before the bigger adversary can come back and take the prize by strength
  • They let the big guy take the left overs—it was still enough to feed them

September 18, 2011
A great commercial & an awful message

This commercial will sell a lot of Coke Zero. It creates a sense of longing for more and fulfills the need.

This is also the same message that absolutely destroys people’s hearts. The pursuit of more almost always leads to unhappiness. I recently had a conversation with a well known and quite wealthy person who’s got all of the more they could have wanted…

and they still felt empty.

More is not the answer. 

Whether you’ve got money or fame or are broke and unknown—more is not the answer. At the time of his life King Solomon was the richest man in the whole world. He had everything—mansions, huge monuments, hundreds of women, all the money you can want and he still wrote this. Today is a good day to take 5 minutes and read it. If you want to know how it ends, the last chapter is great.

September 17, 2011
It’s Saturday—have a good laugh

Stop taking yourself so seriously—an essential piece of a good Sabbath day is a good laugh.