Category Archives: Productivity Software

Tools, Productivity, And Bright Shiny Distractions

Personal Productivity, Productivity Software, Technology, , , ,

Is this you?  Over and over again, you fall off on regular consistent organizational practices like to-do lists, emails, planning, backing up your computer … then you run across some cool new productivity tool. You jump on the bandwagon enthusiastically, promising yourself that you’re finally going to get organized and stay organized. You spend happy hours reorganizing everything to fit the new tool. Then, over time, as the novelty wears off, you end up right back where you started, with the same problems. Cool productivity tools, no productivity.

And then you find a new cool tool and run the same cycle over again.

This is me and productivity tools

I will tell you that this is definitely me. I’ve done this all my life. I veer off to a new organization system like a dumb fish following a shiny new lure in the water. And I see other people doing it too, all the time, all around me. You don’t need a new spreadsheet, or to-do list software, or project planning system; you need to use what you have regularly.

I end up wasting the time it takes to reorganize to the mindset of the cool new tool, repeatedly, instead of managing to follow up on any one thing consistently over a long time.

And what works in the real world is not the tool, not any of the damn tools, but rather the following up. It’s the human behavior that matters, the good habits, consistently applying methods, not getting bored with it, not rationalizing out of it.

I apologize for mixing metaphors with this, but I can’t resist referring to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” Given the world we live in, computers and the Web, it’s something like: “tools, tools everywhere, and not a drop of productivity.”

Or so it seems.

Now, the question: what are we going to do about it?

Disturbing Questions About Productivity and Technology

Personal Productivity, Productivity Software

Have you heard the standard cliche: “Necessity is the Mother of Invention?” In business productivity and technology, in my experience at least,  the old standard is reversed: the new truth is that “Invention is the Mother of Necessity.”

Huge Changes in Productivity and Technology

For example:

  1. Spreadsheets and Budgeting: When I started in business analysis back in the middle 1970s we didn’t have spreadsheets, and a budget was rarely more than a list of numbers on a yellow pad processed with a calculator and a pen. Then came Visicalc, and shortly after that Lotus 1-2-3 and then Excel. Now, not at all by coincidence, everybody in business does a whole lot more budgeting and spreadsheets than we ever would have imagined back then.So what’s happened is that because spreadsheets made budgeting more accessible, the world started demanding more budgets. To me, this is a good thing. Budgeting is good for business. You could argue, however, that maybe the world of small and medium-sized business was better off when the world summarized budgets into a few key items.Ultimately, in this case, I think it’s obvious that we do more budgets because budgets are easier to do
  2. Desktop publishing and business documents: I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same thing happen with desktop publishing. Before desktop publishing appeared with the Macintosh and the Apple Laserwriter in the middle 1980s, people put business correspondence onto simple pages printed onto letterhead paper. Nowadays we take desktop publishing techniques for granted. People routinely merge graphics and text onto simple memos and letters and standard business documents, without thinking twice about it.
  3. From paper to online: Speaking of documents, the idea of the paperless office was first popular in the 1980s but is still largely a dream. I checked for this post, and was surprised to discover that the use of printer and copy paper in the U.S. continues to grow. What? What about the cloud, accounting and bookkeeping online, electronic documents, and email, all of which is moving to mobile phones? It hasn’t cut into paper consumption. Yet. Well, to be fair, it has in my office … but not for the world, or the U.S., according to available statistics. Why is that?
  4. 24×7 connectivity and availability: How often do you get the delightful experience of somebody complaining that they had to wait an hour or two to hear from you, or get your answer, or your response to some question or business issue? It may seem odd now, but it wasn’t that long ago that people were disconnected for hours at a time because they were in a meeting, or driving, doing errands, or having a life. A two-hour drive was two hours alone, to collect ideas and review thoughts. There’s research indicating we’d all be better off with an hour or two a day of reflection, meaning silence, dealing with thoughts. But take a look at the line of people waiting for coffee. They are all connected.

Did This Improve Productivity?

That’s an interesting question. We can answer this for ourselves, anecdotally, and probably come up with a better answer than what the statistics give us. Is budgeting better now than in the days of yellow pads and calculators? Are we communicating better? Are we getting more done? There was a time when I would have been tempted to say no, that it hasn’t improved productivity.  More recently I’ve changed my mind.  Having built a business makes me sure that we benefit from the power of more detailed budgeting, and running through the daily process of management made me pretty sure that business documents are generally better communicators with desktop publishing than without.

Statistics are very hard to work with in this area. I’ve found that the average hours worked per week have declined significantly since the 1950s; but so has the work itself, right? We were an assembly line nation in 1955, and now we’re a keyboard and thumb nation. Who’s counting the constant availability by phone?

US Work Week

On the other hand, there’s this, from Why is Productivity so Weak, in the New York Times, just last month:

“Despite constant advances in software, equipment and management practices to try to make corporate America more efficient, actual economic output is merely moving in lock step with the number of hours people put in, rather than rising as it has throughout modern history.

“We could chalk that up to a statistical blip if it were a single year; productivity data are notoriously volatile. But this has been going on for some time. From 2011 through 2015, the government’s official labor productivity measure shows only 0.4 percent annual growth in output per hour of work. That’s the lowest for a five-year span since the 1977-to-1982 period, and far below the 2.3 percent average since the 1950s.”

US Productivity Trends

Here too, what is productivity? The labor department has a global measure of output per hour, but that’s not the way we work anymore.

I still worry that the increased productivity that technology offers us has just raised the bar of what’s acceptable. Now that we can do the numbers powerfully, we do more numbers, which drowns us in numbers. Now that we can do documents that look way better, without the hassle of publishing and layout, we demand better looking documents. And now that we can communicate from anywhere, at any time, we demand more communication.

What do you think? Are we better off?

Invention is the Mother of Necessity: Technology and Productivity

Personal Productivity, Productivity Software, Technology,

Productivity SoftwareHave you heard the standard cliche: “Necessity is the Mother of Invention?” In business technology and productivity, in my experience at least,  the old standard is reversed: the new truth is that Invention is the Mother of Necessity.”

For example:

  1. Spreadsheets and Budgeting: When I started in business analysis back in the middle 1970s we didn’t have spreadsheets, and a budget was rarely more than a list of numbers on a yellow pad processed with a calculator and a pen. Then came Visicalc, and shortly after that Lotus 1-2-3 and then Excel. Now, not at all by coincidence, everybody in business does a whole lot more budgeting and spreadsheets than we ever would have imagined back then.So what’s happened is that because spreadsheets made budgeting more accessible, the world started demanding more budgets. To me, this is a good thing. Budgeting is good for business. You could argue, however, that maybe the world of small and medium-sized business was better off when the world summarized budgets into a few key items.Ultimately, in this case, I think it’s obvious that we do more budgets because budgets are easier to do
  2. Desktop publishing and business documents: I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same thing happen with desktop publishing. Before desktop publishing appeared with the Macintosh and the Apple Laserwriter in the middle 1980s, people put business correspondence onto simple pages printed onto letterhead paper. Nowadays we take desktop publishing tecniques for granted. People routinely merge graphics and text onto simple memos and letters and standard business documents, without thinking twice about it.

Did This Improve Productivity?

That’s an interesting question. Ten years ago I would have been tempted to say no, that it hasn’t improved productivity.  More recently I’ve changed my mind.  Running a company makes me sure that we benefit from the power of more detailed budgeting, and running through the daily process of management makes me pretty sure that business documents are generally better communicators with desktop publishing than without.

What do you think?

What’s In It For You from The Startup America Partnership

Productivity Software, Starting a Business,

So how cool is this? The Startup America Partnership is offering a collection of real business tools and resources, mostly web-based, to help high-growth startups.

StartupPartnership.jpg

This was announced at the White House a year ago this month. Here’s what I wrote then on this blog:

The Obama White House [Feb. 1, 2011] announced its Startup America Partnership yesterday with some very slick online video streaming, some serious financial commitments, and the good sense to lead with real entrepreneurs including Steve Case and Brad Feld, and real information provided by the Small Business Administration and the Kauffman Foundation. That was a great start.

The announcement now is that the partnership has come out with actual resources people can use. We’re talking about software tools like web apps, analytics tools, accounting, legal forms helps, and of course business planning, things people can use, made available to people who need it. If you are an entrepreneur, high-growth business owner, or in the process of starting, you can join the program for free and take advantage of different tools and resources, depending on your stage of business.

You can use this link to register your business, started or about to start.

And I’m proud to say, by the way, that my company, Palo Alto Software, is one of the participating companies. I like to see us doing our part.

And another note, just because it should be said: I don’t like the sentiment that says this is like “at last” the federal government is helping small business. I’ve posted on this blog often about how much I respect the government’s Small Business Administration (SBA) programs to help small business. I cooperate with the SBA whenever I can, and I blog for the SBA community site, and I have business plan tutorials on that site too. I also work often with the SBA-funded Small Business Development Centers (SBDC), which offer help to small businesses in 1,000 locations; they are excellent. And I am a member of SCORE, a mentorship program, sponsored by the SBA. The difference between these and Startup America is that Startup America isn’t using tax dollars at all.

Folk Wisdom Reversal: Necessity Isn’t the Mother of Invention

Personal Productivity, Productivity Software, Reflections, , , , , , , , ,

This will be hard for anybody under 50 to believe, but there was a time when word processing and spreadsheets were a real productivity advantage.

Are you old enough to remember Visicalc, or maybe SuperCalc? In the very early 1980s, most business people still did budgets with paper and calculator. The spreadsheet power user was way faster than anybody else. It was a great secret weapon for early adopters. It was a huge productivity boost.

Now, of course, we take it for granted. People throw multi-worksheet budgets around like nerf balls. If you’re not done in an hour, well, what’s wrong with you?

It was the same back then with word processing. Are you old enough to remember WordStar? That was power when the competition was working with typewriters. Now, you write fast … so what? So does everybody. Go write your big email and come back in 10 minutes.

Then came desktop publishing in 1985. Can you remember Aldus Pagemaker and the first Apple Laserwriter. It was amazing. Any one person could compete with the graphics department.

And slides? There was Aldus Persuasion, replaced later by Microsoft PowerPoint. When I was with McKinsey Management Consulting back in the early 1980s our office had more graphic artists than consultants, because they had to produce the slides that amazed the clients. How long has it been since anybody was amazed by a slide deck?

Do you see what I mean? At first it’s slick and powerful, doing something way faster than the old way of doing it. And that’s productivity at its best. But soon the advances are taken for granted. The bar of expectations goes up, and you spend the same amount of time.

Which is why the saying is reversed. In these cases, it’s not like it’s supposed to be, necessity as the mother of invention. Invention becomes the mother of necessity.

Does All Of This Improve Productivity?

That’s an interesting question. Ten years ago I would have been tempted to say no, that it hasn’t improved productivity.  More recently I’ve changed my mind.  Running a company makes me sure that we benefit from the power of more detailed budgeting, and running through the daily process of management makes me pretty sure that business documents are generally better communicators with desktop publishing than without.

And the new world of social media, infinite communications possibilities, authenticity and content quality threatening to become more powerful than huge advertising budgets?

What do you think?

(Image: JuditK/Flickr cc)

The Pull of Bloat and Feature Addiction

Back to Fundamentals, Productivity Software, Technology, , , ,

This one struck a nerve: This is by Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals, in How to Kill a Bad Idea earlier this month at Inc.com. He’s talking about how software and websites grow too big.

The software grows. Version 2.0 comes along. It does more than Version 1.0. More features, more options, more screens, more stuff. Or the website is redesigned with more pages, more words, more images, more departments, more tools. Nothing has gone wrong yet. In fact, Version Two is pretty good, too.

But over time, yet more stuff is added. Remember our water bottle? Imagine what would happen if more stuff was added to it. Pretty soon it wouldn’t be functional. The physics would push back. Not so with software. You can just add more pages! Or you can just add more features or more settings or more preferences and hide them behind yet another button or menu. It’s just one more button, right?

This is where it all begins to fall apart. Future versions are loaded with more and more stuff. Nothing pushes back; nothing says no. And eventually, the product or the site becomes unmanageable. It’s too big, too slow, too confusing, but it’s still all subjective. Unlike the water bottle, the software can just keep growing. Software can’t overflow. It has no edges, so it can never be too big.

That is so true. I’ve been there. In fact,  I’ve been in the software business since 1983, and in the web business since 1994. We always want to do everything for everybody. What you’d like to do is have as many features in the software and there are users to suggest them, because you never want to say no. This is how Microsoft Excel, to cite just one example, does linear regression. And how many people use it for that?

As you might guess from the three paragraphs I quoted, Jason gets to the problem of when to say no. And that you have to say no sometimes. He says:

The only way to stop this perpetual growth of an object without physical borders is for you to create your own borders. Those borders are discipline, self-control, an editor’s eye for “enough.” The ultimate border is one simple word: no. Someone in charge has to say no more than yes.

If the laws of physics govern the physical world, the word no governs the virtual world. “No, that’s one feature too many.” “No, that’s just not worth it.” “No, no, no.”

I know. I was right there, at that very spot, for about 25 years. And just reading Jason’s spine tingling account of it, I know immediately he’s been in the same place a lot, and I’m glad that others are now doing that for the company I started.

Saying no was so damn necessary, and so damn hard, at the same time.

(image: istockphoto)

Guy Kawasaki and the Zen of Not Zen

Personal Productivity, Presentation skills, Productivity Software,

I admit it. I got really jealous of all the Zen of this and Zen of that writing, dating all the way back to the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I wanted to like, tried to like, but couldn’t. Zen templeYes, I gave into the horrible temptation, and even posted Zen and Business Planning here. I’m sorry. It was a moment of weakness.

Yes, I’m conflicted. Here I am after 30+ years of professional business planning fascinated by Gil Fronsdal and friends on Zencast, trying hard to reconcile Zen and business planning, and failing. Putting Zen and business planning into the same post is kind of like putting a dog and a raccoon into the same laundry bag.

Confession: my vanity license plate reads “not Zen.” If I could add a subtitle, it would be “… but trying.” After all, if I really were Zen, I wouldn’t put it on a vanity license plate. Right?

So you can only imagine my envy when Guy Kawasaki manages to bundle Zen of PowerPoint, Facebook, and Twitter, all at once, in a single post on the American Express OPEN Forum. Complete with 10 Japanese Zen concepts, each of them in Japanese, and each connected  to the points he makes. And then 10 more, which is really showing off. Damn, he’s good! He writes:

I love this kind of stuff: not only can these principles improve your PowerPoint pitches, products, website, and outlook on life, but they make people think you’re smart when you mention them.

Amen to that. Or something more Zen than Amen.

(Image: well, at least I get a point for that one. I took that picture in a Zen temple in Kyoto.)

Easy Spreadsheet Plans a Session or Meeting.

Personal Productivity, Productivity Software

I often have to engineer a workshop or presentation to fit into a few hours with topics divided into segments, and times set up for breaks. That’s just hard enough to do that I sat down the other day and looked up the Excel functions so I could set it up and then shuffle and juggle the different items. Is the break two early? Change it. Does somebody say you need to change the order, or change the time allotted for the session? Change it. With the right spreadsheet, it’s a lot easier. You don’t have to retype.

It depends mainly on one formula with nested time-related functions. Look at the illustration here first, and you can assume that once it’s done, then as you type the minutes in column C and the titles in column A, the start times will adjust automatically. If you insert a new row, you have to use the fill down feature to copy the formulas again from B2 through the last row. To make your own, you can follow my step-by-step directions below. And I’ve put a simple one, that you can modify, where you can download it (see my last paragraph).

  1. Just type the starting time as a time. I typed it into cell B1 as 1:00 PM. And with that entered there, you can change the whole thing just by entering a different start time. Just type the time. Screen ShotExcel understands that 1:00 PM is a time.
  2. The important part is the formula to cell B2. I’ve highlighted it in yellow. Make that formula as shown there and it will show you a strange number. Don’t worry; take the next step.
  3. With that cell highlighted, go to your Format Cells command (there are multiple ways to get there; check help if you have to) and change the Number format to show up as h:mm AM/PM as you can see here to the right. You’d think that would be in the Time Category, but it’s in custom.
  4. Then you just fill in the sections in column A and the times allotted in column C, as shown, and you copy that formula in cell B2 down to the other cells in B3 through (in this case) B9. And you’ve got something you can work with now.
  5. By the way, I like that last calculation, in cell C9 where I’ve highlighted it in the main worksheet illustration above, because it tells me exactly how long the event will be (that is, if I stick to my timing plan). Its formula is =B9-B1. And its format is “h:mm” from the custom format list we’ve already shown you.

You can use it with PowerPoint too.

You often want that schedule or agenda as part of a presentation. For that, you can open up an Excel object in PowerPoint and set it to show just the first two rows. You can see an example here. PowerPoint opens up Excel and I do the same as above, but I set the fonts larger. It’s also interactive, since it’s just embedded Excel, so you have the same functionality. To the right there’s an example of the resulting slide.

I’d like to give you more details about how you work with the Excel object in PowerPoint, but that’s too much detail for this post. But the executive summary is that you find the feature to insert an object into the slide, and then a dropdown menu lets you choose among objects including an Excel worksheet. And then you use the same formulas and functions and formatting as above. And if you insert a row, you have to adjust the formulas in the second column with a fill down command.

By the way, if you’re interested, I’ve left a simple version of that XLS file in my public dropbox where you can download it. To do that, just right-click this link and use your browser’s commands (usually that’s save as, but it depends on the browser) to save it to your disk as an Excel file, then run it.  Change it, modify it, it’s yours to use and enjoy.

What Business Plan Software Shouldn’t Do

Business Planning, Productivity Software, Technology

The ideal business plan software doesn’t write your text or do your numbers. Instead, it helps you with the mechanics of managing the links between the different numbers, and the main topic outline, laying out the page if you need to print it, and giving you ideas, questions to answer, and suggestions.

Broken_Lightbulp_Flickrcc_snail_race[1] I just saw another blog post by somebody who ought to know better, knocking business plan software for writing people’s text. What would a programmer know about your business or what should be in your plan, the blog asks.

This is the logical equivalent of saying that word processing software isn’t a good tool for writing a letter, because what would a programmer know about the content of your letter? It’s a tool, for heaven’s sake. Done right, it doesn’t write your text. Of course not.

I get the feeling that people who have never used business plan software guess what it’s doing and then criticize their guess, instead of the actual software.

Or maybe it’s that they’ve seen those stupid ads all over the Web for business plans that write themselves, or just fill in the blanks and get financed, and similar dumb claims. That’s not business plan software any more than a purchased term paper is research or writing software.

(Image: Snail Race via Flickr cc)

Are You Kidding Yourself About Tools and Productivity?

Personal Productivity, Productivity Software, Technology, , , ,

Is this you?  Over and over again, you fall off on regular consistent organizational practices like to-do lists, emails, planning, backing up your computer … then you run across some cool new tool. You jump on the bandwagon enthusiastically, promising yourself that you’re finally going to get organized and stay organized. You spend happy hours reorganizing everything to fit the new tool. Then, over time, as the novelty wears off, you end up right back where you started, with the same problems.

And then you find a new cool tool and run the same cycle over again.

I will tell you that this is definitely me. I’ve done this all my life. I veer off to a new organization system like a dumb fish following a shiny new lure in the water. And I see other people doing it too, all the time, all around me. You don’t need a new spreadsheet, or to-do list software, or project planning system; you need to use what you have regularly.

I end up wasting the time it takes to reorganize to the mindset of the cool new tool, repeatedly, instead of managing to follow up on any one thing consistently over a long time.

And what works in the real world is not the tool, not any of the damn tools, but rather the following up. It’s the human behavior that matters, the good habits, consistently applying methods, not getting bored with it, not rationalizing out of it.

I apologize for mixing metaphors with this, but I can’t resist referring to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” Given the world we live in, computers and the Web, it’s something like: “tools, tools everywhere, and not a drop of productivity.”