Social Media University, Global (SMUG)
Suus Non Ut Difficile • Home of the SMUGgles
That’s how my good friend Reed Smith deadpanned on the “amazing productivity improvement” he’s seen with his new iPhone when he was in Minnesota for our Social Media Week at Mayo Clinic.
That reminded me of some video I shot comparing my iPhone 4s with our #MCCSM Medical Director’s new iPhone 5:
Looks nice, but not worth breaking my contract that still has a year to go.
…but tonight as I fly to Tampa to be on a panel sponsored by The Atlantic and National Journal in conjunction with the Republican National Convention, I am experiencing a level of relief that I haven’t had for several months.
Last Monday, after a summer full of travel both for work and for my son Joe’s AAU basketball, I hit an unbelievable six-year high-water mark for unresolved emails, and took this screen shot:
Lots of reasons, but no good excuses.
After six days of dedicated effort during breaks in my daily routine (and several evenings of just plowing through messages), tonight I finally reached my GTD goal:
Since I first read Getting Things Done by David Allen in 2005, I have found its principles extremely helpful. When I started this blog, GTD was one of the main topics. I would particularly recommend this post I wrote in November 2006. which links to some of the important lessons I learned.
I’m glad to be on the right side of the email tsunami again.
Now I hope a literal hurricane, Isaac, doesn’t cause too many problems in the coming week.
As I mentioned in this post, David Allen’s work with GTD was a major focus of the content here in the pre-SMUG days.
Through this video, I’ve invited David to be a guest lecturer for the SMUGgles, giving an overview of his GTD methods and how and why they work.
(Well, in reality, Google invited David to to address its employees, and because of the magic of YouTube we all get to listen in.)
I highly commend this to your viewing:
And if you don’t have the book yet, you can order it below:
The last several months have been a whirlwind, culminating (at least to this point) with the Feb. 10 launch of our member community site for the Social Media Health Network, which is associated with our new Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media.
We’ve also now completed our staffing for the Center, and of course that was a major undertaking, as was selecting the new members for our External Advisory Board.
The hectic pace and the need to try to get back on top of it all led me to refocus on more rigorously applying David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, which was among the main topics of this blog in the pre-chancellor years. Here’s a post from 2006 that’s a good jumping-off point for GTD exploration.
So on Saturday, January 15 I decided to head over to the office after our radio show production, and spent about three hours getting to this point:
Of course I didn’t capture the “before” state, but let me assure you it wasn’t pretty.
And as I referenced in the video, neither was my email inbox. I did make a strong effort over the ensuing few weeks, but even as of Feb. 13 I had nearly 2,300 emails that were in various stages of processing:
So last week I made a major push, and by Friday at 3:38 p.m. CST I reached my goal:
As GTDers know, that doesn’t mean that I had nothing left to do with my emails, but it did mean I had processed all of them and had decided whether they were
As of this evening I have kept my office in the clean and clear mode for 27 work days. I’ve had five straight days of getting to the empty email inbox.
With the explosion of communication, your life is not likely to get less busy any time soon, as the number of potential inputs you get will continue to increase. That’s why it’s important to have a means of handling all that “stuff.”
If you haven’t explored GTD, I highly recommend it.
Yesterday I posted a video in which Lucien Engelen (@zorg20) interviewed me about social media in healthcare, which he shot while I was his guest in the Netherlands earlier this month.
I interviewed Lucien that same day, asking him to tell the story about the mobile phone application for iPhone and Android that he had gotten developed and launched. It’s an augmented reality app that shows where the nearest automated external defibrillator (AED) is located, using the phone’s location awareness. In the case of someone experiencing cardiac arrest, the ideal would be for one person to administer CPR while another bystander uses a smart phone to locate an AED that could shock the heart back into normal rhythm.
I could talk more about the application, but Lucien demonstrates it briefly in this video. More importantly, he tells the story of how Twitter enabled him to find a programmer to get the project done, and how much time that saved in development.
Twitter is an amazing tool for finding information, but more importantly making connections with people. Three weeks from first Tweet to completed iPhone application is pretty amazing. In the way of the Web 1.0 world, Lucien’s analysts would have had to identify a list of companies with programming capability, build a list and then send candidate companies a request for proposals. In the Twitterverse, he could just tweet the question, directed to no one in particular, and the answer found him in less than 30 minutes.
That’s serious productivity ROI!
How about you? What’s your best story of how Twitter helped you find information quickly?
Update: Here is the AED4.EU site.