With “quality” webcams ranging in price from $50 to $200, it’s hard to understand why the market share for these devices keeps growing despite the relative affordability of the far superior camcorders (see Tom’s Hardware).

In the effort to fit the most functionality into the smallest space, the humble webcam is achieving a market penetration that the better-quality HD camcorders will not achieve. Between smart phones, security systems, video blogging, video telephone, video conferencing, gaming, digital music players and home-entertainment systems, WinterGreen Research, Inc. projects the webcam market to reach $3.2 billion by 2015.

It makes a certain amount of sense; if you can get a “good enough” image of friends and relatives in other cities or continents, are you going to worry about whether the 640×480 image running at 15 frames per second is broadcast quality? Within the next few years, if past trends are any indication, the resolution and frame rate will improve.

But it does beg the question of how long a wired webcam is going to be useful. With video devices being embedded in mobile phones and laptops, as well as the availability of wireless webcams, it’s hard to understand the viability the wired versions.

The wired USB HP HD – 3110 Webcam is a device dedicated to desktop Windows machines. You can’t run it on a Mac. You can’t download drivers for it (the HP software and driver download page kindly sends you to a CD-ROM order page, presumably because the software is from ArcSoft), so if you’re running the camera out of the office, you’ll have to pre-install the software via your network.

Once you get it installed the software is somewhat misleading; the settings panel has a suite of camera control sliders that appear to promise more than they deliver. Do not be fooled by HP’s one-package-for-all-cameras software design: zoom, pan, tilt and roll controls will not work for this device. When that kind of functionality is miniaturized to fit into a webcam, we may be able to fly the devices around the room as well.

On the other hand, the ArcSoft WebCam Companion allows for some creativity. In addition to the basic and advanced editing functions, there’s a masque (face morphing) and fun frame (auto capture). Just the thing to amuse aspiring social media divas.

The HP 3110 appears to be positioned for at least three areas: social networking, security monitoring (face and motion detecting) as well as social media-style clip editing. As such, it’s perhaps not surprising to get continual warning dialogues that higher resolution recording will reduce functionality.

This webcam may need a certain amount of adjusting. Despite the potential 1280×720 resolution, it was difficult to get any kind of quality out of the video recording; images were blurry and not very vibrant, although the video stream was smooth enough. File sizes may also require some work; 17 seconds of video produced an 867Kb .wmv file. Finally, the grip mounter, although allowing for manual tilt and pans, was extremely weak, begging the question of durability.

Available for $49.99 at Best Buy.

In my day-to-day work life as an image consultant I’m privileged to go through the wardrobes of my trusting clients. Inevitably we come across pieces where we wonder, “Is this working or not? Keep it, or toss it?” There are certainly pieces I can take one look at and think, “Oh, Lord help us, no,” but that might not be as clear to the person who owns it. In these circumstances I take a cue from Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and I start with the end in mind.

Taking some time to write down what your desired outcome is will give you a template for appraising your current wardrobe. It’s not about a particular garment being right or wrong, necessarily, but whether it is right or wrong for you. Is this piece of clothing bringing you closer to, or further from, fulfilling your goals? Is this enhancing your credibility or making you look like a clueless teenager? Once you start asking those questions, it will be much easier to part with the pit-stained Mickey Mouse T-shirt you’ve had since grade nine.

By spending a bit of time with yourself to design and align your look with your intention, you’ll find that you can craft an image that is authentically you, which shines through in every situation, projecting precisely the message you intend. You can start the journey with these three easy steps.

1. Go to you your closet and select your “magic outfit” – the one you go back to time and again when you have a really important meeting or have to dress to impress. If you have more than one magic outfit, or even just magic pieces, bring those out as well.
2. Identify the ingredients that make this your magic outfit. Is it colour? The perfect fit? The feel of the fabric? The confidence you feel wearing it? Or is it the fact you get positive feedback when you wear it? Chances are, it will be a combination of those factors. Evaluate any similarities your magic outfit shares with any other key pieces in your wardrobe.
3. Check yourself in a full-length mirror. Why isn’t every outfit in your closet a magic outfit? Use the image cues you gleaned from your magic outfit to influence further purchases.

If you are going to successfully conquer the world, you’ll need to know the little details that can polish you up and enhance your reputation.

FABULOUS FIT

Garment fit is crucial, because when your clothes work with your body, you’re ready for anything. A good fit equals comfort and confidence, and is flattering no matter the size or shape of your body.

Don’t wear garments that are too big and baggy with long hems, or garments that are too tight. Pay attention to the hip and crotch – beware of the cat whiskers strained into horizontal pleat formations, or, God forbid, vertical pulling at the end of the crotch (you know what I’m talking about, don’t make me say it). Trouser hems that are too short also send a message that you are clueless. The hem should touch your instep in front and cover half of your heel on the back.

The shoulders of a garment must be the first place you fit as they affect the overall fit and cannot be altered. The seam should align with your anatomical shoulder. If the shoulder fits, you can get the bodice of the garment taken in if need be.

Further fit foibles:

• Falling apart at the seams. The garment is either too small or worn out.
• Bumpy zippers. Toss it, or don’t buy it in the first place, because it can’t be fixed.
• Scruffy hems on pants, jeans and wrists.
• Missing buttons. Says, “I’ve lost control and I’m clueless because I’m still wearing this garment.”
• Button-blouse bra, waist and tummy peekaboos. They say, “I’ve put on a few pounds.”
• Tugging at waistbands, bra straps or undergarments. These say, “I’m trying to pull it together, but am obviously not there yet.”

TIP: Budget tailoring costs into your clothing allowance. Don’t force yourself into “ready-to-wear” garments or items that used to work but no longer fit.

CREDIBILITY KILLERS

As a general rule, be aware of what you are exposing or drawing attention to. In a professional work environment, it is especially important to avoid the following:

• Drawing attention to erogenous body parts, tattoos, or underarms
• If you have flabby arms, skip sleeveless tops. Says, “I don’t consider my shortcomings”
• Thong or panty peekaboos
• Too much cleavage
• Short skirts
• Visible panty lines. Men, be sure to wear appropriate underwear for your type of pants. The more slim-cut the pant, the more tighty-whitey your briefs need to be
• Wearing garments with food, oil or coffee stains
• Pet hair on clothing
• Fabric snags, holes or tears. Save them for cleaning the garage
• Pilling on knits
• Underarm stains or fading colour
• An overstuffed handbag. Says, “I’m overloaded;” scuffed and beat-up bags and briefcases
• Scuffed shoes and belts. These say, “I’m tired, I can’t afford anything else”
• Buy quality socks and hosiery – they last longer and make a successful statement. Men, your socks should match your trousers. No athletic socks! What to wear with your jeans? Co-ordinate your socks with your shoes … or just wear blue socks.
• Ladies, beware of jewelry overkill. Too much will overload you and distract from the words coming out of your mouth and your overall message.

TIP: In business dress, if your outfit is simple, choose one or two accessories to be your focal point. This brings drama and power into your overall appearance. If your outfit has a “star” piece, like an unique and interesting jacket, one simple accessory will finish the look without competing for attention.

FABRIC FAULTS

• This is one of those grey areas that can confuse people, and so they often send a mixed message. For example, wearing linen in January is perfectly acceptable in a tropical climate, but for a winter climate, keep the linen in the closet until spring. It works the other way too: wool overcoats in the summertime? They send the style message of, “I’m unsophisticated.”
• Avoid combining linen fabrics with fall or winter fabrics (wool, cashmere, leather, synthetic blends). Acceptable in combination with linen are silk, chiffon, cotton or other sheer, matte, lightweight fabrics, knits and denim.
• Watch out for fabrics that, when worn together, rub each other the wrong way and cause a “riding up” effect.
• Combining light and dark fabrics that leave traces on each other. Has the same effect as pet hair.
• Mixing patterns can be modern and current (Alec Baldwin’s character on 30 Rock refers to this as “power clashing”). However, done poorly, it sends a message of haphazard thinking or being out of touch. Unless you are confident in this technique, it is best to avoid experiments.
• Clingy or slinky fabrics should be avoided in conservative business as the attention will be on your form and people may not hear all you have to say.

TIP: When considering a garment for purchase, rub the fabric on itself to check for pilling. If it starts pilling in the store, leave it there.

BLACK – Everyone’s favourite neutral, a.k.a. are we going to a funeral?

Go to any business event and you’re bound to see it – an ocean of black coming at you. In an environment like that, it lacks personality, creativity and can be extremely depressing. Black has its place, to be sure, but when selecting clothing items, keep in mind that there are FIVE OTHER NEUTRALS that one can use to mix and match with any colour or print. What are they? Grey, brown, beige, white, and navy. I often get quizzical looks when I suggest navy as a go-to neutral, to which I respond, “Do you have any problem pairing any top whatsoever with your jeans? And what colour are your jeans?” So why not experiment with other neutrals as well? They all mix and match with one another and any colour can go with any neutral.

IMAGE 911 – What every closet needs

• Proper hangers. Get rid of the wires. Thick plastic hangers will do the trick; satin padded, velvet and wooden hangers are the cat’s pajamas. At the bare minimum, blazers and suit jackets must be hung on sturdy wooden hangers to keep their shape.
• Space to fold items. Sweaters should be folded and not be hung as they’ll stretch out.
• Pill shaver and lint brush. They can be acquired at most drugstores and can breathe new life into a pilling or fuzzy garment.
• Mesh laundry bags. Perfect for washing dedicates and sweaters with ease in the washing machine.
• Fabric steamer. They save time on ironing and can keep dry clean-only garments fresh for longer.

By looking good and feeling great every day, you will project confidence and give yourself a silent advantage over the majority of people you’ll meet along the way. Having consistency in what you say, wear and present to others instills trust, builds rapport and creates an understanding that is unspoken. Your message is the result of what you say and how you say it, successfully combined with what you don’t say. Now go get ‘em, Tiger!

Clay Shirky is a smart man. There are very few people better at writing about the intersection of technological innovation and social change. He also knows how the web works. This is a guy who can write a blog post on the most bare bones, standard issue Wordpress blog you can imagine and get 100+ thoughtful comments with his take on the collapse of complex business models.

When he drops a new book on the world you can be sure that his thesis will quickly find itself with a Wikipedia page and so it is with his latest. Called Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, it is a tribute to the possibilities of free time.

His central theme is that we are just now beginning to see the possibilities of constructive use of our spare time. With our media diet switching from consumption to creation and the advent of online tools that bring the costs of collaboration down to zero Shirky muses at the greatness that we could be capable of.

Take the hundreds of billions of hours Americans spend watching television. Merely by diverting a fraction of a percent of that free time we were able to create something as useful as Wikipedia. What other Wikipedia’s do we have in us?

Shirky is quick to make the point that the Internet revolution, like the communications revolutions that preceded with it have brought its share of crap. Think of the printing press. With the spread of cheap books came the advent of mediocre and disposable adventure stories and erotica.

Shirky likes to use the example of the lolcat. While the creation of a lolcat is, in many ways, silly and derivative, it is still fundamentally a creative act. In today’s society we’ve become so used to passive media consumption that even a lolcat fundamentally changes the way we think and act.

While lolcats might be an example of a fundamentally creative act it doesn’t do much for society. Shirky juxtaposes locates with a service like Ushahidi, an open source project which allows users  to crowdsource crisis information to be sent via mobile phone.

Originally used in the aftermath of Kenya’s violent presidential election in 2007 it is what happens when free and widely available disruptive technology is used for something more important than a lolcat.

This is not to say that the book is perfect. While Shirky is an academic, the book is unfortunately short on studies. While an engaging and easy to read writer the plural of anecdote is not data.

Also, some of his examples walk the line in terms of believability, particularly his assertion that Korean schoolgirls helped force the Korean government to overturn an unpopular decision on American beef imports. With Shirky being the unrelentingly optimistic techno-deterministic cheerleader that he is, don’t expect him to find arguments and examples that countervail his wisdom.

However, don’t let that scare you off there is a lot of great stuff in the book about social networks, group psychology and human behaviour but it’s the fundamental optimism of the book that forces me to recommend it.

As Shirky says, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here and there, could we make a good thing happen?”

My assignment would be much easier if I could open this review by exclaiming, “You need to read this book.” The truth is you don’t, that is, if you enjoy the status quo rut you’ve curled up in. But if you want to know how to fix the world’s convoluted and oftentimes redundant systems that affect global productivity, then you’d best crack open Macrowikinomics.

For the sake of Unlimited’s Money theme, we’ll focus on authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams’ chapter on the financial services sector (other chapters centre on outdated educational systems, the green economy and health care, among others). In chapter two, they look into what caused the financial crisis and then discuss the pros of collaboration as a solution.

The openness of collaboration is the core of Macrowikinomics and its precursor, Wikinomics.

“[In Wikinomics] we wrote about how businesses could harness collaboration to compete, to develop better products and services, network with customers and engage with partners and suppliers, essentially to tap into skills and knowledge they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to tap into following conventional business wisdom,” says Williams. “Macrowikinomics essentially applies that same thinking and some of the foundation and principles to all the other institutions in society.”

Concerned that Joe and Jill Internet will impede any productive discussions due to their poor credit scores and lack of knowledge in the industry? The authors address these concerns by saying, “there are plenty of financially sophisticated people around the world who do not necessarily work on Wall Street or in the City but have the requisite skills” – analysts, traders, professionals, academics and experts.

When it comes to the financial services sector, this is a conversation requiring some level of expertise. Tapscott and Williams also stress that this process will take time before anyone sees buy-in from the industry.

Read Unlimited’s Q+A with co-author Anthony Williams

One of Michael Sikorsky’s first business ventures, when he was seven years old, was what he calls Desk Sales. “I would open up the drawer where I put all my top possessions and auction them off to my brother and sister. I would bundle items or hold back items till the next desk sale. I loved it.”

Flash forward to 2009. Sikorsky has started six businesses, made two exits and was forced out of a company he founded. He is an angel investor, software programmer and self-professed hair product enthusiast. And he’s done all of this with a computer engineering degree from the University of Alberta and the help of books. Thousands and thousands of books. Based in Calgary, Sikorsky has created what you might call his own personal MBA-style reading list and, in the open-source tradition he comes from, posted it on Google Books for everyone to see.

Sikorsky’s list offers a peek inside the mind of a successful young entrepreneur. Unlimited talked with him about how he got started, which books have influenced him most and why he doesn’t read in the bathroom anymore.

Were you an obsessive reader as a child?
No, it didn’t really hit me till around 12. Until then, I think I had read – by volition – a few Encyclopedia Brown books. I got passionate about reading when I realized how it helped me do stuff, like learning how to program computers.

You’re not just a serial reader, but also a serial entrepreneur.
The first real company I started, when I was 26, was Servidium, which ThoughtWorks bought when I was 28. After selling Servidium, I entered what I like to call my post-exit depression. You’re supposed to be happy, so, you feign it, but on the inside I felt like my “meaning bubble” had just been popped.

Why did you post your reading lists on Google?
I love what Google is doing for books. And I knew that putting my books online would help other entrepreneurs. Most people guard their book lists or forget what books helped them grow. Being able to search the books I’ve read for quotes, for instance, is really powerful. When I search my books list for the word “enzyme,” I find one of my favourite quotes, by Gérard Bricogne: “Mankind is a catalyzing enzyme for the transition from a carbon-based to a silicon-based intelligence.” [This appears as an epigraph in Mark Buchanan’s book Nexus.]

Would you have learned as much only from school?
Reading is how I learned pretty much everything I know, so if you said I could only have one of the two, I would pick reading. But I loved university. Reading plus school plus doing is the secret combination. And doing is at least 50 per cent of the equation. Doing gives context to everything you read in a book.

What do you read in the bathroom?
I used to read in the bathroom. Now my 18-month-old twin daughters always want to come in there with me. Basically, we floss and do makeup.

If you were to write a business book, what would it be called?
Opposite George: The George Costanza Guide to Business. The premise is, basically, to do things opposite to what people expect. Why start a company when you’re 40? Start one when you’re 20. U

This inspiring and almost unrealistically optimistic book defines natural capitalism as the economic practice of assigning a cost and value to the use, maintenance, depletion and restoration of natural resources and ecosystems. This dense, well documented book is packed with stories and anecdotes of how entrepreneurs, companies and organizations are realizing the value of natural capital and incorporating it into their business. If you want to save the world and make money you’re going to need an understanding of the principles espoused in this book. The four main principles being;

• Radical resource productivity – Getting much, much more from less will be more important than ever.
• Biomimicry – Design systems around nature. Nature doesn’t truck it’s garbage 200 miles away to end up in a landfill. From the book, “Spiders make silk strong as Kevlar but much rougher, from digested crickets and flies, without needing boiling sulfuric acid and higher temperature extruders. The abalone generates an inner shell twice as tough as our best ceramics, and diatoms make glass, both processes employing seawater with no furnaces. We may never grow as skillful as spiders, abalone, diatoms, or trees, but smart designers are apprenticing themselves to nature to learn the benign chemistry of its processes.”
• Service and flow economy – Shift the perception of wealth from good and purchases to valued desires and satisfying human needs. Don’t sell your product, become a deliverer of a service with long-lasting, upgradeable durables. Interface Carpet leases floor covering services rather than selling carpet. This also makes makes manufacturers responsible for their waste instead of downloading it to the consumer.
• Investing in natural capital – Develop economies and markets that enhance and restore the environment.

The connection between The Geography of Hope (a previously reviewed book) and Natural Capitalism is unmistakable. Both are optimistic enviro-screeds focusing on the business end of the equation. While Chris Turner focuses on telling stories in Hope, Natural Capitalism is much more focused on concepts and real world examples.

An important concept to take away would be what the book calls tunneling through the cost barrier. Traditional thought holds the more you want to save on a resource the more you will pay for each increment of saving. Let’s use the example of building a home. If you super insulate your house, using energy efficient windows and maximize passive solar heating your upfront costs will be high. However if you do a good enough job you can remove the need for a furnace. The lifetime cost of heating the home has now dropped very close to zero and you get one happy homeowner. This idea can be applied to to many different processes across various industries. Inertia keeps far too many wasteful and inefficient practices going.

A lot of what is written about is just straight up common sense; eliminating waste, energy efficiency, resource efficiency, integrative holistic design and closing the materials loop. These ideas are not new but when put out there with such thought and passion it’s hard to understand why these ideas aren’t ubiquitous.

I swung drastically from quite high to very low in reading the book. They’ll drop some terrible stats about the loss of topsoil then follow up with an intriguing anecdote about an entrepreneur growing watermelons in the a desert with something called subsurface drip irrigation. Most of the innovations talked about seem frustratingly out of reach for mainstream adoption despite the quality of the idea.

There are definitely parts of the book that show their age (the book was published in 1999) and parts that are just flat out wrong. In Chapter 12 specifically, the authors are extremely excited about the possibilities of the Kyoto Accord and spend the chapter making projections about the future of carbon trading that just didn’t come to pass. The authors, specifically Amory Lovins, go on about ultra-light, ultra-strong Hypercars. Of course after publishing the book domestic automakers pumped out thunderingly inefficient SUVs for the next nine years.

The chapter on economic and market theory offers an excellent critique of the subject. Transferring taxes from labour to resources is such a basic idea that it’s shocking it’s not in place. Taxing the pollution that ends up in our water table is a much better idea than taxing my income.

I’ll end off with this quote from the book.

“How is it that we have created an economic system that ells us it is cheaper to destroy the earth and exhaust its people than to nurture them both?”

The creation of an economy that realizes the hundreds of trillions of dollars of value present in our atmosphere, the soil and water should be the economy that our grandchildren should inherit.

In this optimistic ode to a sustainable planet, Calgary-based writer Chris Turner tours the world, offering up slices of sustainability from Indian office parks, rural Thailand and other locales.

Turner, a former door knocker for Greenpeace, mixes a cheery outlook with a pop culture commentator vibe that makes the book quite readable. This is an excellent  introduction to basic sustainability concepts in energy, food, shelter and transportation but it also has a beating heart. His sincerity is engaging without being preachy. I particularly enjoyed his examination of carpet company Interface and his sojourns to Denmark.

I have a bit of a history with Turner. My parents gave me his first book, Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation, as a gift five years ago and I remember it as decent. What I liked about the book weren’t the dissections of various characters or discussions about the best Simpsons episodes of all time. It was that it widened my view of the pop culture world. He introduced me to things like street art, Banksy and Adbusters. In Hope, he does much the same, opening my eyes to the cool world of sustainability.

Turner can write but he’s also a helpful curator. After reading Hope, I went out and added books like Natural Capitalism and Small Is Beautiful to my reading list. My Internet browser bookmarks were similarly burnished with new places to visit like Grist (link).

Of course it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. There are times when he goes too far with the background information. If you’re familiar with architecture, the introductory preambles on Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller and LEED might be a bit much. Also, his relentlessly optimistic approach glosses over some of the hard realities he’s talking about. Just because BP is investing in solar energy means little without context. He tends to curse, which I don’t really mind in real life but it hurts the message and seems out of place.

If you’re a nascent greenie or just want to introduce yourself to what a sustainable world would look like, I recommend The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner.

Read an excerpt from the Geography of Hope from issue 5 of Unlimited.

I have an ever-growing list of the most depressing books I’ve ever read. Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates, topped the list for a long time. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman has a place. The Da Vinci Code makes an appearance, but for reasons unrelated to subject matter. (That book is this popular? Really?)

Now I have a new addition. The Ego Boom: Why the World Really Does Revolve Around You, by Canadian Business editor Steve Maich and Maclean’s staffer Lianne George, thoroughly got me down. That isn’t a bad thing. I probably needed to read it. A lot of people, from generation X right on down through generations Y and Z (once they’re out of grade school) need to read it.

Ego Boom documents the rise of the “You Sell.” Maich and George explain, “Where marketers used to primarily sell products or brand values, they’re now selling You – an idealized, self-actualized version of yourself – back to you.” Take L’Oreal’s recent slogan tweak. The company’s catchphrase once was, “Because I’m worth it.” Now that first person singular has been replaced by the second person: “Because you’re worth it.” Or consider that Time’s Person of the Year for 2006 was none other than You.

Marketers have changed their messages from aspirational to affirmational because they’ve realized consumers are increasingly narcissistic. Such self-esteem building has created a generation of individuals who each believe they are unique – too unique for mass-produced computers, entertainment, or spirituality. Companies like L’Oreal reaffirm this trend by showing how products will enhance that individuality. It’s a compelling argument, but it makes me wonder if there is too much mythic power attributed to large corporations.

New media, meanwhile, has created its own constellations that revolve around you. In a chapter titled “That’s Show-Me Business,” Maich and George propose that the “me media revolution” means that “by selling us on our own individuality, putting a feeling of control in our hands, big business has engineered a new golden age based on the same old star system.”

What makes this especially depressing for me is when my generation (the millennial, generation Y, generation next, whatever you want to label us folks born from the late 1970s to the early ’90s) is singled out as the most self-involved of the bunch. We know the least, we participate in society the least, and we think the highest of ourselves.

Maybe we (and you) need the reality check of a book like Ego Boom, distressing only because it forces us to re-evaluate our relationships with ourselves, with each other and with consumerism.

A little bit of humble pie never hurt anyone. Case in point: Kanye West. “The danger,” the authors astutely point out, “is when the ascendancy of ‘You’ crowds out any sense of ‘us.’” And if the message is hard to swallow, remember it’s because we’re worth it. U

+ Enter to win one of 22 copies of Ego Boom. Contest runs from December 1 – 31, 2009.

+ Listen to Unlimited’s CareerJoy blogger Alan Kearns’ conversation with Steve Maich and Lianne George.

David Allen picked up a black zippered pouch from the table and began stroking it. “I love these,” he said, cracking a smile. He put it down and reached for another item from the table, a plastic red file folder. “This is one of my favourite tools in the world,” he said. There were approving nods from the roughly 30 people seated inside the conference room in a downtown Montreal hotel. They loved the folder, and the pouch.

Handmade accordion folder by Kasaa

Next door, in a larger room, a bank was holding a rollicking meeting. People clapped, cheered and stomped to the music. By contrast, our room was quiet and focused on Allen, our leader for the day – and possibly a time period long beyond that.

Allen is the man behind the Getting Things Done productivity system and bestselling book. His system for managing tasks, commitments and the “stuff” that fills up minds and inboxes has helped many a knowledge worker get a handle on work and life. The man is a rock star to hyper-achievers because he helps them go farther, faster. Lifehacking aficionados love him, and some of the biggest companies in the world such as BMW America and Microsoft pay him and his company big bucks to help senior executives, dare I say it, get things done. I leapt at the chance to take part in his one-day GTD Making It All Work session in Montreal. This was an opportunity to learn the finer points of his system, and see Allen in action.

ALLENISMS

At the beginning of the day, he covered some of the topics that we spoke about when I interviewed him for the Globe and Mail a couple of weeks earlier. Like any top speaker and session leader, Allen had his shtick down. Some of my favourite Allenisms from the session give you an idea of what he’s trying to communicate:

“It’s about the strategic value of laziness… People who work in technology stay up all night to make things so that they’ll never have to work again.”
“If you aren’t trying to get anywhere, getting rid of drag is a drag.”
“I can resist anything but temptation. You know those horse blinders they use? That’s what I need.”
“When I get jumped by four people in a dark alley, I don’t want 200 unanswered emails weighing on my mind.”
“Having the freedom to make a creative mess is our most productive state.”
“Our mind’s system is not wired to remember and remind us of things. It focuses on the latest and loudest.”
“Too in control is out of control.”
“It’s the dumb people that think they’re smart all the time.”
“GTD is the most radical group of non-joiners you’ll ever meet.”

Got that?

This Should Come Naturally

Allen’s system isn’t like learning a new technology or language – it’s based on natural human behaviours. “How many of you ever felt better simply after making a list?” he asked the class. We all raised our hands. By keeping things in your head, his theory goes, you’ll forget important tasks and commitments, and increase stress.

Allen also talks a lot about the “strategic value of clear space,” or the physical space in offices, and what he called “psychic RAM.” You can only process so many things at once. Clear away all of the stuff that weighs on your mind, and suddenly you can focus on the task at hand.

Kids as young as two or three years old easily latch on to the basic concepts and processes of GTD. (“We’ve got to reach the kids very soon, and early on,” he said.)

Allen had already done a good job of reaching the folks in the room that day. Several people in the session were already committed GTDers. Two men sitting in front of me had driven up from Vermont. Others came from Toronto. At the end of the day, one man went up and had his picture taken with Allen. Lots of folks got him to sign books.

The big question is where to start. With that in mind, here are three easy to implement tips I gleaned from the session.

The Two-Minute Rule

If an action requires less that two minutes of your time, do it right away. Need to confirm that appointment via email? Do it now. Imagine how much you could finish in just 15 minutes if you stack up your quickie tasks and push through them. This single piece of advice, if followed regularly, can clear away the items that weigh on your mind and distract you.

Perform a Mind Sweep

This is a simple process to extract the things you’re storing in your heads. During the session, Allen asked us to take a few minutes and write down everything that was on our minds. Everything. One person was thinking about winter tires. Somebody else needed to clean his garage. I came up with a list of about 15 items, and decided to keep adding anything that popped into my head during the day.
Allen challenged us to never have the same thought twice. If you thought about it, you wrote it down. I ended up with around 60 items on my list. Some of them had been rattling around in my head for days. Once written down, I knew I’d captured the thought. Then I could use the list to create tasks or reminders that would help me take action. Do this right now to get everything out of your head. Then, as an ongoing technique, you need to…

Create an Inbox/Capture System

We all have an email inbox. You also need one for all of the other, physical stuff that comes your way. Grab a file folder or similar organizational item and keep it on your desk. (That red folder Allen said was his favourite item? It was his inbox.) Keep a pad of paper or a small voice recorder nearby. Anytime something pops into your head, write it down or record it, and pop it into your inbox. (Unless it’s an item that you can take care of in less than two minutes.)

Now you’re capturing things that need to be dealt with, and keeping them in a central location. (You can also use something such as Evernote or Remember the Milk to capture items electronically.) You need to process your inbox regularly, and either take action on an item, or file it away so you can address it at the appropriate time. U