#Gtd

Really liked this article (dead link) by Lifehacker’s ex-hacker-in-chief Gina Trapani on her personal business model. Basically, it’s never always about the money (unless you’re a very shallow person). Primarily about freelancing, it has a nice framework for how to split your time between the benjamins and the other important things.

How she developed it her business model:

1. List of people you admire in business (and why)
2. List of people you enjoyed working with (and why)
3. Big Question: What do you want to accomplish ?

It distills to a 30/30/30/10 business model which is interesting. I’m hoping she updates this post at some point in the future with a followup telling us how the reality tracked to the ideal and what sort of tough decisions she might have made looking at that pie chart.

DHH (of Ruby on Rails fame) at Startup School (dead link). He did a very similar presentation at FOWA Dublin when I was there this year, but this is a nicer, refined version with him side by side with his slides.

I loved his comment about there being “not enough people trying to make a nice Italian restaurant in the webspace.”

Obviously, nothing earth shattering in here, but it’s wise to keep it in mind in an environment where everyone is trying to hit one over the fence a la facebook, youtube and twitter.

I’ve had this theory of happiness (or at least what I think I need to be happy) for some time now. Long-suffering friends have had to listen to my ideas that are part-Frankl, part pseudo-science, part observation and part admission about the good and dark in my own soul. Ready ? It’s quite simple, really.

The keys to happiness are : Meaning, Belonging and Someone. No, I’m not going to expound on it here. You can buy me a beer if you want the full explanation.

Interesting and article in Fast Company about making your own luck .

Wanna Get Lucky ? 4 Things You Should Do…

Maximize Chance Opportunities

Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing, and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, which include building and maintaining a strong network, adopting a relaxed attitude to life, and being open to new experiences.

Listen to Your Lucky Hunches

Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. They also take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities – for example, by meditating and clearing their mind of other thoughts.

The boat voices have been whispering to me again. Perhaps because I was too close to the sea the entire time I was in Turkey, or they sense I’m on the cusp of making some big decisions, but the fact is they’re reminding me of how happy I was when I lived aboard the Neilali.

Suspiciously, this weekend’s edition of the Instructables Weekend Builder , caught my attention with an entire mini-feature on How to Get a Free Yacht (and its maiden voyage).

I have to admit to being a little bit jealous of people who are only working twenty hours a week and pulling down amazing salaries or writing productivity “work smarter, not harder” pr0n. I mean, it’s true. There is very little correlation between hours worked and what most people define as success. And that’s before you even get into the whole argument about what success is to some people versus others. I know I feel a lot more successful having taken a huge paycut and doing what I’m doing now than when I was being paid a lot more (I still remember the look on the face of the CFO when they said they’d counter-offer me leaving and I said I was taking a huge pay cut. ;-) )

I like this. From mattf’s shinily resurfaced blog .

1. Go to google docs, click new spread sheet
2. Click form, create your form with title, description, severity (1 minor .. 5 epic fail), who’s responsible in a dropdown and reported by.
3. Save your form
4. Add conditional colouring in spreadsheet on severity
5. Add a completed/status column
6. Embed form onto a page/email form to bug hunters

Love the simplicity of this.

The only thing I’d add is that you should go into the resulting spreadsheet, go to Share | Set Notification rules and have it email you whenever anyone submits a form right away.

Animation on the then versus now world of brand communications.

And what works. Which kinda of harkens back to the cluetrain manifesto idea that markets are conversations. And in fact, not just the traditional idea of a market, but any market; attention span, fundraising, information consumption has to have people with something interesting to say and to interact with. advertising and sloganeering is no longer enough.

Really great article from the creator of Gmail on how important it is to be experimenting constantly with live code to drive innovation and how much more strongly is speaks than a fat PPT deck.

Two great gems here, the first on time for unapproved ideas:

The other point is that it’s important to make prototyping new ideas, especially bad ideas, as fast and easy as possible… This is also where Google’s “20% time” comes in – if you want innovation, it’s critical that people are able to work on ideas that are unapproved and generally thought to be stupid. The real value of “20%” is not the time, but rather the “license” it gives to work on things that “aren’t important”.

I’m pondering whether I could pull off National Novel Writing Month this year and pen a novel in the month of November as the nights get longer and the days colder.

50k words by the end of the month ? That does seem a little daunting. Say 2000 words a day over 25 days ?

Ok, maybe it wouldn’t be a good novel, but…