Calling All Bloggers – What’s your productivity dream?
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Here I’d like to start another round of discussions, debates, flames, threats — you know, the fun things. Most of all: deep deep coffee.
So I tag Jawwad, Adnan, Jehan, Jaffer, Dr. Awab, Bilal, Babar, TM, Ramla, Zeeshan and all the other bloggers who read G&W on one question. First some background.
I asked people earlier what they use to get organized (read that post for some background), and pretty much whenever we talk about organization, maintaining context of work and productivity the standard answer gravitates back to a combination of Basecamp, GoPlan, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Smartphones, Outlook, Email Management systems, IMs, post-its and whiteboards.
First, the solution here in itself is a problem because of so many mediums to juggle over. But the real problem is that that isn’t a productivity solution.
A productivity solution should be something that knows me, understands my profession, and the things that make or break the work that I do. A productivity solution can put me ahead of all my competition just in terms of the speed and volumes of the work that I can produce, in my particular profession; typical day; lifestyle.
What’s more, the solution should know all of the different roles that I play in today’s world. I could be a business manager, author, consultant, speaker, musician, and more simultaneously. The solution should thus be ideal for me, in my life, for my happiness.
So that’s why I’ve tagged people with about as diverse a set of professions and work-lives as can be.
Here are the questions I’d like everyone to answer:
- If you could change everything about software – from windows and apps to internet solutions — how would you create your ideal productivity solution?
- How would you define productivty for YOU — your particular worklife?
- What parts of your daily workflow or your team or the specific dynamics that exist in your team would the software just have to know about for the whole team to become more productive together?
- Tell us a little about your work — what is the single biggest bottleneck, hurdle or annoyance you still feel daily despite all the softwares in the world that exist to help you. Again, describe this in your specific context — e.g. maybe you’re a graphic designer who make sketch art — thats a specific context.
- What about all the people in your profession? What’s the one thing all graphic designers could benefit from? Is it better management of wireframes?
SO, tagged bloggers, please do the following:
1- Answer the questions above, either in the comments or your own blogs
2- Ask the same question on your own blogs for your readers. Spread the brainstorm virally.
Let’s see if we can try to get the biggest collection of varying professions to give their unique perspectives.
In the meantime, I’ll go get me some coffee and await responses.
8:10 am
This is a big question! For one I want all my bookmarks from the 3-4 PCs to be synced up. Same goes for my contacts.
Productivity at work is big business and collabration is the killer app – thats why google is after it. But more than tools, I’ve found that processes and change management is far more important.
4:15 pm
Before i make any comment regarding the subject matter, just a little correction.
In the post my blog address is http://billish.wordpress.com/
which is not correct, I have deleted that blog
The new URL is http://bilishy.wordpress.com
Cheers
5:11 am
I switched to Apple Macbook
thats a great productivity gain. Besides few windows specific apps I haven’t encountered any big hick-ups yet. Now, I do focus on work not on blue screens, viruses and bunch of stupidities for which we usually waste a considerable amount of time per day.
As I’m into multiple things, each business has its unique requirements and niche’ solutions to address them. I agree with Babar Bhatti as at the end of the day its all about productivity vs. time & effort deployed and how collaborative / automation addresses your unique business process requirements.
7:13 pm
Salman,
What are these niche solutions? Can we have an example or two?
9:17 pm
@babar
foxmarks (foxmarks.com) is a firefox plugin that will sync up your bookmarks across PCs. Wont help with contacts, but any bit of time saving helps (assuming you use firefox of course)… I use it to sync between my desktop and laptop…