Jason Spencer – GPS For Success

As everyone knows, the world of smart phone applications is constantly inundated with new applications, apps promising better features to enhance your productivity and change your life. Sadly to say, some often come with hefty price tags and offer little in return, but empty promises. Time management paradigms aside, the reality is that there is only so many ways that a programmer can create a calendar and a task manager, before it becomes a test in futility. Remember the old saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results and that is exactly what a number of these developers are doing.

Many mobile PIMs  (Personal Information Managers) are either too stripped down or over wrought with unnecessary features and have a user interface that is kludgy at best.  The reality is that a good UI designer when porting an application’s interface to a new environment should take into account the unique advantages of the mobile device that they are designing for, rather than trying to create a one size fits all application. One example of bad design or at least poor programming is the opera mini on the AT&T Blackberry Bold 9000, although fast on a number of other cell phones—it runs painfully slow on the Blackberry Bold 9000, making it highly undesirable. (Note the full Opera Mobile browser on a AT&T Tilt 2 running Windows Mobile 6.5 flies and is utterly amazing.)  Other applications include any number of web applications on the Blackberry and iPhone that simply create a front-door to a preexisting web application, making these free applications often nothing more than glorified web site short cut links.

For these reasons alone, I found a refreshing difference recently when I was invited by Yuriy Savchenko, the Project Manager for WebIS’s Blackberry development team out of Kiev, to join their beta testing team. I found a completely different approach to product management and programming development at WebIS. They are a company that cares not only about the quality of their products, but actually about their end-user’s experience.

As many Blackberry Developers know, there has been serious synchronization issues for third party app developers with RIM’s Blackberry Desktop Manger 5.01 and Yuriy’s  team tackled these problems ferociously  creating what  I have come to see as a world class application.  I believe that Pocket Informant 2.01 for the Blackberry is a serious game changer in the development of RIM mobility applications.  First off,  WebIS CEO Alex Kac and his team under Savchenko have done a superb job of porting  Pocketing Informant  from the Windows Mobile Platform to the Blackberry.

Any long term user on the Blackberry knows that RIM is famous for its shortcut keys  and Pocket Informant’s  speed keys on the Blackberry are where the application begins to shine. Learning these shortcut  keys turn Pocket Informant into a worthy, if not far superior alternative to the Blackberry’s native PIM applications.   Using Pocket Informant’s short cut keys is a  powerful option because Pocket Informant allows  a user to access their tasks, their journal notes, their calendar and their contacts all from  a single highly customizable user interface that can be easily modified to your heart’s content. Here’s the real kicker, Pocket Informant’s short cut keys are also fully customizable allowing the user the ability to define which buttons launch which PIM functions.

Pocket Informant also works with any of the major time management systems from David Allen’s Getting Things Done to Stephen Covey’s First Things First.  In fact, Pocket Informant actually comes with GTD  and Franklin Covey preconfigured settings built right into it. Pocket Informant is the de facto mobile standard application on Windows Mobile and now the Blackberry for Franklin Covey’s PlanPlus mobility solution.  For example, a mobile license for it now ships with Plan Plus. The Franklin Covey tools include the weekly compass, goals, projects, mission statements and daily notes functionality pre-built in. These settings can be turned on and off in the Pocket Informant options tab which is so customizable that the feature list alone could fill up multiple blog entries.  The daily notes actually sync with Microsoft Outlook’s journal application—a feature that some mobility developers actually develop and sell separate applications for.

Pocket Informant 2 can fully sync with or exist separately from the  blackberry native PIM database (allowing for a person to carry around two separate sets of information – one for personal and one for professional information) giving the end user more options.

In conclusion, I encourage every Blackberry user to test drive the new Pocket Informant PIM application as it hands down one of the best blackberry applications on the market today.

To embrace life more powerfully, we must embrace it by living consciously in the moment. Reverend Will Bowen in A Complaint Free World challenges us to sport a purple rubber bracelet as a form of metacognitive awareness training (thank you Timothy Ferris for this poignant observation) in what Bowen calls the 21-Day Challenge. You have to go 21-Days without complaining, criticizing or gossiping. Having just completed 85% of the book I can say it’s a challenging concept.

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This blog will no longer be inactive. I will be posting regularly here with some terrific surprises and some insights from my own life. Many of you know that jasonrspencer.com was my testing ground for a pod casting channel that we have been developing for the past year and half.  I kind of got distracted with getting the project setup — it won’t happen again. Well the  channel www.BrainBites.com has just done it’s soft launch. If you want to see all the exciting things going on  — please visit my corporate web site at www.MediaADDICT.com.

Here’s my gift to you — an exclusive  interview with my life long hero Steve Wozniak discussing the iphone:

In life it’s often difficult to find authenticity, the true self within ourselves. Barbara De Angelis, Ph. D, writer, researcher and relationship expert summarizes this universal timeless struggle when she writes, “We need to find the courage to say NO to the things and people that are not serving us if we want to rediscover ourselves and live our lives with authenticity.” Which in of itself is the utter simplicity of being yourself having the clarity of the vision to see deep within who you are and what you are meant to be and do with your life.
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The Challenge

“Man has a limited biological capacity for change,When this capacity is
overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock. ” writes Futurist Alvin Toeffler in his 1970 Landmark book Future Shock, where he coined the phrase information overload. Toeffler poignantly argues that man’s ability to deal with his reality — his “sanity itself thus hinges on man’s ability to predict his immediate personal future on the basis of information fed him by the environment.”

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One of my favorite web sites that I find myself revisiting is Bruce Keener’s blog Keenerliving and his PDA resource for Palm OS and Windows Mobile users. He also offers a free ebook which is a portable summary of all his suggested best practices and principles from years of experience in corporate America. Keener, as an author, is both practical, humble and highly effective in his writing. He offers real gems of incite covering the finer subtleties of Getting Things Done implementation and execution, devoid of the fluffy egotism rampant among many of the blogosphere’s blog gaggle of new wanna be gurus. Humility in this world is something that we all need more of. In a candid, brief interview with me, Keener gave me his opinions about the Getting Things Done Phenomenon.

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A single Google of the phrase “Getting Things Done” (GTD) turned up 12,200,000 results and counting at the moment of this writing and a single sponsored article link headline kept taunting me, “What is Wrong with GTD?” which necessarily resulted in the delay of this posting.

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David Allen opens Chapter 6 of Making It All Work with an introductory quote from blogger Steve Pavlina on the power of clarity, “If you aren’t yet at the point of clarity, then make that your first goal.” The quote is from Pavlina’s Do It Now post part of his series on time management in which Pavlina portrays himself as a productivity expert and maverick challenging traditional life management systems. In his article Time Management, Pavlina writes that he has read all the books on the subject and that if there were such a thing as a “Ph. D in time management,” Pavlina claims “to have gone over the curriculum many times over.”    Of course Pavlina gushes over Getting Things Done (GTD), writing “I love the standard GTD system” which brings us back to the concept of clarity. Interestingly, helping people gain clarity at the higher levels is something GTD completely lacks, Pavlina argues in the Essential Missing Half of GTD. What is the quintessential Pavlina productivity paradigm and where does it veer off from GTD and the traditional top down systems he abhors?  Where do they connect?

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Purchase Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life

In his first book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity , David Allen, the visionary of open source productivity, sparked a global revolution by turning conventional  time management principles on their head.  Allen advocates in his first book that a person must first clear the decks, starting with the mundane by processing the work in front of them (commitments or open loops), before attempting to realign their higher altitudes of vision, purpose and values.

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