The beginnings of my outsourced life
16 January 2010I'm currently experimenting with my life in ways that I wish I would have a few years ago. Tearing a page from Tim Ferriss' playbook I'm testing assumptions left and right. I've already chronicled the elimination of physical media. In February it's likely I'll sell my beloved big screen TV, home theater system, all my gaming systems and my AppleTV as well. I know that I couldn't have done this before now but it's interesting to think how things might be different if I had. This however is not the intention of this blog post but rather the new in-flow of products in my life. I'm beginning to believe that I can have anything physical delivered to my house. And since the start of the year it's proven remarkably easy with a little planning. Books and content are now all digital and get delivered immediately. Physical books get delivered in 2 days from Amazon but those have only been gifts for folks and not things I'm keeping. I've even shipped packages from my house without even seeing the delivery service guy. The two things that I regularly left the house for in my car were work and groceries and well the ...
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Sleep Cycle – the $1 that may quite possibly be reason enough to have bought my iPhone
14 January 2010This last week I spoke about my passion for my FitBit and how much I love this little piece of technology. I stated that I was considering about playing with a Zeo to help me monitor and improve my sleep but that the price was the sticking point for me. The day I made that post Lifehacker made note of Sleep Cycle (http://bit.ly/52lHtE). This little app uses the same accelerometer inside the FitBit to make observations about your sleep. For those who have known me for a long time, they know I'm not a morning person. For the longest time I used to tell folks that if it's before 10AM it simply didn't mean anything to me. After only a few days using this application I completely believe in the idea of alarm clocks that take advantage of your body's own rhythms. Basically, you tell the alarm to wake you up at a certain time and the iPhone and this app begin searching for a time up to 30 minutes in advance of that time for the most opportune moment to wake you up. When it finds it the alarm goes off.It's pretty amazing between the ...
5 internet tools you should be using (but probably aren’t)
13 January 2010There are several tools that I absolutely love on the net which are still a little obscure but make my life so much easier. If you aren't already using these tools seriously check them out! 1. TokBox (http://tokbox.com, free) Tokbox is one of those services that I use at every chance I get. Tokbox is in a very competitive field of video conferencing software that requires no installation in order to run. All it needs is a browser and flash to have been installed (and not to mention a camera, microphone, and an account to the service). The reason I like it is it's incredible ease of use and the simple process to sign someone new up. The opportunity to see someone's facial reactions and non-verbals when talking or listening makes conveying information that much easier. Top it all off with being free and having a really strong integration with other services like YouTube and Slideshare and that's why it's my default web conferencing software. 2. Tungle (http://tungle.com, free; http://tungle.me, free) Tungle is an amazing application that makes not only tracking whats on my schedule easier but also allows for people ...
Content – Your ultimate resume and legacy
12 January 2010After a few self indulgent posts I've decided that this one will entirely be about helping you. I know from the stats and the folks who have spoken to me privately that a lot of folks reading this blog are new to social media. I also know that I primarily promote this blog on Twitter where I'm followed by a lot of sharp minds in the space. With that frame I'm going to try and speak to both sub-audiences simultaneously. The topic: content. A lot of social media folks who actually do this work professionally often feel hypocritical because they push their clients to produce content on a regular basis yet fail to do so themselves. While they can point at the fact that this is the fight they put up all day and all they want to do is watch TV or Hulu when they get home they're doing themselves a disservice. (I fell into this group in such a massive way and that's entirely why I'm taking part in the post-a-day challenge.) I would posit that content is the only thing that really lasts on the internet any longer. Ads in the form of PPC or display banners aren't ...
How being interested in European football (soccer) has helped me in business
11 January 2010[This is another introspective post so if you don't dig them feel free to skip this one.] Most folks in America spent the weekend watching the NFL playoffs and to be honest I watched the overtime session of the Packers and Cardinals game. Overall though I've found that my passion for European football has served me better than any other sport. I haven't always been a fan of soccer. To be honest I used to make fun of the kids who played it in high school. Little did I know that I would end up becoming a fan of the "world's game" only a few years later. I didn't jump directly from playing baseball and being obsessed with it and watching Lakers games as if I was a part of the team to the Barclay's English Premier League. Like most things it was a long and varied path. My first introduction to sports outside the US actually was the Tour de France. I became passionate about it starting in 2000. Watching a Texan win the race made this entirely foreign sport seem ok because it fit my worldview that Americans can win at anything. Cycling though isn't televised here in the ...
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FitBit and my obsession with analytics
09 January 2010I know that some of the most successful entrepreneurs that I look up to simply don't believe in analytics. Maybe they're too high level for those kinds of detail or simply are more concerned with putting huge wins on the board. Either way they choose to ignore the minutiae. I've always been willing to experiment with my body; partly because I'm naturally a night owl and partially because I think it's interesting to experiment and see where I can innovate. Over the last five years I've tried different diets, drank and didn't drink sodas, slept in all kinds of configurations (my personal favorite remains a full dymaxion sleep schedule which gave me 30 minutes of sleep every 6 hours) and every once in a while I would experiment with exercise. [To put this in context, I am, without a doubt, one of the most physically lazy people you will ever meet. I suspect that my small physical frame (5'8", 126lbs) never intended for me to lift heavy things or even put up much of a fight. That stated, I feel that I need to be active because I know the health benefits that activity can have and while I may not enjoy ...
Why my books and DVDs are now in boxes
08 January 2010Around the holidays I decided to rearrange my furniture because I renewed my lease. As a result I got a very up close and personal look at the amount of stuff that just sat on my desk. The vast majority of it had no real value but simply sat there because, well, that's where it had been. I began looking at other areas where "things just had been" and it became apparent to me that there were several areas in my house where it was happening: my desk, a pair of book cases, a filing cabinet. As a result I've set out to clear those areas of stuff that is no longer needed. First up are the books. As you may have guessed I love books for the knowledge they give me and I hate to throw them away. That stated it's simply time to clear the backlog and through services like abebooks.com and cash4books.net I can do so really efficiently. With just the first of two bookcases examined, I will be nearly 100 titles lighter and should all the book buy backs come in at their expected values almost $500 richer. I definitely won't go racing back to Amazon ...
One heck of a day: The Ren Men and Wired to Care
06 January 2010Over the last two days I decided to blog about some of the things that had come across my desk; namely Wired to Care and, through a thin veil, The Ren Men. Needless to say that I was shocked that both reached back out to me and do so in such meaningful ways. Let's start with last night's post and bring you all up to speed. I quickly wrote about playing the role of connector and doing things that give perspective. The reason why that post had a very different feel was because it was literally minutes after I had emailed a key member of Gary Vaynerchuk's staff who I feel fortunate enough to call a friend and one of the nicest guys I've come across professionally, Matt Sitomer. I was on the high of simply helping someone achieve a goal that they had had the confidence to make it public. Grant and Alan, the guys behind the Ren Men Show, stated in an early episode of their podcast that their major eustress goal was to get in contact with Gary V. I feel pretty fortunate to consider several members of the Vaynermedia ...
Why I’m not making a 2-year plan
02 January 2010Those who have known me for an extended period of time know that I love to have some structure to my daily life and have some long term goals. Normally those long term goals are done in 2 year plans. I've been doing them basically since when I moved out to Arizona and they've proven to be a great motivating factor to get large obnoxious things done. This year was to be the start of my 4th 2-year plan but I decided to go against that. The main reason is that in the last two year plan I had completed 70% of my goals in the first 10 months. While that part was great I really feel that during 2009 I relaxed and let things come at me rather than hit new goals and gain new skill sets. So that brings me to the idea of having 1-year goals. For some reason 1 year seems odd to me for making a goal happen. Maybe it's because I genuinely don't like way everyone else uses that as a metric or that I have an odd relationship with the number "1". So this year I've decided that I'm going to implement parkinson's law ...
A New Year
01 January 2010First off, happy new year! Secondly it appears I fell off the planet if you only follow my blog's RSS feed. Thankfully this wasn't the case. I've continued to read like a mad man and as a result have a lot of books I need to go back and provide reviews on. In an experiment for me I've decided that January 2010 will be my first 1 month experiment. The experiment is for me to publish content each and every day of the month. The goal here is two-fold: 1) clear out all the backlogged stuff I want to talk about in a regular way and 2) get into the habit of creating content extremely regularly. Accordingly the content will vary from day to day simply because my focus is going to change. Some days it may be what some of my experiments in my life are (there are two other huge ones for January which I'll describe in subsequent posts), book reviews or simply stuff I'm thinking about when walking to and from work. (I know that that may shock some of my Phoenix based friends, yes I really do walk to work everyday.) There's my post for today but I ...
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