Daniel Gold is an attorney and productivity author & presenter. He wrote Evernote: The Unofficial Guide to Capturing Everything and Getting Things Done and Springpad: Smarter Notebooks. Smarter Sharing. A Smarter Way to Get Things Done. You can find out more about him on his site DEG Consulting and on his Evernote blog appearance.  Connect with him on Twitter @dangoldesq.

If you look on your computer, your phone, your desk, wall, or maybe even your refrigerator, you’ll find something civilizations have been using for thousands of years — the calendar.   It’s funny to think that the little calendar refrigerator magnet the local real estate agent gave you has always had so much reverence and so much power.  Scores of people have always looked to the calendar to determine when the harvest season begins, when religious observances take place, and when trading should start.  It has always been held in such high reverence.

It is somewhat ironic that thousands of years later, we’re still using the calendar for many of the same purposes.  There is something psychologically powerful about setting appointments.  Writing something down or inputting into our electronic calendars can almost be as empowering as signing a contract.  Why?  Because we are making a personal and/or professional commitment to someone that we will do something at a certain date and time.

We use our calendars to capture and remember important events in our lives – whether they are personal, religious, business, or for school.  We use the calendar to remember things such as birthdays, anniversaries, parties we need to attend; appointments such as doctors, a haircut, spa, client or colleague meetings; reminders to perform certain tasks; or even to block off time to perform tasks (such as writing this blog post!).

Time management methodologies such as Franklin Covey and Day Planner systems have capitalized on the professional services space for a long time in hopes they could help business people manage their time better.  This in turn elevated the calendar to a new dimension and provided brand new revenue streams for dozens of paper calendar manufactures in producing a relatively stagnant market. Carrying the fanciest calendar became somewhat of a status symbol for many business people.

Getting Things Done with Your Calendar

If you are a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD for short) time management methodology, you know a couple of things: 1) it has taken on a bit of a cult like following of incredibly enthusiastic people ranging from professionals to stay-at-home parents; and 2) the system helps people organize their lives into lists, while leveraging the calendar for more strategic purposes.  David Allen strongly believes that a calendar should not be used to hold action items, but rather to track the “hard landscape of things that have to get done a specific day or at a specific time.”[1] In fact, he goes on to say that those things that reside in a calendar should only be those things that are either time specific or day specific. [2]  Those things written down on sticky notes, hand written notes, and other doodling should go into  your ubiquitous capture tool, such a Moleskine notebook or Evernote.  In fact, in my book on how to leverage David Allen’s GTD system with Evernote, I also strongly encourage the use of the calendar for just those things that have definitive dates and times, while using Evernote for your tasks and reference related materials.

In other words, the calendar should be considered sacred ground for pure strategic thinking.  As an example, let’s say you have six time-specific appointments on your calendar on Monday, but you also have on your next action list: 1) create guest blog post due next week; 2) finalize presentation for Wednesday; and 3) call client about signing the contract next month.  There is a strong likelihood that looking at the calendar for Monday, you will be able to make a strategic decision about which task must absolutely get done in order for you to be successful.  It is at that point, you can make a determination as to when in the day you should be able to get that task done, and then block out your calendar accordingly.

Technology is Changing the Way Use Our Calendars

Technology has been increasingly helpful in allowing you to have access to your calendar everywhere you go, to easily create conference calls on the fly, generate WebEx meetings from our phones, and see your colleagues’ availability from wherever you are with our mobile devices.

But technology has done something else for us as well.  We now have the opportunity to do things we couldn’t before – leverage new technologies such as semantic searching to provide greater context to your calendar.  Semantic searching differs from typical keyword searching we’re used to on Google because it looks for meaning in your search.  Wikipedia defines it as a way to “improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results.”

Here’s how this would work: imagine setting an appointment with Sally Smith for 3pm on Thursday.  A “smart calendar” would leverage semantic searching to find relevant information tied to Sally Smith.  For example, this “smart calendar” would pull of your conversations from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instant Messaging clients, Skype, and e-mails into your calendar appointment.  This would truly fill the gap in elevating the calendar to all new strategic heights as it would be surfacing up everything you would need to be more successful at this meeting with Sally.

How Meshin Recall is Filling the Gaps 

Meshin is one such company that is on its way to filling this gap.  Meshin originally came to market with a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that employed semantic searching to allow users to enter a search term, such as “Evernote”, and wherever Evernote was mentioned as a keyword in any conversation, contact, attachments, and web search. What this meant was that meaning was attached to your e-mails. Your e-mail had context rather than hoping that you could find the right e-mail that might have your keyword in there.

Meshin has now come to market with an amazing app that has me, in particular, incredibly excited.  It’s called “Meshin Recall”.  It is currently only available on the Android platform, but the iOS version is coming soon.  In essence, it is your “Evernote Calendar.”  It integrates Evernote in a very meaningful way.  Let me explain how this works.

When you first start the app, you connect your Evernote account and link your calendars.  Then, you can designate a default Evernote notebook in which you want your notes to go into when you make them in Evernote.  Next to each event in Recall, you can add a new note to the calendar entry.  In other words on your phone or tablet device, you can create notes about your appointment which gets stored in Evernote.  This will obviously help you better prepare for your meeting. Alternatively, while you’re at your appointment or on a conference call, you can input notes about the appointment as its taking place.  If you already have an Evernote note created next to an event, you’ll see the iconic green Elephant next to the event in the calendar list.  Clicking it will allow you to view it or share it. You can also create new text, photo, or voice notes, search Evernote, or go directly to Evernote all from a beautifully intelligent and simplistic design.

Now, let me bring it all together for you in a way that will skyrocket your productivity.  I set the default notebook in Meshin Recall to my default “.Inbox” notebook in Evernote.  After I’ve added notes to my calendar item, that note resides in Evernote. As I begin to process and organize my Inbox in Evernote, I can tag those notes, let’s say by a project.  If action items arose out of the meeting (as they typically do), I then copy and paste those action items into new tasks.  Then, leveraging my favorite feature in Evernote, the copy note links, I can paste a note link from my note I made in Meshin Recall to provide more context for the action item, and create an index of all the important notes I’ve created for that project in a Master Project Note (the Master Project Note is part of the Master Note Series I created and available for download for free with the purchase of my book) which would include all of the notes from Meshin Recall.  I now have a complete inventory of everything I need for me to be successful in a meeting: from action items, to reference notes, to important information I have added in Meshin Recall!

Looking at this from a much higher level, look at what I have really done here:  I have elevated the status of a plain calendar to a far more strategic tool by integrating Meshin Recall with Evernote and my calendar.  This in turn allows me to have everything come together in one centralized repository to help skyrocket my productivity in ways I am certain the ancient Mayans never dreamed possible.

[1] Allen, David (2001). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, page 96. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-200028-0.

[2] Ibid., Page 144.

GUEST BLOG by CHRIS HOLMES, CEO and CO-FOUNDER OF MESHIN

I’m passionate about start-ups and photography, both are insanely creative processes and success requires great vision and great execution, oh and a bit of luck along the way helps too.  So when I started incubating Meshin (www.meshin.com) in PARC just over a year ago i was struck how much the process of making a photograph (good photographs are made not taken) is similar to getting a winning startup off the ground.

The photographer, like an entrepreneur, sets out with an idea in mind, one for an image, the other a business.  The entrepreneur chooses a product and a market, the photographer a place and/or a model – they both start with something simple, a prototype or a few test images, to check their ideas.  User feedback (and innovation) guides the entrepreneur, photographers are led by their ‘mental eye’.  They both refine, seeking clarity and focus on what’s important, what’s thereal idea here. More images, more releases, more feedback, more analysis. The process repeats itself; until the product resonates with users or the images delights the photographer other times it doesn’t – skill, patient and in the entrepreneurs case money, may dictate just how long before they succeed or have to give up.  But along the way sometimes something quite magical happens – the very act of trying presents a much better image or better opportunity – its right there, begging to be addressed yet we are hung up on our original idea.  But just sometimes you choose a different perspective and you see it.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve shot a few dozen images of a sunset only to turn around in frustration to see a magical landscape scene behind me glowing in the golden last rays of the day, the sky draped in a beautiful purple hue.

That’s what just happened here at Meshin …we had this great vision (we all loved it of course) it goes like this – these days we are constantly mobile right? and we have lots information that is important to us (emails, messages, txts, contact profiles, calendars, files, notes, etc. ) about the people we care about but its scattered all over the place in different systems - right? – So our idea was simple … connect all this together in one place, add a dash of smart analysis (PARC was that in spades after all) and you have a system that knows everything about how and who you have interacted with people, still with me?  With this there’s lots of possibilities to add ‘context’ to our daily need to use and find information.

So to do just this we build a cloud-based system, called the iMesh, and we decided to bring this vision to life using an smartphone (Android) app, we called it Meshin too.  This app was to be the ‘go-to app’ to manage your daily barrage of messages and meetings, everything is in one place delivered when you need it – no more bouncing between different apps and hunting around for what we need when we need it. Bottom line Meshin was a replacement Inbox solution. We tested it with early users and investors, they loved the idea, but not the early builds so much, but we got lots of good feedback to improve it, we re-iterated as fast as we could, more feedback & more releases.   There was lots to do so we decided to test our calendaring sub-system using a separate and much simpler application. We called this Meshin Recall (recallmuch.com) and it consolidates all your calendars into a single elegant view and integrates the popular Evernote system so you never lose a meeting note again.

Then it happened … we launched Meshn Recall and the immediate user feedback was universally positive, Evernote was enthusiastic & gave us marketing support, we got 4000 & growing downloads in 16 days, in far more than the original app in 6 months, plus a 4.8 star rating from users.  Back channel feedback was equally positive too.  The opportunity was right in front of us all the time, yet we hadn’t ‘seen’ it, we were too intend on our original application.  Now our users are asking us to connect their inboxes (and much more) with their calendars so they can quickly & very simply see all they need in connection with their meetings. Bingo – that’s where our original vision comes in – we can do that, that’s what the iMesh does.

Watch out – I’ll blog more as we bring this ‘Smart Calendar Solution’ opportunity to life, you can follow me at SXSW [twitter @alt0163] and we are running a competition to win an iPad3 check it out here recall much.com.

[You can also see some of my images here if you are interested - user either flickr to FB.] ]]> http://www.meshin.com/blog/2012/03/taking-a-great-photo-is-like-creating-a-great-app/feed/ 0 http://www.meshin.com/blog/2012/03/recall-much-sxsw-day-2/ http://www.meshin.com/blog/2012/03/recall-much-sxsw-day-2/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 22:28:33 +0000 kristengalliani http://www.meshin.com/?p=1158 The rain kept the crowds away and the mood was not fantastic, but conversations were great.   Looked at my blog from day 1 and saw that one  of the music fans is not thrilled by the Interactive folks.  But, that comment I embrace because it points out that change, for many people is hard, and SXSW is full on throttle change.   Whether people are deep in conversation or derped out on their phones looking for dinner with Yelp, or sharing their experience with Trover , or hanging at Google Village checking out Google Play they are looking for change.   The worlds have collided at SXSW.. Music meets Film meets Interactive.  It is all about change.. experiencing new things and engaging.   What are your top experiences at SXSW??

As I look over at the guy one aisle showcasing his film for this week I realize, all the people I am working with came through happen stance, the nature of SXSW.  So let’s all go with the flow and enjoy the journey   Hoping it is a week to be remembered for Meshin

It’s videos like this that make us feel like we’ve been through a lot. That we’ve accomplished a lot. That we’ve made the world feel more alive. More real. More personalized.

In our corner of the world in Palo Alto, we’re still working to bring a new breed of personalized communications technology to the palm of your hand. We’ve taken the idea of personalization – and how it affects your productivity – extremely seriously. The connected world, thanks in no small part to Google search, is becoming more and more personalized, too.

Like we see in the video, 2011 was a big year for Google – and for you, too. We can plainly see how Google+ is only just beginning to connect Google services, users, and information in a more personalized environment.

At Meshin, we’ve taken some gigantic steps forward over the past year. We’ve helped thousands of beta testers move beyond searching their inbox, to a unified inbox where personalization, priority, and productivity have an enduring connection.

Beyond search in 2012, how can Meshin help boost your productivity?

The technology is here, and everyone has a point of view about what should be used to keep the global workforce better connected. Many thoughts echo our own.

Deep Nishar, SVP of Products and User Experience at LinkedIn re-emphasized their mission is still to “connect the world’s professionals and make them more productive.”

Timothy Young, VP of Social Enterprise for VMWare says they’re not really building software, but “helping people to unleash their power internally, to become heroes and become more effective at their jobs.”

In a world where everyone is trying to solve a technology problem, we’re using Meshin technology to solve a more human problem. Like Tim says in this video, simple technology can make us more effective workers.

While Meshin’s backend technology is far from simple, the day-to-day use of our app is remarkably so; see your important communications in one place so you never miss a beat.

Put simply, work today demands productivity. Is your connected workforce positioned for improved productivity?

You already work from home. You’re connected to your mobile phone and you’re already thinking about work even before you get there. That is, if you have to go to an office anymore.

From corporate enterprise to sole entrepreneurship, employees and independent workers aren’t restricted to a central workplace. According to IDC, a global provider of IT market intelligence, there will be almost 1.2 billion mobile workers in 2013. And, according to the iPASS Mobile Workforce Report, remote workers are putting in more time on the job than office-based workers.

It’s important to put all this change into perspective. Which is why it’s important for Meshin to sponsor the GigaOm Net:Work conference this week. This is the premier event that explores the intersections of technologies and social connectedness with the people that will shape the future of work.

We hope you’ll either be there to join us – or follow @meshin and #workconf over the next couple of days. We’ll be rolling up a few informational gems over Twitter and we’ll also be rolling out a new Meshin infographic about the productivity of the mobile worker. We’d love to hear your opinions and thoughts on what the mobile workforce looks like.

As one of the emerging mobile app technologies impacting collaboration, remote workers, and business in the networked age, our team is still hard at work building your feedback into the Meshin app.

We’ve already made several new builds, added Microsoft Exchange, added more intuitive “Person view” updates, as well as a new “Actions” section where you’ll see all the messages you’ve flagged for “action” or follow-up. See more about what Meshin can do for you right now:

What Meshin Does from Meshin on Vimeo.

It’s clear that OUR WORK has changed in the age of networks. How has your work changed? Leave a comment below – or meet up with  @alt0163, @hoffboy and @oneumbrlla at GigaOm Net:Work!

We’re gearing up for GigaOM Net:Work 2011, a conference that focuses squarely on the future of work.

As a Showtime Sponsor of Net:Work, we’ll be in attendance (hint: look for @alt0163, @hoffboy, @oneumbrlla). We’re looking forward to learning how forward-thinking CIOs and CTOs are adapting to the challenges of managing the mobile workforce.

Beyond the challenges Meshin already addresses by helping the mobile workforce be more productive, we need to consider the unknown. After all, what was true a generation ago remains true today, only more so. Consider this bit from the NYT:

According to Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.

Net:Work seems like the perfect venue to explore the questions we’re already thinking about:

• What will the collaboration tools of the future look like?
• Can we make calendar and task sharing more accessible?
• Can we automagically prioritize time management issues?
• Can we unify the real-time communications experience in a more productive and intuitive way?

Connect with us at GigaOM and follow @meshin for updates. If you’ve got burning questions about “the future of work” that you want to ask – send us a Tweet!

In the meantime, check this out. Chris Holmes, CEO of Meshin, talks about The Mobile Experience and how we handle work today:

The Mobile Experience from Meshin on Vimeo.

It’s one of our favorite conferences, and we’re continually amazed by the fantastic content and plugged in attendees! We had some great hallway conversations, our pre-conference dinner was well attended and super thought provoking, and many people attempted to juggle their way into the new Galaxy Tab 10.1 that we offered up to the person with the best three ball juggling time.

In then end, Alessio Signorini walked away with the prize after posting an impressive 90 seconds of exquisitely controlled juggling.

One thing we noticed repeatedly was how folks’ willingness to juggle varied in direct proportion to their knowledge of the stakes. Several times we were initially waved off, only to have the juggling balls snatched from our hands when the competitors found out a Galaxy Tab was on the line.

Context changes everything, doesn’t it?

Here are some of the juggling times.