the [non]billable hour

links for 2007-03-30

• TripSync: Simple Business Trip Planning and Management
  An interesting tool for travel planning.
  (tags: travel tracking planning)
• Presentation Zen: Can limitations and restrictions be liberating?
  Interesting take on Theory of Constraints
  (tags: constraints productivity presentations)
• Intelligent online task management | Smartsheet.com
  (tags: spreadsheet collaboration productivity web2.0)
• Power plug ID labels
  (tags: design productivity)
• Hack Attack: A beginner's guide to Quicksilver - Lifehacker
  (tags: mac apple quicksilver)

Ultra-Rapid Focus Group

Kathy Sierra talks about an Ultra-Rapid-Design Party with some great brainstorming tips that I'm going to shamelessly steal for my Idea Markets and Innovation Retreats.  Here's how she describes it:

Forget focus groups. Forget endless meetings and brainstorming sessions. Throw an ultra-rapid-design party, and do it in a single day. This approach exploits the wisdom-of-crowds through a process of enforced idea diversity and voting, so no consensus, committee, or even agreement is needed. And it's way more fun.

The Product Design Dinner Party takes 9 people, a pile of diverse "inputs", and has each of the 9 people voting on--and pitching--one another's ideas to continuously reconfigured groups of 3 people, letting the best ideas rise to the top. The process is a little complicated, but it's derived/modified from an existing rapid-prototyping design I'll talk about later in the post.

Go to the post for a step-by-step guide.  Definitely worth a try.

How to "Black Out" During Your Next Presentation

Bert Decker has a great (and easy) tip to improve your next presentation:  Use Black Slides.  According to Bert, a blacked out slide (as opposed to justing hitting the "B" key) accomplishes three things:

1. Clear the screen.  Once you’re done with the picture, graph or supporting information, you want to remove distraction, and go to a black slide so you can amplify, tell a story, or make an additional point, etc.

2. Black out the screen.  Simply put, so you can walk in front of the projector. Almost all meeting, board and conference rooms are poorly designed so that they have the projector screen right in the middle of the room or stage. It should be at the right or left, so YOU can be in the middle. After all, YOU should be the center of your presentation, not your slides.

3. Totally change your mindset.  Change he creation and emphasis of the presentation. This is by far the most important of all, and needs it’s own paragraph.

Who is Going to Pay for Those 18 Minutes?

NYT article on the perils of multitasking.  The money quote:

In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

There are some other good studies mentioned in the article.  Worth a read -- if you've got the time.

Pay Per Client?

Not sure where the legal ethics gurus come down on this one (I think I can guess), but Google has now rolled out a Pay-Per-Action advertising service, which requires you to pay only if the user completes a clearly defined action after clicking on an add -- such as buying something, joining a mailing list, etc.  Pricier than AdWords, but much more bang for the buck.

The Bonus Boost: Better Peformance

File this one away in the "things that make you go hmmmmm" department.  This article in Science Daily (hat tip: Guy) suggests employee bonuses work WAY better then pay raises in motivating employees:

Giving a 1 percent raise boosts employee job performance by roughly 2 percent, but offering that same money in the form of a bonus that is strongly linked to a job well done can improve job performance by almost 20 percent, finds a new Cornell study on the relationship between pay and performance.

Full study here.

links for 2007-03-29

• Rock Your Google Calendar in 18 Ways
  (tags: google gcal calendar)
• Add to-do's to Google Calendar with Remember the Milk
  Pretty slick To Do add-in for GCal
  (tags: google calendar gcal googlecalendar)

I'm Sorry for Your Loss. Was He Funny?

A quick tip for meeting the family of a decedent at estate wrap-up time, courtesy of Tricks of the Trade:

If you have to interview a grieving family after a death, a good question to ask is: "Did he have a good sense of humor?"

This will almost always shake the family out of their grief, making it easier for them to talk to you, and bring up an anecdote that really shows the character of the dead person.

Presentation Inspiration

If you want to see some best-in-breed presentations, check out Slideshare's World's Best Presentation Contest.  Slideshare is an online, presentation sharing application.  Worth a look.

Building the Perfect Innovation Retreat - Call for Help

Readers, I need your help.  I'm designing an intensive, two-day, innovation-focused law firm retreat that I can sell to medium and large firms.  Before it goes "live" I need to do it at least twice to iron out the kinks and make it hum.

Here's what I'd like to do:

• Do the retreat for a firm of 10-20 lawyers, their staff and selected clients (yes, I said clients).  The cost to the firm will be my travel, lodging and retreat materials.  I'll also ask the firm to pay me an amount commensurate with the "value" of the retreat to the firm -- but only if they thought it was the best retreat they'd ever done.
  

• Assemble a group of 10-20 small firm or solo lawyers for a two-day innovation retreat here in St. Louis in early June.  Because most solo and small-firm lawyers don't get the benefits of a law firm retreat, I want to bring several of these lawyers together to collaborate with one another and to bring innovation into all of their practices.  Also, I want to see if the concept of a solo/small firm "retreat" will work.  If I get enough people, I'll set the fee at an amount sufficient to cover my costs (probably at $250 per attendee or so).  Each attendee will be on their own for travel and lodging.
  

Let me know if you are interested.  You can e-mail me at Matt@LexThink.com if you or your firm would like to participate.  Thanks.