Open up your mind and say, ahh...

GTD, 18 minute plans, organized folders… none of them work as well as you’d like.

The reason is simple: you don’t want to get more done.

You’re afraid. Getting more done would mean exposing yourself to considerable risk, to crossing bridges, to putting things into the world. Which means failure.

The leap the lizard brain takes when confronting the opportunity is a simple formula: GTD=Failure.

Until you quiet the resistance and commit to actually shipping things that matter, all the productivity tips in the world aren’t going to make a real difference. And, it turns out, once you do make the commitment, the productivity tips aren’t that needed.

You don’t need a new plan for next year. You need a commitment.

How many Twitter followers will be enough?

How many Facebook fans does your company page need?

How much traffic to your blog?

In the digital age, for the first time ever, most of us come face to face with the opportunity for unlimited. No bakery can handle an infinite line, no orchestra could possibly have an infinite number of violins, no teacher in a classroom covets a classroom of infinite size…

But in the digital world, the pursuit of infinity isn’t just possible, it’s the norm.

The question: What price are you willing to pay for that pursuit?

Deciding that the only audience that is enough is everyone completely changes the way you measure your worth and your work. If pursuing a number you will never reach changes you or your approach or your beliefs, is it worth it?

(The corollary of infinity is zero. As in zero people disagreeing with you, questioning you or ignoring you).

A team of German researchers have found that five cars in a thousand communicating with one another is all it takes to reduce congestion.

That small sample size is sufficiently representative of overall traffic flow to let engineers and officials make decisions about traffic planning that may help to alleviate rush-hour jams and construction delays.

“Location-specific traffic information and warnings in real time can help to remedy this, while simultaneously increasing road safety,” said Nick Reilly, president of GM Europe, whose Opel marque participated in the research. “Less congestion means less wasted time, reduced fuel consumption and lower CO2 emissions.”

The finding was the result of research in Europe’s Dynamic Information and Application for Mobility with Adaptive Networks and Telematics Infrastructure (DIAMANT) program and presented at a conference celebrating the 20th anniversary of the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA).

Already, DIAMANT has been instrumental in the Jam-Free Hesse 2015 initiative, which seeks to reduce traffic jams in the German state where Frankfurt is the capital. Though those in the US tend to imagine Germany as a model of automotive efficiency, with Audis, Benzes and Porsches whizzing along the Autobahns at unfettered speeds, a study by ADAC — Germany’s version of AAA — found that the opportunity cost and wasted fuel of traffic congestion causes losses to the German economy of $425 million dollars each day.

Since the project began in 2003, Hesse has implemented low-tech strategies such as scheduling construction in off-peak hours and opening shoulders to traffic during periods of heavy congestion.

The next step in reducing traffic jams in Hesse is a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) telematics system that sends data from in-car sensors to local traffic control centers over 802.11p WLAN, reserved for intelligent transportation networks. Data from the V2V network would be analyzed by local authorities and sent to motorists through navigation systems, text messages and radio traffic reports. The technology’s one-year trial period ended recently and is being analyzed before it’s presented to the public.

Photo of LA Traffic: Flickr/chuck.taylor

New polling out this week shows that Americans are frustrated with the world and pessimistic about the future. They’re losing patience with the economy, with their prospects, with their leaders (of both parties).

What’s actually happening is this: we’re realizing that the industrial revolution is fading. The 80 year long run that brought ever-increasing productivity (and along with it, well-paying jobs for an ever-expanding middle class) is ending.

It’s one thing to read about the changes the internet brought, it’s another to experience them. People who thought they had a valuable skill or degree have discovered that being an anonymous middleman doesn’t guarantee job security. Individuals who were trained to comply and follow instructions have discovered that the deal is over… and it isn’t their fault, because they’ve always done what they were told.

This isn’t fair of course. It’s not fair to train for years, to pay your dues, to invest in a house or a career and then suddenly see it fade.

For a while, politicians and organizations promised that things would get back to normal. Those promises aren’t enough, though, and it’s clear to many that this might be the new normal. In fact, it is the new normal.

I regularly hear from people who say, “enough with this conceptual stuff, tell me how to get my factory moving, my day job replaced, my consistent paycheck restored…” There’s an idea that somehow, if we just do things with more effort or skill, we can go back to the Brady Bunch and mass markets and mediocre products that pay off for years. It’s not an idea, though, it’s a myth.

Some people insist that if we focus on “business fundamentals” and get “back to basics,” all will return. Not so. The promise that you can get paid really well to do precisely what your boss instructs you to do is now a dream, no longer a reality.

It takes a long time for a generation to come around to significant revolutionary change. The newspaper business, the steel business, law firms, the car business, the record business, even computers… one by one, our industries are being turned upside down, and so quickly that it requires us to change faster than we’d like.

It’s unpleasant, it’s not fair, but it’s all we’ve got. The sooner we realize that the world has changed, the sooner we can accept it and make something of what we’ve got. Whining isn’t a scalable solution.

Tomorrow: part II—the opportunity

When a popular rock group comes to town, some of their fans won’t get great tickets. Not enough room in the front row. Now they’re annoyed. 2% of them are angry enough to speak up or badmouth or write an angry letter.

When Disney changes a policy and offers a great new feature or benefit to the most dedicated fans, 2% of them won’t be able to use it… timing or transport or resources or whatever. They’re angry and they let the brand know it.

Do the math. Every time Apple delights 10,000 people, they hear from 200 angry customers, people who don’t like the change or the opportunity or the risk it represents.

If you have fans or followers or customers, no matter what you do, you’ll annoy or disappoint two percent of them. And you’ll probably hear a lot more from the unhappy 2% than from the delighted 98.

It seems as though there are only two ways to deal with this: Stop innovating, just stagnate. Or go ahead and delight the vast majority.

Sure, you can try to minimize the cost of change, and you might even get the number to 1%. But if you try to delight everyone, all the time, you’ll just make yourself crazy. Or become boring.

The first revolution hit when people who made stuff started to discover that information was often as valuable as the stuff itself. Knowing where something was or how it performed or how it interacted with you can be worth more than the item itself.

Frito Lay dominates the snack business because of the information infrastructure they built on top of their delivery model. 7 Eleven in Japan dominated for a decade or more because they used information to change their inventory. Zara in Europe is an information business that happens to sell clothes.

You’ve probably already guessed what’s now: information about information. That’s what Facebook and Google and Bloomberg do for a living. They create a meta-layer, a world of information about the information itself.

And why is this so valuable? Because it compounds. A tiny head start in access to this information gives you a huge advantage in the stock market. Or in marketing. Or in fundraising.

Many people and organizations are contributing to this mass of data, but few are taking advantage of the opportunity to collate it and present it to people who desperately need it. Think about how much needs to be sorted, compared, updated and presented to people who want to choose or learn or trade on it.

The race to deliver this essential scalable asset isn’t over, it’s just beginning.

1. People don’t like deadlines. They mean a decision, shipping and risk. They force us to decide.
2. Deadlines work. Products that are about to disappear, auctions that are about to end, tickets that are about to sell out–they create forward motion.
3. Deadlines make people do dumb things. Every time I offer a free digital document or an educational event that has a deadline, I can guarantee I will hear from several (or dozens of) people with ornate, well-considered and thoughtful arguments as to why they missed the deadline. Never mind that they had two weeks… the last fifteen minutes are all they are concerned with. If it’s important enough to spend an hour complaining about, it’s certainly important enough to spend four minutes to just do it in the first place.
4. Deadlines give you the opportunity to beat the rush. Handing in work just a little bit early is a sure-fire way to tell a positive story and get the attention you seek. The chart below tracks the day (out of 10) that I received each of the more than a thousand applications for the free nano MBA program. Want to guess which day’s applications got the most attention from me?
5. When we set ourselves a deadline, we’re incredibly lax about sticking to it. So don’t (set it for yourself, in your head, informally). Write it down instead. Hand it to someone else. Publicize it. Associate it with an external reward or punishment. If you don’t make the deadline, your friend gives the $20 you loaned her to a cause you disagree with…
6. They have a lousy name. Call them live-lines instead. That’s what they are.

Key takeaway: Deadlines are a cheap and useful tool to for yourself (and others) to make a decision and to ship.