The Eric Wroolie Blog

Overpass Experiences

Speech Slows the Speed of Information

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Is it more advantageous to sit in a training course or read a really big book?

Seth Godin wrote a great article today on the inadequacies of speech as a training tool:

Speech is both linear and unpaceable. You can’t skip around and you can’t speed it up. When the speaker covers something you know, you are bored. When he quickly covers something you don’t understand, you are lost.

It is a fantastic means of inciting something from listeners, but not to stand in front of a group of people and read.

He makes a great point, and I think it has a lot of relevance to the rise of podcasting. Everything is podcasted now. The only things that make podcasts better than blogs is that you can (a) get to know the speaker on a more personal level or (b) listen to it in your car. With all the podcasts out there, how much driving can you possibly do? If I listen to five minutes of a 40-minute podcast, it means I was really interested (but I got other things to do).

I think the assumption that people see a teacher standing in front of a class as more efficient is that it is the only ‘proof’ that the students heard what was saying. Ridiculous, but I suppose some people just don’t read.

I know as a software developer, I can pay thousands of pound for a 5-day course which loosely covers a technology or programming language. Or, I could buy a very good book for £50 which would give me 20 times more information and I could devour it in those same five days.

At interviews, are they more impressed with me taking a course or reading a book? They always go for the course.

Read Seth’s article here.

GTD Outlook Add-In–Who needs it?

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I’m nearly finished with my 30 day trial of the GTD outlook add-in. GTD stands for “Getting Things Done” and is intended David Allen’s fantastic book on productivity.

The Add-in is very simple. Anyone with any VSTO knowledge could create it quite simply. It provides the user with a toolbar that allows them to set emails to “Defer” (this will put them in a @Defer folder), “ACTION” (this will put them in the @Action folder), etc.

I’d read a lot of good things while searching the web about this add-in. People raving at what a good help it is–how it streamlines their life. I was excited to try it.

I’m unimpressed with GTD for Outlook. The application doesn’t seem to be written by anyone who has ever read any of David Allen’s books. I’m surprised it even got his endorsement. Unlike the Franklin-Covey Planplus outlook add-in, there are no glaring bugs, but for $50, I would expect more than the application saving me the arduous chore of copying an email in my inbox to the @DEFER folder.

There is a short ebook for sale on the David Allen website GTD and Outlook(http://www.davidco.com) that tells you how to configure Outlook 2003 for maximum productivity. This will cost about $10, but you can probably find the same material on the web for free if you look hard enough. With this PDF, you can get Outlook working as well as you could with the GTD add-in but without cluttering you desktop with another add-in. The URL for this PDF is http://www.davidco.com/store/product.php?productid=16173&cat=0&page=1

So if you found this post because you were doing some product research prior to downloading (as I did), let me offer my opposing view to all the glowing posts I had read and tell you that I don’t think you need it.

So now I get the nag screen telling me to register for the next 10 days. I’m uninstalling. As with all outlook add-in uninstalls, I hope I don’t end up crashing my system.

Filed Under: GTD

Blogwild! review

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Last night I finished reading BlogWild! How everyone can go blogging by Andy Wibbels. This book wasn’t bad if you know absolutely nothing about blogs or blogging. I had read some good reviews of the book, but found it very simplistic. Blogwild!: How Everyone Can Go Blogging

I found a little bit of information that would help someone with their existing blog (about enough info to fit in an article) but a lot of stuff that told you how to set up a Typepad blog from scratch.

As someone in the IT industry, it wasn’t really meant for me. If I wanted my grandmother to be able to blog, I would recommend this book to her. Actually, in the last place I worked, I know some very technical people who didn’t know what a blog was or have ever read one.

Too much reliance on Typepad for my liking.

Andy Wibbels has two blogs which are very successful. I found them very entertaining and have added the RSS feeds to my aggregator. The blogs are at:

http://andywibbels.com/

http://www.andymatic.com/

Still, it got me motivated to write a bit more and to think about more information to include on this site. If nothing else, that was a benefit to reading it.

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