Read this paragraph from this article discussing the effect of “digital input” on thinking:

Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

When I spend time away from my iPhone, my laptop, electronics, media, and people — even for a short period of time (30 min, 2 hours) — I solve problems and re-focus in a unique way that has a dramatic impact on my effectiveness when I “return” back to my noisy world.  And this is my experience as an extrovert myself, who can generally handle a pretty steady stream of noise and activity.

Just this past Sunday afternoon I had about 3 hours of silence as the three other members of my family took long naps… I came up with ideas and thoughts in a way that I had not done in quite a while.  The challenge for me — and probably for most of my readers — is to make this time priority, so that all of our other hours of the day or week will be that much more productive.

And not only are all 3 tools very useful, they also have basic, fully functioning versions that are completely free!!

1)  LastPass – http://www.lastpass.com

This password-memory tool appears to be the industry leader.  It bills itself as the “last password you will ever need” — you do, in fact, log in once and then worry no more about remembering passwords.  LastPass is smart– when you are in a website sign-up page asking for a username, password, etc., Lastpass offers you the choice to have it generate a unique, secure password that it will remember in its database.  If you decline and enter one on your own, as you successfully hit submit/continue/etc on that page, it gently prompts you at the top of your browser to ‘Save site’ if this a site whose username/password you would like to retain.

LastPass has a lot of different features- AutoFill, AutoLogin, and even multiple form-field profiles to save common sets of information you may find yourself entering on websites of all kinds (think ‘home address’, ‘business address’, even payment info, etc.).  There are plug-ins for multiple browser types, and even an iPhone version.  Though I’ve not yet tried the iPhone plugin, I imagine that it will be immensely helpful.  Not only is entering usernames/passwords in iPhone’s Safari often cumbersome, it’s an even more grueling process if you have to go through a Forgot Password routine!  LastPass helps you avoid both scenarios.

2) Adolix split and merge PDF – http://www.adolix.com/split-merge-pdf/

Talk about a paperless office has been almost constant now for the last 10-15 years — and yet, from my own experience, it has just been the last 2-3 years that the mainstream business world is really grabbing hold of this concept.  True, digital signatures have not yet taken over as a preferred method of signing over a signature, but on the few things that still require signatures, the printed and then signed document quickly becomes digital again for the purpose of emailing over to a colleague, customer, vendor, or other party expecting the quick arrival of the signed document.  In this new world of electronic documents – largely dominated by MS Word format documents in the sphere of ‘editable’ formats, and especially in the world of imaged documents dominated by the Adobe PDF file format, there is need for easier management of not just files, but also PAGES.

How many times have you needed to pull out pages 3-4 of a 20-page pdf contract to email to someone?  What do you do?  You probably either email them the whole file and hope they can find the sections you need to emphasize to them, or you laboriously print out the relevant pages out of the larger PDF, scan them back into your computer, and email the new, smaller PDF file.  Painful, eh?

Enter Adolix.  They have created a very helpful utility that allows you to quickly split out pages of a PDF document.

How about combining PDF’s?  Or combining pages 1-2 of one PDF file, and then pages 7-10 of the next file?  You can use the utility’s split tool to first pull out the relevant pages, and then use its MERGE tool to combine the two newly formed PDF’s into one new file.  And, if you use this tool in conjunction with a PDF creator such as Adolix’s own “PDF Converter” utility, or my personal favorite CutePDF (http://www.cutepdf.com/), you can easily take a number of files in different format (a Word document here, an Excel document there, a PDF document there), convert the non-PDF files into PDF’s, and then combine them withoT Adolix!

3) Mikogo -  http://www.mikogo.com/

After being tired of essentially being tied to GoToMyMeeting, GoToMyPC, or WebEx for years, I finally spent some time googling around about a year go to find a free solution for screen sharing and web conferencing.  I was very happy to come across Mikogo.  Mikogo was developed by a company that sells high-end virtual conferencing solutions — a company that now appears to have moved into the GoToMy____ space.

Again, the Mikogo product is FREE, and I have found works just as smoothly as any of the other solutions out there– additionally, I found that the app that runs resident in the system tray does not bog down your computer’s memory or processor, and the features that come in Mikogo are equal to or even better than those found in comparable and more popular utilities.

Now if they could only change their name to something less nonsensical…

I hope that this review of these tools has been helpful!

So not only was I frustrated to be reminded of my many started but not yet finished blog posts, I was also amused — because it reminded me of my “Idea Productivity” blessing and curse.

Let me explain.

Thanks to the generosity of a relative of mine on one of my birthdays a couple of years ago, I had the privilege to take part in a leadership development and personality assessment comprised of two individual assessments: the MBTI-II (Myers-Brigg Type Indicator II) and the Highlands Ability Battery.  This was a perfect gift for me, because those who know me well are aware of my fascination with personality studies, leadership profiles, and other personal characteristic evaluative mechanisms.  My interest in that world is strong enough that I’ve even thought about spending the time and money to become a licensed Myers-Brigg facilitator so that I can officially administer and interpret the Myers-Brigg test for others.

Anyhow, on the Highlands Ability Battery that I completed a year ago, one of my highest-ranked “driving abilities”, as it calls them, was Idea Productivity.  It explains Idea Productivity in this way:

Leaders who score high in idea productivity (Brainstormers) generate ideas continually.  A measure of the quantity of ideas produced, and not of their quality, high idea productivity results in a continuous stream of sometimes-related and frequently-unrelated ideas and in multiple streams of virtually simultaneous thought.  Brainstorming leaders excel in roles that draw on their strength in producing their own ideas, inducing others to produce theirs, and motivating the discussion and selection of ideas that lead to a concerted plan or solution.

Because one idea tends to trigger another, leaders with high idea productivity often work on several projects simultaneously; they may actually have difficulty maintaining a single focus for prolonged periods of time.  If they have 10 tasks and ten days in which to complete them, these leaders will devote some time to each of the tasks every day and may or may not complete them by the deadline.   (Source: tHAB Leadership Report for Phil Murray, January 2009)

I was thrilled to get a better grasp on this part of my personality and approach, and I constantly (and annoyingly) pointed out the many wonderful examples of this Idea Productivity to my wife ad nauseum for weeks after completing the assessment.  And you can probably understand why this attribute is such a strength and yet also such a weakness.  As a strength, it makes me a great contributor in a brainstorming session, it allows me to multi-task, keep a lot of balls in the air at once  and accomplish work quickly across a broad spectrum of subject areas.  It provides me with a constant stream of ideas, and makes it relatively easy for me to see solutions to many difficult problems.  On the flip side, it’s also the attribute that will get me producing new things at such a high rate that I don’t bring projects to completion — such as my 59 started but unfinished blog posts as of tonight!

In a work setting I am very cognizant of deadlines and accountability needs and so generally this does not create a huge problem — in fact, in my role I’m often the individual laying out the deadlines, holding people to them, and all the while trying to lead by example.  But in my personal life, it keeps me spread thin across many projects, books, and relationships and often keeps me from being as effective as I could be.  It’s also the attribute that doles out a bit of insomnia to me from time to time as I often awake in the middle of the night just to let my mind kick into high gear.

To be clear, this is not a personal rant or complaining session.  Rather, I thought it would be a good way to expose more people to this strength of Idea Productivity.  This may help many of you better understand the constant flow of ideas that seem to pass through your mind, or better understand how your spouse or co-worker “thinks”.

And, like any strength, it has a “weakness” attached to it on the other side of the coin.  But remember, thanks to “Idea Productivity”, you just read another blog post from me.  Happy brainstorming!

THE OBVIOUS ALTERNATIVE TO FAXING

With Internet access and Internet use now more ubiquitous than a nearby fax machine, one would think the simple act of scanning and emailing a document would have replaced faxing years ago.  The idea of emailing a scanned image, and more importantly the idea of receiving a scanned image attached to your email (as opposed to pages falling off of a fax machine in the next room) is extremely attractive.  The electronic, scan/email approach is so much easier (in my opinion) that at one point when I worked at an office without a scanner but that had a fax machine down the hall, I would fax a document to my e-fax number on my computer, walk back to my computer and then forward the email I received from that fax machine on to the intended recipient via e-mail.  I did both myself AND the eventual recipient of my fax a big favor by keeping our correspondence digital by converting the hardcopy document into digital format.  This would allow us both to access and view the document then and in the future from anywhere and at any time.

REASONS WHY FAXING ISN’T DEAD

All this having been said, why is it then that fax numbers still exist, and fax transmissions continue?  I would propose that the jump has not yet happened for 3 reasons:

Reason #1: Scanner manufacturers (i.e. Brother, Canon, HP, etc.) and computer manufacturers (Dell, HP, Apple, etc.) have not done a good enough job of simplifying the act of sending an image to someone else, thus making it as easy for everyone to throw out the fax machine for good.

Despite my obvious preference for scanning as described above, even I must admit that sitting down at a computer, finding the scanning software, and making it all happen together with the device at hand is not as easy as it should be, with different processes, software, and things to consider.  Less-comfortable computer users will often find it easier and quicker to use a dedicated device – a fax machine – to send several pages of images.

Even if the Windows and Apple operating systems got their act together, you still have the issue of the scanning device itself.  Until the recent popping up of The Neat Company kiosks in airports all over the country, I haven’t seen one vendor get the device small enough, simple enough, and integrated with scanning/filing software well enough to really push scanning into the mainstream.  Again, The Neat Company has done a pretty good job with this, although my impression is that their filing system is still proprietary, but their flagship desktop scanning device and system is listed at $399 on the first page of their website — a price too step for most people to consider a dedicated device.  Instead most people will stick with a Brother multi-function device or similar (great machines, by the way) and that would be fine, except many of them will never figure out the scanning technology and system well enough to use it smoothly and productively.

Reason #2: Services rose up to fill in the fax -> technology gap, thus prolonging the total death of faxing technology.  Efax.com, a leading online fax service provider, gives people free fax numbers and lets them receive a limited number of faxed pages per month at no cost (I use this service, in fact, as some people still want to fax me documents from time to time).  For a monthly fee, Efax.com provides outbound faxing, a local phone number of your choice, etc. etc.  Within corporations, IT departments have long been acquainted with fax server software made by companies such as GFI which allows for the routing of incoming faxes straight into employee e-mail boxes.

These services have kept people tolerant of the old fax-to-a-phone number approach, largely because people often send and/or receive faxes through these systems without ever touching a fax machine.  The tragedy here is that money is spent on fax server software and phone lines are tied up in the transmission and receiving of faxes with this technology.  Despite the obvious benefits to these services, over the long haul they will become unnecessary.

Reason #3: The move from transmitting hardcopy documents over the phone lines via faxing to the outright irrelevance of paper documents in many of our homes and companies has created something of a “leap frog” affect. Ironically, I believe one reason few companies have ever gotten serious about giving the average personal/home user an easy, consistent, and inexpensive way to scan, email, and organize paper documents on their computer is that very few things even come to us in hard copy form any more. Bank statements, newsletters, daily news, and correspondence all come to us and are available for later retrieval by us in a web browser. As a result, there almost wasn’t enough time and profit incentive for hardware and software companies to kick out fax machines for good by creating an inexpensive, easy-to-use device that could be successfully sold and marketed to millions.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, this is what I believe:  faxing will “die” once and for all when desktop scanners become cheap, small, and easy to use– AND when paper document flow slows to such a crawl that an email address will be more than sufficient on a business card for all professionals — even attorneys.