Trim the fat or increase the muscles ?

In tough times, most companies focus on trimming the fat.

However, there is an alternative if you want to lose some weight; you increase your muscles ! That way, you'll be stronger instead of lighter.

Trimming the fat is easy - you stop eating (or stop paying employees). Increasing the muscles is much harder - you actually have to exercise your muscles. For knowledge workers, this means exercising your brain. For companies, this means encouraging and supporting training of your employees.

Will you invest in software like iKnow to increase the collection and creation of knowledge, or will you let people go and lose all of their knowledge ?

Most people expect 2009 to be a challenging year - will you trim the fat (by losing people) and become lighter, or will you invest in your people and become stronger ?

iKnow is too fast - we have to slow it down

iKnow is a productivity tool, and speed is therefore very important to our users.

In "the good, old days", computers used to have a turbo-button to slow down the computer if it was too fast.

But in most cases, even with modern computers, most applications struggle to keep up their performance - they are never fast enough.

The main reason is of course that more powerful computers enable more powerful applications.

iKnow is a modern application with extra graphical touches, taking advantage of the amazing power of modern computers (but we automatically reduce the extra touches if your computer is slower).

However, we actually have to slow iKnow down for some computers. This happens when you click a link to go to a different note - in most cases this is too fast, and you may wonder what happened if you accidentally click a link.

We deliberately delay the loading of notes to ensure that there is a small pause so that the user can see that the note is changing.

It's "painful" to waste computer power like this, but it improves the usability and that makes it worth it !

Go to location

We've assigned the Escape key as a shortcut to toggle between Quick Search and the Editor.

However, if you do touch-typing the Escape key is hard to reach, and we have therefore included an alternative shortcut key

Read more....

Web 2.0 tools and the Cloud

World's most admired knowledge enterprises

According to Teleos these are the 20 Global Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises:

If I re-group by industry, I get (roughly):

The consulting companies make a living based on selling their knowledge, so they must be "best in class".

It is interesting that the troubled American car companies (General Motors, Chrysler, Ford) is not on this list, while Toyota and Honda is.

Is the software companies (2,5,7,9) on this list because they are more technically capable than most other companies ?

Is technology the limiting factor for other companies (as opposed to work culture) ?

Are the tools to difficult to use for most people ?

Wanted: Beta testers

A quick reminder for new visititors:

We have just released our public beta of iKnow, and want beta testers.

Help us create the best product possible by reporting any bugs you find, and we'll give you a minimum 50% discount while in beta.

Report: Corporate blogs not trusted

Personal blogs are reported as 18% trustworthy, while corporate blogs are 16% - so it should rather read "Blogs not trusted".

Which is how it should be - a blog is (usually) a personal opiniated view of the world, and you should be sceptical and critical.

This is a personal blog from the founder of a company that sells a product
- I strongly believe iKnow can help many people (but not everyone), and I will of course try to communicate that through this blog.

I hope that some of my posts will help you as well - I personally have a passion for knowledge management and personal knowledge management issues, and the more knowledgeable we are, and the more knowledge we share, the better.

You should certainly read everything with a sceptical and critical mind, and if you don't find my posts interesting or useful, I'm quite sure that you'll simply leave and don't waste any more of your time here :-)

Word Count

If you only need to know how many words a part of your note is, all you have to do is select the text and the word and character count will be shown automatically.

Read more....

Note: 2Do

Getting things done and To-lists....

(example note - click the icon to the right)

Note: Creativity

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."
- Scott Adams

(example note - click the icon to the right)

Note: Productivity

Short version:
1. Write everything down
2. Do it !

(example note - click the icon to the right)

E-mail

"E-mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating the Internet."
- Wikipedia

General tips

- Don't.check.mail.every.few.minutes (2 or 3 times a day usually better)
- Organize your mail in folders
- Create templates if you create similar emails often
- Empty your inbox every day (delete or move to folders)
- Learn to use your eMail tool effectively (shortcuts, scripts, searching, tips etc)

Read more....

Information overload

"Never memorize something that you can look up"
- Albert Einstein

With more than 100 million distinct websites and an ever-increasing amount of e-mail, people are drowning in information.

Basex, a business research firm, picked 'Information Overload' as the 'problem of the year' for 2008. They estimated the 'cost of unnecessary interruptions' to $650 billion.

According to a report from Accenture research cited in CIO
- 42 percent of IT managers complain about too much information
- 39 percent can't figure out which information is current
- 38 percent need to weed out duplicate information
- 21 percent don't understand the value of the information they do receive.

Read more....

Productivity

"The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st Century is to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker."
- Peter Drucker (1999)

Drucker points out that many knowledge workers have many activities beyond their core task which take up their time and remove their concentration, thereby impacting productivity. He strongly advocates concentration of effort, with other tasks minimised or delegated.

Read more....