It’s been a while since I posted on productivity, perhaps I should have written this post some time ago.
Every been stuck on a project? Had something that needed doing; but just couldn’t seem to get around to it?
Most of us face this sort of procrastination from time to time and it can be very difficult to get a project moving once it’s run aground. However one technique you can use to get a project going again is to work on the project’s Next Action.
The Next Action is the very next thing that needs to be done to move a project forwards. Sometimes I think I have a good idea of what the Next Action for a project might be; but when I look closer my Next Action is actually something very vague and not actually actionable at all. This is a sure fire way of ensuring a project doesn’t make any progress at all.
Let’s look at an example. Suppose I have a ‘project’ (a.k.a ‘dream’) to buy a house in the country. I kind of know that the next action for this project is to check my financial standing to see what I could afford.
Well months and years go by and I’ve still got this dream to buy a house in the country; but why am I no further forward with the project? It’s because my Next Action, ‘check my financial status’ or ’see what I can afford’ isn’t an action at all – it’s some sort of nebulous fuzzy idea designed to make me feel like I’ve control of the project whilst not providing anything actionable.
When I find a stuck project like this I take my fuzzy Next Action and begin to break it down into something more concrete:
What should I do to check my financial status?
How can I see what I can afford?
From this comes something a bit more tangible:
See mortgage advisor to find out what I can afford
Get current property valued
Finally some real Next Actions can be written down:
Call Bill at "Mortgages For You" to make appointment
Call surveyor to get property valued.
If there’s a lot of resistance to doing something you might have to set very find grain Next Actions. Remember that every journey starts with a single step.
Maybe you have some tips and techniques for setting Next Actions for your projects. Please don’t forget to share them in the comments.
I’ve done a few reviews of Goalpro versions over the years and so I was interested to find out just what the new GoalPro 7 had to offer.I used to be a daily user of GoalPro up until version 6. It managed all my work and life goals and I was a great piece of software in those days, even if the user interface was a little unusual.
Since then I feel that the software has completely lost it’s way, and version 7.0 only reinforces this view. So many of the brilliant features of earlier versions seem to have been dropped from this version in an effort to "streamline" (aka "dumb down") goal setting. These include:
Infinite number of sub-goals. I don’t know what the limit is; but youcan bet someone will hit it.
A full scheduling calendar. I used to be able to drag tasks from the task list and drop them on the day and time I was going to work on them. That functionality has been dropped.
Specifying the number of support items required. I found this essential as a check that I had all the required support in place. If I knew a goal needed 6 tasks; but I’d only assigned 5, then I knew I had t revisit that goal and work out what was missing. This really helped prevent things from falling through the cracks.
The scratch pad. Again this was really useful for brainstorming a goal and then creating tasks and goals from the resulting list. Another loss.
Outlook sync. I could keep my goals and tasks scheduled in Outlook by syncing the two products. This was invaluable in a business environment with group collaboration – when someone on the team wanted a piece of my time they could see at a glance what aspects of the projects I was working on and when. In version 7.0 I’d have to do all that scheduling manually.
Goalpro 7 seems to have reduced the product to the barest minimum amount of functionality required for a Goal setting program. The user interface has been tidied up a good bit; but at the sacrifice of most of the features that made this software very useful. A great dissapointment.
Rated 1/5 on Feb 7 2010
Vote on David Hollingworth’s reviews at LouderVoice
My last couple of posts have been reviews of Birdpost.com and Birdstack.com websites. As these were supposed to be objective reviews I was constrained from comparing the two sites directly. However as this is not a review I’m going to compare the two sites and what I like, and don’t like about each. So as "first impressions are lasting impressions" lets start with the visual appearance of each site.
Appearance
Well you wouldn’t expect two sites to look the same and these two are radically different in appearance and style. Birdpost.com has a very swish and modern looking landing page with a nice tabbed menu along the top. Right throughout the site the user interface is easy to use and the colour scheme a pleasing pale blue. The whole site looks and feels very professional.
Birdstack.com, on the other hand, has a very basic design. The landing page is very clunky and plain compared with Birdpost.com, it’s still functional; but just doesn’t look very professional. The one advantage is that it probably performs a lot better on a dial-up line or mobile device than Birdpost.com due to it’s minimalist code, and very few images.
Adding Observations
Having signed up for one of these sites you’ll want to add some sightings(well I did). On Birdpost.com there’s a "Add A Bird" button on the right hand side of the page, clicking this opens a nice Web 2.0 style dialog box that allows you to enter a single sighting or multiple observations. Birdstack.com, on the other hand, uses the old Web 1.0 style of form, which works fine, just doesn’t look so cool.
Entering your sightings is a bit different and here the functionaility of the two sites begins to come into play. Both sites do a search as you enter a bird name and suggest names as you type, which is great when you consider there’s about 10,000 bird species to search through. However Birdpost.com hasn’t got this feature right at all, for example start typing Starling (Sturnus vulgaris) and Birdpost.com supplies a list of starlings that doesnt contain Common Starling. With so many possible prefixes (E.g. European, Eurasian, Northern, Common) this is makes it very difficult to find a bird if you’re not sure of the full english name. Birdstack.com, on the other hand, accurately finds species even if you enter only part of the name. If you enter a local variant name for a bird (like Pied Wagail for White Wagtail) it’ll recognize that too and advise you of the correct species name. Birdstack.com have definitely got the feature spot on.
The amount of information you can enter for your observations also differs markedly between the two sites. On both sites you can enter the basic information:
Bird species
Date and time
Tags
Quantity seen
Notes
On Birdpost.com you can also enter:
Whether the bird was in flight
How close it was (a choice of some pretty arbitrary distances)
Whereas on Birdstack.com you can also enter:
The location (see more on lists below)
The trip you were on
A detailed breakdown of the number seen by age and gender
A link to any other information online about the sighting (e.g. a blog post)
Whether the sighting is private (default is public)
Overall you can enter more, relevant information on Birdstack.com than you can on Birdpost.com.
Listing Your Sightings.
I haven’t met a birder yet who didn’t keep lists of observations; life list, year list, garden list, local patch list, work list, county list, country list, trip lists…. There’s no end to how you can list your sightings. Birdpost.com is completely lacking in it’s listing ability. Everything has to be entered by tags, so if, for example, you want a sighting to be included in all your lists you’ve got to remember to enter all the relevant tags and it’s very easy to forget or mis-spell something.
Birdstack.com, on the other hand, has a great system of setting up locations, creating tags and then creating lists from combinations of these. There’s a good example in my review of Birdstack.com so I’m not going to repeat it here. Just sufficient to say that Birdstack.com if far superior in this area than Birdpost.com which really sucks when it comes to creating lists.
Mapping Sightings.
Both sites have the ability to place your sightings on a Google map, however both sites take a very different approach to this with advantages and disadvantages on both sides.
On Birdpost.com every sighting you log is flagged as "unmapped" until you map it. You can do this by opening the map view tab and then displaying all your unmapped sightings. Mapping is a process of dragging a sighting onto the map and clicking the save button. Because you can zoom the map in as close as you want you can place each sighting as accurately as you want.
This approach is great if you have a relatively low volume of observations. However if you record everything you see at a site you visit regularly, your garden for example, one of two things is going to happen:
Your map is going to be swamped with observations at that site, so much so that it’ll become unusable. Of course you could choose only to map the first sighting of a species at a site in which case:
Your list of unmapped sightings becomes so long that it becomes unmanageable. It would rapidly get so long that you would find it difficult to locate a sighting that you did want to map.
I think this represents a considerable flaw in the design of Birdpost.com.
Mapping on Birdstack.com isn’t done on a per sighting basis; it’s done for each birding location. As part of adding an observation you need to select which location you were observing at and when you create the locations you can specify their position on a Google map. What this means in practice is that you can’t map each sighting individually; an observation appears on the map at the lat. and long. set for that site. Whilst this helps to keep the confusion down on the map; it’s not as helpful in locating exactly where a species was seen.
Once you’ve got your observations mapped there’s a different viewing experience on both sites. On Birdpost.com you can see a map that locates each specific observation. I thought there was a facility to show all your sightings on a map; but I’ve been unable to locate that today, possibly it was just my imagination.
On Birdstack.com you can click through on a specific observation and it will show you a map with the site marked on it rather than specifically where you saw the bird. By clicking through on the species name you can view a map that shows either all members observations of that species or just your observations of that species.
So which site has the better mapping facilities? Birdpost.com starts out really good; being able to map each sighting to the nearest few metres is great; until you’ve hundreds of sightings for a site. Birdstack.com only maps the location not the sighting so the map is less crowded; but less accurate. I’d just come down in favour of Birdstack.com in this area; after using Birdpost.com for only a few weeks I was finding it unmanageable.
Other Features
Images
Birdpost.com has ‘em and Birdstack.com don’t. WHen you’ve added a sighting on Birdpost.com a nice thumbnail of your species appears associated with the sighting. You can change the thumbnail and you can upload your own photos. If you view the map and roll the mouse of a sighting pin then a little thumbnail of he species as well as the other sighing information appears in the information bubble. It really is a great feature of the site and makes it very attractive. You can even view your life list as thumbnails of the species rather than a plain text list. On Birdstack.com there are no bird photos and no facilites to upload them. Tbhis helps to keep the bandwidth down; but it makes the site very text based and boring in appearance.
Community Features
Both sites have a ‘friends’ feature, though not having any frieds (sob) I’ve not tried these features out. Both sites have a community forum.
Export Sightings
Birdpost.com doesn’t seem to have any export features, which means you can’t backup your sightings in any way. It would be a great shame to use the site for a few years only for them to loose your data. That would suck! Birdstack.com, on the other hand, can export your lists in a number of different formats such as XML and CSV. You can also import CSV data so if you’ve sightings in a spreadsheet you can import these. You can also create an RSS feed of and of your lists or create a Bird Stack . This is a create feature that allows you to create a small widget you can display on other web sites that shows a the latest sightings from that list. You can use any of your lists to create a stack. Here’s an example stack created from my garden list:
Performance
For it’s great looks Birdpost.com suffers from some dreadful performance issues. The sie uses a shed load of Javascript and this, combned with all those lovely pictures, really drags the performance down to a point where the site is very, very slow. It will also throw Javascript errors from time to time, which isn’t very pretty.
Birdstack.com uses only a modicum of Javascript, has no images and performs as a web site should. I’ve also not seen any Javascript errors either.
Summary
Which site will I be using for my sightings? Birdpost.com has a great look and feel and pictures of the birds; but dreadful performance, inability to create decent lists and problems with the map feature really do it down. Birdstack.com looks dowdy and has no images; but works well and has great listing features as well as good exports.
For me the list feature is crucial so, despite the lack of images, Birdstack.com wins the day and I’m now using it for all my observations.
This is my second review this week of an online service for birdwatchers. You can read the other review about birdpost.com. In this posting I’m going to try and keep this to a review of Birdstack.com and avoid doing a comparison of the two sites. That will have to wait for a third article.
Birdstack.com presents its home page as being pretty basic in appearance; a bit of a jumble of plain looking text and some images. At first it all looks a bit old fashioned and amateurish, which is a shame because behind the front page is some great functionality.
Once you’ve signed up, which requires the usual email activation, you then have access to your "dashboard". From here you have links to all the features of the site, such as adding observations, your locations (where you’ve seen the birds) and your lists. You can also see how many birding friends you have, the trips you’ve recorded, your tag cloud and a table of all your sightings. Again the layout is pretty minimalist with very little in the way of frills – which might be good for people on dial-up or accessing the site on a mobile device.
Adding a sighting is first a question of adding the location you saw the bird. This form allows you to name the location before entering its geographical details. After these there’s a Google map of the world, if you enter a town that the system recognizes it will place he marker in the right spot on the map, which is cool. However, if it doesn’t recognize your particular neck of the woods you’ll have to find the correct latitude and longitude and enter these into the form. (BTW There’s a good site for doing this at http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html. Below this there’s some optional information such as elevation and an ecological region classification.
Once you’ve added your location (which you only have to do once) you then select the species seen. This is a neat feature; as you type in the species name the system does a look-up on the complete world list of birds and will prompt you with similar spelled names and their geographical breeding region. Just click the correct species and away you go. You can enter part of the middle of the bird’s name and it will still be able to find the species.
Once the species is selected you can then enter:
The location (you can add a new location at this point if you want)
Date seen
The trip name if this sighting was made on a specific trip
The time of observation
Number seen, broken down by gender and age if you desire
Tags
Any link to other related information
Notes
You can also mark the observation private if you don’t want it published before finally clicking to save the observation.
Once you’ve entered your observations you’ll want some way of reporting them and, for me, this is where Birdstack.com really excels with its comprehensive listing functionality. You can build lists from any of the parameters you use when creating sites or entering an observation. For example I have a County Cork list which is composed of:
Any observations with Co. Cork set as the County
Any observations with Cork set as the County
Any observations with Cork set as the City
I could also create a Cork City list that just pulled in the latter observations.
I’ve created a year list for all observations seen in 2010 and tags can be used too, so any sighting with a "Garden" tag appears on my Garden list. You can also create your list to show all observations, the first observation of each species (for location and year lists for example) or the most recent sighting of each species for recently seen lists. These features give me the flexibility to list my sightings just the way I want and I’ve not yet found any list type I couldn’t create.
The features of this site don’t stop there. There are Forums, Events and Friends features for socialization; but what’s neatest is the ability to turn any list into a Bird Stack. This is similar to a widget and can be used to display the last n sightings on another web site. Here’s a Bird Stack for all my observations:
With all these great features why didn’t the site rate 5 stars? As I mentioned above, the look of the site is a bit drab and uninteresting despite the great functions; but the biggest drawback for me is the lack of pictures of the bird species. There are no photos attached to the birds at all and no way members can upload their own photographs. I think this is a great pity as I love to see a thumbnail of the birds I’ve seen next to the observation. That was enough to knock a star off the site rating.
To sum up Birdstack.com is a great site for birders with lots of great functionality and a superb listing feature. Performance is good, the only thing missing are some photos of the birds.
Rated 4/5 on Jan 31 2010
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