Roughly the TRUTH

Stephen Covey and David Allen present the replays of two recent video casts to keep you centered and productive…

Here are the links and brief descriptions:

Forbes Live Video Chats | Stephen Covey

Forbes.com Vice President Michael Smith talks with the author of the seminal bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey discusses how those seven habits continue to be relevant in an increasingly interconnected world and the evolution of management techniques.

David Allen Getting Things Done: Time and stress management… how to be more productive and get the most out of your time and life

In this fast paced, information rich hour, David Allen creates a mindmap of the core elements of GTD best practices to increase your productivity. You’ll learn how technology - in particular mindmapping using MindManager software – can be a powerful tool to support at least four of the best practices for Getting Things Done

These two leaders in their respective fields have provided a very useful framework for getting your life in order. If you like what you’ve see, I’d suggest the following books to supplement your interests:

After getting my pants scared off by this article, a search for a Survival Guide yields some great returns…

New Yorkers need to be ready to evacuate: experts | Reuters.com

“You don’t want people in an emergency situation, a life or death situation, to do something for the first time — that’s a recipe for disaster,” said Galea, who is heading a study of the World Trade Center evacuation after the September 11 attacks.

This unsettling reminder of our vulnerabilities has motivated me to try and do a little good. With the fifth aniversary of 9/11 right around the corner, aggregating the best safety preparedness resources from around the web seems like a good idea. Five resources stand out, but many more are out there. So, without further adieu, here they are:

1) Scout’s Honor…A Guide To Safe Scouting
(Sections V.Emergency Preparedness & VI.First Aid are the most helpful)

2) In case King Kong ever shows up again in midtown…Safety Tips from NY State

3) The RAND Corporation researched and compiled this report on Preparing For Chemical, Radiological, Nuclear, and Biological Terrorist Attacks - They’ve also provided a nifty little PDF pocket survival guide…Saying that this would suck does it little justice

4) Kind of random, but some guy who writes the Urbach Newsletter asks, “Are You Ready for the Big One?” - There are some useful checklists and some bothersome product pitches, but all-in-all it’s a nice peice he’s written.

My Favorite:
5) Wikipedia NEEDS us to survive or it would be so lonely and empty - Here are the entries for “Survival Kit” & “Survival Skills”…buyer beware though, you never know who’s putting this stuff out there; could be the bad guys.
(The external links found at the bottoms of these two entries are required reading too; it might just mean the difference between life and death!)

That about wraps it up. Stay safe and if you know of other great resources out there, please share!

Full Featured, Free & a Cinch to use…

If you’re familiar with 37signals’ “Backpack” application, you’ll have no problem getting used to it’s half sister - Zoho Planner. Zoho.com (a competitor of 37Signals) has just released an upgraded version of this personal/project planning application. I found it much more streamlined and less cluttered than it’s Backpack counterpart. Another huge advantage it has is the unlimited storage that accompanies the free user accounts (you may upload files to your account - not to exceed 10mb). You’re looking at $5 per month with Backpack and you still don’t even get as much storage space. I’ve just been using it for a day now, but am already hooked.

A brief overview of the features are as follows: there’s no apparent limitation to the number of pages you can create, and within each page you can add a description along with multiple occurences of To Do Lists, Notes, Appointments and Attachments. In addition to sharing these pages with others, Zoho Planner also provides a comprehensive overview of your To Do’s and Reminders. You can mess around with the demo sign-in and make up your own mind…or, if you’re looking for more opinions, here’s another recent review:

Web 2.0 Journal Product Review: “Zoho Planner” — The Zoho series of online software products from AdventNet has been growing quickly over the last year, and their Zoho Planner product has just been revamped. Designed specifically for the Web 2.0 era, Zoho Planner is an online service for managing task lists and appointments.

There is very little down side to this application, but a few things that I’d like to see added in the future are as follows: a print view (for use with paper planners); persistent URL’s for each individual page (helping integration with components of other various planning systems); sync or export capabilities with MS Outlook 2003 (a feature that no one has perfected to date - not even Microsoft itself)

For the record, I’m only using this as one component of my complete organizing system (based on Getting Things Done by David Allen & First Things First by Stephen Covey). Project planning and brainstorming appear to be the most effective uses for me; but it’s much more capable than this and may even meet all of your planning needs. I’ve had some difficulty finding reviews of this software, so please feel free to add your own or post links to others…thanks for reading!