Two points he made which resonated with me:

1) make lists for everything...I used to make fun of people who were anal enough to do this, but I've joined their ranks. Albeit with my interpretation of what qualifies for list status. I use Things across all of my devices (phone, iPad, MacBook) to stay synced up.

The system in Things breaks my lists into projects (something that will end) and area of responsibility. It's nothing more then titling the organization of lists, but it makes all the difference to me. I have dozens of conversations each day where people need me to do something, this keeps me organized and sane.

2) The experts recommend making the first task of the day the hardest! Resist the temptation to respond to emails (it's easy) or tackle a few easy projects first.

I find the longer my list the more efficient I am in completing items. I also find I procrastinate some of the more creative tasks as that requires a focused space to concentrate. Tough to find in the office or with the phone chirping with texts, voicemails, and email.

Time will tell if these techniques will work, but getting into the habit of thinking different about my efficiency should pay dividends.

Our technology manger found CloudApp, it's free and can handle unlimited number of files. Check it out @ http://getcloudapp.com/ also available for the ipad.

Spent a lot of time with vendors looking at new products. All are big companies with rich R&D budgets and large manufacturing operations. Some interesting possibilities, but nothing that's game changing.

We don't have thousands of dollars hanging around to acquire marketing lists, but I needed a way to find new, potential clients. As I looked back on the new accounts we've closed most share strong similarities. Using Google Maps, Wikipedia, and a lot of search queries I was able to piece together profiles of target accounts. It's all mapped in Excel and out to our sales force. We'll see what they do with it!

It's clear we're more agile and have a better sense of the market then the big companies. Our intimacy with the details of those products and their daily application is going to allow us to continue to find new product and service ideas.

The problem is of course, customers don't know what they want. They know what they want to change about current products. However, a good product manager looks beyond the obvious iterations and re-examines the customers entire lifecycle of the product to find the unspoken needs.

We listened to these customers for two days, many of which confirmed it looks like a good product. However, the PM never read between the lines to hear the true needs. He acknowledged one key need which would present a huge improvement wasn't going to be addressed even though no manufacturer had addressed it. He was here to validate what they had, not find a revolutionary product need. Shame.

http://www.laurengreenfield.com/

I think this is one of the inherent advantages in a small business where spending years and millions of dollars on a project without concrete results is not acceptable.

One of the key concepts they discuss is dashboarding, which we do in a rudimentary form. The authors talk about dashboarding your 'leaps of faith', quickly, to validate or refute your assumptions. I'm reframing projects through this lens and I think it's helping me to articulate the value proposition and needed tasks better to our team.

Rework from the founders of 37Signals is a breath of fresh air. Breath deep, relax - this book has helped me maintain a healthy perspective on my work and where it should sit in the priorities of life.

Lots of short chapters explaining their philosophy of running a company and building elegant software products. Having worked for myself and in large companies, the lessons in the book can be applied in almost any organization.

http://37signals.com/rework/

ESPN Story

Prescription: Find a business, get your hands dirty and you'll find enough problems you can solve with a solution.