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Bill Payne called me up a few months ago and asked me to write an article for the Kauffman Foundation website on attracting angel investments.  My answer was that "I just got lucky" but since he WAS one of my angel investors, and I admire the Kauffman Foundation so, I wrote an article for their Pitching Angels section of their new eVenturing website.  Check out what other, more experienced entrepreneurs have to say about it if you are curious about raising angel money.

I’ve been meaning to write this story for a couple of
months. Mostly because I’m so grateful
to Ben Watson for restoring my phone. This phone was an antique when my parents had it. It hung on the wall in our kitchen for as
long as I remember when I was growing up. I mentioned to Ben’s daughter Angela, who works at Gold Systems, that I
had the phone and was thinking about hanging it in my office. Angela also grew up with these phones as her
dad restores them. She “volunteered” him
to make my phone work again and he graciously agreed to give it life again.

A week later it was back and hanging on my wall. I think it might be the one and only
speech-recognition-enabled crank style phone in the world. We hooked it up to our PBX so that when you
pick up the receiver, the phone automatically connects to our V-Dialer
product. You can then say the name of
anyone at Gold Systems and be connected to them without annoying touch-tone menus. We haven’t programmed V-Dialer to understand “Hello
Central” or “Mr. Watson–come here–I want to see you.”, but we could.

This week I was playing with the phone to see how many
technologies I could span with it. This
phone doesn’t represent the very first phone, but it goes back almost to the beginning
of telephony history. Now it is
connected to a modern PBX and speech recognition. If I pick up the receiver and say “Herb
Morreale”, the call is routed to Herb’s desk phone where it forwards via VoIP
to his Skype phone running on his laptop. If I pick up and say “Terry Gold on his mobile phone”, V-Dialer routes
the call to my cell phone. If I don’t
answer, the call then forwards to my laptop via Vonage and then from there to a
network voice mail server via VoIP. A
few seconds later, the voice mail shows up in my Outlook email inbox on my
laptop. If I knew someone with a
satellite phone, I think we could touch all of the existing telephone technologies
with this great old wooden wall phone.

All of this is possible because Ben gets a kick out of making
old things new again. (You should see
his T-Bird and Model-T hot rod!) Thanks
Ben. I’m really enjoying my “new”
telephone!

This week I talked to two people who admitted that their email inboxes were overflowing and that their voice mail had stopped taking messages because they had hit their limit. Maybe it is the season as everyone is trying to finish out the year, but a lot of people just have trouble managing their emails and tasks.

Over the years I’ve worked on a system that keeps my task list and email under control, most of the time.

To get your email and task list under control, you probably have to first admit that it is out of control.  Symptoms are:

• More than a dozen emails in the inbox.
• Email folders with names like Urgent, Today, To Read, Hot, etc.
• Your inbox contains several very important emails, but to find them, when you think of them, you look at all the stuff that isn’t important or urgent.
• You are saving voice mails so that when you have time you can go back and deal with them.

I often see inboxes that have hundreds of read and unread emails.  You are probably thinking that the only way to get to twelve, much less to zero, would be to just delete everything and start over.  (I just checked, my inbox has five emails in it.  It’s not that I don’t get a lot of emails either.  These came in during the last twenty minutes and today is a light email day since it is the day before Thanksgiving)

Symptoms of an out-of-control task list are:

• You aren’t sure what a task list is
• You can’t find your task list
• You have multiple task lists and your monitor is growing yellow sticky notes
• People have learned to remind you of what you need to do, or you find yourself saying to people “Remind me that I have to . . .”

I have to admit that I am by nature not very organized, and I don’t always follow my system, so on occasion I accidentally let something fall through the cracks.  But without my system, I would have a lot more stress in my life, I would more often than not be working on unimportant tasks and I certainly wouldn’t get as much done as I do now.

Here are the basics.  If there is interest, I’ll write more about how it works.

Use one task list.  I keep mine with me all the time, so I use the one that is built into Outlook and I keep it sync’d with my PocketPC.  Most of the time I’m dealing with the version on my Pocket PC.  I almost never write to-dos down on sticky notes or on the back of business cards.  If I do, I transfer it to my task list as soon as possible.  This is very important.  Multiple lists are error prone and cause stress, because if your brain is not convinced that you are handling everything it will constantly interrupt you for reassurance that you aren’t forgetting something.  If my brain comes up with something that I should do, I put it on the task list.  (When I first committed to this system, my task list had hundreds of items on it, but trust me, it is for the best.)

Follow the age-old advice of “touch it once.”  Before email, people were overwhelmed by paper mail, memos and little pink message slips.  Try to avoid cycling back through the email in your inbox over and over again.  When I sit down to read email in the morning, for every email, I will:

• Read it and delete it
• Read it, reply or forward it and delete it (maybe file it)
• Read it and file it for future reference
• Or if I just can’t or won’t deal with it right then, I read it and then drag it onto my task list.

In Outlook, you can drag an email over to the task list icon and it will create a new task with the body of the email in the notes.  During the day I do sometimes quickly read an email and leave it in my inbox, but I try not to, and I ALWAYS start every day with an empty inbox. No matter what, I take the time to clean it out first thing in the morning.  At the end of the session, which usually only lasts a few minutes because I’m not starting with hundreds of emails, I have an empty inbox and a task list with a few more items on it.  I also try to end the evening with an empty inbox and a completed task list of the day’s tasks.

By using the task list in Outlook, I easily prioritize and categorize everything that I need to do.  When I can look at a priority sorted, categorized list, it is much easier to decide what is important and what to work on next.  If I’m not going to work on a task today, I defer it to tomorrow so that I don’t have to think about everything that I need to do in the future.  It isn’t productive and it distracts from today’s tasks.

Trust me, you can reduce stress, get more done in less time and amaze your friends with your empty inbox. If there is interest, leave a comment and I’ll write more about how I categorize because it is a big part of the system.  You too can have an empty inbox.

Like most people, I’m still trying to figure out how to help and how to make sense of what went wrong.  While it seems that the news is suddenly reporting progress being made, the first few days after Katrina had me wanting to commandeer a bus and go down and get people out of there myself.  I would have had no shortage of people willing to go along I’m sure.

We heard that this could not have been predicted, but if you read this National Geographic Article from October, 2004 you will find yourself checking the date a couple of times because it reads just like a news report from last week.  If you keep reading you will see that there was a proposal to spend 30 billion dollars over 10 years to try to fix the problem, but that was cut to 2 billion dollars over the next ten years.  Unfortunately it will now cost many times that, not to mention the terrible loss of life.  Having grown up on the Ohio River and seen it get out of its banks many times, I’m familiar with the argument that dams and levees work to a point, and then they just make things worse.  Ultimately nature will have its way.

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This Sunday morning I was waiting at the gate for my plane. Generally I hate traveling on the weekend unless I’m on vacation but the
customer could only do a Monday morning meeting.

Someone else was traveling on business too – I’ll
call him "Mr. yellow shirt." Mr. Yellow Shirt was distressed. Not only had he
forgot to wear a belt, but he had also forgot his network access password.  (Gold Systems just release a password reset application,  but I am not making up this story as an excuse to blog about it. This
really did happen.)

Mr. Yellow Shirt just had to have access to the
network. His business Card, in plain view on his laptop case,
indicated that he worked for a Really Big Consulting Firm. He whipped out his
cell phone, punched a speed-dial button and waited patiently. "Norman, hey buddy
I’m sorry to call you at home on a Sunday morning but my password isn’t working
and I really need access to the network." Long pause, presumably as Norm gets out
of bed and logs into the network to reset Mr. Yellow Shirt’s Password. Passwords
generally don’t just "stop working", but I’m guessing they both know that Mr.
Yellow Shirt just forgot his password again. Now that Sarbanes-Oxley (or more correctly, the people interpreting SOX) is
mandating frequently password changes, this sort of call is happening a lot
these days.

"Hey OK, that’s great – Q W E R T Y . Just a second,
let me write that down . . . OK, that’s Q . . ." At this point Norm must have
told him not to repeat his password out loud in a busy airport where anyone
could be listening. Norm probably also made a mental note to give out even
easier passwords than the top 6 letters on the keyboard because the only thing
worse than saying a password out loud in public is to write it down.

Mr. Yellow Shirt thanked Norm again for helping him
out and wished him a good rest of the weekend. I’m sure Norm appreciated the
wake up call and the chance to start his day bright and early. Just then they started boarding our
flight and Mr. Yellow Shirt hurried off to his business class seat without
getting a chance to login and change his password from "Qwerty" to something
easier to remember. According to the in-flight map, Mr. Yellow Shirt and I are
just now passing over Harlan County Lake, Nebraska. The temporary Password that
Norm assigned probably just expired, so Norm’s going to get another call this
afternoon.

This is a true story and it is costing help desks
and IT departments time, money and security. Norm, if you are reading this give
me a call and let me tell you how Gold Systems’ Password Reset could have let
Mr. Yellow Shirt reset his own password securely using just his voice and a
telephone. It’s less than the cost of even one of your help desk agents and it
works 24 hours a day. (Don’t they have better things to do? Gartner estimates
that about 25% of all calls to help desks are now password reset requests.) With an
automated solution, you don’t have to worry about the help desk giving out passwords to a
cracker with a good story. Even better, you could have slept in this morning. 

Out of the blue, my friend Bob
Levin called to say he finally got around to reading Peopleware
by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister.  We spent the next hour talking about
offices versus cubical, diversity and half a dozen other topics.  Bob’s
one of those guys that I can just bounce all over the place with exploring
interesting ideas and I always go away being more motivated because he often
reminds me why I became an entrepreneur in the first place.

Peopleware probably was the first book I read that made me think, "maybe I
could start a business someday".  It’s a great book that tries to get
to the question of how to create a great development team.  There are lots
of specific conclusions based on research about what can be done to make people
more productive and happy with their work.  For instance, they found that there
is a correlation to the amount of uninterrupted time a person spends at work
and their productivity.  It is why
everyone at Gold Systems has an office (OK, there is one exception) and why
every office has a door.

By the way, I’m not against cubicles or open space. I’ve offered to build out cubes for anyone
who thinks they would be happier or more productive, because that’s really all
I care about. We’re incorporating Agile
development processes into our product development process, and the team has
their War Room, so I’m all for creating the space that people need.

I was just flipping through the book again and realized that
a story I like to tell actually came from this book. A developer was working on a very complicated
problem. He was sitting at his desk with
his feet propped up on the desk staring into space. His boss came by and said “Wendl! What are you doing?” Wendl said “I’m thinking.” And the boss said, “Can’t you do that at
home?” It sounds like a Dilbert cartoon,
but as far as I can tell Scott Adams didn’t come up with this one.

I highly recommend Peopleware. It is becoming a little dated though it was
revised in 1998, so get the second edition. I’ve just put it on my reading stack again. Flipping through it has convinced me that it
is still a great book and I need to review the lessons I learned the first time
I read it.  Thanks for reminding me Bob!

Since I wrote my post on Jarbarish, I’ve been getting a lot of examples of how we as business people often don’t speak clearly.

I haven’t read this book yet, but I like the title:  Why Business People Speak Like Idiots:   A Bullfighter’s Guide.  It has great reviews on amazon.com, so I’m putting it on my wishlist. 

I recently read Success on the Step – Flying with Kenmore Air by C. Marin Faure and it definitely makes my list of Five Star books for Entrepreneurs.  I picked this up at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.  It isn’t even available on Amazon.com which is too bad, but you can order it directly from the Kenmore Air website above.

If you’ve ever been to Seattle, more than likely you’ve seen a Kenmore Air float plane fly overhead.  You might of thought that they are just a sightseeing company, but they are much more than that.  Many people have depended on Kenmore Air since 1945 when it was founded by Reginald Collins, Jack Mines and Robert Munro.

Success on the Step tells a true story of entrepreneurship, bush planes and Alaskan and Canadian adventure.  If like me you love great stories about people who just won’t quit, airplanes and anything having to do with the water, then this book is for you.

With the company only about a year old they lost their pilot when Jack Mines was killed in an accident.  It would have been easy for Collins and Munro to quit at that point, get nice safe jobs at Boeing and live comfortable lives.  They didn’t though, and now the world has another great company that’s been built on integrity and doing what is right for the customer.

I have never flown with Kenmore Air, but the next time I’m in Seattle I’m going to take a flight with them.  I only wish that Bob Monroe was still flying – I think we’d have a lot to talk about.