APP = Accountability, Purpose, Priority

These are three things that I’ve found critical to have when trying to get things done. Really, this goes for personal productivity and team productivity.

Accountability - You need to have someone that holds you accountable to doing the things you commit to doing. This could be your spouse, a business partner, a friend, a co-worker, etc. Find someone that will hold you accountable.

Purpose - You have to have a purpose for doing things, and that purpose should be clearly defined and stated/published somewhere. Being reminded often of the purpose for doing something helps to keep you focused.

Priority - How important is something compared to other things you want to do? Without priorities, you’ll flounder and jump from half finished item, to half finished item.

Purpose and Priority are also good ways to evaluate whether or not you should work on something at a given time. It’s easy to let “something cool” or “something new” steal your attention. If the purpose for you doing something is not clear and it doesn’t take priority over other items, don’t work on it.

In trying to really stay focused and get more things done, these are a few of the things I’ve realized I need. I also have a new filing system I’ll share soon, that some of you may find useful as well.

One thing that I failed to mention in my last post, which is an extremely useful feature of Twitter that has enabled me to find many of the people that I currently follow is the “Track” feature.

You can simply type “track X”, or “track X Y Z” and twitter will automatically send you anything that anyone says that includes that word or combination of words.

Politweets is a great, and recent example of this awesome feature in use. It tracks what people are saying about all of the presidential candidates, and presents the comments side by side in a nicely designed interface.

Steve O’Hear gives a great overview of this over at ZDNet, as does Josh Catone at Read/WriteWeb who also gives some other great examples of the power of the Twitter “Track” feature.

Just one more reason to start using Twitter!
Have you come across any other extremely useful Twitter mashups? I’d love to check them out.

I’ve been telling a lot of people about twitter lately, so I thought I’d broach the topic as to what makes Twitter so great.

For me, Twitter has been WAY more effective in helping me find and connect with individuals with similar interests than anything else. More effective than if I had actually been looking for them.

That’s part of the beauty of Twitter. It happens organically. I am constantly finding more people to follow that “speak my language”, and/or are interested in the same things I am.

There is minimal effort involved in the beginning, but once you start following a few people, you tend to just naturally find additional people to follow that add value. One thing I would suggest is to browse who other people are following, and check them out as well. I’ve found lots of great new people to follow this way.

I was definitely a naysayer at first, but this article was what caused me to give Twitter a second look and actually try it out:

Ten Questions with Chris Brogan - http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/09/ten-questions-w.html

Also, if there is one person I would suggest you follow to start, follow Chris Brogan. Check out his blog as well. Fantastic stuff. Definitely one of my favorite reads online.

Here’s an additional link to a good post about how twitter improved Truemors:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/10/how-twitter-mad.html

And a post with a link to a research report by Forrester on “microblogging” (PAID):

http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/2007/10/i-just-dont-get.html

Of course, you can follow me on Twitter as well at: http://twitter.com/kliza23

Last week RivalSoft launched RivalMap, a collaborative web based solution for managing competitive information.

I’ve used Competitious on and off over the past year, and it’s a great tool. Though, as stated in this Competitious blog post,”Competitious is a great way to quickly list your competition, and start finding news and traffic stats about them, but RivalMap is focused on what happens next.”

RivalMap is definitely a much more robust and feature rich solution. It has a beautiful user interface, and it maintains the same level of excellent usability and simplicity amidst a great deal more features. Anyone familiar with Basecamp will be right at home with RivalMap, as it has a very similar look and feel.

The beauty of RivalMap is that is provides your team a central place for MANAGING competitive information, not just storing it. I’ve seen companies “manage” their competitive information by sending around emails of press releases to different people throughout the organization, or creating a wiki, or at the most sophisticated level, by setting up a project within their internal project management system where they post information about competitors. However, all of these approaches fall FAR short of what RivalMap allows you to do.

RivalMap serves as that central place for all competitive info, but it also provides you with the tools to actually organize, and manage competitive information and begin to formulate strategies to address competitive threats. It allows you to build comparison grids (company and product comparison), easily associate links to news articles, build out a full SWOT analysis, and lots more. It even lets you segment out the distinct verticals in which you compete, and track all the way down to your competitors’ individual customers!

The one thing I was disapointed to see missing was the ability for the software to search for, and suggest links and articles, that are related to ones competitors. This was a very nice feature of competitious. However, it was mentioned in the competitious blog that they are planning on adding a similar feature to RivalMap, and potentially integration with third-party information services.

I would also like to have the ability to have my google alerts and similar services automatically parsed, and applied to the appropriate competitor’s profile.

All in all, I’m VERY impressed.

Their website is also very good in terms of clearly stating the benefits and features of the product, and with a completely free account for up to 3 users, it’s a no brainer to at least try it out.

You can also check out the RivalMap blog, and there is a great discussion over at TechCrunch as well.

Keep up the great work RivalSoft!