1. The right people aren’t there to get things done;
2. The agenda is unclear or particpants don’t stick to it;
3. The conference call solution being used lacks visuals.

Meeting solutions company TimeBridge is trying to make meetings better. We’ve reviewed TimeBridge before when it launched as a scheduling application, and I wrote about TimeBridge when video conferencing was added. This week, the company announced their unveiling as a full suite of tools to “run great meetings.”

Some of the new features include:

• Let’s Meet ™ — an optimized scheduler for one-on-one meetings
• Collaborative agenda — a feature that allows meeting participants to contribute to the meeting agenda
• Meeting Time Messenger ™ — an SMS feature to remind participants of the meeting
• iPhone Application- – turns your iPhone into a meeting gadget to keep your meeting on track.

Using TimeBridge, you can find the ideal meeting time using a single email and the system will work across companies and calendaring systems, bringing together one or many participants in the scheduling process.

The meeting system can include voice through FreeConference.com and desktop sharing as well as video for up to six people using DimDim technology. The visual features are offered at $8.95 per month or $89 per year, a steal compared to the WebEx-es of the world.

You can send a scheduling message using Let’s Meet in two ways: Let others vote for the time slot from the ones you’ve provided, or propose a time based on your availability which they can see via a visual calendar that shows when you are busy or when you restrict times such as restricting your availability to business hours only.

When you set up a meeting through your TimeBridge dashboard, you can opt for “meeting extras” which are the Meeting Agenda gadget where others can participate in building the meeting agenda and SMS notification where you are prompted to enter mobile numbers for participants. Five minutes before a meeting, all participants are pinged either in email or with SMS. If they are running late, they can respond to the SMS with their status or dial straight into the conference call number to join the meeting.

The TimeBridge iPhone app allows you to access all the meeting setup and participation features to manage your meeting. You can also set up an enhanced address book that syncs with people’s calendar system and will actually show you if they are busy or free if you are trying to call someone. If their calendar is free at the moment you want to call, a green button let’s you know. If their time is blocked off, the button is red.

If you’re team is virtual across a number of time zones, your TimeBridge dashboard can give you a view of all team members and visually show the overlapping hours when everyone is working at the same time and could potentially participate in a team-wide virtual meeting.

Company reps say that they aren’t done yet in terms of adding to their meeting management suite, and they take their feature development cues from GTD guru David Allen. If TimeBridge keeps this up, they may just be creating the Holy Grail of meeting efficiency. Actually holding a good meeting, however, is up to you.

What virtual meeting solution are you using and how is it working for you?

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For years as a developer and writer I’ve used David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology; but I’ve been increasingly nagged by the question of whether GTD out of the box really worked for my increasingly webized life.

Earlier this month I had the chance to interview David Allen so I grabbed the opportunity to scratch that itch and ask him a few questions about GTD and web work. (Read part 1 of the conversation, focusing on health and stress)

Bob Walsh: OK. Well, I’m wondering, since your first book came out I think it was early 2001 things have changed a lot in terms of what a lot of people do. They spend more and more time working on the web. Has GTD evolved for you at all since the proliferation of web applications and cloud computing? The original book was very focused on paper and cut and dry silo working. With information overload and active exchange of ideas and comments online, has anything changed?

David Allen: No.

There’s no difference in the cloud of information that’s sitting in the web or the cloud of information in the forest. It’s all of your filters in terms of what you do with it. What’s changed, if there’s anything that’s changed, it’s just the speed and volume of stuff that has potential meaning in it has probably gotten faster and bigger.

So the necessity to do GTD, that is to make quick decisions and appropriate decisions on the front end when things show up on your radar, instead of just letting them lie fallow there just becomes that much more critical. So I wouldn’t change a thing in terms of the book.

Nothing has changed, because it’s not about paper. The book is not about paper. By the way, you’re never going to get rid of paper. It’s just an externalized communication and information transfer medium. So the medium really doesn’t make that much difference.

Bob: Well, I know as somebody who practices GTD, that I find myself, basically I have sort of two contexts in my life: at the computer and not at the computer. Any implementation tips for people who, all their work happens within the Internet?

David: You only need as many as you have contexts. You don’t need to carry your bills around to pay it if you pay them every Friday night at your desk, just leave them where ever you pay them. That’s fine. Since you only work on the web you don’t need, unless you need when you’re away from the web to be able to see what your work is on the web. So when you say they only do work on the web, does that mean they only need to be reminded of it when they’re setting up their computer? And if that’s so, fine.

So if you think doing GTD means you have to have a bunch of lists, you don’t get it. And by the way, if you only had 18 things to keep track of, put them all on one list, it won’t blow your fuse if you look at the whole list. The only reason to separate it into context is if that makes it easier. Most people have over 150 next actions to write, and if you stick those all in one list, you get to a phone, you’ll blow a fuse trying to find all your phone calls.

All I did was add complexity that made it simpler.

Bob: All you did was add complexity to make it simpler?

David: Well, it’s the cybernetic principle. If you’re trying to make complex things simple, you need an equally complex system in order to make it simple.

Most people are using too simple a system to manage a lot of complexity, that’s why it feels so overwhelming. So you have to have, it’s one of those “get it as simple as possible but no simpler” kind of things. And you say people only do work on the web. I say yeah, well do they ever go out for errands? Maybe there are people who never do, I mean, I don’t know.

Bob: Once in a while, but more often it’s flipping over to Amazon to buy something.

David: Sure. If you never go out and about and need anything or a reminder, or one Post it because you only do it once a week for one thing, a Post it is fine. If you even need that. I don’t need to write down all the food to buy, I just walk down the aisles in the grocery store and that’s enough of a reminder.

Bob: So the key for people who spend all that time online isn’t the way they track all this information, it’s much more about getting it out of their head, whatever way they find that works for them to externalize it?

David: If they can in 35 seconds see every project they’re committed to and all the next action they need to take on all of those, they have some improvement about relaxed control. If they can do that, they’ve done enough.

The only thing about GTD is look, there’s something on your mind, if it happens twice on your mind then you don’t trust your system, so what do you need to do so that you trust it? Hardly anybody is ever disturbed by where they need to be two weeks from Monday at 3:15 in the afternoon because that’s a system they trust called their calendar.

They know it’s in there and they know they’ll look at it at the right time. So all GTD said is, well look, if you want everything off your mind, like not having to keep track of your calendar, just make sure you put it in the same kind of a system that you trust just like your calendar. Meaning you trust that it has all the content it needs and you trust you’ll look at it when you need to see it. That’s all it’s about. So it’s nothing to do with paper or email or where you sit or any of that.

Bob: One quick question about “GTD Connect 2.0,” how is that going and how has been the adoption rate on that?

David: Well, it’s kind of just launched. We kind of kept it behind the kimono for a while and it’s still kind of a rolling open, because we have other things we’re adding into it. It’s great, we’ve gotten great response.

A lot of the big driver for that was that a lot of the people in house in companies that are bringing us in to do seminars or some version of introduction to this. And they wanted an ongoing kind of support and implementation tool. So that was part of the driver of building “Connect” to begin with.

Bob: There are probably hundreds of GTD desktop and web applications. More than a few people have wondered if you’re going to do a web based GTD application as part of “Connect?”

David: Probably.

Bob: Any time frame on that or is it just a someday/maybe at this point?

David: It’s not someday maybe, it’s actually moving. But we’re still very much in research mode. What you don’t need is another application, another operating system, what you need is an integrating system and building that in.

But for the most part, Bob, most of the things that portend that they are GTD related software out there are really just another version of a list manager. There’s a whole lot more to GTD than lists. They’re an important organizational component of it, and sure it’s cool to have nice ways to make lists, but frankly most of those applications you have to think too much in order to know how to insert it. So that it gets fancy, and then it loses its real value.

So it’s almost like the simpler and the faster you can make simple lists and access them, the better. Whatever any applications do that support that, I go “that’s great,” but quite frankly it’s hard to beat just paper and pencil.

Look for part 3 of Bob’s conversation with David tomorrow, focusing on the core of what is GTD and plans for a new book.

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Many people report experiencing physical symptoms (77 percent) and psychological symptoms (73 percent) related to stress in the last month. Physical symptoms of stress include: fatigue (51 percent); headache (44 percent); upset stomach (34 percent); muscle tension (30 percent); change in appetite (23 percent), teeth grinding (17 percent); change in sex drive (15 percent); and feeling dizzy (13 percent). Psychological symptoms of stress include: experiencing irritability or anger (50 percent); feeling nervous (45 percent); lack of energy (45 percent); and feeling as though you could cry (35 percent). In addition, almost half (48 percent) of Americans report lying awake at night due to stress.” – APA study.

For me, the single biggest stress reduction tool I’ve found this decade has been David Allen’s Getting Things Done: A Guide to Stress Free Productivity book and what’s become something of a movement among web workers: Getting Things Done (GTD).Earlier this month, I interviewed David Allen with an eye towards finding out how he stays healthy. Excerpts from that conversation:

Bob Walsh: I wanted to focus on three things that go together: stress, online work and GTD. Part of the motivation of this article is both Om Malik’s heart attack that he survived, and Mark Orchant’s heart attack he did not. You run a sizable business and you travel constantly…and run an online/offline business..how do you stay healthy?

David Allen: I don’t have some facile answers for that, but I won’t be glib. I’d say enough coffee, enough alcohol, enough humor and you can handle anything. But, that’s actually not true. To a large degree, sometimes I forget because it’s just so much a part of my lifestyle that I practice what I preach. I have managed to eliminate or certainly get to manageable levels, the source of most stress for most knowledge workers, which is basically getting everything out of my head and managing externalized systems so that my extended brain is kept pretty intact and current. That frees up a lot of focus. I think that to a large degree, it’s not the prime thing, but it keeps me all right.

Frankly, I don’t like feeling tense, so a lot of how GTD got created was because I didn’t like the pressure that kind of stuff created, so I spent a long time fine tuning how you get rid of that. It’s actually easier if you’re dealing with physical stress. If you’re out chopping wood, it’s easier to deal with that than it is having the same things over and over and over about your Mom, or about the strategic plan, or about your bills to pay. They don’t physically beat you bloody, but it’s that psychological drain that I think reduces your ability to deal with a lot of other things.

Bob: Do you exercise? I know you were into karate many years ago.

David: Not as regularly as I can. I do a little bit of yoga, and try to work out a swim at the gym when I can. Sometimes that goes by the wayside when I’m wall to wall doing other things, like writing my manuscript for my book right now. A lot of things have been sacrificed when I have to get down to it that way. I have a pretty active lifestyle: I walk dogs, get on planes, all that work. You know, one of my biggest “A ha’s!” that was a big surprise to me, was nutrition. I didn’t think it was that big a deal. I lived a disposal life, just “open mouth insert food.” In the travel I was doing in my life, I thought if I exercised enough that would handle it.

I was quite surprised at how I almost serendipitously discovered a naturopath, a nutritionist I knew back east that my wife and I saw right before I published “Getting Things Done”. Long story short, that was end of 2000, like seven or eight years ago I discovered a nutritional program that made a lot of difference. Since then, I’ve reduced to almost zero cold and flu. It allows me a lot more stable energy, I think, than the highs, ups and lows and downs that I’ve been expecting before.

Bob: Who is this person?

David: A guy named D’Adamo, James D’Adamo. He’s in his late seventies, I think. He and his son [Peter], they did the “Eat Right for Your Type” books. His big discovery over the last 20-30 years was how much your blood type affects your metabolism and your ability to process various different types of foods.

Anyway, I don’t know how much of that, you can get into that detail, but that was a big “A ha!” The typical alternative medicine nutritional admonition is, if you’ve cut out sugar, wheat and dairy, you’re probably going to feel better. I haven’t eliminated those; certainly reducing them has made a huge difference in terms of my energy. I think probably a big key is not so much doing things to relax, it’s just doing things that on an ongoing basis allow your constitution and your system to be stronger and not drained, so that you can attack all the stresses that come out of you with a better constitution. That’s probably the key.

Bob: I have yet to meet anyone who spends most of their time on the web working, that isn’t stressed. Is there something about being a web worker that’s more stressful than being your office/knowledge worker?

David: I don’t think so, Bob. I don’t know because I’m not a web worker, so it’d be hard for me to speak from experience. I guess there are factors, I’d just be guessing like you would probably guess, I’m not speaking with any kind of authority on that. It’s kind of like writers can often seem highly stressed because, jeez, how good could it be? It can always be more, it has to be good and everybody’s going to be looking at it. It’s a highly visible thing, and obviously you’re putting your signature on it, everybody’s going to know you based upon that.

Then you’ve also got deadlines. I don’t think it’s really any different than any kind of an author or artist that works under deadline, because there’s usually a high perfectionism working inside of all that.

Bob: In a word, web worker tends to combine dealing with lots and lots of people online, and actually fewer people face to face. Does that have an effect, do you think?

David: It might.I think a lot of that depends on peoples’ personality styles. If you’re an introvert, you’re happier not meeting people people face to face. If you’re an extrovert you’ll go crazy if you can’t somehow engage with people in some way if you’re juiced that way. One of the problems that’s endemic with the younger generation people who have grown up with computers and with email they make the assumption that email is a fine medium for communicating anything and everything.

But one of the things we’ve learned is that if you try to communicate something that requires a broader bandwidth of communication, in other words I actually really need to see what you look like when I say something and how you respond to it. Otherwise you might very easily misunderstand what was going on.

For people that are trying to do strategic or sensitive or complex things through email and it’s the wrong pipe to be using, that’s very easy to blow a fuse. In terms of the stress, the misunderstandings, the conflict, the sort of lack of fulfillment or lack of getting a result that may occur because of it. But that may be more of a sidebar to what you’re talking about. That is, that’s a factor with anybody who assumes that email is the communication media of choice.GTD is certainly not the end all answer for good health. But if one allows the kind of stress that GTD alleviates to linger, it certainly would diminish your ability to, as I said, you won’t have as strong a constitution to be able to then engage with the world in a healthy way. So I would say it is certainly a critical factor.

Related Resources:

• 15 Stress Management Tips for the Web Worker
• The Web Worker’s Stress Busting Toolbox: 50 Tips to Improve Your Life
• Medline Plus: Stress
• Mayo Clinic Online Stress Center
• How Does Stress Affect Your Body?

Ed note: Part 2 (of 3) of Bob’s conversation with David, focusing on GTD and the web worker, can be read here. Part 3 is here.

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