As the new year comes and we ramp up our daily lives once again, I look for technologies that will help me and others in the new year. Here are three of my favorites for 2010.

For many years I have been interested in the intersection of people, nature, and technology, and at the end of 2009 I discovered MindBloom, the perfect digital companion for anyone who is interested in achieving your own significant life goals. Paul Ingram and the crew at MindBloom have done a superb job of moving goal achievement to the next level. An immersive natural metaphor creates a reflective space you can easily enter and exit within a couple of minutes… or linger for a while if you have some pondering to do about what’s important to you. I’ve been using the service for about a month now and I highly recommend it as a way to keep what’s important to you front and center throughout the year. It’s unlike anything you’ve seen in this space before. Do yourself a favor and give it a try — there’s a 14 day free trial and they have a great deal of half off the annual subscription right now.

As a Christmas gift, my family gave me a Garmin Forerunner 405 sports watch. I have to admit, I was skeptical at first, but this thing is quite impressive. Press a couple of buttons and it tracks speed, pace, heart rate, elevation gain, etc. If you’re like me, that information doesn’t matter much when you’re out on a walk or a run, but once you get home, the data syncs wirelessly with your computer (unfortunately through a USB “ANT” device instead of bluetooth, but it works well enough) and the Garmin site shows you a map of where you’ve been, how far, your average, high and low pace, calories burned, etc. I wore it skiing the other day and it tracked my entire day of activities… including an increased resting heart rate at altitude. At my age it’s time to start paying attention to my heart health, so I’m grateful to have this “set it and forget it” device that can give me a baseline for what “healthy” means for me and then makes visible any variation from my norm. It even has me thinking I’ll run a marathon one day!

Finally, I just started using the LiveStrong iPhone app as an experiment. It’s essentially a calorie counting application, but it makes the process fairly easy and gives me useful information such as calorie target for the day, calories burned from exercise (you enter the type and amount of exercise), and calories eaten from food. After using it for a couple of weeks, you have a library of foods you commonly eat and searching for something that’s not on the list is a fairly quick process. It’s all tracked and private (if you want it to be), and the software can help you with your particular health and weight goals. It even made me re-think my portion size for tonight’s dinner… now that’s something!

Which brings me to my first and most important point: each of us organizes things differently because our brains are organized differently. Due to our unique combination of genetics, personality, and experience, we all see, store, and remember the world differently from each other. You thought there was one world “out there?” Well, I’m here to tell you, there are multiple worlds, and they are all “in here,” inside each of our minds and the way we interpret experience to create what we think of as “real.”

That makes creating a single method for organizing that works for everyone a nearly impossible task. Even more challenging is the fact that our individual organizing needs and styles change from day to day and moment to moment based on things like our mood (I’m having a bad day, so I should do things that will help me feel better), or location (I’m on-site with the creative team, so a picture might be worth a thousand words) or content (how do I help this engineering team see the forest in addition to the trees?).

With the advent of the iPhone, I thought I would finally have an electronic organizer that could replace the paper I habitually carry around with me to organize my day and week. After all, the key features I needed were 1) something I could write on that was small enough to fit in my pocket and 2) something I was sure to have with me when I needed it.

It turns out that the iPhone has a variety of options for keeping lists of things, some of which let you prioritize, set due dates, etc. I’ve used the very simple Notes application that comes with the phone as well as Jott (which has the very satisfying feature of swiping across an item to draw a line through it and mark it off the list) and OmniFocus, which is based on Getting Things Done and includes optional due dates, photos, and voice recordings.

The shortfall of these applications as compared to a good old piece of paper is this: they all assume that one method of organizing works all the time. Their well thought out structures require me to fit my thoughts and priorities into a predetermined organization that may be great for some things and terrible for others. I’ve been around enough to know how I think best in different circumstances. When I have to change the way I think to use a tool that is supposed to help me organize my thoughts, it’s no longer a good fit.

A blank sheet of paper, on the other hand, is an inviting space that asks me the question: how do you want to organize your day? It remembers what I write down, what I cross off, what I connect to another thought or action or picture. It has no issue when I decide half way through my day that there’s a better way to organize for the week. It works with me so I can change how I think based on changing priorities, moods, and circumstances.

The software I’ve used that comes closest to the flexibility of paper is probably Microsoft OneNote. OmniGraffle, MindMeister, and MindManager are also good for certain kinds of thinking. None are available in a mobile version yet. I keep hoping that Apple or an iPhone developer will fill this gap with an organizing app that flexes with my thought process.

I continue to experiment with electronic organizing apps because I like some of the things they do well. But when I’m serious about organizing my day and week, I pull out my pad of paper and get down to business.

If you have used other tools or methods that work well for you, drop me a line, I’d love to hear about them.

Epilogue:

Other organizing / thinking / planning tools that I and others have found useful include:

SmartSheet
Microsoft Excel
Google Docs & Spreadsheets

(Nancy Margulies painting from the Channel Rock gathering)

This year I was fortunate enough to attend 2 such gatherings, the first at an off-the-grid retreat center called Channel Rock that is stewarded by Gifford and Libba Pinchot. It serves as the remote campus for the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, which offers one of the first sustainable MBA degrees in the United States. The site is accessible only by boat or on foot… there are no roads that lead there. The conference was about the fundamental elements of change methodologies, and how to be effective in a time of extinction level issues (an extension of my work with The Change Handbook and Nexus for Change).

(Oyster BBQ on the beach at Hollyhock)

The second conference I attended was an invitational event at Hollyhock, a 25-year-old learning center with a mission that combines personal development with social action. It’s a rustic, beautiful place that is a fabulous setting for important conversations and action planning.

At both events I had my laptop and my iPhone. The laptop mostly stayed in its bag, while the iPhone came along in my pocket. I used it to take pictures of the groups, to capture contact information, to take notes, and to send quick email during breaks. Each evening, I connected the iPhone to my laptop to charge and synchronize it (I left the docking station at home, so I was using the computer to charge the phone via USB). By the last day of the event, I was able to email everyone a full contact roster that included head shots of each person, taken from the phone, as well as a group vCard for one-click importing into contact management software. I exported the full-sized photos from iPhoto to Flickr, and I created a wiki (using PBwiki) to post some of the conference artifacts.

I’ve attended quite a number of conferences and meetings over the last 17 years, and in the past I’ve often had good intentions about following up with contacts but waited long enough to do so that my memory of which person said what or which face went with what name had faded. The iPhone helps me in 2 ways to remedy this problem: It provides a non-obtrusive kinesthetic experience (taking photos, adding contact info, taking notes — all in one device) and it captures that information for future reference.

I experienced the iPhone as an extension of myself, of what I wanted to do. It enhanced my experience of being in nature with other people, capturing important details but not distracting me for too long, and it helped me deepen and extend human connections by formalizing my learning process and giving me the ability to act on networking opportunities immediately. Interestingly, it’s also the least amount of time I’ve spent staring at my laptop to “catch up” with email in quite a while.

From a design perspective, the iPhone is so seamless for me that I don’t think about it as “technology.” It’s just an extension of how I engage human relationships. If this is true for other people as well, it’s quite a design coup for Apple.

I must admit, there were several motivating factors that helped me make the decision to purchase an iPhone at this time — I don’t usually purchase 1.0 versions of any physical product at this price point. First, I already use Apple hardware and software to organize my life — the calendar, email, web browser, and iTunes media organizer included in MacOS X. That makes the iPhone the first device to be fully compatible with my digital world. Previous smart phones, such as the Blackberry and the Treo, require third-party software to synchronize with a Mac, and the results are somewhat mixed. Second, my partner Tracy was in need of a new cell phone, so I had the excuse of buying an iPhone and passing my old phone to her (this also helped me bypass the “early termination fee” when moving from Verizon to AT&T). Third, my iPod’s screen has been on the fritz for several months. It’s basically unreadable and I use it only as an alarm clock, since those settings were already in place before the screen went out. If these elements had not been in place, I may have chosen to wait until next January when a second iteration of iPhone hardware may be announced.

The verdict?
For me, the iPhone is working as advertised. Synchronizing with my computer is as easy as plugging it in and letting iTunes do the work. The battery lasts all day, even with significant use of all features. I can add new calendar events to the phone while out and about, check and reply to email, take notes, and check the weather. The web browsing experience is amazing for the screen size. The touch screen keyboard took about 3 days to get used to, but now I’m typing on it at about 75% of my full-keyboard typing speed. In short, this thing just works.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. Others have identified several shortcomings and the AT&T network has been oddly missing in some critical places (near the Seattle airport, for example). I’m sure that Apple and AT&T teams are watching closely the initial experiences of early adopters in order to improve that experience in the coming months.

My favorite feature of the iPhone has to do with its architecture — it works as a phone, but it thinks like a modern computer, meaning it can do multiple things at one time. While on a call, it’s easy to look up a phone number or address. If you are near a WIFI network, you can even look up information on the web to relay to the person on the other end of the phone. Yesterday afternoon I was working at a remote site when I received a call asking if I wanted to go to the movies. I switched to speaker phone, opened the web browser, and did a Google search for “Ratatouille near 98103″ – then relayed that information to my friend (the movie was ok, but not as good as I wanted it to be). This multi-tasking ability is absent in most cell phones, and it’s really the key ingredient that changes a “phone” into a “communications and entertainment” device.

Since the phone is based on Apple’s MacOS X operating system, there’s a tremendous ability to improve the user experience without changing the hardware at all. I expect this to be the first cell phone I’ve owned that will actually get better over time without a hardware upgrade.

I’ll end with a list of software-only changes that would significantly improve the iPhone experience.

Things I the iPhone Could Do with a Software Update
As a user experience designer, here are the things I hope Apple will update in the iPhone’s software over the coming months to make current generation iPhones even better:

1. Sync with my computer automatically over a wi-fi network (right now a cable is required)
2. Sync To Do Lists from Address Book
3. Copy/Paste
4. Add Flash player to Safari on the iPhone (web sites made with Flash technology don’t work today)
5. Voice commands for making calls hands-free (a feature present on most modern cell phones)
6. Vocal directions for Google Maps (avoid the danger of looking at the screen while driving)
7. Allow developers to make iPhone widgets (I’d like a flight status widget for example)
8. View Notes and Email in landscape orientation (only web browsing currently works in landscape)
9. One-touch email to “me” for Notes, Pictures, Maps
10. Send calendar invitations via email
11. Send contact info via email (find a contact, click to send that info to a 3rd party)
12. Show multiple calendars with different colors and options to display selected calendars only
13. Bluetooth tether — connect a laptop wirelessly to the phone for remote internet access
14. Create new email folders from the phone for organizing messages
15. Email rules – add ability to filter and organize email coming to the phone (see my previous post about using gMail to do this on the server before it gets to your iPhone or in-box)