Let's step back a bit from the iPad and take a look at professional workflows and current software tool sets.
I am a Professional Engineer. I manage professional teams of electrical engineers and designers in the building science field. We work with our customers, Architects and other Engineers to make things. Our work is partly creative and partly analytical; engineering is about what is possible, what is safe, what is appropriate. We work on a myriad of projects, sub-projects, developing ideas and business concepts. By myriad, I mean hundreds of GTD style projects are active on a regular basis.
Conventional Microsoft Office tools are ill suited to planning, strategizing and determining what is important. (A lot of other applications software fits that description too.) In order to use Microsoft products, you need to smear a layer of customized developer goodness on top of the basic applications, all of which have too many features. For the average user, Microsoft Word is a Boeing 747 cockpit. It is impressive, daunting, clearly powerful and entirely useless without extensive education, practice and regular use. You have to be a highly skilled, demonstrably expert airline pilot to fly Microsoft Word. That makes no sense. It's the same with Excel and especially Outlook if you really want to lever rich value out of the software. Why do you need to become as heavily invested an expert with the craft of the tool as you are already in your field of choice? I do not have to become an airline pilot to fly from Vancouver to Toronto. Every time I need to be productive in a Microsoft application I have to think really hard about whether what I want the program to do will make me more productive or force me to burn cycles discovering how to make it work.
Many companies use Microsoft platforms and applications. The platforms are okay. The applications... well, umm.... please re-read the previous paragraph. This then is the challenge of the modern professional worker: How do you break free of the constraints inherent in tools that have a lineage forged when the space shuttle was new technology? How do you establish a workflow that can both conform to the incumbent's behaviors; but also, enhance your workflow? That kind of magic happened in 1979 with the release of VisiCalc. Ever since we've just been tarting things up with feature after feature.
There is no miracle in my efficiencies or work patterns. I am inundated with no more emails or phone calls than many; considerably fewer than many well known gurus or mavens, I would guess. The biggest difference is that, perhaps, I can afford to ignore far fewer of the messages I receive. There are nascent actions buried in about 75% of my emails. I am getting better at appraising content and determining whether it necessitates a reply, largely due to a multi-year rumination on the thoughts in "Getting Things Done". Not replying is not the same as ignoring messages. A celebrity may get thousands of "Ur kewl" greetings that can be dealt with by way of an auto-reply. Engineers don't have fawning masses that can be assuaged with a mail rule. Working professionals get deluged by documentation and deliverables. In turn, we generate a considerable number of our own deliverables; drawings, sketches, letters, reports, calculations, presentations and, latterly, many more photographs, even videos and audio recordings.
The Microsoft Office of today enhances the production of deliverable spew but it does little to organize the volume of stuff. Take a look at the average professional's computer desktop or file structure. There's crap everywhere. It may be crap. Or it may be really important. It may be a really, really important file that sits in an obscure folder, that was updated, never re-named and saved in the wrong place after being emailed to only 2 of the right people on a distribution list that should have had 3 others on it. Only in the last couple of years has a product like Sharepoint emerged that can help with these typical distribution and filing faux pas.
We have developed bad habits in office and professional workflows. The biggest of these is that we react immediately to our email applications; Outlook while at our desks and the Blackberry when on our feet. Should I be interrupting a conversation to look at my pocket delivered email? Why, how, when did email become an immediate communications medium? These are neither new nor original thoughts. Rather than lamenting what to do about it though, professionals have an obligation to move to a more productive and responsible model. For a variety of demographic, competitive, economic and humanitarian reasons all professionals must assert more creativity and innovation. That means not being professional email reactors but actually being more professional. Do more of what the profession requires of you and less of what the tools require of you. Nobody wonders what kind of typewriter Ernest Hemingway used.
