Online Collaboration

"Social" media is also used for work - hence the rise in blogs such as this one. However, it's all push. Collaboration is mainly when people butt in and add their own content. Synergy only happens when people are occasionally inspired to new ideas by what they've read and integrated with their own knowledge before they add new content back into the ether. So where's the pull? Where's the actual productivity enhancement? Can we do better than just creating additive knowledge?

I'm a big fan of David Allen's books on "Getting Things Done." It's a complete system of work productivity based on a simple idea: think about each new task long enough to figure out what the next couple of steps are, and write those down in the appropriate place so that you will be reminded to do them when the time is right. The implications are huge - you mind is freed from worrying over things that cannot be done right now so your free to be more creative and - dare I say happier - in your daily work life. However, the actual mechanisms for finding "the appropriate place" to record those next steps so that you are "automatically reminded" are cumbersome and clumsy. I know - I've tried everything from an online To-Do list to the  Outlook plugin for Allen's method. Unless you're crazy motivated to keep things organized or unless the reward is immediate, you won't. And if your a natural procrastinator - the kind who could really benefit from Allen's methods - you will quickly find the task of staying on top of your to-do lists to be just another chore that you keep putting off.

Here's my thinking. What if these to-do lists were collaborative? What if you didn't write all these next steps down in a private tool that only you know about - what if they were pooled in a common area for everyone in your work team? What if each of your team's next-steps were freely available for any team member to move it forward - or to remind you when the opportunity was ripe? Often a teammate can think of an easier "next step" if they just know what your goals are. Often it's easier to solve someone else's problem - and if someone else solves yours, we all win. Can social media be enhanced to support this kind of productivity environment? Consider figuring that out to be my first public to-do pull request.

An apparent downside to this is how much privacy you give up when you tell the world (or even just your work team) all the things you need to do. Suddenly everyone knows your business and will hold you accountable when you don't meet all your obligations. Instead of a few people only knowing about one or two things that you need to do for them, suddenly everyone knows what you owe everyone else. I have two possible solutions for this de-motivator.

First, people change. "My generation" is so worried about how much privacy younger people are just giving away online. However, the younger people themselves are just fine with it. The whole idea of embarrassment seems strangely out of date in the online world. So maybe this "problem" will simply fade away. Maybe.

Secondly, the to-do lists do not have to be personal. Instead of writing down what you need to do - and hence what you will be perceived as failing at if you don't get them done - simply write down what needs to be done, anyone will do, just as long as it does get done. If you do this at your work-team level, the tasks become team goals. Then, instead of tracking what you don't get done, you simply track what each person accomplishes out of the pool of team goals. Everyone in the team can add their own goals. You can even rate the goals by difficulty and have people get achievement points by some function of quantity and difficulty for the tasks they accomplish. Hmm, sounds like a Facebook game. Must add this to my list...