#1 Way to Address Procrastination: Do Something!

Isn’t procrastination such a fascinating thing!  It can lead to great innovations and streamlining as deadlines loom and the unimportant is stripped off the “to do” list.  It can lead to elevated blood pressure and heart rate and untold damage on our psyches.  There is always a good reason to procrastinate a task or decision. Sometimes you procrastinate really important things, perhaps because they are so important and you want to do them right.  This is where I find myself on this Sunday night.

In preparation for the upcoming beta (not to late to sign up, by the way) of Remarkable Tributes and the go live later this Summer, I have been working on a series of “Frequently Asked Questions.”  You know the type that walk customers through how to use the website, why to use the website, and what to do if things go wrong.  I will be putting them into the new Remarkable Tributes Help Center to be searched and added to by you once the system goes live.  This is really important stuff!  I have brainstorming a list of questions and typed them out this weekend to begin the work of answering them.  The list of questions is 9 pages long!  Those are just the questions, as I have not yet penned the answers.

Now, readers to this blog (or perhaps my other blog or Twitter stream) will probably rightly assess that coming up with a lot of ideas isn’t a problem for me.   So, perhaps some of these questions are not as important as others.  Some of thing may very well be a question that no one would ask, but still the list is there.  All 9 pages of it. 

So, I am going to fight procrastination.  I am taking a number of questions a day and will write the answers.  The ones that require screen shots or other reference materials from the software (which is in development and not quite ready for prime time) will have to wait, but there are many that I can do now, get out of the way, and be ready for the go live.

There, now I feel much better.  I have a plan.  Certainly, I can’t wait to see what questions you have once you start using Remarkable Tributes.  Stay tuned for more details on the Help Center and other things we are pulling together to make you successful!

By the way, this post will be mirrored over at http://RemarkableTributes.wordpress.com where I will be moving the blog officially in the next few weeks.  Go ahead and change your reader to the new address.

It’s still about the humans…making choices

My 5-year-old son has never probably seen us look up anything in a phone book or heard us call directory assistance.  We never had to go the library for anything, but recreational reading.  His only frame of reference includes high-speed internet.  Today, he asked me if I knew why God invented lightning (oh, the questions of a pre-schooler!).  I said that I wasn’t sure.  He replied, “you should look it up on the computer.”  “Hmmm, I am not sure the computer will know what God was thinking…” I start to reply.  “Mom, the computer is really smart!” he retorts. 

I then try to explain to him that it is people that are smart, that put information on the Internet, and develop ways to search.  So, if we wanted to learn more about lightning it was someone who learned about it that posted the information so that we could find it (not to mention God, for “inventing” lightning in the first place, but that is another post all together). 

To this my son replies, “Yeah, but it was the computer that found that cartoon episode of Ben Ten Alien Force.”  True, but yet not so true.  If the animators, storytellers, marketing folks, executives at the Cartoon Network, and IT gurus didn’t create and post the Ben Ten episodes, we never would have found them…no matter how much R&D Google invests in search technology.

All of this makes me realize how easy it is to lose the humaness when dealing with technology.  We sometimes forget that every piece of technology (from our TV remote to a sophisticated ERP software system) is actually the creation of human beings and the collection of tough choices that they made.  Ben Ten could have been live action instead of cartoon.  He could have been called Kevin Eleven (a great name for a sequel, I might add, if Kevin hadn’t been the name of the bad guy).  The stories could only be available online, on TV, or in theaters.  Choices, choices.  And these are just the choices we can see from the outside.  Internally, the development team made thousands of choices about how they would work, what tools they would use, etc that although behind-the-scenes, but still critically important.

As we approach the beta release of Remarkable Tributes, the breadth of these choices are becoming clearer.  We have long selected development platforms and key vendors, but continue to add tools and supplementary products to the business so that we might serve our clients and our customers.  We continue to refine features to make sure they provide the most benefit and allow you to do new things in new ways. 

So, perhaps one day another family will be able to have a discussion about how smart their computer is because they found Remarkable Tributes!

Testing and More Testing

I apologize that things have been quiet on the posting front lately, but we have all been very busy in development and testing.  And testing.  And more testing.  Did I mention there was some testing involved?  It is great to get to know the application and I can’t wait to share it with you…but alas we haven’t done all the cool things we want to do yet, so it will be a few more months.

So, while we code, design, and test, sign up for the beta and encourage your friends and family to do the same.  Should be something remarkable!