October 2014 Summaries

You can choose a CRM that fits your needs by considering factors such as simplicity and cost, customizability, integration with existing tools, and the ability to automate repetitive tasks. Some teams prefer simple and affordable options like Highrise or Insightly, while others opt for self-hosted CRMs like SugarCRM Community Edition or SuiteCRM, which offer more flexibility and customization options. Customizing your CRM can be done through adding custom fields, tags, and views, allowing you to tailor it to your team's workflow. Additionally, using Zapier to integrate with other apps can enhance the functionality of your CRM. It's essential to choose a CRM that is actively developed and improves over time, and one that fits your team's needs and workflow. By automating repetitive tasks and leveraging the capabilities of your CRM, you can make it an extension of your brain and a valuable tool for managing contacts and interactions.

Having good ideas requires having bad ones too, and it's not just about coming up with original concepts, but also connecting existing ideas to create new ones. Creativity is about finding connections between experiences and thoughts, and it's essential to have more experiences to draw from. To generate more ideas, you need to be willing to try out bad ideas and take risks. A safe environment for sharing ideas without criticism can help encourage creativity. Scratching your own itch by paying attention to personal experiences and needs can also lead to good ideas. Recognizing which ideas are worth pursuing requires passion and a willingness to say "no" to others. Tools like Wunderlist, Evernote, Fetchnotes, Slack, Pie, and Trello can help collect, organize, and share ideas. With practice and development of a process for idea generation, it becomes easier to come up with many more ideas.

Bad meetings are a widespread problem that costs time, energy, and productivity, with 11 million meetings taking place daily in the US and over 2 billion ineffective meetings per year. The reason for this unhealthy behavior is habit, which can be overcome by thinking critically about the purpose of meetings and implementing strategies to make them more productive. Approaches such as setting a cadence for meetings, writing down materials beforehand, starting with wins, articulating purpose, and limiting distractions can help increase the quality of meetings and reduce their frequency. By adopting these strategies, individuals and organizations can harness the power of meetings to have constructive conversations, work through problems, and make plans and decisions face-to-face.

Alfred is an alternative to Spotlight that allows users to perform various tasks with just keystrokes, including launching apps, finding files, and searching the web. It also includes customizable workflows, which can be used to automate repetitive tasks, and integrates with other applications to provide efficient solutions. With Alfred's powerful features, such as creating custom web searches, performing quick calculations, controlling iTunes, finding files quickly, contacting contacts, running Zaps, and automating workflows, users can streamline their workflow and increase productivity. The app is highly customizable, and its preferences can be synced through Dropbox, making it easy to use on multiple Macs.