Every once in a while I like to check out a store online called See Jane Work. I have an irrational love of paper and office supplies, and I enjoy the cheerful upbeat nature of the site. Everything is so cute! If this website were a gal, I'd marry her :-)
Today I ordered my first product, a magnetic chirping bird for holding paper clips. This is probably the least necessary thing I need in my office, but its role is more symbolic than functional. There are these little birds that I see every day at Starbucks in the morning; I believe they are some kind of common swallow. I usually sit outside if it's not raining, taking in the morning air, and observe these birds almost every day. There's something about the way these birds approach us that I find fascinating. They're tiny, fluffy, and pretty cute. They're also diligent, bold, and industrious. I realized a couple weeks ago that they do a very good job of "just being themselves", and that I could learn a thing or two from them. I sometimes get wrapped up in thinking I should be "more professional" or "building my career", and though I've definitely chosen a more non-traditional path to life-work I still get caught up in thinking about "success" and how people perceive me. Those little birds have no such pretensions, and every day they remind me that my OWN little bird inside of me needs to come out and "just be". That realization has become one of my moral compass points.
That my moral compass point is now available in shiny magnetic bird form is just a bonus. Woot!
I was pleasantly surprised to receive my XO Laptop, formally known as the $100 Laptop for the One Laptop Per Child non-profit, and I just spent a couple hours playing with it. It is the cutest, coolest piece of gear I have in the house. I would venture to say that it's WAY cooler than my MacBook Pro 17" which is, basically, a production workstation. Sure, the XO is not very fast, is made of the type of plastic that's used for toddler toys, and the "keyboard" is a chicklet-style membrane that is not designed for touch-typing. There isn't a hard drive, and it doesn't run Windows or a window system for that matter. So what good is it you ask? It's good for getting education and computing into the great outdoors, that's what. It is the most exciting thing I've seen in quite some time. Yes, I even think it's cooler than the iPhone.
Admittedly, it is designed for smaller hands than mine, and in terms of speed you can practically feel the tiny processor grunting to itself like a jogger huffing I CAN!!! toward the top of a mountain as tourists stare curiously at him from their air-conditioned rental cars. Fast, it isn't. It reminds me a lot of one of the microcomputers I wanted when I was 12, the Sinclair ZX80. Like the Sinclair, the XO makes thrifty use of its limited memory. And like microcomputers of the early 80s, the XO is open. Open Source, in fact. The guts of the software are accessible, so this is a machine that people just getting introduced to computers will be able to learn on. What's really exciting, though, is the quality of the I/O. There's a camera, microphone, speakers, a high-res sunlight-readable display, and self-organizing mesh networking all built in. For expansion, there are USB ports and a memory card slot. You can take this computer on outdoor adventures with you, take pictures and notes, and share your findings with your peers around you. I find this incredibly exciting.
I haven't really played with the software at all yet, but I'm looking forward to trying to use this machine quite a bit as my primary "on the go" laptop to see what it's like. When I'm traveling around I usually just take notes anyway in my reporter-style Moleskine. The wireless networking capabilities of the XO should make this a good coffeehouse companion, though the keyboard is not suitable for touch typing at all.
Fortunately for me, the XO recognized my treasured IBM Model M 84-Key Space Saver Keyboard, which I plugged through a PS2-to-USB adapter. Seemed to work fine with the machine. When you put the XO into tablet mode, you end up with a very compact word processing station that is high-resolution and usable in direct sunlight. While the XO is supposed to run for quite a while on batteries (especially with the backlight off), the additional current drain of the Model M keyboard might reduce battery life further...I have no idea.
Anyway, it's here in time for Christmas, so I'm looking forward to spending a bit of time looking at the development environment. It might be neat to develop some portable tracking tools for the machine, if only for my own amusement.
I've been writing way too much heavy stuff about focus lately, so it's time for a quick gear break!
I ordered an Inka Pen from ThinkGeek a few weeks ago, hoping to use it as a replacement for the flat pens I've been using. While I like the flat pens, they are not quite as durable in the pocket, and despite their relative thinness they tend to bulge out of my reporter-style Moleskine notebooks. Wear and tear is also increased because I carry the notebook in my back pocket, which makes the flat pen tend to chew its way out of the pocket. Not good.
Construction
The Inka pens are pretty cool, having been designed for extreme conditions by its inventor, Greg Adelman. From the website:
Lightweight, watertight and built to withstand harsh environments. The pressurized ink cartridge ensures the pen will write wet or dry at any angle, any temperature, and any altitude.
I was a little skeptical about the robustness of the pen, because I could imagine the steel barrel warping or other some similar disaster occurring. This post on Kickstart News, however, offers some heartening detail about the pen's machined outer barrel and carbon-fiber inner body construction.
I've been carrying the Inka around on my keychain for about a week, and I haven't yet noticed any warping or even scratching. We shall see how it holds up over the long term, but two small details give me hope: the end of the steel outer body, which you can see above, is utterly round and smoothly polished, unlike just about every mass-market pen I've ever seen. The pen also screws together without any scratchiness or scraping sensation, again unlike just about any other pen I've owned. This is a precision-made object.
The pen itself is comprised of several unscrewable components. You can use the pen in two ways:
- Pull the pen straight out of the outer body tube. It's held in place with friction from a blue o-ring. The pen is short, but usable.
- Assemble a full-size pen. Unscrew the pen from the key ring cap, then screw the mini pen to the end of the outer barrel. The result is a full-sized pen that feels pretty good in the hand.
The one down side I've found about the Inka pen is that it got me held up at the TSA security line. It didn't help that I was also carrying a stubby plastic pen shaped like a small cigarette and mechanical lead engineering pencil with a very cool double-clutch lead gripping mechanism on top of the usual laptop gear. My laptop bag must have looked like a bomb maker's tool kit. :-)
We born-again productivistas are packin' paper heat in our leather-backed Moleskines and slingin' Hipsters in our back pockets like they grow on trees instead of bein' made from 'em. Back at the ranch we've got Noguchi and tickler files backing us up, keeping our thoughts sizzling and ready-to-go. I once seen a guy, a specialist by the looks of him, use simple index cards kill a task dead at 15 paces without having to click a single mouse button. Welcome to the Wild Wild West of Paper Productivity. It's a gritty, physical world we live in, and we likes our tools to be tangible, portable, and crushproof. Booyah!
As tough as I reckoned I was with all my paper-based weaponry---you should see the paper task shuriken I've been working on---my delusions of badassedness came to an abrupt end when I came across Magnatag products half a year ago. I had stumbled onto a trove of custom magnetic whiteboards and task tracking support tools, built large from steel and plastic. They're working tools for daily use in the field, for information-critical activities like truck dispatching, construction projects and even church management. From shipping containers to saving souls, Magnatag seems to have an informational whiteboard product for every industry that needs to get things done. Suddenly, my pretty inkjet-printed forms didn't seem so substantial, especially when the most pressing item listed is don't forget to buy more cat food and toilet paper.
That said, I try to learn from my mistakes, especially when it means there's an opportunity to upgrade my arsenal. If you are shopping for a productivity freak itching to lay the hurt on a pile of projects, you might give Magnatag a look-see. Here are some new products I've taken a fancy to since my last post:
[NOTE: I've just read in the comments that the Magnatag website is only viewable in North America. Apologies for the inconvenience.]
The Magnatag Grand Planner shows up to two years of a project, in familiar Gantt chart style. That's a big board, for big jobs.
For those seeking something a little more intimate, this Personal Time-Task Organizer might do the trick. I like the idea of it, though I don't have space to put one.
I love the idea of the Tack-Free Quick Change Bulletin Board, as one might guess from my dalliance with check rails and task tracking.
These TCards fit into a special board, and are loaded with information. I don't know what I'd personally do with it, but dang...I want one anyway.
I like the name of the Do-Done StepTracker, and I love the idea of "flip the magnetic button over to switch from to-do to done" functionality. Elegant and effective!
Ok, I listed this one before, but now there's a video showing just how the RotoGraph® Long Range Daily Line Item Planner actually works. It's one continuous scrolling surface that you can write your schedule on, kind of like a real-world version of Excel with locked sheet cells.
This is a great idea: a whiteboard with faint gray lines that show up only when you're up close. A whiteboard to put an end to migraine-inducing crooked writing!
There's all kinds of other stuff, like the crazy awesome specialty boards, including a transparent whiteboard for use with neon markers...great for that "war room" look, I'm thinking. Check the older Magnatag post for more interesting items.
The Story of Magnatag
As I oooohed and aaaahed over the products in the Magnatag online catalog, I couldn't help but wonder who or what was behind it all. Usually, I think of office supply provisioners as being rather lame, pumping out mediocre product with little effort going toward innovation. About six months ago, though, Magnatag's PR company came across my blog and asked if I had any questions about the company. I got to email some questions to the founder, Wally A. Krapf, who generously forwarded me several fascinating anecdotes about sales, personal initiative, and risk from his days as a young salesman-turned-entrepreneur in post-WWII Rochester, NY. Here's an excerpt about how he got the idea for Magnatag.
NOTE: I've removed names for purposes of privacy, edited some sentences out for flow, and bolded a few phrases for my own emphasis, but otherwise this is what Wally related to me via email:
Dave, you ask for a comparison story about our very first original product that I saw could be made as a new company. Actually it did not come about that way. Each day brought a new challenge, adventure and learning as I evolved and applied my “systems” marketing concept to my sales job. It all kind of evolved over time like I was being drawn toward a distant goal in mind that each day’s activity brought a little closer and clearer and sharper until the time just arrived to make the move to “go on my own”. On the personal front, I was married and had three young kids to support as a commission salesman, so income generation was a very big incentive, but not the really driving one.
The concept of making my own products, and marketing them by direct mail came about piece by piece after I had left the stationery company and set up my own business as Krapf Business Systems, Inc. on January 30, 1967. It is hard to isolate a significant event to say that it was the bright light that flashed on and became the company we have today. Each step evolved and was driven usually by reaction to some negative event with a lesson learned and applied.
[...] Anyway, after I conceived the idea of “systems packaging” of selling products as a solution to a problem by bundling all the components into a single entity, I discovered that many of my customers had the same problems and that one packaged solution could be sold to many others with similar problems, only tailoring it to each potential customer’s specific needs and pointing out clearly to him that he had a problem, which they often did not realize. (Listerine told you that you had Halitosis, Nexium told you that you had acid reflux disease, for example).
[...] Our stationery company [where Krapf worked before founding his own company--Dave] was housed in an old loft 4 story building near the headquarters of Kodak in downtown Rochester. It was the old Shinola Shoe Polish factory from the early days of Rochester when it was a center of the men’s fashion clothing industry with hundreds of companies housed in as many loft buildings in the old city, each contributing a piece of the fashion pie. In fact my dad earned his living as a freelance commercial artist doing many of the fashion paintings for industry advertising. When depression hit before I was born, most of his business folded and we lived through some pretty hard times through the 1930s and through the war.
The stationery company had a “systems division” that basically sold the Acme Visible Record line of information storage and retrieval systems equipment. I was getting bored with the furniture and supplies and wanted to get into this department. It really seemed challenging and fun. It was run by an old WWII vet named D- ( a D-Day Silver-Star Purple-Heart veteran, 13 years older than me. He is now 88 my good friend and we lunch every month with the other old vets I told you about). D- had just fired a salesman who had sold a large system to a bank and lost money on it. I pestered D- to give me his job, but he kept turning me down saying there was not enough business for the both of us. I kept after him for about a month and every day he kept painting a more dismal picture of my earning potential as his assistant. To get rid of me he made me a ridiculously meager offer of a sales draw that was about a quarter of what I was making in the furniture. To his shock, I took it. Everybody in the place thought I was nuts making a move like that. I started on a Friday morning. D- took me to what was supposed to be a sales call at Xerox, but he was actually just picking up an order he had sold earlier. Then he took me to an early lunch and when we returned to the office he told me he was taking 2 weeks vacation and that it was all mine. He walked out. As soon as he left, I backed my station wagon up to the door and loaded it up with all his customer files and catalogs and took them home. I studied them all weekend. The line was very complex. On Monday, when repeat customers called, I told them I was new and asked them to help me work through the product line with them. When D- returned I had it down cold. 2 months later he left the department and took my old position selling furniture. He kept dropping in to the systems office every day and we became really good friends. D- kept saying “You know, we really don’t need the stationery company to do this, we could keep all the profits ourselves if we went out on our own” At first I thought he was kidding, but after a few months it started to come about. In the meantime I had applied my “systems packaging concept” to several complex but very interesting applications (designing unique voter registration systems, jury selecting systems, and others, selling them to several counties in western NY state. (another interesting story).
One day the field rep for Acme Visible showed up unannounced and introduced me to the manufacturer’s vice president and told me that I had built up their business in Rochester to such an extent that they were putting in their own factory direct sales office and gave me 30 days to close up. Acme accounted for about 90 percent of my business. The owner told me I could come back to selling the furniture (about 2 years had elapsed). I told him forget it and to “just leave me alone, I’ll be just fine”. Although Acme had a very broad line and there was no other manufacturer who had one even near it, each product segment of their line had competitors. I immediately got on the phone and started calling up the competitor manufacturer sales managers and made appointments to visit their factories. I got in my car and started driving. At the end of about 2 weeks I had visited each plant, and secured a dealership on each competitive line. In the end the product mix I put together was much larger than the Acme line. Unfortunately,. I had made the mistake earlier of having Acme drop ship all my sales, so they knew exactly who all my customers were and gave that list to their new salesman, so I had to start from scratch again, except that I had created a lot of personal relationships with the customers most of who switched over to my new lines. ( I noticed that mostly the newer customers switched, which told me that the loyalty gradually moves from the salesman to the product once they become accustomed to it)
[...] I was [now] selling a broad line of business filing systems, visible record retrieval systems equipment, complex business forms and a lot of unique products including a new line of magnetic scheduling boards. The scheduling board people would send me sales leads from their space advertising, but I soon found them to be pretty poor quality and mostly a waste of time. Their catalog just showed photographs of existing boards in their customer’s offices, and a list of components you could select and build your own system. One day I was selling a filing system to a high school and saw they had a cork board on the wall with paper stickers on it showing teacher-class schedule against the daily periods. I suggested that we could do it better with color-coded magnets, and designed a system right on the spot which they ordered. I cold called a couple more high schools and made an easy sale at each. I then started calling on them all over the area and sold several. When the manufacturer asked me about them and I told them what I was doing, they offered me $500 if I would write up how I did it, for their sales manager. I ignored the request, but got to thinking, they should be the ones telling me how to sell their product not the other way around. In the mean time I also created a computer scheduling board system. In those days if you got a computer, you build a big glass walled room to house it, positioned it on a special built up floor with air conditioning to keep it cool, and invited all the neighbors to come in to see how modern you were. Of course, any department that wanted to use it had to reserve time on it, and I found that that called for a magnetic scheduling board with the 24 hour time scale reservation time spaces and color-coded application magnets. I also had designed system kits for school bus route scheduling and hospital staffing schedules. (another story).
One day I was selling a computer schedule to the Friden company factory when they asked me if I had a thin magnet that they could write on and erase to use to label their parts bins that were constantly changing contents. The magnets I was selling with the boards were about a third of an inch thick with stiff plastic plates adhered to them. You needed a saw or guillitine type blade to cut them. I asked the factory to make them thinner but they refused to consider it. The problem intrigued me, so I looked up the manufacturer of the raw magnet material (Goodrich) and got some samples of the extrusions (the only ones made in those days). I sliced them thin and then went to a local plastic supplier and went through hundreds of plastic samples until I found just the right one that would take writing, not smear and erase with a damp tissue. Next I had to find an adhesive that would cement the plastic to the thin magnet, be flexible because the magnet material bent easily, and wouldn’t come off after being bent or twisted. I also wanted a product that you could easily cut with a scissors. I was having no success with the adhesive, so I went to the adhesive wholesaler and asked for their help. They were not very interested but told me they had a loft with all the special adhesive tape samples the manufacturers were sending them over the years and I was welcome to poke around there and see if I could find what I needed. I spend 2 very hot sweaty summer days in that loft but finally found one that worked after hundreds of tests. That was 38 years ago. They put me in touch with the rather obscure adhesive manufacturer, I had them make me some and voila, I had my first invention, the Magnatag. The very first successful magnatag I made in my basement at home and when I came up and showed it to my wife, she said “When are you coming up for dinner?”
A year later the adhesive started to liquify and the plastics started to come off in the field. My next door neighbor was a chemist at Kodak so he took a sample to work, analyzed it and told me to tell the adhesive manufacturer to change one of the chemical components which they did. I still use that adhesive today.
At first I called them Magnamatic labels, until one Saturday morning I started rhyming mag with words to get a better name: Magnatag. I started showing them on my customer calls and they got a really good reception. By the way 6 months had gone by since the guy at Friden had asked for the special magnets, but by then he had left and the new guy was not interested. I also soon found that my new magnets were much better on the scheduling boards that the klunky ones that came with them, so I decided to drop the other supplier and make my own boards and magnets, (I didn’t tell them right away because I knew they would immediately send another salesman to compete with me, which the sales manager, E-, who left them a few months later told me on a visit to my office.) I bought green steel chalkboards and taped lines on them, later silkscreen printing them (another skill I had to learn). Whiteboards had not been invented yet.
I then took a nice color photo with a model of my board for school classroom scheduling, had it printed on a color post card, went to the library and got a directory of schools, copied out about 500 addresses and mailed them by hand. I was swamped with orders. I was making them at home in my basement. When a truck arrived one day with more steel chalkboards (while I was out selling) and made my wife unload the truck in the driveway, with our three little kids in tow, I came home to find them all over the driveway. Of course, she kicked me out of the basement and I had to get my first production facility which was a little store front on South Ave. in a poor neighborhood. I was there for one year, 1969. I worked alone there 12 to 14 hours a day but was happy a lark with my inventions and business. When a truck would show up in the street with my delivery of steel chalkboards, I would go to the local bar and hire one of the guys on the bar stools for five dollars to help me unload the truck, then would talk the city trashman into taking the crating materials which was against the rules (not an easy sell, but a few free magnets would do the trick). The next year I moved to a 2nd floor loft in an old macaroni factory, kind of an incubator for dozens of would-be entrepreneurs with dreams and schemes. It was a zoo, and I could do a whole book that would keep you laughing for hours about my year and a half in that place. I knew absolutely nothing about manufacturing but just asked questions wherever I thought I could get answers. I bought an old Davidson offset printing press, and read the manual to learn how to print my first brochures. I bought an antique Verirtyper for fifteen dollars to set my first type. Even did all my own mailing (some really funny stories there too).
WOW. I certainly hope Mr. Krapf writes his book, because it's the most inspiring bit of business storytelling I've ever read. It reminds me of Richard Feynman's autobiography, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, one of my favorite books for its humor, personality, and insight.
For those of you checking your credit card limits, a caveat: I haven't yet ordered anything from Magnatag, as I don't have the space for a whiteboard, so I can't say I've hefted their boards or written on their magnets. They sell direct from their factory, and don't seem to use retailers like Staples. I imagine that they're used everywhere, taken for granted as reliable pieces of functional architecture in businesses and organizations across America. If someone in the Boston area spots one, let me know! I want to check out the construction and finish, and through that, get some closure on this story :-)
Last week I wrote about these flat bookmark pens I got at Barnes & Noble. I finally got a chance to use them "in the field" during Barcamp Manchester, tucking one into a thin moleskine cahier journal. It was quite convenient, and I discovered that the flexing of the pen body was actually an advantage: it doesn't break when you sit on it! At least, so far it hasn't.
The one complaint I had was not due to the pen; the cahier is a very flimsy notebook to write on while standing up. So today I stuck a flat pen in the regular moleskine pocket notebook---the one that fits in your back pocket---to see just how much of a problem it would be.
As it turns out, it's not so bad if you put the pen in the middle, clipped to one of the manilla folder inserts (it's a thin cardboard as opposed to regular paper). The bottom of the pen tends to move around though; I might use a small loop of paper or sponge to help keep the pen in place. The cover does bend alarmingly, comforming itself around the pen, but I think the moleskine can probably hold up to it. Time will tell.
The picture above shows the cahier notebook on top, and the pocket notebook on the bottom.
