A couple of days ago I was contacted by a guy from Behance, a fairly new online magazine for creative professionals who also develops products for the creative professional community. Apart from praising my writing(!), he advertised his website well (whatever you read after being praised is looked at with mild eyes!). They’re probably trying to get the word-to-mouth ball rolling, and seems to have a fair amount of success, including being a Yahoo pick.
Their online magazine, philosophy and products does really look nice and well laid-out. They have developed the ‘Action Method‘, which is an approach to make ideas happen by putting down actions next to your scribbles from brainstorming sessions, meetings etc (see Productivity501 for a well-written review). They have even developed a paper pad to ease the process. Could be a nice supplement to any GTD’er, but nothing more than that. If you’re a GTD’er, you are probably already writing next actions down as the meeting develops or immediately afterwards. Also, I wonder why they don’t mention the GTD approach at all on their website? Edit: They do actually ref GTD under O for Organization…
Anyway, they do have a nice website and a lot going for it, and the magazine part of it seems worth looking into. It’s always nice to be inspired by successful, creative people. Would love to see a similar cool magazine about successful scientists…!
I liked the way their system makes a point to record possible future actions/projects that come out of any meeting or interaction. That seems like a very valuable exercise especially if it was somehow recorded as part of a shared system.
Could you imagine being able to search through all the ideas employees have had in a medium sized company? I think that would be an incredibly powerful tool.
Yes, their system make the recording of actions obligatory, but I’ve found that most meetings work that way anyway - otherwise they’re just a waste of time. But they do have a nicely designed template. I also think they phrase their Action Method philosophy a bit hard, because sometimes you go to a meeting, talk or even conferences, where you mainly want to take summary notes (for reference filing).
The possibility to search through ideas company-wide seems so good and powerful, so many must be doing it already? But I wonder what software solution they’re using then. It should be possible using either a wiki or maybe some of those new web-based mindmap apps?