Eric Mack On-Line

Several weeks ago, I had a conversation about Lotus Notes and one of my takeaways was that I should explore doing more webinars to help people get more from Lotus Notes. Webinars were always a part of my agenda but had often been placed on the back-burner to projects like grad school, my speaking engagements at KMworld and Lotusphere, launching a new product release for Lotus Foundations and planning for the BlackBerry application. Several people encouraged me to move webinars from 'Someday/Maybe' to 'NOW' and they offered to help spread the word.

Because I wasn't sure how much interest there would be, I decided to look at my web logs and databases to look for potential groups of interest. Seeing that I have a large number of IBMers that follow my blogs and some who use eProductivity, I decided to make the first webinar a private webinar and, based on the interest coming from IBMers, I decided to make it specific to that audience. I then asked people I know to share this event with their coworkers so that we could see who might sign up. I told them that if there was sufficient interest in a webinar, I might invite David Allen to copresent with me. This would allow us to cover methodology as well as technology.

The response was overwhelming

As of today, we have well over 500 IBMers signed up and a growing list of people that have expressed interest in follow-on events. I'm still working on the agenda, but here's a quick overview as it stands now:

AGENDA: Getting Things Done with Lotus Notes
•Your Personal Productivity Equation
•Overview of the GTD® Methodology
•How to implement GTD in Vanilla Lotus Notes
•How to use eProductivity™ for IBM Lotus Notes
•What's in Eric and David's Productivity Toolkit
•Your Roadmap to Making It All Work
•Resources and Tools

IBM-only Event, April 8, 2010 10:00-11:30 AM PST        
Public Event, April 28, 2010 10:00-11:30 AM PST        

I think this agenda will provide value for most anyone that chooses to participate. Following my overview of the productivity equation, David will cover the methodology part with a high-level presentation on GTD. Then, we'll show how to set up vanilla Lotus Notes to better support the GTD methodology. In other words, we'll give you information you can put to use immediately -- no matter what version of Notes you may have and without the need to purchase anything. Following that, we'll give an overview of eProductivity, the software application that makes getting things done in Lotus Notes easy. Then, we will share what's in our own productivity toolkits -- this is where we will talk about some of the other tools we use to make our use of Lotus Notes and GTD even more productive - things like ActiveWords, GyroQ, and time-permitting, Mind Maps. Finally, we'll offer a roadmap for people who want to get started with GTD and Lotus notes (with or without eProductivity) and some resources contributed by The David Allen Company. I will package all of these resources in a free eProductivity Reference database so that people will have an efficient way to store and organize personal information in Lotus Notes.

That's a lot to cover in 90 minutes and still leave time for Q&A, so I'll support this with a follow-up list of resources.

If you haven't already signed up for the event, IBMers can sign up here and everyone else, can sign up here.

If the times of these events do not work for you, consider signing up for the eProductivity newsletter to stay informed of tips and tricks and upcoming events.

If you have any ideas for things you'd like to see covered or questions you hope we will address, please let me know and I'll do my best to cover them.