Should you buy it?  Will it help you make the leap from existing to exceptional in your business?

I ordered Rework last week and had it shipped to my hotel for SXSW.  I was able to read it start to finish on my 2 and a half hour flight from Austin to Chicago so it’s an easy read.

I’m going to lay down the good points here in my review.

I will start off by saying this is a business book.  This means the goal of the book is to help you take action.

This book is about how to get the balls to run your business.

Twitter hashtag I’ve seen going around is: #rework

Ready To Get Real?

If you haven’t read “Getting Real” which is the first book by 37Signals, you need to read it.  It was the first book put out by 37Signals nearly 5 years ago.

Getting Real is  free to read online or $19 for the ebook and $25 for the paperback.  I bought Getting Real in 2005 around the time I first trialed Basecamp and it caused me to quit my job (a good thing!).  Getting Real delivers sound advice on how to run a company.  Even though it’s actually addressing a style of computer programming, the lessons are applicable to any business out there.  It made me realize that the company I worked at needed to “Get Real” but it wasn’t my job to help them.  People start companies to run them so I started my own within 6 months of reading this book.

Digging into Rework

photo credit: dbnunley

If you already have balls, you won’t need this book.  That’s the truth.

Rework is a feel good book that is there to give you that push to start making change in your business.

It starts off by making several statements that you end up nodding your head in agreement:

Success is more important than failure.
A Harvard study found that successful entrepreneurs had a 34% chance of having future ventures funded.

Working long hours affects your creativity and judgement.
Workaholics aren’t heroes.

Serve your own needs.
The best business for you is the one you created to scratch your own itch.

But you already knew that right?  Maybe not.  They have a ton of great examples in the book to illustrate how business owners (including 37Signals) make bold decisions that pay off.  See, I’m already drinking the juice here so this was more of a checklist for me than revelation.

They touch on important points that are obstacles for self realization:

Finding Time – “Whaaa!  I can’t find the time to do xyz”.

One of my favorite quotes says it all:

“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”  – H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

They point to how you spend your free time.  One of my clients last year was having trouble.  He’d hired me as a Personal Technology Trainer to help him start his business.  We kept bumping into tasks he said he was going to do but didn’t.  I began asking him about his free time and suggested he cut out television.  I like to say, “Do movie stars watch TV?”.  Within 15 days, he began to notice a difference.  He actually had more time, felt less stressed out and began actually working on his business.  I’m happy to say he now has a business name which is registered with the state of Georgia, a domain and his business cards are “in transit”!

Getting Started – “I can get this idea going once I _______”.

I have a favorite post by Seth Godin I point people to as they start counting off all the reasons they can’t seem to get traction.  It’s called, “When To Start“:

The best time to start is after you’ve worked all the kinks out of your plan.

The best time to start is when you’re sure it’s going to work.

The best time to start was last year. The best opportunities are already gone.

Each day you open your eyes.  Thank God you made it another day.  That’s what Dr. Maya Angelou says.  Consider how you would behave if the end of your life was much closer.  After 9/11, many people felt that sense of urgency take over.  How soon we forget.

Need Things or Money – “Once I get that raise in 14 months I’m going to _____”

And then you get laid off.  This happened to a friend of mine.  He was planning to get some Microsoft certifications under his belt so he could start looking for a new job.  We met for coffee in 2008.  I urged him to take action by creating a plan.  I even emailed him an excel spreadsheet.  I offered to coach him on this since I had several Microsoft certs and had done a good deal of job hunting in my day.  My friend let the distractions of daily life get in the way.  One year later, he had a pink slip, no severance, no Microsoft certifications and a newly leased car.  Now, one year later, he’s still struggling.  He thought about starting his own business, filing a patent and now is considering going back to work full time for someone else as his unemployment runs out.

Would Rework of helped my friend?  Probably not.

Rework is a “yes” book.  As you read through it, you find yourself saying yes…a lot.  I found that I had say a quiet “yes” at least 5 times by page 19.

Yes, is great but the point of yes is action.

Action requires balls so my next question is…

Do you have the balls to run your own company?  And successfully?

Business Balls Checklist

photo credit: HokutoSuisse

I made this short list of 9 items covered in the 37Signals book, Rework.  This is your reality check.  There are a lot of people out there who think they’re making progress but in truth, they’re simply moving the same pieces of a puzzle to a different part of the table vs actually completing that task at hand.  How do I know?  Because I used to be one of them until I got sick and tired of allowing others to run my life.

1. You don’t worry about what the competition is doing
2. You take risks but set goals with measurable metrics
3. You run your company based on the needs of your customers but don’t let them run your business
4. You have a process in place to digest feedback
5. You know what every position in your company requires (because you’ve walked a mile in their shoes)
6. You expect higher productivity vs hiring more staff
7. Location is not a factor when it comes to hiring the best folks
8. You say no to “endless meetings”
9. You ignore naysayers

What I Expected in Rework

photo credit: alykat

If you’ve had a chance to read the blog, Signal vs Noise, you know that 37Signals as a company is extremely transparent on how they run things and very opinionated.  One of my favorite posts that I share with my clients is “Making Money Twice” where Jason Fried lays out how they generated nearly $800,000 from one product.  Here’s an excerpt because it’s just that good:

Money One: A lot of our ideas originate on this blog. We post articles which generate traffic. We make money off the traffic by running Deck ads in the sidebar. We make a few thousand a month off The Deck ads.

Money Two: We bundled up the best blog posts about our software development philosophy and turned it into a PDF book called Getting Real. We sell the PDF for $19. We’ve made a few hundred thousand dollars from the PDF.

Money Three: We take the Getting Real PDF and turn it into a paperback at Lulu.com. We sell the paperback for $25 and we make a few thousand a month on royalties. The paperback is currently ranked the 4th best seller on Lulu.

Money Four: We took the content from Getting Real and produced a Getting Real conference series. We held a few conferences a year and made about $50K per conference. We’ve produced about 5 of these conferences.

It Adds Up

So if we add this all up, we made about $100K on The Deck ads (The Deck has been around about two years and we are a founding partner), $350K on the Getting Real PDF, about $65K on the Getting Real paperback, and about $250K on the Getting Real conferences (before that they were called Building of Basecamp).

That’s roughly $765,000 over a few years off roughly the same content. Insight and ideas about how we run our business. Blog entries, PDF, paperback, and conferences.

Jason is talking about repackaging information.  I thought this post was just brilliant and I began to look into my value as a “knowledge worker” to see what I could do to strengthen my existing messages rather than spread myself thin with many.  This post was also personal to me because my last boss paid to attend one of these 37Signals conferences.  $800 a head for him and two developers.  That was the turning point for me at the job after reading “Getting Real”, seeing my boss flock to Chicago to find out the “secret” of working smart and realizing my workplace didn’t match my values.

I like the Signal vs Noise blog because they explain how they run their business. Another great post was “How we reduced chargebacks by 30% (as a percentage of sales)“ where 37Signals explored different options for the line people see on their credit card statements.  37Signals figured out that putting in a url in that “merchant name” space gave people the opportunity to understand why there was a charge from this 37Signals company.   Brilliant!

I was looking for more concrete examples like this in Rework.

Summary

photo credit: jcarwash31

I was expecting a book with hands-on exercises.   What I got was a pat on the back that everything I’ve been doing for the last 4 years since going into business for myself is right.  It’s nice to know that I’ve internalized and acted upon the workflows and ideas I’ve read about.

But what will happen to people who keep puttering along?  Unable to take that very important step through the door of success?  A strong piece of imagery I picked up from Tyler Perry is about the door of success.  Often times, people point to the door, talk about the door, walk near the door but many do not pass through the door of success.  Fear of failure, fear of success or just the plain unknown is enough to keep most of us from reaching our dreams.  People need step by step guides when making drastic changes in their lives.  I think this book was a great opportunity to provide that.  Maybe 37Signals is planning to release a “Rework workbook”?

In fact, while reading Rework, I kept comparing it to The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.  I’m going to break out my comparative thoughts in part two, “Rework vs Four Hour Work Week”.

So, what are your thoughts?  Are you going to pickup a copy of Rework?

photo credit: enfad

Now I was skeptical as to how much a “computer game console” could help me be healthy.  I remember the Super Nintendo (SNES) power pad days with the Track and Field.  Those hurdles were hard!  Still, I decided to keep an open mind because you can’t learn if you mind is shut!

First, Annie had me create a profile.   it seems your entire existence with the Wii is based on this profile so we picked out the shape of my head, my hair, my skin tone, my eye color, if I wore glasses and my height/weight.   There is a remote control that you use  to make choices and I found it easy to make basic selections but it took a while to use with the games (more later).

You don’t get on the Wii until just before you’re ready to play.

Wii Yoga

Yoga comes as part of the Fit Plus game package  and was also a part of the original Fit game.  It also has this extremely fun (and physically exhausting) bicycle game.  That one took me over 2 miles of “virtual peddling” to capture the 13 flags.  Whew!

photo credit: domesticknitter

The first thing you do with the fit program is get your BMI which is in index comparing your height/weight against other folks.    I tried three of the yoga items to. The first one was balancing and I wasn’t sure how I would do sense balance is something I’ve always had to work on the. I had ACL surgery on my left knee back in high school.  Combine that with the often sedentary lifestyle of people who work in technology and you have a recipe for not being physically fit!

Surprisingly I got a very good score in terms of balance!  This means doing yoga since 2006 has helped!  When I saw a physical therapist after a nasty fall on the ice that left me on crutches for a month back in 2005, the first thing she told me was that I was physically not strong.  Yes I was thin but I didn’t have core strength.  An easy way to test this is to lean against a wall with your back flat to it in a squatting position.  I began trembling immediately.  That was years ago and since I started doing yoga in 2006, I’ve felt more balanced, had very little pain in my back/neck/wrists and have better posture.  Go yoga!

photo credit: photos.by.ed

I also tried the yoga exercise where you bring your knee up to your chest and a warrior stance. What I enjoyed about using the system was that I could see on the screen my real body balance with this little meter which showed if I had more weight on the left or more weight on the right. The same thing went while doing the warrior pose I could see if I had too much weight on the front foot or not enough on the back foot. Wowzers!

photo credit: kelvin255

I never got this kind of feedback going human person and even though I love doing my video yoga with Yogamazing on iTunes, real time feedback is huge!  Yoga Wii will give you tips to improve your alignment and yoga posture after you complete a section. It will keep track of how much time you have spent doing these exercises. You can then create a goal for yourself to maintain or increase your health.

I think I like the information that we gives me because it’s like Google Analytics. Not only does it collect the information but it also provides me with actionable items! Plug me into the Matrix!

Part of the BMI I is learning your weight.   I wasn’t sure if the Wii could really weigh me but it did! Wearing clothes, I am 128lbs.   I’ve been at this weight since the age of 14, pretty much. The highest I’ve fluctuated was to 140 in 2002 from eating out three times a day for four months while working on a technology project in living out of my suitcase.   I lost the weight by exercising and increasing my protein intake.   it took about three months to lose 15lbs.

I’m Getting A Wii

As you can see, I was able to find many photos of people using the Wii, and more specifically using the lead for yoga! I always thought it was silly to interact with the computer about your health. When the computer know about you? A lot obviously!   I was very impressed with the Wii and was happy that Annie shared it with me. I don’t know what my neighbors will think of me doing this stuff on the Wii but I’m going to wait until I move to San Francisco and pick one up!

photo credit: shareski

Click here to view the embedded video.

I subscribed to the monthly version of Logmein Pro before I went out to New York for Wordcamp as I knew I would be transferring files from my home computer.  It worked out lovely!

Over Turkey Day weekend, I had a chance to finally test the remote sound.  The sound was great!  It was loud, clear and there were no skips while I played music in iTunes on my old computer.  This is a nice feature as I move applications, data and songs from my Shuttle XPC to my new Dell XPS 8000.

The Pro2 version would be great for someone who is on the road often.  Network administrators would also find it helpful to install on a server to quickly get a bird’s eye view of the system.  More on that in a future post.

LogMeIn has several tools you can use to remotely access your computer. You can connect to your PC or Mac while on the road and do it securely without installing any complex software.

The Pro version allows for remote sound and printing plus other goodies like file transfer and detailed diagnostics. The cost of LogMeIn Pro2 is $12.20 per month or $69.95 for the year.

There is also LogMeIn Free which provides you with remote access as well you just don’t get all the goodies mentioned below.

I’ve been using LogMeIn since 2006 and like the direction they’re going to have more cross platform support.

More reviews soon!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m wondering where Google got this technology to find faces.

• Did they contact the Las Vegas mafia?
• Was this recovered from an alien spaceship?
• What are the potential problems with identifying people you’ve photographed and giving that information to Google through Picasa?

This is the first product from Google where I’m a bit suspicious and although I think Google is quite awesome, I’m worried about the privacy issues.

I’ve been drooling over this battery charger for almost a year.  This charger will rock your tech world  because it shows the health of the battery so you don’t waste time charging up duds.  Take your old batteries in for recycling.  I’m all about saving the earth and rechargeable batteries are the way to go!

Thank you to Jacque for sending me this from my Amazon wishlist for jailbreaking and unlocking her iPhone onto T-mobile!

Contents

The La Crosse Technology BC-9009 AlphaPower Battery Charger comes with:

• Charger unit
• Carrying case
• Set of 4 AA batteries
• Set of 4 AAA batteries
• Set of 4 C battery adapters
• Set of 4 D battery adapters
• Power cord

[ad#googleadsensepost]

Battery modes

Charge

8 seconds after placing batteries, charging automatically beings at 200mA, or select 500, 700, 1000, 1500 or 1800 mA settings for faster charging times

Discharge

Reduce memory effect in rechargeable batteries by discharging completely then recharging to full capacity in one cycle.  User selectable mA.

Refresh

Batteries will be discharged and recharged 20 cycles or until batteries are refreshed to maximum capacity.  user selectable mA.

Test

Batteries are charged to full capacity, discharged completely to measure capacity for dispaly on mAh or Ah, then recharged to full capacity.

What I Doing With It

I’m  testing the “refresh” mode on two older batteries I have and will see if I am able to extend the life of my existing batteries.

Summary

This battery charger rocks!

Questions I still have

Do “fast chargers” affect the life of the battery?

Struggling to manage registrations for your event and not lose money?

Want a better way to promote your event and utilize social media to do it?

Say Hello To Eventbrite!

How’d they do that?

Have you ever attended a conference and thought to yourself: ”Wow, they did a great job and I learned so much!”.

It takes time, energy and organization to hold a successful event.  Many companies struggle with the registration process, using outdated methods like asking people to register via postal mail or email.  This puts a huge administrative strain on the organization resulting in overtime, lost registrations and stress.  This is why so many people are smiling on the event day; they’re thinking, “We made it!”, lol!

Get paid before your events

Another challenge is collecting payment.  After you go to the trouble to promote an event, shouldn’t it be easy for you to get paid by attendees?  Again, most organizations are still asking people to mail in payments or are struggling with some sort of online merchant account, Paypal button that doesn’t tie into registration or just asking people to mail checks in.  Why wait until the day of the event to get paid?  People who pay ahead of time are making a commitment to attend and that makes it easier for you!

Making registration fast and easy

Now you could hire a programmer to come in develop a custom event registration system for your business.  I’ve seen several out there which look like they were put together in a way that the registration site looks awkward and just plain confusing.

Break the mold

If you’re still reading this post because you want relief.  You’re tired of low registration numbers for your events, lost entries and people getting in who didn’t pay.  You would like a system that is fast and easy with no training required.

Eventbrite will rock your event!

Powerhouse for SEO and event promotion

One of the most amazing features of Eventbrite is it’s powerful SEO.  When you create an event, you get a customized URL where people can sign up.  Eventbrite has swirled in their SEO mojo to make these pages highly optimized for search engines.  A few days after I posted my workshop for Microsoft Word training, I noticed hundreds of hits to my event page only to find out I was #4 on Yahoo search for, “microsoft word“!

Eventbrite also has built in functions which make it easy for you to promote you’re event on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook plus when people are done registering, they can tweet or post that they’re going to your event!

Blog and CMS Friendly

Want to sell tickets for an event from your blog?  Easy!  You can embed event registrations right into your blog posts for a seamless look.  They also have code snippets that will rotate your upcoming events in the sidebar.   Great way to post events in your WordPress, Blogger or Typepad blog.

Looking to list events on your Joomla or Drupal website?  Never fear!  Eventbrite works here as well and you can customize the colors of your event page to match your website.  Your event registrations are secure as Eventbrite uses SSL through the entire check out so your registration info is safe.

Free event?  Free for you too!

Eventbrite has an interesting fee structure.  Events that you hold for free don’t cost you anything.  If you charge for the events then you are charged:

Eventbrite fee

You pay this fee every time you charge for an event.

• 2.5% of ticket price plus $0.99 for each ticket sold

Payment processing

You pay one of these fees to accept electronic payments for your event.  You can also choose to accept payments offline or at your event in which case you won’t pay a processing fee.

• Eventbrite is 3% per transaction
• Paypal is about 2.5% + $0.30 per transaction
• Google checkout is about 2.5% + $.30 per transaction

Who’s using it?

• Thousands of Wordcamp events
• Hundreds of Barcamp events
• Social Media events
• Green confereneces
• SEO workshops
• Colleges, Fortune 500′s, Nonprofits and more!

Humanity’s Greatest Challenges was held at NASA’s Ames Research park in July where the leading experts in our environment gathered to discuss how we could develop and maintain more sustainable ways of living

Mashable held their Social Good conference via Eventbrite in New York City to educate people on the four charities chosen for the Summer of Social Good campaign; Livestrong, Humane Society, Oxfam America and WWF.

Techcrunch’s annual event to feature new an innovative companies is known as TechCrunch50.  For those of you who know, the tickets to this conference are $3,000 each so that speaks volumes that Techcrunch rolls with Eventbrite!

Savannah State University held several trainings on ADP payroll software to bring staff up to speed on their transition to the new service.

Summary

I started looking for a tool that would help me easily and quickly allow people to register for my live, online training at Freshworkshops.  I didn’t want people to fool around with signing up and needed a way to quickly communicate with attendees.  I needed the process to be as automated as possible so I didn’t have to babysit registrations.  I found Eventbrite and fell in love!

It’s so easy that I can setup a new training workshop in under 15 minutes.  I sold my first ticket within a few days of posting the training.  It rocks to wake up and see people have signed up for my technology workshops!

If you’re using some archaic, old system for registrations, you need to have a serious staff meeting, move your conferences to Eventbrite and start making money!

Photo credit: Gnerk, Davemedia

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Would Miss Your Computer Files in a Fire?

Mozy is an amazing solution for keeping your data safe.  Computer data is usually lost to fire, theft and hardware failures.  Mozy protects your data by securely uploading your files to a safe data center.

I’ve been using it for 2 years and it’s not let me or my clients down once!

• Secure Files are encrypted before they go up
• Easy You don’t need to be techie to backup your data
• Affordable Mozy is just $4.95/month for unlimited storage

It supports both Windows and Macs.  The most I ever backed up was 46GB to my personal Mozy Account

Website – http://mozy.com

I also found a nice WordPress plugin, Flickr Blog This to Draft, that will block it from directly posting to your blog, allowing you time to come back and add in the good stuff like links, tags, geo maps and all your other favorite things first.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.