How do you GTD? (Credit: Carvalho)

TL;DR
I’ve implemented most of the GTD organizational system using just Gmail. You can too!

Introduction
For many years, I’ve been a devotee, if not quite an adherent, to the productivity school known as “Getting Things Done“, much more commonly referred to as GTD. GTD is based on a book of the same name, by David Allen, and boils down productivity into maintaining focus by having trusted systems to deal with maintaining your commitments, and handling potential disruptions.

The book itself lays out some specifics of how these systems could be implemented, but it is stressed that the results are what matter, not the implementation.

In general terms, you need the following to do GTD (messages can refer to any type of communication that you receive):

• 1 or more “inboxes“. These can be literal email inboxes, or any centralized way to collect messages.
• A “tickler” system that allows you to “mail” yourself things in the future (i.e. I don’t have to pay this bill until 2 weeks from now, so I don’t want to see it until then). This is where the expression “43 folders” came from.
• A “next action” collection. These are actual actions you can do, phrased as decisively as possible, “wash the floor” vs. “clean the house”.
• A “projects” collection. In GTD, projects are defined as outcomes that require more than one action to complete.
• A “someday/maybe” collection. These are messages or topics that are of interest, but you aren’t at the point where you want to take any action on them.
• A “waiting for” collection. These are topics that have been delegated to someone else to deal with, and until they do, require no action from you.

Implementation challenges
Since I first read GTD about 5 years ago, I’ve struggled to put together a single system that would actually allow me to do it reliably.

Some of the problems I’ve encountered:

• Too many inboxes, so I don’t check them all reliably
• Inboxes and other collections in different media (email vs. paper list, etc.), so transitioning between them is non-trivial
• Separate systems for personal vs. work commitments
• Getting a usable “waiting for” collection
• Interacting with systems at my desk and on the go

Progress
Over the past two years, one of simplest ways I have found to maintain “next actions” is as email drafts. A good percentage of the actions I take involve sending an email, so there’s a natural process for those, and my inbox is very frequently referenced, so as long as I can keep focus on those drafts, I can be pretty confident I’m working on the right thing.

When Google introduced their priority inbox feature, I was excited, because of the potential for making multiple collections of email available up-front. Unfortunately, at the time, it didn’t allow you to choose “drafts” as one of them (more on this later), it only allowed 3 collections with limited customization, and most importantly, my work email was still stuck in Outlook.

A solution
When I started at Arc90, I was pleased to discover they used Gmail for corporate email, and even more pleased to discover that priority inbox had received several enhancements. So I started experimenting, and I’m now pretty pleased with what I’ve been able to accomplish.

Here’s how I have things set up:

• Labels for Done, Waiting For, and Someday
• Contact entries for my email, +done, +someday, named just “DONE” and “SOMEDAY” (WTF am I talking about?)
• Filters for messages sent to these addresses, to label them appropriately and archive them
• Priority Inbox:
• Four inbox sections:
• Unread
• All “Waiting For” (usually kept collapsed)
• All Drafts
• Everything else

Whenever I take on a new commitment, I draft an email, with the subject as the project, and lines in the body describing actions. If the action was to send an email, this draft will become that email. If the action is something else, then when it has been completed, I’ll send it to DONE.

When I receive an email that requires a commitment from me, I’ll draft a response with the commitment (and try to make sure I hit “save” instead of “send”).

When I send a message that requires a response, I will open that message and apply the label “Waiting For”. When that response comes in, the message shows up in “Unread”, and I can process it as appropriate. (This is why Unread has to be above Waiting For).

When I am waiting for something else, I will create a draft, write what I am waiting for, save it, and then label it “Waiting For”. When I have an idea for a project, or otherwise become aware of something that interests me, but is not part of my current work, I will draft and (usually) send an email to SOMEDAY.
When I need to be reminded of something in the future, I create a calendar event for that.

Things that could be improved

• Fewer clicks to create drafts. Right now, it’s “compose”, type, “save”, “back”. If there was a way I could start typing, and just hit “save as draft”, that would be nice.
• Applying labels to drafts. Right now you need to save a draft or send the message, and then re-open it, before you can apply a label.
• A couple of times, I have sit “send” instead of “save”. I think I could use “Undo Send” in labs to deal with this.
• I don’t have a projects collection right now. I will often use a single draft to track a project, and just make sure the first line is the next action.
• Some kind of “send later” functionality would be an easier way to remind myself of things at a specific date.

Conclusion
If this is your first exposure to GTD, hopefully this has provoked some interest, and provided something of an example for how a GTD system can be implemented. It takes some getting used to, and there’s a bit more to it then I have described here, but nothing that should cause conflict with this system. If there’s interest, I might write a couple more posts covering in-depth set up, and some other GTD aspects.

Thanks for reading!

Alec Munro is a QA Engineer at Arc90, where he uses GTD to manage his days of tests plans, infrastructure development, and meetings. He’s been using GTD for the past 5 or so years, and just recently began to use Gmail as his primary GTD tool. Alec lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Credit: vaxzine

Unlike the other men and women I work with, I have no computer languages under my belt. When semantics comes up in a meeting, I follow along based on the experience I have: most notably, French, German and some Spanish. So I’ve always been curious. Is learning a computer language similar to learning a foreign language? Or is it closer to math?

I decided to find out. This fall I enrolled in a HTML/CSS class for women with the Meet-up group Girl Develop It. Always the eager student, I loved it from the beginning. The familiar classroom dynamic, a teacher who asked us to introduce ourselves, the fresh text file ready for class notes. I am a sucker for school.

The first evening went well. I wrote enough HTML to scratch out a short page about my cats (cliche!). But it wasn’t until we were thrown into CSS during the second class that something clicked.

“Now type color:red;” the teacher instructed. I watched the text change on my new site. Half the room required the teacher’s assistance, so the women at our table set out into the great unknown ourselves.

“What if we typed color:blue; right after the red one?” someone asked. “Which one will it listen to?”

We tried it. The answer was not what we expected.

“Wait, how does it know all these colors?” someone else asked. “Let’s try to stump it.” We tried indigo, turquoise, puke-green. Some worked, others didn’t. Either way, it was fun.

We discovered borders and played with bold. Sometimes our guesses didn’t work. Puke-green, for those of you who don’t know, doesn’t work in CSS (at least not in plain English). Walls appeared in the mental blueprint of this language, limitations that set down guidelines as we played.

In the midst of all this trial and error, I suddenly felt the click. I understood just enough to ask the right questions. Having landing on a foreign planet, I was starting to explore the space around me, using logic to make educated guesses about how the language worked.

And that, my friends, is exactly what’s fun about learning foreign languages. We learn just enough to start making great guesses… and then we learn some more. The French student learns that “mère” means mother and “père” means father. “Grand-mère” means grandmother. Suddenly the student can make a great guess for grandfather. She can even guess at terms like great-grandfather (though that’s a bit trickier). It’s play with words, a type of scientific experiment. What works? What doesn’t? And how do I get from here to there?

I had assumed that learning a programming language was going to require the same muscles I’d used in math class in High School, muscles that have long since atrophied. But I was so pleased to find that HTML/CSS fell into the same rhythm as my foreign languages had. Sure, there’s vocab to remember. Sure, you’re going to get the grammar wrong. But given time and experience, I don’t think it’s too high a barrier to jump.

It’s easy to fall into the right brain/ left brain trap at work. Some of us have backgrounds in the humanities and others have been coding since Elementary School. But the spirit of coding – the spirit of inventing and playing and discovering – reminds me that we have similar outlooks. Developers, designers, strategists, no matter. As technologists, we are adventurers and explorers in whatever language we please.

In “Getting Real” Jason Fried wrote that Copywriting is Interface Design, yet five years later copywriting is almost always where interfaces fall to pieces.

(By the way, was “Getting Real” published 5 years ago already? Wow.)

As Fried said:

Copywriting is interface design. Great interfaces are written. If you think every pixel, every icon, every typeface matters, then you also need to believe every letter matters. When you’re writing your interface, always put yourself in the shoes of the person who’s reading your interface. What do they need to know? How you can explain it succinctly and clearly?

Do you label a button Submit or Save or Update or New or Create? That’s copywriting. Do you write three sentences or five? Do you explain with general examples or with details? Do you label content New or Updated or Recently Updated or Modified? Is it There are new messages: 5 or There are 5 new messages or is it 5 or five or messages or posts? All of this matters.

If you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably read the above. But do you practice it?

Writing is Fundamental.

In my experience, clear and consistent language (which extends beyond the user interface—into how people describe your application, how the email notifications read, etc.) is often the difference between a good application and a world-class one. And it’s often the difference between a confused user and a comfortable one.

Creating and maintaining that in your application takes time. It’s easy to let this slip: a new feature built in a hurry is referred to inconsistently, proper nouns slip through uncapitalized, overly formal/casual language breaks the established tone. And most easily overlooked of all: email notifications are written in haste, and not by the appropriate member of the team.

And is there payoff for this thoughtfulness? If it comes, it’s certainly delayed. In 2011, application development and delay are not friends.

I choose to remind myself, and my team, that these are the very qualities that make an app stand apart. With our product, Kindling, we’re as interested in renewing accounts as we are in landing new ones, and I can draw a direct line between good, clear and consistent interface language and usability—and continue that line from usability onto usage and straight through to renewals. Or said reductively: good interface copywriting is good business.

A Dribbble for Words?

Des then introduces the concept of a “Dribbble for Words:”

I would love to see a Dribbble for writing. A place where I can post the latest Intercom broadcast, email, even a sentence from the interface and get feedback. “You can strip the word currently there.”, “The important word here is buried in the middle of the sentence!“. “The message makes sense, but what I am supposed to do next?”.

In this hypothetical Dribbble for Words, I suppose product designers would post snippets of interface, buttons, modals, copy and other “language of interface” examples for criticism from the content and interface communities.

Cool idea on paper, but I’m not sure it would work.

In my experience, there’s no universal truth with these things. Interface words live exclusively inside their parent context: the app. Devoid of this context, words become merely an ordered list of letters.

Context is everything... ask King George.

Again, Fried is instructive here:

You need to speak the same language as your audience too. Just because you’re writing a web app doesn’t mean you can get away with technical jargon. Think about your customers and think about what those buttons and words mean to them. Don’t use acronyms or words that most people don’t understand. Don’t use internal lingo. Don’t sound like an engineer talking to another engineer. Keep it short and sweet. Say what you need to and no more.

Either way, I’m glad Des posted this. We as an industry spend an awful lot of time discussing visual/interaction/user experience design, and not enough time discussing the language of interfaces. Words matter.

—

…and speaking of secret weapons, hat tip to Joe on the great drawing accompanying this post.

Tolerance despite lack of skill is almost unheard of, not just in team-based console games but in nearly all aspects of life. Starting from that first gym class—in which the smallest kid was picked last—social cues throughout our lives reinforce the idea that only the good ones get to be in the game. So we go for those advanced degrees, honing our skills in a safe environment in order to be good enough to play.

But time and again, personal experience has taught me that one of the best ways to learn is to just start running around on the playing field. In other words, to learn on the job. It’s true that this can be stressful and scary. You can feel like you are surviving each day by just a hair. But it is a whole lot less scary when the team you work with encourages you to keep playing, no matter what your skill level. In fact, there seems to be a cherished tradition at Arc90 of everyone chipping in to evolve visual designers into badass designer-developer hybrids.

One of the first things I learned about Arc90 was how supportive the environment here is for on-the-job learning. Don’t know how version control works? Ask Stefan. Never heard of a Javascript closure? Get Tyler to help. Need an introduction to HTTP headers? Tom will literally stay until 8 PM to make sure you know everything there is to know about them, and then some. Despite tight release deadlines, everyone gives their time to help each other.

I experienced this kind of generosity first-hand this summer. Embarking on a Design Internship in June, I expected to Design stuff: comps, wireframes, icons and the like. Those I can (and did) do, but my team then handed me a task that required lots of front-end programming: to build an idea submission bookmarklet for one of Arc’s main products, Kindling.

Admittedly, I was worried at first. Visions of internship horrors danced through my head. What if I hit a wall? What if I ask dumb questions? Can I even bother these smart, busy people with the amount of dumb questions required for me to build this thing? Needless to say, the fears went unfounded. What actually transpired was that, with the tireless mentorship of Team Arc, I actually implemented a working software component and, in the process, picked up Javascript in less than 3 months.

So, how does one come by a team that is so open to letting everyone play? Start by hiring really friendly people who are insatiably curious about their trade: these are the people who will never stop learning, improving, and helping others do the same. Dedicate company time for the free exchange of ideas, techniques and feedback: Arc90 holds regular Design and Code Reviews where all are invited to swap critiques on each other’s work in a laid-back, informal setting. But most important of all, create an environment that responds to lack of knowledge with encouragement rather than disdain. Places where judgement is held in check, where the “show me what you’ve got” attitude is nonexistent, are the best places for learning. And of course, it’s helpful to have a culture of mutual trust and good humor.

For all the tech companies out there, here is something to consider: perhaps more important than workforce conversion and ROI is how your team supports learning within itself. After all, the only constant in technology is change. Because of this, creating a good team is not just about hiring people with all the right skills already under their belt, as the need for those skills may change. That’s a starting place, but afterwards, it’s all about crafting a team culture that supports letting one another play—no matter what their skill set and experience level—and tossing out those Cones of Shame.

“Tina possesses that which makes a great designer: a fervent desire to learn all that she can, combined with the skill to put it to use.” —Joseph Lifrieri, Designer

In the midst of all the social app hubbub, we haven’t bothered to consider the potential for technology to serve the other needs of the human condition. Yes, we are social animals and the motivator to connect, share, validate and be validated is incredibly strong, but we’ve got other needs as well. It’s high time we aim the mighty tech cannon at the other emotional and psychological needs that make us tick.

So without further ado, we bring you three brand new royalty-free application ideas that speak to the rest of the human condition. These prototypes are the product of a collaboration with the Arc90 Lab, beer and waking up at 3am with a killer idea that isn’t so killer the following morning.

We hope they’ll cast a new light on what technology can do to make us happier.

Vincetagram

The immensely popular photo-sharing app Instagram does an admirable job of making it easy to share photographs on your mobile phone.

It’s worth asking why Instagram is such a breakout success? It’s by no means the first photo sharing app. It’s popularity is partly due to the vintage feel it applies to photos. The edges are frayed and the colors are saturated in that old-style Polaroid sort of way. It brings the charm of analog to an overly digitized world. Most importantly, a photo taken just minutes ago is instantly imbued with a sense of history and nostalgia. It’s as if you stumbled on it in an old shoe box.

If Instagram can create the illusion of history and nostalgia with photos, why not take it a step further. Why not bring along a friend that you’ve known since junior high school from 20 years ago? Introducing Vincetagram:

Vincetagram takes simulated nostalgia to a whole new level. Not only will your pictures be enhanced with an impromptu visit from your old (albeit imaginary) friend, but your entire online life can be enriched. Vincetagram Free users get a new friend and follower on Twitter and Facebook as well as the occasional “Hey buddy!” SMS. Vincetagram Premium users receive weekly emails from Vince with a heartwarming “just wanted to see how you were doing…”

Appathy

All day every day, we get positive pings. Jim “friended” you. Suzzy “favorited” your tweet. Reggie “followed” you. We’re awash in positive reinforcement. The result is a constantly diminishing ability to appreciate good news. What if there was a tool that pings you when your online activity conjures up little more than indifference and apathy from others? Wouldn’t the occasional “friending” mean so much more? That tool is Appathy.

The goal of Appathy is straightforward: rekindle our appreciation of all those positive pings by surrounding them with the inanity of life’s typical interactions. With its groundbreaking ClearDisinterest(tm) technology, Appathy senses and captures the seemingly un-capturable: the unimpressed gaze, the rolled eyes, the brief moment of disdain. Your Humdrum Dashboard provides a birds-eye view of all those passed-over opportunities for connection and social interaction. It’ll even visualize your friends’ “dead zones”: the hours in the day when they’re most likely to ignore you.

The result is subtle but striking: the winks and pats on the back are far fewer and far between. When you do get that “follow” or “friend” request, it will mean so much more.

GetaGrip

While technology promised us convenience and productivity, its relentless advance seems to only put us further under water. From your never-ending email inbox to the unread count in your feed reader, the march of tech is always one step ahead of you. What we need is an app that pauses the insanity and reminds you of what’s really important: your mortality.

GetaGrip senses when you’re drowning in information overload and pauses everything. That endless stream of tweets, feeds and messages fades away. In its place GetaGrip reveals a jarring dose of reality. How long before others are noticing your protruding gut or receding hairline? How many retirement homes and funeral parlors are within a five mile radius of you? In a brief moment, your entire life (online and off) is snapped back into perspective.

The app also includes a database of over 3,000 disasters from history. Each day you’ll be notified with a reminder that no matter how shitty your day is going, history reveals that someone had a far shittier day than you.

Stepping Back

These prototypes may appear unconventional at first glance but the needs they address are anything but. Hopefully the technology innovators among us will view this article as a lens towards the future. The app store category list of tomorrow shouldn’t just be about games and productivity tools. We need to think more broadly about how $.99 apps can help boost our confidence or help us get over a bad breakup.

We have the technology. We can rebuild us.

10. Sing horribly in front of your peers

From happy hours to talent shows to our annual summer outing, we like spending time together. It’s over drinks (or video games!) that we brainstorm some great ideas and blow off steam. Plus, can you take someone seriously if they haven’t sung terrible karaoke in front of you?

9. Go forth and learn!

We’re serious about professional development and to that end, we send people to conferences all the time. We’ve had a strong presence at SXSW the past few years, but also make it a point to attend smaller conferences (Strangeloop, Web 2.0, Brooklyn Beta, among others).

8. Design and Code reviews

We're THAT efficient.

We regularly hold Design Reviews and Code Reviews where Arcers share designs and code samples for group feedback. It’s a great way to figure out what’s not working in a design or to get insight into new frameworks to leverage.

7. Get the goggles & Bunsen burner!

Everyone has several Lab days a year to pursue projects for the Arc90 Lab. Both Kindling and Readability started as Lab projects and we consider our Lab one of the cornerstones of our business!

6. Weekly lunches (and the occasional impromptu ice cream run).

Bad jokes, good company and (when we’re lucky), amazing baklava. Getting together in the same room once a week keeps us connected, regardless of the projects we’re on.

5. “If I can’t make it there…”

While a few of us are remote, the majority of us are based at our office in midtown Manhattan. That means food trucks for lunch, easy access to tons of subways and a short jaunt to Central Park.

4. Key requirement: both sides of the brain

Arc90 brings together the creative and technical. There are no walls between design and development. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been so successful to date.

3. 100% USDA Interesting Work

Between our longstanding strategic relationships with our clients to our innovative product work, there is no shortage of exciting and thought-provoking work at Arc90.

2. THE PEOPLE!

Over 40 of the most talented designers and technologists make up Arc90 today. We’ve always been about the people that make us who we are. Great work is a byproduct of inspiring one another.

1. Scratch that itch

Every employee who walks through our doors has the opportunity to do great things at Arc90. We reward those who bring passion, enthusiasm and a desire to innovate – regardless of what they’re working on.

We’re looking for all sorts of skills to help us grow. Whether you’re a developer (front or back-end), designer, product manager or strategist and Arc90 feels like the place for you, get in touch with us. We’d love to get to know you.

• Ideeli – a deal a day website that ‘DDoSes themselves every day at noon’. They went into some detail about their EC2/EBS setup, namely the best practices when working with EBS volumes, planning for high availability by making use of Amazon’s different Availability Zones, and some interesting tweaks to use for large MySQL instances running on EC2.
• Baron Schwartz from Percona – a great demonstration of how you can use tcpdump, Maatkit and gnuplot to do non-intrusive monitoring and find problems with locked up queries before they start to cause you real problems. He also showed how you can make a real plan for scaling, at the same time proving why linear scalability is almost always impossible.
• Zmanda – open source backup software that allows you to do point in time MySQL backups via a variety of methods, i.e. a full backup via LVM/ZFS/EBS snapshot and then append replays from binary logging. Definitely cool stuff.
• Facebook – the closing keynote was from one of Facebook’s DB performance team members who spoke about their gigantic MySQL setup, how they deal with sharding and remote references and all sorts of crazy stuff that you only know about once you’ve run the world’s largest MySQL cluster. They actually run two instances of MySQL on single machines as they’re no longer IO bound due to their work with flashcache. It gave me a lot of ideas on how we can deal with expansion in the future.

There’s no amount of reading manuals and whitepapers that can replace real world experience, and hearing community members explain how they’ve overcome various obstacles and emergencies can really help you think about how you’re managing your environment. Thanks again to Percona for organizing as well as all the speakers for making their presentations.

* * * *

This week’s guest is Paul Ford, self-described “writer and nerd currently working as a content strategist, advisor to Readability, partner in SoMuchAwesome.com, and updates Ftrain.com every now and then.”

Says Paul:

“When God closes a door, he registers a domain name. I own a fairly modest 32 domains (some of them shorteners for the other domains), mostly purchased late at night during moments of fevered hope or high amusement. It’s hard to pick favorites, but here are a few…”

• 1 Copywire.com

  My first business website, now nearly 12 years old. Did you need a freelancer to open a spreadsheet and write promotional copy for 700 specific brand attributes of strollers, or synthesizers, or consumer energy products? Then you’ve called (on a landline, assuming the modem wasn’t tying up the line) the right fellow. I knew I needed an edge, so I called myself a “Content Strategist.” That’s how I could bill not $25, but $30, an hour. So if anyone ever asks you, “What is content strategy?” one answer is, “$5 more an hour than copywriting.”

• 2 GratefulPublic.com

  In 2009 there was a grand flowering of tiny social-marketing-focused strategic web consultancies, and I wondered: How hard can that be? A half-hour with some JavaScript and [grateful public] (lowercase, brackets, not serious) was open for business. In order to keep it just like all those other consultancy websites, I never updated it.

• 3 CommentsAreClosed.com

  A single-serving site that allows one to say, gently, that comments are closed (appending a name to the URL personalizes the message). This is part of a suite of sites I’d love to build someday that tell people to please, please, please shut up.

• 4 MediumRectangle.com

  Because the medium rectangle 300×250 pixel banner ad completely dominates online publishing, and is a critical component of our
  wonderful web of remnant networks, lousy clickthroughs, and content farms, I think it would be nice to celebrate the good work that people have done using this awful unit (really!). In my dreams the entire site will itself be a single 300×250 banner, and embeddable as a banner, of course. Stories, poetry, animated GIFs, and, of course, ads. Given that my business partner is a master of banners, this might actually happen.

• 5 Deploud.com

  I was working on a project and we were approaching our deadline. “It’s time to deploy,” someone said. “To deploy…to the cloud!”

  “Deploud!” I said. “We’re going to deploud!”

  Then I thought. “Well, I’d better buy that domain name, just in case.” And here we are. It expires May 22, and it’s yours if you want it.

• SavePublishing.com (Bonus Domain!)

  I bought this years ago and I keep renewing it. Everyone has ideas but no one wants to commit. “Maybe it could be a blog,” they say. “Or something about books? Oh wait, it could be about community. Or e-readers.” The inability to commit tells you something about the industry, I think. I’m going to hold onto it for as long as publishing survives, then let it expire. Right now it’s set to expire in 2012.

Here’s my issue, if I want some specific bit of information or functionality, what’s the best way to find it? Take the weather, let’s say I want to know the forecast for Miami—I can either open Safari and search Google, or thumb through pages of brightly colored, cute icons. Which 57×57 square of pixels represents what I’m looking for, and where on this damn phone can I find it? Is it the sun, or one of the birds? I don’t remember. Thus, Safari.

Pretty, and pretty unusable

We’re nearing half a million apps on iOS, which sounds great on paper (and in marketing materials), but feels imposing. Google was born once it became untenable to organize the Web via a directory listing, and it seems like we’re at that stage again with apps. What’s the long-term strategy for organizing, identifying, navigating and launching apps on mobile devices? Today there are two: browsing icons and string-searching app names. Neither of these work at scale. Once you have more than 50 apps, it becomes hard to remember which icon represents which bit of functionality, and search implies I know all of my app’s names. Have you seen app names lately?

Imagine if finding a Web page was only possible by browsing lists of favicons or by an exact match on the page’s title. That’s the state of navigating apps on mobile devices today.

Until someone comes up with a system as good at scale as Google, I’m sticking with the Web.

Arc90 has been practicing content strategy fundamentals in its client and product work for years. But there is much to be said for what’s distinctive in their approach and where it marries with mine.

When Content Meets Product

1. BROADEN HORIZONS WITH “BIG TENT” CONTENT STRATEGY.

Content is a critical business asset, but where content is the business asset—think namely, but not exclusively, of publishing or broadcast media—the principles of product development apply. This is part of what I call “big tent” content strategy, wherein we try to solve business problems with content rather than limiting ourselves to addressing (sometimes parochial) content problems alone. A big tent content strategy accounts for product, platform, and people considerations.

Incidentally, this is how we become better critics of something like the AOL content strategy. Seasoned content strategists are uniquely qualified to contribute to wider industry conversations.

In the big picture, content and product are a weave of business strategy. Our work practice, pluralistic as it is, can ladder up to address bigger needs. For example, how can an organization single-source its content production, enabling a genuine “author once, publish everywhere” publishing solution, and what’s the ROI? Process and technology standardization here influences how this organization works with content, yet no one would say such analysis is native to content experts. Content work is a catholic practice and content strategy’s credibility rests on how its practitioners rise to the wider collaborative challenge.

2. DAY 2 IS A PRODUCT PROBLEM.

A product development approach to content strategy addresses the Day 2 problem: namely, what do we do after launch day to be effective with content? The postlaunch paradigm requires editorial strategy—that is, dealing with content problems, and engaging an audience, over time.

Again, this is familiar territory to traditional publishers and product professionals. There is a specific name for ongoing, serial content in this context: editorial. In broadcast television, the equivalent to editorial content is programming. Entire businesses, such as the video on demand field led by Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, are predicated on the scope, volume, and inventory of its programming. Day 2 is where content matters most to many areas of business. Questions of product licensing and syndication are completely germane to the content expert.

3. EDITORIAL STRATEGY IS PRODUCT STRATEGY EXECUTED.

As Paul Ford has argued, real editors ship—meaning they are involved in active product development work. The proverbial Day 2, the operational life of an organization, is where both publishing and product development rises or falls. (It’s also where content strategy successes and failures are best evaluated.)

This is the meaning behind editorial strategy as I practice it. Put another way: an editorial strategy is the follow-through, or the operationalization, of a content strategy. Your website is not a magazine, but it should be, inasmuch as it commits itself to the planning and resources required of ongoing professional content care and feeding. Likewise, masthead workflow and conventional publishing practices, like style guides and editorial calendars, are instructive of what’s entailed by being an effective publisher online, or anywhere else. This is why content strategy is “an integrative practice,” to use Joe Gollner’s tidy expression.

4. BUSINESS MODELS ARE THE BUSINESS OF CONTENT PEOPLE.

The marriage of product and content strategy does not stop at support documentation and knowledge bases. As experts in how content, technology, and organizations interact, we’re all management consultants now.

A genuine product strategy for a content offering must consider the business model, remembering always that content is expensive. Free, paid or otherwise on the one hand, and the possibilities of licensing and syndicating content on the other, a complete content strategy must take a position and rationale on the business case of its recommendations. This is being played out all over the web today, in paid content models of subscriptions and advertising, and from SEO-friendly pay fences to apps to content “windowing.” All of this should be core to an understanding of content strategy; it’s prerequisite to knowing product.

5. TACKLE WIDESPREAD USER PROBLEMS.

Content production and consumption are the twin frays of Day 2.

Content production problems are rife in organizations today, as are the opportunities for developing next-generation editorial planning tools. The rise of big data (and efforts like database.com) all but ensures a wave of them around the bend. Like any UXer, content strategists can see problems through to products, and I’m excited to see our analytical chops and problem solving reach wider audiences this way.

Similarly, as user experience professionals, we understand intuitively that content of any stripe can exacerbate general information overload. Done well, great content exerperiences can combat it, too, standing apart from the alternatives. As such, content consumption is an experience to be designed for with care and empathy.

The Content Strategy of Readability

Arc90’s Readability is an example of a product—with its own highly innovative and rapidly evolving business model—solving particularly for the challenges of content consumption.

Readability has cut a fresh path forward for readers and publishers alike by insisting that pleasurable reading, reading on readers’ own terms, is an experience for which people will pay. Credit the entire team here, and incomparable talents like Erin Kissane, for turning a simple sentiment into a real product. In a fragmented market glutted with players trying to rethink how we read online, Readability simultaneously takes a stab at advancing web standards, radically refashioning the reader-writer-publisher relationship, and building a revenue bridge for publishers to the economics of “read later.” (More on that another time.)

As the proverbial read later reader myself, traveling 100 miles a day by train, I cannot imagine a project that has gone further more rapidly than Readability in space-launching beyond our parochial user experience hobbyhorses to breathe fresh life into the future-of-content conversation.

Are You Going Our Way?

The future of content, and certainly that of reading and publishing, will be played out in product.

Somewhere between expertise, experience, energy, and luck, you get the work you deserve. But you don’t pick your time, which makes 2011 all the more exciting for what’s ahead of us.

The future of content, and certainly that of reading and publishing, will be played out in product. There are no more first drafts. The world does not need another wireframe. Ideas and inklings—a Readability, a Donahue, the next new thing—these simply must get out into the world, realized, to find their footing.

It’s true what you’re hearing: Arc90 is rising up as a big-think, liberal arts 37Signals—but its own beast, too, dripping with heart and talent. In New York UX circles, it’s already beaten down the door of best kept secret. I’m proud to thicken its ranks.

Readers and writers, advocates and fans: all of us have a horse in this race about where content is headed. It’s the call of brighter prospects for the stuff we cherish, enjoy, and appreciate. Here’s to leveling up, and to all that’s next for everyone invested in the project of making content matter.

Jeffrey MacIntyre, Arc90 Lead Strategist, is forming its content strategy and information architecture practice.