Not the end of the Press Release, but…

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Christopher Cox has responded favorably to Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s idea that financial disclosures currently required to be made by press release could be posted to a company blog instead.

Schwartz had suggested it in a letter to Cox, and also had posted the correspondence to his blog.

The AP now reports that Cox responded to Schwartz not only by mail, but also on Schwartz’s blog.

“The (SEC) encourages the use of Web sites as a source of information to the market and investors, and we welcome your offer to further discuss with us your views in this area,” Cox told Schwartz in his posting on the CEO’s blog. (He also sent Schwartz a letter by mail.)

Said Cox: “Assuming that the (SEC) were to embrace your suggestion that the ‘widespread dissemination’ requirement of Regulation FD can be satisfied through Web disclosure, among the questions that would need to be addressed is whether there exist effective means to guarantee that a corporation uses its Web site in ways that assure broad non-exclusionary access …”

What could be broader and more non-exclusionary than a company blog, to which anyone can subscribe? I thought this was a great idea when Schwartz suggested it, and I’m really glad to hear Chairman Cox being supportive.

You can read Chairman Cox’s comments in full here.

Regulation FD was designed to prevent insiders and analysts from unfairly trading on insider information. Blogs democratize information and make everyone an insider.

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GTD vs. TOE – The Case of the Rapid Rebate

After reading Getting Things Done on that fateful plane ride a year ago next Wednesday, one of my first steps was to throw away some of the books on organization that had previously guided my personal organizing efforts.

Among these was Stephanie Winston’s The Organized Executive, henceforth known as TOE. I recycled it because it had counseled something directly counter to the David Allen GTD system.

It’s probably bad manners to link to a book you don’t recommend. “If you can’t say something nice…” And TOE probably does have some good advice. But one of Stephanie’s points that had stuck with me was the idea that you should create file folders with broad enough categories that they would typically be about a half-inch thick, so you can ideally find what you’re looking for in 30 seconds or so.

David Allen, conversely, says you need to be willing to have a file folder with just a single sheet of paper, if that’s what will help you find it.

That’s a serious difference of opinion. Which way works better was obvious me when I had to re-file energy rebate forms for my new furnace and air conditioner. The utility company had kicked my application back to me because one of the model numbers and its efficiency rating weren’t matching the database, so I needed to find my receipts and get the forms corrected.

Because I had followed the GTD model (including buying the label machine to make filing fun), I was able to find the documents, go to the utility office, get the form corrected and return home…all within less than 30 minutes, and my $500 rebate was on the way. That’s getting things done.

The problem with the TOE method is you artificially try to create categories, or shoehorn documents into an existing folder, and then when you’re trying to find it again you ask, “Now, what category would I have chosen for that?”

I suppose it’s conceivable that under the TOE method I might have filed these receipts under “Utilities” and been able to locate them fairly quickly, but I’ve had enough experiences when I couldn’t put my hands on documents several months later because I didn’t know whether they were under “Household” or “Home Repair” or “Utilities” or “Misc. Receipts” or one of several other broad categories.

TOE’s problem, or rather my problem with TOE, is you have to try to recreate the complex filing decision process at retrieval time that you used when you first filed the document. And if you guess wrong, you end up digging through a relatively thicker file, only to come up empty-handed and frustrated. I may not have been doing the TOE method correctly. I may have misunderstood how to do it. But I didn’t have the same problems with GTD.

With the GTD system, using one simple A-Z general reference paper filing system, it was easy to guess that the receipts would be filed under “Air Conditioning” or “Furnace.” I had used “Air Conditioning” so I found it instantly. But even if I had used “Furnace” the paperwork would have been in the second place I looked, and it wouldn’t have been packed in with several months of utility bills or other irrelevant papers.

I guess this is my way of saying, “Trust the system.” Start out by trying to follow it to the letter. The recommendations David Allen makes are based on a couple of decades of experience with people whose lives are a lot more complicated than mine, or probably yours. If it can work for them, it can work for you.

Then, after you get confident with the proper form, you can improvise and jazz it up if you’d like.

I’m sure Stephanie Winston’s new and improved TOE that takes modern technology into account has some good advice. I had an edition that was probably 15 years old, so it was probably good to toss based on its vintage alone.

But GTD works well with paper files and index cards, or with the latest gadgets. I’m a geek. I love how blogs, for instance, can be used as a quickly searchable general reference file. To the extent you can use electronic systems and indexing utilities on your hard drive or blog to quickly retrieve information, you could cram everything into the same virtual folder, as long as you can remember any key phrase in the document.

But paper isn’t going away. That’s why the GTD system, complete with electronic label maker, is well worth following.

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Worth a Click

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report shows a slight increase in the time it takes for its number of blogs tracked to double (it’s now about 236 days), which is somewhat to be expected given that the total is now about 57 million.

Businessweek, the Washington Post and New York Times each have articles about Google’s plan to broker print ads.

Jeff Jarvis comments on newspapers in “free fall.”

Wired has a run-down and comparison of social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us.

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Of GTD, iPods and File System Flu

If you were sick with a fever and felt awful, you would take a couple of days off to get plenty of rest, drink lots of fluids and otherwise take care of your body so you could come back both feeling good and also more productive.

You wouldn’t be getting much done anyway with that all-over achiness, and you’d be running the risk of infecting your coworkers, too. And when you came back to work, the business would not have disbanded and been forced into liquidation because of your absence. Somehow, everyone would have muddled through.

So why is it you think you can’t possibly take a couple of days to do the GTD mindsweep and get your filing system organized?

Let’s face it: if you’re like most people (and like I was), your filing and organization system is sick. It’s causing lots of discomfort and inefficiency not only for you, but for everyone around you. You’re operating way below your capabilities.

So, I’m not suggesting that you call in with a fake illness, but that you find a way to set aside the time to get a good start at implementing GTD. Block two days for vacation so you don’t have any meetings or appointments scheduled, but then show up for work and spend that time clearing your psychic underbrush.

That’s what I did last year, just as I was getting started with GTD. I had previously scheduled a four-day getaway weekend with my wife, Lisa, for our annual Christmas shopping trip. With six children, it’s nice to get away for a few days, just the two of us, and wrap up our shopping all at once.

But then Lisa got the idea that instead of buying our offspring a bunch of smaller presents that collectively add up to a triple-digit price tag for each child (but yet six months later none of them would likely remember what they had received!), we should get them each an iPod or something of similar significance.

I quickly agreed. That meant:

1. Our shopping was done, so we didn’t need the shopping excursion
2. I could sell my vacation time (and use the money we would have spent on the getaway hotel) to pay Steve Jobs and my fellow Apple stockholders for the iPods, and
3. I had a couple of days without appointments scheduled that I could devote to establishing my GTD system.

iPod

It also means they’re getting a lot less for Christmas this year.

I’d recommend you consider following our 2005 example, and not just because I own 0.00000012 percent of Apple’s outstanding shares of common stock. By giving an iPod, this year’s present won’t just blend into what you’ve given other years, unless you have a habit of being extravagant. And if you take the two days to clear the decks in implementing GTD, you will feel more refreshed than you would have if you had taken the time off.

You’ll also be off to a healthy start on 2007, with less stress…which may (along with your flu shot) keep you from losing time to illness.

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Gannett ‘Gets’ News Climate Change

Big changes are coming to Gannett…you might even call it a “transformation.” As Wired describes it:

According to internal documents provided to Wired News and interviews with key executives, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened “information centers,” and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like “data,” “digital” and “community conversation.”

The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.

Apparently Gannett’s leadership has seen the melting iceberg, and is taking action.

What’s melting under you?

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