A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs – NYTimes.com

When I read a story like the one below, I realize that it isn’t just the products themselves, it’s the experience and people that make me want to come back.

10-year-old girl has memorable experience at Apple Store

What can you do to make every customer’s shopping trip a wonderful experience?

Today, i have an iPhone, an IPad 2, a 27 inch iMac and a Macbook Pro. One or more of them are always with me. Steve Jobs is responsible for making technology accessible and portable. His innovative ideas and his ability to lead others to implement them changed our lives.

Steve Jobs died peacefully with his family around him. I hope he was able to die knowing his innovations had a huge impact on our day to day lives. He goes down in history with many others who changed our lives.

Apple, the company he co-founded, was removed from, rescued from near bankruptcy and ultimately led to being one of the world’s most valuable companies, will go on without him. I hope that it will pick up the vision and move beyond it, above it. I hope they learn to stop asking themselves ‘What would Steve do?’. Instead, concentrating on solving the problems that technology can solve and sometimes creates.

Steve has a lesson for us all. He loved what he did for a living. He rose every morning and lived it to the fullest. Steve, you will be missed, but thanks to your visionary mind, you will be remembered and your legacy will live on.

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Thanks for the well wishes. Typing with one hand!

Coming home from picking up my son at school. I had my cell phone, my wallet, my purse, two sets of keys in my hands and I’m trying to get it all together in order to unlock the front door of the house. We had two sets of storms, one after the other and my front area is damp and covered with bits of greenery from the trees and the wind.

My family has a long line of less then graceful people, we fall down when chewing gum and walking. I wasn’t even chewing gum. But my feet went out from under me. I see the next few seconds of my life flash in front of me. I see me falling head first into the large fountain, the two dolphins on it flying into the air and hitting the front door, making a dent, shattering the fountain and the dolphins. I have a rich imagination. No dolphins or fountains or doors were injured. I can’t say that for me.

I brace my fall, and save my iPhone by putting it into the dirt, my weight falling on my knees, elbows, wrists on the concrete. Ouch. I pull up my pant leg and look at my right knee, scraped free of skin. Lifting up the other pant leg, I notice a lump the size of a small lemon developing above my knee. Funny, I don’t remember that looking like that before.

After a short call to my Dr., he agrees to see me in his office. Nothing dangerous aside from my ego, the swollen knee, the bruises that will develop tomorrow, both arms ache, my wrist hurts, my scraped knee oozing. My blood pressure is 180 over 130. Evaluated for a stroke, but no, I’m just graceful. Go home with Naproxin and ice and a promise that I will feel much worse tomorrow.

Ok, you can stop laughing now.

But I can honestly say that I’ve moved away from paper and moved to a digital system. Its a system that works for me, and it may work for you as well. I use GTD, Getting Things Done. It doesn’t require a particular paper, binder or digital system, I can use the methodology with any system that works for me. I have a Mac laptop and use Omnifocus desktop on it. On my iPhone and iPad, I use Omnifocus specifically for that device. Using Omnifocus enables me to keep everything on all three devices synced, all my projects, all my todos, my goals, my plans, everything. Every Sunday, I spend about an hour and perform a weekly review on my iPad, doing all the items on my review checklist. It keeps my mind from fretting about things that need to be done the rest of the week.

If you are also a time management addict, remember, it isn’t important what you use to keep your mind clear, its important that you have some kind of system and you use it consistently.  There are lots of methods to choose from.  Some may nor may not work for you.  You may have to design your own.  Don’t ever give up trying.  Once you have the method that works for you, its like gold, you’ll finally be free and have a mind that doesn’t fret.

You couldn’t pry my iPad out of my cold, dead hands, I plan to be buried with one.  At least the most recent release of one.  Let my kids figure that one out.

I use a product called RescueTime that detects what I do all day long and lets me have reports on how productive I am.  I can definitely say that a few things have increased my productivity and reduced my spin time.

One is Evernote.  I would spend my internet browsing time getting lost, following link after link and eventually forgetting what I was looking for in the first place.  Now I spend a fixed amount of time, pop all the interesting pages into Evernote and spend a bit of downtime on the iPad reviewing what I wanted to read.  I also blog in Evernote and automatically post from it using a plugin for WordPress called EverPress.  I write a note I want to post and put it in a specific notebook.  Everpress takes it from there and posts it automatically for me.

Two is my iPad.  I used to cart around my heavy binder full of planning pages.  Every year, I’d update the binder if it was falling apart and update the pages.  I didn’t always use all the pages that were provided, so there was always a big waste of paper.  My iPad functions as my library, currently its holding samples of books I want to read, books I’m currently reading and free content that I put into PDFs or ePUB format. Everything I need is there, in one place.

Writing and Reviewing documents.  I receive and send a lot of Word and Excel documents.  If its a lengthy document I’m writing, its going to take some back and forth review on my part before it looks how I want it to look.  I can collaborate and share documents with people using Dropbox.  I can annotate PDF documents, adding comments to something I want to get more information about.

My calendar.  I use a laptop, a desktop, a client site computer, my iPhone and my iPad.  Keeping it all in sync is fairly simple, even the parts that I publicize with clients.

Planning.  I’m a planaholic. I can spend volumes of time putting things to do in one place, categorizing them and checking off what’s been done.  Its fun and iPad apps like Bento, Things and Omnifocus make it enjoyable to be a bit more productive.

Books and News.  I’m a big book reader.  I call myself a bottle reader.    If I don’t have something to read, I’ll read the label on the nearest bottle.  I’m usually juggling several books, a couple in the throne room, a few in the living room.  Magazines are stacked in the same places.  I’ve switched many of my books over to the iPad and even more magazines over as well.  Tech books don’t work as well, but I think that’s my own limitation.

Do you love your iPad?  How does it help you?

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I’ll recommend to you what I’m recommending to my daughter.  Do as much travel as you can.  See the sights, even if that means hitting the local spots around your hometown.  If the opportunity strikes for you to travel to a land far away, say yes.  Do it now, because life is short and you may never get the same chance.

Eat the food, experience the culture, learn the language of where you live, especially if its a foreign land.  But I’ll tell someone who is moving to a new city of state or across the country to do the same thing.  If you end up living in Paris, France or Paris, Texas, learn everything you can, see everything, eat everything.

If you’re a military person or married to one, you have no excuse that you’re bored.  Stop living on base and get up off your butt and out the door.  If you’re by yourself, just do it, if you have a spouse, kids, grab them and hop into your car, on your bikes or just go on foot.  Hit the beach, climb the mountains, visit the caves, explore it all.

Soon enough you’ll be on your last wish, don’t let it be that you wished you had seen more of the world.  What are you waiting for?  Go see the world.

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I see it everyday.  Poor defenseless people being led around by a ring in their nose, someone else’s ring in their nose.

The ring is a plan, a plan that someone else has put together, put in place and is imposing on someone who doesn’t have the particular skill set that the plan incorporates.

Perfect example.  You hire a person or a company to implement your marketing plan.  Off they go, very little involvement on your part and a short time later, a plan emerges on your desk and waiting for implementation. You approve it, without knowing all the parts and pieces, frankly, you don’t have the time to review it.  Off they go, marching orders limited, full scope implemented.

Time goes by and you don’t seem to see results.  Or worse, things are definitely not working, and you don’t know what to do.

What’s missing in the plan?  Ownership.  You need to know enough about what’s being planned and implemented in order to determine if the plan is for you.  How does that happen?  You need to match up your Strategic Plan with whatever shorter term plan you are planning.

If you’re implementing a social marketing plan, you need to learn the basics about social marketing.  Not down the to the details, but you need to know the basics.  You need to decide what your mission, values and goals dictate for your social marketing plan.  You might decide that you don’t want to use Facebook or Tweeting just isn’t your thing.  When you get the plan from the firm doing the social marketing for you, make sure you understand it, ask questions, draw red circles around things you don’t understand.  Draw red lines through things you don’t want on the plan.  Work with them to make the plan your own.

Don’t abdicate your plan and let someone else run with it.  It’s your plan, retain ownership, work as part of the team to get it done.  Don’t let someone else lead you around by a nose ring.

The first, Temple Bags, has computer bags, luggage and best of all, iPad and iPhone cases made of high quality leather and re-purposed WWII fabrics.  My two favorites, the Medicine Bag and the iPad Folio.  Both with a hefty price tag, but beauty has a cost.

The other company, Saddleback Leather Company, uses saddle leather, and if you’ve ever plunked your behind on a saddle, you know it has to be high quality and soft.  I like the briefcase, large enough for my 17″ Macbook pro and again, the iPad case.

The extra here is both companies have a unique way of incorporating a blog and video into their marketing process. Saddleback uses a story approach, customer’s pop in with picture and word based stories of their own.  Temple bags has travelogue based blog posts to keep you entertained.

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