Here’s a simple but extremely useful solution using nothing more than a bulldog clip!!!

Clever cable holders. Via curled and feathered.

Why do most ideas never happen? The reason is that our own creative habits get in the way. For example, our tendency to generate new ideas often gets in the way of executing the ones we have. As a result, we abandon many projects halfway through. Whether a personal website, a new business idea or a long-dreamt novel, most of these projects stagnate and become a source of frustration.

Some creative people and teams are able to defy the odds and make their ideas happen, time and again. In my work, I have spent the better part of five years meeting these exceptional people and chronicling their habits and insight, which has resulted in the following tips and suggestions for making ideas happen.

1. Avoid A Reactionary Workflow

Without realizing it, most of us have gradually adopted a “reactionary workflow.” We are constantly bombarded with incoming communication: email, text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, phone calls, instant messages, etc. Rather than be proactive with our energy, we spend all of our energy reacting, enslaved to the last incoming item.

To avoid this reactionary workflow, some of the most productive people I have met schedule what can be called “windows of non-stimulation” in their day. For two to three hours per day, these people avoid email and all other incoming communication. In this time, they focus on their list of big items: not routine tasks, but long-term projects that require research and deep thought.

Another idea is to aggregate all messages in a central location. Setting your social networks to email you, and using filters to automatically manage these emails, will reduce your “hopping time” (when you hop between sources of communication) and focus your attention. Some people even have their voice mails transcribed automatically and forwarded by email. In a world of many inboxes, you have to consolidate.

2. Strip Projects To Three Primary Elements

Every project in life can ultimately be reduced to just three primary elements: 1) action steps, 2) backburner items and 3) references. Action steps are tasks that can be articulated succinctly and begin with verbs. They should be kept separate from your notes and sketches.

Backburner items are ideas that come up during brainstorming or while on the run and that are not actionable but may be later on. Backburner items should be collected in a central location and revisited periodically as a ritual. One leader I met prints out his list of backburner items (which he stores in Word document) on the first Sunday of every month. He grabs the sheet (and a beer) and then sits down to review the entire list. Some items will be crossed off as irrelevant, some will remain on the list, and some will be transformed into action steps.

The third element of every project is references: the articles, notes and other stuff that collect around you. It turns out that references are overrated. Rather than spend hours organizing your notes, consider simply filing your notes chronologically (i.e. not by project or anything else) in one big file. In the age of digital calendars, we can search for any meeting and quickly find the notes taken on that date.

3. Measure Meetings With Action Steps

Meetings are extremely expensive considering the cost of time and interruptions they represent. Beware of “posting meetings” or meeting “just because it’s Monday.” Such meetings are usually scheduled for the morning—when you’re at your most productive—and often end without any action steps having been captured. A meeting that ends without any action steps should have been a voice mail or email.

When you do meet with clients or colleagues, end each meeting with a quick review and capture the action steps. The exercise should take less than 30 seconds per person. Each person should share what they captured. Doing so will almost always reveal a few action steps that were missed, duplicated or misunderstood. Reading your action steps aloud also cultivates a sense of accountability.

4. Reduce Your Insecurity Work

In the era of Google Analytics and Twitter, we spend too much time obsessing over real-time data because it’s all at our fingertips. Whether it’s your website’s traffic or bank account, checking these repeatedly doesn’t help make your ideas happen. They just make you feel “safe.” Insecurity work is stuff we do that (1) has no definable outcome, (2) does not move the ball forward in any way and (3) takes up so little time that we can do it multiple times a day without realizing it. Still, it puts us at ease.

The first step to reducing insecurity work is becoming self-aware. Identify the insecurity work in your daily life. The second step is to establish guidelines and rituals for yourself that create discipline. Perhaps you could try restricting all of your insecurity work to a particular 30 minutes every day? The third step, if applicable, is to delegate your insecurity tasks to a less insecure colleague, who can review the data periodically and report any concerns.

5. The Creative Process Is About Surviving The “Project Plateau.”

Everyone has their own approach to generating ideas. There’s no “best way” to be creative. But when it comes to the process of executing ideas, we all face one challenge in particular: sticking with it. Most ideas are abandoned at what I’ve come to call the “project plateau”: the point when creative excitement wanes and the pain of deadlines and project management becomes burdensome. To escape this pain, we generate a new idea (and abandon the one we were working on). This process can easily repeat itself ad infinitum, without us ever finishing anything meaningful.

Show your ideas some respect, and spend some energy improving how you execute. If not for you, do it for everyone else who will benefit from your ideas once they actually see the light.

To add a buzz sharing button on your site go to buzz.google.com/stuff, configure your buttons with a couple clicks and copy a few lines of JavaScript. You can see an example of this button in the sidebar of this post. Expect a wordpress plugin from someone sooner or later.

To add a “follow me” on Google Buzz button you can find full instructions for that at buzz.google.com/stuff too. An example you can see here, purely for reference purposes because I don;t actually use Buzz as of writing this but by all means click this button and follow me:

Follow on Buzz

Alternatively you can simply Buzz this post.

Follow on Buzz

These are small steps in the development of Buzz but steps forward they are. If you ask me, there are a number of other features I’d like to have seen first but this is the new and improved social Google, surely its only a matter of time.

It’s easy to see how Apple might have overlooked this, what with their headquarters located in a place with 60 degree days in February, but anyone from colder climates knows that you can’t operate an iPhone with gloves on. In South Korea, they have figured out a way around this problem using the best tool possible: encased pork products.

Yes, South Koreans have beat the cold by using snack sausages as ersatz iPhone styluses. The touch screen on an iPhone, and iPod Touch, utilizes the electrical conductivity of your finger to locate the input. The device can’t sense that conductivity through a glove. However, this tasty meat treat has the same conductivity as human flesh, so the iPhone registers its touch a if it were a finger.

In particular, it seems the CJ Corporation’s line of Max rods are prized by South Korean techies for their usefulness as iPhone styluses. Of course, as a blogger, most of my electronics are already coated in a thin layer of Slim Jim grease, so maybe I was just ahead of the curve this whole time.

The Times Online article uses PayPal — already a frequent phishing target — as an example.

If the domain, created using Cyrillic scripts “raural.com” was registered, the way that Unicode-browsers will actually render that domain in latin is as “paypal.com.” In theory, phishers could pass around that link and set up a fake version of the PayPal site to harvest logins and credit card data.

Here’s a graphic for even better illustration of the problem:

Searching the iTunes store for new apps can be awkward and slow. Unless you know exactly what you want it can take a while to find what you need.

uquery.com, launched today, wants to be Google for iPhone Apps and they are doing a pretty good job at it. Search queries are blazingly fast and the filtering options in the left sidebar are very convenient for quickly narrowing down a search.

One drawback is that uquery.com doesn’t seem to have all the information that the iTunes App store does. You won’t find any user comments or stars in these results.

Look past that and you have a very good alternative for Apple’s own solutions for finding that one perfect app out of the 72,075 apps available right now. Give it a try.

The annual fun and games with the last few tickets for FOTB09 begins. Currently the tickets are sat there at a ridiculously low price and if it stays that way some lucky peeps are going to get an absolute bargain.

Since the site is new, you’re more likely to find shoppers on the “Latest Tweets” tab than in your hometown, but the site hopes to change that by swinging white label deals with big online retailers, who would enable JustBought.it tweets whenever consumers buy something. A key feature currently missing – a mobile application – is also due in two weeks in the form of an iPhone app, founder Adarsh Dilip (the same guy behind Chart.ly) tells me. Dilip also says that the site will move beyond Twitter and implement Facebook Connect as well.

Much like StockTwits (which bought Chart.ly), JustBought.it is attempting to establish community around something people are already doing on Twitter – sharing their shopping experience. Although the site certainly faces the issue of needing lots of users to become exciting, it seems they have a solid strategy in place to get there.

What Koobface does once you follow the link is a bit trickier than some other scams. It first shows you what appears to be a YouTube video (on a page and URL that resembles YouTube). And, like occasionally the case with YouTube videos, you’re then asked to upgrade your Flash player.

However, what it does from there is install .EXE files. If you run them, you become infected with the virus, and when you login to Twitter, the virus can automatically start tweeting out the malicious link. The tweets spreading the link may look like this, with the text “my home video,” so be sure to avoid following them:

Twitter is already on top of this issue, and has been temporarily suspending accounts that are spreading the link. However, we’re still seeing the “my home video” text showing up in Twitter search, so it appears to be an ongoing issue.

If your account has been suspended because of this, you should be receiving an email from Twitter. Meanwhile, if you think you might be infected, Trend Micro already has a fix.