Eric Mack On-Line

Many years ago, I  took a number of useful productivity concepts and wrapped them in a Lotus Notes solution to make it easier for me to get things done using Lotus Notes. I made this collection part of my "eProductivity" toolkit and I have continued to enhance it over the years.

If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know that for the past 15 years my friend and client, David Allen, has had a profound influence on my work personally and professionally. (Thank you, David!) I've incorporated some of the productivity best-practices that I learned from David and his book, Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity into my eProductivity template as well.

My personal eProductivity system has served me well and has evolved over the years based on daily use, testing, and feedback from some of my eProductivity consulting clients who use the template as part of their own GTD implementations.

The eProductivity software adventure begins.
A few years ago I decided it was time to take all of these eProductivity enhancements for Lotus Notes and create a public version that I could offer for sale. I was in school working on my organizational management degree at the time and my eProductivity consulting business was doing well, so there was no urgency to get anything to market quickly. (Those of you who have followed this blog for many years may even be aware of some of the false starts and delays I had. I even blogged about launching an eProductivityblog site to document the process of bringing the template to market. But then, life happened and I got busy so that had to be put on hold for a while.)

Working slowly, with the help and encouragement of an amazingly gifted and talented team of friends, advisors and Notes developers, I've managed to whittle down the features from my personal version of eProductivity into a core set that I could be happy with as part of a 1.0 version.

Well, I'm pleased to share that I'm making progress.

BETA 1A begins
Yesterday, I rolled out the BETA 1A of the public version of eProductivity to a core group of testers. Currently, I'm preparing to invite the next round of beta testers - people who signed up for eProductivity news & tips - participate in the BETA 1B cycle in a few weeks.  (If you've written me in the past few weeks, your email is probably sitting in my "beta invites" folder; I will respond shortly with an invitation to Beta 1B.) I plan to keep the beta cycles short, small, and numerous. This way, I can personally work with each beta tester and coach them in eProductivity while watching how they use the template. I believe that all of this will lead to a better solution for the final product.  

Praise be to God
I need to publicly praise God for His provision of the people, funds, and resources to move forward on this project. I certainly cannot take credit for doing this alone. I could fill a blog (and someday I hope to) with stories of the doors of opportunity and provision that have been opened to me as I worked on bringing this vision to reality. I'm thankful to my family, friends, coworkers and clients who have all patiently listened to me talk about and pray about this project for not one but many years. They are my champions and I am grateful to have them on my team.

When will I release eProductivity to the public?
I'm not making any promises about a public launch date yet, which is why I've not yet turned up the new eProductivity web site. With my graduate studies in KM and my upcoming conference commitments it will be little while; however, I plan to launch before the end of the year.

I am actively assembling a team to assist me with the public launch. If you want to stay informed, you can check my blog for occasional posts; you may also want to get on the eProductivity mailing list.  I will use this list to send out announcements and beta invites, etc..

I do plan to continue this discussion on my eProductivityblog site soon but for now, I have so much going on that I'll just keep a lower profile with a conversation here at Eric Mack On-Line.

Thanks for your encouragement and your patience.