Grombles

Most of us lead pretty complicated lives. We juggle work, social, play, relaxation and panic as best we can to achieve successes ranging from survival (ideally) to ecstatic amazement at our achievements – and all points between. Rarely does everything neatly fall into place precisely when it’s meant to. My life is no different from most, a chaotic combination of serendipity and attempts at using structures and disciplines to prevent me becoming overwhelmed. I muddle through. When I had a proper job, I had tasks assigned to me, I developed To-Do lists and I adopted the Urgent/Important prioritisation matrix to decide which tasks to tackle first: … which you can read more about here . But there was a catch. My lists and prioritisation techniques were defined by time . When should I do what? And in order to do most of the stuff in my lists, I needed information… and a lot of that information was in handwritten notes, recorded in the most haphazard way possible – sequentially. ...

Have you realised how excessive almost everything has become? Today we are literally overwhelmed by choices and by stuff. What to watch Which app to use Phone to buy Tweets to follow and read News Transport Clothes Food Education Holidays, flights, hotels Careers Sports Friends Choice choice choice Reading, buying, watching, doing, meeting, exploring, finding etc etc. So much more to do, to own, to use, or to waste our money on than any generation has ever experienced - and it's relentlessly getting worse (or better if you relish excess). The global marketplace has only just begun to assail us with all its offerings, and it's limitless. So how do we control this overload of decision making? And it's not just individuals who need to become better organised to manage this deluge. Organisations are called this for a reason too. We assign values to each and every element trying to impinge on our lives. Will it resolve a problem? Will it look good on me? Can...

In the summer of 1986, I met a guy in a pub. At the time I was between jobs having left mainstream marketing at BMW and trying to make a go of Marketing 4 Motorsport (most of my start-up businesses subsequently contained a numeral... 2nd Byte, 10ACT, Calls2Account, R9 etc). The bloke I met, Tom, was a freelance systems engineer (a sort of software expert) who had formed a company called Tome Associates Ltd with another systems expert, Carl Mattocks (now living in New Jersey). Together with an academic duo - Alina Vickery and her husband Professor Brian Vickery, from the University of London, who were much published in the field of Information Science... or librarianship - they formed a company called Tome Associates. The Vickerys had developed some pioneering software with a small team of computer experts at UCL that used an expert system to formulate and then modify boolean search strategies (sets of words combined with AND, OR and NOT that you could use to search textual databases) f...