I use my email for everything. It is by far where I spend the most time, and I have developed many systems to ensure that my Inbox is almost always near zero. Lately I have been using a cool product called IFTTT.com (If This Then That) to flag and capture things that I want to read for later.

I am a queue person. I found myself having more and more queues scattered around the web and with two simple tasks through IFTTT, I am able to consolidate the links into my inbox.

Task 1: Anything I “star” in Google Reader is sent to my inbox

Task 2: Anything I favorite in Twitter is sent to my inbox

I use to have a serious problem staring tons of things in Google Reader and never working through the queue to read/share them all. With them now in my inbox, the inboxzero pressure is there to also move those things through.

With Twitter, I found myself always missing out on great links and content shared by my friends. Now by marking the tweet as a favorite, not only does it put it into my inbox to read later, but it also saves the tweet in my Gmail account (which is essentially my exocortex) so I can retrieve and easily share the content later… This is also true of the Google Reader items… 

If you are interested in hacking your personal productivity I highly suggest IFTTT. In many ways it is fulfilling the promise of something like Yahoo Pipes, only a thousand times easier. :) 

Last week was the annual Healthways Well-Being Summit out in Boulder, Colorado. I was asked to present on the work we are doing at MeYou Health. You can see that presentation in this video. My talk starts at the 2:00 minute mark!

As I mentioned in the talk… there are well-being activities scattered throughout the days of the conference. I signed up for an “advanced” mountain bike ride that took us all over the east and north of the city with 1,800ft of climbing. All of this happening already 5,000 ft above sea level. It took every ounce of will power to get over some of those hills. It reminded me that I can do hard things.

The key points of my talk were summed up in a slide called “10 super magical innovations”:

• Make your programs “open social” meaning that regardless of who sponsors your wellness (your employer, your health plan) make it so that the participants can bring family, friends, whoever they need.
• Shift the thinking from adherence (where we think of the intervention like hand cuffs) to engagement (where people choose to interact… more like a cupcake!)
• Ask people to do realistic, convenient, genuine things.
• Give immediate positive feedback early and often.
• Focus on a journey, acknowledge the endless nature of well-being improvement and pull back from requiring goal setting. What about goal discovery?
• Optimize for social interactions. Create a context in which lots of them are deliberately created.
• Respect the attention that someone gives you in every way possible.
• Provide clear choices instead of tons of options. Design with opinion.
• Remind, remind, remind, and remind again. People forget. Do not let them.
• Be easier to keep using than to stop using. Create attention profit, not attention deficits. 

You can also view a copy of my slides at prezi.com.

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I don’t really mean for this blog to all be all about speaking engagements… it seems like it is a lot of that lately. That is because it is spring… and that is always what seems to happen this time of year. So I am off the Healthways Well-Being Summit in Boulder, Colorado.

Last time I raced armadillos (and came in second!)… what crazy adventures will take place this year? 

My talk is going to be a new take on the one that I gave for the HXD Conference, but this time more focused around the specific design innovations for health products that MeYou Health is pursuing with our emphasis on creating interactions. At the very core, Daily Challenge gets people to do things and say things. So that is what I will be covering with some fancy new network maps from my recent presentation at Activate Networks.

My speaking slot is 8:37am - 8:55am MST on May 18th. If you want to watch LIVE you can sign up to do so here: 

http://www.healthways.com/wbs2012/

(scroll down below the video player to “Register Now”)