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Eric Mack has been showing clients how to apply Information, Communication, and Action technologies to knowledge work for more than 25 years. In 1982, He founded ICA, to provide information technology consulting and training. Since then, ICA has provided expert consulting services to more than 350 corporate and government clients around the world, most notably in the areas of collaboration, personal productivity and knowledge management.

Here is his story of how eProductivity™ for IBM Lotus Notes came to be...

For decades, Lotus Notes has been promoted as a solution for team productivity and collaboration. While I believe this is true, what is often overlooked is that while people may collaborate about a project and decide what needs to be done, the real work gets done at the individual level - knowledge work is distinctly personal. People need a way to track their projects and actions along with anything that they have attention on, and they need to be able to do this effortlessly within their workflow – for Notes users, that means full integration with Notes mail, calendar, tasks, and other Notes applications. I believe we have created such an application…eProductivity™ for IBM Lotus Notes.

The origins of the ICA eProductivity methodologies and eProductivity for IBM Lotus Notes began in the mid 1980's when our consulting firm, ICA, received a contract to develop an Action Tracking system for the U.S. Navy. For its day, the system was really quite powerful as it allowed groups of people to track their actions using a single shared computer and printed task slips.

Prior to this, we were contracted by Edwards Air Force Base, to assist them in developing a system to track all stages of action through completion for communications systems support at the Air Force Flight Test Center.

Personally, this was really my first experience breaking my personal activities down into the very next action. I was accustomed to doing this with the programs that I designed but I had not made the connection between the power of this method in computer programming and the productivity enhancing value of doing this with day to day activities. It would be many years later before I internalized this concept while at a MAP™ Seminar. (MAP stood for Managing Action and Projects and was the forerunner to the Getting Things Done® GTD® Methodology, developed by best-selling author and productivity consultant, David Allen.)

About the same time, I designed a product to help manage the “flood” of email that some users were starting to get. (Back then, a “flood” meant more than 25 e-mail a day!) The product was called MailScout and we had versions for cc:Mail and Lotus Notes. We also had a wireless messaging application to allow users to send & receive email on their two-way pagers. (That was the future of SMS) We sold close to a half a million licenses of MailScout in the 1990s, making it a very successful product for email management.

Over the years that followed, I implemented (and scrapped) several different Lotus Notes based Action Management systems. As I reworked and pared down these systems, they became easier to use and I became more productive in turn. I integrated many of the concepts from the MAP seminars into these early template designs.

I first designed eProductivity™ in the late 1990’s and we provided it as a tool to our ICA consulting clients. We eventually realized that this application had the proven potential to help organizations become more productive in their use of Lotus Notes. It also became apparent that eProductivity could increase the perception of Lotus Notes as a tool for personal as well as team productivity within organizations.

In 2006, after several years of success using eProductivity with clients (and after countless requests from non-clients), we made the commitment to develop a commercial version of eProductivity. We started over and rewrote the entire application from scratch; a year of this was spent on pilots and usability testing alone! That may seem like a long time, but I wanted to earn the endorsement of David Allen, who had been one of our long-time clients. When we finished, I asked David to fully vet eProductivity in the hopes that he would use it personally and recommend it to his clients.

After more than a year of internal vetting by David and the staff at The David Allen Company, eProductivity is now the solution that David Allen and his consultants use and recommend to their clients that use IBM Lotus Notes:

I use eProductivity and Lotus Notes to manage all of my projects and actions. It's indispensable to the way I get things done. eProductivity is the ultimate personal productivity implementation tool for Lotus Notes.
- David Allen, author of Getting Things Done (Listen | Read)

An endorsement like that is wonderful recognition of the capability of eProductivity to transform the way people work. We were also honored to receive the coveted GTD Enabled designation, which indicates that we have successfully and faithfully implemented the GTD Methodology in our software. Out of the many GTD software applications available, ours is the first (and only one) to receive this designation.

A proven product that builds on the power and capabilities of IBM Lotus Notes, eProductivity can help you reclaim wasted time each day and give you control and perspective over your projects and actions.

- Eric Mack

PS. Don’t take my word for it. I invite you to try eProductivity for yourself. Download a stand-alone evaluation here (no installation required, just download, open and go) and when you have completed the evaluation you will receive a link to download the full product