Suggestion: I'd like a "place an order for later" option.
Scenario 1: My wife's birthday is in October. She mentions something in conversation and it sparks a gift idea in my head. It's something I'm sure she won't buy for herself and something she won't get from someone else for her birthday. I go to Amazon.com and "place an order for later" specifying when I want it delivered. I give you my credit card number. A month before and two weeks before the ship date you send me reminder emails. On the calculated ship date, you charge my card and out the door the order goes. I'm the amazing husband who knew of the perfect gift and Amazon is my wing-man, Amazon's got my back, the true hero.
Scenario 2: Household or grocery items I know I'm going to need to re-stock on a regular basis (windshield wiper blades, vacuum cleaner filter - both of these are yearly replacements) can be ordered in advance so that I don't have to think about it. Amazon helps me get things done. Amazon lets me get on with life.
Upside for Amazon, you can project some future earnings, especially if people start Christmas shopping in August, which we would certainly do. Or, you only allow the option for people who have gift certificate balances in their account which means you recognize the revenue much sooner when people put a balance on their accounts.
6 comments:
Scenario 1 is just another example of wanting to substitute technology in place of a mind (or at least a memory). Scenario 2, however, is a useful tool and a seemingly good idea.
Kevin -
That's the whole point of "GTD" - your mind is not a great place for storing/remembering. Your mind is a great place for thinking/doing.
Technology (www.rememberthemilk.com is a great example) helps you clear your mind of the mundane so that you can focus on being creative and thinking new things.
James
And Google Reader. And Jott.com. And Grand Central. And Google Notebook. And if used efficiently, Gmail.
And possibly IWantSandy, though it/she seems to serve a need that no longer exists.
If this were Gene Roddenberry's vision of a perfect future where mankind was free to pursue whatever interests mankind desired, maybe you'd be on the right track. But since imperfection seems to be the name of the game here on Earth, memory retention is at least as important a skill to develop as using the mind to generate ideas.
Who is the better scientist, the one who has to look everything up in journals or the one who has committed knowledge to memory? Who is more likable, the person who insists upon taking your picture with his cell phone because he can't be bothered to commit your name and likeness to memory or the person who is able to recall who you are without the aid of his Blackberry?
I have several hundred videotapes in my collection. In 1997 I created a database on my computer, archiving every tape. What is funny is that to this day I can recall what is on every tape I recorded prior to the creation of the electronic archive, and nothing after it... guess which tapes I watch more often?
I love the fact there are online reference guides to famous literary works, but I place a much higher value on a person who can recall passages, authors, etc. There are websites that make the Bible easier to search than a Sears catalog, but I respect a person who can quote the Bible from memory.
The reason people aren't using their minds for "thinking/doing" is not because their minds are cluttered with memories of things they don't need. If anything memorizing things keeps the synapses firing until it is time to sit down and think about stuff. People aren't using their minds to think for any other number of reasons (laziness, stupidity, apathy... to name a few).
Having an active memory is better than a passive one, if for no other reason than telling a woman you remembered to buy her something on her birthday sounds a heck of a lot better than telling a woman a website logged her birthday into its database and ordered a pre-selected gift and shipped it out at a pre-determined date.
I think you make an excellent point.
However, I used to have a Blackberry. When Lori would mention something off-hand, I would quickly pull out the Blackberry, email myself a quick note.
Then, later, when buying her a present, I had a stack of these emails with specific information that would have otherwise been lost.
And she'd love the gift, I'd mention that she had mentioned something while walking through a store 6 months ago. And the fact that I keyed in on this offhand remark actually carried a lot of positive weight.
This just takes it to the next level and allows me to complete the entire transaction and be done with it.
I don't disagree with your thoughts, but I do suggest you read "Getting Things Done" because I think there's a lot of merit in it as well.
One example, if you have a box in the garage that you know you need to clean out, every time you go in the garage, there's a part of you that says "Hey, are we going to clean that box now?" And when you don't, it gets upset. And eventually you don't want to go to the garage. But when you put that on a "Someday" To Do list, and then regularly review the list, you get to that item and say "Nope, not this week," then the next time you go to the garage, your brain says "ha, ha, box! Not this week."
And I'm not explaining it as well as the book does.
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