It’s key to me. I have a real estate portfolio, 3 kids and a wife.  I am the president of a 300 employee company, and have a series of other investment/business interests – all working in harmony. My value add? I bring organization and structure to everything.

Not because I have a photographic memory..

In fact my business partner at CoffeeTable is a few decades my senior and often helps get me back on track after having a senior moment.

The reason I am so efficient and successful at managing multiple spinning plates is a very tight organizational system.

I’ve always operated off of lists. Not only my own lists, but I’ve required lists from anyone who works for me. This way we all have some semblance of control.

My world changed with Robert Strazzarino introduced me to the GTD platform. GTD was a great old-school system of organizing your life using 43 folders. Supplement it with ToodleDo, and I now had an electronic system and methodology to push people, as well as adopting it myself.

My life improved. The lives of the people I work with improved. It was a huge iterative step, but not a solution, especially when you collaborate with others.

Go with the Flow

So, the problem is ToodleDo as a tool wasn’t good for collaboration, so enter Flow.

Flow did a great job of adding out-of-app collaboration. Flow has some limitations around UI/UX which drive me crazy, but overall, it has been an improvement. I think I’m going to formally move once they get reoccurring tasks…

So on to the next problem. Multiple systems. In fact GTD is a solution to email overload. More of my time is spent organizing, coordinating, assigning emails to tasks in Flow, or adding commentary…..

I still live in email and then work in Flow.

Attention: Google

Since I’m too busy to create the change I want to see in the world, (thanks Ghandi!) I’m asking someone to do the grunt work for me, and ideally unlock massive value. What I’m saying is, we need to reinvent email and add a layer of task management on it to take a step forward, improving productivity in the world.

Enter Google. Google might have boffed it with Wave (which I still can’t explain,) but really evolved email through Gmail. In fact, incredibly so. All my exploits use Google Apps, and it has now became my ecosystem for communication, augmented by Flow, GTD, and Toodledo.

So what should someone do? Someone (ahem, Google) should create email+. Take the existing POP3/IMAP protocol and add an additional layer.

Too much time is spent working on the next hot web start-up, that it seems like the framework could use a bit of innovation. Wikipedia tells me that some variation of POP3 was abandoned in 2003, codenamed POP4, and the initial concept was to include basic folder management and some other fancy tricks. So, I’m letting this one off into the wild. Take Flow – and turn it into an email client. Make it so it’s POP3/IMAP backwards compatible. FTW.

While I think the client and design could be properly executed by a capable entrepreneur, I think the actual pushed (forced?) adoption could only be done by a force as powerful as Google.

Now someone smart go re-invent email to make it more efficient.

P.S. Don’t use any of those guys who created that Wave beast…