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After lots of hard work by the team [1], I'm tickled pink to announce - Ta Da! - Edison version 1.0, The Think, Try, Learn (TTL) Experimenter's Workbook. It's a social networking tool for tracking all the new things you're trying in your life. What do we mean by experiment? Anything you've never done before, that you're a little nervous about, or that you have no guidebook for. (See You Know You're Experimenting When... for more.)
Why should you try this? I've found that thinking of things this way has been a major help in being courageous, enjoying life, and having more fun. When you get into it, I'm sure you'll discover dozens of current experiments you're running in your life (whether you know it or now), including ways in which you're working to improve yourself - losing weight, eating better, or getting more productive (how about some of your GTD projects, or your productivity practice itself?) Check out How Do You Treat Life As An Experiment? for more.
How does it work? It's simple: You create a new experiment for each new thing you're trying [2], make observations while you're doing it, get helpful comments from other Edison users [3], then mark it completed when you're done. You can also participate in the community by making comments on others' experiments, such as giving encouragement or sharing your experiences on things you've tried and learned from.
To get started, simply click Join, type your name, email, and password, then start entering your experiments. (It's the holidays, so how about watching what you eat or keeping a positive attitude?) Or you can look around at some of the experiments our early adopters are running by browsing the main page or scanning the tag cloud. For ideas, check out the range of experiments in Stories From Edison: Lucid Dreaming, Dropping Twitter, Sleep, And Personal Medical Experiments.
It's early days yet, and we'd love to hear your feedback. Use the TTL form, or email me directly. And stay tuned for a little contest with prizes for master Edison-ites, such as people with most new experiments, the most comments or observations, the most positive contributor, and the most surprising, fascinating, or the strange ones :-)
Happy experimenting!
References
- [1] A huge thanks to the Think, Try, Learn team: Liza Cunningham (TTL partner, software entrepreneur, and web designer), Andy O'Shea (programmer extraordinaire and Ruby on Rails developer), and Graham Westerlund (web front-end guru, and HTML and CSS wizard).
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[2] The system gets you thinking when you make an experiment by asking some questions from the TTL perspective:
- What will you do?
- How will you test your idea and measure success?
- How will you know you are done?
- How will you enjoy the journey?
- [3] If you've marked it as public, that is.
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