Well that may be going too far, but he is certainly brilliant. Last April I wrote about how he and I were working an idea for a business. It has been a long haul from the early very simple prototype, but I am now using an application for organising your digital stuff, which is one aspect of the business, and it is a sheer delight.
Over the years I have used a number of organisation tools, but none of them fitted the way I worked. Some were better than others, but all of them had implicit notion of how I ought to work and manage my life.
The joy of what Ben has created is that for the first time I can build things that fit the way I work. So, for example, I have one thing I call “Getting stuff done”, where I can dump all things I need to back-up what I might be doing in a day – appointments, journey details, notes, contacts, things I ought to do, stray thoughts, any related documents and so on. I can add, remove or move stuff at any time and everything is easily accessible in one place.
I’ve built another, which is just about a course I will be running next term and, again I’ve got everything in one place and will be able to add student work and any administrative stuff as I go along.
The one big problem I can see is that the very flexibility of the application makes it hard to describe in a nice, simple soundbite way. It is a tool that allows people to invent different ways of organising, managing, recording, searching their digital stuff and the way it relates to the way they live and work. So it may be a bit difficult to communicate what it is. A classic problem of real innovation. We shall see. Plenty of time until we get to that point.