Spent most of the day working with Darren on the new issue of Alpha Efficiency Magazine, and during all of this incredibly engaging experience I’ve noticed something really amazing. We were applying all the techniques mentioned in the magazine ourselves. The workflow was smooth, and I had a feeling like we were on top of the mind of the each others minds.
Every moment I could imagine his background, his challenges and distractions, as I know he was noticing my lack of focus after 2 and a half hours of intense fixing the titles and editing the articles. As we were going through all the challenges I was coming to conclusion that today we culminated one of the best collaborations so far, and we feel secure enough that issue 2 is twice better than the first one, growing our magazine stronger and giving tremendous value to our loyal readers.
Tools that helped us communicate in creation of Issue 2
Our setup is simple, and I believe that is the reason why we manage to get so much done. There are no features out there that are keeping us away from our most essential tasks. We’ve been using:
- iMessage
- Dropbox
- Evernote
- Byword
- TypeEngine
- and just a little tiny bit of Photoshop
That is all folks. Only the most essential tools created something amazing that we are completely excited about. We are 100% positive that the impact will be immense, but apart from that impact I feel WE got changed in the process. Bringing the collaboration to a whole new level.
How issue 2 came to life
Instead of making Alpha Efficiency yet another productivity, task management magazine, we decided to bring new ideas to the rehashed and consistently repeated topics. A breath of fresh air to the stale productivity community. Talking about communication and linking it’s importance to productivity was a difficult challenge.
Darren was very impatient waiting for me, and he wanted to even write my share of the work, as I felt so insecure talking about the topic, until it finally struck me, reminding me how much I can offer in the field. Followed by a deep revision of my communication habits that lead to the epiphany and explosion of ideas, that helped us finish this issue right at the finish line.
The list of topics we’ve covered
Apart from our usual unique and fresh articles, we brought Augusto Pinaud again, and Mike Vardy from Productivityist. Augusto brought a concept on the cost of “free” communication that still blows my mind and turns out to be one of the favorite articles in the new issue. Mike Vardy shared his tricks of the trade regarding the communication and his deep thoughts on email. Beside that here are some of the headlines we’ve pushed:
- The Essentials: Your Communication Toolkit
- Developing Your Communication Mastery
- Communicate Your Way Into A Successful Career
- Take A Fresh Perspective To Push Past Your Communication Bounderies
- Unplug: It’s Time To Quit Your Social Media Addiction
The words can’t describe the joy we had making this edition. For our Newsletter Subscribers we are preparing the platinum article on communication mastery, with additional sub sections, that will jam pack the value, but for the rest of the magazine you will have to subscribe. And we still keep our free trial open for the holidays, at least for a little while more.
For people that aren’t on iOS
PDF edition of the magazine will be available on the weekend. It will be distributed via Gum-Road and it will cost 6$, or will be available to you the moment you subscribe.
Next steps
Before we even finished the issue 2, I’ve already started heavily brainstorming the issue 3: Organizing. Organizing is the essential concept of CORE approach, and as such is already applied integrated part of my and Darren’s life. It might cover a bit more of apps, but mental and same easily applicable concepts will be there.
Creating issue 2 energized us to approach issue 3 with even more energy, as it inspired us to understand what we are capable of. Hope you enjoy it. Email us your comments and feedback: mail (at) alphaefficiency dot com
