I awoke this morning to this post by Chris Brogan.  He likes to think about 3 words for the New Year that will serve as guidance for his actions and goals.  Not resolutions, but themes.  The concept made me think: What are my 3 words for 2011?

Ship.  The curse of a fertile mind is to create at the expense of execution.  Seth Godin in Linchpin uses ‘ship’ to refer to the final act of execution.  This book influenced me tremendously in 2010.  Scott Belsky in Making Ideas Happen helped me understand that killing some ideas is critical to helping the best ideas flourish and ship.  Killing ideas is a step to simplification.

Simplify.  The idea of the human feed (via David Armano) will continue to become important for me.  I want to work to minimize my inputs and this will involve minimizing distractions and compartmentalizing time on real-time spaces like Twitter.  I am progressively allocating my attention to fewer and fewer, high quality blogs.  Books will evolve as important sources of input.  I will continue to refine who I follow, friend, like and adore.

No.  Demands on my time are becoming greater.  And saying no can be hard because collaboration breeds relationships that can bear fruit.  This is a real temptation that has to be weighed against the urge to get things done and time with my kids.  I’ll be working on no in 2011.

So I’ll simplify and say no so that I can ship in 2011.  We’ll see how it goes.

This is a great exercise.  What are your 3 words?