What you are seeing here is the game being played around you. Clueless people look at random tactics. They jump on the fad diet, the shiny budgeting software, the fanciest productivity tool. Smart people see behind it and realize any individual tactic is just a random tactic — but the SYSTEM of testing different approaches is profoundly important.

• CrossFit -- It’s cheaper than a personal trainer, but not cheap. The payment is automated, so it motivates me to go, and the results have been amazing. Like a personal trainer, the workout regimen is also automated -- just show up and do what they tell you.
• Food Journaling with consequences --
  
  At my CrossFit box, I joined a club where we have to food journal or get punished with hard exercises. We also agreed to eat well, but journaling is the part that makes me stick to it, because we have to show our journal at the meeting. Sometimes I just pre-write the whole day in the morning, and just follow it -- then my eating is automated -- I can’t snack, because I didn’t write it down. Also, the meeting is automated, and the members hold me to my commitments.
• (total self promotion) My iPhone app, Habits -- It helps me remember to do some simple things like call my mom more regularly. I also use TraxItAll to track progress towards my goals. Finally, idonethis.com automatically sends me an email each day to ask me what I got done -- I now have a nice calendar where I can see each day’s accomplishments.
• Putting planning activities on my calendar -- I made it a 2012 goal to spend time on the last weekend of each month to plan out the next. I put these dates in my calendar as if they are meetings, so I don’t schedule anything else.

It happened despite having a clear, front row view of the transition of the industry from mobile voice to mobile computing. The shift in the basis of competition from “connecting people” to “connecting people to data” ended up being a classic disruptive trap. Many will argue that it was the failing of individual managers. Perhaps, but how did they conspire to fail simultaneously?

When you see disruption happening, it’s natural to seek out a cause, a pivotal magical “force” or event that enabled the weak to humble the strong–the proverbial sling that enabled David to defeat Goliath.

With the new touch-based devices of today, we are seeing similar migrations of utilization to new jobs to be done. The simpler creative tasks migrate first and the advanced (or emergent) uses follow. Like with the microcomputer, the first common creative task for tablets happens to be text-based editing.

Briefly, you look at a product as the job it was hired to do, rather than its category, features, benefits, who bought it, etc. Christensen makes the argument that jobs are enduring over time (as products and customer segments change).

Applying this insight gives SDK makers a way to target features, not at just the job the SDK does for their developer customer, and not just at what their application does, but also at the job that the end-user is trying to do.

If we were doing jobs research around the Starbucks offering, it would start with something like: "tell me about the moment when you first considered going to Starbucks. Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you with? What time of day was it?" The interview would move through the decision making process (what else did they consider?), the consuming process (being at Starbucks), and the end with "looking back" and understanding their concept of value (what it did for them) upon reflection.

By conducting a number of these interviews, you can begin to see "jobs" emerge.

If you hire social media, especially to promote your business, you will likely have your own reasons, but ask yourself the question, "What problem am I trying to solve?" This will likely get you to the functional element. To peer into your emotional and social why, also ask "what progress am I trying to make?”