March 15th I was attending a concert of the amazing jazz pianist Keith Jarrett at the equally stunning Walt Disney Concert Hall. I went by myself, since my wife was not interested in seeing him again and going solo for this experience felt like the right thing to do. That day I received the book ‘Rework’ by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 signals in the mail, so I had a great companion.

Glued to the book, I intuitively used the ticket stub as my bookmark and as Mr. Jarrett started playing, I thought of the emotional connection that bookmarks have with the time, the space, the moment in ones life when a specific book was being read. But once the book is put to sleep on the book shelf, that memory is buried, indefinitely. Quite different to a piece of music which can reach your ears unsuspectedly at a gas station, a bar, a restaurant, the car radio, yet it has the same power of almost instantly catapulting you back to a particular scene of your life. The book on the other hand is simply ‘filed away’. I thought it would be great to create a simple web site for anyone to upload their otherwise ‘bookshelved’ bookmarks. Great to have them archived, fun to share and even more fun to peruse other people’s books with their unique or fun bookmarks. Who knows, if a good number of people start using it, we might want to add social components to the site in the future.

The book I was reading, ‘Rework’, has a chapter in it that talks about not trying to produce a finished product, but rather launch it in a bare bones state. If people like it then change the good product to a perfect one (‘Launch now’, Pg 93). Good is good enough. It also declares death to procrastination (‘Start Making Something’, Pg 38). Funny as I run my company in many of the ways described in the book, and many of the others are big aspirations for this year. So here I was at an inspirational concert, an inspirational setting, reading an inspirational book and I had a quick idea.

The next day I showed a napkin sketch of the site to my team and I asked them if they felt it was a good idea. They agreed. I handed it over to our new developer, Tyler, to develop such site in a couple of days time. Sure it took a month, but he was busy on client work and becoming a dad in between, so we estimate his time on the project was less then 4 business days, combined with my input. Technical specs were communicated via IM on the fly until it felt right, and the design did not involve any of our designers (both approaches are usually against our company process when working with clients). It was quick, easy and most importantly fun and very fulfilling for everyone at Geyrhalter Design.

So if you get a chance, read Rework. If you have 5 minutes, look for your hidden bookmarks and add to the collection. And if you have an idea, just go for it. You don’t want to be like everybody else that says ‘I had that idea years ago, I can’t believe these guys did it before me’, because having an idea or transforming a thought into an action are two very different things.