About Me

Matthew Bate – Who he? What do?

Apologies to Little Britain

I’m a British national, resident on the south coast of England and I teach people how to do more, do better and to do it with less stress. As a product designer, technologist and personal productivity expert I train and coach in these skills on a voluntary and commercial basis.

Away from work I live with my partner, Jo Connelly, who runs SGFC Training and three cats who don’t. I like classic cars, classical music and am currently trying to find a forward-looking hobby… I suppose that when work looks to the future, respite can be found in the past.

I have been a vegan for around eight years, that counts as forward-looking.

When I left school I found myself in the construction industry but following a catastrophic collapse in the UK housing market in the early nineties and a critical illness I found myself working for the UK arm of French technology company SERPE-IESM. While with S-I, I was involved with the marketing of marine and aviation electronics and the design and installation of ship-board computer systems.

After this came a disastrous spell as a playwright which combined with my previous technology experience proved the perfect springboard into a career in IT. I now had both technical ability and a sense of humour.

The passage of time has increased my technical ability and decreased my sense of humour.

The last five years have been spent inventing, designing, building, re-building and hopefully launching (please, God…) the revolutionary data system, SmartBlobz. SmartBlobz is an object-based distributed data system, the story of which is so thrilling it could easily end-up as a theatrical release. Don’t for a moment think I’m kidding. I will be posting many instalments in the story on this site as time passes. I’m still constantly involved with SmartBlobz but I’ve also decided to share the knowledge I have gained in my career. The result is m2b8.

m2b8 is an abbreviation of my name that dates from the days when log-ins were limited to four characters. Yes, I am that old, nearly red sports car time.

The purpose of the site is to teach anyone who is interested everything I know and everything I learn.

What I know is this:

I’ve been practising a productivity system called GTD – Getting Things Done – in part, whole and then extended form for years. I’ve no idea when I first started. I only bought the book early in 2006 having read everything on the web about it and having already been practising the principles for a long time.

I should have read the book earlier, when I finally decided to buy it I accidentally bought myself a new wallet instead. This confirmed that I had made the correct decision and I have not looked back since. Luckily, the wallet has served me well.

I also have a long history of exploration and experimentation in systems thinking, NLP and innovation management so I am able to train and teach people how to improve the all of the processes happening around them.

At present I work with my partner’s companySGFC Training who operate a wide variety of training courses and am happy to be booked through them.

As I have said, I’ve decided to open what I’ve learned to anyone who is interested and the form this will take is that I’m going to document a series of the training courses I run and make them available freely under a Creative Commons license in the form of audio, video and PDF books. You will see the legal details at the foot of the page

This begins with a simple productivity course and will extend through project and innovation management. I am currently working on an accelerated learning course which I will make available when it is ready. Not all of my work will be available here, I am writing a book at present which will be published in the normal manner, but everything I have to teach will go through m2b8.

Additionally, I am available to coach anyone who cares to turn-up at any Starbucks in which I happen to be. I will make no charge for this but it is limited to Starbucks so if you see me in Coffee Republic I’m likely to tell you to sod off – nicely.

Having said that there is no charge for my services in this circumstance I would like to mention that I am running an Amazon Wish List and a couple of other ways in which you can show your appreciation. If what I have done has helped you then I’m happy to accept a token of your generosity. If you take what I’ve given, make yourself a fortune and fail to reward me adequately then I will bloody haunt you.

So, on with the show. I hope you enjoy m2b8.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Matthew Bate asserts his right to be known as the creator of these works except where explicit citation or attribution has been made.

Thank you.