In my implementation book The New Rules of Management I talk about the importance of your environment to implementing projects that matter. I believe that most of us underestimate this most of the time.

And I think for those of us working as thought leaders, our most important environment is electronic – our computers (and tablets, phones etc).

In Making Ideas Happen, author Scott Belsky says "the design of your productivity tools will affect how eager you are to use them. Attraction often breeds commitment."

I agree completely, and love this concept. For a couple of years we stored our procedure manual on Google Docs. It was free, functioned perfectly, but wasn’t beautiful. And the strange thing was I didn’t want to use it. I pretty much stopped creating procedures myself, and referred to our systems much less.

So we went on the hunt for another tool (despite the mild dissent of my team who were telling me that what we had worked fine, and I shouldn’t waste money on something else – love that they fight to stop me wasting money).

Eventually we landed on Confluence, a lovely little cloud-based piece of software created by Australian rock start IT company Atlassian. That was cool too, because I’ve been using their core values in workshops for years.

And I love it … suddenly I’m spending time there, which can only be a good thing. Underestimate the importance of your electronic environment at your peril.

Love to hear your thoughts about your most important environment – you can leave them below.