Online Identity
I was listening to a pod-cast which was talking about marketing your pod-casts, and using your online identity as a brand.
I suppose that I could market my pod-cast, but it is not really about anything in particular, and will likely remain like that. Well I suppose it is about something in particular, it is about whatever happens to be of interest to me at the time of writing, but I have quite varied interests, so that hardly helps.
There is also the whole issue of an online identity. At the moment, I do not pass on details of this blog to people I know, and although I would be contactable via this blog, it is a standalone identity. I do not intentionally lie or mislead in my blog postings, but then again, I do not really write anything that would make it tremendously easy to identify who I am. Despite that, this is hardly the most impenetrable of disguises, and I could be identified from this blog, with relative ease.
My point being that one of the benefits of the internet is that one can establish separate identities, that meet your various desires and needs. For most people the appeal is that these are separate, the person one chats to about software glitches is not necessarily looking at photos of your family holiday, and vice versa. As in normal society, you choose how much to reveal to others, you focus on what is of mutual interest, but bring in extraneous material at your discretion.
However with searching now so easy, it is far easier for the curious to pull together these disparate identities. For people in the public arena this is probably not new, but for your average person, it is a disconcerting thought, and your average person is far less equipped to cope with any unexpected consequences.
At Work
My role at work continues to evolve. Some time ago, I was the junior member of a small team, now I am the team. Initially it was my role to promote a piece of work, but with a change in administration, my role is now more one of spinning plates, and potentially taking on more plates. Obviously I now have vastly more work to do, but the more important point is that I am expected to do that work in a different style. Because I am now leading the team, albeit one consisting solely of me, I am judged on the big ticket items, rather than the more mundane. The last year has been so intense, and I have such a long commute, that I personally feel that increasing my working hours is not really an option that is sustainable. So, in the jargon, it is a case of working smarter rather than harder.
In practice, this has meant that I am now picking up a lot of engagements, either speaking at, or simply attending meetings, that my boss would have handled before. I am also having to initiate meetings to progress what I want to do. Accordingly when I am in the office, I need to work through incoming work much more effectively. I have adopted a slight variation of the GTD principles,
if it can be done in a few minutes, simply do it then
if it relates to a category of work, simply put it in a folder with other similar work, so that I can devote a half day to it all sometime
if it needs a bit more work, and has a deadline - set up a paper folder with the deadline and quick description on the front
if it needs a bit more work, and has no deadline - simply flag the email
also for when I am at my desk, I tend to work away from the desk whenever I can, for example, if it is reading, I go through to our canteen, if it is something that I don't want interrupted on, I go down to a hotdesking area. That way I am reasonably available, people can leave a message, that I will get back to, but my availability is not slowing me down.
There is a need to be able to work effectively away from my desk, so I have set up couple of pencil cases with everything that I need, from indigestion tablets, to marker pens, and my favorite little film tags, for highlighting relevant material. I suppose that I could be better organised about carrying about work that I could do, but I have generally found that I will have some task that it usefully completed over a cup of coffee somewhere, like writing an agenda, or organising my thoughts on something.
I suppose that in essence, this is a top down approach, consider the most important priorities, first, and fit the rest in round them,
generally, in the past I have taken a bottom up approach, considering all the things that need done, and then trying to fit them in.
Of course the former approach is fine for a team leader, with some discretion, but it is not so applicable for a team member when your tasks are very fixed, and you have less discretion.
Anyway, interesting to see how I am coping with the current challenges, and changing how I work. My gut feeling is that I am probably pretty good at working at this level, but only if the work is of a manageable intensity. I can see that it would be incredibly easy to burn out working like this.
At Home
I am writing this on a Sunday morning, yesterday was wet and dreich. I suppose that I should have done a lot of useful stuff, but to be honest, we were mainly faffing about. Headed up to the new local garden centre, which also sells food, and pretty much everything else. My wife bought some food, I bought some slug pellets, I am finally giving in with having an organic cold frame. I have tried everything, a sandy base, copper tape round my pots, beer traps. This place is not a cold frame, it is an eat all you want slug conservatory! The little black pieces of snot, are dining on tender shots of basil and camomile, and are presumably looking forward to dining on wormwood and feverfew once they sprout. Nothing is growing in the place, I water it faithfully, the slugs and snails eat their fill, leaving it stripped bare!
I also bought a copy of Getting Things Done to send to a friend.
My girls, bought a couple of books for me - Father's Day - and got their faces painted, and one of them even got a goody bag for appearing on the radio show that they were doing when we were there. Easy enough to see who got the best end of this deal.
Also watched a few vodcasts, is that a word, the new Steve Jobs address and the interview along with Bill Gates. One does wonder where they got the idea for PC Guy and Mac Guy, presumably they wanted to cast Bill Gates in the PC guy role, but he was otherwise engaged.
Interesting and thought provoking stuff, technology is at quite an interesting stage at the moment, and I think that we just have to bite the bullet and reckon on buying a new computer every year. Interesting to see that only a small minority (10%) now use an MAC operating system other than 10.4 or 10.3.
Certainly my advice has been that the computers now are so good, so well specified, have so much additional functionality, you would be a fool not to buy one.
Of course running the IT for a family of four is bound to be expensive. Over the past year and a bit, I have
got a new computer, bought, set up, and working with peripherals
moved from dial up internet, to broadband, much wailing and swearing, and a lot of time doing that sort of English as a foreign language teaching, that you do whenever you phone technical support somewhere
got my wife and myself, both using our own iPods
got the whole family set up with their own iTunes and email accounts, and able to share their downloads when they want to
sorted out an external hard drive and an effective back up methodology.
I am now looking to buy a second computer, either a laptop pre October with extra Ram, and upgrade to Leopard, or maybe wait until October and get something with Leopard.
Amongst the many interesting ideas on the vodcasts (does anyone actually call them that, and indeed what about those phonogram recordings, that were all the rage) is the emphasis on post-pc devices, which includes iPods, iPhones, personal organisers, and I suppose anything else that you can find a use for, extending out to a set top box with a hard drive, like tivo, a handheld gaming device, digital image photo frames, and all sorts of other things that I have not really registered. Apple is pretty good at pushing out the boundaries of what a computer is, look at the all in one computer and display of the current iMac, the unloved Newton, the iPod, the Mac Mini, or even the early luggable portable macintoshes! Clearly the model of desktop or laptop, and nothing much else, is unlikely to continue.
Another interesting thing was that Steve Jobs did not really want to predict where computing would be in a few years, which is quite a sensible position for a clever person. There are simply too many unknowns and variables, for it to be constructive to speculate. We can think of possible directions, and good luck to those who want to make money out of them, but it would be insane to think you know what will come. Sometimes it is useful to accept uncertainty, and develop strategies to deal with it effectively. Simply knowing that things are uncertain, is not the same as relinquishing any control, you simply plan and control in a different sort of way.
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