Image by Will Lion on Flickr via Creative Commons
I work in IT. I spend a lot of my time on the Internet. I love gadgets. I love new technology. The question is, does all this technology help us or is it really holding us back? I personally spend a lot of time messing about with technology and not really achieving anything. Whilst this is fine, as essentially it is one of my many hobbies, I do often have to take a step back and wonder if what I am doing is a productive use of my time. When I say a productive use of my time I mean it what I am doing putting my precious time to the best use to reach my ultimate goals (the end game)?
Whilst obviously it is essential to spend time on your interests (what’s the point of living if you aren’t doing what you want to do), we must review to make sure that we aren’t doing things just for the sake of doing them, and more to the point not kidding ourselves that messing around with our ‘systems’ ‘workflows’ and ‘lists’ is actually productive use of time.
I have found that the more technology and systems available to me, the more information overload I have. I can’t get enough information sometimes and I often find that I don’t want to discard a piece of information until I have got the most out of it. This could be reading it, committing it to memory, filing it for possible later use or sharing it with other people who might find the information useful.
For example, at the moment I am spending quite a lot of time redeveloping my system for holding, organising, using and storing the mountain of information I come across on any given day. I’d say that over 90% of this information comes from being connected. It could be a new blog, a search that I have done on a particular topic and found 10 links I want to follow up on or something that a fellow twitterer has suggested. Whilst systems (such as GTD) are great for organising and storing information, without a execution plan (the actual doing rather than just collecting) your pile (albeit digital) of information to digest just continues to grow. 18 months ago I don’t thing that I had this mountain of information to deal with. I wasn’t clued up on social media, blogs and productivity. However, I probably did have a similar amount of information to deal with I perhaps just didn’t realise that I did or wasn’t so worried about it as I wasn’t clued up on ‘being productive’.
Tim Ferriss suggests going on a low information diet. This is a brilliant Idea and I have applied that principle(at least in part) by cutting down my RSS feeds, and only going on the internet to look for information when I need it. The problem I have is that I am interested in a lot of things and Google and the answer to my endless questions is only a click away.
I do enjoy learning something new every day and being knowledgeable on a given topic, but sometimes I need to take a step back, not gather any new information and process the information I have. My new system that I am working on serves two main purposes therefore:
- Efficient capture, storage and relevance of information.
- Efficient execution of action with the information relevant to my goals and progression.
So my system is a work in progress. I don’t think I’ll ever stop tweaking it, but for now it’s back to my bookmarklets (my latest favourite geek toy) and organising the wealth of information I have whilst being ruthless with the deletes and taking action against those things that are going to make a difference.
Image on DBarefoot on Flickr via Creative Commons
Seems like not a day goes by without a new social media application launching. I’m a relatively late adopter of social media, and also a reluctant adopter. Whilst I like to try out the applications and latest technology, I’m quite concious of the amount of time social media can take up and on some days I’m concerned about the “social media footprint” that I could leave.
Anyway, I’m reviewing my social media options and at the moment I use the following:
- Twitter (for Web 2.0 geekery and blog promotion)
- Delicious (personal bookmarking at the moment)
- Facebook (for school and close social circle friends)
- Last.fm (for music discovery)
- Tumblr (for it’s simplicity for posting links)
- Stubleupon (new to me for blog promotion)
- Wordpress (as my blogging platform)
- Flickr (for sharing and backing-up photos)
So in designing my personal blog for the reasons mentioned before, I am analysing what social media to use and why. I want to use what I will get the most benfit out of, but without having a massive overhead on my time or social media footprint (you’ve only got to look at the image above to see how massive the list of social media is – that’s Schoble’s list by the way). So I’ve set up my “Friend Me” section and will review it over time.
Image by retro traveler on Flickr via Creative Commons
I’ll blog about anything that interests me really. The initial list I have drawn up of likely categories are:
Reviews
I think I’ll write quite a lot of reviews but only of things that I am genuinely interested in (otherwise I want be motivated to do the writing anyway), and I am only likely to recommend things that I would put my own name on. Reviews are likely to be of books, music, gigs, restaurants, products and anything else that can be reviewed I suppose.
Fitness
I am in to my fitness and absorb information about health and fitness like a sponge. Certainly things that I am trying or I am interested in exploring more I will look to blog about.
Guitar
I love music and I love to play the guitar. I have some things to say about guitar (mainly tips for learning). I love to encourage people to take up the guitar.
Technology, Web and Social Media
Deep down I am a major geek. I am a big gadget fan and a missive information junkie. I love trying out new software and I am rapidly learning about social media. Whilst at work all this kind of stuff saps a lot of my time, but at least I’m getting paid for it 
.
Blogging
Obviously I am learning a lot about blogging at the moment. I am very interest in this, I think that it is my biggest ‘project’ at the moment. I am learning more and more each day and have lots of information to share in this area.
Travel
I love to travel. I would travel as a job if I could (and I do aim to have a go at this at some point in the future). I would like to indulge my travel writer aspirations here.
Photography
I do enjoy photography and I particular like finding amazing images for my blog posts. Everyone seems to be an amateur photography nowadays, but this is great as it means there is an enormous amount of superb images around.
Learning
I love to learn and do it subconcioulsy a lot of the time. Whatever I am learning about at a given time I’m sure I’ll blog about.
Productivity
Whether it is productive or not I am defintely a major productivity hobbyist. I enjoy writing posts about productivity and have done a number of successful ones on my main blog. I do however want to focus these on my main blog to my niche, so here can be an outlet for other thoughts.
Lifestyle Design
My main blog is about this and I am currently defining my niche there (hence in part for starting this blog). I would like to post more about Lifestyle design, as essentially it is what I am trying to do!
Random Thoughts
I’ll keep my short ramdom thoughts to my Tumblr-log, but I do have opinions and thoughts on current affairs and a wide variety of topics. I think it will be great to explore these in more depth.
I’m sure that the above doesn’t capture all that I am interested in or will post about. I just wanted to give a flavour of what to expect going forward.
Image by Gonzalo Barrientos on Flickr via Creative Commons
I’ve been blogging through my other sites for a while now and I think that the concepts are taking off. However, I have to admit that the most important part of blogging, content creation, is where I struggle most. I don’t have a problem coming up with ideas for posts, tweaking the designs, finding quotes, pictures or inspirational links but I do struggle with the task of churning out quality content. I think this issue is in part due to the fact that I have so many interests and topics that I want to write about that on any given day what I want to write about is different. I have identified the fact that I need to narrow down and focus my main blog to monteize and maximise it’s potential. However, this will leave a lot of topics that I am interested in not addressed. I think that the more content I create, the better I will get at creating it and the more positive experience I will be able to give on my main blog. That is why I have created this site. It will be a personal site where I can write about anything I want. It is mainly for my own purposes. If one day I want to write about a book I’ve just read that is fine, another day I might want to write about a great new Web 2.0 site or a great restaurant I’ve been to. I’ll just write about what I want, when I want. Obviously I can do this on my main site, but as I want to build a good quality resource on my niche and grow my readership I really need to focus my niche.
So that’s it. Look how easily I’ve created content for this site already. I think it’s going to be a great way at becoming a better writer. For things that aren’t really ‘quality content’ type posts I’ll use a Tumblr account as my outlet for that.
Here goes…
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