Hey, Guys,
Just in case anyone happens to stop by, I wanted to apologize for the lack of posts. I’m working through some personal issues and I’m going to be blogging about them, but I want to talk to my family first before I put anything up out of respect for their privacy. I won’t be able to talk to them until March due to scheduling conflicts (lots of traveling), but I’ll try to have posts on other topics up before then. Thanks for your understanding.
Robin
We all have something we’d love to accomplish, whether it’s a home improvement project, a creative endeavor, or a task for work. For some people, getting things done is no big deal, but for the rest of us it can seem like our To Do list is a mountain we can’t possibly climb. In my struggle to reach the summit, I’ve come across some resources that have helped me deal with my procrastination and become more productive.
1. How to Kill Writer’s Block and Become a Master Copywriter in Only 3 Hours a Day
This blog post by Robert Bruce delivers on the promise in its impressive title. I don’t want to give the solution away, but I will say that the advice in this post is not limited to copywriting. It could be applied to any project, large or small, that you’re contemplating but having trouble actually accomplishing.
2. Everything You Know About Productivity is Wrong
Jessica Stillman looks at Alexander Kjerulf’s new rules for productivity for knowledge workers. If your project involves creativity or complex thinking, this piece if definitely worth a read, both for the rules themselves and for Jessica’s take on them. You can also read Kjerulf’s original post here.
3. Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now
The writers of this book, Jane B. Burka and Lenora M. Yuen, believe that knowing why you procrastinate is vital if you want to stop, so they spend a good deal of time discussing the many possible whys. I loved this in-depth look at the psychology of procrastination, but if you’re not into whys, you can skip right to the concrete solutions discussed in the second section of the book. These aren’t easy fixes, but if you commit to them, they can help tremendously.
4. Navigating Productivity Advice: Finding What Actually Works
Thursday Bram offers something that could be, in the long run, far more valuable than any one piece of productivity advice: a way to determine what productivity advice will work best for you. We are all individuals, with different fears, passions, and needs. There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to being productive. This post discusses how you can put yourself at the center of your quest to end procrastination and be more productive. Some real food for thought here.
There are countless other resources available on the internet or in your local library or bookstore. These ones have helped me, and I hope they can help you too. If there are books or blog posts that have helped you increase your productivity, or you’d like to pass along your own tips, please feel free to share them in the comments.
Social media can be a great way to stay in touch with friends and keep up with what’s new in your industry, your hobby, or the world in general. It can also be completely overwhelming. If you feel like you’re drowning in a river of information when you log on to Facebook or Twitter, then it might be time for you to take your social media to the next level. One of the best tools to do just that is TweetDeck. With TweetDeck you can see all your friends’ and colleagues’ tweets and updates in one place and, even better, you can actually sort them into categories. TweetDeck can take that torrent of information and channel it into something manageable.
Step 1. Download and install TweetDeck
Go to TweetDeck and click the “Download Now” button. There are versions for the iPhone, iPad, Android, Chrome, and the web, but this post will be focusing on the desktop version. Click through the prompts and TweetDeck will install on your computer. If you don’t have Adobe Air on your computer, it will install as well. On the final step, make sure you have “Start application after installation” checked off, then click “Continue.”
Step 2. Add your Twitter account to TweetDeck
The “Welcome to TweetDeck” screen will appear. You can either sign in to TweetDeck or add your accounts manually. Since you’re just starting out, adding an account manually is the more efficient choice. You can choose Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace at this point. TweetDeck works most impressively with Twitter, so start with that one. Click the “Add Twitter” button, then enter your Twitter username and password.
Step 3. Sign up for a TweetDeck account
Signing up for a TweetDeck account allows you to synchronize your Twitter searches and Facebook groups between computers, lets you schedule posts and make full use of the TweetDeck Directory, and gives you full access to TweetDeck support if you ever need it. The option appears as soon as you’ve set up your first Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace account. Just enter your email address and choose a password. You can sign up for their mailing list or follow them on Twitter if you’d like.
Step 4. Starting out in TweetDeck
Since you already added your Twitter account, TweetDeck starts with five columns. From right to left they are: All Friends, Mentions, Direct Messages, Trending: Worldwide, and TweetDeck Recommends. At the bottom of each column there are a number of little buttons that you can use to move the column to the left or right, show what’s popular, filter the column, mark all as seen, clear seen updates, and clear all updates. Hovering your mouse over a specific button will tell you what that button does. If you want to get rid of a column, put your mouse over the Twitter T (or Facebook F, etc.) in the top right corner of the column. An X will appear. Click the X and the column deletes.
Step 5. Setting up columns in TweetDeck
Now we can really get rolling. Up at the top of the screen on the left side are three buttons. The second one, a plus sign, allows you to add a column. You can add columns for every type of social media whose account is linked to TweetDeck. Columns are useful for two reasons: they allow you to group people by any criterion you can think of, and they allow you to save searches. For example, in my TweetDeck, I have groups for friends, people in my fields (librarianship and writing), and general news sources. I also have a column for the hashtag #MyWANA, which is used by writers on Twitter who follow Kristen Lamb and the social media advice she espouses in her book We Are Not Alone: The Writers Guide to Social Media. The possibilities are endless. Where in Twitter itself, your feed is just a jumble of everyone you follow in the order that they posted, TweetDeck allows you to sort people and posts into different categories, so you can see all of the work-related posts in one place, and you can have a column for any search, or any hashtag. You can have any number of groups of people. I would advise not adding the same people to too many different groups because you end up reading their posts over and over again. Also, the more columns you have, the more you need to keep track of, so it might be best to limit yourself, at least in the beginning.
Step 6. Keeping up
Once you’ve set up your columns, TweetDeck will automatically populate them with the relevant posts. To mark a post as read, just click your cursor anywhere within the post. The post will be highlighted. You can then move up and down within the column by using your arrow keys. Any post that you “touch” with your cursor is “seen,” and will disappear if you click the “Clear seen updates” button at the bottom of the column. This is a great way to keep things from getting too cluttered.
Step 7. Tweaking your settings
TweetDeck starts out with some settings that you might want to change. The settings button is the middle button in the upper right corner. It looks like a little wrench. In the General section, one of my favorite settings is “Hide previously loaded updates (after restart).” This one helps keep things orderly by not showing updates you’ve already seen. My one caveat here is that if you shut TweetDeck down without looking at all the updates, it will still consider them to be “loaded” and will not show them next time. If you have to, you can always go to Twitter to check what you missed, but if you know you’re not going to be able to see everything every time you open TweetDeck, you might want to leave that choice unchecked. In the Twitter section, there is also a “Hide previously sent direct messages (after restart)” choice which is similar.
Another setting you might want to look at is “Include @replies from your friends to others.” Depending on how often the people you follow reply to other people (and what they’re replying about), your feed can quickly turn into an endless supply of one-ended conversations that have nothing to do with you. Set it whichever way works for you.
Notifications is another big area to look at in settings. TweetDeck starts off with popup notifications every second that include noises. Depending on how many people you are following and how many columns you have set up, this can quickly get overwhelming. Go to the Notifications area to tweak how often TweetDeck looks for updates and how it alerts you to them. It offers general options and advanced options for your individual columns.
Voilà!
And that’s TweetDeck in a nutshell. This post only covered Twitter, but you can also add Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Google Buzz, and you can set columns up for all of them with their own limits and groups. You can also use TweetDeck to post the same update to multiple places, which is another great time saver. TweetDeck is a very powerful tool for organizing the flow of information, and this post has only scratched the surface. Congratulations on taking a huge step forward in controlling that flow, and have fun exploring all the other things TweetDeck can do for you. Feel free to comment on how TweetDeck is working for you, or on other methods you’ve found for keeping it all under control.
I’ve always been fascinated by the way the mind works, and the role that biology and psychology play in making us who we are. One area that particularly intrigues me is trauma. Why does one person seem to take a distressing event in stride while another person is consumed by it? War is deeply traumatic, but not every soldier returns with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One person might survive a fire and all but shrug it off, while another is deeply scarred by the experience. Is it something within them, or something about the environment they grew up in, or something else altogether?
A few days ago a friend of mine sent me a link to a New York Times article that sheds new light on this question, especially for me personally. It’s about something called overgeneral memory, “a tendency to recall past events in a broad, vague manner.” If I were to ask you to think of a specific time when you felt relaxed, could you come up with one? Maybe a vacation you took to the beach last year, or a hot bath at the end of a long day last week. I can’t. My mind is blank. I’m sure that at some point in my life I must have been relaxed, but I can’t find it. And if I can’t find it, I can’t use it to help figure out something I can do to relax myself now.
This is bad for a person in general, but it’s really bad for a writer. How am I supposed to write from experience when I can’t remember what my experiences are? I do have a few vivid memories, usually of bad things (being yelled at by a teacher, etc.) and I have vasts stores of useless trivia and song lyrics at my disposal. But large swaths of my life exist to me not as distinct events but as sort of lumps of experience. For example, when I was a child an aunt and uncle of mine lived nearby. We probably went to visit them dozens of times, but in my mind it was two or three times tops. If I talk to someone about it, I might be able to tease out a couple of different times–oh, that was the time we went sailing, or that was the time we played Pong–but without that coaching, it’s all the same day.
So I was excited by the discovery of this condition but I was also depressed by the ramifications (especially since the article is actually about how overgeneral memory contributes to depression and PTSD). Lucky for me, though, just when I was getting really bummed thinking that I was stuck like this with no hope, I got to the part with the solution: mindfulness. I need to put more of a conscious effort into being present, paying attention, and processing my experiences, good and bad. Which means I also need to limit my multitasking. I can probably get away with putting the dishes in the dishwasher or moving the laundry to the dryer while I’m chatting on the phone, but the days of trying to watch the news while I’m doing the finances should probably end. If I want to be able to remember something, I’m going to have to give it my undivided attention. I’ve already learned to do that with my writing. Now I just need to expand that to other areas of my life. Because if it’s worth doing, or watching, or reading, then it’s worth remembering.
If you’re like me, you have a pile of books, virtual or real (or both), that you’ve been meaning to read but haven’t gotten around to for one reason or another. Working as a cataloger in a consortium, I’m constantly seeing what books, both newly published and older, libraries are buying. I love to read but don’t have the time (hopefully this will be changing soon…more on that in another post), so all those intriguing titles that catch my eye when they pass by me just pile up. I try to keep up, but every day something shiny and new appears to distract me.
This is why I was thrilled when I read Laura Miler’s post on Salon about being a better reader in 2011 and saw her mention of the 2011 TBR Pile Challenge. TBR stands for “to be read,” and the challenge is to spend the next year reading 12 books that have been sitting around for a year or longer. While I have plenty of real books that are actually sitting on my shelf, I decided instead to pick twelve titles that I’ve had on my Kindle for over a year, including a couple I’ve had since I bought it in February of 2008. Part of the challenge is to review each book after you read it, so I’ll be posting reviews here as I progress. Without further ado, here is my list:
1. Away, by Amy Bloom
2. The gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson
3. Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith
4. The golden compass, by Phillip Pullman
5. The almost moon, by Alice Sebold
6. The emperor’s children, by Claire Messud
7. The hour I first believed, by Wally Lamb
8. Sense and sensibility, by Jane Austen
9. A mercy, Toni Morrison
10. The vagrants, Yiyun Li
11. Kushiel’s dart, Jacqueline Carey
12. Dead witch walking, Kim Harrison
Alternates:
Of human bondage, by Somerset Maugham
Girl with the dragon tattoo, by Steig Larsson