Stephanie Booth's online ramblings
Le brouillard est en train de tomber. Vite, avant que la ville ne change complètement. C’est embêtant, ces bâtiments qui se déplacent en cachette.
Cette fois, il me faudra deux jours pour retrouver ma maison parmi les rues sauvages de ma ville de brume. Je crois que je vais déménager.
Ceci est une mini-nouvelle en 50 mots. Lisez-en d’autres de moi sur CTTSousur Facebook, par d’autres que moi.
[fr] Planifier mon travail sur la semaine me rassure sur le fait que je vais faire le travail "obligatoire" qui est sur ma liste durant la semaine, et que je peux donc me permettre de prendre du temps en cours de route pour des tâches qui me paraissent moins cruciales (mais qui, au fond, sont tout aussi importantes à mon activité professionnelle que le travail payé).
So, enter my second week with a weekly planning, after the first. I spent a good part of my Monday morning getting organized.
I’ve understood how having a weekly planning is helping me make progress in the neglected departments of my “work”: bizdev, research, more writing, etc.
When I work as I normally do, day-by-day, I am only digging into the pile of “things I must do for others”, or “urgent things”. I do not feel I can afford to devote time to less urgent tasks, because there is always this feeling that I should be doing more important things.
With a weekly planning, laying out my week means that I have an overview which reassures me that the “urgent/important” stuff can and will get done, and that it is in fact OK for me to stop and read an interesting publication for an hour or two even though I still need to upgrade some WordPress installations for a client or write a blog post for another. That’s why it works.
The challenge, for the moment, is that I still overestimate what I can do in a day. Or I underestimate the amount of time I need to set aside for the unexpected. And I still have trouble prioritizing, which means that I spent yesterday morning agonizing in front of the rather long list of client work which absolutely had to be done this week.
Yesterday worked out well, but today is being a disaster. Too many rocks, and one task in particular that I completely underestimated: it took me the better part of the morning (granted, there were interruptions and emergencies) to sort through my 350 photographs of Troyes — which I needed to do as I’ll be using some in an article I’ll be writing for a client.
I’m starting to see how longer-term planning (it’s not for straight away, mind you) will come in to help me be better at determining how many projects or how much client work I can take on for a given time period without getting “swamped” in the end.
[en] I'm now writing a column for Les Quotidiennes, a local online publication. The first one is up: E-mail, quand tu nous tiens.
Ça y est! Ma première chronique pour Les Quotidiennes, intitulée “E-mail, quand tu nous tiens“, est en ligne. J’y écrirai désormais chaque semaine les “Chroniques du monde connecté“, un coup d’œil humaniste dans l’univers technophile des gens ultra-connectés (nous!!)
C’est un peu plus “grand public” que ce blog — et j’avoue que j’ai quand même pas mal réfléchi au sens que ça pouvait avoir d’écrire ailleurs qu’ici: eh bien, simplement, toucher un autre public, dans un autre contexte. On verra ce que ça va donner, en tous cas j’ai plein d’idées pour les semaines à venir et je me réjouis beaucoup!
Et une fois que vous avez fini de lire mon article, filez vous délecter de ceux de mes co-chroniqueurs!
[en] I write a weekly column for Les Quotidiennes, which I republish here on CTTS for safekeeping.
Chroniques du monde connecté: cet article a été initialement publié dans Les Quotidiennes (voir l’original).
L’e-mail, c’est proprement merveilleux, sauf quand on est noyé dedans. Pourtant, il existe un certain nombre de choses assez simples que l’on peut faire pour sortir la tête de l’eau. Beaucoup sont ceux qui en connaissent au moins certaines, bien moins nombreux ceux qui les appliquent: désactiver les notifications automatiques d’arrivée d’e-mail, utiliser des filtres, mettre des répondeurs automatiques, encourager ses interlocuteurs à employer d’autres moyens de communication, par exemple.
Le cauchemar de l’e-mail est à deux dimensions:
Eviter la noyade est rendu d’autant plus difficile que beaucoup d’institutions (et les individus qui les peuplent) souffrent d’une compréhension très naïve de certains mécanismes liés à l’utilisation de l’e-mail.
Saviez-vous par exemple:
J’avoue être sans cesse ébahie qu’à l’heure où l’e-mail joue un rôle aussi central dans nos vies professionnelles, on attend de tout un chacun qu’il ait la science infuse et sache se débrouiller pour être efficace avec cet outil pourtant complexe et délicat à manier. Je ne parle bien entendu pas ici de technologie, mais de culture. Comme avec presque tout ce qui touche de près ou de loin à internet, c’est en effet là que ça coince.
Si vous ne deviez faire qu’une seule chose? Si votre ordinateur vous alerte (son, message) de l’arrivée de chaque nouvel e-mail… désactivez cette notification!
Vous lisez l’anglais et désirez approfondir le sujet?
[fr] Cette semaine, pour la première fois, j'ai réparti mes tâches sur la semaine au lieu de travailler au jour le jour comme j'en ai l'habitude.
As I mentioned in a recent post, I felt the next step to take in my “work life improvement” series was to plan beyond the day, and start looking at my weeks so that I can start building in time for long-term projects. I’ve done this for the first time this week, and overall, the result is pretty positive. Here’s roughly how I did it and what I learned.
1. Define office days and meeting days
This has to be done in advance, obviously, or the calendar fills up. I usually have either two or three of each in a week (minimum one). Every now and again exceptions slip in and an office day turns into a half-baked errand/meeting day, but I try not to. I think I can still improve the way I plan and manage these days (for example: errands vs. meetings, laundry days, exceptions for “immediate” paid work…).
2. Define “areas” that next actions fall in
I’ve refined the list I brainstormed in my “balance in the office” post and come up with these four areas:
These are my areas — yours might be different. Suw and I chatted about this on Skype on Monday and hers are slightly different from mine. Just find something that makes sense to you.
Looking at my areas, it’s easy for me to see that “bizdev” and “stuff I want to do” are the two areas which will easily be left aside if I just work day-by-day doing things as they become urgent (in bad cases, call this the “Fireman Syndrome”). If you don’t do stuff people expect you to do, sooner or later they nag you or you get in trouble. Same with admin: forget your taxes or invoicing long enough, and you’ll get in trouble.
As there were almost no tasks in these two areas, I realised that to fill them up, I probably need to do a little longer-term planning. For example, what are the things I want to do in the “bizdev” department over the next 6 months? Over the next month? That will help me generate next actions. Otherwise… I’m just flying blind.
3. Sort upcoming next actions in those defined areas
The way I’ve worked these last months I would have one “master” next action list (in Evernote — I love Evernote) and I would regularly “pull out” the 3-10 next things I was going to deal with, under headings like “today”, and then “next”, or sometimes a specific day.
What I did this week is that I first sorted this “master list” into the four areas I defined. I just made four big headings in my list, and that was that.
4. Plan the week!
This is the fun bit, actually. I just made another 5 “day” headings at the top of my list (Monday to Friday) and then started moving items to given days, making sure the urgent stuff was in there, as well as a certain amount of less urgent stuff (specifically from my two “left aside” areas, bizdev and stuff I want to do more of). Two things to pay attention to:
5. As the week rolls on…
One of the reasons I like having my tasks in an Evernote note is that they have these neat little “todo” checkboxes (keyboard shortcut: alt-shift-T) that I can check as I go along. Sometimes I’ll do something that wasn’t planned for precisely this day, or that is still on the master list. Well, I check it, and it feels nice. It’s also nice to see a day with a list of completely checked tasks by the time I leave the office.
My Tuesday was a meeting day, but I made the mistake of planning quite a lot of stuff to do on that day because it looked as if I was going to have enough time in the office. Big mistake. So halfway through my Tuesday, I grabbed nearly all the items I had placed under the Tuesday heading and dumped them under Wednesday (a full office day).
On Wednesday, I didn’t manage to do everything I had planned (unsurprisingly, as I shifted the “Tuesday problem” to Wednesday). So I checked the actions I did accomplish and left the others unchecked. This meant that Thursday, in addition to the rather modest list of things I had planned to do (buffer time, remember? specially at the end of the week) I was able to go back and check tasks that were leftover from Wednesday. But I didn’t move them over to Thursday — somehow it felt better to be able to start Thursday with a “clean slate” and catch up when I felt like it.
So, Monday morning, I’ll be wiping the slate clean and planning next week — looking forward to it!
Sandy’s clothes insisted on moving around in her cupboard. Nobody believed her. She even put cameras in her bedroom to prove that she wasn’t sleepwalking.
She fell in love with John, whose clothes misbehaved similarly.
The clothes were enchanted by their cupboards. The young couple learned to harness their magic.
This is a 50-word short story. Read more by me on CTTS or by others too on Facebook.
[fr] Ma grand-mère m'a dit plusieurs fois que je devrais écrire un livre pour enfants basé sur l'histoire de vie de Bagha. Cet été, j'ai enfin commencé à écrire. C'est incomplet et c'est surtout un point de départ, mais je le publie ici pour que vous puissiez déjà le lire!
My grandma has told me many times that I should make a children’s book out of Bagha‘s life-story. Sometime this summer, I actually started writing. I’ve not told the end of the story yet (maybe there is more than one book to write?) and it’s a very rough first draft, but I thought I might as well publish it here for you to check out. Feedback is welcome, as well as leads to interested illustrators!
The adventures of Bagha Byne the lucky Indian cat
Once upon a time, far far away in India, there lived a little kitten.
He was tabby and white, like a little tiger.
He was still very small, so he lived with his mother and brother on
the balcony of an abandoned house in the astrophysics campus. He
didn’t have a name yet.
One day, a tall lady caught the little kitten and took it into her
home. He was very frightened, so he hissed and spat and made his fur
stand on end.
But the lady gave him warm milk in a bottle and petted him gently.
“This is a nice lady,” he thought.
Day after day, she fed him milk and took care of him. Soon he forgot
about his mother and brother and was very happy with the lady. The
lady had a husband and a three-legged dog.
They called him Bagha.
Bagha quickly grew up to be a strong healthy young cat. He hunted
geckos and mice. He got into fights with the older tomcats living
around the house, and chased away the other young cats who tried to
settle down too near.
One day, Bagha got into a big fight with his dad, who was a fierce
tomcat. They fought and fought on the balcony. All of a sudden, Bagha
took a big whack on the nose and fell from the balcony! The lady saw
him and was very frightened. His nose was bleeding a lot. She put
Bagha in a box and took him for a noisy ride across town to see the
vet. Luckily, he wasn’t hurt very badly, and his nose had almost
stopped bleeding by the time they arrived. He did keep a bumpy rib and
bent nose for the rest of his life after the fight, though.
When Bagha was about one year old, the lady had a baby. Bagha too had
had children, and he shared the big house with his daughter, who
looked just like him. She liked hiding in the gutters and sleeping on
top of the mosquito nets. Bagha liked sleeping next to the baby or
behind somebody’s knees.
Bagha was a very happy pampered cat. He could go wherever he pleased,
had a nice cosy home full of silk saris he could sleep on, friendly
humans to pet him and rub his belly, and minced beef for supper.
When the baby was one year old, the family grew bigger again: another
tall lady came to live in the house. She liked Bagha a lot. Though the
first tall lady took care of Bagha well, she was now very busy with
the baby. Bagha’s daughter had disappeared and the lady’s husband had
gone to England for a few months. So, Bagha was very happy to have
another human to fuss over him and quite soon, he started sleeping on
the new lady’s bed every night.
Many months later, the new lady came back home with a rather large
wicker basket. The basket had a lid. The baby played with it and hid
inside. The lady started preparing big boxes and emptying the room she
and Bagha slept in.
Then one morning, she put Bagha into the wicker basket and they got
into a big Jeep with all her things. They drove for hours and hours
until they reached the big city. Bagha was hot and a bit worried, but
the lady was with him and kept him company. In the big city, he was
allowed out of the basket, but he was so tired and hot that he just
lay down in the bedroom until it was time to leave again.
[en] As the editor for ebookers.ch's travel blog, I contribute there regularly. I have cross-posted some of my more personal articles here for safe-keeping.
Cet article a été initialement publié sur le blog de voyage ebookers.ch (voir l’original).
Lorsqu’on part en voyage de nos jours, je pense que plus ou moins tout le monde ayant a disposition une connexion internet a le réflexe “web”. Même chez les non-geeks, Wikipédia se consulte sans sourciller, et regorge d’informations sur à peu près n’importe quel destination imaginable.
J’aimerais vous aiguiller sur Wikitravel, un projet inspiré de Wikipédia mais consacré exclusivement au voyage. On y trouve plein d’informations pratiques fournies par d’autres voyageurs ou des autochtones, sans pour autant se noyer dans la quantité de renseignements fournis. En plus, comme c’est un wiki, vous pouvez bien entendu vous aussi contribuer pour améliorer les pages consacrées aux destinations que vous connaissez bien!
Regularly, I’m approached by people who would like to see me for a chat or a coffee. Sometimes I know the person in question, and sometimes I don’t. Usually, the topic of the chat/coffee will be:
Now, first, let me state that there is nothing wrong with informal chats about things. But it can be quite a can of worms when you start putting your nose into the issue of “what do I do for free, what do I get paid for?”
I’ve written at least two articles on the topic (both in French). One was a rant about being asked to do things for free (or almost) again and again, and the second more recent one is about giving away 80% of my work for free.
Do you see the contradiction? Therein lies the can of wriggly worms.
There are situations where I do things “for free” and am very happy to do so. Usually, at least one of the following applies:
As you can see, all this is very “me-centred”. To be honest, if I don’t see what I’m getting out of it, then it feels like work and I am going to charge for it (so that I get something — cash — out of it).
Now, there are a few other things to take into account:
So, here would be my advice to people getting in touch with me and who are not part of my “inner circle”:
This sounds very restrictive for somebody who believes in a marketing model based on providing roughly 80% of her value to the world for free. At least, it does to me — but only if I forget that things work pretty differently for the “inner circle” mentioned above.
I guess that’s the hard truth: how much we know each other has a great influence on what I’ll do for you for free.
But that’s kind of how the world works, isn’t it?
[fr] Deux règles très simples pour survivre à l'ère des médias sociaux.