Author: Stephanie Booth

Working Too Much or Not Enough? [en]

[fr] J'ai souvent du mal à savoir si je travaille trop ou pas assez. Mon entourage me donne les deux retours.

I’m very bad at evaluating how much I work. Not in the sense that I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent in the office or on a given project (I know how to look at the clock and add up, even if I don’t usually bill for my time) — but more as in I don’t really know if I’m slacking or “working hard”.

There are days where I feel that I have been working hard for weeks or months. But then there are others where I look at my lifestyle and find it pretty relaxed, overall.

People around me also have differing opinions: sometimes I get the feedback that I should take my work more seriously (“work harder!”) and sometimes — more often, I have to admit — I get amazement or admiration for the amount of things I’m doing.

I guess this ambivalence in my auto-evaluation reflects an ambivalence in my attitude towards work. Part of me has a heavy workaholic streak (I can get “lost” in work easily, and tend to be a little obsessive and perfectionist, which results in difficulty stopping once I get started) but another part of me strongly resists working a lot and wants to have free time and a leisurely pace of life (that was already the case when I was in school: good enough grades, but never really liked studying too hard).

And in the end, what is working “enough”? I think there are cultural standards here, and that “working hard” in the US (for example) is not exactly the same thing as “working hard” here in Europe.

Thoughts?

Cessons de paranoïer au sujet de la grippe A (H1N1) [fr]

Je salue brièvement au passage la page 3 du Lausanne-Cités d’aujourd’hui, qui via l’interview du médecin et éthicien Martin Winkler, s’élève contre la paranoïa ambiante au sujet de la grippe A.

Extraits choisis:

  • Au 6 août 2009, l’OMS recensait 1500 morts sur la planète… Chaque année, la grippe classique (A H3N2) fait entre 250 000 et 500 000 morts…

  • Dans le canton de Vaud, le médecin cantonal – en charge des mesures sanitaires – a laissé entendre qu’il convenait, dès à présent, d’éviter de se serrer la main et de s’embrasser. Qu’en pensez-vous?

    Que ça me fait penser à ce qu’on disait au moment où le SIDA faisait peur à tout le monde, qu’il ne fallait pas toucher une personne séropositive. Cette recommandation est anti-scientifique. Ca accentue la panique et l’inquiétude dans une société qui n’a pas besoin de plus de méfiance sociale qu’elle n’en a déjà. C’est la grippe, bon dieu, ce n’est pas la peste, le choléra ou la variole! Ne pas s’embrasser ou se serrer la main? Personnellement, je rejette ce genre de recommandation. Médicalement et éthiquement parlant, c’est inacceptable!

  • [L]’angoisse actuelle est majorée par la situation économique. Objectivement, personne n’a envie que les grands pays industrialisés soient paralysés par une épidémie, parce que ça ne serait pas bon pour les entreprises… donc, pour les actionnaires. Il y a là une indécence insupportable. Ce n’est pas la santé des populations qui inquiète nos dirigeants, c’est celle de l’économie.

Merci de faire votre contribution à la lutte contre la paranoïa auprès de votre entourage!

Judy sat down on the mountain trail [en]

Judy sat down on the mountain trail to catch her breath. She imagined all the others who had travelled the same path, centuries or even thousands of years before.
The chill of a ghost disturbed her nap, and she awoke somebody else, dressed in furs, in a time long past.

This is a 50-word short story. Read more by me on CTTS or by others too on Facebook.

In Elo's granddad's garden [en]

In Elo’s granddad’s garden was a pile of ancient computer junk. Elo and his best friend Lit spent their summer putting them back together so that they could explore the treasures buried on those hard drives, piecing back together the lives of their long dead owners, journeying into the past.

This is a 50-word short story. Read more by me on CTTS or by others too on Facebook.

Invest in Social Media Training [en]

For all of you in companies around the world who are wondering what place to give social media — you’ve heard about it, you know there’s quite a bit of hype, but that you should be “doing it” — here’s a piece of free advice: invest in training your staff and providing them with the “social media” skillset.

The trend I see these days is companies and organizations hiring social media consultants, strategists, and community managers. They want somebody to “do their social media stuff”, and often this person is external to the company.

Take a few steps back and think about computing. Nobody today would even dream of hiring somebody into the company to deal with the “computer stuff”. Instead, employees simply know how to do things on a computer. Some more than others, I’ll grant you that, but “working on the computer” is usually so much part of the job description for any office position that it’s not even specified in the job description anymore.

A few years from now, it’ll be the same thing with social media. Knowledge workers will know how to write a blog post (or even open a blog and manage it to some extent), use a wiki, create an event on Facebook and use their network to promote it, set up a Twitter account and put a video on YouTube — just as your average knowledge worker today knows how to create a Word document, send an e-mail, search for something on the web.

You can wait until people naturally learn how to do these things, or the younger, more social-media-literate generation invades the workplace — but you can also speed things up by actively providing your employees with opportunities to acquire these skills.

And yes, shameless plug: if you’re looking for somebody to train your staff, this is clearly something I do (I’m working on preparing proper marketing material for my services these days, so in a few weeks I’ll hopefully have shiny handouts/PDFs describing all the things I do).

Ils venaient de loin et payaient cher [en]

Ils venaient de loin et payaient cher pour passer quelques jours en-dehors du temps. Des vacances sans interruption de travail, le rêve!
Mais au fil des visiteurs, la fabrique du temps se distendait, et des secousses chronologiques perturbaient la vie aux alentours.
L’Ile Hors du Temps tuait le temps.

Ceci est une mini-nouvelle en 50 mots. Lisez-en d’autres de moi sur CTTSousur Facebook, par d’autres que moi.

A Year of Chalet Mini-Holidays [en]

[fr] Ça fait une année que je monte régulièrement au chalet pour des mini-vacances (week-ends prolongés). Bon rythme!

A bit over a year ago, I badly needed a break (after Going Solo). One of my friends was deep in her thesis and needed one too, so we went up to my chalet for five days and walked around in the mountains.

I remembered (or rediscovered) how much I loved walking and being in the mountains. Before I headed back to Lausanne, I had booked subsequent “chalet breathers” for the next few months.

Over the last year, I’ve tried to go up to the chalet every 6 weeks or so. Sometimes it’s less, sometimes it’s more — but that’s what I aim for. I figured that as my financial situation does not really allow me take “real” holidays (2-3 weeks off somewhere) I was going to grant myself regular extended week-ends: mini-holidays.

It has worked really well.

I get breaks, and I have noticed how important it is to be able to hit the pause button once in a while, just think about stuff (personal or professional) but without actually having any work to do, read books, or write. Or just spend time talking with people.

It’s like with sports, really. If you exercise regularly, your body needs a break now and again. For exemple, at a time when I was at university, I would do judo 4-5 times a week. At some point, I realised that my body needed a holiday. And when I came back, I realized that I was refreshed and had actually made progress while I wasn’t training!

The brain needs “off” time to process all the activity and things learned during the “on” time — whether it’s physical or intellectual.

Musings on Twitter and Identi.ca [en]

Ever since the #fixreplies debacle, I have been distancing myself from Twitter a little. Don’t get me wrong: I’m still enthusiastic about Twitter, encourage people to join, and hope that new people I meet have an account there. But I’m slowly moving my eggs out of my one single Twitter-basket and starting to use identi.ca.

For those who missed it, the #fixreplies thing happened earlier this year. Twitter suddenly and unilaterally changed the way one viewed @reply updates sent by people one was following. Previously, there was a setting of sorts allowing you to control if you wanted to see @reply messages only when they were addressed to a person you were also following (the default), or if you wanted to see all of them (that’s the way it worked before Twitter “implemented” @replies, by the way, when it was just a user hack), or if you just do not want to see @replies (probably because you believe that “Twitter isn’t IM” or something).

Over the previous year, Twitter contended that the @replies setting was confusing (I think it was, but more because it was poorly worded than because the functionality itself was confusing), determined that for some obscure technical reason (we still don’t know which one, to the best of my knowledge) that the setting had to go, and noting that a full 98% of people were using the default setting anyway, they simply scrapped it.

Followed a huge uproar, lots of lamenting (by myself included), requests for Twitter to change things back the way they were — to no avail. Twitter apologized for the poor communication around the issue, told us they couldn’t keep the setting because the technical cost was too high, and basically suggested that they would offer grieving fans of that setting other exciting options to discover new users.

Only, it’s not just about discovering new users. It’s as simple as wanting to see all the tweets of people I follow, not just those Twitter considers relevant. In this case, they happen to consider that partial conversations are irrelevant. They’re relevant to me because they’re part of the lives of the people I follow (discovery of new users is just a really fun and valuable by-product of that).

So, enough of this already. The point here is that Twitter decides something, and Twitter does it. We are in a benevolent dictatorship position here, as we are for many of the tools we use online everyday. It’s a risk we take and I’m generally happy to — but when the benevolent dictator of a tool I rely upon as a backbone of my online life starts making changes that upset me, I start looking around.

Enter open source, interoperable standards, etc.

Identi.ca is an “open source version of Twitter”, one could say (the engine running it is called Laconica) — it basically works the same way and has the same features (at first view in any case). Contrarily to the vague of Twitter rip-offs or clones we started seeing all over the place, the important thing to note is that this project is open source. I know I’m not an open source expert and I happily mix up things that are important distinctions for people who are more involved in the “scene” than I am, but here’s what it means for me, as an end user (fellow geeks, correct me if I’m saying silly things here):

  • people can contribute to the code
  • people can take the code in another direction if they’re not happy with what the main development group is happy
  • who knows, maybe some kind of plugin architecture will be implemented (this is a wild guess of mine)
  • it’s based on an open, interoperable standard
  • think “GTalk vs. MSN”

There are of course certainly a full pile of other advantages to Laconica (the fact that it’s decentralized for example) but I’ll stop there.

The big problem, of course, is the people. Most people are on Twitter. Today, I’m following 567 people and am followed by 2481 on Twitter. On identi.ca, despite my best efforts, I’ve reached the staggering figures of 95 (followees) and 127 (followers).

So, should one “move” to identi.ca?

The answer is yes, and “move” is a bit of a dramatic word here.

Identi.ca acts as a Twitter client, which means that all to notices you send through identi.ca are automatically sent to Twitter too, and you can subscribe to your Twitter stream in identi.ca. You can in fact start using identi.ca without abandoning Twitter.

Twitter settings - Identi.ca

The best way to do this is to register the same username on identi.ca as you are using on Twitter (I’m @stephtara on both, here is my account on Twitter and my account on identi.ca). Head over to the Twitter settings tab to connect your accounts. Identi.ca will help you add people you know on both services.

Of course, there are caveats:

  • identi.ca is not your favourite Twitter client (if you’re using something like Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, Twitterrific, Tweetie, etc.) — I’m personally waiting for identi.ca support in Seesmic Desktop and Tweetie on the iPhone
  • the site will sometimes throw errors at you (but on the other hand, Twitter is regularly down, isn’t it?)
  • “Twitter” and “tweet” are really the better names
  • it’s a tad more work than just continuing to use Twitter, but remember, you’re in the process of moving your eggs out of the proverbial basket.

I’m personally pretty happy with identi.ca, and like the way it seems in active development (Twitter is too, but it’s a mammoth now that Oprah‘s been there).

I’m all the more happy now that I’ve read that Twitter plans to implement support for retweets, and that it seems this will happen by removing the “RT @whoever:” intro from the beginning of the tweet, and add that information in a small byline after the tweet. My semi-automatic screening of retweets from compulsive retweeters will be a thing of the past!

So, if you haven’t done it yet, go and claim your username on identi.ca (you can use OpenID), follow me there, and nag me to follow you if I’m not but I am following you on Twitter.

See you on identi.ca!