« October 2006 | Main | December 2006 »

November 15, 2006

The future of social networking

I've been reflecting on online social networking after reading this article. They tell us that young people are "more wired than ever - but they're also getting warier" of tech tools.

They report that more and more people prefer a face-to-face interaction to many of the popular social networking websites that have been getting so much press lately, i.e. Facebook or MySpace. Having just returned home from a wonderfully warm weekend out of town, I'd like to think that they are right, that the warmth of human interaction will prevail over the convenience of the keyboard. But I have a couple of bones to pick with this article...

1) Online social networking is getting younger every day. The article reports that 89% of students at a California public school have cell phones, and some 81% of them are on MySpace. That's huge! That means that if you're not using high speed internet at home you're probably considered somewhat outcast from the normal flow of high school. The reason I point this out is the article quotes several well-spoken graduate students, mid to late twenties, about how online networking sites just don't have as much apppeal for them anymore. I suspect they are outgrowing these sites, and more importantly that these sites are re-packaging and re-marketing themselves for a younger and younger crowd. We've seen it with teenie bopper movie marketing, no surprises here.

2) The more social networking sites there are, the less powerful they become individually. This is how social networking on the Web relates back to Getting Things Done. The more social networking sites you engage with, the more Inboxes you have. Sign up for another site = create another bucket that you'll have to collect, process and organize into a trusted system before you can effectively do and review the items. I think this is one of the least-talked-about dangers of lots of online resources that are popping up today. All of these new tools and sites are designed for convenience- convenient socializing in particular. But convenience gets left in the dust as we accumulate more tools, more gadgets, more sites, more inboxes. So perhaps the deeper issue this article taps into is that we are coming back into an Age of Consolidation. I'll be swapping my Palm and LG cellphone for a Treo soon to prove my commitment to minimalism.

Ok, bones picked. What I most liked about the article was this quote from a 19 year-old Florida student with a great insight about his own generation (hey, it's not easy to come up with objective criticism of your own kind). He reflects on how young people are now using text messaging to avoid uncomfortable social situations, like cancelling a date. "Text messaging has become the easy way out... Our generation needs to get over this fear of confrontation and rejection." Now we have even more options for breaking and/or renegotiating our agreements in an instant, less-human, less-emotional way. A good thing or a bad thing? You tell me...

Posted by at 09:23 AM | Comments (8)

November 20, 2006

Why get things done?

For the first time in the 7-ish years I've been involved with Getting Things Done, I asked myself today: Why do we want to be getting things done?

The word "done" rang out loud and clear in my head at that moment. The sweet tase of completion. It seems that success is a word that really rings our bells here in Western civilization, and completion is genuinely intertwined with worldly success. But perhaps at times we are too focused on the end results, aiming for goals without asking ourselves the big "why."

I'm sure David Allen knows all this (and perhaps to a much deeper cut than I do), so why on earth did he title his book Getting Things Done?

Then I woke up to the word "getting". He didn't choose "Get Things Done", he chose an active, progressive, moving verb. We are in the process of getting things done. Suddenly it clicks for me- we are all in process, all the time, constantly moving and growing and learning as we refine the process called life.

So what? What does this all mean to me?

It means that GTD really is a martial art- it acknowledges both the real stake-in-the-ground signposts that we have out there as goals, objectives, accomplishments, sucesses, etc. and it also reminds us that we are all en route to those experiences.

Where has your focus been lately? On "getting"- the process of life? On "things"- the stuff of life? Or on "done"- completion, closure, end states.

No one focus is better than another. If your garage has 150 boxes of unnecessary stuff, the wisest use of your time may be on the stuff. Go tackle your stuff so it won't have to distract from the other pieces of life. Or if you're 99% complete with a project, career, business venture- maybe "done" has most of your attention. But perhaps the most neglected word- "getting" pops up when we're in the flow, consciously aware that life is a journey. Someone recently pointed out the power of the words "human being". This person felt so completely overwhelmed and caught up in the busy-ness of life that the term "human doing" was almost more applicable. But hundreds of years back when the noun "human being" was coined, someone knew precisely what they wanted to communicate. We are humans being, and also doing, and also completing.

Posted by at 06:00 AM | Comments (5)