April 16, 2006

Natives & immigrants in a changing world

My how the times have changed... I was just reflecting over Easter breakfast with my family and friends about new technologies. My mother recently purchased the MacBook Pro with an Intel chip inside, and though she's the least tech-savvy in the family, she arguably has the best machine.

One of the features she wasn't quite sure she would use is the built in webcam. As I listened to her chatting about it, I was struck that her idea of how to make use of it was vastly different from my own. This is because, as someone recently informed me, I am a native to technology and she is an immigrant. There's an interesting article about this native-immigrant distinction here.

Her thought was that her webcam could only be useful for taking pictures of young children to share with family members in distant locations. For her, it was a tool for connecting about the real, the now, for bridging distances.

My mind jumped to web-culture specific memes, like this. I would use my new webcam to do something creative or expressive, then share it on the web. To a native, we see a new toy and think, "What kinds of interesting and creative activities can I invent in order to interact with my new tool?"

My mother wisely pointed out that this kind of perceptual shift has been going on for many years, long before recent technology ever involved a microchip. Her analogy was that when painting was originally developed, we used it to capture portraits of real life, to record history, and to preserve the moment. Then once photography came on the scene, painting became outdated for those purposes, and it took on a whole new life. She cited Picasso as an obvious example of someone who painted for a very different motive than to capture the visual realities of life. Instead, Pablo captured the realities of life, but through a distinctly new and creative lens.

All of these ruminations about the quickly changing world seem especially appropriate given what I came across in my morning reading of Soft Hay Will Catch You, a lovely collection of children's poems gathered by my friend Sandy Lyne. In his introduction he begins, "My parents were part of that remarkable generation who went from the horse and buggy to the walk on the moon, embracing more change than any generation in history knew." A very eloquent way, I think, of describing how the learning curve of life took a dramatic leap around that time.

All this leaves me to wonder about the changes that will inevitably appear in the lives of my future children. I'm slightly horrified to wonder-- what kind of music will they listen to? Perhaps more importantly, with what technology will they be natives, and I the immigrant? I spend a fair amount of my time "translating" for the brave immigrants in my life, but surely this will not always be the case. Something worth pondering...

Posted by at 12:35 PM

May 10, 2006

Two piles are better than one

As I was reading through an article on managing email in an Outlook environment written by GTDer Richard Kuo, what stuck out most for me was the fact that he had hinted at what I consider one of the most powerful coaching tools available. He says:

Decide whether each e-mail needs to be acted on, and either move it to Action Required or Reference as necessary.

Essentially he's suggesting two simple buckets for your emails instead of one. Deceptively simply, the following question often proves a critical coaching question when a client is knee-deep in processing their inbox:

Is it actionable?

Too often it's easier to shuffle around the various reminders and commitments in our world. (i.e. Ever found yourself changing the due date on a task in a robotic way?) Even when it's all collected in an inbox it can seem easier to rotate the stacks rather than pick away at them. At some point it comes down to a yes or no answer, and I was refreshed by the way this blogger suggests people take the first stab at inbox-emptiness by putting a clear line between pile 1 and pile 2.

What's a reasonable "first-stab" you could be taking towards your objective now?

Posted by at 10:23 PM | Comments (1)

May 25, 2006

Someday maybe...

I first heard about having a list of things to do "Someday/Maybe" when I was about 10 years old. You can imagine the fantastic and wild ideas that came bubbling out of me as soon as I heard that I was "allowed" to think about all the wonderful things I could do, be, and invent in the adult life ahead of me.

Many years, and many notebooks, journals and file folders chock full of design plans, lists, and images later, I still believe in the power of the Someday/Maybe as a way of giving ourselves permission to have creative ideas, even when we can't commit to them in the moment.

I came across this site today from a life coach who is encouraging people to capture their biggest dreams and aspirations on her free website, SuperViva. The feature I liked most about it is that you can easily mark an item on your list "Active" or "Backburner". The backburner seems to me another way of saying, I still like this thought enough to keep it, but I just don't have the resources to commit to it right now. It can take some courage to move that fantastically cool idea OFF your "To-Do" list and over to your Someday/Maybe/Backburner list because then you have to trust that sometime in the future you will have more time, more energy, or more money; and that you will get to some of those cool ideas.

The other issue of trust is whether or not you will remember that cool idea, which is where GTD comes in as a fail-safe way of keeping track of things without relying on your fallable memory. For me the weekly review has made all the difference in being able to trust that my Someday/Maybe list is alive and well. I review it every week, no matter how large it gets, knowing that I'm keeping those items around for a reason. Often times I find I've already done a few things on the list without even planning it that way, and I also end up removing the items that just don't have value for me anymore.

Just hearing the term "Backburner" after such a long time of being used to the terminology "Someday/Maybe" reminded me that this isn't just a list I keep because a smart guy said so. It's a list I keep because my dreams matter to me now just as much as they did when I was 10 years old.

Posted by at 09:29 AM

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)