Tag: Productivity

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Geekend Notes by Raise Small Business Marketing

Hilton Head, South Carolina’s own Raise Small Business Marketing did a brief summary and write-up of my “How to Do Stuff and Be Happy” talk from Geekend 2010. Here’s the run-down:

I was excited for this session, mainly because doing stuff and being happy are two major challenges!  Roy Christopher gave a laid back presentation that basically went through some ideas on how to keep your focus and try and stay happy while actually getting things done.

Roy covers a lot of the information that was in his presentation on his own blog right here so we won’t go over all of that however some of the things we really took away from the session:

  1. Roy was a competitive Rubik’s Cube Player (established geek cred for sure!)
  2. Find people who have done what you want to do and emulate them
  3. Feed and water your mentors- let people know you respect them and why
  4. Save your own story
  5. Keep a journal
  6. Keep a promise file
  7. Get organized
  8. Trust your curiosity

You can read the post here.

Many thanks to the folks at Raise and Geekend 2010.

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A Small Victory: How Rock Climbing Keeps Me Sane

In my “How To Do Stuff and Be Happy” talk, I tell people that everyone should have one “head-clearing activity.” Let me explain that by example. My friend Ben Hiltzheimer used to ride motorcycles. When he started learning how, he said that you can’t think about anything else while you’re negotiating the streets and traffic because all you’re thinking about is not dying. I have equated this experience to learning to ride a fixed-gear bicycle.

I started rock climbing a little over ten years ago, and since there’s a wall on campus at UT, I’ve been going in the last couple of years more often than ever. I didn’t realize it until recently, but this is my main head-clearing exercise. While on the wall, you’re only thinking about your next move, about how to position yourself to make the next hold. It’s as mental as it is physical. I can’t think about deadlines, paper revisions, book chapters, magazine articles, student issues, bills, etc. It’s just me and the wall. I do this for an hour or so three times a week, and during that time, I clear the mental cache and leave to start anew. This is what I mean by “head-clearing activity.” Find yourself one. It’s good.

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The video below is of a climb that took me all of fall semester to figure out. For those that don’t know, the routes are marked off with colored tape, so only specified holds are allowed to be used on certain routes. I’ve been stuck on the last two moves of this purple route for the last two months. Well, I finally finished it on Monday: A small victory. Here I am sending it clean on Tuesday [runtime: 0:50]:

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Get Em to the Geek: Geekend 2010

I scarcely know where to start. Geekend is the beautifully geeky brainchild of Sloane Kelly, Jacob Hodesh, and Miriam Hodesh. 2010 marks the second annual meeting of what everyone familiar hopes will be many years of the interactive conference. It has just the right balance of size and intensity.

I didn’t get to Savannah until late on Day 2, so I roamed around downtown by myself Friday night. I stepped into a raucous karaoke session and had the biggest beer I’ve ever seen. No problem not finishing it because in Savannah, you can drink in the streets. To-go cups are a normal courtesy, and I took one and finished my beer, strolling languidly back to my hotel.

Immediately upon arriving at the Coastal Georgia Center on Saturday morning, I was rushed into the geek melée. Swag bag and badge in hand, I sneaked off to the speakers’ green room to finish the final tweaks on my presentation. People always say of SXSW Interactive that the best stuff happens in the margins, that the sideline conversations are always better than the panels and talks. Well, as much as it resembles SXSWi, Geekend is not quite like that. I’m not saying this because I was one of the speakers this year, I’m saying it because Geekend’s organization and size lends itself to round-the-clock stimulation. Sure, the chats in the hallways and at dinners are productive, enlightening, and awesome, but they do not outshine the scheduled talks.

My talk was called “How to Do Stuff and Be Happy” and was loosely based on my previous post of the same name. It seems to have gone over well, and I had numerous inspired chats with attendees and other speakers over the rest of the time I was in Savannah: so many amazing people all in one beautiful city for a very limited time. From futurists (e.g., Frank Spencer and Scott Smith) and future-of-music geeks (e.g., Aaron Ford and Jack DeYoung), to indie entrepreneurs (e.g., Noah Everett and Scott Stratten) and big-media programmers (e.g., Oscar Gerardo and Craig Johnston), as well as just plain badasses (e.g., Maria Anderson, Zachary Dominitz, Pete Hottelet, et al.): It’s a pressure cooker of inspiration.

The closing after-party at SEED Eco-Lounge was the perfect, weekend-ending, chaotic spectacle: fire juggling, ribbon/curtain dancing lady (check the photos), loud, mashed-up hits, and literal dancing in the streets. Geek bedlam!

Geekend 2010 was one of those events where saying “thank you” to the organizers, the speakers, and all of the attendees just sounds ridiculous–but I’ll say it anyway: Thank you! See you next year!

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Here are a bunch of pictures I’ve gathered from the event. Many thanks to the camera-wielding folks I borrowed these from (e.g, Sloane Kelly, Jennifer Parsons, Josh Branstetter, and Rhiannon Modzelewski). And a special thanks goes out to Alex Sandoval and Rhiannon Modzelewski for hauling me around, taking me to the fair, and letting me sleep on their couch that last night. You folks are saints!

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How To Do Stuff and Be Happy

For my recent guest lecture at UIC, I was tasked with three things. Mike Schandorf asked me to do a little motivating, do a little background, and answer some questions. For the first, I went back through some of the posts here, some things I used to handout at the end of the semester in my classes, and a few key essays by people who have motivated me. This is still rather diffuse, but since these are all just recommendations (i.e., you should only use what works for you and ignore the rest; they are suggested tactics, not steadfast rules), it would probably seem that way no matter. Continue reading “How To Do Stuff and Be Happy”

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Pumping Irony: Technology and Disconnectivity

Since I started riding a fixed-gear bicycle, people often ask me why? What’s the appeal? Well, one of the reasons that fixed-gears are so seductive is the direct connection one has to the distance traveled and the control of the motion. No matter the terrain or conditions, your body is always at work negotiating the ride. You are directly connected to your environment. Continue reading “Pumping Irony: Technology and Disconnectivity”

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The Maker’s Notebook from O’Reilly

The staff over at O’Reilly Media‘s magazines, Make and Craft, asked around to see what features The Ultimate Notebook would include. The result is their newly published Maker’s Notebook. “Clearly, lots of DIYers dream of designing their own project notebooks. We incorporated as many ideas from this Notebook Braintrust as possible,” explains Gareth Branwyn, friend and contributing editor to Make. Well, being the journaling, notebook geek that I am, I got my hands on a copy as soon as I could. Continue reading “The Maker’s Notebook from O’Reilly”

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Daniel H. Pink: 9-to-5ers Anthem

Daniel H. Pink has been exploring the way we work for over a decade now. From Free Agent Nation (Warner Books, 2001) to A Whole New Mind (Riverhead, 2005), he’s been unearthing the intricacies of the working world from the abstract to the concrete. His latest book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko (Riverhead, 2008), is a career guide written in the Japanese graphic-novel style of manga (a trailer for which is embedded below). As the world of work continues to get more and more confusing, we need all the help we can get.

Roy Christopher: Your work has made an interesting shift from the nomothetic to the idiographic, from the working trends of the masses to the career of the individual. Has this been an intentional change in focus?

Daniel Pink: A little bit. I’ve tried to write all my books from the perspective of the individual. As I write, I really think about an individual reader going through the pages and trying to glean some information and guidance. The big change with Johnny B. is that I decide to do a pure narrative — and, of course, I decided to tell that story in the picture-based form that is manga.

RC: Tell me about Johnny Bunko, “the first American business manga.” Where’d you get the idea to present your business writing through the Japanese graphic novel format?

Johnny BunkoDP: It was a bunch of factors. I spent a couple of months last year in Japan studying the manga industry. One of the things I discovered that manga is ubiquitous in Japan — 22% of all printed material is in comics — in part because it’s a form that’s for adults as well as
kids. In any Japanese bookstore, you can find manga to help you manage your time, learn about Japanese history, find a mate, etc. But as popular as manga has become in the U.S., we still don’t have that genre of manga for adults. What’s more, when it comes to career
information, people today get their tactical information online — what keywords to include in a résumé, info about what a company does, etc. What they want from a book is what they can’t get from Google: strategic, big picture advice. That’s why I’ve organized this book around the six broad principles about satisfaction and impact at work that I wish I’d known 25 years ago.

A Whole New MindRC: A Whole New Mind goes a long way to reconciling the brain-hemisphere bias we’ve all been trained to accept. The book is definitely full of solid insights, but did you ever feel like you were reaching a bit?

DP: No. If anything, people have told me that I went overboard in the book repeating that both hemispheres — or, more accurately, both left-brain and right-brain style thinking — are important.

RC: There seem to be two sides to the whole-mind concept: one is an opening up to new ideas and influences so that one doesn’t become stale, and the other is a narrowing of stimuli just so one can get one’s work done. How do we find a balance in this?

DP: That’s one of the most central questions of personal productivity. And there’s no simple answer. It seems like it’s less about balance than about being able to toggle back and forth between those two modes. The key, of course, is figuring out when to shift. I have a tough time with that myself.

RC: I’ve been primarily freelancing for most of the last decade. Looking back, how prescient were your ideas in Free Agent Nation?

DP: I let others decide the prescience. What I see is that this form of working has become more prevalent and more socially acceptable. And perhaps more interesting, Corporate America itself is becoming more free agent-like. Job tenures are shorter; companies hire people without extending any expectation that new hires will be there for a long time. Organizations are extending much greater flexibility over time and work style. And, of course, they’re shifting responsibility like health care and pensions to the individual. In some sense, whether we’re getting a 1099 or a W-2, we’re all free agents now.

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Here is the trailer for Daniel Pink’s Johnny Bunko (runtime: 1:46):

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Defence Against Weapons of Mass Distraction

In a post called “Kill Your Email” on his guest blog on the Powell’s site, best-selling author Neil Strauss made the statement that “most of us are constantly busy but not constantly productive.” It’s a simple, but key insight. At what point does your day consist of more distractions than plans? There’s a threshold in there somewhere, and finding it is crucial not only to getting things done, but to enjoying your everyday existence. Continue reading “Defence Against Weapons of Mass Distraction”