Iain’s Blog

I’ve discovered one thing over the last year. Writing a blog is difficult! Or rather, consistently writing a blog is difficult. It’s not that I can’t find things to write about … or that I don’t enjoy writing … it’s just nearly impossible to find the time!  In the words of my last post “I regret often that I have spoken; never that I have been silent” … not this time!

But more than that it’s increasingly difficult to find the time for lots of things. Mark Evans is on a similar topic here … “So Much to Do, Not Enough Time!“.

Of course I have a time (or should that be life!) consuming job and other organisations I’m involved in, but lots of people have much busier lives than I and yet seem to accomplish more. I’ve read lots of books over the last year about time management, prioritisation etc but the implementation of theory isn’t always easy. What I’d like to know is how the people who run countries or large companies manage to do what needs to be done!? We’re often disenchanted with our politicians & leaders but my goodness these guys must be on top of their task management game in order to do what they do.

We’re increasingly juggling a world where there are just too many things trying to steal our attention: bombarding us with information, and demanding our time by email, SMS, phone, mobile, facebook, twitter etc. Manager Tools dealt specifically with the topic of Email in a podcast a few years ago and identified email as a major cause of interruption in the workplace.

All of this makes it increasingly difficult to actually concentrate on doing useful stuff - the desire to multitask is enormous and it’s so easy to flit between things during the day and end the day having accomplished little. I often find myself having to take a mental grip and focus on one thing at a time.

With a new baby in the house (3 days!) it’s perhaps more on my mind that a 70+ hour work week + my non-work activities just isn’t sustainable. The answer I know in theory is to do less “average stuff” and concentrate on the really “important stuff” - defining what is the important stuff - that’s the difficult bit!

Once again Facebook demonstrate their finesse by kicking off a high profile blogger. In this case I agree that it’s not the “kicking off” which is the problem - the naming of this account was quite clearly in contravention of their rules - but rather the heavy handed and abrupt method in which they pulled the plug. No warning - just gone!

In a recent Scoble interview with Mark Zuckerberg he expressed the desire to encourage new applications which are less useless (my words not his!) and more functional. But why would anyone trust their data to a company who can restrict your access to your own data, and kill you off without so much as a sniff!

As it stands I wouldn’t be all that bothered if I wasn’t able to poke someone with a carrot - or throw a wardrobe at them! But if I was using this platform for anything other than total trivia I would be starting to get concerned ….

Been using Google Reader for the last few months as my main RSS reader/aggregator - I was initially reluctant to go with a web based reader but have definitely gotten used to it with time. Having access from any machine at home, work, or when travelling is great.

This morning I lost the sidebar / panel thingy that usually lists your subscriptions on the left hand side of the screen - and in a bit of an airhead moment couldn’t quite work out how to turn it back on! I could still use the dropdown list but that’s a bit of a faff.

So, for all my fellow web thickos who have found this page - here’s how to turn on the missing panel.

Two options :

1. Click on the little arrow pointing to the right - this opens out the panel. It’s a bit on the pokey side which was how I missed it I guess. Doh!

2. Use the “u” shortcut key to toggle it back on again.

Incidentally - the Google Reader keyboard shortcuts are well worth a look - speeds up reading quite a lot. The ones I use most are :-

J - Next Item

K - Previous Item

S- Star Item

Shift-S - Share Item

Shift - A - Mark all as read

U - Hide / Show sidebar panel

And ……..

SHIFT-? to get a full list of shortcuts.

PS - Here’s an article from last year with some information on what RSS feeds are!