random thoughts

Becoming well read...

At the risk of making this a "New Years Resolution" (that I would therefore have to break by January 9th...), I am going to work on "optimizing" my reading this year.

The subtle difference between determining to be "well read" and vowing to "read more" is that I want to be able to have read more of what is important to the big picture...

• Personal and Professional Development.  I'm not just talking about "Self-Help Books", but rather publications that can help me achieve other personal and professional goals.  This can be anything from Religious and Philosophical to Inspirational and Motivational.  I prefer things that have practical applications and are succinct.
• The Classics... if I'm going to read fiction, then it may as well be notable.  My parents got me a Dickens' book for Christmas this year, and I also have some other older books that are on my shelf waiting to be read (Tom Sawyer
• Current events... I currently read 3-5 newspapers (The Sun, The Post, The Journal and The Times) daily, about a dozen magazines (including The Economist, BusinessWeek) and currently about 400 RSS feeds.  I'm becoming a media junkie, and I wonder if that is actually all just counter productive.  How much of that information is truly useful or can even be retained effectively?

I'm going to try a few approaches to becoming well read this year:

• Audiobooks.  Sounds silly, but I think this could work.  This approach to optimizing reading time will be to take "windshield time" spent commuting to the office/meetings, etc. and even time working out (another "non-resolution" ... another post I'm sure) and "read" some Audiobooks that I've been picking up from iTunes.  Stephanie is also exploring this as a means to make the most of her 3hr per day commute from "Squampton".
• eBooks.  I'm a fan of eBooks as well, primarily because I can have an entire library in my laptop/tablet.  On the same note I'm a big fan of Zinio and PressReader for magazines and newspapers respectively.  Easy way to not only have a large library, but it can be indexed as well for quick searches on a topic of choice.
• RSS "Best Practices".  A few ideas related to RSS reading...
  • Shared Feeds.  I love Google's feature here, and I'm finding that I'm starting to unsubscribe from some feeds in favour of reviewing shared feeds by people that I (and/or others) respect in various fields.  For instance, I know that Scoble has (absolutely) nothing better to do than to scour every feed on the web to pull out the pearls (subscribe here), that I will gladly capitalize on...  :) 
  • Subscribe to Categories.  A lot of the feeds I read allow for more focused subscriptions by subscribing to specific categories.  That way you can largely avoid un-interesting content.  The problem is that a lot of feeds (mine included) don't make proper use of these publishing features.  (My excuse is that I have a bug in my categories module.)
• Television.  One thing I'm going to do is NOT use TV as a source of current events.  The other tactic is to NEVER WATCH LIVE TV.  I've got Windows Media Center and a Digital PVR (from Shaw), so can record just about anything I want.  The thing is that live TV is designed to keep you watching... with recorded TV I watch my show, and even if the next one looks interesting I can't watch it because I (probably) didn't record it.

At the end of the day, I guess nothing really beats just curling up with a good hardcover (a term which will no doubt be lost on future generations) and bottle of Merlot.

Klogging?

Update: Completely forgot the URL (www.junklog.com)

I can actually see how this could be of value... I can subscribe to someone's RSS feed (if we have similar tastes), I can use it as a review site for movies and books and I can and I can follow thought patterns of people that I read (their blogs that is).

I wonder if they're open to opening this up to restaurants, places-i've-been, etc?  (... though you'd lose the cool cover graphics).

I guess it is like the first of what may be a number of spins on "del.icio.us-esque" social bookmarking and/or GTD memes (though I guess this would be considered "got things done").

(BTW - Amazon will love these types of things, and I can only imagine that Brad has an "Amazon Associates" account that will do fairly well).

Technorati Tags: jamehealy, del.icio.us, rss, gtd, junklog, amazon

Personal brand development...

Its been a while since I shared some thoughts on Personal Brand Development with Kris Krug down at the Bryght offices. I was particularly keen for his (and their) perspective on it as the Web 2.0 is such an interesting opportunity for personal brand development. (Shameless plug: I currently use Bryght to host my personal Web 2.0 site)

I should mention at this point that I am not an authority on Personal Brand development... as a matter of fact if you google or "technorati" me, you will find things that probably aren't that interesting...

... having said that, what I have always wanted to do was get behind all the members of our team at Sunaptic Solutions in order to promote their individual personal brands. The concept for me is simple:

"where an individual's personal brand succeeds, the organization succeeds with it"

My concept has always been to find something that you and the employee can take an active interest in building together that is of mutual personal value. The answer is almost resoundingly ... them.

Conventional wisdom might suggest that everyone in the company should all pull their weight to promote and build the corporate brand, but I think that is shortsighted. You could also argue that if you are ultimately successful, and their brand is successful (and by extension their "marketable value" increases) you will need to a) pay them more, b) deal with a bloated ego or even c) promote a destructive culture.

In my experience, when employees can see that their personal success is of real interest to you, you will instill in them confidence, loyalty and trust.

... am I a good practitioner? Maybe not... but I'm working on it, and I believe in the concept fully. The next step is to fully understand the vehicles at our disposal to make the concept of Personal Brand Development real and effective.

personalbranddevelopment | personalbrand | kriskrug | jamehealy | bryght | web2.0

GTD...

It's the first I heard of "Getting Things Done" or "GTD", the concept pioneered (I'm guessing) by the author of "Getting Things Done", but it lead me to a number of interesting tags, including of course "GTD", "lifehacks" and "productivity".