UK Digital Mission Stand at SXSW in 2009

For those of you who not come across SXSW it’s a huge festival in Austin, Texas for music, film and interaction. Eight months before the festival the voting process gets underway to pick who will speak. Here’s my recommendations of who to vote for and hopefully if they get chosen who to go see next March in Texas.

First up my boss, fellow cxpartner and very clever guy Giles Colborne:

• Delight (very excited about this one)
• Making the Mobile User Experience Simpler

Overall smart dude and mr web typography Jon Tan:

• Web Typography: Get Your Glyph On 2 (follow-up to the great panel from last year)

Local Bath & Bristol people:

Alan Colville (ex cx’er and nice guy)

• Is Your Website Heading for a Car-Wreck?

Dan Dixon (clever UWE dude)

• The Aesthetics of Pervasive Gaming

.net magazine editor and nice guy Oliver Lindberg

• Design Perfect Site Navigation

Wathershed and iShed’s Clare Reddington:

• Pervasive Games and Playful Experiences: Rendering the Real World
• Seeing Round Corners: Artists as Innovators in the Corporate World

Mike Bennett from E3:

• How Networks Will Make Your Business Fly
• From The Kitchen Table To $Million Business

And all round clever people:

Elliott Jay Stocks

• Is WordPress Killing Web Design (interesting one)
• Web Typography: Get Your Glyph On 2

Matthew ‘Squaredeye’ Smith and friends:

• Designing For Content : Art Direction On The Web

Update!  Mr Chris Shiflett, very smart PHP security guru:

• Social Web Security: From Psychology to Programming
• Travelog With Maps: When 1000 Photos Aren’t Enough

And last but not least the full UK contingent for this year (great work Sam at Chinwag for putting the list together)

• Over 60 UK panels at SXSW

So what are you waiting for? Register and vote at SXSW

Over the years I’ve developed a number of ways to help deal with the worries – ways to limit my worrying to 9 – 5.

They work for me and maybe they might just work for you. Now let me get this out of the way first, I’m not talking productivity here, I’m not talking ninja super skills to get more stuff done. What I am talking about is just not worrying about getting stuff done. The doing of it, well that’s up to you.

Reviewing all the loose ends

At work I probably have upwards of 10 projects on the go at any one time and probably twice that number of future projects I’m hoping to do. That’s an awful lot of things to worry about. What I try and do is limit my ‘oh my god I’ve go so many things to do’ time to just before I get into the office and just before I leave, oh, and one big worry session on a Friday morning.

To focus my thoughts on projects I have 5 lists, I know what you are saying now, bet the words ‘anal’ ‘loser’ and ‘obsessive’ are going through your head. Five lists to help me stop worrying, I’m no loser. Anyway, the five lists. I have a daily ‘Open’ list, a daily ‘Close’ list, a ‘Projects’ list, an ‘Everything else I need to do’ list and a ‘Weekly review’ list.

Ending the day right

I find if I can tie up all my loose ends at the end of the day my mind doesn’t feel like it needs to worry, I put the worry off until the next day when I’m paid to worry.
So before I leave for the day, I used to do this on the train home, but lucky me, I have no commute anymore, I review the following, my ‘Close’ list: .

1. Today’s actions (noting those annoying things I haven’t managed to get done
2. Tomorrow’s actions (I keep a tally of things to do each day)
3. Today’s meeting notes and think about people I’ve met today to capture actions
4. Glance at ‘Projects list’
5. Glance at ‘Everything else to do list’
6. Tomorrow’s calendar
7. The day after tomorrow’s calendar

From that list I write down all the things I need to do tomorrow. Anything that doesn’t need doing tomorrow goes on my ‘Everything else to do’ list. Any new projects, they go on my ‘Projects list.’ Easy. Worrying differed until tomorrow, no loose ends.

All my actions for the next day, ready for when I come in the next morning

Starting the next day

The ‘Open’ list I normally look over at breakfast (when in Bristol I love Lashings to do this over tea and toast with Marmite). Here’s the contents of my list:

1. Today’s actions (all carefully listed last night)
2. Today’s calendar
3. Tomorrow’s calendar
4. Glance at ‘Projects list’
5. Glance at ‘Everything else to do list’

From this I update my list of todos for the day. This really only takes me a couple of minutes.

Weekly cleanse

Every week I spend a good hour or so going through the loose ends in my head. I have list to help jog my memory, my ‘Weekly review’ list. It includes all possible places where the stuff I need to do might be located. From texts in my phone to twitter DMs to who knows what. Using this list I put together stuff I need to do for next week against each day and all the other stuff on to my ‘Everything else to do list’

Here’s my Weekly review checklist to give you an idea where stuff lands in my world.

So there we have it, 5 lists to stop worrying. It works for me, hopefully it will for you too.

Do you have any tips to stop the worry and keep on top of stuff?

My internet World talk Social Networks: build your won or take advantage of an existing one was scarily full with standing room only.

One of main points was to listen to the chatter on twitter and facebook. I was doing the same through my talk and had some great feedback from people.

The audience did better than I did at summerising:

My slides are here:

I’ve written a whitepaper to accompany the talk:

• They’re talking about you online

I’m a bit of a control freak when it comes to my email and like to keep my inbox at zero messages. I BCC myself in all my email so I can keep a folder with emails I’m waiting for the answer to. Once I have the answer / reply I delete them.

In moving to Gmail the auto BCC from Apple Mail stopped working and I stopped being able to keep track of stuff.

After lots of digging around I found a way of fixing the problem. (Google was no help hence this post)

In the mail settings tab change your username to: recent:your.name@yourdomain.com

Now I get all my BCC’ed messages sent to my inbox, they are marked as unread for some reason but at least now I’m getting them.

Thanks to Ed Mitchell for hosting and Laura Francis, Eben Halford and Fraser Stephens for presenting.

A small cog in some really big wheels
How to keep your head across multiple projects

Some links:

• That Book Getting things done by David Allen
• The template I use: Hipster PDA

Googleitus
The syndrome where you find yourself in front of an empty Google search box thinking “What was it I was going to searching for again?”

Symptoms include:

• Only needing to type ‘g’ then enter into the URL bar to find Google
• Visiting Google more than 4 times an hour

Not to be confused with Fridgeitus where you find yourself in front of the fridge, door open thinking “What was it I wanted again?”

• Googleitus from Wikipedia

Sift has always prided itself on the quality of it’s thinking and I’ve learnt a huge amount from the great people at Sift. It’s been a pleasure to work there but the time has come for me to move on.

Thanks to the Uber Blogger Griff Wigley for taking this shot.

Having worked for a couple of ‘orange’ companies am I a bit behind the times?

The Logos of Web 2.0

But something I am noticing about new media is that it is slowly becoming middle-aged media. This week for example four pregnancies have been announced at the company (we only have 70 employees so 4 babies is a big deal) . This got me thinking – it seems that the company is growing older with it’s employees. Procedures are starting to get formalised, priorities are changing everybody seems to be moving into middle age. Interesting times ahead!

I’m Web Editor for Decode – a creative magazine for Bath & Bristol – and about 18 months ago we decided to move away from our mostly static pretty site to a new dynamic, content driven site. We decided on using a Wiki, believing it to be the tool we needed to showcase the best writing from around the area.

Eighteen months on and most of the contributors to the website hate it – they hate the way it’s really fiddly to get the formatting they want and more importantly how hard it is to add picture and well make the site look pretty.

Adding content to a Wiki is really straight forward – anyone can do it and that is half the problem. The style guide we use is routinely ignored. Everybody seems to have an idea about the best colours to use to highlight text. In fact it looks a bit of a mess. Adding pictures is so tough that even I find it hard – so consequently the site is so heavy on the text that things can look a bit flat.

So to the solution – well there are two strands to this. Firstly we need a new tool, a web publishing tool not a social software tool, something suited to the job, not something that is ‘cool’. Mambo seems to be the main candidate at the moment, but we are also looking at Drupal.

Secondly and most importantly a change of outlook – publishing on a website is different to publishing on a Wiki. It’s more formal for one, your name is attached to the post. Prioritising of content is down to the editor rather than it being a bit of a free-for-all. Processes are applied by the software not by editorial guidelines. This I guess will make the website more like the magazine and less like the collection of ‘stuff’ it is now.

The new site is still really only at the planning stage and the changes we need to make should be addressed now rather than waiting for the website launch. Getting buy-in at an early stage will mean less of shock to the contributors and readers alike when it is launched.