Rebooting working out loud

I’m three months into my new job and that seems a good time to reflect on how things are going. I’ll save the meat of that for another post, because this one is about how I am working within my network, or rather how I’m not very much at the moment.

I haven’t posted to this blog for some time, and most of that was just links – however recently even that has dried up. I’ve not even bookmarked anything, nor saved any items to read later in Evernote. My email newsletter has equally dried up.

The reason for this is that I’m not reading much. I’m still pretty old school and use a feed reader, and the counter on that read 5,000 unread items yesterday evening. To be honest I think it’s said that for a while and it just stopped bothering counting after that. I hit the “mark all read” switch on it this morning. It felt good.

Does this matter? I think it does because in many ways I am what I read, in that all my best work comes on the back of having read something that someone much cleverer or more accomplished than me has published. Without that stream of ideas coming in, being thought about and then regurgitated with my own half-baked spin on them, I’m missing something pretty important, and I’m sure my work suffers.

Not only that but my role in my network takes a hit too. I’ve always prided myself on being a good curator of interesting stuff for the people who follow me on this blog, or on Twitter, or subscribe to my newsletter. Having that active network has helped me a lot in the past, whether by opening up opportunities or simply sharing ideas and feedback. Not having that loop in place leaves me feeling somewhat bereft.

So what am I going to do about it?

I need to find a new rhythm, one that works for me in my new role. Part of this is about technology and tools, part about how I manage my time, and part about finding the right forms to work with.

First, I need to carve out some time everyday to do some reading. The fact that I spend an hour on the train every morning and evening ought to provide a good opportunity to do that, and perhaps if I didn’t get sucked into taking the chance to write one more email, I could use that time productively to scan through what my various RSS and email subscriptions throw up.

Key to making this work though is moving from what has been a pretty traditional laptop based mode of working to being mostly operated from my phone. This is because I can’t really do this effectively from my work corporate laptop, and I’m not lugging two computers around everyday. So I need to look at the apps I am using to make it as easy as possible on my phone.

Second, I need to figure out a workflow for sharing good stuff back out to my network. This has worked well in the past through bookmarking using Pinboard, which then fires off some IFTTT applets to ping content out to Twitter, into link posts on this blog, and into Evernote to read later or consider for inclusion in my newsletter. I need to get this back on track and ensure it still works, particularly when I am mostly working from my phone.

Third, I need to experiment a bit with how I publish content, particularly here on the blog. I’m not convinced the basic link posts that dominated for most of last year are a great use of this space – they are better suited to a medium like Twitter, and to be collected together in the newsletter. I’m really intrigued by the weeknote format that Jukesie has been popularising, and I do believe it would be healthy for me to be able to post reflective pieces here to get a better understanding of how I am progressing things at work, whilst hopefully sharing something useful for readers. There are a few different formats for weeknotes, some that baldly state what happened that week, others more reflective and personal. I think I’ll probably aim for the latter, but as with most things, it’ll probably take a few goes to get the tone and format right.

I also need to consider how I use the other platforms available to me. We have the work blog of course, for which I am contractually obliged to produce content. We also have a thriving internal network of Teams, to which it’s helpful to curate and post links and content to share with colleagues. I don’t want to end up duplicating loads of stuff and copying and pasting content from one place to another, so that might need a little thought.

Restarting the newsletter is also important to me. It’s been bothering me that I haven’t sent one out in ages and it’s a shame, because it used to get a load of good feedback. I suspect perhaps switching it from weekly to fortnightly might help ease some of the burden. The newsletter though is something that I will struggle to do from my phone. Whilst it’s technically possible, it would probably drive me mad attempting it!

In summary then, I need to find some time and space to read and research, come up with a mobile-centric workflow for writing and sharing interesting things with my network, and experiment with new forms of writing that fit in with the above whilst bring value to me and to my network. Seems reasonable, but probably not that easy.

If anyone has any ideas, I’d be really interested to hear them!