The Bamboo Project Blog

Do You Know How to Ask the Right Questions?

Looking at tools like Google Squared, Google Trends and Wolfram Alpha, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that one of the key challenges we have before us is learning how to ask questions. And not just any question, but the RIGHT questions. There's tremendous power in the possibilities of these tools, but if you don't know what to ask about or how to ask it, then what's the point?

This leads me to wonder if we're really doing a good job of teaching the art of questioning, either in schools or in the workplace. My anecdotal response would be "no, we do a terrible job of this," partially because we seem to do what we can to kill curiosity and creativity, starting from an early age. A 4-year old does a great job of asking question, but by the time he gets out of 2nd grade, not so much.

And from what I can tell,  many workplaces are structured to avoid questions. Let's just do what we've been doing and not stir things up with curiosity. We also seem to love moving immediately to answers and solutions. Maybe we need to spend more time formulating the right questions.

This seems like one of those areas where we need to think carefully about how our tools may be outstripping our ability to use them. I love all this cool technology, but are our skills keeping up with what the tools can do? And how are we going to address this?

Some Resources for Accessible Learning

In using social media tools for learning (or anything else), one thing I think we often forget is the issue of accessibility. And by that, I don't mean in terms of issues like having access to a computer or broadband, although those are issues as well.

Currently I'm working with two different clients who work with individuals with disabilities and one of the things we're grappling with is how accessible these tools are. For many of their consumers, web-based technologies have been a God-send that has helped them access information, resources and communities of support  they never would have dreamed possible a few years ago. Opportunities for teleworking, online learning and self-employment have also exploded.

But for some people, especially those with visual or cognitive impairments (including brain injury and learning disabilities), social media and the Web can be a mixed bag. One one project, for example, we've had problems with one of our team members, who is blind, being able to use our group wiki with JAWS, a tool that many people with visual impairments use to surf the web. I've also heard some individuals from the brain injury community complaining about use of Flash and how difficult it is to navigate through some sites. And let's not forget the large numbers of people who have learning disabilities.

This has all been a real eye-opener for me, so I've been doing some research into accessibility issues and wanted to share a few resources.

• 100 Killer Web Accessibility Resources: Blogs, Forums and Tutorials--Resources on general accessibility, as well as for individuals with specific disabilities, such as visual impairments and epilepsy.

• Accessify--News, tools, etc. related to accessibility. Shows you how to do things like easy closed-captioning for YouTube videos, as well as providing some useful tools for development.

• Access eLearning--a tutorial of the Georgia Tech Research on Accessible Distance Education (GRADE) project at Georgia Tech. Includes 10 modules.

• Designing Web Content that is Accessible to Users with Cognitive Disabilities--This webcast provides information on cognitive accessibility research conducted by NCDAE and others, and overviews and provides strategies for addressing the most common web accessibility issues for users with cognitive and learning disabilities.

• TARGET Center Discovery Series--a whole series of webinars on issues such as making accessible PDF files and emails with file attachments. Also a bunch of webinars on ergonomics and the home office.

• For Twitter--Accessible Twitter and TwInbox have both been recommended to me. The latter lets you use Twitter from Microsoft Outlook. This post on Twitter for Those Who Can't Talk or Type is also eye-opening.

I'm still learning a lot myself, so if this is something you have experience in, I would love to get your feedback and links to the resources you use and find to be helpful.

Feeling Like Dirt

The past few months for me have been a sort of hodgepodge of deadlines and projects and weird personal things like realizing that my younger daughter is going to college next year (COLLEGE! My baby!) and that she doesn't need her mother so much anymore. Compounding the situation,we've had lots of rain and cloudy, cool days and my heart is crying out for 85 degrees and sunny so I can sit on my patio and listen to the birds.

I've also had several profound reminders recently that I've been doing what I always do when I start to get overwhelmed, which is is to retreat deep inside myself where I don't have to notice that I'm overwhelmed. I can just slog through things under the premise that I have my act together. Which in many ways I do, but in many more important ways I don't.

The problem with this mode of dealing with things is that I end up feeling really alone and isolated and my feelings of isolation only reinforce the sense that I should stay inside my little hermit cave. I am also less into blogging and commenting and online socializing because of course that means coming out of my cave. And then I miss that sense of community, which further reinforces the cycle. . . well, you can see the problem.

So this morning I have time to breathe a little after weeks of competing deadlines and I come across this post by Havi Brooks who talks about how she's feeling like dirt right now and giving herself permission to do so. And I realize that right now I'm feeling like dirt, but have been trying to talk myself out of that feeling, which honestly only makes things worse. If you're going to feel crappy, at least don't add to it by beating yourself up for feeling crappy.

Why am I writing about this? Because I think a lot of us can get stuck in feeling like dirt and we don't have enough compassion for ourselves to just let those feelings be there for a time.  The combination of feeling this way and trying to make yourself NOT feel this way is a powerful recipe for personal and professional dysfunction. I've seen it in action and it's not pretty.

I also know that for myself as a learner, it's just as important for me to acknowledge and explore the emotional undercurrents that pass through me as it is for me to look at using a new tool or developing a new process. I'm reading Brain Rules right now and I can see so clearly how emotions and stress are as important to learning as anything else, but you have to know where you're at in order to move forward. And if I'm going to blog about learning and development, then I need to also blog about when things are NOT working, which right now, they are definitely not.

So suffice it to say that I'm feeling like dirt, but I'm cool with that, because this too shall pass. Plus dirt can be what makes things grow as long as you give it the chance.

Flickr photo via Teeny!

Deconstructing "How to Nail an Interview"

The other day I found How to Nail an Interview, a one-page website set up to describe the 22 Tips on Interviewing Steinar Skipsness learned as a result of a hidden camera experiment he set up:

What is it that certain people say or do during a job interview that makes them stand out? Why do some people struggle to find work, while others land a job in no time? I wanted to know, and the only way to find out was to experience the interview from the other side of the table. If I could be the one asking the interview questions, not answering, I could see first hand what made candidates stand out. I could then take that knowledge and cater my behavior in any future interview to give myself the best chance of getting hired.

First, I needed to create a "corporate presence." I found a company that rented office space by the hour. It was in a downtown Seattle high-rise, had a killer view, and came with a secretary, who'd call me once an interviewee arrived. It was perfect.

Next, I posted a job on craigslist for a marketing coordinator at a "soon to launch" web company. Literally minutes after the posting, resumes poured in, 142 on the first day, 356 in the first week.

Finally, giving the interview wasn't enough. I wanted to be able to go back, review the footage, and dissect answers, body language, everything, to really see what makes someone look good or bad. So before scheduling any interviews, I got online, bought a couple of small cameras, picked up a couple lamps and lamp shades, and with a drill, some super glue, a little bit of cardboard, and electric tape, I constructed 2 hidden camera lamps.

Of course to make sure everything was legally kosher, everyone was required to sign and fax back an appearance release waiver before an interview was scheduled. The reason, "some company meetings will be filmed and we needed proof you'd be comfortable appearing on a video blog if hired."

While the legality of Steinar's hidden camera approach may be in question, certainly the results are interesting and helpful in a cringe-inducing sort of way.

What caught my eye with this (besides the content) was the simple, streamlined set-up here--a single web page, brief lessons learned from the video-taped interviews and very brief video excerpts to illustrate several of the tips.This is something that could easily be done with a blog platform (Blogger comes to mind as a down-and-dirty choice) or on a wiki.

Although clearly this took time to pull together (28 interviews to cull through), something less elaborate could easily be done to support workplace learning, using videos, screencasts, etc. that have already been developed, either for other purposes within your organization or that are freely available online. You could also use your Flip video camera for quick, informal video that can be uploaded in a few clicks and then embedded into a blog or wiki, along with the tips.This format would also lend itself to an easy online Orientation session.

Taking off the designer hat and putting on the learner hat, I also see something like this as a culminating project for a training to both demonstrate learning and provide job aids or tips to other employees following the training.  Picture, for example, some kind of customer service training. Learners could do brief Flip videos of themselves illustrating various do's and don'ts and then embed those into a wiki or blog with their text tips.

On an individual level, this is the kind of format that might also work well with an online portfolio--maybe "10 Reasons to Hire Michele" or to illustrate a particular skill set you possess.

Nothing earth-shattering here, but the simple format really got me thinking about some different possibilities.

Is the Best Predictor of Future Failure Your Past Success?

Shafeen Charania makes an intriguing suggestion--that the best predictor of our future failure is our past successes. His premise is that when we've found a course of action that proves successful, we are more likely to become wedded to it. We then resist changing our approach, even when circumstances have changed.

This is related, of course, to the tyranny of dead ideas. But there's a twist. In Shafeen's formulation, we're invited to anticipate that our past success will predispose us to future failure. This means we have the opportunity to build into our processes those strategies that can help us avoid resting on our laurels.

On an organizational level, Shafeen has a few suggestions for doing this:

One approach to helping companies stay open to new ideas, while making sure they extract maximum return from existing events, might tie back to that blog entry Size Does Matter.

What if there was also a policy that once a successful business line in the main company hit a certain profitability and had achieved a specified return (say 200% of the original investment), it was required to spin off 20% of its employees and fund that "start-up" with 5% of the profits for 2-3 years? The start-up is  charged with beating the incumbent and taking down the mother-ship. If after those 2-3 years there are no promising results, the start-up is on its own. But if it succeeded, the parent company would have a choice of bringing them back in-house, or sticking to the program as defined in Size Does Matter, and creating a whole new revenue stream, while milking the last drop out of their cash cow.

Individually, we can take action too.  We can engage in  ongoing reflective practice, which provides us with a framework for examining our assumptions. This is a necessary and critical component of any individual plan to avoid being imprisoned by our success. 

We can conduct regular After Action Reviews. These, too, provide a structure for reflection and evaluation and allow us to see where we should and shouldn't consider other alternatives. 

One of the dangers of success is that it can lead to "When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail" syndrome. I see this with new users of social media, for example, who, enamored of the benefits of blogging or wikis or Twitter, suddenly see a social media solution to every individual or organizational issue.

While applying new ideas or tools or approaches in different realms can be a great strategy, we should do so with a spirit of inquiry, rather than with the belief that it "should" work. This is where we need to develop the habit of engaging in personal learning experiments , regularly engaging ourselves in asking questions and testing our ideas. 

Being aware that in our past successes lie the seeds of our future failures gives us a tremendous opportunity to avoid this fate. 

Is this something you think about? What have you done to make sure you don't cling to outmoded approaches when circumstances have changed?

Bamboo Project Readers' Guide to Blogging for Personal Branding

Networking 2.0: Blogging Your Way Out of a Job... and Into a Career

View more presentations from Sacha Chua. (tags: blogging web2.0)

Last week, I asked my readers to share their best advice for using a blog for personal branding and job searching. As usual, I got some incredibly thoughtful and helpful responses that merit elevation to a new post. I've also added some links and other resources. So below is the Bamboo Project Readers' Guide to Blogging for Personal Branding.

Should You Blog?
To the question of "Should I Blog?" the answer for most professionals is "Yes." Google is often the first place people turn  for information on potential employees and as we've discussed before, Google is not a search engine, but a reputation management tool.

Monitoring and managing your online reputation is a critical career management skill and your blog can be THE best tool you have to maintain that reputation.

A blog can:

• Improve your search engine rankings
• Establish you as a "thought leader" in your profession--someone with an opinion, credibility and a point of view.
• Show potential employers and/or clients how you operate in a way that's more meaningful than what you put on your resume or how you answer questions in your interview.
• Provide you with a valuable way to network with others who are online, expanding your connections and exposing you to new people and ideas. 
• Be a valuable tool for your own ongoing learning and professional development.

All my commenters are bloggers themselves, so clearly they believe that blogging is an important part of the branding process, too.

Heather Carpenter shared a paper that she wrote based on interviews with Rosetta Thurman, Trista Harris and Sean Stanndard Stockton, all of whom have experienced incredible career growth as a result of their blogging experiences. If you want to read some real-life stories of how blogging has accelerated several careers, definitely check out Heather's paper.

Sacha Chua, another poster child for how blogging can support personal branding, offers additional advice in her presentation, Networking 2.0: Blogging Your Way out of a Job Into a Career (see above). She points out that blogging can help you develop your passions, build skills and make networking contacts, all of which are essential components of building your brand.

And if you need a final bit of convincing, then see what Tom Peters and Seth Godin have to say.

When Should You Start a Blog?

The entire issue of blogging for branding arose from a conversation we had in our first Career Commons webinar last week. Several people indicated they were in the process of starting up a blog as part of their job search, which raised the question of whether or not professionals should be blogging and, if so, how did that fit into the job search process?

Ideally, you should start a blog BEFORE you're in the market for a new job. As Catherine Lombardozzi pointed out, "Blogging for personal branding may be more productive as an ongoing strategy than a job-hunting one when you're in a crunch. Branding takes time..."

Tony Karrer, echoed this thought, pointing out that time spent on blogging is time NOT spent on your job search.

I would argue that the time to start a blog is NOW. If you are not actively job searching, then you'll have more of an opportunity to begin developing your brand over time.This is the ideal situation if you can do it.

However, if you ARE actively job searching, I still think it's worth spending time on setting up and maintaining a blog. It can:

• Serve as an online portfolio and as a hub for all of your online identities and connections (i.e. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). 

• Be your platform for connecting to other bloggers and the conversations happening within your industry and profession.

• Provide you with a way to show your ongoing engagement with topics in your industry and profession and help you stay up-to-date on what's happening. This can be particularly important when you're unemployed.

Just don't get so hung up on blogging that you forget to spend time on actually looking for work! Set up your blog and then spend a few hours a week working on it. The rest of your time should be spent on making connections and working your network.

What Should You Write About?

Clearly if you're using a blog for professional branding purposes, your blog should focus on topics related to the skills, interests, and ideas you want to showcase as being key to your brand.

Clark Quinn said:

They should write posts talking about the things that interest them (positively or negatively) in the field they want to work in. That is, riff intelligently about the field. Chronicle new ideas, reflect on some issues, be constructively critical. You're showing that you're an active thinker in the field.

Catherine offered this advice:

Consider defining what you want the blog to be about - for a "personal branding" blog, you don't want to just post about whatever comes into your head. It should be about the area(s) in which you want to be seen as a thought leader or expert.

And Sacha said:

Read. A lot. Read blogs, books, and anything else you can get your hands on about the field or industry you want to be in. This will give you plenty of material to write about.

Join the conversation. Find other bloggers and comment on interesting posts. If you have more to say, write a blog post and link back.

Write about your experiences and what you're learning from them. Write about what you do and how you can do it even better. Teach people as you learn.

Create value. Don't worry about the number of readers you have or the number of comments you get (or the lack of either). Write things that are useful for you, then use that practice to write things that are useful for others, and then keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities to help others. When you answer an e-mail with generally useful information, spend a few extra minutes on putting that into your blog, where it can create more value for others. Think of ways you can help others, and use your blog to reach more people than your initial audience.

I would also recommend looking for blogs written by others in your industry or profession to see what kinds of conversations are happening. (Here's a good article on some ways to do that).

What are the topics people are talking about? Where are there gaps that you might be able to fill through your expertise or ideas? What questions are raised by what you're reading and what answers are you finding in response to those questions?

From a purely practical point of view, you might also want to check out these different types of blog posts--they can give you some ideas on the kinds of posts you could start writing. Just apply the basic posting types to the content in your field and see what you can come up with. (For example, this post is a combination of advice, collation, and link posting.)

How Often Should You Write?

Most of us live in a perpetual time crunch, so the issue of how often to post is a pressing one for many new bloggers. From reader comments, it appears that frequency of posting ranges from once a day to once a week.

Said Clark:

I try to hit a post a business day. I don't get there, it's more like 3-4/week, but it's my goal. More than one a day I think puts a burden on your audience. May seem too frenetic. Tweets are for short thoughts, blogs are for more reflections. Of course, it may depend on your field; maybe it's important that you're processing and reacting to an ongoing slew of announcements of new products, pieces, etc (ala Engadget or Gizmodo).

I'm like Clark, shooting for once per business day, although not always hitting the mark, depending on what's happening elsewhere in my life.

Catherine favors once a week:

I find a commitment of one blog post per week is a good pace. I think it's frequent enough so people won't lose interest in monitoring the blog, but far enough apart that I have time to ruminate on a good topic. It takes me several hours to write a blog post, so I can't be doing it every day at this point.

And Sacha says at least once a week, but try for more often:

Write at least once a week. You don't have to write every day, although you'll get the most benefits from blogging when it becomes a natural part of the way you do things. Learn something? Blog. Do something? Blog. Got through another week? Blog about your achievements and your plans for the next week.

Most bloggers find that if they are writing shorter posts, once a day can work, but if they are doing longer, more thoughtful posts, then once or twice a week is your best bet. Plus most readers can't handle really long posts every day.

The point, as Soha El-Borno pointed out, is to get in the habit of writing regularly. You should also be sure that whatever you're writing is creating value, as Sacha mentioned earlier. Better to write nothing, than to write just for the sake of writing.

What About "Voice?"

Another issues that many new bloggers worry about when they are blogging for branding is their "voice." More to the point--what's the balance between sounding "professional" and sounding like a human being?

Catherine reminds people that it's OK to let your personality show, something I agree is critically important. Blogging, by nature, is a medium that invites you to have an opinion, to tell stories and to show who you are.

If you take the time to check out other bloggers in your professional space, you'll find that there is usually a range of "voices" from the purely professional to the sometimes irreverent. Each blogger has to find his/her own way on this, but in general, the more "you" that shines through, the better. 

It's Not Just About YOUR Blog

As several readers pointed out, blogging for personal branding is not just about writing your own blog posts. It's also about connecting to other bloggers and participating in the conversations happening elsewhere online. 

Said Catherine:

To be visible, find ways to get your blog out there... answering other's blogs is a terrific start - especially Learning Circuits and like forums. Respond to hot topics on other's blogs - I've found some of my favorites by following links when I was reading a comment trail on a particularly interesting post.

Soha echoed this:

Make friends and link to other bloggers. Add your point of view. . . . always leave comments and connect.

And Tony offered this advice:

I would highly recommend the trick of engaging in interesting conversations with some of the bigger bloggers in the persons space.

For example, if you are in the world of eLearning, you should definitely engage me around one of my conversation topics.

If you're blogging for branding, keep in mind that blogging is not simply the act of posting to your own blog. It's also interacting with people who leave comments in your blog and the comments you leave on others' blogs.

It's all part of a package and for blogging to work as a strategy for branding, you have to be prepared to visit and comment on other blogs as well. (For more advice/ideas and practice in commenting, check out the Comment Challenge activities)

Additional Advice

A few commenters had some additional advice:

Clark suggested:

Pick a good name (.blogspot or .wordpress is okay, but have a good 'meme'), and pick a professional design.

Ideally, have a branding that follows through on Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, etc.

Make it easy for people to follow (make your RSS feed easy, and have an email link, ala FeedBlitz).

Have different topics, and list your categories. Have a blogroll of people you follow. Do follow other folks, go out and comment on their posts; let people know you're active and supportive.

And Catherine said:

Personally, I generate readers when I teach, and when I present at conferences, plus I put my blog URL in appropriate e-mails and other communications. Getting listed in eLearningLearning has also helped.

Additional Resources
I'm going to close this post with some additional resources and links that might be helpful. And a BIG thank you to all the readers who commented and shared their advice. I think that together, we came up with a great (if a little overwhelming) guide!

• Blogging for Jobs, Visibility and Employer Research
• Chris Brogan's Best Advice for Personal Branding
• Know Your KASSIs to Build a Personal Brand
• Get Yourself a Reputation: Blogging for Personal Branding
• Personal Branding and Blogging
• Your Personal Brand: Does it Matter? (Hint--it does. You already have one whether you realize it or not). 
• How to Set Up Reputation Management and Online Monitoring for Free
• Debriefing Myself: A Noob's Experience After 100-ish Days of Blogging--Janet Clarey shares her observations of what it's like to be a blogger, which might be helpful if you're just starting out.

Flickr photos via Tonivc and  mexicanwave

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Blogging for Personal Branding: Your Best Advice?

We had our first webinar today for the folks at Career Commons. One of the questions that came up was how to use a blog for personal branding, particularly during the job search.  As Jesse put it in our call, "there's a broad blank canvas of possibilities when you start writing for your professional blog,  so how do you get started?"

Jesse had a great idea--he plans to start responding to the Learning Circuit's blog Big Question. I also shared some follow-up ideas and resources in the forum.  I'm wondering, though, what advice you have for the job seekers over at Career Commons.

Here are some questions:

• What's your best advice for job seekers who want to start a blog as part of their job search and personal branding process?

•  What kinds of posts could they write? How often should they write?
  

• What other advice do you have for a new blogger wanting to put his/her best professional foot forward at a time when the blogger really needs to be visible?

Let me know in comments or write your own post and drop me a link so we can share it with everyone. These are particularly important questions for all of us to think about in today's economy.

Reflective Diary Tool Flow Chart

REFLECTIVE DIARY TOOL - Get more Business Plans

Here's a neat little tool to support your reflective practice, especially useful for those of you who like a more structured approach. It could be an alternative (or a complement) to the "debriefing" I talked about a few months ago.

Reducing Mental Clutter: Some Solutions

 Yesterday's post on reducing my personal mental clutter apparently struck a chord with a lot of people.

Farhan and Steve Bridger are with me on the whole multiple open tabs thing. So is Talia. And Sarah Stewart apparently distracts herself with Twitter, while Christine Martell shares my angst about needing to get clearer about her big goals.

This is good. At least I know I'm not alone.

I promised to share some of what I'm trying to do to deal with the problem in today's post. But I'm also going to point to some of the ideas my readers had because isn't that why we spill our guts on the Interwebs in the first place? To get others to commiserate and share their ideas?

So this is what I've been doing:

1. Keep Gmail and Netvibes closed, except for specific periods during the day when I'll deal with email and read my feeds. This is something suggested by the GTD cult and by Tim Ferris, but it's advice that I find hard to take. It actually seems to cause me physical pain.

2. Minimize multi-tasking. Also difficult to do, but when I can I'm much more productive.

3. Observe the 2-minute rule. This is another GTD fix that I started with in 2008 but that fell by the wayside. It's back.

4. When I start thinking about other people and the problems I need to solve for them, stop myself and ask what I'm trying to avoid by doing this so I can get back on task. This one sounds a little strange, I know, but I've found that when I start thinking about how my ex needs to deal with our daughters, I know that I'm really just trying to NOT deal with something else. I'm trying to cut down on letting my "fixer" mode interfere with actually fixing things that I have the power to fix.

5. Limit the scope of work and stick to those limits. I have the capacity to give a client about 4 times more than they expect from me. This can be good, but it can also be a killer. Sometimes I've even found that they wish I'd given them less. Scope creep is a big problem, but I'm trying to keep it under control.

6. Journal every day to get stuff out of my head and down on paper. I'm trying to journal every morning and also when I feel like I have something to work through, just so I can get it out of my head. It seems to be helping.

7. Use index cards. This is a big one. I'm writing each task on a separate index card. I know it's both low-tech and environmentally un-friendly, but for now it's helping me organize and re-organize what needs to be done in a visceral kind of way. I can group related tasks together and also group by days of the week, hours of the day, etc. I know there are digital ways to do this, but for whatever reason, I'm needing something physical right now to ground me.

8. Work this as a process, rather than focusing on "Am I more productive today?" Sometimes when I focus too much on the end result ("I need to get my act together!") this actually becomes its own form of mental clutter. So what I'm trying to do is focus on the different elements, rather than my desired end result. Call it a 12-Step program with fewer steps.

I also got a lot of excellent ideas and feedback from commenters:

• Even though I mentioned daydreaming as a way to avoid work, Steve Bridger pointed out (and Amy Harbison agreed) that it can be a positive development too. His post also led me to a great resource called "Mindapples," where readers submit 5 daily things they do for mental health. It has a whole host of other strategies for me to explore and try.

• Cammy Bean reminded me that it's easy to get bogged down in doom and gloom,  but that the way to get back to "the glass is half full" is to focus on solutions. That's actually what led me to journal about this problem. I was getting sick of listening to my own whining and needed to find SOMETHING to do differently.

• Mike Slater said he leaves his computer and goes for a 2-3 hour walk when he needs to. That's something I find easier to do when the weather is nicer, but maybe I need to stop being such a big baby. At the least, maybe I need to play a little Wii tennis or something.

• Farhan  leaves open the tabs he needs to get a particular job done and closes everything else. He is also checking email only a few times a day. Amazingly, the world apparently keeps turning!

What else did we miss? What are your favorite ways to reduce mental clutter?

Flickr photo via FreeWill

Reducing Mental Clutter: Identifying the Problems

Being away from my computer for much of the past few weeks really showed me how much mental clutter I've been accumulating as a result of my bad digital habits. Over the past several months, I've taken multi-tasking to new and dangerous levels and had noticed a precipitous drop in productivity that seemed like it was spiraling out of control. I literally felt like my brain might explode.

One good thing about time away from my computer was that I used it to think and write in my journal, trying to figure out what was wrong. Among the bad habits I noticed:

• Having multiple windows open, especially Gmail and Netvibes, that I continually and obsessively monitored and responded to. I read every email as it came in and spent WAY too much time reading my feeds.

• Procrastination, even when there was no good reason to put something off. That left stuff sitting in my brain without resolution. 

• Daydreaming. This may have been a symptom of my mental clutter as much as being a source of problems, but I increasingly found myself going off into little mental fugue states as a sort of break. 

• Spending a lot of time thinking about how other people should deal with their problems. One of my personal mental issues is that I'm a "fixer." I usually know what YOU need to do to solve your problems and I spend a lot of time thinking about that. This tends to get worse when I feel stressed, because certainly it's better for me to think about what's wrong with other people rather than thinking about my own issues.

• Allowing my desk and office to become physically cluttered. I work out of a small bedroom in my house and there isn't a lot of space for unecessary paper and files. Yet I allowed this stuff to accumulate over weeks and months. It only got worse when my office became the Christmas staging room. By the week before Christmas, I had a tiny hole from which to work, with every other inch of space filled with file cabinets, boxes and wrapping paper.

• Not doing a good job of considering my work tasks in relationship to priorities. This played out in a few ways. One was working on things that seemed appealing at the time; I rationalized this as following my creative impulses, but it was really just a form of procrastination. I also didn't look at my larger goals and make sure I was working on activities each day that took me closer to those goals--a form of just getting through the work on hand, but not in a good way.

• Related to the whole goal/priority thing, I realized that I'm not really clear in my head about what my big goals and priorities should be. I'd become so reactive and responsive to work and issues coming into me, I lost track of what I really want to have happen. This created its own form of mental clutter that created a vicious cycle, blocking me from really knowing what I want to do work-wise.

Tomorrow I'm going to write about some of the solutions I came up with, but for now I'm wondering if you've experienced these kinds of issues.

Do you have habits that add to your mental clutter? What do you do to deal with them?

Flickr photo via Maandag