infoarch

How do you get things done? Do you have a method you follow? I’ve written about this before . A lot of times actually. The trigger to write about it again is my continuous surprise how little people have a method to work productively. Actually everybody has a method, at least implicitly, and sometimes it’s pretty OK. But often I see people struggle. Usually this is because they don’t have a productivity approach and/or there are all kinds of loose ends in their method. I follow the ‘Getting things done’ productivity approach by David Allen . I follow it fairly strictly and revisit the books quite regularly to see if I can do better. I read ‘Getting things done’ for the first time when I was about two years into work life. I was struggling. I had a method, but it wasn’t working. I wasn’t in control and often forgot to do tasks. ‘Getting things done’ was a revelation to me. After reading it I thought: This is it, everybody should read this. This should be a mandatory course at univ...

Some time ago my friend Ana Silva wrote a n interesting post about a very important topic: digital literacy . Please read her post (and the comments). The main point of her post is that we should not assume people get the internet or get social media and will start working out in the open by themselves. Some do, but many need to be helped. We have to teach them, step-by-step, to be digitally literate. This is hard work. I’ve written about this topic quite a bit as well using a different term: ‘personal knowledge management’ . How do we become more productive working out in the open and using the new (and old) social concepts and tools? As I wrote in a comment on Ana’s post, this is not a small issue. Recently the Dutch newspaper I read ( nrc.nl ) ran an extra section of the newspaper about ‘searching in a smarter way on the internet’ (Dutch: Slimmer zoeken op internet’). Very interesting stuff with all kinds of tips & tricks to improve the way you use the internet. But wh...

Oscar Berg wrote a blogpost about a short discussion we had on Google+ recently. In his interesting post he shares  how he consumes and shares social media . Over on his blog I commented on his post by asking him some questions about his strategy. But I thought I'd share my strategy here as well. I've shared my strategy in the past , but it has changed over the years. Here's my current strategy in one picture: A couple of remarks about the picture: I use Flipboard to interact with my Twitter Lists (3 lists) and Google+. I also consume the HBR-, National Geographic-, Vimeo-, and Instagram-feed there. I read interesting tweets right away or email them to my inbox to read them later. I view my Twitter search every now-and-then on Twitter.com. But will move that to Flipboard as well after reading Oscar’s post. I read my feeds in Google Reader. If I want to read a post I star it and make sure I find time during the day/week to read the starred items. When I know I’ll...

A conference about social media, organized using social media and presented by experienced social media enthusiast, can that be done? Yes, it can. I was part of such a conference a couple of weeks ago. It was called 'The Social Media in Practice Event' (Dutch: Social media in de praktijk) . Ronald van den Hoff of Society 3.0 kicked off the event. He gave an interesting talk about the influence of the internet and social media on society, and its implications for businesses. I liked how he stressed businesses should be built around passion and learning from mistakes. They should be ever more open to what's happening around them or else they will be eclipsed. Interestingly he also said large companies will get smaller and smaller and independent contractors/free agents will be the 'companies' of the future. I also went to Roos van Vugt 's breakout about leading into social media. She works for Deloitte and explained how see introduced and is cultivating socia...

A long time ago I blogged about the IT Flower . I thought is was a very interesting diagram and I still use it regularly. I find it helps people understand the different types of work, how things get done and how they are(n't) support by tools in companies. Recently I read Harold Jarche 's post about "Informal Learning is a Business Imperative" . I find his work on social learning and personal knowledge management highly interesting. Most of his posts contain lots of food for thought and have interesting diagrams to chew on. This post did as well. The diagram in this post clearly shows the different types of work and how they relate to different types of learning. This fits perfectly on my two above-mentioned posts about the IT Flower. This diagram is an extra layer focused on types of work and learning. (Or the other way around, whatever you like!) I’m also happy to see that the diagram shows that even in very structured work there are still non-routine tas...