Is MySpace the New Pot?

In the December 31 column “On Blogs” by Troy McFCullough in the
Baltimore Sun “’07 may be year bloggers break free of all the hype.”

Daryl Plummer, chief Gartner fellow, is quoted by the Associated Press about blogs:

“A lot of people have been in and out of this thing. …Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they’re put on stage and asked to say it.”

Then this morning, according to ResourceShelf, which is “.. where dedicated librarians and researchers share the results of their directed (and occasionally quirky) web searches for resources and information.” (If you aren’t actually a librarian, you might have NOT idea about the kinds of quirky things these pros can dig up. How about the “Atlas to Plucked Instruments”? Wait, I digress…)

The ResourceShelf reported this morning:

More than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Past President Bill Clinton may made the most famous denial of his association with marijuana in March of ’92 when he said simply, “I didn’t inhale.” But he certainly was neither the first nor the last to get poked because may — or may not — have dabbled in drugs. The more accessible the forbidden is the more people will try them. (n.b. I am NOT encouraging or condoning drug use or experimentation. I am mother, for cryin’ out loud!)

Today, checking on a candidate’s past drug use is as common as checking on the attitudes and dalliances of his youth. It’s part of the business of politics. Tomorrow, it will be checking them on the internet or in the archives of ancient online BulletinBoards, UserGroups, MySpace,YouTube and other such on line social networks.

In my opinion parents today go way over board by teaching children to fear strangers. We all need healthy respect for that with which we have no experience. We don’t (please tell me you don’t) send money to Nigerians who send emails offering us millions of dollars for our help. We don’t eat food we find in the street.

We can be polite if someone asks for directions. But we don’t get in the car with them to take them to their destination. Respect vs. fear.

I am not making a statement about drugs here. Don’t suppose I am. Don’t infer it. I am not talking about drugs.

However, I am talking respect.

We must not fear MySpace or the internet. We must be careful; we must it wisely. Because in the end, the ether is absolutely NOT PRIVATE. And your mother WILL find out what you did here.

Happy New Year.
Watch what you say!

Kerch

Make time for the mess

Yesterday two of my friends sent me links to this article in the New York Times: Saying Yes to Mess. One friend — this would be the friend who does NOT have ADHD – attached a note saying: “I should not send this to you. It only reinforces the futility of your struggle.” The other one, a comrade in the struggle, said: “Yesssss! Up to a point, anyway.”

Personally, I think that’s the key. “Moderation in all things.”

My father, not one big on moderation, insisted, “There is a place for everything and everything goes in its place.” If I would just always put stuff back where it belonged then I’d always know where it was. And I would never waste any time looking for the thing. But, in fact, I do know where most of my stuff is. And maybe the time I spend looking for what I can’t find offsets the time I would spend cleaning it up.

I believe moderation is making the piles neat enough so they can be contained and do not threaten to topple or explode. Moderation is putting all the collected out-of-place stuff into one box so I know where to look for it. Or so it’s contained and more easily sorted later. Moderation is understanding that clean enough is just that.. clean enough. I prefer one of my grandmother’s mottos: “It’s better dusty than broken.”

I asked a neighbor who always seemed to have a perfectly neat house, “How much time do you spend each day doing house work?” She listed the time she spent cleaning up the kitchen and making beds and doing a little laundry, running the vacuum and dusting a little. I’m sure it was about two hours – every day! Man, I got stuff to do in those two hours that’s more important TO ME than cleaning. But you gotta know what your priorities are. Clean house was never one.

My husband likes his underwear folded neatly and put in his dresser drawers. He can’t understand why I shove my mine in the drawer just as it comes out of the laundry basket. He thinks it doesn’t take any time to fold underwear before you put it in the drawer. Have you ever actually figured out how much longer it takes to turn an undershirt right-side out and fold it? Let me tell you, it’s a lot longer than just shoving it in the drawer! And when I can no longer look in the drawer and tell the difference between panties and bras, I should just get locked away in a home!

If I take the plastic wrap off the new container of mushrooms and put it on the kitchen counter, my husband seems to think that I should stop everything and throw it immediately away. He claims it doesn’t take any time to do that. But that’s not true. Besides, if I stopped to put the trash away, I might forget the important part of the job I had set out to do, like, maybe, make dinner!

Jerrold Pollak, a neuropsychologist at Seacoast Mental Health Center in Portsmouth, N.H., pointed out in the Times article that which we messies already know: “Total organization is a futile attempt to deny and control the unpredictability of life.”

Life is unpredictable – and messy! I can’t control the weather. I can’t control when the phone rings. And I can’t control where the lid of the spice bottle falls.

By the way, if it goes under the stove, I just put a plastic bag over the top of the jar, secure it with a rubber band and call it a day. I am NOT putting MY hand under the stove to pull out that lid! And if I fished it out with a broom handle, you wouldn’t want it back on the jar anyway! So why should I waste time fetching that which I can not see and is not in my way and is of no further use anyway?

David H. Freedman, who the NYT calls a “mess analyst,” and Eric Abrahamson are authors of “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder,” out in two weeks from Little, Brown & Company. They suggest this great “mess strategy:” … “create a mess-free DMZ … and acknowledge areas of complementary mess.” For me it could mean that there shall be no, er, very little mess in the living room. But the basement? That’s a whole different world. If my dear husband wants to keep every scrap of wood that he ever cut off the end of a board, he can do it in the basement.

Einstein’s oft-quoted remark, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?”

I knew I liked Einstein!

Signature Files for Advertising

In my continuing rant on the simple things of business, I wrote a piece for the ADHD Coaches Organization about using a signature file, also called a sig file — those short couple of lines at the end of your emails that tell people who you are and a pass on a tiny bit of advertising about your business.

From the article:

It should not be more than about seven to ten lines long. It should contain at least your full name with appropriate credentials, your business name, your web site address and your phone number. I also include my street address and my email address – just in case the body of my email is detached from the header (the top part of an email that includes the to/from info).

If you send a joke to your mother and she sends it on, then your info will follow with it. I can’t tell you how many random emails I’ve gotten from people looking for a coach who found out about me because of those couple lines of text at the end of an email they read someplace — someplace in which I was not particularly trying to advertise!

You can have different sig files for different kinds of correspondence. I have one for emails about the ACO (ADHD Coaches Organization), one for the work I do with our local CHADD chapter.

Read the full article here.

And, just FYI, here’s the file I use most often:

———-
Kerch McConlogue, CPCC, PCC
              Clients with too many ideas are my passion!
Map the Future
701 Hunting Place
Baltimore, MD 21229

VOICE:        410.233.3274
WEBSITE:   www.mapthefuture.com
                   www.fixmybylaws.com
EMAIL:        Kerch@mapthefuture.com

Jumping Monkeys

Mark Forster ususally has great tips for organizing your life in his blog called Get Everything Done. But now, perhaps as a holiday gift, he posted a link to this great time waster! Check it out. A jumping monkey game Air Monkey.

Hey, I call this post a “flick” from the Caltech practice I stumbled on close to ten years ago, I’m sure.

Flicking is the art of actively avoiding work.

True masters of the art may also practice advanced flicking. This rarefied art is in concept very simple: it involves doing other, less important work, rather than the true work at hand. Even normally onerous and necessary jobs such as dishwashing are advanced flicking, if a paper is due on the next day. Homework itself may be advanced flicking if it is more necessary for the dishes to be washed.

So I am doing something “important” — sharing with you — instead of something which is probably more important — organizing my office!

Have fun.
Happy day after Turkey Day.

kerch

Who the heck IS FamousPerson@AOL.com*

It has generally bugged me when otherwise seemingly professional business people use an email address with someone else’s domain name. If you actually WORK for AOL or MSN or even GOOGLE, then, even if you think the address is cheesy, you’re sorta stuck with it.

But people with their own businesses ought to have an address that encourages correspondents to think of them in that professional manner. The email address you first got when you were 12 (something like flowerchild2456@hotmail*) is probably no longer appropriate if you own, say, a private investigating business. I know Lynn Levy has another address, but the published one uses her domain name. Way to go Lynn.

I had generally considered people who use free addresses to be somehow not quite “up on the low down,” if you know what I mean. FamousPerson@aol.com* just doesn’t quite ring true. I mean how famous can you be? And if you’re just trying to be famous, seems to me you’d want something to set you apart from the 63bagillion people who use AOL or gmail or, in my opinion even worse, the address that comes from your internet provider — which, you may remember, is what AOL was back in the day.

Lena West, a guest blogger over at Lip-Sticking: Smart Marketing to Women OnLine made a great point yesterday when she said:

If you think AOL/Yahoo/MSN or any of these other companies need your help in advertising their companies, I have a bridge I want to sell you.

HA! You’re advertising AOL/Yahoo/MSN! You think they need YOUR money? Well, thank you very much. See my priority #2. People who want to give me money… I’m sure they’re all happy to take your money. But do you choose to give it? Or would you rather keep it yourself.

I hadn’t actually thought about using an AOL address as advertising for someone else. I just figured people who did it were just lazy. Or worse, in my opinion, not very smart — especially for a business owner!

Lena pointed us over to Seth Godin’s post on the topic. He calls people who use free email addresses, “Lazy people in a hurry.” But guess what?! (I am so disappointed) Seth Godin, Marketing Guru Extraordinaire, has a typepad address — sethgodin.typepad.com — a free blogging platform. Oh the hypocrisy of it all!

Nevertheless, even your parents told you, “Do as I say and not as I do.” You lived to learn from them and try something new.

So get yourself your own domain name and your own email address. You can do it thru GoDaddy.com Get a domain name and get an address. If you can’t figure out how to change your in-house system, set the new address to forward all mail to the address you have now — If you can’t figure out how to maneuver thru the godaddy site, get a high school kid to help you. It’s just not that hard.

PS. GoDaddy will offer you all kinds of extra “features” like private registration which keeps your street address and name private from people who would like to know who you really are. You really don’t get much from paying extra for a private registration. Besides that, what if you have a great name but go out of business? Wouldn’t you like someone to find you if they want to PAY YOU MONEY for your domain name?

If you publish the address, and of course you’ll do that, right? I mean what’s the point if you don’t? You want business, right? Private registration keeps people from finding your street address, but, in my opinion, not much more. And for goodness sakes, even the government has your street address, so how safe can that information be?

* These email address are PFA (Plucked from air) — Made up. I apologize to who ever might actually HAVE these addresses. Also, I send my sincere condolences.