Networking and Sleeping

I’m behind in blog posts, I haven’t tweeted much lately, I can’t remember the last time I logged into that site! Oh, god, here’s another one. Hey looks cool. I’ll join. Woops, now I have to update it?! But, I’ve already got something similar. But everyone else is on it…Will I miss out? I said I’d start that wiki, but haven’t put anything on it yet. I started that group, but haven’t posted anything! Oh, and blog posts. Need more blog posts…

I’ve been out of the loop for the past three weeks or so and consequently feel fairly disconnected. Ah, this happens every now and again through those stages of insane life busy-ness that we all undoubtedly have at some point. While trying to reconnect myself though I started thinking about what makes someone a valuable member for their social networks (even if they drop off the face of cyberspace for a while!). It’s challenging to keep up with all the things that are going on – joining this that or the other new application/tool only to then discover that, as valuable as it is, it’s another account to keep up to date.

I am a member of quite a few different things, but I know I don’t use them all to my full potential or the network’s full potential. I do contribute, but I’m sure I could do more. Although, that’s a dangerous way to think sometimes, as there is always more that can be done, or something that can be improved.

I can’t possibly contribute to every network that I’m part of everyday or else I would never have time to plan for school, cook a meal (even though I try to avoid doing that anyway) or simply sit and chat with my husband.

What does it mean to be a valuable network member? Some of my ideas follow. Please leave your own in a comment!

How to be an effective network member and still have time to sleep:

There really is no secret. For me, it’s about focus. It’s the same when facing a reader full of feeds and feeling overwhelmed. It’s about deciding what I want to get out of a particular network for a given session and focusing on that. I think of it this way:

Problem: Haven’t written on my blogs for a while. Need to write better quality posts

Solution: Decide that for this afternoon or whenever that my aim is to write however many blog posts. Do that. Don’t have Twitter on. Email is No Go Zone.

Problem: Haven’t had an good conversations on Twitter lately. Feeling out of the loop. Watching too many good conversations with interesting people who aren’t following me!

Solution: Ignore my blogs. Don’t visit anyone elses. Don’t worry about commenting for a while. Just focus on putting up some good thoughts in Twitter, posting some good links and maybe follow a couple of new people.

Problem: Delicious links a mess and don’t even know how to use Diigo yet.

Solution: Ignore blogging. Forget my podcast. Maybe leave Twitter on though cause undoubtedly there will be someone there who can help me out.

Problem: Have not even logged into many ning networks!

Solution: Question whether I really need to be part of them all? If I don’t have time to contribute, should I even be there? Probably not. Then, get cup of tea. Take laptop into bedroom. Climb back into bed. Stay there until important ones have been chosen and contributed to. Maybe add something to them once a week or fortnight. Can only do what I can do.
I think the key thing for me to remember is that in this age of mass amounts of (digital and very easy to access) information I cannot possibly know, be part of or absorb everything. I don’t really want to be a ‘jack of all trades and a master of none.’ I want my main blog, technoLOTE (language teaching and technology) to grow, so that will be my main focus.

Oh to be a Master… :-)

6 Tips for Taking Control of Your Unruly RSS Feeds

feeds.jpg feeds.JPG picture by fishkeeperswifeI have subscribed to (what for me is) quite a few blog and discussion feeds and on many occasion I find it very overwhelming to even open my reader to see all the posts I’ve got there to read. I’m one of those people who likes to have everything neat and tidy and finished, so I struggle to leave too many unread feeds for too long. Yes, I’ve done it. I’ve hit ‘Mark all items as read’ from time to time. I honestly don’t know how people who’ve got hundreds of feeds (I’ve got 80-odd) actually cope with them all. Tell us your secrets! Anyway, I sat down yesterday and tried to take more control of my unruly RSS feeds and here are a few tips that I came up with. Some of these tips have been adapted from a post on Zen Habits called Email Zen: Clean Out Your Inbox

1. Be Cruel
I found that I was just skipping over posts in some feeds because they were rehashing the same thing that many other people were writing about, and that there were just a few feeds I had subscribed to because I thought I should. So, I deleted a few. If I need them again, I know where to find them. The trick is not keeping something because you might need it, it’s knowing where to get it if you need it again. Be honest and be cruel. Delete those feeds you know you don’t really read. Be realistic about how much you can read and how often.

2. Organise into Folders
This really helps me to make sense of all the feeds that are coming in. I love categorising things and making lists, so grouping feeds into folders is something I can’t do without. With folders, I can see which group of feeds has a few things for me to read and judging by what category I’ve put them in, I can make a decision whether those feeds are something I want to read at any given time. For example, if I am not interested in reading any blogging advice today, but I want to catch up on what’s going on with the MFL teaching blogs that I’m subscribed to, then I go straight to that folder and concentrate on those feeds for the time being. With a restricted amount of feeds in the folder it helps me to feel less overwhelmed by the amount I have to read.

3. Prioritise your reading
We all know which blogs we read the most because we find them interesting and important. For me at the moment, these are my 31 Day Challenge Team, MFL Teaching Blogs, AUS edubloggers and a few US and UK edubloggers. They are the folders I will always look at first. These are the blogs I am most likely to comment on (the ones I plan to comment on more often!) and really become part of the communities surrounding them. There are some feeds I subscribe to just for resource purposes, for example – the mLearning and eLearning Resources folders. I don’t make a point of commenting on these blogs, and don’t necessarily read the feeds each time. Knowing that I don’t HAVE to read them helps to make the whole process less overwhelming.

4. Browse quickly, star items and then concentrate on reading those
One thing you could do is to browse through your feeds, reading the first one or two lines of each post and maybe a heading that stands out and use this information to decide whether you will read the whole thing. If you decide to read it all, star it. Then, once you’ve gone through your whole list this way, go back to your starred items and spend some time with them. If there are lots of blog posts for you to get through, you will be able to quickly tell which ones are covering similar ground and you can then decide which ones of those you will actually read. If you are coming across lots of articles in your reader about the same topic, see tip number 1. The only thing with browsing feeds and starring things for later, is that you have to actually get back to them later! Oh, the challenges…

5. Print longer posts out to read later
I don’t know about you, but I can’t do all of my reading on a compute screen. I’ve had enough after a while, but I still need time to read those longer posts. I know printing lots of things out if not very environmentally friendly, but I am not advocating that you print every post, just the longer ones that you really want to read but keep avoiding. Pull them out when you are in the waiting room at the dentist or doctors, or when you are on the train or even just when you prefer lying on the couch to sitting upright in front of your computer.
6. If the post is short enough for you to read immediately, do so.
One trap to getting things done is to fall into the ‘I’ll do it later’ hole. Oh there’s a lot to read there, I’ll do it later. Hmm, I’ve got a lot to say in that blog post, I’ll write it later. Of course you can’t always do everything on the spot, but doing as much as you can helps. Once you put something in the ‘I’ll do it later’ basket, how often do you come back to it? Honestly? If you do, that’s fantastic, but for many of us, putting it in that basket often means it stays there for quite a while and then either gets thrown out because the basket is too full or the ‘Mark all items as read’ button gets pressed! If a post can be read right then and there, read it. If you are sitting down thinking you are going to check your feeds when you really should be doing something else therefore you have no time to really read them, then don’t even open them up. Being rushed will only help you to feel more overwhelmed. Well, it does for me anyway.

I hope these tips are helpful. Please help me add to them! How do you manage your feeds? Don’t keep it a secret!

Just in case you were wondering, I use the reader in Flock to read my feeds because I really like the nice big layout they have. I sometimes feel that Google Reader is a bit cramped and I like things to be clear. I regularly export my feeds from Flock to Google Reader though, so then I have an online version as well. More on what else I do with my Flock browser soon!

If you’re interested in reading some blogging tips, check out these posts: Hey Good Lookin’ – advice for choosing a blog theme, 5 Ways Blogging is Like Running a Cafe and Being Yourself for the Betterment of Your Blog.

Blogged with Flock