My 2007 in cities and celebrities

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I wanted to reflect on a few of those fun things, places, people and memories that entered my life this year this year. With no hesitation I present my year in cities and celebrities:

Cities

  • Boulder, CO (moved from here)
  • Denver, CO (to here)
  • San Francisco, CA (CommunityNext, birthday)
  • Bay Area, CA (San Jose, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Jelly Belly Factory)
  • Beijing, China (Spring Break, Great Wall, Forbidden City)
  • Shanghai, China (Incubator visit, Ex-pat panels, Pearl Tower)
  • Suzhou, China (tea garden)
  • Los Angeles, CA (training, bull riding, Manhattan/Venice/Huntington Beaches, Dodgers)
  • Cleveland, OH (more training, more bull riding, tequila, Indians)
  • Santa Fe, NM (visiting an old friend, culture)

Celebrities (they’re internet-famous)

…and so many more people. Some I didn’t even get to meet in person but had the opportunity to work with, talk to or cross paths (Ryan Healy and Ryan Paugh, Jeremy Wright, everyone at 9rules especially Scrivs, Tyme, Mike, seanrox, everyone from Startup Weekend (Micah, Michael, Charlie, John).

Anyway, a good year for new friendships and heres to many more!

Twitter is about me and you and you

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When you sign up and join Twitter it’s about a lot of things. Some say it’s an ecosystem, it’s about the simplicity, it’s about the voyeurism, it’s communication porn and so on.

I think it’s also like walking into a chatroom with just the people you want. Any other chatroom (IRC, AOL, Yahoo Games!) has a bunch of folks that are ‘noise’ and you’re not always interested in. With Twitter you can tune them out (setting: only see @replies to people you mutually follow). This is important because my experience is tailored to me and different from everyone else’s. I follow different people so even though my social circles may overlap with hundreds of people I don’t have to be involuntarily involved in those conversations.

When my experience is just about me and the people I want to interact with then I find that valuable. Facebook, Plaxo and LinkedIn have screwed this up because they’re overwhelming me with information about people that don’t always matter to me. MySpace realized that we should be able to opt-in to our friends because, of many reasons, some people change their profile picture too much, or leave groups too much, or add applications too much, or… whatever reason you want.

Twitter means the updates I receive are from the people I want, the conversations are with the people I want, and even more importantly: the content is limited to what they want (to divulge). I believe this control is missing from sites like Facebook and is why so many people hide and remove all their feed activity. In some cases, those are the people I want to ‘follow’ the most.

Google Docs and quick PDFs

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If you’re looking to create a quick PDF you can simply copy and paste your document (or spreadsheet) into Google Docs and export it to a PDF. Neat, huh?

Wait, why aren’t you using Google Docs as your primary word processor or spreadsheet application?

Pros

  • Access everything from home, work, neighbor’s computer.
  • Simple online interface and no bloated software to install.
  • Ability to share and easily collaborate.
  • Easy to post content online.
  • Revisions!

Cons

  • Cannot (yet?) access offline.
  • Big privacy and security concern.
  • No grammar checking.
  • Very simplistic styling (cannot change line spacing, header/footer, among others).

All my documents at work need to be done on my computer (in Microsoft Office) because of the collaboration tools we use. But, all my personal documents from now on are in Google Docs. What are your thoughts on online software? Any other pros/cons I missed?

Track your goals for the day, week or resolutions

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I’m a huge fan of simplicity; I’ve been working on de-cluttering, simplifying, and reducing the unnecessary in my life lately (which is why I’m in love with Zen Habits). I’ve started tracking the many things I want to do by using Joe’s Goals.

Joe’s Goals is a simple site where you set a goal (positive or negative), which days it applies to, it’s weighting (1 point? 2 points?) and then you have a simple grid with days across the top and goals across the side. As you complete a goal every day you check it. Joe’s Goals tracks this for me and serves as a simple checklist (with a history).

Joe's Goals

If you’re looking to start making change in your life, set up an account and set it as your homepage. I’ve done this and, again, being greeted (aware) of what you want to change is sometimes all it takes.

Improving my fitness with traineo

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I’ve decided it was time to focus a bit more on my personal health including my diet and exercise:

  • First Step: Joined a gym since moving. I’ve paid for the membership which allows me M/W/F/Sun access. I also scheduled 9-10pm on my calendar so that I keep it on my radar.
  • Second Step: Paid attention to what I eat. I’ve created my traineo account in order to track my diet (both quality and quantity). I use FitDay to quickly reference what kinds of calories I’m really eating.
  • Third Step: Paid attention to my activities. I’ve never really been aware of how active I am but by using traineo I can start to chart and improve my weekly workouts.

It’s not revolutionary but I’ve realized just being more aware of something can help you on your way to improving it.

Vacation ethics

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The dilemma is simple: I get next Tuesday off for Christmas (thanks, Christians) but I don’t get Christmas Eve off. I have a Monday gap. The same goes for New Years and New Years Eve. These floating days off in the middle of the week sound like “well you’d take those weeks off anyway.”

Wrong.

What if I don’t want to take the time off? What if I want to get lots done while everyone else is at home? What if I don’t celebrate Christ-related or late-night-binge-drinking holidays? I’m forced to shut down along with the rest of the country?

Okay, fine.

But I have no work to do on Monday. I have no clients to work with on Monday. Why don’t we just get Monday off, too? Hmm, I’m faced with the following:

  • Go to the office and sit there, alone, refreshing my email and trying to find something to do that will help develop my career.
  • Take the vacation day because I’m essentially forced to since everyone else is.
  • Work from home even though it’s not permitted and even though there will be nothing to do. Oh, and nobody would be around to notice.

What would you do in this situation?

Everyone is a consultant

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Penelope Trunk is predicting it: the end of consulting. I agree. I call myself a ‘consultant’ but I realized that all the work I’ve done in the last few years has been, in essence, “consulting.”

I’m not surprised, either. It’s easier than ever to become an expert (Wikipedia, right?) and it’s especially easy to work from home (Web Worker Daily rocks!). In fact, I intend to work from home or a number of remote client locations for the next few weeks. Heck, I work for a Big Four and I use Toggl to track my time across clients, projects and many other things.

That’s what I love about where I work. There’s a desire to be entrepreneurial, a leader in innovation. Our partner realizes we need to adapt and I strongly believe we’re all consulting for a variety of people (clients, colleagues, etc.). And once everyone is consulting, no one is consulting.

Sleeping at work and mentors

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…not with mentors, and mentors. My company matches you up with a mentor (typically a level or two above you) and you meet with them a few times a year to discuss your career, reviews, future, and so on. This is awesome because we’re forced to meet and do the things that often get overlooked.

Aside: my second engagement since starting work was out in California. On the first day we meet with the client after lunch in a dark room with a PowerPoint presentation on all kinds of stuff I really have no familiarity with. I started doing that head nod, eyelids droop thing. My supervisor across the table from me noticed. Yup, you know that’s going in the review!

So, as I sit here at lunch with my mentor and I tell him this story he stops and says “haha! I’ve got a better story than that…” and proceeds to tell me about how he, too, once started to doze while talking with a client. Score.

That’s what mentors are for. When we see that review come up we can just chalk it up to “first time” and be done with it. No more stress!