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Live Tweeting Events: A Contrarian's View

Friday, July 31, 2009

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about live tweeting during events.  It appears to be “all the rage” for some, but here’s my (admittedly contrarian) view:  Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Learning Versus Reporting

My reason is simple:  You can’t do two things well at the same time  – which has also been the theme spreading around Twitter for the past few weeks.  Consequently, if you stop to tweet during a seminar, YOU will lose part of what the speaker’s saying.  Not maybe, definitely.  In the end, it’s your loss and you’re free to accept that in the name of viral publishing.  However, I challenge you to review that decision based on the reasons for being at the event.  Is it to learn something or to report it to others? 

Reporters do this all the time, but they are primarily at the event to report to others.  You also “distract” yourself to take notes during a presentation, but I would posit to you that they are quicker and less intrusive to your learning experience.

Ultimately, I attend events to learn something (hopefully) from the speaker.  Thus, I generally want to focus that time on what they have to offer, not to regurgitate it for others.

Incomplete Thoughts

Tweeting snippets of a larger presentation is the equivalent of extracting sound bites from a press conference.  They are incomplete and often result in mis-communicating the intended message.  Is there value in sound bites?  Some.  Is it worth the lost learning opportunity?  Not in my opinion.

Respect for the Speaker

As a speaker, I accept that not everyone is paying attention all the time.  I also accept that it’s my responsibility to engage the audience.  However, I believe the audience has some responsibility to the speaker as well.  Consider what yours is before tweeting.

This is a quick-and-dirty post on the subject which I hope generates discussion.  My parting thought is to think before you tweet.  Even 140 characters can be meaningful if done with malice aforethought!

Ideas to Action: The Little Engine That Could

Thursday, July 16, 2009

I’ve often said that everyone has good ideas; it’s those who do something with them that succeed.

One of the most difficult things to do is convert an idea into action.  It doesn’t matter if it’s an idea for a new business or for getting new clients, a personal or professional goal, or simply visiting a new place in the world, getting it from inside our heads to the light of day is often a struggle. 

One of the biggest struggles is simply finding the time to make it happen.  Yet, time management is not really at issue here.  The real issue is prioritization.  It’s amazing what gets done simply because we decide it’s going to get done or because it is assigned some “obvious” higher priority.  High priority items are always get high priority.  No argument, right?  A bit of a circular argument if you ask me.  My challenge to you is to change that perspective. 

What I’m asking you to do is reconsider what is high priority and what isn’t.  Before tossing your coffee at the screen or stomping away from the computer convinced I’m a soft-on-work nut, consider my perspective:  Accomplish makes me feel good.  Feeling good is my definition of success.  Therefore, the more I accomplish the more successful I am.  As a result, I strongly believe in getting as much done as possible, professionally and personally, to maximize the sense of success I enjoy.

I think you’ll find that layering this accomplishment perspective onto the priority question drives some different decisions making.  Specifically, to get ideas to actions, you must really decide if the accomplishment of the idea will make you feel better.  If so, then you need to proceed to the hard part – prioritize accordingly and define the specific tasks necessary to convert the idea into action.

In addition, you’ll realize that a lot of good ideas are just that – good ideas.  They aren’t necessarily going to significantly increase your sense of satisfaction and well being if accomplished.  Moreover, you may find that  the arduousness of accomplishment doesn’t merit the reward that accomplishment will deliver. 

Try blending how valuable accomplishing a good idea will be with the effort required before you determine what priority the good idea has.  You’ll find it greatly helps in the initial decision making stage, which is often the most ambiguous.

Take Five – How A Little Break Goes A Long Way

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Rushing to meetings to appointments to teleconferences and back again.  Ah, the life of a busy professional.  Whenever I work with a client who is scheduled back-to-back I am often put in mind of the disheveled teacher charging down the school hallway, papers flying asunder, racing to her next class.

In fact, change that imagery only slightly and you’ll have a more apt description of what’s really going on during that charge down the hall.  Imagine that instead of papers floating to the floor, what’s getting lost are ideas and tasks. 

To state it even more directly, when we schedule ourselves back-to-back, we never get a chance to “finish” one meeting before “starting” the next.  We are still thinking about the last event as we enter the next one, resulting in lost information on both ends.  That’s because we begin to forget details about the prior meeting and we aren’t focused yet on the current meeting.  It’s ineffective and inefficient and, more importantly, it’s unnecessary.

Solution: Schedule at least five minutes between all appointments.

If you give yourself five minutes between events, you’ll have a moment to jot down or otherwise record all the pertinent information about the last event before entering the next one.  This will greatly increase your effectiveness and your information capture in terms of thoughts, ideas and tasks that originated during the last meeting.  Plus, you will enter the next appointment focused and fresh, ready to address the issues presented there.

Effecting this change is relatively easy once you make the decision it’s valuable.  My recommendation is to be like TBS (Turner Broadcasting System) – start your meetings on the 5′s – 00:05 and 00:35.  If you use Outlook, simply set your meetings for those times, which is especially effective if you use the Invite function in Outlook.  You can also direct anyone who schedules you to do the same.  Finally, you can regularly and repeatedly communicate your desire to do so to everyone with whom you meet, creating a bit of cultural shift in the process.

When you’re asked why the change, you explain that you want to give your full attention to every appointment.  By putting five minutes in between each, you are assured of capturing everything from the last event and of starting the next event fully focused.  Oh, and by the way, you might even have time to grab a cup of coffee or catch up on some other items (voice mails, e-mails, etc.) during that five minutes – assuming you’ve already completed your primary objective and still have some time left!

Try scheduling a few minutes between meetings to see if it increases your effectiveness and efficiency, while also reducing your stress.

The Insanity of "Unread" – More On Treating E-mail Like Correspondence

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

One of the more common behaviors I run into when working with audiences or individual coaching clients is the “ureading” of e-mail.  Now here is a Top 10 contestant for insane things we do simply because we don’t know what else to do! 

Unreading e-mail involves selecting and reading an e-mail, then right clicking on it and marking it Unread.  The purpose is, of course, to make it appear bold again because it’s important and needs our attention.

Let’s review this behavior.  It is the functional equivalent of opening a piece of physical mail, reading it, then putting it back in the  envelope and returning it to the inbox!  For many, given the amount of time it will take to get back to that item, you might as well put a stamp on it and mail it to yourself (again and again and again…).  Net result:  Lots of Activity with no corresponding Productivity! 

We all know the definition of insanity, right?  Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  Unreading e-mail fits squarely into that definition.  This behavior exacerbates the current sense of hamster-on-the-wheel syndrome we all experience.

The solution is to treat e-mail like the correspondence it is.  If it’s junk delete it.  If it’s archival or reference information, file it away either in your e-mail sub-folders or DMS system or, using File, Save As, as a document on your hard drive.  If it contains an action item, either adopt/develop a workflow management method (like QuietSpacing(tm)) or drag and drop it to a new Task.  Just don’t Unread it and come back to it again and again hoping that either (a) you will now have time to do it, lest you need to Unread it again, or (b) it has magically done itself or is no longer ripe for execution!

Approaching e-mail like regular old-school correspondence provides a number of ready solutions to the never-ending stream of information that comes our way through this valuable, but overwhelming, form of communication.  It really is up to each of us to find a way to command this particular method.