bookmark_borderWhat value social media?

Future of personal social media

Is personal (or perhaps personable) social media on the way out?

I’ve been on… in… using… making… I’m not even sure which verb to use but that’s by the by… let me start again.

I’ve been ‘involved’ with social media for a long time now, certainly longer than the term itself existed (round ’ere, t’were all fields.. etc) and recently, with yet another option starting to make some noise in my own circles I’ve been wondering about where my future with social media lies.

What value social media?

I am not a follower whore, but then my livelihood doesn’t depend on my internet presence, so as a hobbyist internet user I have a different view of the value I get from social media. For those who worry about stats, how to improve their coverage and saturation is important, but as I use social media on a personal level my value judgements are very different.

For me it boils down to a simple equation, what is my return for the energy I spend on social media?

Recently I closed down my Google+ profile because I wasn’t expending any energy or time using it so, obviously, it wasn’t giving me anything back. My lack of desire to invest made it an easy decision to close that account down. Zero investment. Zero loss.

But could I do that with Facebook? Possibly, although it has some uses for keeping up to date with friends and family (as opposed to, you know, phoning or visiting them). I don’t use it all that often, and it’s definitely not where I focus my energy. Equally I rarely get ‘news’ via Facebook. Low investment. Medium loss.

Could I close my Twitter account? Again possibly, but of them all it’s the most ‘fun’. It’s also the easiest way for me to get a view of the world that is different from mine and due to the nature of the medium I’m much more relaxed about ‘missing’ any updates. But the world of Twitter is changing, adverts are becoming more and more prominent, and some people are starting to look elsewhere. That said, Twitter is where I’m most active and where I find out what’s going on in the lives of my ‘internet friends’. High investment. High loss.

Another channel

It’s not the first time this has happened – anyone remember App.net? – and the current noisy startup is Ello which is promising to be ‘ad-free’. And yet, after only a few days of noise, there has been a tempering of enthusiasm. This cycle has happened before but it seems to have quickened around the launch of Ello. The realisation that there is a business, money and investment behind something being offered to us for free is an obvious one that many still don’t always consider, and why should they when places like Facebook offer no ‘harm’ (on the surface at least, which is where most people focus).

And there is the key. The many millions of people who use these free services, monetising them, who don’t mind how Facebook makes money, just that they can use it for free. It’s a simple enough equation.

My social media

What of my usage? There is no doubt it’s changing. I find myself looking for where the value lies and where I want to ‘exist’. Facebook, despite a recent slimming down of my friends list, remains a chore. It feels like I have to use it because so many of my friends and family do, whereas most of my internet friends are more active on Twitter.

Even then I find myself dipping in and out of Twitter much less often than I used to, perhaps my interesting is waning there too? It’s hard to tell.

I know the value I’ll get out of these things is largely a result of what I put in and, as I continue to streamline and minimising the things in my life that aren’t all that important (or don’t bring much value) then I’m not expecting any of the above to change.

bookmark_borderBye Bye Foursquare

4sq badges

I’ve had an on/off relationship with Foursquare for a few years now. I started using it in March 2010, and the whilst the initial fun of using a ‘location based app’ (this was a few years ago when such things were new) quickly faded, it was replaced by a level of usefulness through discovery, particularly as I moved into the fair city of Glasgow.

So I would dutifully log in to the places I visited and was rewarded with badges and mayorships and other such ‘gamification’ tricks. I did use it quite often to see what else was close by as I wandered around, and it proved useful when visiting other cities; not so much when travelling abroad though, thanks to the varying cost of data charges.

These days though I have a better service for finding local places, Yelp. I’ve been using Yelp since December 2012 but it’s already proven useful. I use it mostly for finding places to eat or drink, but beyond that it’s also got a wonderful community aspect to it, with coordinated events (taster menus, guided walks and more) that have helped me get out and about a lot more than I used to in the past.

I’m not really sure why I stuck with Foursquare for so long, but it’s now gone from my iPhone. Oddly whilst I question the value of things and how much benefit they can bring me, and the converse for things that drain time or energy, Foursquare remained. Perhaps it’s the hope that that data might one day be useful?

For the last few months I’ve been grabbing my Foursquare checkins and logging them in my journal (Day One) but I’ve not once looked back at the data.

Ultimately I have no good reason to use Foursquare anymore. It offers me no value (I’ve never gotten a discount anywhere for checking in, nor used the data for anything of note) so it’s time to say goodbye.

All of this creates another problem, I now have a free spot on my homescreen! Ahhhh, such are the trials and tribulations of living in this day and age.

In related news, I think this is the most ‘first world problems’ style post I’ve ever written!

bookmark_borderPodcasts

Podcasts

I’m way way behind the curve on podcasts and I’m laying the blame firmly on my parents and their use of radio.

I grew up in a house where music was the backdrop to most activities – my first hearing of Appetite for Destruction? My Dad loaned the cassette from the library and I walked in as Welcome to the Jungle kicked off, epic! – so I never really had much of a view of things like the Shipping Forecast, radio plays and so on. I’m sure my parents did listen to ‘talk radio’ on occasion just not when I was around so I’ve always associated radio with music.

I won’t bore you with tales of recording the Top 10 to cassette, but my maturing musical tastes have mirrored my growing distaste for radio DJs and all the talking, yak yak yak they go, largely spouting nonsense and noise when all I really want is to listen to the music. So I’d turn off the radio and start listening to my own music; the rise of the MP3 made this approach all the more satisfying.

Of course the real problem wasn’t radio at all, but my choice of radio stations. Thank heavens for the internet I say, as I’ve many more ways to find music I like and, as the charts descended in mass produced pap… sorry, pop, I increasingly looked to the Pitchforks of the world to find new music. For quite a while I eschewed all radio as, wrongly, rubbish.

Recently that’s been changing as I’ve switched on (sorry!) to the richness and depth of talk radio, and whilst that’s largely been via Radio 4 at present, I’ve been enjoying the discussions, debates, and plays on offer. But how did I get here?

Bye Bye Radio

From tapes, to MiniDiscs, to CDs, I’ve spent countless hours creating playlists and recording it to the media of the moment. Where MP3s triumphed was speed, create a playlist on your computer and seconds later it’s copied to a USB stick. Roll forward a few years and, with all my music stored on my iPod, a quick sync was all it took to update several playlists and I had hours and hours of music at my fingertips.

An avid consumer of new music, I’d scour review sites and buy several new albums every fortnight or so, soon building a bank of new artists and albums (yes, I had a system for this to make sure everything got a good rotation).

So with my appetite for music being whetted elsewhere, and perhaps with my advancing years, I looked around for something a little less full-on for my morning commute.

Talk is cheap

Most mornings I’ll listen to the news as I drive to work, although it depends how much tolerance I have for whatever topic they are manhandling into a forced argument on any given day. Leaving work at odd hours to drive home (sometimes mid-afternoon, sometimes late evening) meant I was exposed to more of the planning and soon found I was getting drawn in and seeking out more alternatives.

Hello Podcasts

Podcasts are not new, I’ve listened to a few now and then but in the past, with my association for radio (which is still how I view podcasts oddly) being music, none of them ever stuck. Perhaps I was just listening to the wrong podcasts, god knows there are some awful ones out there but that’s the same for everything.

However, I was determined to find podcasts that work for me, so after a fair bit of digging I’ve not got a nice workable solution that gives me a selection of podcasts available to me on any of my Apple devices.

The latter part of that solution is provided by Downcast, a multi-device podcast app which syncs my playlists. It’s installed on my iPhone, my iPad, and both MacBooks, so if music isn’t cutting it I can get to many different podcasts and usually find something to keep my attention.

Admitedly some of my these aren’t strictly podcasts but recordings of radio shows but I’ve never really been one for following rules, all I know is that they are spoken word recordings that give me an option when the radio fails me and I’m not in the mood for music.

My current playlist includes:

Do you listen to podcasts? If so, any recommendations to share?

bookmark_borderTackling Tasks

Tasks in motion

I have a terrible memory. I am aware of this flaw and rely heavily on a variety of systems to help me cope. The main things that help me remember to Get Shit Done is Google Calendar (should I be somewhere right now?) and a list of things I need to remember to do (what tasks should I be doing next?).

I don’t follow any methodolgy for how I manage my to do list, I’ve read books, articles, and follow various productivity related blogs as I’m always happy to tweak my system but it’s important to note one thing, dear reader, before you continue; This is my system. It works for me. It may not work for you.

Warning: I am totally geeking out on this. Read on at your own peril.

Short version: I use Todoist.

Continue reading “Tackling Tasks”

bookmark_borderEmail

Too many emails

Like it or loathe it, email is a fundamental part of most people’s lives. Managing your email account can be time draining battling and I’ve flirted with a variety of strategies to get to where I am today which is, for me, a practical way to keep on top of my email inboxes.

I have two email accounts. One for work. One for personal use. The latter includes different types of emails for different purposes; emails about websites I maintain, personal emails from family and friends, notifications from online accounts and everything else that tends to fall into most email inboxes every day.

How I use email

The ability to receive email on multiple devices is seen as a boon of the modern age. I’ve turned off email on my iPad to trying and change my usage pattern and that seems to have worked. I use my iPad for leisure activities almost exclusively these days so I’m keeping it, mostly, clean of anything even remotely related to “productivity”.

I only have two email accounts to make it easier for me to manage and I use a similar approach for both accounts; I read everything I need to read, action what I need to immediately and everything else goes to Todoist. The only differences between work and personal accounts are driven by the functionality available. For work I have one big long inbox in Outlook which emails stay in after triage, for personal use (which I prefer) I move anything I’ve actioned to the Google’s All Mail folder, which keeps my inbox also empty, but never quite zero.

For me the biggest change to how I used to handle email was to make decisions on each email. Either reply or action it immediately, store it away if it’s worth storing, set a reminder/task to look at it later, or delete it.

Yes, delete. Or at the very least mark it as read and move on. I’m a firm believer that if something is important it will bubble up again.

Inbox Zero

The slightly anal tidy freak in me loves this idea. A nice clean empty inbox at the end of every working session, that sense of achievement, that everything is cleaned away. Oh yes, Inbox Zero sounds great.

In reality I’m quite happy to use my inbox as a pseudo-task list. It might not hold the actual task but will hold relevant information that I need to action. That means at any given time there are a few emails in my inbox. It’s also a nice visual way to push me to take action on things that may have hovered around for a while; when my inbox gets to 10 or more it’s time to clear out down as much as I can.

When that time comes I’ll archive what I might need later, and delete the rest. I’ve always had grand plans of going through my GMail archive and moving information I want to keep to Evernote but, as yet, it’s not been pressing enough for me to do.

Email on iOS

Treating email as tasks, or at best reminders, is something I’ve been doing for a while, so when new email apps started to appear for iOS that were more focussed on that way of working I was keen to try them. The first one I tried, and the one that stuck for a long time, was Mailbox.

I love the idea of Mailbox, being able to triage my Gmail inbox, move emails to folders and have other emails ‘reappear’ when I want to action them was a useful way of keeping my inbox manageable. However, over time it became more of an overhead having two places that were acting as reminder services. ToDoist has richer functionality and as I started to adopt that more and more, ultimately Mailbox became just a separate app on my phone that I was using to access my personal email (it only connects to GMail).

For my work email I was using the default Mail app which did the job required perfectly well. However, with my use of Mailbox changing it soon became apparent that what I really needed was one email app on my phone that would let me manage both accounts.

I looked around at some other mail apps and ended up with CloudMagic purely because it allows me to view both my GMail and my work email in one place, and, unlike the default Mail app, the emails are easily distinguishable with a simple coloured sidebar denoting which account an email is from.

Bonus: CloudMagic recently updated to include support for both Pocket and Evernote making it easier to capture articles or information from my inboxes.

Controlling my email

Outside of the apps there is one more thing I’ve been trying recently, specifically during my working day. I’ve adapted some advice I read and I’m only checking my emails three times a day. Once when I get into the office in the morning when I triage anything that’s come in over night (working with teams in California and Indonesia means a lot of overnight emails), once just before lunch in case there is anything urgent needing dealt with, and once before I leave the office (or finish my working day if I’m at home).

For personal email, I try and use the same time slots but I’m a little more relaxed about those.

I don’t think there is a clean answer for dealing with email. By it’s very nature incoming email is not focused so the triage step is what works for me, and sticking with that gives me confidence I’m doing the right thing for any given email at any given time.

It only occurs to me now as I write this post that I’ve spent more time trying to figure out how to manage my email than any other part of my working, connected, life. I will continue to tweak things but a lot of my working habits haven’t changed in years… and you know what they say, if ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

bookmark_borderiOS Apps

I’ve not indulged in a tech/gadget post for a while, so forgive me (or don’t!).

The ever changing merry go round

I’ve mentioned before my strive for ‘better’. It’s a constant part of my life and, considering that I spend a lot of my life using my iPhone, that means I’m always on the look out for better ways to get things done.

Here’s my current home screen:

My iOS Apps

There is some notion to the arrangement of my iOS apps, although it’s the one thing I tweak quite often; ideally I’d be happy if there were an ‘auto-arrange by usage’ option as that’s how I try and group things on my home screen. That said, I do put some apps there to force usage, current example being Downcast. I’ve not really been a big podcast listener in the past, but I’m trying to nurture my growing love for spoken word radio, hence it’s current position on the home screen.

For the most often used iOS apps – email, tasks, calendars and various writing tools – there is a general theme for the apps I use most frequently, they work and sync across all of my tech (iPhone, iPad and MacBooks). Some are backed by Google technology (mail and calendars) but given I use my phone for both personal and work use, my system is deliberately built around those dual uses.

Read on for the full list…

Continue reading “iOS Apps”