Big wheel in Manchester

Big wheel in Manchester, originally uploaded by chris_stott.

I love structures that are well lit on the skyline, and this one in Manchester just looks great.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Bloggers Launch TrainforHumanity.org Humanitarian Initiative

Image by darkmatter on Flickr via Creative Commons

I know that a lot of my readers (judging by the Lifestyle Projects people have been leaving – thanks!) are interested in running and fitness. I myself enjoy am a (very) amateur triathlete, and I like to support charity. Therefore when I heard a few weeks ago about TrainforHumanity.org I thought it was a great idea. I also thought, how the hell does Leo execute so many good ideas! (I think that the point is that he does take action. It’s all very well having ideas but what makes people successful in their pursuits is taking action on those ideas).

Here’s the blurb, I hope you will support in any way you can.

Over the past five years, 200,000 civilians have died due to violence, malnutrition, and disease in Darfur and an additional 2.2 million people have been displaced. We want to do something about it.

Fed up with watching humanitarian crises on the evening news and not doing anything to help, a group of bloggers (most notably, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits) have created and founded the non-profit Train for Humanity, which is an online humanitarian awareness and fundraising organization.

Over 150,000 new blogs are added to the internet everday. Train for Humanity’s mission is to utilize the web, social media, and blogging, in tandem with athletes in training, to support organizations that help prevent suffering and alleviate the pain of children, orphans, and refugees who have been displaced due to genocide or internal strife and war within their country.

Quite simply, they believe – getting fit + social media + blogging = social good

The three pilot project athlete-bloggers, Mark Hayward, Dan Clements, and Leo Babauta are hoping to raise awareness for the current crisis in Darfur and funds for the organization Darfur Peace and Development. All three are training for endurance events of varying distances ranging from a triathlon to a marathon.

They hope to show people that with a little creativity and innovation, anyone can assist and make a difference in the world. If you would like to learn more, have a look at the Train for Humanity website and please consider sponsoring one of them or spreading the word.

Productivity and Information Overload

Image by Will Lion on Flickr via Creative Commons

I work in IT. I spend a lot of my time on the Internet. I love gadgets. I love new technology. The question is, does all this technology help us or is it really holding us back? I personally spend a lot of time messing about with technology and not really achieving anything. Whilst this is fine, as essentially it is one of my many hobbies, I do often have to take a step back and wonder if what I am doing is a productive use of my time. When I say a productive use of my time I mean it what I am doing putting my precious time to the best use to reach my ultimate goals (the end game)?

Whilst obviously it is essential to spend time on your interests (what’s the point of living if you aren’t doing what you want to do), we must review to make sure that we aren’t doing things just for the sake of doing them, and more to the point not kidding ourselves that messing around with our ‘systems’ ‘workflows’ and ‘lists’ is actually productive use of time.

I have found that the more technology and systems available to me, the more information overload I have. I can’t get enough information sometimes and I often find that I don’t want to discard a piece of information until I have got the most out of it. This could be reading it, committing it to memory, filing it for possible later use or sharing it with other people who might find the information useful.

For example, at the moment I am spending quite a lot of time redeveloping my system for holding, organising, using and storing the mountain of information I come across on any given day. I’d say that over 90% of this information comes from being connected. It could be a new blog, a search that I have done on a particular topic and found 10 links I want to follow up on or something that a fellow twitterer has suggested. Whilst systems (such as GTD) are great for organising and storing information, without a execution plan (the actual doing rather than just collecting) your pile (albeit digital) of information to digest just continues to grow. 18 months ago I don’t thing that I had this mountain of information to deal with. I wasn’t clued up on social media, blogs and productivity. However, I probably did have a similar amount of information to deal with I perhaps just didn’t realise that I did or wasn’t so worried about it as I wasn’t clued up on ‘being productive’.

Tim Ferriss suggests going on a low information diet. This is a brilliant Idea and I have applied that principle(at least in part) by cutting down my RSS feeds, and only going on the internet to look for information when I need it. The problem I have is that I am interested in a lot of things and Google and the answer to my endless questions is only a click away.

I do enjoy learning something new every day and being knowledgeable on a given topic, but sometimes I need to take a step back, not gather any new information and process the information I have. My new system that I am working on serves two main purposes therefore:

1. Efficient capture, storage and relevance of information.
2. Efficient execution of action with the information relevant to my goals and progression.

So my system is a work in progress. I don’t think I’ll ever stop tweaking it, but for now it’s back to my bookmarklets (my latest favourite geek toy) and organising the wealth of information I have whilst being ruthless with the deletes and taking action against those things that are going to make a difference.

Keeping Social Media Simple

Image on DBarefoot on Flickr via Creative Commons

Seems like not a day goes by without a new social media application launching. I’m a relatively late adopter of social media, and also a reluctant adopter. Whilst I like to try out the applications and latest technology, I’m quite concious of the amount of time social media can take up and on some days I’m concerned about the “social media footprint” that I could leave.

Anyway, I’m reviewing my social media options and at the moment I use the following:

• Twitter (for Web 2.0 geekery and blog promotion)
• Delicious (personal bookmarking at the moment)
• Facebook (for school and close social circle friends)
• Last.fm (for music discovery)
• Tumblr (for it’s simplicity for posting links)
• Stubleupon (new to me for blog promotion)
• WordPress (as my blogging platform)
• Flickr (for sharing and backing-up photos)

So in designing my personal blog for the reasons mentioned before, I am analysing what social media to use and why. I want to use what I will get the most benfit out of, but without having a massive overhead on my time or social media footprint (you’ve only got to look at the image above to see how massive the list of social media is – that’s Schoble’s list by the way). So I’ve set up my “Friend Me” section and will review it over time.

What I’ll Blog About

Image by retro traveler on Flickr via Creative Commons

I’ll blog about anything that interests me really. The initial list I have drawn up of likely categories are:

Reviews

I think I’ll write quite a lot of reviews but only of things that I am genuinely interested in (otherwise I want be motivated to do the writing anyway), and I am only likely to recommend things that I would put my own name on. Reviews are likely to be of books, music, gigs, restaurants, products and anything else that can be reviewed I suppose.

Fitness

I am in to my fitness and absorb information about health and fitness like a sponge. Certainly things that I am trying or I am interested in exploring more I will look to blog about.

Guitar

I love music and I love to play the guitar. I have some things to say about guitar (mainly tips for learning). I love to encourage people to take up the guitar.

Technology, Web and Social Media

Deep down I am a major geek. I am a big gadget fan and a missive information junkie. I love trying out new software and I am rapidly learning about social media. Whilst at work all this kind of stuff saps a lot of my time, but at least I’m getting paid for it .

Blogging

Obviously I am learning a lot about blogging at the moment. I am very interest in this, I think that it is my biggest ‘project’ at the moment. I am learning more and more each day and have lots of information to share in this area.

Travel

I love to travel. I would travel as a job if I could (and I do aim to have a go at this at some point in the future). I would like to indulge my travel writer aspirations here.

Photography

I do enjoy photography and I particular like finding amazing images for my blog posts. Everyone seems to be an amateur photography nowadays, but this is great as it means there is an enormous amount of superb images around.

Learning

I love to learn and do it subconcioulsy a lot of the time. Whatever I am learning about at a given time I’m sure I’ll blog about.

Productivity

Whether it is productive or not I am defintely a major productivity hobbyist. I enjoy writing posts about productivity and have done a number of successful ones on my main blog. I do however want to focus these on my main blog to my niche, so here can be an outlet for other thoughts.

Lifestyle Design

My main blog is about this and I am currently defining my niche there (hence in part for starting this blog). I would like to post more about Lifestyle design, as essentially it is what I am trying to do!

Random Thoughts

I’ll keep my short ramdom thoughts to my Tumblr-log, but I do have opinions and thoughts on current affairs and a wide variety of topics. I think it will be great to explore these in more depth.

I’m sure that the above doesn’t capture all that I am interested in or will post about. I just wanted to give a flavour of what to expect going forward.

New Blog

Image by Gonzalo Barrientos on Flickr via Creative Commons

I’ve been blogging through my other sites for a while now and I think that the concepts are taking off. However, I have to admit that the most important part of blogging, content creation, is where I struggle most. I don’t have a problem coming up with ideas for posts, tweaking the designs, finding quotes, pictures or inspirational links but I do struggle with the task of churning out quality content. I think this issue is in part due to the fact that I have so many interests and topics that I want to write about that on any given day what I want to write about is different. I have identified the fact that I need to narrow down and focus my main blog to monteize and maximise it’s potential. However, this will leave a lot of topics that I am interested in not addressed. I think that the more content I create, the better I will get at creating it and the more positive experience I will be able to give on my main blog. That is why I have created this site. It will be a personal site where I can write about anything I want. It is mainly for my own purposes. If one day I want to write about a book I’ve just read that is fine, another day I might want to write about a great new Web 2.0 site or a great restaurant I’ve been to. I’ll just write about what I want, when I want. Obviously I can do this on my main site, but as I want to build a good quality resource on my niche and grow my readership I really need to focus my niche.

So that’s it. Look how easily I’ve created content for this site already. I think it’s going to be a great way at becoming a better writer. For things that aren’t really ‘quality content’ type posts I’ll use a Tumblr account as my outlet for that.

Here goes…