Tangents
It’s Friday and I’m in a fabulous mood. I worked my ass off the first two days of the week because I knew I’d be in meetings all day long on Wednesday and Thursday. What that means, for better or worse, is that I don’t feel as crunched for time today as I normally do. So I took my sweet time reading both Seattle and Portland newspaper sites this morning, checking stats on my blog, reading a few friends’ blogs, IMing a co-worker, and perusing my Myspace page.
When I finally tired of all that, at about 10:15, I decided it was time to buckle down and really get some work done. I started with my favorite current project.
We are thinking of starting a company blog. I have been chompin’ at the bit to do this since I started this job almost a year ago. But recently, our CEO started reading another CEO’s blog and he is all set on the idea of having one of our own. Awesome.
My boss knows I have my own blog, though she refuses to read it or even let me tell her what it’s called because, as she says, “How can I read a story about you dancing drunk on a table one day and then give you a professional performance review the next?” It’s a good point, aside from the fact that I don’t often blog about dancing drunk on a table, mostly because I don’t really do that.
Anymore.
Anyway, she knows I have my own blog, so when this idea came up again, she asked me to spearhead the research about how we would go about doing it. I, of course, jumped at the chance to take valuable work time to see how other organizations are blogging. Are they using Blogspot? Or separate URLs? What software are they using?
I’m not super tech savvy, so this research thing has been a bit of a challenge. My blog is my own domain. I own it (well, kinda, I owe Joe some $$ because he’s paid for the site registration twice now). And I produce it on a Word Press platform. I’ve mastered Word Press, or at least know how to post and all of that. But that’s about as far as my tech skills go. So understanding other people’s blogs, unless they are on Blogspot, is a bit difficult for me.
But that’s not the biggest challenge I face when doing research for something like this. No, the toughest part for me is overcoming the thing that makes me a shining example of my generation: ADHD.
I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD, and, honestly, I don’t really believe I have it full-blown. I just think pretty much everyone my age has a form of it. Find me one 30 year old who doesn’t have at least three programs running on their work computer at all times. Name one person under the age of 40 who doesn’t check email during conference calls, or surf the web while waiting for a large file to save. We’re the ultimate multi-taskers, and that’s both good and bad.
For instance, in the middle of doing this blog research, I googled “company blog” and found a few good examples. Google always leads to good train-of-thought brainstorming. While on the MDSN Microsoft blog page, I thought, “Oh, I wonder if Apple has a blog.” Still work-related, right? Sure.
So I google “apple blog” and one of the good links takes me here. I quickly see that it’s not an official Apple blog, and that’s when I should have backpaged to Google. But I didn’t. I have a Mac iBook at home, so I read with some interest the post about discoloring keypads. I didn’t really follow what the guy was trying to say, but I could just barely sense that he was trying to make some larger point. But I kept getting stuck on the ambiguity of these sentences:
“Then slightly more recently, a lady lost her camera while on vacation. A family contacted her that they’d found it, but had given it to her son and wouldn’t return it.”
Huh?
So, I clicked the link to the story of the lady who lost her camera. A fascinating story. Twenty minutes later, I’d read all of the posts, and was scrolling through the comments to the post called “camera unlost, but not quite found” when I realized I was no longer “working” per se.
Snap back to work mode. Back to Google. More company blogs. Mmmm hmm, here’s some. Click through. Yep, pretty interesting. Make some notes.
Then it hits me. Oh, this might make a good blog post.
So now here I am blogging about how easily I go off on tangents about nonwork-related stuff when I’m supposed to be working.
I should really get back to work. Oh, but look at that, it’s 12:15. Time to eat my sandwich (roast beef, by the way) and read Gawker. You know, kick back and take a break. Because I’ve been working so hard.
June 25th, 2006 at 10:00 am
Wait…how is dancing on a table, NOT good for a performance review? I don’t know about you, but that’s commonplace at my job.