Archives: personal productivity

For your next presentation, consider using this tactic to keep people involved with LEARN NC.

On Tuesday, Emily and I presented some LEARN NC resources to Wake County middle and high school teachers. They were a receptive bunch, and our resources went over well. In addition to handing out flyers and lanyards, we passed around an email sign-up sheet so people could sign up for email updates (we put our names and email addresses on the sheet so they could see how to fill out the form, as well as so they could see our email addresses). They could choose to receive updates for general LEARN NC news, as well as professional development updates. After the presentation, we sent an email listing links to all the resources we talked about (Digital Textbook, standard course of study, Instructify, PD) plus a few we didn’t have time for (DiscoverNC, The First Year, Ed Reference).

If you’re underwhelmed by our strategy, I don’t blame you. A clipboard and a pen (even a snazzy LEARN NC pen) are as low-tech as it gets. Besides, folks can sign up for email updates very easily from the LEARN NC website. So why bother?

In my opinion, when asking people to take action, no matter how simple it is, your odds of success are inversely proportional to the number of barriers in their way. While someone can easily go to the site and sign up, they can just as easily decide to check their email instead. Or maybe they’ll visit the site and forget to sign up. Or they can’t find the email updates link (I confess I often miss things right in front of me). Or maybe all the enthusiasm they built up during the presentation has been overwhelmed by test scores, grading and lunch duty. Putting a sign-up sheet and pen in their hands right there and then removes all potential distractions or avenues for procrastination. If they’re not interested, they pass the clipboard along, no harm done. If they are interested, they sign up, and we don’t have to worry that any potential LEARNatics slid off the hook.

Further, sending a follow-up email gives them a direct line to the people they talked to, in case they have questions or ideas. Sure, we had business cards ready during the presentation. But are you more likely to type in the email address of a speaker who gave out a business card, or hit “reply” to an email from the friendly presenter who reminded you of the URL to that neat Digital Textbook project?

In case you’re wondering, we got 23 signatures — roughly one-third of the attendees — all but two of whom signed up for both general updates and professional development updates. I honestly don’t know if that’s a lot, but I’d bet you 11 American dollars that’s at least double what we would have gotten had we just asked them to sign up at the website later.

It’s possible, of course, that all of these folks will unsubscribe once they get their first email from us. It’s also possible — even likely — that at least a few will forward some of the information on to a friend who they think could benefit from it. Remember, each person we speak to is a potential LEARN NC evangelist, and I’m all for making it as easy as possible for them to spread the word to their friends. For them to do that, though, they first have to be excited about what we do. And if they’re new to LEARN NC, the time when they’re most excited is moments after we’ve just shown them all the great stuff we can do. Why risk letting that enthusiasm fade away? Sign them up on the spot so we can keep them in the loop.

We had a productive meeting with Angela Bardeen and Chad Haefele from the UNC libraries. So many of the periodicals we would like to read are already part of the Libraries’ subscription services. Besides, with our work loads it is increasingly unlikely that we’ll keep up with reading our journals, so it seems even more foolish to subscribe to print editions.

Setting up an RSS feed from brings the most current articles to your desktop and offers an opportunity to stay current with a small investment of time and no investment of money. We spent about an hour working to get feeds in three RSS environments: Pageflakes, iGoogle and Google Reader.

Pageflakes and iGoogle provide a dashboard-type widget-intensive option that many of us find useful. If you need help with Pageflakes, Bobby and I are using that pretty extensively. Gail was working in iGoogle. Google Reader is easier to set up, I think, but requires you to actually go to another place to read your feeds… unless you cheat and use a web page widget in your Pageflakes to display your Google Reader feeds, like I do!

Bottom line, it was pretty easy to get the subscription content from some of the vendors, namely EBSCOhost, CSA, Gale and ISI, working in our various readers of choice. RSS feeds are still “experimental” in these products, so there is no guarantee that it will always work (as we experienced ourselves Tuesday morning!). Our library guides reassured us that if we persevere, we will get the feeds working just as we need them to, and if we get stuck, they are just an email or phone call away.

Contact Angela or Chad if you have any questions or need further assistance:
bardeen at email.unc.edu
chaefele at email.unc.edu
or by phone 919-962-1151

I am, as usual, beating myself up about a failure to do something perfectly. (”Must get A. OK, A+ works, too.”) I have been warned by friends and colleagues, coached by professionals, and reassured by family members that it is OK to NOT to do everything to the nth degree, OK not to be perfect. Rumor has it that there is a RANGE of acceptable performance on various endeavors. Who knew? Apparently that range is NOT, as I have always maintained, A to A+, but rather there are other options, including B and C!

So what am I stewing about now? Getting Things Done. I read it (OK, well almost all of it) and I worked to put it in place and yet I have not systematized this, I am still struggling. What should I do? Renew my commitment to this program? Quit?

[This is how it is for perfectionists, BTW, you either do it perfect or you quit 'cause you are not doing it perfect.]

Turns out lots of people struggle to GTD and that it is OK to do something different. According to the author, David Allen, I need some version of “collect” so I can externalize all the stuff spinning in my head and I can get the bandwidth to be productive. In an interview about his new book, he says “It takes a couple of years for most people to really, really, really begin to integrate that so that that builds the consequential and sort of cruise control kinds of behaviors.” Years. I don’t have to quit, I just need to make it OK to not get an A+, OK to not know how to do it in the first month, OK take the time it takes to systematize. I can do that, right?

As an economics major, I know widgets. I have considered the elasticity of demand for widgets, the consumer surplus when widgets are priced competitively, and the change in price when the component materials for making widgets are suddenly more scarce. Always, my professors discussed economic concepts in terms of widgets.

Now, today, I am actually using widgets! Thanks to Widgetbox, I can easily create a way to keep up with ever-changing content like the LEARN NC features and the latest Instructify articles. I’ve even created one for this blog.

Just this morning, Bobby and I were discussing how we really need something to pull together the fiftyleven things we need to update, read, check, and generally pay attention to. How can we keep up with it all?

Pageflakes might just help me, as they promise in their byline, Get it Together. Using this tool, I can pull together the news, online tools, blogs and more that I am trying to keep up with. I can even create widgets and with one click, put them on my Pageflakes page. Pretty cool, eh?