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Podcast interview: Productivity Alchemy

If you like my productivity stuff, I did a podcast interview that went live today (May 16, 2019) with Kevin Sonney of Productivity Alchemy.

If you’ve been reading here for a while you know most of what I’ve said (it’s in my productivity category…) but I also talk about my current creative writing project as Celia Lake(self-publishing romances set in the 1920s with magic) and some of the tools…

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Many internets

I’ve been thinking recently about how we often think we’re having the same experiences – online, in research, in other ways we learn.

There are many internets out there. We may be using the same tools, but we can use them in such phenomenally different ways.

A few examples:

Appleuses her account as a public or semi-public place to share things she cares about (or finds useful or beautiful or…

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#online conversations

Books

The question of getting rid of books is a very delicate one.

If you’ve been on certain parts of the Internet recently, you may have noticed backlash against Marie Kondo. (People argue she said you should get rid of all your books. She’s said she keeps about 30, but other numbers are totally fine, as long as they’re evoking joy for you.)

Now, I just moved apartments. Moving books is not a joy,…

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#ebooks #how I do things #library concepts

Ongoing learning

I’m writing this just after New Year’s, which is a time when a lot of people start to think about improving themselves or learning something new (along with wanting to pick up new habits). So for today, I want to talk about how I structure ongoing learning, and some things that help.

Professional development

A lot of my approach to this is shaped by my professional education. I’m a librarian,…

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#how I do things #skills #tacit knowledge

Evaluating sites

For those who pay attention to certain corners of the internet, December brought another major upheaval. Beginning on December 17th, Tumblr made a major turn in how they intended to handle certain kinds of content (and among other issues, applied a computer-driven algorithm to figure out what was banned and what wasn’t. Dear Internet, our AI is not actually that good yet.)

This means it’s time…

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#online conversations

Astrology and planning

I promised a post about astrology and planning. This is a combination of ‘why might you care’ and ‘how I do this’

Astrology, huh? I’m a librarian, right? Supposed to be a rational person, wanting my world to be backed up by evidence. And astrology doesn’t fit into that at all, by modern scientific standards.

But part of me is fascinated by the way that astrology and astronomy were once one…

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#astrology

Yearly cycles

One thing I’m thinking a lot about right now are yearly cycles.

In my religious practice, Samhain (October 31st) is the end of the old year, and nominally the beginning of the new year. But it is also the beginning of a fallow period when we rest and take stock of what’s going on in our lives. For me, this is coming out this year in figuring out my new tracking system and spreadsheet for next…

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#how I do things #spreadsheets

Making space

One of the things I think about a lot is how to leave space in my planning – both time for recovery and time for the unexpected to pop up.

A few years ago, I read the book Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco.. It talks about the importance of leaving space for the unexpected, and for rest and recovery. A lot of productivity tools focus (rather a…

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#how I do things #skills

Writing tools

In honour of NaNoWriMo starting tomorrow, here’s a post on how I get writing done.

What is NaNo?

If you’re not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, where an awful lot of people commit to writing 50,000 words (in classic form, of a novel or other fictional work. But there are lots of Nano Rebels, too.) There are write-in events in many locations, and lots of other…

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#how I do things #tools

Inexpensive information sources

I was talking to someone last weekend about Pagan topics, and money’s tight for her (like it is for a lot of people), so we got to talking a bit about the usefulness of the library.

Which leads me to wanting to talk about some tips for getting books inexpensively in general.

The library

Let’s start with the most obvious – libraries exist to share materials so we don’t all have to buy our own.…

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#librarians #libraries #library concepts #print books #tacit knowledge #tools

In case of emergency: finding information in a crisis

Finding out what’s going on in an emergency can be complicated. Figuring out what to believe is even more so.

I’ve been thinking about that this week because the gas line explosions and fires in the Merrimack Valley (north of Boston) and the communities of Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover were right near me. (I’ve spent a lot of time in the latter two places earlier in my life, and I have…

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Managing online spaces for yourself

I’ve heard or been around several conversations recently about people thinking about their interactions with the Internet, and what it meant for them.

Let me start by saying that I am one of those people whose friends are in the computer. Oh, I’ve met a fair number of them, the ones I’m closer to, by now (or we met somewhere in person, and continued the conversation online).

But as someone with…

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#how I do things #online conversations

Big projects

You can tell I’m thinking about this one a lot, both because I’m still not talking about Zotero, and because it’s been two weeks since my last post.

(On that note, I’m going to go for a post every other week here for a while, both because I’ve got some other projects I’m working on in bits, and because I have a shorter list of things to cover here easily.)

I think a lot about the interaction of…

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Mechanics of a project

My new project seems an excellent time to walk through a way to think about a large long-term research project (it’s always nice to have a handy example!)

Step one: What am I trying to do here?

I described a lot of this in my previous post, but I want to turn out articles that take on the core theories behind what a given plant was used for, and provide more information about them, in a way that…

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#how I do things #research #research questions

New research project

So, I’d planned for this post to be an introduction to Zotero, as an example of how to use a citation management tool.

But then i was talking to a visiting friend about a project I’ve been kicking around for a while, and got some great ideas on how to approach it. So instead, we’re going to have a post explaining the project, and then I’ll be using it as part of an example of setting up Zotero,…

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#correspondence project #magical texts #projects

Research tools: how to choose

Last week, I talked about different kinds of tools you might use for research. Today, I’m going to talk about how to choose tools.

Where will you use it?

This is one I think about a lot.

Some people do all of their research work or personal computer work on a single machine. I am not one of those people.

I work on a Mac at home (I’ve been a Mac user since … well, before there were Macs,…

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#research #tools

Research tools: what I use

Time for a new series – this one on keeping track of reference materials. In this post, I’m going to talk about a couple of different aspects. Then, in future posts, I’ll be looking at some specific tools to keep track of references, like Zotero (one of the citation management programs.)

Why have a system to keep track of things?

If you’re only managing a few references, or a few sites (for…

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#research #tools

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