Reengaging, incrementally

[kallistixf]

What rituals would make you happier? What would you like to introduce to your life? Introduce no more than one or two rituals at a time and make sure they become habitual before you introduce new ones. "Incremental change is better than ambitious failure. Success feeds on itself." -- Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier, p. 9-10

It's been a mighty relaxing ten days. My break wasn't quite complete: I used Twitter, Facebook, and email a few times each to arrange logistics, and spent a couple of hours reading blogs one night to see what was going on in the world. Even so, it was a dramatically different rhythm. Which makes it a great opportunity to rethink how I'm engaging with social media.

As a first step, last night and this morning, I checked the places I usually hang out. Have I mentioned recently how much I like social networks? Usually I don't hit all of them in order, so it was interesting to compare-and-contrast. Each of them has a different feel -- and a different focus:

• my Dreamwidth reading page has comics, information about Nanowrimo, and a couple of great diversity-oriented blog posts.
• free-association, tribe.net, Diaspora *, and Google+ all have privacy and civil liberties stories I haven't read; Travel Underground and FlyerTalk cover the TSA
• Twitter, Google+ and a few of my favorite blogs have bunches of stuff on activism and politics
• Geek Feminism and (rather unexpectedly) Quora* cover women in technology
• Facebook has updates and photos from several of my closest friends and a lot of activist and professional former colleagues
• Google+ and Hacker News have tech and entrepeneurial news -- and as a bonus, Google+ also has some links on writing and some great photography
• in email, there's a conference being organized -- and my brother's sent me a funny link

It sure seems like a ridiculously long list ... in fact my first reaction was "no wonder I'm so much more relaxed when I'm taking a break from online." Then again I don't want to give any of them up -- especially since almost all of them are places where I hang out with a diverse group of people -- including some good friends -- who I don't stay in touch with any other way.** So yeah, it seems like a good time to look at my rituals.

Since I want to spend more time on Dreamwidth and Diaspora *, I'll make those the focus of my start-the-day ritual: checking them first, sharing some links on D* and writing a DW blog post, and jumping into the comments in both places.

Here's to incremental change!

jon


PS: It's easy enough to tweet the links and share them on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ as well -- and for privacy and civil liberties stories it's not so hard to cross-post them to tribe and free-association too. But at what point does it become too much and lead me to distraction? Hmm, dunno; I'll have to experiment.

* where Harvard student Alisha Ramos posted a link to her' senior thesis project Where are the ladies
** Hacker News and Quora are the exceptions here, but they're important for professional purposes.

Comments

[kallistixf]

Four weeks later, it's a good time to check in on how I'm doing. The good news: I check Dreamwidth and Diaspora first most days, and have really cut down on how much time I'm spending on G+, Hacker News, and Quora. But there are challenges.

It's an exciting time on Diaspora. Usage is growing as they try to raise money and get to a beta. They've even adopted the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Social Network Users Bill of Rights that we drafted when I co-charied CFP 2010. w00t!

Alas, the more time I spend there, the more annoying the usability issues are. It's not easy to share a link and have it look good. You still can't edit posts after you make them. There isn't a visual editor. No matter how many times I uncheck my 'noisy' aspect they still seems to show back up in my stream after a while. Much of my feed is duplicates. And so on ...

Ah well, such are the perils of pre-beta software. But the net is that hasn't been as much fun recently as it was when I got there, and I notice that I'm checking it less frequently and not staying there as long. And that in turn makes me less excited about fighting through the installation battles to run a pod or work on the software.

So instead I think I'll be spending more time on Dreamwidth. Dreamhack admin Sophie's message in the latest update has some great suggestions about how to get involved ... and it took me less than five minutes to have a test site up and running. Cool! And it'll be fun to program in Perl again :)

yRfjbkxrPLQ

[(Anonymous)]

For clarification: In my peorivus comment I tried to quote the template part of the d_net_alarm destination, but the comment system deleted the 144 tag .

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[(Anonymous)]

Please feel free to moderate my ceommnt. My goal is to just the attention of the author. I don't intend to hurt anyone's feelings. Thanks. Btw I was not able to edit my ceommnt. Thought this would help.

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[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for being on point and on tgaert!

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[(Anonymous)]

I've been hearing good hntigs about this site and am curious about joining. I'm almost finished with college (studying graphic design), and I think getting involved with a creative community would be a great way to get ideas and talk to others. I've dabbled with CSS and HTML and have made a few websites, but I'd love to get my feet wet even more!(That is if there are any codes left? Either way, it is good there are so many generous people)

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[(Anonymous)]

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[(Anonymous)]

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